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Paul Rosolie is a conservationist, filmmaker, and writer. He's the founder of Junglekeepers, an organization protecting threatened habitat in western Amazonia, and the author of "Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey into the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon." www.paulrosolie.com
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Jungle Man.
What's happening?
Good to see you, my brother.
What's going on?
You got books?
You got notes?
I got books.
Marshall's here with us.
I got this for you.
Yeah, a little note in there you can read later.
Jungle Keeper, buddy.
Yeah, the brand new.
That's what, back from the Amazon with that.
Nice.
Marshall, say hi to everybody.
I love that you bring Marshall.
Has Marshall come on other podcasts or is it just...
Yes, he's been on a couple.
You're a good boy.
You're a good boy.
We should...
I just have to keep him from going under the water with a little buddy.
Yeah.
I got to keep him from getting under the water.
Come on.
Come on.
Say hi to everybody.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's the best.
He is the best.
He's a big sweetie.
He's soft, man.
He's got amazing coat.
Big sweetie.
Well, he gets groomed.
Oh, thank you.
Thank you for the kisses.
Okay.
Okay, lie down, please.
Lie down.
Lie down, please.
So...
Oh, my God.
You released that video.
I saw the video of the uncontacted tribe.
Yeah, hitting send on that was scary.
Woo!
Yeah.
Wild.
I sent you a message that day.
Yeah.
When that happened.
Yeah, you did.
That is crazy.
I've shown it to a few people, but we never showed it live.
But it is...
So, Marsha, you got to lie down, buddy.
You can't be climbing under the wires.
Lie down, Bubba.
Sit, sit, sit.
Come here.
Go, boy.
Go, boy.
Go, boy.
Go, boy.
That experience has to be so insane to contact, like, legitimately uncontacted
people.
There they are.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ladies and gentlemen, do not look at their dongs.
Do not.
Well, I mean, you know, but also maybe take a style tip from them and tie them
up.
Weird how they got their waist wrapped up, but they don't have their dongs
wrapped up or their
butthole.
Well, it seems like they're trying to protect or they're trying to keep lots of
rope.
I think rope is, like, their main thing.
So, that's how they carry all their rope.
Interesting.
They carry their rope around their waist.
They carry their rope around their waist and they just want rope.
They want rope and bananas.
Do bananas grow in the Amazon?
So, bananas don't grow unless people plant them.
So, there's certain human settlements where, you know, you can find old bananas
growing.
But, you know, plantains, really, is what this is.
And they were requesting them.
And what you see happening here is—
They request them?
Yes.
They come out.
And, I mean, these are people coming out a thousand years late to society.
And they're out on the beach holding up their hands saying,
No mole.
We are the brothers.
No mole means brothers.
Oh.
And so, now we actually think that they call themselves the brothers.
Whoa.
And their first thing was, we want bananas.
And so, the local anthropologists that we were with,
we were just there to work with the communities that we work with.
And these guys came out across the beach.
And you see them, they're holding their bows.
And those bows are six-foot bows, seven-foot arrows.
And we were saying, you know, the anthropologist was saying,
Put down your weapons.
Put down your bows.
Before you talk to us, this does not need to be violent.
Because their first instinct is to defend themselves.
And so, there's maybe 20, 30 of us.
And the local guys had a couple of shotguns just in case for protection.
Because we were not initiating contact.
That's the thing I've been explaining to everybody.
We were just there working in the community.
They came out to us.
So, they knew you were there.
And they came out to you.
And how, does someone speak their language?
There's one guy in the community that kind of speaks a little bit.
They speak, in the community, they speak yine.
The mashkopiros speak a derivation of that.
And so, he's, they're speaking in broken terms across the river.
So, they were sort of shirts versus skins.
We were on this side of the river.
They were on that side of the river.
And then, I mean, the courage of this guy to get in the river and go, you know,
10 feet from them and push the canoe.
There was no contact, no physical contact made.
But he gave them these plantains.
And then, you notice when they take them, it's not like, oh, yeah, let's take
the plantains.
We'll go back in the jungle and divvy them up.
It's like, what I get, I get.
They're fighting over them.
And they were all screaming and fighting over them.
So, there's desperation there.
Yeah, well, I mean, I guess food is fucking hard to come by, right?
I mean, the jungle is filled with life.
But it's still, it's got to be difficult to source.
And you've got to do it every single day.
Every single day.
Yeah, I mean, there's no refrigeration.
There's no preservation.
No, so everything is instantaneous.
You shoot a monkey, you've got to cook it and eat it.
You know, you get a turtle, you've got to eat it.
You've got to open it and eat it.
And so, there's, I mean, you can see there's more, there's that questioning
look on their face.
They don't understand who really, who we are.
And really, the only communications that we got was, we need more food and stop
cutting down our trees.
They wanted to, they said, who are the bad ones?
They said, of you, who are the bad ones?
Why are you cutting down our biggest trees?
Well, not just cutting down the trees, but also killing the indigenous people
that protest it, that get in the way of it.
If their tribe is centrally located in an area where they're chopping down the
trees, they kill those people.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, right now, what we have is we have the loggers and the gold miners
coming in.
And so, since like the last time I saw you, it was, we were nailing all these
successes, adding acres to the reserve.
Because what we're doing is trying to create this corridor, which is going to
become a national park.
We're trying to save this one river in the headwaters of the Amazon.
And we had been on this success run, you know, from people hearing the stories,
from things like this, people coming in and helping us do that.
And then it started to change where we realized, okay, we're protecting so much
land that the logging mafias and the narco traffickers started pushing back.
And so, now it's getting more serious.
As we're getting closer to the finish line, it's getting harder because they're
going, we want this to remain wild.
And we're going, we're trying to protect this.
And the local communities are going, this is our forest.
And the loggers and the narcos and the miners are coming from other places and
they're cutting down this forest.
And so, it's just, you know, I mean, everyone knows the Amazon is the lungs of
the earth.
Everyone knows it's got a, it produces a fifth of our oxygen on our planet.
It contains a fifth of the oxygen of the fresh water on our planet.
So, it's vital to global planetary stability.
But we've already destroyed 20% of it.
And so, we're seeing the moisture cycle get broken.
20%?
20% of the whole Amazon rainforest.
That's insane.
And that thing is 2.7 million square miles.
And I think the lower 48 is 3 point something million square miles.
Wow.
It's gigantic.
Wow.
And they've already killed off 20% of it.
20% of it's already gone.
Is it mostly cattle running?
Like, what is, what are they, what are they doing it for?
Cattle ranching accounts for 60% of Amazon deforestation.
And then it's just development, roads.
China has a new shipping port in Peru that they want to, you know, create a, I
think, a railroad over the Andes Mountains or through the Andes Mountains.
So, they can start getting access to the Amazon for Asian markets.
Is it true they carved out a giant pathway through the Amazon for a climate
change conference?
You know, I've been trying to figure out if that's true.
I saw that go all over the internet.
But it's one of those things, it's like, who knows if that's real.
That, and then the other one is they're like, you know, Swedish billionaire
bought this much of the Amazon, and it's like, but what's his name?
Right.
They keep saying that, and I'm like, I don't.
Well, let's put it into perplexity and find out if that's true.
Which one?
The, uh, whether or not they carved out a pathway through the Amazon for a
climate change summit.
Because that sounds like horse shit.
That just sounds too, too ridiculous.
There's no way they would do something that stupid.
I don't know, but I did see people.
Also, why would they have a climate change summit in the Amazon?
Are you going to do it in a tent?
No, I think they did it in Manaus.
I mean, there are cities in the Amazon.
There's Iquitos, there's Manaus.
Right, sure.
But you can fly into those cities.
You don't need to carve out a fucking pathway.
But I remember seeing a video of this guy, and he was saying, like, this is
where the jungle used to be, and now it's just this big road.
And I was like, but again, who in charge of the climate?
Unless they were going to have a climate conference, and just local
administrators and politicians said, well, we better get ready and clear this
area.
And, like, maybe it wasn't intentional.
I don't know.
I mean, if they have pictures of it.
Whoa, it's on the BBC.
Amazon forest fell to build road for climate summit.
There you go.
Oh, my God, it's real.
Oh, my God.
A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected
Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian
city of Belem.
Oh, my God.
I wish it wasn't Manaus.
That is so crazy.
It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will help climate.
It's easier to drive when there's no trees.
Which owes more than 50,000 people, including world leaders, at the conference
in November.
The state government touts the highway sustainable.
I love how they use that term.
Sustainable is one of those wonderful terms you can just throw on things.
Sustainable.
Credentials, but some locals and conservationists are outraged at the
environmental impact.
Yeah, duh.
That's crazy.
Yeah, look at that.
You're chopping down trees to protest chopping down trees.
That's fucking insane.
Sounds amazing.
I just, you know.
At what point in time are people going to wake up?
At one point in time, people are going to wake up.
And I think that that's, you know, that's sort of as I've been, I've just
started this book tour and everything else.
And it's the thing I'm trying to impress.
I was just talking about this the other night is like, we've had world wars.
We've had great famines.
We had the dust bowls.
Like there's never been a time in history, though, before where we're looking
at, is there going to be ecological collapse?
The thing that I'm talking about with where they've cut 20% of the Amazon,
scientists are warning that if we cut too much of the Amazon, that moisture
cycle, I think the thing was that 20 trillion liters of water every day are
pumped into the air from the Amazon.
And that becomes the cloud system that rains back down and creates the Amazon
rainforest.
If you cut too much of that, you break the cycle.
And that forest has been growing for something like 55 million years.
I believe it formed in the Eocene.
And so we are the generation that's going to decide, do we find a sustainable
way to keep the Amazon rainforest functioning, or are we going to break that
cycle?
And once we lose it, it's not going to come back.
It's so crazy.
It's so crazy that people are so short-sighted.
They're like, we want them to have cattle ranches.
It is disorganization and apathy.
It's like we have the ability to organize and credit.
I mean, if you can organize an airport, you can figure out a way to protect a
forest.
But the fact that it's in numerous Latin American countries, Brazil wants to
develop.
In Peru, you have the legal gold miners coming in.
And now you have the pressure from the Asian markets.
And, you know, we found that if you just, I mean, that's what we've been doing
over the last 20 years is going to these gold miners and loggers and going, how
much do you make?
And they go, $20 a day.
You go, do you want to make 60?
And you get a cool shirt.
And you get health benefits.
And you get to ride a boat.
And you get a team.
And they're like, yeah, that sounds so much better.
And they're happy to come over.
But they need the opportunity.
Yeah, we've talked about you doing that.
And I think that is really amazing.
It's just crazy that it takes a person like you and your organization to, like,
put some sort of a dent in this.
That this isn't some sort of a gigantic global effort.
That there's not a lot of people that are recognizing this issue and saying,
hey, this is a huge problem if this goes away.
I think, though, that I see in the world that I exist in, I see that all over
the world there's people doing conservation projects.
And that we are at this point where there's enough happening where, I mean, you
had E.O. Wilson advocating for the half-Earth policy where it's, you know, at
least half of the Earth has to remain ecosystems.
If you break too much down, if you ruin our ocean fisheries, if you cut the
rainforests in the forest, you're going to ruin the weather.
Right.
The stuff that comes standard with life on Earth is going to be depleted.
Right.
And so I think, you know, you see tiger numbers going up in India.
You see that there's actually been an increase in forest cover globally, but in
some of the most important areas, like the Amazon, it's just wild.
And, I mean, that's what we're doing is, you know, the guy, JJ, that I work
with, who's local, he's been trying to, he's been saying this for years.
I mean, since we saw each other, he got, which I don't know how this happened.
I don't know how some of this stuff happens.
But we got a, we got an email one day from Time and they were like, we're
selecting our, you know, 100 climate leaders of 2024.
And they're like, JJ is one of them.
And I have no idea how the people at Time select this, but they chose this.
I mean, JJ grew up in an indigenous community barefoot.
He didn't have shoes until he was 13.
And it was because he saw his forest get destroyed and because he saw the fish
vanish from the rivers as nets came in.
And then as chainsaws came to the region, he saw the trees go down and he went,
we got to protect the next river.
And so he's the one that, you know, when I went down there at 18 years old, he's
the one that was like, look, you got to help me protect this.
And of course, at 18 years old, I was like, how, how do I do that?
How, how on earth is that possible?
And then when we started seeing the smoke on the horizon and we started hearing
the chainsaws and it got more urgent, I started telling these stories.
And then the Anaconda stories and the, everything else, the first book that I
wrote and little by little, Jane Goodall, um, people helped along the way.
Joe Rogan helped along the way.
Well, I'm happy to get the word out because I, I, I mean, it's, it's kind of
insane that it's happening, but it's also that place is such a magical place.
And it has such an insane history that we're, we're just starting to understand
the history of the people that live there.
I mean, through the use of LIDAR, they're just starting to understand that the
entire place was massively populated and that a lot of the plants that exist in
the Amazon
are actually agriculture plants that went, you know, went rogue when the people
were depopulated because people brought in smallpox.
I, I got to push back on that.
That's, that's, I feel like that's a theory that's been becoming prevalent as a
theory.
Well, I'm sure there was a jungle before, because even in the lost city of Z, I
mean, even the, the talk, what is it?
Percy Fawcett?
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Percy Fawcett.
The people that went there, they talked about the Amazon being a lush
rainforest.
Yeah.
And these enormous cities that were incredibly complex before the jungle
swallowed them up.
So it's, it's clear that there was some form of jungle there already.
A hundred percent.
But that these plants that they grew for agriculture were the ones that had,
you know, once people stopped tending them and taking care of them, they
overwhelmed the rest of the forest.
Yeah, a friend sent me a clip and you, I think you were talking to Tom Segura
and you went, you know, and the crazy thing about the Amazon and you went, it's,
it's largely manmade.
And I was like, and I like threw something and I was like, no, it's not.
Well, let's find out why we said that.
Let's pull that up, put, run that into perplexity and see what articles we get.
Because what they're saying is that these plants, the, the number, if I believe,
if I'm not misstating, the numbers that they exist in are, are not natural.
But that's only around these ancient sites.
And so I went and did a deep dive into this and the sites that they've studied
are along the watersheds.
And so in the Amazon, you have terra firma, which is sort of dry forest, and
then it dips into the river basin and you have floodplain.
Most of these cities existed on floodplains.
And so where the scientists are able to go is up the rivers and they go to the
edges of these floodplains where they find ancient human settlements.
And that's where you find terra preta soil, which is human engineered.
And that's where you find there'll be like a higher incidence of certain trees
or certain plants.
What are these trees?
And so like bananas, for example, or sometimes they'll plant a higher amount of
Brazil nut trees.
So here it is, our sponsor, Perplexity, which is always accurate.
Estimates suggest that roughly 10 to 15 percent of the Amazon standing forest
shows clear signs of being man-made, are strongly shaped by long-term
indigenous management, not planted as uniform tree farms, but modified over
thousands of years.
Much of the Amazon that looks wild has been influenced by pre-Columbian
indigenous agroforestry, soil enrichment, Amazon dark earths, that's terra preta,
and species selection rather than being a purely untouched wilderness.
These systems differ from modern plantations.
They are diverse, semi-natural forests enriched with useful trees and crops
rather than rows of single commercial species.
So the idea of the terra preta was that a lot of the Amazon soil is not good
for agriculture, is that correct?
It's barren.
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It used to be a vast inland sea.
Crazy.
Yes.
When it separated from Africa, the Congo and the Amazon used to be joined in
some sort of proto-Congo system.
And then when they separated, the Amazon, South America hit up against the Nazca
plate.
The Andes Mountains shot up.
And then the salinated water drained out.
And that's why we still have inland freshwater stingrays, manatees, pink river
dolphins.
Oh, that makes sense.
And so that happened over millions of years as the salinated water.
And here's the saltwater dolphins adapted to freshwater.
Exactly.
And is that why they became pink?
They became pink, I think, because they've lost their pigmentation.
They have terrible eyesight.
They almost don't need to see because you don't – in that sediment-rich water,
they're using – they're using sonar.
Whoa, that's crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
So they've become almost blind?
Yeah, all the fish.
You pull out these giant catfish.
They hardly have eyes.
They have, like, light-sensing organs.
Whoa.
You can't see – I mean, there are clear rivers in the Amazon, which I would
love to – I've never been to one.
And, like, the streams are clear, but the Amazon River itself is nothing.
Everyone's like, oh, you should bring a GoPro in the river with you.
And I'm like, for what?
You're not going to see anything.
It's just sediment.
Yeah.
But the thing that this theory about the Amazon is even human-engineered is
wrong because when you look at the size of the Amazon, you look at that 2.7
million miles, it's that they've said that what they're not getting is that in
the areas that these people have been studying with LIDAR and through this
anthropological digging, they're saying it's more than we thought.
There's certainly more human settlements than we previously thought.
There maybe were a few million people there before Pizarro and the explorers
came.
But what you don't realize is that between the rivers, between each river,
which is the majority of the Amazon, is this terra firma giant jungle with
hundreds of miles between the rivers, nobody's been there.
And so I just was reading a scientific paper that was saying they went out and
sampled those areas, and it showed absolutely no sign of human engineering.
And so most of the forest-
In terms of the growth of the plants, but did they do LIDAR to see if there's
previous structures?
Well, the good thing with the LIDAR is that they fly over.
And so the LIDAR confirmed that over those human areas, like you get like a
river confluence where two rivers are coming together, there'll be a human
settlement there.
And in those areas, they find that the terra preta, they'll find that the
plants occur in different abundance and diversity than in the other places.
But this message that the Amazon itself was engineered by ancient humans or prehistoric
humans is not actually accurate.
It was a wild jungle.
So do you think they're saying it for clickbait?
Did they make those articles for clickbait?
I think they're saying it because people build their careers on, you know, if
you come out and say, I have a new theory about how this formed, it gets
attention.
There's even a-
And nothing against, what's his name?
Graham Hancock.
Mm-hmm.
For a while, everyone was like, oh, Paul Rosely needs to debate Graham.
No, I got nothing against Graham Hancock.
He's great.
But it's just the messaging is becoming that the Amazon was kind of man-made.
And so what happens is you get leaders like in Brazil going, well, if the
Amazon was really man-made, then we can manage it now.
And it's just not accurate.
If you look at the- and even Smithsonian did an article where they said, these
are the current things that are coming out.
These are the theories.
And then it went, yeah, but these theories discount the fact that 95% of the
Amazon rainforest has not been surveyed in this way.
And most of it shows that these are just wild ecosystems that have been growing
since the dawn of time for the last 55, 30 million years.
And it's just been speciating and growing and evolving on its own.
And it's only in these tiny areas that humans have done this sort of
engineering where there were tribes.
The first one to come down the Amazon, he mentioned that there were tribes that
had sectioned off parts of the river and they were growing the giant river
turtles.
And that was their prime source of protein.
So they figured out how to get protein.
Big as a giant river turtle.
Oh, tremendous.
They're like three or four feet across from the carapace.
Show me a giant river turtle, Jamie.
Oh, they're huge.
They're monstrous.
Absolutely.
We don't have them where we are.
Like bigger than sea turtles?
Like those sea turtles that you get in Hawaii?
Sea turtle size.
They're huge.
They're absolutely monstrous.
Right.
And then we found fossils over there.
We were on a beach.
We found fossils of an eight-foot river turtle.
Yeah.
But see, like that.
Oh, okay.
So just like the ones you find in Hawaii.
Those sea turtles are like, if you go to the big island, you could swim with
them.
It's pretty dope.
Yeah.
These guys don't have flippers, though.
They still have claws.
Oh, okay.
I mean, those are monster turtles.
Massive.
And so they were growing them, farming them for food.
They were farming them.
And so in areas like that, you're going to see agriculture.
You're going to see pottery.
You're going to see terra preta.
You're going to see things where there was a small civilization by the edge of
the river.
And then in the other 98% of the Amazon, no one's ever been there.
Have you had sea turtle before?
Have you, this kind of turtle, whatever it is, have you eaten it yet?
Oh, sea turtle?
No.
This?
Yes.
This turtle?
Yeah?
Absolutely.
What is it like?
It's kind of slimy.
It's not like anything.
It's very strange because they cook it and just, you know, everyone always, how
could you be a conservationist and eat the animal?
Because when you go to someone's house and they live on the side of a river and
they go, we're having dinner, that's what they're serving.
You got to eat with them.
You got to eat with them.
I wouldn't do that, man.
You're ruining the earth.
Yeah, how could you?
Let me throw paint on it.
Let me glue myself to the shell.
Yes, that's what I'm going to do next time.
And I showed you that video where I'm sharing the monkey head with the girl.
Yeah.
And I was like, I was babysitting a six-year-old and she was like, it's lunchtime.
And I was like, well, what did your parents leave you for lunch?
And she like, opens this pot and pulls out a monkey head.
And she was like, this.
So we put it on the fire, warmed it up.
And then we both sat there just like, rip it.
I would like rip off a piece for her because I was stronger and give it to her.
And then she was like, no, no, no.
I want the ear.
And she was like, she would rip off the ear.
Like, we just sat there eating a monkey face.
And so the turtle, they cook it in the shell.
They'll just like, you know, they'll just like slit its throat, throw it on the
fire.
And so it cooks in the shell.
Then they part the shell.
And then you kind of just like, it's like a slow cooked, like when the meat
falls off the bone.
Oh, wow.
You just throw a little salt on there.
And it's kind of, how do they get the salt?
Is that something they trade?
They trade for it.
They trade for it.
I mean, the people I'm dealing with have access to the outside.
Even the really remote communities that are two days upriver, they trade with
the outside world.
They have some interaction with money.
And so that's one of the things that we're doing as an organization is saying,
okay, what do you want your future to look like?
Because right now you have a couple shotguns.
You got a couple chainsaws.
You got a couple boats.
And those things make you want money.
But you also want to eat fish out of the river every day.
Right.
You also want to eat monkeys every day.
And these are your staples.
And they're like, you know, if you cut down more of these trees, there will be
less monkeys.
If you shoot too many, like it's not like they have deer tags where it's like a
monitored thing.
They just, they're not understanding.
You know, when it was a bow and arrow, it was kind of a fair game.
All right.
Now the shotgun, it's like you can go shoot whatever you want.
Yeah, every time you point at a monkey, it's dead.
Yes.
It's not a tricky hunt.
And so we're, these guys are, you know, working with us as rangers and we're
building this, developing this relationship with the local communities of
saying, how do you, do you want to continue living this way?
Do you want your kids to live this way?
And the answer usually is yes, but with better health and education.
So we want to, yes, but, that's interesting.
So they like that way of life.
They want, they want to continue that way of life because it's the only thing
they've known.
I mean, have any of these people ever gone to like any of these other cities
that are fairly close or that they could reach and see what that life is like?
Yeah, we brought, we brought one of the communities, they were having trouble
with the Peruvian government getting recognized as an indigenous community.
And they were having this trouble for 15 years.
And we, we used, you know, now we have lawyers and people and we have an office
and all this stuff in Peru.
And so we, we went and sat down with them.
We said, okay, why are you having this trouble?
I mean, you clearly are an indigenous community.
What's, what's the holdup?
And the holdup was that it takes two days for them to get to the nearest town.
When they get to the nearest town, they're scared of the traffic.
They have no idea what to do with paperwork.
They have to sit in an office.
I mean, these are people that are like putting their bows and arrows and guns
down and walking into an office and sitting there in the air conditioning.
And they're like, next.
And they're like, sit.
And they're like, do you have form like I-227B?
And they're like, I-2-a-b-b-b-b.
And they're like, what's your social security number?
And they're like, ah, you know, they got some like fish shells in there.
And so what we realized was that they were just having trouble with the
administrative part.
And so we put our lawyers on it and we got them their indigenous titled land.
And so now no one can take that away from them.
And so for that, we brought them all to the city.
We had a big conference and we had a big celebration about it.
And they all had the feathers on their head and they were all celebrating.
And now they're safe.
Do they get – is there any pushback?
Like is there any like political influence by the – whatever it is, miners,
ranchers, anyone who tries to stop that from happening, bribe people to try to
take over the land of these people?
Absolutely.
I mean the Amazon is a war zone of influence.
And so you have – I mean the miners, if anybody tries to protest the gold
mining, they kill you.
So one of the lawyers that I was working with, his father had come out and said,
look, as a local Peruvian person in the jungle, I want this to stop.
They can't – they're destroying – there's a – Jamie, there's a photo in
the folder that says – I think it says sandstorm or something.
But it's just – it's not even – again, deserts are actually ecosystems.
This is a wasteland.
They've destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres in the Peruvian Amazon.
You can see it from space.
It's this horrible scar.
And they've cut the trees, burned the forest, and then they've sucked the land
up.
And then they take the bottom of the sediment and they use mercury to bind the
gold out of the sediment.
And then they burn the mercury off the gold, releasing it into the air.
Oh, great.
Oh, yeah.
So that then in the rain, it comes down as mercury rain, which gets into the
fish, which gets into the people.
And then also the miners must be getting mercury poisoning.
The miners all have mercury poisoning, birth defects, health problems,
respiratory issues.
I mean, it's – yeah, that's some of the fires.
Is that you?
That is me.
That is me running out there with my –
So you're right there.
Yeah.
I mean, as soon as we see forest burning, we run towards it.
And it rains there a lot, right?
So, like, how long does this forest fire last?
Well, they do it in September when the – it's like July through September
when the forest is at its driest.
They come in and they cut the forest and they leave it down.
What was that picture you just showed me, Jamie?
That's a horrible picture.
Was that animals burned alive on a tree?
That's two baby jaguars that were burned alive.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
And so people –
And they're just stuck on the tree, burned alive?
That's crazy.
People talk about, you know, we're losing ecosystems.
And it's like, it's not just about us.
These animals live there.
They have nowhere else to go.
And so there's massive individual suffering for – I mean, there's millions of
animals on a single tree.
And so then when you have these fires where they cut the forest and just burn
everything, this – I mean, those trees would have been filled with monkeys
and birds.
And the snakes, you know, they get scared.
They burrow deeper into their hole and then it burns.
And so this is all for gold mining?
This was for cattle ranching, this one.
This was invaders on our river that come in from other places.
They set up cows.
They set up papaya.
I mean, this is what it's supposed to look like.
It's supposed to be this lush, verdant, ancient rainforest filled with wildlife.
I mean, the cacophony of sound.
When you're going to sleep in your tent at night and you're out in a place like
that, it's just this throbbing, pulsing symphony.
It's incredible.
The magic of that place, of real wilderness, is wild.
I mean, this is a place – that particular shot was – it's – we had to go
for days to reach that spot.
You know, all day on the river camp, all day on the river camp.
You know, you're going up rapids.
You're going up the waterfalls to get to these places that nobody can go.
And there's an example of – that was specifically a location where they've
studied and they've found that there's never been a human settlement there.
It's just a corner of the Amazon ever.
Have they done LIDAR in these areas where they say that people have never been?
I don't know for sure.
That's where it gets weird, right?
Because, like, they've done LIDAR in some of these places that were, like, very
lush and tropical.
And then they find these structures underneath it.
Absolutely.
They find these areas that clearly had, you know, some sort of pathways and,
like, geometric patterns that indicate foundations of buildings.
Yeah.
No, I mean, those are there.
I just think that right now the problem is that it's getting grossly overstated
how much of the Amazon – if you take it as a football field and you go, man,
I thought it was only in this much of the football field, you know, in a few
inches of it.
And then you find out there's actually 10 feet of the football field that was
– there's still the rest of the football field is still wild.
Right, right.
And so I think that's the message that's getting lost is they're going, there's
a lot more here than we thought.
That doesn't mean the whole thing.
I watched a documentary once on this guy who was losing his mind.
He was a scientist who was a biologist who was convinced that the giant sloth
still existed in the Amazon.
Yeah.
And they couldn't find it.
Yeah.
And that these people who lived there were telling him, we see them.
We know what they are.
We have a name for them.
And this guy had been there for years and he was losing his mind because he
couldn't find it.
And he sort of staked his academic reputation on the idea that this sloth
existed, couldn't find anything.
But it doesn't mean it's not there.
It doesn't mean it's not there.
Because there's so much.
There's so much.
And the locals are never wrong.
Like imagine if you were looking for a coyote and you had to look through the
entire – like there was a thousand coyotes in the center of the United States.
And you started in Pennsylvania.
And you were hiking your way like, I don't see any fucking coyotes.
I don't see any.
But there's a thousand of them that are in North Dakota.
And you've got to find – like that's essentially –
That's a great way of thinking of it.
It's the same thing with rattlesnakes.
When I was a teenager, I was exploring the mountains of New York.
And I was going, it says there's rattlesnakes here.
So I was just walking around finding every kind of snake.
I'd be like, well, where are the rattlesnakes?
And you don't realize that the wildlife occurs in populations.
And so the rattlesnakes were all near rattlesnake dens.
And so then I started making friends with other guys that were into snakes.
And they were like, yeah, we know where they are.
It's only – you see that mountain right there?
It's like it's on the side of that.
Go to that in the morning when there's sun and you'll see them basking.
It's like you've got to go to where they live.
Right, and you have to talk to the people that actually know.
Well, this guy was trying to do that.
But there was this one scene of exasperation where he was like sitting down
saying,
did I stake my entire reputation on horse shit, you know?
Did he –
Buddy, do you have to pee?
He keeps getting up, which is unusual for him.
Can you tell Jeff to come and get him and see if he can – he might have to
pee.
He's generally – he's happy to chill.
Yeah, I'll just lay down.
He keeps getting up and he's huffing, which is like he communicates that way.
Like when he wants to eat, he comes up to me and he huffs, you know?
My buddy, he's the best.
He's the best.
No, but I think that that's the truth is that it's – people think it's like
you can just go find this stuff
and it's – the secrets in this world are hidden for a reason.
And even if there is a tribe that knows about the giant ground sloths, they're
not going to tell us.
Right.
They're not going to tell someone from the outside.
Right, right, right.
So it might be like one valley between two mountains where there's still a
population.
Just take him to go to the bathroom and bring him back in here.
I'm pretty sure he has to go.
Thanks, Jeff.
I wouldn't – you know.
I mean there's got to be a bunch – well, there's so many plants that they
find there.
This is an interesting statistic.
Find out what percentage of pharmaceutical drugs the compounds emanate from the
Amazon.
It's an enormous percentage.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A lot of the base drugs – quinine came from the Amazon, the first cure for
malaria.
I know captopril, which was a blood pressure medication, came from Bushmaster
Venom.
That was in the 90s.
There's so much.
I mean I just got whacked by a stingray hard.
I saw that.
It got your foot, right?
That was brutal.
What was that?
What happened?
That was brutal.
I mean that in –
Bro, you've been hit by everything.
I had to –
Dude, my body is a Jackson Pollock painting of scars.
Do you ever get checked for parasites because you must have all of them.
I do.
Estimates typically say that about 25% of modern pharmaceutical drugs are
derived from rainforest
plants.
And many of those known examples come from the Amazon, but there's no precise
peer-reviewed
percentage just for the Amazon alone.
Most popular figures, you see like 25% of medicines come from the Amazon
actually refer
to all tropical rainforest, not specifically the Amazon.
But the thing is like how much of the Amazon has not been explored and how many
potential
pharmaceutical drugs or – that's the term, right?
Pharmaceutical drugs.
What about natural remedies exist in the Amazon that aren't – you don't need
to patent
them and sell them at a fucking pharmacy and –
Yeah.
I mean look.
So we have neosporin.
You get a cut.
It looks a little infected.
You put neosporin on it.
It might work.
Down there we have a tree that if you – we tested this and it murders
bacteria.
It's like 100 times more potent than neosporin.
What's it called?
The sangre de drago.
It's not even a big secret.
Like people know about this.
Every time I post about it, everyone's like, yeah, we know about that.
We use it.
No, kidding.
But no one's ever turned it into a cream.
Can it grow in Austin?
Probably.
Can I get some sangre – how do you say it?
Sangre de drago.
The dragon's blood.
Sangre de drago.
Sangre de drago.
Sangre de drago.
Yes.
Dragon's blood tree.
I'm watching Game of Thrones again.
That sounds like something Khaleesi would say.
The mother of dragons.
I mean – and by the way, Carl Drago could have used that.
He died of an injection.
I mean, right?
The thing that took him down.
That didn't make any sense to me.
I thought that was a plot hole.
No.
Here it is.
Dragon's blood.
Sangre de drago.
Wow.
Yeah, but is it good?
Is it sourced well?
Right.
It's probably made by some asshole.
It's probably like 1%.
The rest of it's corn syrup.
Because we just go – we just hit the tree with the machete.
And then you have a spoon.
Right.
And then you put it on your thing.
And actually, exactly that.
When I saw that, I thought the opposite.
I was like, oh, this great warrior.
I was like, that's such a great plot twist that just a nick kills him.
I mean, I just had a staph infection in my leg from one mosquito bite that just
got itchy.
And then it spread and it spread and it spread until I had to be on double
antibiotics.
They cultured it.
And it was MRSA.
And it's like, I would have died.
MRSA in the Amazon.
Well, I got MRSA years ago at – I had dengue and I had gone to a clinic in
the city,
which MRSA usually lives in the hospitals in the human areas.
Right.
Because it's a medication-resistant staph infection.
Exactly.
That's what MRSA stands for, right?
Yep.
And so I had gotten it.
And so I have a tendency now.
I've been a little bit compromised in terms of infections because I was living
20 years
in the jungle.
And so I had already gotten it.
So chances are that's where – it doesn't exist.
And that's the thing.
You see in the wild jungle, you don't have malaria.
You don't have rabies.
You don't have dengue.
Because the human population is so low that it doesn't spread.
A mosquito bites you.
Here, the next person that's going to bite is me or Jamie.
Mosquito bites me in the city and then I go out into the rainforest.
There's no one else for it to bite.
It's going to bite an anteater.
Right.
And so it's not going to spread like that.
Got it.
Whereas if we have a town of loggers – that's why when you go to these
logging and mining
camps, the diseases – they're just – I mean, there's this thing called –
this type
of flea called a piki that burrows into your feet and lays eggs.
There's leishmaniasis.
There's malaria, dengue.
What's the bird?
Zyca virus.
There's all these crazy things.
But we don't have that out in the jungle because, I mean, the ecosystem, the
frogs
eat most of the mosquito larva.
The mosquito larvae like bromeliad cups or puddles.
Well, bromeliad cups and puddles are filled with tadpoles.
And then, of course, there's turtles in the puddles eating the tadpoles.
And then there's other things eating the turtles.
Everything's eating everything.
Ecosystem regulates it.
When you ruin that, so then you cut down the forest, now you have puddles
sitting in
the sun and they're all twitching with mosquito larvae.
So then you have tons of mosquitoes.
And so that's how nature – they say, you know, mangrove forests will stop
tsunamis from
destroying a town because they'll stop the rush of the water.
Well, forests will keep you safe by not only producing rainfall that'll come
down on your
crops, but also making sure that the ecosystem's not out of balance so you're
not covered in
mosquitoes and parasites.
When I lived in L.A., I moved into a house in Encino that I was renting and no
one had
lived there in quite a while and they had left the water in the pool.
And when I was going out to look at the pool, the pool was completely green and
there was
things swimming in it.
Like, I mean, like school, swimming.
And I go, what is that?
And the guy goes, that's mosquito larvae.
I was like, oh!
I'm like, no way.
And he's like, yeah, we have to kill them.
We have to drain the pool.
Like, I was just thinking about how many times I was going to get bit once
these things hatched.
It was crazy.
Like, it was like watching little fish swim around, little hatchlings.
And then thank God for dragonflies because they'll lay their young in the same
thing.
And dragonfly larvae will go merc those things.
They're savage.
And then you get tadpoles.
You got a wild kingdom right in your pool.
Right in your pool, right in your little cup.
But when I got stung by the stingray, it was crazy because I had been walking
with shoes
in this stream.
I took my shoes off because I was like, oh, I'm at a waterfall.
I know this waterfall.
I love this waterfall.
Playing in the waterfall.
Man, it's the one thing, bullet ants, caiman bites, snake bites.
I've had it all.
The stingray bite was the one thing.
Worse than bullet ants?
A hundred thousand times worse.
Really?
Yes.
And I'd seen one guy get stung by a stingray and he had nerve damage, a
systemic infection
up his leg and his whole body, and he didn't walk for months.
So when I got hit, I felt, this is what I felt.
I felt, in the flash of a second, I felt the stingray barb go into my foot and
it wagged
its tail under my skin.
So it flayed the skin off the arch of my foot and came out.
And it has venom?
Yeah.
So there, all the skin is.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
That's nasty.
Did you put the skin of the dragon or whatever the hell it is?
Better.
So I sat and, of course, my first thing was, I was like, okay, I got to
document.
Oh, man.
I'm unconscious.
I'm unconscious at this point.
You're in that much pain?
Yes.
I was blacking out.
Marshall's freaking out.
He's like, what is happening?
Yeah.
I mean, I was literally, I knew people were filming and I was like, I didn't,
you know,
you want to be tough.
You want to be like, all right, I just got bit by a stingray.
It's going to be fine.
I was not tough.
It says, I don't remember any of this.
Yeah.
So that first thing right there, I started taking a video.
My friend comes up to me and he was like, hey, man, he's like, we got to, you
got to
stop.
He's like, cause in a minute you're going to go under.
And I was like, what do you mean?
I'm going to go under.
And he's like, once the venom hits your system, he's, he goes, you're not going
to be able
to walk.
And we're, we're still a few miles from the river.
And he's like, we got to get you to the boat and we can't carry you.
And so they got me back to the station.
I don't remember any of it.
They had me laying on my back and I was in so much pain.
I couldn't put my foot down.
I mean, I was making deals with God.
I was going, if I, if you, if you just make the pain go away, I was like, I'll
go to church
every day.
I was like, I'll never smoke a cigarette again.
So that's the plant medicine.
That's where I'm going with this.
I'll never smoke a cigarette every day.
That's funny.
They, that, that pack there, they went to two different trees and they removed
compounds
from the tree.
One was the bark and one was the fiber and they put it into a leaf pack and
they cook it
on a pan and they heat it and it makes this plant poultice and they put this
boiling
hot piece of plant material.
It's like a, it's like a fish cake and they put it against the wound and even
that burned,
but it felt better than the, than the venom and it starts to suck out the venom.
And so when they took it off my foot after like, this is, this is them getting
the, getting
the plant material where they know the medicines and that's been handed down
through the generations.
So they're just shaving it off with a knife.
Yes.
You see this few different colors.
And then they make like a cake of all this stuff.
Uh-huh.
And then they heat that up until it's scalding, press it against your foot.
And you've been in the Amazon for a long time.
Is this, this is the first time that's ever happened to you?
You've been stung by a stingray?
This is the first time.
Now, how does it happen?
You just, you step in the wrong place?
JJ's nephew.
So he knows he's got the indigenous training.
He knew exactly what to do.
Wow.
Yeah.
And so that's all the venom.
So now all that black stuff is all the, all the, the, the denatured blood that
came
out of my foot.
And so for about four hours, I was in this state of just level 10 pain, just
white hot
pain.
I couldn't talk to anybody.
I couldn't do anything.
People were coming to me and they were like, what can we do?
And I was like, just leave me alone.
I was like, I don't want you to look at my face.
You know, I was coming in and out.
And then, and then by nighttime it had, it had gotten, this was at night where
I was like,
okay, the pain had subsided, but I didn't get nerve damage and I didn't get a
huge infection
because they had this indigenous plant medicine to save me.
Wow.
The last guy that I knew that got it, he'd went straight to the hospital and
they'd had
no idea how to deal with it.
The locals know how to deal with this stuff.
Wow.
Look at that.
That's crazy.
That's tree medicine.
That's crazy.
So what happens?
You just stepped in the wrong spot.
That's all it is.
I mean, I've stepped on stingrays before and you feel them flutter.
And I, one time I even felt the barb go like past my foot, but it didn't
penetrate.
I do not know how, I mean, it must've been a small one or something, but it
just right
up through the, through the arch of my foot.
And what's funny is it just.
I would never walk barefoot ever.
I walk barefoot all the time, but, but, but just days before, not days before
that, about
a month before that I'd fallen off of something like a 50 or 60 foot cliff and
just rolled
down and bruised ribs and gotten all banged up.
I'd climbed up this cliff thinking I could, I was like, Oh, I see this root up
there.
I can get up to the top.
And at the top, my strength just ran out and my feet were peddling and I had no
footholds.
And I just went tumbling down this thing.
And I just went, you know what?
I said, I've had infections.
I've had crocodile bites.
I've had, I've had dengue.
I said, I'm, I got a week left in the Amazon.
I'd been in the Amazon for six months and I was like, I'm doing nothing
dangerous.
No tree climbing, no anaconda hunting, no croc diving, none of that stuff.
And I was just swimming in a waterfall.
Bam.
Just, just put me out of the game.
That was actually in April.
I waited to post it until now, but everyone's, everyone's messaging me going,
how's your foot?
And I'm like, it was months ago, but I was like, it is better.
How long did it take before it was better?
Honestly, two days.
I was on my feet in two days.
It was fine.
Yeah.
And if you went to the hospital?
I did not go to the hospital.
But if you did go to the hospital, how long would it take?
I mean, the guy that, the guy that went to the hospital didn't walk for two
months, had
the necrosis and, and had a huge infection that he had to go get treatments for.
I mean, he went back to his home country and had to continue being treated for
months.
I felt terrible.
And him too, watching, watching someone roll back and forth in that type of agonizing
pain,
like brave heart pain, like when they're just like opening him up.
I mean, I just didn't know there was pain like that.
You know, I mean, I've, I've, I've ripped open every part of my body and, and I,
I just,
this was, it's from the inside and it's pulsating and you just go, the other
thing is you go,
how much, how much of my year did I just miss?
You know, am I gonna, it's like the, the one time I almost chopped my knee.
Uh, I almost cut the tendon that holds your kneecap on.
And I was just like, man, did I just take myself out of the game for a year?
You know, just like, come on.
And so when that happened, I was like, this is going to be so bad.
And meanwhile, a couple of days later, you're walking around because they
understood the
medicine.
Well, because the local guys know.
Yeah.
That was awesome.
Did you ask them how they know this stuff?
Yeah.
Their father taught them and their mother taught them and their grandparents
know.
And so that's the thing with knowledge, indigenous knowledge all over the world.
If you, if you listen to authors like Wade Davis, who writes a lot about
indigenous wisdom,
you know, this is stuff that's been one at a time gleaned from nature.
And, you know, you, you know, better than most, you know, you're living out
there.
Who's the first person that figured out ayahuasca?
You know, if we take this and this, we take this vine and then we take this and
we boil
them together.
How many trials and errors, how many dead guys were there before one worked?
Right.
And what was the motivation?
And what was the motivation?
They said the jungle taught them how to do it.
They did.
The prevailing thing is that science and, and sort of the, like the statistics
of, of trial
and error are incomprehensible given 40,000 plant species and all the different
flowering
and orchids and trees.
And so it would take millennia if, if you did trial and error.
Yeah.
And the cost of human life to any civilization would make it too high.
And so when they say that the gods gave us ayahuasca, that's the prevailing
best thing
we got is that it's a link between our world and the spirit world that the
jungle gave us.
Right.
And, and the, you know, the other thing is like how much of our senses have atrophied
by modern civilization?
Yeah.
Like what kind of communication do you actually get from the forest?
Like, is there, is it instincts, intuition?
Are there senses?
Does, is there a feeling that you get where you get an understanding of
combining two things
because the jungle's actually got a way of communicating with you that's a nonverbal
way?
I think the, the jungle, I mean, I view it as almost a, you know, it's like, it's
godlike.
It's, it's almost like a giant complex sentient being.
And so you, if you listen to, if you watch, you know, if you walk the jungle
with JJ, an
indigenous tracker, he'll tell you, you listen to the birds, they'll tell you
how fast you're
allowed to walk.
What?
And what he, what he means is you're walking through the forest on a sunny day,
it's the
afternoon and everybody's chirping and making tons of noise.
And all of a sudden everything goes quiet.
And then you got to figure out, you know, is that because there's a weather
system coming
in and we're about to be in a thunderstorm or is there a jaguar right over
there?
And everything around me knows, and it's like the, the, the birds are the messengers
of
the forest.
And so you, even that you start to become attuned to the frequency of the
forest.
And I notice when I bring people in that, you know, I've never been in the wild
before
they, they walk loud, they're talking the whole time.
They're not paying attention to that sort of, you know, holistic view of where
you are.
You know, modern civilized life has made us so clunky when it comes to the
woods.
Yeah.
You know, just when I take people in the woods, if people have never hunted
before, you know,
they're stepping on branches, snap, snap, kicking rocks over, you're like,
talking loud.
My favorite is walking in front of you.
And then when the stick snaps back, like having the sensitivity to like, they
don't catch it.
Yeah.
They don't catch it.
Like, come on.
Just get smacked in the face.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Well, it's just a lack of awareness.
You know what I mean?
It's like, if you've never been, you don't understand.
But I mean, I would imagine it's that times a million in the Amazon and then
all the different
things that are communicating.
One of the things that they found out with, uh, with monkeys is that monkeys
have some sort
of a language where they can say a sound that means an eagle is there.
Yes.
And that they will play tricks on other monkeys so that they can get to fruit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they will say that an eagle is there when an eagle's not there.
Uh-huh.
And then they'll go and steal the fruit.
Yeah.
So they will lie about an eagle being there.
Not surprising.
So they can get access to fruit.
Lying monkeys does not surprise me.
It's African vervet monkeys that I, that I've read about that they have
different calls,
different words for land predator, lion, eagle, and they can communicate these
things.
So, I mean, they're speaking.
Yeah.
They're speaking.
As are crows, I'm sure.
Oh, God.
Yes.
Yeah.
Oh, yes.
They're super intelligent.
Yeah.
Oh, I don't know how we pull this up.
I have it on YouTube, but there was this thing where we were coming down river.
It was like seven in the morning.
We'd been up at our, this is a communication with monkeys theme.
As, as we're coming down river, it's like seven in the morning and I'm, I'm
always cold.
So I'm sitting on the boat and I'm cold.
I'm just like listening to music or something.
And JJ is like, look, look, look.
He's like, there's a spider monkey in the river.
And I was like, there's always a, you know, spider monkeys cross rivers.
That's okay.
And he's like, no, no, no.
The river is high right now.
And there's all these whirlpools and currents.
And so, yeah, I jump into the river.
To save the monkey?
To save the monkey.
She couldn't get to the side.
So I give her my paddle and she looks at me and she goes, no.
She's like, I'm scared of you.
And then I spoke to her in spider monkey.
What did you say?
Like that.
She thinks you're going to eat her.
She thinks I'm going to eat her.
But as soon as I started going, look, look, she's looking at me because I'm
making the
sound and all of a sudden she goes, wait, wait, wait, you, you speak me
language.
Whoa.
And then.
She would do it like you would do it.
See, I'm making it right there.
And she's looking at me.
We're talking right to her.
No, no, no, no, no.
And then I'm like, look, it's okay.
And they like their tail to be supported.
Wow.
That's crazy, dude.
She let you hold on to her.
And so now she's relaxed.
That's crazy, dude.
You saved a monkey.
Only because I spoke her language and I learned her language from some of the
orphans that I've
rescued.
That's crazy, man.
And then she was like, well, if you let, because I could have grabbed her like,
you know,
like animal control, like grabbed her by the neck.
And I was like, you know what?
Look, she's looking at me because I keep talking to her.
And then you got her over to the shore?
Yeah.
Got her over to the side.
And she kept looking at me like, what is, what?
What happened when you put her down?
I put her down.
She ran away.
She just ran away?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But not fast.
She didn't run away like she was in terror.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
When I first did it, I went, and she looked at me and she went, she looked at
me and she
like responded.
She was like, what?
That's crazy.
You speak at me.
That's crazy.
It was wild.
And that's one of those stories where if it wasn't on video and I said, I spoke
to a
spider monkey and she responded, people would be like, yeah, bullshit.
Right.
I saved a spider monkey like, bitch, that was your pet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That looked like a pet.
That looked like you had a relationship with it.
Like as you're holding onto the tail, like it knew you.
When she was looking back, I mean, she was like, hey, thanks for the branch.
You know?
Yeah.
I was, she, because she was drowning.
We saw her head go under a few times.
She was really struggling.
She was exhausted.
And I know that the spider monkey, their tail is their fifth limb.
They have this incredible finger pad that's like 12 inches long.
And so it just, it just wraps.
They always had their tail anchored on a branch.
And so I, I held her tail and I was like, I got you.
Now hold onto the stick.
I was like explaining it to her.
And she's looking at me going, how the hell are you?
That is so wild.
Yeah.
It was, it was really cool.
That was a, I originally, I was like, JJ, I was like, I don't want to get wet.
She'll be fine.
He was like, go get it.
Go catch it.
I was like, okay.
Wow.
Meanwhile, you've eaten spider monkey, haven't you?
Well, sure.
That doesn't mean I don't want to save him.
Right.
I would save a deer.
There you go.
But does it feel, it must feel really weird eating a primate.
I wish I could say it did.
I don't care.
Really?
No.
I mean, I've, we've become very callous to certain things, but I mean, when
people serve
turtle now, I'm like, well, which one is it?
You know, it's like, I don't, I don't really, you know, it's like ribeye or T-bone.
Like, what are we, what are we eating?
Is turtle good?
Like, would you like order it at a restaurant?
All right.
So the problem is that the way they, the way they cook it down there, these are
people
that live hand to mouth.
Right.
And so when they cook a turtle, if you get salt, you're lucky.
It's not like they're sprinkling some cilantro on it and like marinating it.
It's, you know, so if you just like took a chicken and threw it on a fire and
then like
ate a piece of it, it's not great.
And so a lot of times that you eat this, this food way out there in the bush.
I mean, I've been there where they've shot a spider monkey, grilled it up and I've
been
like, you know, I'll just eat rice.
And then I'm like, I'm going to be, I'm going to be tired tomorrow.
There's no protein.
I haven't had protein in a week.
And I'm like, give me an arm, you know, you just like eat the hand.
I'm like, all right.
And it just tastes awful.
It just tastes like char.
My friend Steve Rinella, he was in the Amazon with the Yanumami.
Yeah.
And he said that that's their preferred food, that they like that above
everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I, and I see no, I see no conflict between, you know, we're trying to
protect the ecosystem
and save the monkeys.
And I love the monkeys and I've rescued a lot of them personally.
But again, when you're, when you're in Rome.
Right.
You know, if you don't eat with them, they go that gringo, you know, they think
that
they're, whereas they're like, oh, you're one of us.
Right.
You have to, you know, you show them, you know, how, you know, little, little
things or
must be chewy as fuck, right?
No, it's, it's, it's kind of smooth.
It's kind of like, if it's well cooked, it's kind of like mutton.
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It's gamey.
So you have to slow cook it, long cook it?
Is that what it is?
Ideally, yes.
But a lot of times it's just, they tie it to a cross.
It's like it's a little monkey Jesus and they throw it on the fire.
Yeah.
When I saw them cook it, they singed the outside.
They singed all the hair off.
And then they cooked it.
I think they cooked it inside bananas.
See if you can find Steve Ranella eats a monkey.
I think they, and then they boiled some of it in like a soup.
I don't enjoy boiled meat.
I'm never excited by boiled meat.
But stew, right?
Isn't stew kind of?
Beef barley stew is good.
Yeah, I mean, if you, if you sear it first and then you, I mean, it's kind of a
boiled.
If you sear it first, right?
Because like just boiled chicken to me, just like a white, like.
Just eating it.
Yeah, so here he's just eating chunks of it.
Yeah, see like they're like having a really good time.
Yeah, initially he was like, I'm not doing that.
Yeah.
And then once they started doing it, he was like, okay.
He said it tasted like smoked turkey.
Yeah.
My boy Giannis.
Yeah, it is, it's interesting because if you live there, like my friend David
Cho, he
was in Africa and he hunted with the Hadza and they eat baboons.
And he said one of the craziest things is when you hit the baboon with an arrow,
they grab
it like a person.
Yeah.
Like if a person gets shot with an arrow and he's like, dude, it's fucked.
Yikes.
Yeah.
But that's what they eat.
They don't have a lot of food.
And, you know, it's like you were saying also when they don't have a sense of
wildlife
conservation.
It's not like, hey, we have an accurate assessment of how many baboons are here
or how many deer
are here or dikers or whatever the animal is that they're hunting.
They just eat whatever they can.
And sometimes they eat them almost to extinction and then they have to move on
to baboons.
And baboons were like the only thing that was left.
And there's also like other people have encroached in settlements and, you know.
That's the way my guys, because we have a lot of wildlife in our region and
people from
other regions will come as loggers and they'll go, oh my God, my dad told me
that it used
to be like this where we were.
And now we have people from other watersheds in the Amazon, like, you know, 150
miles away
coming to us and they're going, can you guys bring jungle keepers over?
And they don't understand, you know, we're killing ourselves just to protect
this river.
And they're going, can you do this where we are?
They're like, we have no more food because they don't have any regulation on
this.
And so what we're doing with the tribes in our area is just teaching this basic
thing
of like, you know, don't hunt, you know, at these times of year when they're
having their
babies.
Right.
Don't overhunt.
Monitor how many monkeys you're bringing into the, into the, into the village.
And so we're trying to develop this with them where if you're going to keep
eating monkeys,
do it in a way that they're keep being monkeys.
Especially once they've gotten firearms.
Especially once they've gotten firearms.
The, the, one of the older guys said to me, he goes, man, it's so sad.
He goes, we grew up.
He goes, you could just pull fish out of the river and there was monkeys in the
trees and
there was turtles.
He goes, you could eat whatever you wanted out of the forest.
He goes, now he goes, we're eating sparrows.
And he was like, we've just, we've eaten everything down to the smallest birds.
He was like, it's just destroyed.
And it was where he is, is like something was like Cormac McCarthy's nightmare.
If Cormac McCarthy was still alive, I would show him the, the, the, I went to a
part of
the Amazon that, that really no one goes to up this horrible river.
And, and the, they were recently contacted, uncontacted people, just, just this
tribe that
had just come out of the forest and they still had their bows and they had no
idea.
Me and JJ went for like a three week expedition, plane to plane to plane to
three days on a boat
to two days on a boat to finally reaching this last settlement.
And the missionaries had pulled this tribe out of the forest.
They'd tricked them.
They said, just come with us for a ride.
They pulled them out.
But then they said, well, if you want to go back, you got to pay for your
gasoline.
And the tribe was like, well, how do we pay with what?
And they were like money.
And the tribe was like, what's that?
And where do we get it?
And so these little people were standing, these were not tall people like the
Mashko Puro.
These were little tiny people and they were standing there with their bows.
And so we showed up with our tents and our gear and we were trying to go up
this river
and our boat and these little people came up to us and they were like, they're
making the
gesture for food.
And so there's some loggers over there.
And so JJ just didn't think.
And he was like, you want some food?
You got to go pay for it.
He was like, money.
And he threw a guy.
He was translating.
And these people are going, but we don't have any money.
And JJ took some coins out of his pocket and was like, just go buy some bread.
And he gave him some coins.
And they went and they tried it.
And they got some bread.
And then all of a sudden there was 50 of them coming at us and they were
surrounding JJ
and they were grabbing at him.
And they were like, he's the guy with these tokens that allow us to eat.
And we had to get out of there because it was causing a problem.
Oh, wow.
But I mean, these people think they're with their bows and arrows and there's
no more
animals to hunt.
And no one's going to give them money.
And they live at the edge of the world.
And they're probably tiny because they don't have any protein.
Yeah.
It was horrifying.
It was one of the worst things I've ever, I've seen poverty all over the world.
This was, uh, again, a hunter gatherer tribe with no food, with no food and no
way of getting
back to forest where they could be a hunter gatherer tribe.
Now they were in this, in this wasteland where the loggers and the gold miners
and the oil
companies, there was, there was even, there was even a barge with oil.
And it was like, this is where the Amazon is being eaten.
And it was out of sight.
You have to go for days just to get there.
There's no foreigners there.
Actually, they did say, we were talking to one logger and he said, it was, you
know,
a few years ago, he goes, there was a, we saw some rafts coming down river and
then they
stopped at this beach up river and they, they, they made camp.
And he's like, so we all talked about it.
And we said, well, we have a feeling they're organ harvesters.
And they, they were scared of these, of these incomers.
Right.
The organ harvesters visit the Amazon?
No.
And so, but that's what they were, they're sitting around the campfire and
someone was
like, what if they're organ harvesters?
Why would they think that?
I don't know.
That must be a thing that gets, I don't know.
But, but the dude I was sitting with told me, he goes, you know, we got real
scared sitting
around the campfire.
Everyone was telling these stories.
And he's like, so we figured the safest thing would be to go kill them.
So they went and they killed them.
And they were a couple of European like hikers on a mega expedition in the
Amazon.
And they just got murdered by the locals preemptively in case they were
dangerous.
Oh, God.
And this dude was like, yeah, we fucked up.
Oh, man.
And I'm talking to him.
I was like, so who did the killing?
Was it, you know, I was like, shit, man.
But I mean, this place was dark.
You know, in the next book I write, I'm going to have to do a deep dive into
this one because
it was just, it was, it was heavy.
And we also, we knew we, for the first time, you know, when you're in the
jungle, we're like,
we're safe.
This place, it was like, people are looking at you and they're like, that's a
jacket
and a watch, you know, like a camera and a tent and a pack raft.
They're like, you, they're like, if we killed him, we'd get all kinds of stuff.
They're looking at you like, man, that's a, that's a lot of opportunity.
And you could just see them being like, well, let's separate him from the herd.
Oh.
Yeah, it was rough.
It's like, you think like the cowboy days, like when it was really wild, like
blood meridian.
Well, not only that, but there's probably a ton of stories about people that
have come
down and done horrible things.
So it's not like you're thinking like, these are wonderful people that come to
give us plantains.
No, you're thinking these are the type of people that would do horrible things
to us.
Yeah.
So we have an opportunity to get something from them and pure desperation, pure
desperation.
And so like the, the communities that I've worked with in my region of the
Amazon, they're
all, you know, you show, I've showed up on a pack raft and been like, Hey, and
they're
like, where'd you come from?
And I'm like, I'm just this foreigner who does work here.
And I talked to them and they're like, Oh, camp here.
You'll be safe.
They're really nice.
They're caring.
They're families.
This place that we were at was this outpost and it was all extractors.
It was all gold miners, petroleum people, loggers.
And it was like all the men who were in the dark bit, the black market people
were all
in the same place.
So there was like a brothel.
There was these displaced natives.
And then there was like this one really scary missionary.
This man looked insane.
He had crazy eyes and he wouldn't come anywhere near us.
From where?
Where is he from?
I couldn't, I couldn't tell where he was from, but he was dressed in the robes.
It was like the mission, except he was evil.
Like you could tell he, you could tell he looked at us and just vanished and he
had this
little settlement that he had cleared and he was bringing his children in and
pulling them
out of the forest.
Was he a white guy?
He looked like a white guy, but it was hard to tell.
He had, you know, he looked like Rasputin.
Oh, wow.
And these poor people are sitting there and you could see them like they were
all like
breastfeeding their babies and like, like trying to eat rats.
And like, it was just, we stayed there for one night and we all, we didn't
sleep.
We slept back to back.
We were just in our tent, just awake all night.
And then the next day we got in the boat and we kept going further up river and
we finally
made it into the, into past the edge of human civilization into, into just uncharted
jungle.
But it was really dark.
And so at least where we are, it's like, we're, we're working with these tribes
to make their
lives better, to educate them.
And there's this feeling, there's this good feeling.
We have jungle keeper shirts.
I mean, now we're on the river and we see jungle keepers boats going by where
we had gold
miners just a few, just a few weeks ago.
We had gold miners.
Everyone, the whole team was calling each other.
We sent our, we sent our ranger team out there.
We brought the police.
They arrested the gold miners.
They brought them to town.
They offered them jobs and they said, you just can't be doing that here.
And so they only cleared like half an acre of forest and then we got them.
So they didn't destroy anything.
And so that's how we're keeping the river.
But someone hired them to mine gold, right?
So that's the thing.
No one hires them.
They, they get it in their head.
They go, you know, Hey, to their cousin, they're, you know, they'll go, why don't
we go make
some money?
Let's go up there and see if there's gold.
And they'll launch a little expedition.
They'll bring like a 16 horsepower motor and go for three days and they'll,
they'll sneak
past us on.
I mean, now the government's getting involved because we've been having the
success.
We're going to get a park guard station on our river.
So we're not going to have this problem, but they'll go up the river and they'll
just
set up and they'll, you know, they'll start panning and they'll go, I see this
little
flake here.
And they're like, cool, let's burn some forest and then we'll start sucking it
up.
We'll run it through the big motor and they, they'll bring their wives and
their kids.
And it's artisanal.
They're very, and so what they do is they get the gold and then they have to
take it
in their little boat back to the town.
And then here's the problem.
There's one store where you go to sell the gold and guess who's waiting outside
that
store?
The people that rob you at gunpoint and take your gold and then give it to the
actual
people.
And so it's, it's really sad artisanal gold mining.
They're not organized.
And it's the same with the narcos.
We've been having a problem with narcos and everyone's like, dude, you can't
mess with
the narcos.
Like you're going to lose the fight.
And it's like, yeah, but these are, these are people that are like, we're just
going to
grow a little bit and then try and sell it.
Coca there.
I mean, we busted, we helped the police bust a, a, we saw a clearing on deep,
deep, deep,
deep, way up river, days up river.
There was a clearing out in the jungle.
And so we sent our rangers.
The rangers came back and we're like, we can't deal with this.
There's something scary going on up there.
And so we told the police and the police were like, yeah, we'll try and get up
there.
Now at the same time, I'm with JJ one day and we always do the same thing when
there's,
there was a, there was a bad patch of deforestation along the river.
And we said, how the hell did this happen?
They did it so quick.
And so I put up the drone and I flew it over and I'm so going, who, you know,
who are these
people?
Are they loggers?
We're just trying to get a sense of what's going on.
Fly the drone down.
And usually when we see loggers, they'll run into these little palm thatched huts.
They'll run into them to hide from the drone.
That's crazy.
They know what a drone is.
Well, these people came running out and they had guns and we had already on the
river.
We had passed their settlement and flown the drone back.
Their boat came out after us and we started going and I was like, JJ, you could
just talk
to them like normal.
And he looked at me and he went, not this time.
And we had a, we had a 60 horsepower and they had a 40 and we were just blazing
ahead of
them and I had the drone in the air.
And so it was $5,000 drone.
And so I'm driving the drone and I was like, can we, can we like, I got to get
this drone
and they were like, we, JJ looked at me, he's like, we're not stopping.
And it dawned on me that it was like, we're, we're, if we get caught, we're
getting killed.
Oh man.
And we arrived at our, at this point, nobody on the boat had a gun.
And so we arrived at a place where the police were camped out, where the guard,
they had
been dispatched to go check out that other site.
And so we arrived and the police force that we work with was there and we
pulled up and
we're like, yo, we got bad guys coming in and they, they masked up, loaded up.
They got on our boat.
We turned around and then as soon as they saw us coming back at them, they left.
And then days later, they went to that same police force and assassinated one
of the guys.
Oh man.
So the narcos are different.
The narcos are scary.
And that clearing that we originally found, they were actually predated sacks
of white powder.
The Peruvian military went in and actually raided that camp, arrested everybody.
It was so big that the American DEA knew about it.
They were notified.
And so this is now what's happening on this river where it's because it's the
last wilderness,
they're coming.
And so we're, we're, we're trying to, you know, we're relying on the Peruvian
authorities
to stop this from happening so that we can create this park before it's too
late.
Cause they're also blazing roads.
They're bringing in loggers.
They're smart.
They bring people and they'll send the loggers ahead of them.
And then when the loggers clear the land, they'll just start growing coca.
And so it's gotten, it's gotten scary.
I texted you when it was at its, uh, when I first started having to travel with
security.
Um, I remember texting you because I was like, this is, this is a different
game.
You know, it used to be like, we're, we're counting the butterflies and we're.
Yeah.
You wanted to learn where to train.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cause it's scary walking around.
Well, the thing is the, the police intercepted off the one of the people that
they arrested
on the phone.
It said, if you see JJ or that shithead gringo that flies the drone, they said,
if you kill
them, we'll reward you.
Oh man.
So they found this message on WhatsApp.
They showed it to us and they were like, you guys have a hit on you.
And then a few days later, they, they, JJ was supposed to get in the car at the
side of,
you know, you take the boat down river to the car and he was supposed to get in
the car
and go back to the town.
He actually came down river in the boat and then went, I forgot, I forgot that
I wanted
to finish up something at the station.
Take me back.
He went back to the station.
So our driver, Percy started driving back along this little dirt logging road
by himself
and they had trees across the road, masked guys with guns.
They put the guns in the windows.
They pulled him out and our windows are tinted.
And they said, take JJ and Paul out.
They were going to do it.
And so it just so happened that JJ wasn't in the car.
Just by pure luck.
He was not in the car that day.
And they roughed up our driver.
They took his driver's license.
They took his cell phone.
And they just said, just let them know.
We missed him today, but we'll get him soon.
Oh man.
And so we went, of course, we went to the police and we're like, look, we're
going to need
a lot more protection.
They're like, it's getting, I mean, we're just trying to save the rainforest,
man.
Like we're not trying to, and these people are going, well, we're just trying
to grow drugs.
And we want to do that where there's no police.
And the wilderness is only, the wilderness is becoming a finite thing now.
So it's becoming this battle, battleground.
Jamie, on there is a map.
I'm wondering if you could pull up the map because I could explain to you.
What's the status of this right now?
Are they still after you guys?
They are still after us, but it's been, for about eight months, it was really
bad.
It was really scary.
It was horrible.
Like every day, anytime JJ called me, I'd have a panic attack.
But you see the yellow on the right is the Trans-Amazon Highway.
That's the big, that's the big artery.
That's what the Chinese and Brazil built.
But then that smaller thing going up, that's the roads that the loggers and the
narcos are making.
And so that big red arrow, they're trying to make a road that goes in through
there.
And so the white line outlines what we're trying to protect.
And that light greenish blue is the area that we have protected.
That's that 130,000 acres that we have protected.
And so that's what we're doing right now.
It's a race against time.
If we can fill in that area, if we can fill that whole thing in, we save the
land.
And once it's ours, once it's under Jungle Keeper's protection, it's indigenous
protected.
All right, we're back.
Yeah.
So where are they growing the drugs in this map?
So right at the upper tip of that arrow, sort of the outside, they had cut a
little road filament into there.
And again, these little tiny trail roads, they go under the forest.
The forest is 160 feet tall.
Is there a way you can communicate with these guys saying you're not trying to
stop this?
I mean, right now what we're doing is putting signs on all of these little tiny,
I mean, these are jungle roads where just to go on the road, you're going out
to where, you know, if anybody finds you out there, they'll just kill you.
And your body will be decomposed and recycled within 48 hours by the jungle.
So you're past where there's police.
This is just earth.
It's the Wild West.
More than the Wild West, right?
Because the Wild West was never this dense.
Well, it's the Wild West and you can't see 10 feet in front of you.
Right.
That's what I'm talking about.
This is more wild than the Wild West.
I guess so.
Yeah.
And you still have, you have Indians with arrows and now you have these narcos
that are straight up evil that are coming.
I mean, they're taking girls from indigenous communities to work in their brothels.
They're growing cocaine.
They have brothels up there?
You got men working out in the jungle.
And so they go to the communities and they tell them, hey, your daughter is
very pretty.
She'd be a great waitress.
You know, we can educate her while she trains and helps people.
And then they never see him again.
And so it's all that darkness.
And at the same time, what we're doing is bettering the lives of the community,
making friends with these people.
We have these amazing rangers.
And I mean, we have different ranger stations along the river.
And if we make this into a park like Teddy Roosevelt.
No, John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt on a three-day camping trip and showed him Yosemite
and like Sequoia and all this stuff.
And he was like, we got to protect this.
Like, it's special here.
Look at the size of these trees.
Look at the beauty of this valley.
And then they protected it.
There's nothing as wild as this river on earth today.
And so if we protect this now, the 200 indigenous people that live on this
river get protected from the narcos.
They continue having abundant fish and resources.
And then they'll work as park guards and educators and chefs and boat drivers
to maintain this gigantic protected area.
And then Peru will have this crown jewel of the Amazon.
So they love it.
But how can you protect them from the narcos?
I mean, it seems like the amount of money that's involved in trafficking
cocaine would make it a real problem.
But the good thing is that these are the little artisanal ones.
These are the guys that go.
These are not like mafia bosses.
This isn't like the Mexican cartel.
These are like these little clans of people that go, you know what?
We could just grow some cocaine and then we'll sell it to the big guys.
And so they're just – they're like mom and pop cocaine growers.
But they're also murderers.
Well, of course.
And so when the cops go out there, the cops just arrest them and take them
straight to jail.
And so the cops have been – everyone assumes that Latin American police, no
matter what, are going to be corrupt.
And like the police force we've been working with has been keeping us alive.
And they want this park protected as much as the indigenous people do.
It's amazing how many good people are out there.
They're actually helping.
And how many narco organizations, artisanal narco organizations are out there?
Peru has become – it's not great.
Peru I think has become, if not on the same level as Colombia, I think they
might have surpassed Colombia in terms of cocaine production.
They're not doing great with that right now.
And so we're at this very, very crucial juncture there.
But, you know, it's funny because in doing all this, you know, with – even
with the book coming out and I've been talking to people and people go, well,
you have narcos now.
They're like, so you're going to fail.
And it's like, man, you're not even the one on the ground.
Like I'm the one on the ground.
I'm telling you we're not going to fail.
And the police have been successful at clearing them out.
And it's getting better.
Just like the whole thing with, yeah, the Amazon is disappearing, but we can
still stop it.
It's like you got to – you think like before D-Day if Churchill was like, oh,
we'll probably lose.
Like you can't have that mentality.
And so it's very, very encouraging seeing the local people stand up for what
they believe in.
And the job is dangerous.
There's a video on there that I think it says Sandra Tree Crush.
But we – I got woke up a few weeks ago and one of my managers came running at
like 3 a.m.
I see a flashlight coming through the jungle.
And so I'm thinking the worst.
And then he comes.
He's going, Paul.
He goes, a tree.
And I told you the last time I was on here, I said the most dangerous thing in
the rainforest is the trees falling.
He said a tree fell on the ranger station.
And it's raining.
And I'm talking about rain.
You know when you're at the airport and you hear that sound where it's like
there's no sound louder.
Your ears can't handle it.
It was raining so loud.
And he's screaming into my ear that this tree fell on the ranger station.
He goes, and one of the rangers was crushed.
And I'm going, but dead or alive?
And he goes, we don't know yet.
And so it's 3 a.m.
And we get in this boat and we're going upriver and there's lightning flashing
and there's rain falling.
And I'm looking with the flashlight and I'm navigating by the crocodile eyes
because we don't know where the edges of the river are because they, you know,
the eye shine.
And so we have footage of this and we arrive at the ranger station.
And sure enough, this tree had fallen, crushed the roof, all the beams and all
the scaffolding under the roof and fallen on this woman's face while she was in
bed.
And so she was crushed under this and she couldn't even scream because it was
raining so loud.
And so we get there and I stick my hand into the rubble and I hold her hand and
I'm like, are you okay?
And she was like, hey, Paul.
She's like, I have no idea.
And she was amazingly like, like buoyant.
She was like, I have no idea if I'm okay.
She's like, but I'm alive.
I was like, we're going to get you out of here.
And we started chainsawing, I mean, like 16 feet of tree debris over her and
all this gnarled roof material.
And we had to pull her out of there and she had a scratch on her ankle.
Wow.
We've got this great video of her sitting in a hammock at like 6 a.m.
And she's smoking a cigarette.
She's like, I'm alive.
She's going, I'm alive.
And she didn't quit.
She's still a ranger.
And it's like, she's out there right now driving up and down because she wants
that forest protected for her kids.
And it's like, these people care.
It sounds like the adventure of this is very addictive to you.
This is what I'm getting.
I think you love it.
I think you love the forest.
Yeah.
I think you love protecting it.
But I think there's something about the danger of it and the chaos and the wildness
of it all that seems to me, I'm looking at your eyes.
You're smiling because you know I'm right.
I know, yeah.
I'm not going to deny that.
When I was a kid, I remember sitting in school and being like, why did, like
you read about like Roosevelt and Jane Goodall and like these people had these
amazingly adventurous lives.
And I was sitting in school getting detention after detention and getting
yelled at and being like, can I go to the bathroom?
And I was like, why do they get to do that?
And I have to do this.
And they're like, you know, everyone around me was like, you know, when you get
a job, then you're really going to love your desk.
One of my friend's mom said that to me.
She goes, you think you hate your school desk?
She goes, wait till you get your real desk.
And I was like, oh, man.
And so, yeah, riding on the boat at 4 a.m. with the lightning is incredible.
Showering in the river.
Navigating by crocodile eyes.
Yeah, man.
I mean, with the wind in your hair and the feel.
I mean, you know the magic of the mountains.
Yeah.
And the jungle has its own vibe.
You watch that mist snarling up off the canopy and it's like, it's so wild that
you just, you feel better.
You feel healthier.
And, again, you know, that whole thing of, what's that thing they say, like a
sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace.
And it's like the beauty of that, you know, you drink from the river and then
you sweat it out and you watch your sweat join the steam and rain back down
onto the jungle.
You are connected to your environment.
And every single day you don't know what's going to happen.
You know, I opened.
There was one day where I was like, OK, I'm going to stay on the station.
I'm not going to do anything.
I've been hammering myself in the swamps for a week.
And I was like, I'm just going to, like, drink coffee and, like, do office work
on my computer.
And so I was, like, at the station.
And my team comes running.
And they're like, anaconda.
And I was like, where?
I was actually, like, annoyed.
I was like, where?
How big of an anaconda?
And they're like, no, it's a pretty big anaconda.
As we go down to the thing.
And sure enough, there's a big-ass anaconda on a log.
They were, like, 11 feet.
You know, not a monster.
But so then I started doing this thing where I was like, because they were all
like, be careful.
And I was like, of what?
And they're like, it could bite you.
And I was like, it's asleep.
I was like, she's just trying to get the sun.
So then I started, I took out my phone.
I started doing this thing.
I was like, people are scared of snakes.
And I was like, if you're scared of snakes, I was like, there's an 11-foot anaconda.
I was like, do I appear to be in danger yet?
And then I kept getting closer.
And I was like, how about now?
How about now?
And then I was like, she's not waking up.
So I get on the log with her.
And the anaconda still doesn't get up.
And so I turned around.
And her coil is here.
And her head's, like, you know, 10 feet over there.
And I just put my head on her.
And now I'm laying on the snake.
And I'm still taking a video.
And I'm going, see, this snake doesn't care that I'm here.
And even if she wakes up, you know what she's going to do?
She's going to jump in the water.
She's not going to bite me.
And she never woke up.
And I figured, you know what?
Why bother her?
She never woke up when you rested your head?
She woke up.
She moved her tongue.
But she never freaked out.
Well, they're the king.
It sounds like they don't really have any natural predators, right?
Do they?
When they're small.
When they're small.
Crocodiles, right?
The crocodiles, the herons, the piranha.
Oh, right.
You forget that, like, pelicans and herons can eat, like, a baby alligator.
They'll just, like, throw it back.
Sure.
Just take it down their throat.
And the herons are crazy.
Herons are amazing hunters.
Pelicans are disgusting.
The way they'll take, like, a whole bullfrog and just glut it down.
So you know that thing's, like, alive in their chest.
I've seen videos of them doing it to pigeons or seagulls.
Yes.
The one where you swallow the seagull.
Hole.
And the seagull's, like, getting smaller as it goes down.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you realize, like, that crazy mouth that they have is just so they can
swallow things alive.
Yeah.
I mean, this weird-looking, funky thing.
You're like, oh, that's a monster.
Yeah.
That's a monster that just swallows things alive.
Yeah.
You don't think of birds as savage as they are.
What are you laughing at, Jamie?
Pictures of pelicans trying to eat shit on the screen.
I'm trying to eat a dog.
Oh.
Oh, God.
Oh, come on.
Marshall.
Marshall, look out.
He's trying to get a cat.
He's trying to eat a cat.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, they basically can eat almost anything that's near their size.
Good Lord.
That one, just fly out.
Wow.
It's too late.
Oh, man.
Yeah, they're monsters.
He's trying to eat another.
God, that's, I call bullshit on that one.
There's no way his pelican was trying to eat a bear.
I believe that, though.
I've seen that video.
What are those things called again?
Those are baby capybaras.
Capybaras, right.
Those are, they've, are those the things that have made their way into, no, it's
a different
animal that's made their way into, like, Louisiana, and they have to go out and
shoot them?
Javelinas.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
It's a type of large rodent, because David Tell used to have a TV show called
Insomniac,
and he went out at night one time with them in Louisiana, and they're hunting
these things
that they're an invasive rodent, a giant rodent.
And it was like, Dave would do his shows, and then after, it was a Comedy
Central show,
it was a really good show.
And then he would find things to do in the town, because he can't sleep,
because he's
up all night.
And so he went out with these people that were, God, I can't remember what the
animal was,
but it's a large invasive rodent that exists in the South.
I mean, nutria.
Nutria.
That's right.
Geez.
Yeah, and people eat them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the rodent, I mean, capybaras.
See if you can find that video, because it's kind of crazy.
Nutria.
They're out there hunting them with 22s.
With 22s?
Yeah, I mean, they have to.
They're a completely invasive species, and they're huge.
They're like a small dog.
That's something I left off the list.
We eat those all the time.
Nutria?
We have something called a paca.
It's like a small capybara with spots.
And those, I mean, it's like squirrels.
But they're big.
They're like cat-sized and fat.
People eat them all the time.
Those are delicious.
What's your favorite thing to eat in the jungle?
Piranha.
Piranha?
Fuck yeah.
Really?
Oh, my God.
They're delicious.
And when you fry a piranha, you know, you make the slits along it.
You just fry the whole thing.
You just pull it right off of its skeleton.
And the fins become like chips, like little salty chips.
Oh.
Oh, they're so good.
You just put salt on it and fry it?
And we just a little bit of salt and then fry it up.
And then better than the piranha is the paco, the big vegetarian.
And the piranha species, yeah.
Those are invasive species in America as well.
Yeah.
People catch them all the time.
Oh, they're so good.
Yeah, they catch them and they're like 40 pounds.
They're huge.
Yeah, someone caught a world record paco.
Powerful.
Really powerful.
Paco, P-A-C-U, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I want to say in Georgia, Georgia or Florida, somewhere in there.
And fucking huge.
Yeah.
No, they're powerful.
We fish for them.
You have like a 10-foot pole with a rope on it.
Yeah, there's a paco.
Yeah.
Yeah, look at the size of that thing, man.
That's crazy.
50 pounds.
World record size paco caught in Florida.
There it is.
50 pounds.
That's nuts.
Dude, those are so, they're so nutritious.
When you eat them, you feel like you're just gaining muscle.
Really?
Yeah.
Like, you still eat a lot of elk?
Oh, yeah.
Like, don't you feel like it's like a superfood?
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
This is how I feel.
I live on these things.
Oh, it's wild, yeah.
I feel like I just...
You live on piranha.
Yeah.
Piranha and paco.
Yeah.
Wow.
How do you catch the paco?
10-foot pole.
You have a piece of rope and you put like a piece of like last night's dinner.
You tie a bunch of rancid chicken.
You leave it out in the sun, make it smell bad.
You go out at 6 in the morning.
So they're not vegetarians?
Well, they'll eat anything.
They specialize on the nuts.
That's why they have the human teeth.
Oh.
Those are the ones that have the human teeth.
When you open their mouth, they have like molars and then like a few like front
teeth.
And so we go with this 10-foot pole and nobody can make a sound on the boat.
You're just floating with the river.
You're like invisible.
And you wait for a feature in the river, like a rock or a place where the water's
rushing and you smack it against it because they like that falling fruit or
falling seeds.
And when they hit – I'm talking about like a four-inch hook.
When they hit that hook, this is the thing because you're doing this for –
you're doing it for an hour and you're like, all right, there's no paco in here.
Well, guess what?
When they do hit it, they'll pull you right out of the boat.
I mean, I've been dragged straight across the boat where like you got to use
one hand to stop yourself and the other hand's holding this pole.
And then your friend's got to pull you back.
You get this fish on the thing and it's going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,
boom, boom, boom, boom.
How big are they?
That you're catching?
When you saw, they're big.
You're catching them that big?
Yeah.
They're huge.
And then you got to have a hammer because you got to shut them off somehow.
Right.
You got to crack them right on – you know, between the eyes because otherwise
they'll just either jump out of the boat or injure someone.
Or destroy everything.
That was the other thing.
We were going upriver a few months ago.
We're at night.
We're all just quiet in the boat and we're going to go up to this tributary to
explore it.
And I had a group of tourists with me and this girl was sitting on the front
and all of a sudden I feel something go past me.
There's something – and all of a sudden I got wet and all of a sudden I hear
ba-bang, ba-bang, ba-bang, ba-bang in the boat.
I'm going, what the fuck is going on?
Turn on my headlamp and there's a Paco in the boat.
And the girl that was sitting on the front, her head is bleeding.
One of those huge-ass Pacos jumped out of the river in the night, hit this girl
in the head, and then fell into the boat.
Whoa.
And so we just grabbed –
Yeah, we just ate it.
But, I mean, that Paco was in the middle of the Amazon at night just jumping
around enjoying itself and it just jumped in the wrong boat.
Wow, wow.
Two-foot fish flying through the air.
And that's your favorite thing to eat.
Absolutely.
What else is really good to eat?
There's these little cup mushrooms that are really good.
You fry them up with garlic.
You do that and Paco, now you're talking good.
My friend Roy is a chef.
He's really – he's one of the jungle – he's the president of Jungle Keepers
right now.
He's a local guy and he focuses on Amazonian cuisine.
And so he goes and he picks all the right flowers and funguses and he'll take
Paco and then he'll flavor it with a type of orchid thing.
And, like, all of a sudden you have this amazing food.
And, like, Lima, they have – you know, Peru's become this amazing place for
food.
Peru is great food.
Wow.
He does the jungle version.
Wow.
So it's not, like, nasty monkey soup.
It's –
Not turtle.
It's the curated, you know, five-star version of jungle cuisine.
So that's number one?
Paco's number one, 100%.
I mean, even right now.
You're a big crocodile?
I think I tried alligator ones, but it didn't leave an impression on me.
I haven't really – also, I feel like they're my friends.
Really?
Yeah.
How so?
Like, I like them.
Just because they're cool?
Well, I mean, I work with them a lot.
I'm always catching caiman.
I always see them on the side of the river.
You know, nobody's serving me.
If they were serving me caiman, then it would be just like the monkey where it's
like, all right, I got to eat it.
But nobody's serving me caiman.
So I'm not going to go.
So that's not a staple of their diet?
No.
In the north, in Iquitos, they eat a lot more caiman.
So you don't see caiman.
On our river, there's still – there's a caiman on every beach.
There's jabby roost dorks.
There's kakoi herons.
There's just macaws everywhere.
It's just – there's just so much life.
It's avatar.
It's just pulsing life.
Wow.
It's incredible.
Did you find that video of David Tell?
No.
It weirdly is, like, not online.
I found a picture of the episode, but not a video of it.
Yeah.
And they're just –
Shooting nutria.
Yeah.
I think they eat them too.
But I can't find it.
Yeah.
And he was actually on the episode just –
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This is a long time ago.
This is back when Dave was drinking.
So this is, like, Dave's been sober for, I want to say, 15 years at least.
Somewhere in that range.
Yeah.
And this is back when, you know, he would just drink at the comedy club and
then stay up all night, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee.
Never end.
Yeah.
I mean, he's the most unhealthy and also the most hilarious guy alive.
You've stopped drinking, right?
I drink a little every now and then now.
I went, like, eight months with no drinking.
And I started having, like, a glass of wine with dinner.
Yeah.
And a cocktail or two.
But I have not had more than, like, two drinks in a night since.
Yeah.
Feels good, doesn't it?
It was a good break.
Yeah.
The eight months, I felt really good.
And I was convinced I was never going to drink again.
And then I drank a glass of wine.
I was like, ooh, I like this.
I miss this.
Well, the wine, that's the one thing.
The wine is good.
Yeah.
Wine with a steak?
Oh, red wine.
Yeah.
A little.
I think it was important to just recognize that I was doing it.
And it wasn't an alcoholic.
I was just, I have a club.
Yeah.
I'm there all the time.
And, you know, you're out with friends.
You want to drink?
Yeah, sure.
Let's have a drink.
Yeah.
Go to dinner.
Have a drink.
Have another drink.
It just got to a point where I was like,
I was feeling like, and I'm too healthy.
I work out all the time.
And I was like, why am I doing this to myself?
Yeah.
You know?
But now I realize, you know, it's a little moderation.
It's not bad.
A little moderation.
But drinking is essentially fun poison.
Fun poison.
Yeah.
It's weird.
After Lex ruined drinking for me.
Lex gets saucy.
Well, this is the thing.
When he came to the Amazon, he goes, I want to do ayahuasca.
And so we called, you know, JJ's oldest brother is 70-something.
We called this shaman in.
And he's like, you know, with the Lex voice, he's like, brother, you have to do
this with me.
And I was like, I am not drinking ayahuasca.
There's a chapter in the book about when I did it with the old master and he
overboiled it.
And we all like saw God in the unit.
We were there for the Big Bang.
It was awful.
Yeah.
Nice.
It was hard.
No.
It was not.
No.
Why?
It was like taking a mega dose.
It was like, sure.
It was awful.
It was traumatic.
You don't like to get scared?
I was terrified, man.
Yeah.
No.
So I was like, I have retired.
I was like, I'm not doing it.
And Lex was walking around in circles for two hours and he comes up to me and
he puts his hand on my shoulder and he goes, I came all the way here for you.
He goes, now you do this for me.
He goes, don't leave me alone in the dark.
And I went, God.
I said, all right, I'll do it.
And we drank right next to each other and the guy's smoking his pipe and, you
know, he has the feathers on and he's singing to us and you're drinking and you're
going deeper and deeper into the hole.
And God, it was interesting, though.
We both, the shaman said that, you know, he was talking about what Lex was
going afterwards.
He was talking about what Lex was going through on his journey.
And he goes in and does this deep work of the things he sees coming off of you.
And this is a guy, the shaman, I've known for 20 years.
He's like my uncle.
And so he would come up to me and he'd go, I'd be laying down.
You can't, you can't get up.
And he'd come up to me and he'd go, one more cup.
And I'd be like, sure.
Like, why not?
And he'd like give me like a kiss on the forehead and throw it down my throat.
And then he'd go to Lex and go, one more cup.
And Lex would be like, yes.
And then, you know, give it to Lex.
And he said that, he said that he wasn't worried about my spirit.
He said, I was, I was there to protect Lex.
And he said, Lex was there to, to, to do some real work.
And so what's interesting is that we both reached this sort of, we, we both
reached the pinnacle of, of, of what was happening at the same time where I
felt myself about, I felt it coming.
And I was like, oh no, I'm going to throw up.
I'm going to throw up.
And all of a sudden my, my consciousness lifted six feet above my body and I
was looking down at me and Lex and I got this overwhelmingly calm sensation.
And without speaking, the shaman said to me, he said, you're not going to feel
this.
I know you don't like it.
He said, you're just here to support him so you can vomit now.
And so Lex started vomiting and I started vomiting, but I was watching myself
and I was watching him.
And I was just like, this is fine.
It doesn't hurt a bit.
And it was very, very comforting.
And then he came and he started with the, you know, shaking the leaves and
singing louder and, and really cultivating, making sure we gave everything that
we purged all of it.
And then, and then he brought the crescendo down and then he, he, he calmed and
then he began singing.
And then we, we came, we, we, we settled back into the, the, the symphonic throb
of the night.
And then the trip went on for some time, but it was, it was interesting that
things heightened at that moment and that we went through it together.
Wow.
So why did he think that you were there to protect Lex?
It was just like something he felt?
That's what he said.
That's what he said to me.
You know, and then, and then, and then, and then, you know, it was very
interesting watching Lex.
Lex go through his journey because he, he, by the end of it, he just got
happier and happier.
He just, he just liked it more and more.
And around, around, I think cup six, I, I tapped after the, after the vomiting,
after that thing, it was sort of, again, there's, there's energies floating
around and he's singing.
It's great, you know, understanding a little bit of the language because, you
know, he's singing to his grandfather.
He's singing to the spirit of Santiago and the spirit of the Anaconda and using
the old words for them, you know, not even saying Anaconda.
He's, he's saying the other things, Amaru Mayu and, you know, he's saying shiwawako
and he's talking about the, so he's doing this and shaking his thing and you
hear the frogs throbbing and it's all moving through your skin.
And so I, yeah, I, I tapped out after a while and Lex kept going.
He's got an amazing constitution.
I think that's the Russian thing.
But since then I can't drink.
Really?
I can't drink.
I could have a cup of wine.
Maybe if I have more than that, I feel sick.
Interesting.
Like I feel damaged.
I have not been able to drink.
I haven't had a beer since, since two years ago.
So what do you think it is?
It just like let you know what it's doing to you?
I have no idea.
It's just a weird side effect.
I keep trying it.
I'll like, I used to love whiskey.
I'll like, I'll like smell some whiskey and I'm like, blah.
Really?
So we cracked the bottle right now.
Turned off.
I don't have any in here.
I wouldn't.
You, you would, it would make you still a sip?
I mean, I could take a sip of it, but my body would be like, no, red light, red
light, no.
Yeah.
Well, that's, your body's correct.
Yeah.
But it made me, made me hypersensitive.
I noticed from that moment onwards.
Did it have the effect with Lex?
No.
I don't think so.
You can still booze it up.
I don't think so.
Lex goes hard.
I'm sure he's.
We went to Andrew Schultz's wedding with Lex.
Yeah.
And then we had a float.
We flew with Whitney Cummings.
Lex was doing a gig in Vegas.
Yeah.
And we said, we'll go with you.
So it was me and my wife and Whitney and Lex.
We flew to Vegas.
Yeah.
And then we hung out with David Goggins.
I called him up.
I was like, come meet us at the hotel.
Does he party?
No.
No.
No.
No.
Him and Lex were doing push-ups.
They were doing drunk.
Lex was drunk and David wasn't.
And Lex wanted to have a push-up competition.
With Goggins.
With Goggins.
That's amazing.
I mean, but that's why he's Lex, right?
At the encore.
Because he's willing to try everything.
Yeah.
Oh, he's an animal.
I mean, the fact that the push-up competition with David Goggins.
He's just silly.
That's hysterical.
He's quite a character, that Lex.
He told me he's going to Dagestan to train.
He's going to go to Dagestan and train with Khabib's team.
Yeah.
Good Lord, dude.
Yeah, good Lord.
You're like 42.
How old is he?
Lex's got to be in his 40s.
But early 40s.
I think he's still very young.
Yeah, but you're going to go there and train with savages.
But how old is Khabib?
Well, Khabib's retired, but he's probably 35, if I had to guess.
You know, somewhere around there.
Yeah.
But it's a different thing.
He's the one, let's talk now.
Yeah.
Let's talk now.
Well, he's training those guys now.
He's training Islam Akachev and Umar Nurmagomedov, his cousin.
He's training some of the best guys alive.
So he's running a camp down in Dagestan.
Because he's kind of like, so did he, it seemed like, at least, I don't like, I
wasn't really
following his career, but it seemed like he came in like an assassin, did some
big stuff.
Well, his dad died.
Okay.
His dad died during COVID.
Okay.
And after his dad died, he promised his mother that he was going to stop
fighting.
Got it.
Yeah.
His dad was his trainer.
You know, his dad was a legendary, legendary trainer.
He trained Islam, trained Khabib.
And when he died, Khabib made a promise to his mother.
He fought Justin Gaethje, beat him, defended his title, and that was it.
Done.
But I mean, he's very well regarded now for his accomplishments in fighting,
right?
One of the greatest of all time.
Yeah.
I mean, there's an argument of who the greatest of all time is.
It's very subjective.
Sure.
But he's certainly in the conversation.
Yeah.
You know, he's one of.
I don't think there is a, maybe John.
John Jones is the greatest of all time, just based on his accomplishments and
also undefeated.
But also the time that he's been.
I mean, John won a world title at 23 and is still, like, up until he relinquished
his heavyweight title recently.
He's 36, 37 now.
Yeah.
No one's beaten him.
Crazy.
That is wild.
I mean, no one's had a run like that.
No one's had a run like that.
That's insane.
How big is it?
How big is he?
John's a heavyweight.
Yeah.
She's, John, I think, is 6'3 or 6'4.
You know, and now he's about 240-ish, but he used to fight at 205.
That was his main weight class.
That's some crazy.
Yeah.
And so, you know, the conversation of who is the greatest of all time.
In my book, Mighty Mouse is in that conversation, too.
Who's Mighty Mouse?
Mighty Mouse is Demetrius Johnson.
Okay.
He's a flyweight.
The problem is he was a very small guy, and so a lot of people disregard the
smaller guys in that conversation.
But skill-wise, in terms of the expression of mixed martial arts excellence, I
put Mighty Mouse in his prime right up there with everybody.
Do you think that, now, your arms are significantly bigger than mine, and I
feel like the guys who are good at striking have smaller arms.
Mike Tyson.
Giant arms.
Giant arms.
There you go.
Yeah, that's not it.
Don't you feel like you're swinging around some weight?
Well, you are, but you also have a lot more power behind it.
Yeah, yeah, so when you do connect.
That's true.
It's conditioning, you know, like the whole thing of swing.
It's like, did you develop those arms just doing bicep curls?
Yeah.
Or did you develop those arms doing functional things?
Yeah, yeah.
Like, constant training that gives you muscle endurance.
You know, it all depends.
But if you see, like, a big, bulky bodybuilder guy, yeah, that's not good.
No, but for, like, our level where we're still athletic and stuff, I'm going,
but man, I don't want...
I don't want to put on more...
I want to get stronger, but I don't want to put on more mass.
Yeah, I don't do really anything to try to put weight on.
Yeah.
I don't lift anything heavier than 70 pounds.
So many dudes just want to...
Yeah, they just want to look big.
Yeah, I don't do anything like that.
No.
I don't...
Like I said, the heaviest thing I lift is my body weight.
Yeah.
You know, I do a lot of body weight stuff.
I do a lot of chin-ups and dips, and sometimes I do it with a vest, you know,
and I do, you
know...
But with kettlebells, like, the heavy...
Occasionally, I'll throw around a 90-pound kettlebell, but the heaviest I
really train with
is 70.
Yeah.
But that's plenty.
But I don't...
Like I said, I don't train for size.
I just train for function.
Strength and function, yeah.
Yeah, it has to...
To me, it's silly.
If I don't have range of motion and function, like, what am I doing?
No, you have to...
Yeah, I'm a martial artist.
Like, my whole thing is to being able to use my body.
Yeah.
It's not to make it look like I can use it.
I'd rather be smaller and more functional than bigger and just look like a big,
goofy
toad.
Yeah.
I bulk too easily.
I actually try to put on...
That's why I only do...
I mean, yeah, we're Italian-Irish.
I mean, come on.
You get thick.
Yeah, you get thick quick.
Yeah.
You got to wash the pasta.
Long line of people.
Long line of thick people.
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
Can I take a quick...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Let's take a quick...
We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen.
You've been murdering it.
Like, you've been having just tons and tons of people.
You do them every day?
I just keep...
I mean, it's not any different pace than before.
Yeah.
It's usually four a week.
It seems...
It's just...
Maybe it's because I'm in the jungle for a few weeks and then I'll, like, come
back and look
and I'm like, whoa.
Yeah.
Johnny Knoxville, Matt Damon, and, like, bang, bang, bang, bang.
The key is just keep going.
Yeah.
You know, like, you've run 1,000 miles, right?
But you didn't run 1,000 miles in a day.
Yeah.
You know, you run 10 a day.
You keep going.
And then days go on and on and on and on and on and on and on.
You get to meet everybody.
You meet a lot of people.
Yeah.
You definitely develop a better understanding of human beings.
Because, you know, you're limited by the amount of human beings you interact
with, your scope,
your understanding of people.
Yeah.
The more you can talk to, the more different people, the more you get a
different sense.
Yeah.
Well, you're in a very unique...
I mean, again, I always go back to the bee lady.
Remember that?
Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
She relocates the bees.
She's cool.
Yeah.
And then you have people like Knoxville on and you guys are talking...
I just heard you guys talking about when he got hit by the bull.
I was always wondering if that was real.
And then I remember the first time I came in here I was asking you and Jamie, I
was going,
the one question was the David Blaine thing because he had you shove that thing
through.
I was like, come on.
Oh, I shoved it through.
Yeah, that was real.
I was going, come on, they got it.
That can't be.
Nope, that was real.
Yeah.
I mean, because I did it once and I hit a nerve.
And he had to restart it, right?
Yeah.
Maybe back out and shove it right through.
But it's not a trick, you know?
It's just pain.
Like, I could do that.
If I wanted to do that, I could do that.
I could shove a needle through my arm.
How bad do you want it?
I don't want to do that.
Yeah.
I don't understand why I would do that.
And I feel like that's a little bit of what Knoxville was saying where he was
like,
look, he's like, I got a response.
And he's like, this is what I started doing.
Yeah.
You know, and it's like one way or the other, how are you going to get the
attention?
I mean, that's what brought him to the dance is just getting hurt all the time.
But when he told me he had been knocked unconscious 16 times and then the last
one, that's really
bad.
And then the last one was the bull one that landed on his head and he was
depressed for months
and had to get on medication.
I am very averse to head injuries, which is kind of hypocritical because I'm a
combat sports
commentator.
You know, it's weird.
And I've also been hit in the head a bunch of times, but I just think it's
really fucking
bad for you overall.
I stopped sparring when I was in my late twenties, really kickboxing sparring.
Yeah.
And then I did it a little bit when I was supposed to fight Wesley Snipes.
I went back and started sparring again.
Did you fight Wesley Snipes?
No.
Wesley Snipes was hysterical.
It was in, I was in my mid thirties.
I was like, this is the last chance I get to do something like this.
Yeah.
And then I got contacted by Campbell McLaren, who was one of the producers of
the early UFC.
He's like, this is going to sound crazy.
But Wesley, he was in tax problems.
He wound up going to jail for tax evasion.
Apparently he had some crazy guy who was telling him, you know, you don't have
to pay taxes.
You know, there's, there's those guys that are like, what do they call them?
Sovereign citizens.
Is that what they call them?
There's a lot of people that give really bad advice, you know?
And they got in with someone like Wesley Snipes.
Uh-huh.
And, you know, they tell you like they can't prosecute you.
It's not in the constitution.
And he believed it because he didn't have access to other people.
I never talked to Wesley.
I don't know.
I don't have anything against him.
You sure he just wasn't scared of fighting you, so he made up this whole story?
No.
I think Wesley also might have been embarking on a journey of cocaine.
Oh.
Which gives you a very distorted idea of what you can and can't do.
Everything.
Yeah.
You think you can do everything.
I don't know if that's the case.
I think it might have been just, well, he's a very legitimate martial artist.
I mean, Wesley, if you look at his like skills, like from the movie Blade and
like he's a
really good martial artist.
He knows how to fight.
Yeah.
You kind of have to be to do those movies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But my thought was just I'm going to grab him and choke the life out of him.
Yeah.
How is he going to stop me?
Yeah.
Like also, I know how to stand up.
That would have been awesome.
He was a kickboxer.
That would have been awesome.
If you could fight one person dead or alive, full fight.
I don't want to do that.
I wouldn't eat.
No.
The problem with it, it really.
No, but like theoretically, not you as Joe Rogan, the dad and like does Joe Rogan.
It would not be one person.
What it would be is start fighting again.
It would be fight whoever.
It was the whole thing would be competing.
But obviously I'm 58.
That's never going to happen again now.
I'm saying like, but like Wesley Snipes, it's like, you know, you say like, oh,
I'd want to fight.
Well, I just thought it would be an adventure.
Yeah.
And I trained for like six months.
I was training with Rob Kamen, who was like a legendary kickboxing, a Dutch
kickboxing champion.
So he was my kickboxing coach.
Yeah.
And so I was training with him in the mornings and I was training jujitsu at
night.
It was hard.
It was really hard.
I was doing it for six months.
I was training twice a day for six months.
Yeah.
It was really brutal.
And I was so tired.
I was tired all the time.
And that's where you got those leg kicks that you were teaching George St.
Pierre.
Nah, I learned how to do that when I was a kid.
Now, my question is now he's such a legendary MMA guy.
Like he was, did he not have.
Well, I was a Taekwondo specialist, you know, and I was a multiple times state
champion in Taekwondo.
And I won a bunch of national tournaments.
And I was really good.
I was really good at Taekwondo.
Like I had fought at a very high level.
And I have a lot of really good instruction that I got from, I got very lucky.
And I stumbled upon a school in Boston called the Jae Hun Kim Taekwondo
Institute.
Just randomly walked in the door one day and it turned out to be one of the
best Taekwondo schools in the world.
And so I had trained with some of the very best people in the world just by
fortune.
And I was physically gifted.
I was very lucky in a lot of ways.
I had a lot of natural power.
And I learned technique, which is the most important thing, like perfect
technique.
And so when it was funny, it was because it came about because of John Donaher.
I had a conversation with John Donaher, who's George's jiu-jitsu coach, who's
maybe the greatest martial arts coach in the world, maybe of all time, really,
legitimately, like a brilliant man.
He was a philosophy major from Columbia who got – I think he was a professor
for a bit.
But then he got obsessed with jiu-jitsu and was just teaching jiu-jitsu and
training jiu-jitsu and sleeping on the mats and – like literally.
Literally.
Literally teaching all day and training all day and sleeping on the mats.
But a brilliant man.
And we were having dinner one night and he's like, George needs some help with
the finer points of the spinning back kick.
Do you know anyone who can help him?
And I said, this is going to sound crazy.
I go, but I have like the best spinning back kick you're ever going to see in
your fucking life.
I go, I know it sounds crazy because I'm a comedian.
I go, find a bag I could show you.
I could show you what I could do.
And then I brought – there's a video of me.
Oh, I saw it.
Okay.
It was me taking –
The sound is imprinted in my mind.
George.
Whack.
This is when we were at Legends.
Yeah.
Legends MMA in L.A., which is where I trained.
It was where Eddie Bravo had 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu.
And, you know, I go, okay, let's go downstairs to the Muay Thai part and I'll
show you.
And then I kick the bag and he's like, man, what the fuck?
Can I film this?
And like he's filming with a flip phone, which is crazy.
Like that's how long ago this was.
That's crazy.
I don't know.
It was probably 2005 or something like that.
I had hair.
And it was funny because it was like this thing.
It's like – because I don't do it.
It was – even back then, it wasn't like I was training in kickboxing.
I wasn't training in Taekwondo.
It was just – I just still had it in me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Do you still – do you keep it?
Did it today.
You did it today?
Yeah.
Nice.
Yeah.
That was an impressive video.
And you just go, Jesus, he's – if he's showing this to George St. Pierre, how
good is he at this thing?
It's like –
I used to be really good.
Yeah.
I believe you.
But I realized when I was like 21 – well, I realized when I was 19 that I was
going to have to stop because I fought in California.
I was living in Boston at the time.
I was traveling all over the country and fighting.
And I fought in the nationals in California against this guy who was the
Illinois state champion.
And I knocked him out really bad.
It was really bad.
I hit him with a wheel kick in the head and my heel was sore for days
afterwards.
Yeah.
Like I had a hard time walking from his fucking head.
Yeah.
And he never got up.
He went down face first, was snoring.
And back then my thing was if I knocked anybody out, I would just act like it
was no big deal.
I would just turn away and walk away.
No celebration.
I just walk away like that.
I'm going to do that to all of you guys.
Yeah.
And so I walked away and then I turned to my friend, Junkzik, who was my corner
guy.
I said, is he getting up?
He was like, he's not getting up.
He's not going to get up.
He's out.
And then they took him and they put him in a – they took him and they put him
in a stretcher.
And then they were taking care of him.
And for like a half hour, he was still unconscious.
Yeah.
And then they took him to the hospital.
I have no idea what happened to him.
But I realized it was so bad.
It was – because he came forward.
So what happened was he did – do you know what a switch kick is?
No.
A switch kick is you're standing with your left leg forward and you switch legs
and you come like with the left kick.
So you think he's repositioning and then –
He's moving forward and he telegraphed it.
And it's his left leg.
So I saw that his left leg was coming this way.
So I spun with my right heel and I hit him in the head as he was running
forward.
So it's like multiple – the force itself of a wheel kick is so powerful.
Yeah.
And then when you're running into a wheel kick, it's crazy.
It's like two cars driving at each other.
It's like getting hit with a baseball bat that fucking – you know, Mark McGuire
swinging.
Yeah.
It's crazy how much power there is in it.
Because it's your legs.
Your legs carry you around all day.
And the torque of your whole body, you're whipping around and you're hitting
with the heel.
And you – you know, there's no padding on your heel.
And it's not – I hit him right on the fucking cheek, like right on the side
of his head.
He went out.
And then I came back to my instructor and he wasn't there at the tournament.
I went back to Boston.
He's like – he goes, I heard you had a really good knockout.
And I said, yeah.
I said I was – it was scary.
I go, I thought he was dead.
He goes, sometimes they die.
And then he walked away from me.
And I was like, fuck, man.
Sometimes they die.
I'm like, that's me.
I'm like – and I had no health insurance.
I was 19.
I was broke.
I was training for the – I wanted to be on the Olympic team.
And that was two years from there.
And I lost a lot of my steam at that moment because I was like, what am I doing?
I'm fighting for free.
I don't have any money.
I have no insurance.
And I'm doing this thing.
And I knew back then I was getting some brain damage for sure.
And then I started kickboxing like right after that.
And then I really kind of lost my feeling for Taekwondo because I realized it
was so limited.
You know, that like when I was sparring with kickboxers, I was really like, man,
my hands are so limited.
So then I started working with this guy, Joe Lake, who was a boxing coach.
And that's when I was doing a lot of boxing and a lot of kickboxing.
And I was like, man, I'm getting my brains beat in.
And I don't know why I'm doing this.
And I'm like, there's no professional.
It wasn't like the UFC existed at the time.
I got offered a kickboxing fight for 500 bucks.
And I was like, 500 bucks.
So for 500 bucks, I lose my amateur status.
I can never fight in the Olympics.
And there's no money in it as a professional.
I'm like, what is my future?
Am I going to be one of the – and then I'm new guys in the gym that I used to
train with like when I was 19.
And then by the time I was like 21, I was seeing brain damage in these guys.
I was seeing them slurring their words, forgetting what they were saying,
repeating themselves.
The weird thing is they'll tell you a story.
Yeah.
And then they'll tell you the same story.
Yeah.
Like two minutes later.
And they're like, you just fucking told me that story.
That's terrifying.
They don't remember.
They don't remember anything.
And now – but now, you know, George St. Pierre is a good example of someone.
I feel like he made it out of fighting before.
Yes.
Like he looks very healthy.
He's fine.
He looks like he's fine.
He's fine.
But he's, you know, he's a very intelligent guy.
He does – also does a lot of things to keep his mind very active.
He plays chess.
Yeah.
You know, and he's very like proactive about it.
Yeah, but he seems like – even like I've just seen him on social media where
he's like, hey, guys, this is how I do.
Like he's just like a very –
Oh, yeah.
Seems like a very positive, fun, you know, does not seem –
Best case scenario for both – another guy in the argument for the all-time
great.
Yeah.
For an all-time great MMA champion who has a successful and happy life outside
of it.
Didn't end up with the shakes.
No.
No.
No, he's fine.
I mean, I've hung out with him a bunch.
I've hung out with him recently.
Yeah.
He was great.
He came to the comedy club.
He was actually playing my friend James McCann.
They were playing chess in the green room at the Comedy Mothership.
It was so cool.
We were filming it.
The last time I came, I think he had been in there the night before, and I was
like,
I would have been – that would have been a trip to meet him.
He's amazing.
He's – but he's such a sweetheart of a guy.
You would never imagine that he's this fucking killer inside the octagon.
Yeah.
He's such a sweet guy.
Yeah.
But it's just like, for him, it was just this incredible challenge, and he was
really good
at it.
Yeah.
And he just figured out a way to express himself that way, and, you know, he's
a legend.
Like, I don't imagine that he was, like, big on, like, the trash talk before
fights and
everything, right?
He was probably just like, look, we're just going to –
No, there was no trash talk.
He was very respectful.
No.
No.
Unless someone was disrespectful to him, and, you know, and even then, he wasn't
trash
talking.
No, he always seemed like he was cool.
Yeah.
He was just doing his thing.
No, he was one of the best representatives of the sport of all time, if not the
best.
No, I like that.
Like, never got into trouble outside the octagon.
Yeah.
Never, you know, was never drunk driving or beating people up, and, you know,
just a great
guy.
And if – I would have to tell people who he is.
Like, he would – he was like, who's your friend?
I was like, what do you think he does?
Yeah.
What do you think my friend does?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, like, I don't know.
He seems cool.
How big is he?
He's one of the – he's about 5'9", 5'10", maybe.
Yeah, sure.
And now he probably weighs 180 pounds, 185 pounds, maybe.
Fought at 170.
Okay.
You know, he's not, like, a scary-looking person.
I'm like, that's one of the greatest fighters that's ever walked the face of
the earth.
I'm like, no way.
I'm like, yeah.
I mean, he's like, hey, how you doing, man?
What's going on?
Like, he doesn't seem rough.
He's, like, jovial.
No.
Yeah, he's a sweetheart.
No, he's not trying to intimidate – like, you know, Khabib looks like he's,
you know.
He's really smart.
I mean, he's really – he's always, like, watching documentaries and reading
books.
Yeah.
He's fascinated by ancient history and dinosaurs and really into aliens.
We lost dinosaurs.
No, it's just crazy, man.
You've gotten to this – you've met everyone.
Did you ever have Jane Goodall on here?
No, I did not, unfortunately.
I wanted to make that happen.
I wanted to.
I wanted to make that happen.
She's gone, right?
She just died.
I just lost her.
I wanted to talk to her about Bigfoot because she was convinced that Bigfoot
was real.
What?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
She was convinced that Bigfoot was real.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
She did this interview.
She said she's certain of it.
Yeah, yeah.
We'll find it.
Jamie, you'll find that.
I – not that I don't believe you, but I just don't find Jane Goodall.
I know, I know, I know.
I was stunned.
I was like, what?
And this is by the time I had been convinced that Bigfoot was fake.
Yeah, I'm in that camp.
There's camera traps.
But this is the camp.
There was an animal that coexisted with human beings for sure that was called
Gigantopithecus.
Yes.
You know the whole story.
Yeah.
So Gigantopithecus, they found bones in an apothecary shop in China in the 1920s
or 30s.
And an anthropologist found these molars and said, where did you get this?
These are primate molars and they're fucking enormous.
Yeah.
Like whatever this thing was, was absolutely huge.
So they went to the site where they got it.
They found mandible bones that indicated it was bipedal.
So it was an upright walking primate that was 8 to 10 feet tall.
Like what the fuck is this?
And so I'm sure you've seen the images of what a Gigantopithecus looked like in
comparison to a human being.
It's in the orangutan family.
And so that thing existed and also existed in Asia, right?
So you look at the Bering Strait and you look at the Bering Land Bridge that we
know existed during the Ice Age.
And so we know that humans migrated from Siberia into North America.
We know that for a fact.
You know one of the reasons we know that for a fact?
Because Mormons were convinced that Native Americans were part of the lost
tribe of Israel.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So some rich Mormon guy did a DNA test on Native Americans and found out that
they emanated from Siberia.
Yeah.
And so it was incorrect.
So we know humans came down from there.
Why wouldn't other animals?
Sure.
We know they did.
We know short-faced bear, a bunch of different animals that they find their
bones in Alaska.
And they know that they probably made their way down through North America.
It just stands.
It just makes logical sense that if you have a variety of different megafauna.
Of different primates.
That probably one of those primates or a bunch of those primates lived in the
Pacific Northwest, which is the area where they would be.
And then you have incredibly dense forest, right?
Yeah.
So Jane Goodall won't rule out the existence.
But no, no, no.
Find the video where she says, I'm convinced.
I'm convinced.
Yeah, because she was talking.
I didn't see her say that.
Oh, no, no.
I've heard it.
I'm not saying she didn't.
No, I'm not saying she didn't.
Okay, just find it because it exists.
It doesn't exist.
I can't listen to the videos.
No, no, no.
Go to video.
Dude, she would have been awesome on the recording.
I'm so sad.
Jane Goodall on how Bigfoot might be real.
That's it right there.
Put the headphones on.
Listen to this.
Headphones.
Here we go.
I climbed into the hills.
Oh, there's Jane.
This was where I was meant to be.
I wanted to talk to you about something that some would say is fictional, but
you would say,
hold up, we don't know for certain, and that's Bigfoot.
Everybody talks to me about it.
I would, I'm romantic.
I would like Bigfoot to exist.
I've met people who swear they've seen Bigfoot.
And I think the interesting thing is every single continent, there is an
equivalent of Bigfoot or Sasquatch.
There's the Yeti.
There's the Yari in Australia.
There's the Chinese wild man.
And on and on and on and on.
And, you know, I've had stories from people who, you have to believe them.
So there's something, I don't know what it is.
I'm always open-minded.
What about other mythological creatures?
Pause for a second.
So they're saying that to her.
He's saying that to her.
And she said that in reaction to a previous interview that she did.
In the previous interview that she did, she said, I'm convinced that it exists.
I don't know.
Well, you know, you've got to realize this is a lady that lived with primates
in an inaccessible area where there's very few human beings.
And she had these interactions with them.
I don't agree with her.
But I think that it existed at one point in time.
One of the other reasons why I think it exists is that different Native
American tribes put this into perplexity.
How many different Native American terms were there for a hairy wild man or Bigfoot?
And I believe there's more than 80.
That's wild.
Now, they don't have a lot of mythological creatures in Native American culture.
Yeah.
Right.
And so in different tribes.
Right.
But they have a name for this hairy, wild, giant man that lives in the woods.
A Wookie.
Yeah.
They also have the other thing that's really fascinating is giants.
There is a lot of ancient cultures have stories about giants.
And Native American tribes have ancient stories of giant red haired men.
Which, you know, God, it's in the Bible.
It's in a bunch of, okay, 40 to 50 separate terms across different languages
and regions.
Harry, wild, giant man.
No single agreed upon count.
But dozens of distinct Native American names for Harry, wild, giant man beings.
Easily over 40 to 50 separate terms across different languages and regions.
Interesting.
I still, I would love to see the clip eventually of Jane Coyle saying, I
believe in Bigfoot.
Because if you're saying that, she's like, I'm open to the idea of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
She's saying that.
And the reason why he's asking that is because he had, exactly.
He'd seen the, yeah, yeah.
Because he had seen the previous interview.
See if we can find another interview with her talking about Bigfoot.
Yeah, she was, she was awesome.
She was awesome.
She, she's the reason I have a career.
Really?
Her being awesome.
I always, there's two stories I tell people.
If I go, first of all, because everyone goes, what's Joe Rogan like?
And I, no, it's true.
Because everyone wants to know.
And you're controversial.
And so I'm like, I was the nicest fucking guy in the world.
Like I said, the first time I came in, you sent me a message and you said
something about
like, hey, don't worry about a thing.
Like, I'm even going to bring my dog.
Like, it was very nice.
It was a little pat on the back.
Because you go, Jane Goodall, I went to a talk when I was like 22, something.
And I was just writing chapters of my first book, Mother of God, which didn't
even have
a name yet.
And I had chapters in a manila envelope and I went to a talk that Goodall was
giving.
And I mean, I'd been read stories and seen the black and white pictures.
So this was like, you know, like Einstein, Abe Lincoln, Jane Goodall.
It's like a living historical figure.
And so now she's talking in front of me and I had brought these chapters and I
wanted to
ask her because I'd already sent the chapters to publishers and they'd all been
like, kid,
none of this is true.
You know, no way did you jump on a giant anaconda.
No way did you raise an anteater.
They just didn't believe me.
And then I, when it was my turn after hundreds of people, I get to her and, you
know, she
goes, hello.
She goes, takes a little picture with you.
And I said, would you read these chapters?
I said, I would love it because I loved your stories as a kid.
She goes, thank you.
And she puts it to the side.
48 hours later, her staff gets in touch and they go, Jane actually read what
you gave
her, loved it and said, finish the book, get a publisher and I will write you
an endorsement.
Whoa.
She waved her magical wand in my direction and gave me a career.
That's so cool.
And what's really great is that earlier this year, I emailed her and it was
because this
book was coming out and I, I, you know, I said it would be amazing to have, I
mean, I
said, at this point, no one's, you know, the conservation, the voice of mother
earth.
And she just, you know, she was just, she just said, you know, just keep
protecting the
Amazon.
That's, that's your mission.
She was always very, it was like, you know, Luke, believe in yourself.
It was like, you know, she was just like, you, your job is to protect this
forest.
And it was incredible.
That's amazing.
And so, yeah, right, right.
You know, about six months ago, I got to tell her, I was like, look, cause the
last time
I'd spoken to her, we were protecting, I think it was like a hundred thousand
acres.
And then in the last year we added 30,000 acres to the reserve.
And so I said, you know, we're, we're making strides forward.
And she just, it was good that I got to tell her that.
And then, and then, uh, you know, recently we found out that, that she died,
but what
a legacy, what a legacy, what a legacy.
Yeah.
I mean, we know so much about primate behavior because of that woman.
We still know so much about, I mean, man, the toolmaker before her, we said,
there was humans that use tools.
And now we know that, you know, capuchin monkeys use rocks.
We know that otters use rocks.
I mean, I've seen elephants use a stick to scratch.
I've seen, I've seen, I've seen camera chat footage of an elephant using a tree
to knock
over an electrical fence.
Like animals use tools.
Oh yeah.
She was the first one.
I mean, she went out there when she was what, 20 something years old, middle
Africa, blonde
girl.
Crazy.
And then spent the whole rest of her life.
But the lesson that I take away from that is that even as famous as she was,
that she
was traveling 300 days a year.
I mean, she'd been, you know, uh, an icon for decades and that she still took
the time
to actually read something that some kid handed to her to that's unfathomable
grace to do that.
And then literally if that didn't happen, I never would have published Mother
of God.
I never would have started Jungle Keepers.
I never would have been protecting the rainforest.
She, she, she empowered that.
She did that with her magic.
It was, and I think that that's incredible.
That's so cool.
Absolutely incredible.
Did you find any other?
No.
I guarantee it exists.
Yeah.
But it's okay.
You have to trust me.
Um, I don't think she's correct, but, uh, I do think not Bigfoot, but I do
think that
it's entirely possible that there is a small, hairy, uh, primate, like human,
like primate
that exists still.
That's like the Hobbit people from the Island of Flores.
Yeah.
You know, there's, um, there's the thing called the Orang Pandek.
Have you heard of that?
No.
The Orang Pandek, uh, I think, uh, Indonesia, perhaps Vietnam.
There's a bunch of places that have this creature that gets sighted on multiple
occasions.
And they used to think of it as like just silly legend, but now because of the
discovery,
which was, was it in the nineties that they discovered the Hobbit people on the
Island
of Flores?
You know about that, right?
I've heard of them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Homo.
And those are real.
Yes.
Those are real.
We have their bones.
Very real.
Very real.
It was a very small, um, like Hobbit-like creature that was a type of primate
that was
bipedal, um, that was like a little tiny hairy human being that lived at least
on the Island
of Flores, but most likely lived in many other places as well.
And, um, there's, there's a possibility that it still exists.
And it's not me saying this.
It's like some actual anthropologists that believe that this thing might still
be alive
because you're dealing with incredibly small populations.
But are those, I mean, are those islands so small that no, like unlike the
Amazon, it's
gigantic, but like how could there be a population?
They're incredibly dense, incredibly dense forest and no one's going down in
the bushes.
Right.
It's like the Tasmanian tiger.
I was just going to say that like the thylacine where it's like, they're just,
they're just
hidden.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Like small population.
Like there's a lot of sightings of the thylacine, you know?
Yeah.
But somehow all these sightings, it's never on a, it's never clear.
No, no.
That was the, it's also, there's no one there.
Yeah.
Here's the thing.
I mean, let's pretend that you saw a Wolverine in the Montana woods, like dense
Montana woods.
And it's a hundred yards away.
You see it briefly for a second, get your phone.
You're not going to, you might've seen it, you might've seen it traveling
between trees,
but like, how are you going to get it off your phone?
You're going to have to, unless you have a Samsung where you have a really good
zoom,
you're not going to be able to zoom in enough.
You know, like you'd have to have like, there's only a few phones that are,
yeah, you're not
going to get good footage, but we know that Wolverines are real.
But finding a Wolverine in the woods, I've talked to, God, I've talked to
hundreds of
men who spend a giant portion of their life in the woods.
And only a few have seen Wolverines.
I would love to see a Wolverine.
Or how about mountain lions?
They're everywhere.
I've only seen three of them in my entire life.
That's wild.
But I've probably been around a hundred of them and not known it.
You know, that's what, that's the reaction we got with the tribes was that if
you look
at uncontacted tribe, my whole life, you look at photos of uncontacted tribes,
it was like
blurry, crappy, because who was out there?
It was like a logger, right?
Or it was somebody running.
Right.
And even when I saw them the first time, when I was out on a solo, it was 10
days deep in
the jungle, I saw them and I ran for my life and everyone went, you didn't see
them.
I mean, I'm a, I don't mind that if I have pics or it didn't happen.
Right.
Right.
And so with this, when we started, when we started actually showing people what
we had,
it was like, this has never been, it's like, it's like a vision into the, into
the stone
age.
Right.
I mean, I mean, like really not even the stone age, like they're not even the
stone
tools.
They're using sharpened sticks.
Yeah.
I showed it to an anthropologist and he was saying, you know, stone age isn't
necessarily
accurate here.
He said, because they're not using stone.
They don't have clay pots.
He goes, this is something, this is, but I mean, it, then think about it.
It's actually like a time machine because you're, you're, you're, and we were
standing
across the river, look, talking to these people and it's like, you guys are a
couple thousand
years back.
And so it's like, this is such a strange aperture into history.
Maybe not even a couple, maybe like 30, 40.
Maybe.
I feel like, I feel like the, I feel like somehow to me the number seems like
two, but it's like,
you know, we were, we were like little tribes.
Yeah.
But 2000 years ago, uh, the Egyptian pyramids were already 2,500 years old.
That's true.
That's true.
But I mean, again, the civilization isn't homogenous, right?
Like different, different, you know, so obviously there's uncontacted tribes
still right now.
Yes.
That's what's crazy.
Yeah.
It's like a man with a cell phone from the future filmed people.
That's what I'm saying.
It felt like that.
It felt like this was like a back to the future moment where it's like, you
know, this
is, they have no idea.
And, and my people thinking of everyone else back home, I was like, don't
realize that
these people are still out there in the jungle living like this.
Right.
And probably in the dense, dense, dense forest, there's probably many more of
them.
There are many more of them.
In fact, while we, yeah, while we were watching them out front, there was a
terrifying moment
where the, we heard something behind us and it was, which we never saw them,
but the women
came light foot in behind and they pulled up all the yucca and the bananas and
they were
raiding.
And so for a second, we were like, there's an ambush.
And everyone was like turning the shotguns away from the river.
And they were like, we thought there was going to be arrows flying.
So like my guy, Ignacio grabs me and like put me down and we were hiding behind
trees,
waiting for it.
And it was like, no, no, no.
They're just stealing all of the fruit and all of the crops.
And they just raided our, our, our whole village.
Wow.
But I really, I really did feel like, you know, like you, you go, imagine what
it would
be like to go back and see the Comanjis, watch them riding across the plains
after the
buffalo.
And it's like, we can't.
But in this case, they were right there.
Right.
Right.
And now, and now, now that these videos are going out across the world, it's
like,
look, we're trying to explain to people, you know, first of all, there's a lot
of those,
you know, you know exactly what kind of prey people are like, leave them alone.
And it's like literally where the people trying to make sure that they get left
alone.
Like that's our job.
Yeah.
You got to ignore those folks.
Yeah.
You, you, especially you, you're not the type of person that's interfering with
their
life at all.
No.
And by giving them the bananas, you're help.
You're literally helping them.
Well, and again, I was a witness.
Right.
That was happening between the tribes and the tribes.
Right.
Right.
And so, and so, but, but, you know, for all the, all the indigenous cultures
that have
been destroyed in, in the last few centuries, we can, we can do it right for
once.
We can actually respect these people.
If they want to come out, they can come out.
If they want to adapt, they can, but they need to have forests to live in.
Right.
In order to make that decision.
Right.
And so that's where it's like.
How can they make an informed decision?
How could they, how can they adapt?
I mean.
Well, I think it would be very slow.
The gap is so crazy.
I think it'd be slow.
I think it'd be a few more banana exchanges, maybe without the, the, the arrow
shot afterwards.
And then maybe it starts to be like, okay, you guys can come here.
Maybe, maybe, maybe the, the communities teach them how to grow bananas.
Right.
Maybe they don't want to come, but they want a few things.
Right.
You know, maybe they want a couple of machetes cause it'll just help.
Uh huh.
You know, and they want to keep to themselves.
Maybe.
But I mean, other than them, the, the thought of the most uncontacted people is
North Sentinel
Island.
Yeah.
And North Sentinel Island, the, the interesting part of that is one of the
reasons why they're
so distrustful of people is because they had been contacted in the 1800s.
And it was bad.
Yeah.
By a fucking pervert.
There was a guy named commander Maurice Vidal Portman, who was a, like a
explorer slash pervert.
And the reason why I say that is like, job title, this guy had like weird
journal logs where
he was like, this one has testicles the size of a sparrow's egg.
Like he would dress them up like Roman soldiers and take pictures of them.
They kidnapped a few of them and then they gave a bunch of people the flu and a
bunch of people
died.
And so they had this immense distrust for people because of this guy and his
explorations onto
that Island, that Island and other islands like it.
So they, they don't have a written language, right?
These people, there's no evidence they have fire.
So there's this story of these, because you know, it's incredibly wet
environment.
So they, they have this stories that they probably have these oral traditions
of these white people
that come and fuck up everything.
So when someone shows up on a boat, like there's been a few instances where
people were killed.
Obviously that missionary a few years back, but not just him, there, there's a
boat that
sank there.
So it washed the shore and sank and they were headed to go kill those people
when they were
rescued.
And now we've spotted them.
We people have spotted them with metal and they believe the metal they got was
salvaged
from the boats.
Yeah.
So they got pieces of metal and yeah.
So this, this is the boat that, that shipwrecked in 1981, a cargo ship named
the Primrose ran aground
on the coral reef surrounding North Sentinel.
The crew radioed for assistance and settled for a long wait.
But in the morning they saw 50 men with bows on the beach building makeshift
boats to swim
out to them and fuck them up.
Yeah.
I mean, they have a severe distrust, obviously, you know, people.
So I was on the Underman islands, which is right next to these.
That guy, respectable lawyer on Twitter.
He's the one I got the information from.
He documented the whole story of, if you scroll all the way up, he'll talk
about that guy.
Maurice Vidal.
See, look at how he dressed.
That's the guy.
Yeah.
So that fucking creep.
Look at him.
He looks like a pervert.
Oh, come on.
So he's hanging out with these guys.
They should have known he was a pervert.
Look at him.
Look at him.
Look at his dress.
They probably didn't want to.
Wonderful testicles.
They probably didn't want to profile him.
Yeah.
So that's the dude.
Yeah.
He's from the English Royal Navy.
Yeah.
Portman.
Maurice Vidal Portman.
Yeah.
Dude, those guys look built.
Look at these guys fucking thrown.
Those guys be doing some sit-ups.
Well, they're out there hustling.
I went to the Andaman Islands, which is right out there.
That's where he originally landed?
Yeah.
And if you want to feel like you fell off the face of the earth, you go to the
Andaman Islands.
First of all, beautiful.
I think if you're still like this, you can only get there from the Indian city
of Chennai
or Calcutta because it's an Indian territory.
They limit who can travel there.
And they've brought elephants there because they didn't used to have bulldozers
and stuff.
So the British brought elephants by boat.
And there's these old archival photos of them lifting off of like pirate ships,
lifting elephants on the rigging and then putting them.
And now the Andaman Islands have elephants.
Whoa.
And there's still people riding around on the elephants, you know, like moving
trees off the road and doing things.
That's crazy.
But when you go from one place to the other place, exactly what you said,
because they don't want human safaris, because they want to protect these
indigenous people,
you have to go with a police escort to cross the island because you have to go
through.
And the police watch you like a hawk.
And I, you know, I take a picture of everything.
I take 300 pictures a day on my phone.
Look at that.
No, see if you can see elephants being lifted off of ships.
There's a bunch of pictures here that are crazy.
They're pulling logs.
I mean, but this is, you know, elephants moving logs happens all the time.
But there's literally a picture of the elephants up on the riggings.
Wow.
And, uh, but man, you drive through areas where there's just these tiny little
people with bows and arrows and they're still out there.
Um, I, I, I got to go swimming with an elephant there.
Yeah.
Wow.
You got to.
That's so dope.
Look at the elephant swimming.
How cool is that?
Yeah.
Wow.
That's fucking awesome.
There you go.
Whoa.
Look at that.
That's them.
That's nuts.
Lifting the elephants.
The elephant's probably like, what the fuck am I doing in the air?
Yeah.
Look at that.
They have to blindfold him?
No, he's not blindfolded.
He's just painted.
You know, they probably should have.
But back then.
Well, back then.
Maybe the elephant would freak out.
Look at that.
Look at that.
Boy, it takes so much for an elephant to freak out and fucking kill people.
Wow.
There's a horrible video of this guy's abusing an elephant.
Like, he's a trainer and he's like, keeps whacking the elephant.
And then the elephant goes, that's enough.
Yep.
And just stomps him into a pancake.
Yep.
Or that, that video I sent you with the tiger, the one, the tiger.
Which one?
Where the tiger mauls the guy and you're like, that's terrible.
He kills him.
And then the second shot is they show the guy and he's still alive, but he's
got slashes
down to his skull.
Like, just don't.
Just, I mean, these animals are, you just don't push them.
Yeah.
Especially not an elephant.
Well, human beings just want to fuck with everything.
That's part of why we're on every fucking square inch of the earth, practically.
We want to fuck with everything.
You know, it's, we're the weirdest animal ever because we're on every fucking
continent.
We're everywhere.
There's not another animal like us.
No.
You know?
No.
And, you know, all of us came from Africa, which is even nuttier, right?
Yeah.
So we emanated from Africa and just spread out all over the world.
Yeah.
As soon as we figured out how to float.
As soon as we figured out how to float.
How to hike and how to wear warm clothes.
We just kept moving.
And now are we going to figure out how to not destroy the systems that keep us
alive?
Right.
And now we're talking about doing the same thing on other planets.
We're talking about it.
But way before we start worrying about other planets, I want to make sure that
this planet works.
Yeah, man.
I mean, I'm just, I'm so, I'm just, it drives me crazy how quickly everyone's
going.
I just, in the, in the, when I come back to society so quickly, we're like, it's
on people's minds.
They're talking about this stuff and I'm going, guys, the ocean is filled with
trash.
Like the Amazon is burning.
I'm like, can we just fix this?
And there's areas where we have, I mean, you know, this, like they brought
rules back to
Yellowstone, like New York's waters are getting cleaner.
The humpbacks are coming back, but, but everyone's so, I mean, but we haven't
actually, when we
get to Mars, talk about it all day, but it's like until then, I just feel like
we, we are
so overwhelmed with serious problems here and the last chance in history to fix
those.
And so there's an amazing opportunity.
And I feel like people are so like this, this modern nothingness that people
feel where
it's like, oh, it's the end of times.
And it's like, dude, this is the most exciting time.
You can fly everywhere.
You got information at your fingertips.
There's more people than ever before working to make good in the world, to help
people,
to save animals, to restore ecosystems.
And it's like, so I get confused when I come back from what, what I feel is
like battle.
And I'm on this mission for 20 years to do this one thing.
And people are like, I'm just scrambled and delirious.
And I'm like, go outside.
Yeah.
Get off your phone.
Put your phone down.
Go to the mountains.
That John Muir thing.
I'm, you know, to the mountains, the mountains are calling and I must go.
Like, go, close your phone, go touch grass for a while.
Actually, that was one of the favorite, I forget what I, I posted a video of me
with this huge
anaconda around me and I'm holding her head.
It was a 20 foot anaconda.
One of the comments was this guy.
He was like, dude, you've touched enough grass.
Go back inside.
Go watch Netflix.
Yeah.
He's like, that's enough.
You're the opposite.
You've gone too far.
You've gone too far.
Interesting use of free will.
Well, it's fascinating to me when people were trying to save things and by
saving things,
they don't realize that they're actually fucking things up far worse than
saving them.
Well, there's a good example.
I think it's the Mojave Desert where they just now, California and all their
infinite wisdom,
decided to build this immense solar farm out in the desert.
I saved it.
I'll send it to you, Jamie.
It is so crazy.
So they decided to build this immense solar farm.
It turns out this solar farm, because it's got mirrors that point towards these
solar panels,
it's incinerating 6,000 birds a year.
Incinerating 6,000 birds a fucking year.
Which is like, what does that even mean?
Like, how is that even...
So it's a death ray.
A fucking death ray.
God, I know I saved it.
Where did I save it?
I got it, though.
Oh, you got it?
I mean, I don't know which article you got.
It's okay.
Pull up any of the articles.
But, I mean, when you look at it, it heats up to a thousand fucking degrees.
The Mojave Desert.
Yeah.
Well, they just shut it down.
So it's concentrated sunlight.
Solar power towers use mirrors to focus sunlight onto a receiver, creating
extremely high temperature.
The problem is they're fucking killing birds like a motherfucker.
Just like those ugly windmill farms, those things are a blight on the face of
the earth.
When you drive to South Texas, a buddy of mine has a ranch down there.
Look at that.
Mojave Desert solar plant kills 6,000 birds a year.
I think that too.
That's from 2016.
They just recently shut it down.
They've spent billions on this fucking thing.
And it's not generating nearly the amount of solar power that they were hoping.
It turns birds into fucking fireballs instantly.
But when you drive down to South Texas, they have these – that's what it
looks like.
Isn't that crazy?
Look at that.
Isn't that nuts?
Yeah, we've got to stop spreading out.
We're so stupid.
We've got to stop spreading out.
But that's like, who said that's a good idea?
And counterintuitively, nuclear power is like the best for the environment.
Yeah.
Which is people think, no, Three Mile Island, no.
They've got to just – you know what, they just call it something else.
If you just – if you just rebrand it, stop calling it nuclear.
Well, they just have to realize that the old – like the Fukushima plants and
they fucked
the whole area up forever.
Those are old.
That's a plant that I think went live in the 1970s.
Like the new technology, you can have solar power and it's – or excuse me,
nuclear power
and it's clean.
But I think people are scared of the word nuclear.
I'm saying if you came out and you called it like a something-something plant,
they'd go,
We've got to get over it.
We've got to get over that hump, you know.
But that's – it's just human beings.
But there's this constant battle, right?
There's a battle of good and evil.
Yes, there is.
And there's also a battle of ignorance and information.
And it goes back and forth.
And the only way to educate people is sometimes you have these brave people
that are responding
to this intense amount of ignorance and they have to go out there and say,
No, that's not it.
It's this.
And there's this huge societal narrative, this huge cultural narrative that
they have to fight against.
Which is almost impossible to undo.
I mean, when you realize there's something that everybody has wrong.
Right.
Or you realize that there's something that – I mean, the amount – because
then you've got to get the message to everybody.
Right.
How do you do that?
Right.
Then you've got to make them care about it.
Right.
And I mean, it's just – it's wild to –
But that's us.
That's the battle.
There's always this, like, I think you need those things in order for us to
push progress.
You need something to fight against.
Like, think about where you would be if you didn't have this thing to push
against.
Like, there's – it's not that the thing is good, but it is bad, but it
creates good people that push against it.
And this is the constant battle of the human spirit.
We're always engaged in this battle to right wrongs and to figure things out
and to make things better that are bad.
And then to realize that, oh, we're making it way worse.
Someone has to come along and course correct.
Yeah.
And then, you know, it's usually a few brave people that are pushing back
against this tidal wave of negativity and ignorance.
I think that the tidal wave of negativity is wild.
The grief is just – it's like a poison peddled by the darkness.
It's like they want you sad and disoriented.
And I just feel like so many people now, when I come back, they're downtrodden
by the – just the buzz of the news and everything.
And I'm like, listen, like, choose something that you care about and work on it.
Yeah.
Or just pick that one thing.
Be the good you want to see in the world.
Be the good you want to see in the world.
And it's like I'm in this unique position because I'm contacted now all day
long by people that want to help us protect the rainforest.
People who want to use that blueprint to do it somewhere else.
And we're on the cusp of doing this.
So I'm surrounded by – I get a lot of positive people with innovations,
people with ideas, people – I mean, even, you know, everyone says, oh, why
can't the billionaires?
And it's like we get people who have money and they come in and they're like, I'll
help you get that piece of land.
That'll be protected.
I get reinforced all the time.
People go, the world's going to shit.
And I'm like, the world's amazing.
People are helping.
Yeah.
You know, and it's like I've seen so much good done.
It really is all what you're focusing on.
If you're focusing on – that's the very thing – unique thing about today is
that you're inundated with so much information.
And we generally tend to gravitate towards the things that are terrifying and
the things that are dangerous, that scare us.
And so you're paying attention to the news of literally 8 billion people.
Which is not natural.
It's not normal.
We're supposed to know about our village and maybe the next village.
And so, like, that's one – you know, I had a friend, you know, did you hear
about the flood that happened in Bangladesh?
I was like, what are you – you know, my sympathy.
But, like, there's always a flood happening.
The world is gigantic.
There's 8 billion people.
Right.
And so, like, you know –
There's only so much you can pay attention to.
There's only so much you can pay attention to.
But if you have a phone, all the bad stuff is coming into your pocket all day.
Yeah, and I think a lot of the – it's funny because a lot of the people, like,
the adults are – people are worried about the kids.
I think the adults are worse.
Yeah, a lot of them.
Yeah, and a lot of them, they're searching for meaning.
And so they find meaning in activism or in pseudo-activism and yelling about
things online and then maybe going out into the street and screaming at people.
And they think that that gives meaning to their life.
You know, there's a lot of people that just feel, like, really lost.
And this strange concrete culture, concrete and electronic culture that we've
created, it doesn't give you the fulfillment that the natural world does.
I mean, I'm sure it's one of the draws that you have to the jungle is that
living out there in nature is wildly fulfilling because it's normal.
It's like it fills in all the slots that you have evolved to have, like, as a
human being.
We have always lived in coordination with nature up until fairly recently.
You know, if human beings have been alive in this forum for half a million
years, how long have we been in cities?
In cities.
How long have we been in even agriculture?
A few thousand years.
Temperature-controlled rooms.
Yeah, it's crazy.
With a little noise box constantly stressing us out.
Also, Wi-Fi and EMF signals.
I was just reading this fucking crazy thing.
Have you paid attention to this, Jamie, about the 49ers?
About San Francisco?
Isn't that fucking nuts?
It could be.
Yeah, go ahead.
They think it's real.
So there's a disproportionate amount of severe catastrophic injuries that come
out of San Francisco,
and their training facility is right outside this power station.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, way more Achilles tendon blown out, way more knees blown out, way more,
like, catastrophic ligament and tendon ruptures.
Like, and they've been talking about it since, like, the players started
talking about it in, like, 2012, I believe.
And people are like, oh, that's nonsense.
And now the stats are in, and you're looking at the amount of injuries that
come from this area.
It's like it's not normal.
No.
And so you think, what, they're getting weakened by the water, by the...
Electricity.
Electricity.
Yeah, by the EMF signal.
By the EMF.
I mean, it's...
Look, EMF signals, we know, disrupt human beings.
But to what extent?
Like, to what extent does LED lights, and to what extent?
Is it minimal?
Do you feel it?
Is it not?
Is it...
Does it have a long-term effect?
Does it take forever until it actually compounds?
But they're looking at the data from this one training facility, so you can
find something on it.
I'm looking at it.
Because a lot of stories have come out this week about it, where people are
starting to gather up all the data, and they're like, hey, this is not normal.
No.
Like, this is, like, a much higher percentage of severe injuries from this one
camp, which doesn't make any sense.
Well, it's like that Erin Brockovich thing, where it's like, you find a place
where a lot of people are getting the same kind of cancer, and it's like, there's
a reason.
So, what does it say here at the top of the article?
What's the article say?
It's just about the whole thing.
It explains stuff.
So, is it true?
What is this from?
How long ago was this?
Two weeks ago.
Yes, two days ago.
Okay.
The Injury Conspiracy Theory, and is it true?
So, what is this?
This is USA Today, which is like, eh.
I just skipped ahead to the...
The so-called mechanisms have not been established.
Many of the experiments are contradictory.
Many of the experiments have exposures that either don't relate specifically to
50, 60,000,
50, 60 hertz magnetic fields.
It's a topic that will likely resurface.
There are any major injuries during the Super Bowl at Levi's Stadium, February
8th in Santa Clara.
Is Santa Clara near there?
That's where they play the game.
That's where they play the game?
But is that the training facility?
The idea is that it's near the training facility.
Right.
And I don't...
That's again, that's...
This is...
So, that's where the electrical substation is, and there's the field.
I mean, cut the shit.
Whoa.
That can't be good.
So, it's literally radiating onto them.
That can't be good.
But I don't think...
But I don't think it's going to affect the game.
You know what I'm saying?
I think it's like being there all the time, practicing there all the time, is
what's going
to weaken their bodies.
Without checking, I don't know.
Unless that's where they practice, I don't see a large practice facility.
Oh, look at the fucking multi-use fields.
I know.
They don't practice on those fields, generally.
They practice inside.
Right.
But they use the fields.
I mean, they must practice there.
It could be...
This could just be a park.
That's why I've got to look up where they practice.
Right, right, right, right.
The LA Rams don't practice next to SoFi Stadium, you know, they have...
I can't imagine it's good for you.
I mean, there's also...
Okay, we'll find this out.
Is there any truth to power lines and people living under power lines having
increased rates
of cancer?
Because I've heard that that's true.
Yeah.
I mean, in Environmental College, that was...
There's numerous giant class action lawsuits for people that were living under
high-tension
power lines.
And I mean, I actually...
I knew someone who...
I mean, I've been to the places where I did for my senior project I was doing,
where we
went to the areas where they were fracking.
Remember that documentary where they were lighting the water on fire?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gasland.
Yeah.
Great documentary.
Yeah.
And those people were screaming.
They're trying to get the attention to say, this is not good.
And of course, the companies come in and they go, we'll give you $2 million.
$2 million before you let us drill on your land.
And these are people that could need the money.
Right.
And then a few years later, all of their kids have cancer.
Pull that back up again, please.
So we put it into our sponsor, Perplexity.
There's some limited evidence.
There's a small increase in childhood leukemia risk, very close high voltage
power lines.
But overall, the lick is weak, not clearly causal, and typically residential
exposures are considered
within safety guidelines.
See, the thing is, it's like, who is...
One of the things about Perplexity or any large language model is you've got to
get the information
from online and who's publishing this information.
So it's like, there's only so much of it that's available, but possibly carcinogenic
is a weak category.
So it says, International Agency for Research in Cancer classifies extremely
low-frequency magnetic
fields, like those from power lines, as possibly carcinogenic to humans, mainly
because of the
childhood leukemia data.
Fuck that, dude.
That's wild.
Yeah, just fuck that.
I would never buy a house that's near them.
What are you looking for?
I just realized that what that is.
It's a molar.
Yep.
I just realized that what that is.
This is from my buddy John Reese from Alaska.
That's that guy?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's incredible.
Actually, no, this one is from Colossal.
So that's a...
This is the company that's bringing the woolly mammoth back.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Those guys.
This piece is from my buddy John Reese.
That's a molar.
That's cool.
Yeah.
That's a tooth.
That's gorgeous.
But that's how many of them they have that they can turn into art.
That they're just starting to make it into art.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have a pool cue that has woolly mammoth ivory in it.
Dude, look at that.
Look at that texture.
I know.
Isn't that nuts?
That is so beautiful.
Something 10,000 years ago used that to mash down vegetables.
Wow.
That is a gorgeous piece.
You know about the boneyard, right?
That place.
No.
You were the first time you told me all about it.
Incredible place.
That's amazing.
Shout out to my boy John Reeves.
Yeah.
I would love to go there.
Oh, you should, dude.
I would love to.
That's just so fascinating.
Yeah.
The Colossal guys have been up there.
Yeah.
Quite a few people have been up there to explore.
I think either Grant, no, Randall.
Did Randall Carlson go up there?
I think he's either gone there or is going there.
Yeah, you got to make the intro for me.
I would love to go see that guy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'll set that up.
He's always trying to get me to go out there too.
I just don't have the time.
But what a phenomenal place.
By the way, he's found a new site.
He's found a new site up there that has more bones.
Yeah.
I mean, you're talking about an area that's only about four to six acres that
he's been exploring.
And he's got others.
Deposits, right?
It's like a-
Massive deposits.
Thousands of animals.
Yeah.
Including animals that weren't even supposed to be there.
Yeah.
That's so cool.
Crazy.
So cool.
And a thick layer of carbon that indicates that fucking place was on fire.
Mm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, when you find fossils in the wild, there's nothing like finding fossils.
I remember the first time I found a little shell.
And then, like I said, not that long ago, we found a seven-foot turtle shell.
Thick, thick, thick.
Like black, fossilized.
Mm.
In the river basin, in the Amazon.
The river was especially low.
And it was just, you know, it was half out.
Like a crashed alien spaceship.
Like it was just this huge thing.
And it was like, you get this sense.
You get that tactile, visceral sense of like, whoa, these used to be here.
You know what they found in China recently?
What'd they find?
They found dinosaur eggs that the inside of them is all crystals now.
Oh.
It's crystallized.
Is it like a crystallized baby velociraptor?
No, it's just basically all crystal.
Just crystal.
Like a geode.
Yeah.
But it's a dinosaur egg.
It's just over millions and millions of years.
They're probably making art out of that right now.
I don't know what they're doing with it.
Yeah.
I think it's fairly recent that this discovery, at least the article that I
read was fairly
recent about it.
But it's just crazy shit, man.
So much cool shit.
Oh, so much cool shit in the world.
We're on such a cool planet.
So here it is.
Yeah.
A 70-million-year-old dinosaur egg contains a sparkling crystal surprise.
Isn't that nuts?
Ooh.
It's turned into crystals.
How do you even know if that was a dinosaur egg?
Grapefruit-sized dinosaur egg from a fossil bed in China gave paleontologists a
huge surprise.
Rather than a dinosaur embryo or sediment, it was filled with sparkling
crystals of calcite lining
the inner shell, a natural dinosaur geode.
A rare occurrence provides researchers with unique information on the structure
of the shell.
In this case, a never-before-seen O-species?
O-O-S-O-O-O species, species of egg named, oh boy, good luck pronouncing that,
identified
in a 22 paper led by paleontologist Quing He of Anhui University in China.
Not only that, it's among the first dinosaur eggs, or evidence of any dinosaurs
for that
matter, found in the roughly 70 million year old upper Cretaceous Christian
formation of
the Quichon Basin, wow, that's insane, fucking A man, dinosaur eggs that are
filled with,
look at that, crystals, beautiful, it looks like a geode, it's a dinosaur egg,
nuts, that's
insane, nuts, that's wild, yeah, the world's a wild place, my brother, the
world's a really,
really wild place, and you know more than anybody, well, that's what, I've been
trying to see as
much of it as I can, and save as much of it as I can, it's been, it's been,
well, I'm glad
you're out there, and I'm glad you're still alive, because you freak me out
every now and
then when you send me messages, and I'm worried about your safety, and I need
someone to train
me to use a gun, I'm like, oh, Jesus Christ, oh, we're dealing with the narco
people, oh,
Jesus Christ.
Well, we're closer than we've ever have been, thank you for how much you've
been able to
help us get that message out, this, this, this book is 20 years of the wildest
shit, it's
the story of how, Jane, and how we, I went, how I met JJ, how we found the anacondas,
all
the, all the, everything that led to this, I mean, how, how, I mean, you talked
about when
you started out, I mean, just being a kid, and you have a dream, and I mean, I
went to the
Amazon, I just wanted to see the Amazon, that was, that was the dream, I never
in a million
years imagined that I'd get to go on these adventures, see these animals, and
then now
that we're on the cusp of protecting an entire river, I mean, the wildest
dreams that, that
me as a kid had, couldn't even touch this, and so it's, it's, it's, it's a fun
book to be sharing
with people.
Dope, my brother, and the book is Jungle Keeper, What It Takes to Change the
World,
Paul Rosalie, available now, thank you, my friend.
Yeah, I think you're in there, good, thank you.
Always great to see you.
It's the best.
Let's do it again.
Thank you, brother.
Thank you.
All right, bye, everybody.
Bye, everybody.