I Met An Uncontacted Tribe: They Killed My Friend!

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Already over 43,000 businesses have chosen to future-proof their business with NetSuite. So if you'd like to learn more on how you can help your business, just get their business guide, which is called Demystifying AI, and you can get that free at netsuite.com. This Burmese python wants to know what is inside the diary of a sea cow. Oh my God. Now, what are you feeling right now? Wondering why the f*** I do this for a living. Have you ever done a podcast with a 10-foot snake across the table before? No, this is my first. Awesome. and bring out the next friend. Don't bring it over here. Just don't move. Paul, what have you spent the last 20 years of your life doing? Living out of a backpack in the Amazon rainforest, barefoot with a machete to help the indigenous people save the Amazon. Whatever it takes. Which means crocodile bites, snake bites, very rare diseases, hunted by the narco-traffickers. Like the picture of that guy. That scar is because he was shot in the head by a seven-foot arrow while he was trying to make peaceful contact with the uncontacted tribes. And this is actually a very important story. I think I have a video of this. Yeah, this is world first footage. So tribe isolated so deep in the jungle that they've never heard of a spoon or the wheel or Jesus was coming out to make contact. So we do a two day boat journey in one night through the worst thunderstorm I've ever seen. They were scared. We were scared because these tribes kill people all the time. And they had one question. How do we tell the bad guys from the good guys? You see, these people are being hunted by traffickers and gold miners and loggers and boxed in by deforestation. but if our oceans of rainforests are vanishing, life on Earth is not possible. Now, it's not too late, but we the last generation that can save it Paul young kids are growing up attached to screens and loneliness is at an all high Is there anything that you learned in those 15 years that a Westerner like me would find useful A hundred percent. So let's start with purpose. Listen, my team gave me a script that they asked me to read, but I'm just going to ask you in the nicest way I possibly can. Thank you, first and foremost, for choosing to subscribe to this channel. It's been one of the most incredible, crazy years of my life. I never could have imagined I had so many dreams in my life but this was not one of them and the very fact that these conversations have resonated with you and you've given me so much feedback is something I will always be appreciative of and I almost carry away a sort of burden of responsibility to pay you back and the favor I would like to ask from you today is to subscribe to the channel if you would be so obliged it's completely free to do that roughly about 47% of you that listen to this channel frequently currently don't subscribe to this channel so if you're one of those people please come and join us hit the subscribe button it's the single free thing you can do to make this channel better. And every subscriber sort of pays into this show and allows us to do things bigger and better and to push ourselves even more. And I will not let you down if you hit the subscribe button, I promise you. And if I do, please do unsubscribe, but I promise I won't. Thank you. Paul, you live an extraordinary life, a very atypical extraordinary life. What have you spent the last 20 years of your life doing? Trying to find a way to explore the wildest parts of the Amazon and figure out a way to save them. The Amazon. For a lot of people that don't know anything about this part of the world, they'll think of it as a bunch of trees where lots of wild animals live. What is the sort of central misunderstanding of the true nature of the Amazon? I think it's a problem of scale. People don't understand the importance of the Amazon. This is one of the most crucial things on our planet. It's one of the most physically defining features of our planet. If you look at Earth from space, you see this giant green belt over most of South America. That's the Amazon rainforest. And that's where one fifth of our fresh water is contained and another fifth of our oxygen is produced. This system is irreplaceably valuable to all life on Earth. And you live in the Amazon? For the last 20 years, I've lived mostly in the Amazon. I've slept more nights outdoors than I have in, in my adult life, because I befriended the indigenous people of the upper Amazon rainforest. And that's what the book is about. It I went down there at 18 years old because I needed adventure and then the quest for adventure led for this call to meaning And then that led to the discovery that we were the only ones who could do anything to stop the bulldozers and the chainsaws from destroying the thing that we loved. A lot of people have clicked on this conversation for whatever reason. What are we going to talk about today that you think might be interesting to them in their lives? And what is the wide variety of things from the conversations you have every single day that compels people? Because I want to give them a bit of a tail DR before we get into the detail. I think that what people are going to find, and this is what I tried to write about, was that I didn't know where I was going at first. I just knew what I loved. And so over the last 20 years, it's been following a dream in a direction. And that dream was finding a way to relieve the incredible stress that I felt over the state of the environment. We live in these times where people feel like the world is ending, there's nothing we can do, our oceans are collapsing, the rainforests are vanishing, elephants are being hunted to extinction. And I wanted to know, are there solutions to these problems? Is there a way to change the narrative of conservation and come up with an alternative reality where everything's okay? And do you think your message is more timely now than ever with everything that's going on with technology and AI and this sort of great transition we're in? I think that this message is timely now because whether we like it or not, we're alive at the most important moment in history. And the reason that that's true is because never before as a global society have we been all faced with the same problem. If our ecosystems collapse, life on Earth is not possible. And we are the last generation in history that's going to have a chance to restore those ecosystems and those sacred cycles before it's too late. And as it relates to mental health, young kids are growing up attached to physical screens and to technology and all these things, you've lived almost the opposite life, it appears, for the last 20 years. I'm wondering if there's anything, you know, because you said today on your way here that you, like, didn't know how to get out of the Uber. Yeah, no, it was a mess getting here. I almost got run over by a guy who recognized me and said, get out of the road, Anaconda guy. And then I'd never opened, I guess I'd never opened a door with a button before, but I couldn't figure out how to get out of the Uber. And then I had a whole adventure in the bathroom that should have been filmed. but no I mean I have lived we used to we could call it the barefoot machete days you know a lot of my early learning in the Amazon took place under the tutelage of indigenous experts and these are people that like JJ who I meet when I first go down to the Amazon he didn have shoes until he was 13 years old So he lived a life where if you wanted fish, you have to go to the river. And if you want to eat, you have to go out into the forest, not to the supermarket. And so when you see kids today that are only using their thumbs, it's not too surprising when people are disconnected and disoriented and sort of don't know what's real and what's not real anymore because you go to the mountains and the rain and the sky and the rocks will teach you what's real, real quick. And you all have to agree on it or else you'll die. And the jungle is the same thing. It's sort of when you find yourself with these chemical, physical boundaries, life makes a lot more sense. Have you been able to make sense of the life that someone like me lives more because you've spent time in the Amazon? Like, do you look at us differently? I know that sounds like a crazy thing to say. but in the same way that people might look at the way you choose to live your life and say, this is very, very strange. Do you look at people that, you know, like me, that work seven days a week behind the screen and think, that's a very strange life? I just know that I couldn't do it. I depend almost, almost, I'm so reliant on nature. I have to be around trees. I fall asleep to frogs. I mean, even being in a city, I go seek out a place where there's a lot of trees. I am like a forest creature. If you take me out of my environment, I start to stress and die. And there's a part of me that, yes, that starts to die. If you keep me locked in concrete or if you were to relegate me to a— I was just in a hotel last week on the book tour, and I realized nothing in the room with me was natural. The carpet, the table, the windows, the television, everything that was in this room with me was composite materials. and I couldn't even open the window to get to the outside air. And it did occur to me, I said, I wonder if other people feel this type of societal claustrophobia where to me it's I have to have my feet in a river at some point. I have to, every night before I fall asleep, I have to look up. It's a ritual. I have to look up and look at the stars. How else can you pray? And so for me, being in a city has become a very different reality to what I'm used to. I mean, just taking a shower. I mean, trust me, very different reality to what I'm used to. I mean, just taking a shower. I mean, trust me, it's not as much fun standing in a cold tile box and spraying water on yourself as it is running through the jungle, diving into the river and swimming in the whole river rushing around you. It's a whole different experience. And so when I come back, I get a little bit, you know, I miss my, I miss the frogs and the birds and sort of my neighbors of the jungle. Do you think there's like a collective delusion in terms of the way we live our lives? Do you think we're we've gone a bit crazy kind of like the frog in the frying pan it's happened so gradually the sort of technological creep of our lives that you know and we're looking at young kids that are more anxious and depressed than ever before loneliness is at an all-time high more people are taking antidepressant medications than ever before i think that yes is the simple answer to your question that that that sort of we're a species perpetual fish perpetually out of water, that is humans, because we've taken ourselves away from forests and away from deserts and away from mountains and the ocean. I mean, we used to be fishermen and we used to be farmers. And now the life that we live is so incredibly different than that. If you ask kids, where does their meat come from? There are kids that will say the grocery store. You know, they don't know that chickens exist before it's in the package. And so, you know, there was that generation, which I think that you and I are both a part of, where it was like we were the bicycle generation. We might be the last one. Where it was like you went out in the morning and you were on your bicycle or you were running around with your friends and you would come home for dinner. And I was incredibly lucky to have, you know, on the weekends, I would go to the woods. I would take a steak and I would take one match and I'd take my golden retriever and we would go get lost up the side of a mountain. And we'd just go camping. My rule was no shelter, one match, one steak, dog. So you couldn't mess up the match. At what age? I would say 12 or 14 I was doing this. I had a little hunting knife on my side. Not typical for a 12-year-old. But I needed it. Why? I don't know. I needed adventure. I think because being stuck in a desk and being told you can't get up and you can't even go to the bathroom and you look down, do what we say, just being controlled was so counterintuitive to my essence. and so I grew up with this need for adventure and then somewhere along the way the fact that I couldn't drink the streams that I was exploring or the fact that even when I was deep deep deep in the forest I knew that if I really hike for another four hours I come out the other side I wanted to experience wilderness I wanted to experience wilderness where it never ended I wanted to see the really wild places on the planet And for some reason that was inside me since I was very young So how'd you go from there, from being that 13 year old to setting off at what, 17 years old with your Amazon research in Peru? You didn't go to university. You, you were actually really, really smart. Are you here? I was smart enough that they had me both suspended and in detention and in American Mensa. I was really all over the place. And the thing is, they make you feel stupid when you can't do the assignments. So I'd say, why are you failing math? And why can't you read this book? And you didn't do your homework. But I was like, I know I'm smart. And in the forest, I was good at tracking. And I could survive. And I could make it through a weekend. And I could build shelter. And so I always just gravitated towards that. And so I spoke to my parents. I dropped out of high school. You can take your GED and get out two years early with a one-day test. And I did that. The rule was I did have to go to university, so I had to start taking semesters. But in between semesters, I was free to go to the Amazon rainforest. And so I booked the most remote position that I could at a place where it took two days by boat from the nearest city to get to this tiny little research station. And it was run by this Peruvian guy and his partner, and his name was JJ. and that's the guy that opened the Amazon for me. He opened the Amazon for you. Well, JJ grew up in the Amazon as an indigenous person. So what he was learning, the first chapter in this book is called the rarest of species because he's the only unicorn in the Amazon rainforest. He's an indigenous person. So he's been learning from his grandfather's, grandfather's, grandfather's, grandfather's all the way back. And indigenous means? Indigenous means his family is from the jungle. Their heritage, their lineage going back, they are jungle people. They're from the Eceaja tribe. And so his father, Don Santiago there, they knew the medicinal plants. They knew how to fish for piranha. Then he can cut a piece of callus off of his foot and put it on a hook, using himself as bait to catch a bait fish. He can mash up a barbasco root and put it in a stream, and then all the fish float to the surface. He can track a deer. He could track a jaguar. He could track a person. So these people know everything about the forest. And they're the people that I came in with. And because I knew about snakes he knew everything about the forest the medicines the habits of the animals the systems The only thing I knew was I said I know how to handle snakes And he said I scared of snakes And I said I could teach you snakes I said you teach me everything else And he goes you like snakes He goes come with us He said, we go on a family hunting trip once a year where we go on this expedition 10 days into the jungle where no one's allowed to go, only people with indigenous status. He said, you're our guest. You come with us. And so there I was going up the river into parts of the world that have yet to be named into the wildest places in the Amazon rainforest and learning from these guys through experience, how to catch fish out of the river, how to navigate through difficult parts of the, of the stream when the storms are coming, how to survive them. And then we found anacondas. And so it was like this, I had this very, very unorthodox training and introduction into the jungle. How big is the Amazon rainforest? Try to get my head around the scale of it. I'm bad with numbers. What I do know is that it's larger than the lower 48 states. It's absolutely tremendous. It's the largest contiguous rainforest on earth. And are there parts of it that people have never been to? 100%. There are still parts of the Amazon rainforest that are unexplored. There's parts of the Amazon rainforest that no one's ever been to. And if you really want to blow your own mind, the canopy of the Amazon rainforest is about 150, 160 feet up above our heads, which is far. and half of the life in a rainforest exists in the canopy. So you're talking about the most mega biodiverse biome that has ever existed. There's never been more terrestrial wildlife anywhere on earth than in the Amazon rainforest and right now. In the entire fossil record, we're at the apex, the climax community of the Amazon rainforest. It's that brilliant. Where the Andes rainforest, cloud forests meet the lowland tropical Amazon. There it is. That's the most life we know of in the entire universe. And in terms of human life, I hear there's lots of human life there that we've never contacted. There are various tribes living through the Western Amazon. And you have the Eseha and the Machigenga and you have the Yine. And then further out beyond all of these, there were always rumors that there were uncontacted tribes. And for the first many years that I was there it was always someone uncle someone brother someone cousin would come back with these crazy stories that someone had seen the tribes and that they were tall and naked and they still hunted with bows and arrows and they would and then every now and then somebody would come back with a seven foot arrow a spear tipped with bamboo huge bamboo tip this big razor sharp like a machete. And that was the only proof we had that they existed until the day we met them. When did you meet them for the first time? So in order to explain how we met them, we should probably explain why, where we got to in how the 18-year-old researcher became the director of a major organization. Please. Okay. Well, somewhere along the way, as we did these expeditions through the Amazon and I became closer and closer with the indigenous people, you know, JJ, as a teacher, kept telling me. And that's what the first chapter of the book is about, is him just teaching me the incredible interconnectedness. There's this moment that I write about where he's going, look at this beach and tell me the news. And I said, what? And he said, yeah. He said, every day the ground is like last night's newspaper. It tells you what happened. So I look at the beach, and there's jaguar tracks, and there's like a mess of jaguar tracks and some jaguar scat. And I made no sense of it. And he was like, this is where she came yesterday to drink. That's where she pooped. this is where she came today to drink. You can see the newer tracks. And then he's like, and what you didn't notice, you didn't see the vultures above us. I look up and there's vultures above us. And he goes, notice, they're not looking at us. They're looking at the Jaguar. And so they're looking that way. Jaguar had a fresh deer kill and had continually been eating and then coming to the river to drink. And so he can decipher all of these incredible things. And so as he's taking me through these worlds of butterflies and interconnected species, where there's a mist river flowing over the rainforest, this avatar on earth. And then they burned it down. Who burned it down? The loggers. And so the first time I saw ancient forest, a place that I love with trees significantly bigger than this room, vanished. There's this cacophony of life, this orchestra, this symphonic roar of life that you get, especially in the morning in the Amazon. And then at night there's the night chorus. And when you hear that silenced, it's one of the most horrific things that you can experience because places that we loved, trees that have been sanded down, night, there's the night chorus. And when you hear that silenced, it's one of the most horrific night, there's the night chorus. And when you hear that silenced, it's one of the most horrific things that you can experience because places that we loved, trees that had been standing for a thousand years, species that had never been described by science, were all incinerated. And I said to JJ, I said, how do we, this can't be allowed. This can't possibly be something that's permitted. And I said, isn't there somebody that we can call? We were standing on the side of the river and he leaned forward, he looked this way and he looked that way and he goes, do you see anybody? He goes, because I don't see anybody. He goes, you have to do something. I said, I have to do something. I said, I'm 19, 20 years old. So what am I going to do? I said, I don't have a PhD. I don't have a trust fund. I don't have a media presence. I don't have anything. I had a machete and I had bare feet. We both had machetes and bare feet. And so that was the start of the journey where we said, the thing we love is being destroyed. We could see the smoke on the horizon, the trees that we had explored and become to love. We're laying, smoldering on the ground in front of us. And we said, okay, now we have to figure out a way to change the narrative. The wildest place on earth is about to be destroyed, bulldozed, and burned. How do we save it? And so that's where, when you ask the question of how does life in the jungle sort of translate to what your listeners are going to find interesting, it's taking on a task that's so gigantic that at the start of it, we couldn't even come up with it. We couldn't even conceptualize how it could be possible, even with the right tools. To save the Amazon. To save the Amazon rainforest, let alone for two guys with zero qualifications, bare feet and machetes. And so we started behind zero. And today we're at the point where we've turned loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers. We're protecting 130,000 acres of the river. We're on the cusp of creating a national park. Me and JJ are the directors of Jungle Keepers. and we're about to make history because we're going to save the entire watershed and all the trees and animals and heartbeats that are left. And that's the story that I'm trying to tell. That's the whole reason for my existence. That's why I, that's what I wake up and do every day. And you've really taken on that responsibility in a very personal way, I can tell. Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's a point where, you know, I remember because you grow up and I was born in Brooklyn and then we, you know, I grew up in Jersey for a while and then we moved to the Hudson Valley. But when you start going to the Amazon for months and months and months out of the year and you come back with scars and stories where a jaguar is breathing on your neck and you go out on a solo and you come back and then suddenly standing and making conversation at a barbecue feels different It's almost like, I imagine I have a lot of veteran friends and sort of you almost get addicted to the action. And then you also get addicted to the team. You know, Sebastian Younger writes about this, about the need for community. the tribe and sort of the mission. And I think that that's one thing that people are missing today, where they don't know, you know, we've been disassociated from religion and community and immediate sort of connection with other humans. And so then, well, then what else is there? How do you, where, to what do you more your existence? What do you, what's your purpose? What do you wake up and do every day? And so I think, you know, in the old days, it was like, you know, we have to defend ourselves from the outside world, from warring communities, or even just providing for your family. We have to bring water every day. We have to chop wood every day. We have to figure out how to survive. And today, I mean, when I'm here, I wake up and I go, well, there's water in the fridge, so I don't have to do that. And I'm like, the air conditioner is on. And I'm like, I guess I'll check my phone. And so I think we have, like you said, become somehow we've gone really far away from what we are built for. And one of the beautiful things that happens when you go into the wild, and this can be any wild, is that it starts to change you. And so you go into the wild and you start picking up logs and throwing them. You start splitting firewood. The first day you're going to have calluses on your hands. But then after a few weeks, you're going to have tough hands. You start walking barefoot, same thing. The sun starts to make your skin thicker and tanner and more resilient. And then the rain will hammer that home. And you start to get your eyes start to get sharper. And you start to pay more attention to what you're hearing. and so you start going through this whole transformation where you start to be almost become a different animal you become the jungle version of yourself you become the mountain version of yourself your legs start to get strong again and so so the wild puts you through this gauntlet of transformation and you become connected to your environment and then that feeling of disassociation tends to alleviate a little bit i heard about this particular part of the brain that changes as well. You talked about transformation. Yeah. They discovered something not so many years ago called the anterior mid cortex Andrew Huberman I heard him say that he thinks it was one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience of the last century The anterior mid cortex is a part of the brain sitting between your emotional brain and your executive control centre that essentially grows when you do hard things. Not when you do things that, specifically when you do things that you don't want to do, but you do them anyway. So not running a marathon because you enjoy it, things you don't want to do and you do it anyway. And it went through some of the studies I saw said that younger people that have been brought into this sort of doom-scrolling generation have smaller ones. If you are obese, it's smaller. Athletes have bigger ones. And people who live longer have even bigger ones. And they kind of call it like the muscle of the brain of doing hard things. And so when you were talking about that physical transformation, I weirdly thought about, I think it was Roosevelt, who, after losing his mum and his wife on the same day, after his baby girl was born, he went out to the Badlands and spent two years doing pretty much what you said, putting himself in intentional discomfort. Yeah. And he came back and all of his friends described him as being transformed. He went on to become the youngest president in American history. He got shot and carried on doing the speech. He led the charge, I think it was the Spanish Crusades or something like that, the Spanish War. And the Rough Riders. Yeah, the Rough Riders. And they all pointed at the moment when he went out to the Badlands. They said it shaped him into becoming a completely different man, that discomfort. Yeah, 100%. And that's why Native American cultures, for the initiation of the young men, would have vision quests where they would send them out into the wilderness. And there was all different types. Aboriginal cultures have similar things, and I wanted to put myself through that. And so I went out on, that's what I described in my first book, is going out on, that's where JJ taught me enough to survive in the jungle. and then I started going out on 10-day solos into places. I'd have people bring me to the last place that had a name. Like I'm talking about poachers. And then I would start hiking. And I would go so deep in the Amazon rainforest that I was just off the map. And I would try and survive out there. And so I had a lot of adventures that I should not have survived. But it was very important to me to put myself through that because I grew up with that discomfort. I grew up with the overwhelming, crushing stress of being told that we're at the end of days. We are losing, I mean, I saw it at the Bronx Zoo. They said, you know, we're losing our rainforests. And they had the sound of the chainsaws and you see the trees going over And they said we losing elephants You see somebody shoot and the elephant goes over And they just said everything that you for me everything you love is being destroyed And pretty soon we not going to be able to drink and everything going to be polluted and our fisheries are being destroyed. And I said, wait a second. I said, I have to know if it's really that bad. So when I got old enough, it's not just that I was inspired to go out on a mission. It was that I wanted to find out for myself because I don't like finding out through a screen. I don't want other people filtering my information. I want to find out for myself, is it really that bad? And so I was going out on a quest to understand what the reality was. If I sat 18-year-old you at this table, he sat there, and this version of you at, what, 37? 38. 38, you were sat there, so 20 years difference. What would the notable differences be between these two men? well he didn't know how to fish with his feet um that's for sure his machete skills would be terrible but the noticeable difference would be that that 18 year old his greatest dream was to alleviate the environmental stress that he grew up with escape the world of rules find purpose in life and to just have adventures. My greatest dream was to see the Amazon rainforest. I looked at people like Teddy Roosevelt and Jane Goodall, and I said, man, they had such incredibly extraordinary lives. And I said, how come my life can't be like that? I'm over here in detention. I'm over here being told I didn't do my homework. And I'm like, I want to chop wood and carry water. I want to go to war. I want to be scared. I want to be challenged. And so for me, that would be the difference, is that I would be hungry for all of that. Whereas the person sitting across from you today, my body is a Jackson Pollock painting of scars, crocodile bites, tiger bites, infections, times that I've been almost crushed to death by elephants. I've been hunted by the narco-terrorists. And at this point, the responsibility of that kid got to see all the things he wanted to see. We found the biggest anacondas. I lived through the amazing adventures, and that's great. The person sitting across from you today is responsible for protecting millions of animal lives. And my job is to explain to people that we, that everyone reading this message or listening to this message, has the chance to help the indigenous people save the Amazon before we lose. is to explain to people that we, that everyone reading this message or listening to this message, is to explain to people that we, that everyone reading this message or listening to this message, has the chance to help the indigenous people save the Amazon before we lose it forever. And so that's the main difference, is that at that age, I just wanted some swashbuckling adventure. And now I found that adventure became meaning. I found it along the way. And then now I'm on a whole other journey. Now it's can we bring it home? Now it's can we achieve something that we thought was impossible? and change the narrative of how it's done. And I guess this kind of brings us back to this question about the uncontacted tribes. You said you and JJ were talking about how you might go about saving the Amazon. Was highlighting the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon part of the mission there? No, very much no. That's a great question. Because what we started doing was we looked at this river basin and we said, okay, we love this one really wild river. And now we say, why has this river been so wild? You know, so you think of the Amazon as a tree of rivers. You have the main Amazon channel and then all these millions of branches. And so the upper Amazon, the uppermost branches of the Amazon rainforest, those tip-tip-tops, people are only just getting to them now. You know, the main Amazon channel is a shipping port. And then you have these huge tributaries going off of it. And you can get in as far as Iquitos with a steamship. Like you can go all the way through Brazil, thousands of miles and get all the way to Iquitos, Peru to the, almost the back end of the Amazon. I've been there. And it's beautiful. We are at the Southern edge in the tributaries down there. There's one tributary. What's a tributary? A tributary is an offshoot from a larger river. So a stream is a tributary of a larger stream, which goes into, you know, and then eventually reach the Hudson river. And so this is a tiny little tributary. And what we discovered is that the reason people hadn't developed this tributary, the reason other indigenous communities hadn't formed, was that for hundreds and hundreds of years, this particular river had been protected by the violent, mysterious, Mashkopiro nomadic uncontacted tribes. And that had kept it wild. They were the original jungle keepers. But by the time I got there, they were sort of just a myth. And so they were something that they said they lived really far upriver past the last indigenous community And when I say indigenous community I mean people that we can talk to people that we can interface with that I can speak a little Spanish to and they understand me I think that an important distinction Yes Because can you make that distinction between indigenous and these tribes? Yes. So within Peru, you have Lima and, you know, Michelin star restaurants and all this amazing food. And then you travel down to Cusco, you have Machu Picchu, and you have the Andes and all of that incredible culture. And then you go down to the jungle and that's a little bit like going to the back end of Alaska. That's where it's like, you are very far away from LA or New York, like, but it's the same country. And out there, you'll reach these communities where they are indigenous. And so in the reserve that we currently protect as jungle keepers, there's two indigenous communities there. And we work with them to sort of support them because as these loggers and narco traffickers and gold miners come in, they see them as a mark. They'll go in and say, oh, there's these helpless indigenous people. How can we exploit them? How can we get their trees, their fish? They'll go and take those things from them or they'll sell them something that's not worth what they think it is. And so we've been working with these indigenous communities to say, do you want the loggers to come in and cut down all of your trees? And they go, no. And they go, but at the same time, we need a little bit of gasoline because what if we're having a baby and we have to get our daughter to a hospital in town? And so we've been working with them to provide sustainable jobs as rangers, protecting their own land. It's such a simple solution, whereas otherwise they would go and be loggers to get that cash. And so we're working with these communities. And now they're rangers and boat drivers and guides and handymen. And they called us about a year ago and they said something incredible is happening and it's going to be dangerous. but you are the directors and you're part of this family and you're part of this story and we need you here for this but the tribes are about to come out of the forest and we were in town and where what you know what we do now is you know we and we can explain this later but we raise money and we bring it to the amazon where we the local people have the opportunity to set aside huge acreage of the amazon to protect it we're changing the narrative of destruction where we just protect it before they get to it and so we were in town with jj who's now the director of this major organization and we're talking to our lawyers and we're in the office and we get this call that the tribe is out. The tribe is out? The tribe is out. What does that mean? It means the mythical uncontacted tribe that when I arrived in Peru the president of Peru had been saying these are a myth They don exist And it just it the boogeyman It been made up as a story to scare the loggers So their existence was contested They were almost on the fringes of imagination. Could we not have flown a plane over there or something? Is that, you know, this sounds like a dumb question, but presumably we have satellites and we can zoom in. The BBC did do a piece where they were flying a plane and they were looking at an uncontacted tribe from miles away. And they said, we're being very careful not to disturb them. But there is a tribe in the rainforest that has no contact with the outside world. And you can see these people bending and they're looking at the plane, but the plane's not close enough to really scare them or to cause them any distress. And so we have done that. But then on our river, out in the middle of nowhere, where no one's heard of the BBC, you just hear stories from loggers who've come down river from three weeks up river. You can go for three weeks up the river and hit nothing. There's nothing human. It's like the last endless forest. And so when the community called and they said, there's arrows on the beach, the tribe is coming out. It's the first time in 10 years that the tribe seems to be coming out of the jungle to make contact. And so they got the directors of jungle keepers up there. We had to rush to be there. They begged us to be there so that we could see it because they were worried that we wouldn't believe them. And so we got there and we went all night. And when you go up a river at night, we do a two-day boat journey in one night. And so the guy right there, the picture with the guy who has the scar on his forehead, that's Ignacio. That scar is because he was shot in the head by a seven-foot arrow while he was trying to make peaceful contact with the uncontacted tribes. He was trying to give them a gift and they got spooked and they scared and they shot him in the head and he almost died from that. When we heard that this was happening and he's now one of our best Jungle Keepers Rangers, we said, can you do a two-day boat journey in one night? And he went, yes, sir. And he put on a headlamp and he got in the back of the boat and we took an open top canoe and we drove from 6 p.m. until 9 a.m. the next day through the worst thunderstorm I've ever seen. I was on the front of the boat with a flashlight using the crocodile eyes, the caiman eyes on the side of the river to navigate because they shine, the eye shine comes back. The storm was so bad that we couldn't see anything. We couldn't see the side of the river. And because of the light igniting the raindrops, you can even see what in front of you So we were using the croc eyes to navigate where the edges of the river was So I was spotting and telling him which way to go And he drove and we did that all night long Got to the indigenous community and said, okay, so what's going on? And they said, oh yeah, they left. Tribe's gone. The only thing that they had was that one guy the previous day had been shot by an arrow. And he had been fishing and he had seen the tribes. So he said, and they had shot an arrow at him. The first thing they had done was shot one of these seven-foot arrows at him. And the way it had hit the boat, ricocheted and then hit his thick leather belt and blunted the tip of the arrow. And he had the arrow. And so he says, so there are people here. And then a native anthropologist from another region showed up and he said, they know me as the grandfather. I can speak to these people. I speak a little bit of their language. And so we stayed another night. two days deep in the jungle. And the following morning we said, okay, we're getting out of here. There's obviously nothing here but, you know, stories and footprints and arrows, and we have important work to do back in town. And did you believe them? I've learned one thing working in the Amazon, always believe the locals. Always. If they say it's there, they're not wrong. And that's part of the reason that I've gotten to go on these adventures. You know, when J.J. Tell told me there's places you can go that are so wild that it's like the Galapagos. The animals don't know a human. But you have to go for days on foot to the topmost reaches of the rivers to find this. Well, that's why I went on these solos. And so as a writer, that's what I do, is try and take people on these adventures through the Amazon. And so when they said the tribe is coming, Ignacio, the guy who'd been shot in the head, he said, listen to me. He said, you're my boss, right? I said, yeah. He goes, I need to speak to you like a friend. I said, speak, speak, speak. And he said, they're coming. You'd be an idiot to leave. And so we posted up. We waited. How he knew? Yeah, I'm wondering how he knew. He just knew, man. They just know. It's like they can tell. And then, you know, I mean, these are guys who know when there's a jaguar close by by the sound of the birds. They know when a storm's coming before the storm is audible. You know, they have higher tuned senses than we do. And so he said, look, the tribe is coming. There's the arrow. They're in the region. And he goes, and when they come this close, they generally, they want to talk. I said, but this is, and sure enough, you hear, mosh go, and everyone starts screaming. And it was just this moment of absolute, come this close, they generally, they want to talk. I said, but this is, and sure enough, you hear come this close, they generally, they want to talk. I said, but this is, and sure enough, you hear mosh go and everyone starts screaming. And it was just this moment of absolute panic where women were lifting babies and chickens are flying around and dogs. And we're in this tiny little indigenous community on the side of a river with hundreds and hundreds of miles of jungle around. And we run to the edge of this, you know, the edge of the river where this cliff is. And across the river, we see them coming towards us and they're walking out of the jungle and And they're naked from head to toe. They just have some string tied around their waists. Penises tied up to their bellies. They all have seven foot long bows and arrows. And they're crouched over. And they're looking at us. And we're standing there. And you go, you sort of like, you go, I just, I wanted to see this. And now I'm not so sure I want to be here. Because there are warriors coming out of the jungle. And they're from a thousand years ago. So I asked the anthropologist. I said, they're like stone age people. And he goes, they don't have stones. He said, they're still in the bamboo age. He said, these people are living such a primitive lifestyle. They're hunter-gatherers. And they've been isolated so deep in the jungle for so many centuries that it's like a time capsule. So there was 1,000 years between us. We were standing on either side of the river with 1,000 years between us and this aperture into the history of what humankind used to look like. And these people came out holding their bows and arrows that they had made out of the jungle. And they held up their hands and they were talking to us across a river. And it was sort of shirts versus skins. We were just two tribes separated by a little bit of water. And they wanted to communicate. With what language? With their language. I mean, we don't even know really what to call them. For a while, they were calling them the Mashko Piro, which means the wild Piro people. And then more recently, and partly because of our encounter, they held up their hands and the first thing they said was no mole we are the brothers brothers and so then our side said the same thing the anthropologist said no mole brothers and then this this this exchange began and it's like you know i as a spanish speaker when i've been in italy i can use my spanish to kind of get through in italian and i feel like it's like that the The Yiné people can speak to the Mashkopiro and it is an approximate translation And the first thing that they said after coming out of the jungle a thousand years late to civilization was send us bananas They said send us food And they demanded that we send them plantains as an offering And our side said, you put down your weapons. We will talk to you, but we do not want this to end violently. We want this to be peaceful. If you want to talk to us, put down your bow and arrows. Because a shotgun, a shotgun only goes how many meters? You know, it's not even going to go 100 meters, 50 meters, maybe buckshot. A longbow arrow is going to go 300 meters. It's going to go far. And needless to say, they're very good with those arrows. They are very good with those arrows. These things will fly. And so even standing on the other side of the river, we were not safe. And so we were all standing behind trees. We were watching. Ignacio, who'd been shot before, was watching with the binoculars. And he's going, whenever you see them walking, he said, they let you see them. And then they clever girl you in the forest where there's one watching you from the shadows. And he would grab me by the shoulder and go, look, there's one. And you would just see this red face paint in the shadows of the forest. And he'd have the bow trained on us. And so while some of them in the front were putting the bows down, there was others of them in the shadows that were making sure that they still had support. But we asked the guys in the front to put down their arrows. the anthropologists got in the river and gave them an offering of bananas. I think I have a video here of this. Yeah, this is world first footage. I'll let you, you know how to use an iPad, right? There we go. Yeah, so this is just a random moment from the earlier days, but this is that moment where everyone starts screaming, Mosh, go, and we're all running. And this is what I was talking about, where they are moving across the beach. And you can see the sort of the posture they're using there. I mean, he's got, they have their bows and arrows in hand and then they showed up and see they're pointing. They were worried that our cameras were guns. And so they were asking to put down the cameras. They were curious about various members of our tribe and they were all talking at the same time. And so it was very difficult to understand what they wanted. What's he doing with his finger there? He's doing this. Yeah. I don't know. this is the moment that we gave them the bananas. And what's haunting about this is the desperation that you see on them, where they're all rushing to get the bananas. And they not necessarily taking them like they going to share later They taking them like I get my bananas you get your bananas You see this They all rushing to get this little boatload And these are people that don't have boats. And as they're doing this, they're all talking at the same time. It was like a flock of parrots. It was just a cacophony of sound. And they're all fighting over these plantains. And then once they get them, each person held their own. They have rope and plantains. And this interaction went on for several hours, and we negotiated with them. And this is the footage. This is the footage that we're allowed to release right now. And this is them moving back off into the jungle. There's a lot more that happened. And again, that's why we're releasing this now, I should say that. That's why we waited a while to release this footage, because footage like this is incredibly sensitive for a number of reasons. A, you don't want people to think that we went out and contacted these people that want to be left alone. You also don't want to encourage other people to indulge their misconceptions. People go, oh, these are the last free people on earth. They live perfectly in balance with nature. No. People will go looking for them, whereas for hundreds of years, these people have asked for one thing and one thing only, to be left alone. And they've enforced that kind of like the Comanches with arrows. And on this day, they said, please give us food, please give us rope. and they had one other question. They said, how do we tell the bad guys from the good guys? And we said, what do you mean? Who are the bad guys? And they said, some of you shoot at us with the chichitsu, with the fire sticks, the guns. And we were going, who does that? We said, we are not the bad guys. And they said, no, you also. They said, we know you cut down our trees. They were speaking to all of us. There's no white guy, brown guy, Peruvian, foreigner. There's none of that. It was just all of you outsiders. stop cutting down our trees. Our trees are our gods. It was sort of like, you don't do that. And then when they left just a few weeks ago, we learned that the narco-traffickers view them as a threat. And there was actually a mass grave found of a similar clan. And so these people are being boxed in by deforestation and hunted by narco-traffickers and gold miners and loggers. And so I think that them coming out of the forest was their way of saying, hey, we're trying to get to read on what's going on in the outside world. Who is it? Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? They don know that Jungle Keepers is protecting the land that they live on They never heard of a spoon or the wheel or Jesus or World War II or the country of Peru And so they're coming out with so many questions. And the only way to care for these people and to give them the rights that they deserve is to protect the forest they live in. Do you know why some of them seem to be touching their nose? It's funny. I didn't notice that. I think this is going to be your discovery to anthropology. I did not notice that, but you see this. A lot of them are doing this. Yeah. And the outfit. The outfit. What is this outfit? It looks like there's kind of rope tied around their midriff with their penises out. Yeah, the head of the penis is covered by rope. Oh, they've got the penis up into the rope. No, the head of the penis is up and protected. and that makes sense given the jungle where there's mosquitoes and bot flies and sand flies that's a smart move and then rope seems to be I mean it goes like fire rope ladders I think it's like man's second invention they are obsessed with rope that's how they make their bow strings that's how they make their arrows that's how they lash things together to make the limited structures that they make and some of what we know about them is you know we find their camps after they leave so we know what they eat They eat primarily turtles and monkeys. They don't fish. They don't have fish hooks. They don't eat humans, do they? They do not eat humans. They are not cannibal tribes. That's a rumor people have talked about before. People have said, yeah, there's even a couple versions of my voice in AI saying that on the internet, but it is not true. And their haircuts? They all seem to have this sort of mullet style haircut from the 70s. It seems like they all grab the front and just find a way to cut it. There might be like one guy with a machete who just does the haircuts. And for a lot of them, this is the first time they've seen a human. So actually, this was first contact. The anthropologist who came to the scene, who managed this interaction, he said he had met an uncontacted tribe before in the region. He said none of these were men that he'd met. And the other thing, notice they're all men. Yeah. The women were hidden in the forest. And while the men were making a distraction in front of us, the women were raiding the farm behind us. Raiding? Raiding the farm. Your farm? The Indigenous people's farm. Our community's farm. So the women went to steal while they were distracting you? That's right. And did you catch the women on tape? No. Your farm? Your farm? The Indigenous People's Farm, our community's farm. So the women went to steal while they were distracting you? That's right. And did you catch the women on tape? No. No, no, no, no, no. Everyone was, we were all huddled up very, very close. I mean, this was an incredible encounter, but let me explain the prevailing emotion during this entire thing was fear on both sides. They were scared. We were scared. The Indigenous people naturally have shotguns anyway. Everyone had their shotguns out. They all had, some of them had put their bows on the beach, but they had other, they had archers waiting. And so everyone was sort of, you know, it was like, put down your guns and we can talk, but nobody really wanted to put down their guns. And how'd you know the women were stealing from your farm? Because after this was all over and we went to the farm, everything had been pulled up. All the yucca, all the plantains, all the sugar cane, the entire farm was ruined. How did you know it was the women? The women in the village told me it was the women. They went, oh, that was the women. Also, you see the smaller footprints. These men have wide, big men. They're from walking barefoot their whole lives. Their feet get ancho. They get really thick. And I have jungle feet like that now, but these guys have almost duck feet at this point, like big, fat, calloused feet that get wider. You ever see a farmer's hands? But they just grow. Yeah. Like that. They're all young as well. Where are the older people? We'd love to know. We don't know. There's some tribes in the Amazon where the elderly people have more permanent settlements. There's been rumors of some extreme tribes where the elderly people, if they can't keep up, are just left to perish. But we saw people between the ages of probably 12 and 45. I don't think anybody looks like they're in their 50s. So we left with more questions than answers. On that day, they did get a pot that they stole from the community. They have their farm, and so there was also a machete at the farm. Somebody just whacked it into a log. And so as they were leaving, one of the best things that we caught on video that we're not able to share yet is that one of these guys, and this was at the end, while everybody was going home, the anthropologist held up his hands and he said, you know, no mole, brothers, go in peace. And these guys actually asked about me I was the only person there with a big beard And they said that one They said show us that one And so I came forward I stood at the edge of the river which my heart was pounding And the anthropologist said, he said, hold up your hands. Show them that you don't mean any harm. I held up my hands like this. And they held up their hands. And they sang. They said, no more. They knew that I wasn't from the indigenous community. And that was an incredible moment of we couldn't communicate, but it was just sort of that basic, I acknowledge you. And they said, I acknowledge you. And we just had this thing across the river in about 1,000 years. And then that was it. And as they left, one of the guys had a machete. And he showed it to us over his shoulder like this. And one of my friends was going, oi. In the local language, he was saying, put down the machete. Leave the machete. And the guy just smiled and looked at us like, hey, come and get it. Come and get it. And then just as they left, one of the warriors walked out to the beach, put an arrow on the string, smiled at us, and just shot it. I was like, ha. Up into the air. Just at us, in general, just to spook us. And then they all turned and left. So they have a sense of humor. We saw them smile. We exchanged a little bit of that with them as well. They look cold. They are cold. I mean, it's 95 degrees on that day. The other thing is, it was cool. As they're coming, if you go to the part where they're coming across the beach, There was millions of butterflies. That beach was covered in just millions of butterflies. And so as these people are walking out, the butterflies are just swarming around them. Go back to the beginning, that right there. If you just notice, you don't notice it at first, but as they're moving, look at that. The world is swirling with Lepidopter in color. It's just absolute insanity how beautiful this scene was. And I mean, when you see this, you know, if a Tyrannosaurus Rex walked out behind them, I wouldn't have been surprised. It was such a strange, literally unbelievable thing to see because, you know, these literally are the last people on Earth that are still living in this way. We're a society. We have planes, trains, automobiles, iPhones, all of this technology. We're talking about going to other planets. They don't have metal, even a knife, unless they get it from someone else. And so it's just an incredible—you know, the other thing is they do have medicinal technologies. They're able to stay infection-free living in the tropical wet jungle. That pretty incredible Because they virtually naked I mean essentially naked I think that how they carry their rope I don think that so much of clothing as we need rope and that how we carry it It's very, very complicated because the loggers shoot at them. The narcos shoot at them. People shouldn't be getting into the places that they live. And if you think about in the last few centuries, how many indigenous cultures have been annihilated by the outside world coming in. There's no shortage of these stories. And in this particular case, in 2026, when we have the communication and people are able to hear this story, this is why we're releasing this footage. Because the only hope these people have is if we protect them. They can't come on a podcast. They can't address the United Nations. They can't write a petition. the only hope they have is if we are able to protect the forest that they live in. That's it. And that's why we've released this footage now. Because for a long time we said we can't release it. We said, what if crazy hippie people go down there thinking that these are the last free people and they want to go live with them? That will kill them. The outside pathogens that you and I carry on us every day, the common cold that we have immunity to, could wipe out an entire tribe. And how many tribes like this do we believe are in the Amazon rainforest? Several thousand little tribes, little clans that move nomadically through the Amazon. Were they tall? They looked like they were at least, you know, 5'9", 5'10". They were pretty tall, especially because the Peruvians and the indigenous communities that we work with tend to be on the smaller side. They are taller than the average, some of the other tribes. There's another tribe that we ran into down there called the Nawa, and those people were absolutely tiny. They were below five feet, all of them. These guys were tall. Yeah. And is there a leader here? Is someone in charge? Another great question. It seems to be that there's two. They look like brothers. There seems to be two guys who do most of the talking. One in particular who seems to be doing the most gesticulating, and he was communicating more forcefully. He had a smile, that guy, he had a smile on his face at certain times. This one? Yeah, I think so. And he was the one that would walk the furthest out into the river. Yeah. And he seems well healthy He the biggest as well in size by the looks of it Yeah Okay These tribes have been known to kill people These tribes kill people all the time. The day after this happened, we went downriver, and one of the people who had been maintaining the peace during this negotiation across the river was my friend George. And George kept saying, don't worry, it's going to be okay. don't worry no mole and he'd say let's get them more bananas and he said you stay behind the tree say hey please put down your camera they don't understand that it's not a gun he was making sure that everyone was calm well george was driving the day after this in the river as he does every day and he rounded one river bend and the tribe was out again they were further up river and usually when they leave they go deep into the jungle but on this day they had been walking up the river which nobody expected. And so when his boat came around the river, they hadn't expected it, and they opened fire. Everybody else on the boat was able to get down under the benches, which is made out of heavy, thick wood. As he was driving, he caught an arrow over the scapula, came out by his belly button. So it collapsed his right lung and cut through his whole body. And he had to be helicopter evacuated out of the indigenous community. And somehow he lived. But he's never going to be the same. And there's a hundred stories I could tell you of people that have been killed by them. But now and more and more there's stories of that they are also being exterminated. So their violence is in response to the fact that the outside world has been cruel to them. And the only way that they can ensure that they survive is by keeping the outside world out. This might be a bit of a dumb question, but there's no consequence to that, Is there from the Peruvian government or anything? The Peruvian government aren't trying to, you know, if this uncontacted tribe kills somebody, they're not necessarily going to go there and try and enforce any kind of law. So that's actually a great question because it illustrates something that I think a lot of people fundamentally don't understand about this is that, you know, if this banana is the last town and then you imagine just our river is the size of a football field, right? How are you going to get to the other side of it? In the jungle, it takes you about a bit. is the size of a football field, right? is the size of a football field, right? How are you going to get to the other side of it? In the jungle, it takes you about an hour to cover half a mile through dense jungle. If me and you were going with machetes right now through dense, dense jungle, about an hour for every half mile. That's with no trail. With trail, you can go a little faster. With a boat, you can go a little faster. But the police have no jurisdiction outside of the city. The only reason the police have power is because everyone has agreed that there's a government and that they have power and that there's a – but it's all made up. And when you get out in the jungle, you realize that there is no law in the wild. It's just whatever happens. Two has a bigger stick. And so they're still playing by that game. They've never heard of a law. And so they've been known to find something interesting just the way – today, if we're interested in a bird, we take a picture of it and then we study it. or we can capture it and we can study it. You know, sometimes people will criticize Teddy Roosevelt for being a hunter, but a lot of the species, if he saw a new species, he would shoot it so that he could study it. That was what they did back then. But they do this with humans. They'll be like, that's an interesting pair of pants. They seem to think about life and death very differently. And I was watching something, a podcast that you did, where you said that they also speak the same language, some of these uncontacted tribes as the monkeys? Yes. So what they do is they will emulate capuchin calls, bird calls, the undulated tinamu goes... The capuchins, I can't do their call, but these guys have it down perfectly. Capuchins being? Capuchin monkeys. And they'll use those sounds. And JJ's father, Don Santiago, had told us years and years ago. We thought he was just trying to scare us. He said, if you're ever in the forest and you hear the animals sound a little off, if you ever just feel like something's not right about the way the animals, he said, they've surrounded you and they're all watching with their bows and arrows. The tribes have. Yeah, and so they'll go, and you'll go, and he'll go, and you go, wait, wait a sec. You don't hear three Tindamus in a row. That's not how it works. The one Tindamu talks to the other Tindamu, and all of a sudden I got five Tindamus around me Uh And then you know that you got the tribe around you And so this is where the local people know how this stuff works And to anyone from the outside they go there no such thing as uncontacted tribes and they don't communicate what you really do. And one of my friends was in that exact situation where they were communicating with animal calls in a circle while he was in a stream with his father. And unfortunately, they shot his father in the stomach, and his father died. and he ran for it and he lived to tell the tale. And the next day his community, our friends, came back and they found this guy who had just bled out through his stomach. And why they killed him, we do not know. So they pretend they're animals. Well, they use animal sounds to communicate with each other. Yes. Because then the prey, which in this case might be a human, won't know that it's... Exactly. Okay. So if we go, okay, let's split up and surround. We're uncontacted tribes now. And we go, okay, there's loggers over there. Let's split up, surround them. We'll see how many of them there are. And use the monkey's language. And we'll use the monkey language so they don't think anything of it. They'll just keep doing what they're doing. And then when we give the go-ahead, everybody, we just slice them with seven-foot arrows and they're all going down. I was going to ask about happiness, but I don't even know the context in which to ask the question about their happiness. No, I think that there's some Cormac McCarthy quotes that would probably do better justice to their reality than the idea of happiness. I think that they are living in a world where they're more concerned with calories. They're more concerned with how much blood does it cost to walk a mile. They're more concerned with stealing the women from other tribes. They're not concerned with happiness. It's more apocalypto than Downton Abbey. You know, they were in a state of desperation. You could see it in their face. And that's where there's a further anthropological question of what happens in the future for these people. But one thing that we know for certain is that rapid contact destroys them. It's happened before. All of this has happened before. You know, when the outside world reaches an uncontacted tribe, the pathogens kill them. When the outside world reaches even an indigenous community alcohol outside pathogens money can destroy an indigenous culture and take away their language in a single generation So these types of severely isolated cultures if they want to come out and make contact with the indigenous communities that are their neighbors, that has to happen over time. And they have to have the agency to do it, which means their forest needs to be protected. And that's all we know. You know, we don't know what their birth rates are, what their infant mortality rates are, where their old people are, what are their creation myths, what are their beliefs? We have no idea. Do we even know where they live in terms of do they live in huts, houses? Do we know that? No, they don't. In fact, at this very moment right now, I would imagine that there's several of them hunched around a campfire in the darkness beneath 160 feet of canopy. You know, because when you're in the jungle, there's these pillars going up, but then it's a 4D environment because it's just you're walking. It's like you're walking along the bottom of the ocean. You're this tiny thing and above you is all of this slithering life and frogs and things moving through the branches. And so they're huddled down there below the Amazon rainforest. And somehow they figured out how to make fire. which if I handed you a lighter and a full cup of gasoline and said have all the sticks you want in the jungle you still couldn't make me a fire right now how do you know they can make fire? because we see them cook stuff we find their camps but it's also conceivable because they don't have pots it's conceivable that some of these people haven't seen water boil right? They just drink water and it falls on them from the sky. They certainly don't know that water freezes. On this point of happiness, you said that you saw desperation in their faces. But does that mean that you think they're not happy? Or do you just think that that isn't even a sort of a paradigm that they even consider? It's all about survival. I think that we're inbuilt to enjoy moments of joy. I think that humans enjoy moments of interaction, moments of play. and not just humans, I think that animals in general, you look at two puppies chasing each other, they're having fun. Even on this day with shotguns loaded and bows cocked, and we still found the time to smile a little bit at each other. I said, give me that machete. He said, yeah, yeah, come and get it. And we kind of like, it was kind of like, you just as scared of us as we are as you are It was we were on the same level for that smile And I was like oh okay Yeah None of us want to do that Um and so there there is happiness there but I saying you know knowledge comes with benefits. You know, there's a lot of things that they may believe that I remember when I was in college reading about an anthropologist group that got to somewhere in New Guinea and all the people were hiding in trees because they'd, they'd gotten to a point in their civilization where the, where they believed that everything that was bad came from magical spells. You know, if I fall and break my leg, it's because you set a magical spell on me. And if I get sick, it's because of a magical spell. And everybody was so scared of upsetting each other that they'd all just started living in the trees and hunting. And they were living in this constant fear state. And so, you know, at times like that, you need someone to go, okay, guys, look, here's what, you know, here's what's happening. Let's get on the same page. And maybe they would be helped by having a small plantation of plantains. And so if they have a bad week of hunting, they can just come in and they can get some of their own food. They don't need to start being agricultural. They can still be nomadic hunter-gatherers, but maybe having some supplemental food out there in locations that they know about would help. But these are things for the local people and for anthropologists to figure out over time. I heard you say that children from the tribe who were raised by outside communities claimed to remember nothing about their time in the tribe. it's haunting what do you mean by that? I mean that a child washed down river on a log to one of the very remote communities in the Amazon rainforest and was adopted by an indigenous community people that speak an indigenous language as well as Spanish and when he was old enough to be asked questions someone said hey by the way when you were living with Los Calatos with the naked people that's what they call them um what was it like and he just went i don't remember he walked away but i mean when he came down he was eight years old you can't tell me you don't remember anything and but it was a it was a it was a it was a guarded i don't remember it was a i don't remember no access denied it doesn't i mean you got you know and that's what people get wrong where they Like, oh, these people still live in communion with nature. And it's like, yeah. And there's a lot of rape and murder and warfare and probably needless death from infections and disease. know, in communion with nature. know, in communion with nature. And it's like, yeah, and there's a lot of rape and murder and warfare and probably needless death from infections and disease. And they're living a very different lifestyle. But it certainly is fascinating that they're out there. And I think that it only goes to illustrate that what we're protecting here is truly that wild. Because a lot of people will say to me, well, how come you guys are so focused on protecting this river? There's thousands of tributaries in the Amazon. why protect this 300,000 acres right there? And it's like, well, this is the wildest part. John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt on a camping trip when he wanted him to protect the Yosemite Valley and the Sequoia trees. And he said, you have to see this. And so he took Roosevelt and showed him how amazing it was. I mean, Sequoia trees like that exist nowhere else on earth. They're the biggest trees on the planet. If they hadn't protected them, they'd be gone. and so them having the foresight to protect those trees then we still have sequoia trees and so that's what we're doing on this river it's like by protecting 300,000 acres of forest we ensure that those millennium trees those skyscrapers of life continue to have monkeys reptiles amphibians birds mammals that these tribes continue to live out in the far reaches and then again to use the football field analogy, in this vast expanse of wilderness, we found a way to use just like a little pinprick to actually bring people and let them see this amazing place. And so we, you know, the whole 99.99% of the thing is wild. And we, that's why we built that tree house to let, you know, some of our donors, some of our people, because now people from all over the world are helping us save this river. And the tree house, that was a dream. You know, there's a, there's a mist river that flows above the Amazon that's invisible and it's larger than the Amazon river itself. There's an invisible mist river above the Amazon that's larger than the river. Mist. Mist. Okay. And so the first time I saw it, I had climbed the tallest tree in the jungle, which took hours. And I was standing on a branch at dawn and I saw the sun illuminate the mist river going across the canopy. And I went, I have to share this with people. And so we built that treehouse on a promontory at the edge of the terra firma, looking out over the jungle so that people can see the reserve see all the forest that they protecting Because at this point the way we seen this and see that picture below it that the wasteland That what happens when you don protect the Amazon Are you at all, on some level, jealous of how these uncontacted tribes live? Is there any part of you that wants to go and experience their world for a day or wishes you could spend some time living how they live? No. No, I really enjoy hanging out with my native friends, like when spending a day piranha fishing. But I also really love my camera role and doing photography and having modern medicine and being able to FaceTime my mom when I'm in the jungle. Like, you know, I don't I don't I don't know romanticism about their state that that seems like stress and destiny. I don't I don't need to. I don't want I certainly don't want to do that now. Is there anything that you learned or gleaned from them that, I don't know, a Westerner like me who's spending a lot of time on screens and stuff and the way we live our lives might find useful? I don't think that we're at the point where they're imparting lessons. I think we're at the point where we're learning which questions we want to ask. That was first contact. And so at this point, our job is to figure out how do we move forward? What do they need? How do we ethically proceed in protecting this forest? I don't know any founder who started their business because they like doing admin. But whether you like it or not, it's a huge part of running a business successfully. And it's something that can quickly become all-consuming, confusing, and honestly, a real tax. Because you know it's taking your attention away from the most important work. And that's why our sponsor, Intuit QuickBooks, helps my team streamline a lot of their admin. I asked my team about it and they said it saves them around 12 hours a month. 78% of Intuit QuickBooks users say it's made running their business significantly easier. And Intuit QuickBooks new AI agent works with you to streamline all of your workflows. They sync with all of the tools that you currently use. They automate things that slow the wheel in the process of your business. 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It also automates a lot of the tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming parts of the sales process, which in turn saves you so many hours every single month, which means you can get back to selling. Making that early decision to switch to Pipedrive was a real game changer, and it's kept the right things front of mind. My favorite feature is Pipedrive's ability to sync your CRM with multiple email inboxes so your entire team can work together from one platform. And we aren't the only ones benefiting. Over 100,000 companies use Pipedrive to grow their business. So if something I've said resonates, head over to pipedrive.com slash CEO, where you can get a 30-day free trial, no credit card or payment required. I've got so many photos here. What do you got? I mean, in so many of these photos, you're holding massive snakes. And when I say massive snakes, I don't mean the snakes you guys listening are thinking about. I mean anaconda-sized snakes. like oh yeah this was this was me and JJ's first first big anaconda that we big anaconda we caught was only about 12 feet and uh yeah that one that one this was a great snake because I'd never caught a big snake before I'd always been you know you catch a small snake and I'd learned from Steve Irwin you know you catch a catch a snake by the tail and it might try to bite you if you don't get it by the tail snake's gonna run away every time snakes are not never going to attack you period. So I learned you catch a snake by the tail. And then once you get it by the tail, it's going to come back at you and try and stop you from grabbing its tail. Great. And if you need to, you can get it by the head and you got control of the snake. But if you have the head, you have the snake. So that first snake, I mean, I'm talking about a 12 foot snake. That's, you know, that's at least as thick as my leg. And I ran in there and I said, JJ, you come from that side. I'm going to come from this side. We get the snake. We're going to measure it just because we thought it was so fascinating. I ran in and I dove and I grabbed the snake by the head, big mistake, wraps around my arms. And the first thing that I realized was I had an anaconda handcuffs now. I couldn't release the snake if I wanted to because it was around my wrists. And then the second coil came around my shoulders And now I feeling that I can actually hear my collarbone start to flex the way a stick sounds right before it snaps and JJ grabbed the snake by the tail and pulled the tail off and then his other brother they got to me right as I was about to I mean literally the eyes are going to come out of my head he's going to crush you that's what happens and so he pulled that right off at the last second so that was about as close as I came to knowing what it feels like but that's not even a big one. I think you came a little bit closer. Yeah, no, that's, that, that's, uh, explain this to me. So for anyone that can't watch, can't see it, I would highly recommend you look at the screen now. Please look away. Look away. Don't listen to him. This is an absolutely crazy story. What's going on in this photo and why did you do that? Sure. This is actually a very important story. You know, you hear these people talk about how If you're going to succeed at anything, you have to become very familiar with losing. You almost got to learn to love it. And so as we set out on this journey to explore the Amazon and to build relationships with the indigenous people and to study anacondas and to find a way to protect this place, at around 24 years old, I got approached by Discovery Channel. And they said, kid, we've never seen one like you. Let's do a show where we take people into the Amazon rainforest and show them anacondas. And I said, that would be amazing. I said, I would love to do that. I could teach people about the forest. Let's go. They said, great. The only thing is, they said, it's not a good enough show if we just show them the science that you're going to do. Because we want it to use as the apex predators of the ecosystem. If there's mercury in the system, they're bioaccumulating. Any toxins that are in the Amazon, they're going to absorb. It's going to get into the fish and then into the caiman, into the birds, into the anacondas. the apex predator. We were doing groundbreaking research on anacondas. They said that wasn't good enough. They said, imagine if, they said, no one's, you know, reticulated pythons have eaten people. They said, no one's ever had on record an anaconda eating a human. And I said, it happens. It happens. I know a few people whose grandmother or uncle was eaten by an anaconda. It happens, but it doesn't happen where people, no one's taking a picture of it. And so they said, well, if we make you a really expensive suit, will you get eaten by an anaconda? I said, I'll try. I said, it's not going to eat. Snakes are sweethearts. It's not going to try to eat me. And they said, but look, we'll call the show Expedition Amazon. Send you out there with a team of scientists. We'll film the whole thing. Long story short, I agreed to it because what I thought at the time. Look, we'll call the show Expedition Amazon. Look, we'll call the show Expedition Amazon. Send you out there with a team of scientists. We'll film the whole thing. Long story short, I agreed to it because what I thought at the time was I keep seeing forests getting burned. I keep seeing my millennium trees go down. All of those monkeys and birds and snakes and beautiful animals that are getting incinerated. And they're telling me all I got to do to get a TV show that will reach millions of people and let me get that message out there. All I got to do is at the end do this silly stunt to show people that snakes aren't that bad. And so we filmed this show for six weeks. You agreed to what? I agreed to potentially be eaten by an anaconda. Okay. I mean, if it wanted to, if it wanted to, I had a breathing tube and I had a, it theoretically could have eaten me, but I knew it wouldn't because I know snakes. But the producers were very, you know, these are people that have never left the office building and have watched too many movies. and they wanted to see a guy get eaten by a snake. And you volunteered. Of course I'd volunteer. I would have cut off my foot to save the forest. I'll do anything to save the forest. And so when somebody gives you a chance like this, and it's funny, I actually spoke to Jane Goodall about this. I said, there's this chance I have. And I think I could use, I think I can navigate this in such a way that, that at the, you know, we take people on an expedition through the Amazon. And at the end, I'll go, I'll get in the pit in a special suit and I'll let the snake wrap around me. And I'll show people that anacondas are really, these, you know, sweethearts. And she said, I don't think it's going to go well. For anyone that doesn't know who Jane Goodall is. Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, the earth shattering scientist who redefined humans from men, the toolmaker to what we are now, the one who did more for conservation, wildlife, women, science than just about anybody else. And she's also the person that quoted on the front of your book saying, on behalf of the forests that I love, thank you, Paul, for writing this book. Clearly, from reading through your story, she's quite a hero of yours and has been for a long, long time. Yeah. I mean, and going from when my parents were reading us, me and my sister, they'd be reading us stories at night, you know, Jane Goodall and Gombe with the chimps and how she didn't listen to the rules. She named them, even though her colleague said, you never name your study subjects and she said they have names they have personalities they have names she broke all the rules and so I grew up with Jane as sort of this historical figure but she was still like a living historical figure And so then when I when I when I actually met her it was so incredible because I I met her at a talk that she had given And this informed the rest of my life. The grace and wisdom that she showed changed me as a person. Because I met her at a talk that she was giving in New York City, and I had printed out a couple of chapters. I'd printed out one of the chapters that became my first book where I'm taking care of a baby giant anteater. And I had printed out a chapter where me and JJ were looking for our first anaconda, this story. And I put those together with a little cover letter that just said, hey, I love wildlife. I've been working in the Amazon for like five years, and you've always been an inspiration to me. If I write a book, would you endorse it? And so I gave this to her in the manila envelope while there was a line of 500 people. And, you know, you take the picture, and she said, thank you very much. She puts it aside. And I said, all right, you know, I tried my best. And 48 hours later, her team reached out and said Jane read the material. She read the chapters, and she thinks that they're wonderful. And if you find a publisher, let them know that Jane will endorse your book. And so then I went to the publishers and I said, I have the endorsement of Jane Goodall. And they said, well, that's basically Mother Earth herself. And they said, so that's what got me in the door to become an author with my first book was Jane. You know, she was this titan of conservation, this legendary figure. And her just, first of all, for someone that was on the road 300 days a year, that's an icon of science and conservation and hope. For her to have the presence of mind and the patience and the sense of responsibility to actually read something that some kid handed her, that's incredible. That's magic to me even to this day. And it matters to me and it informs how I act even to this day. but without Jane sort of waving her wand in my direction I would have no career there'd be no Paul no jungle keepers no book we wouldn't be sitting at this desk today Jane Goodall saved my life she's uh an iconic scientist as you say um known for groundbreaking research on chimpanzees and her work generally and globally on conservation um so you you decide that you're going to be eaten by an anaconda. Oh yeah, that was a tangent. Yes. So is this a wild anaconda or is this an anaconda held in captivity How did you get the anaconda to eat you So let me see that next one on the picture This one Yeah This is a snake called Eleanor We named her this after my dear grandmother, who was an incredible woman and the matriarch of our family. Now, Eleanor is the largest snake ever measured at the time, verifiably scientifically measured. She was 18 feet 6 inches and over 100 kilos. And she was skinny. She hadn't eaten in a while. But imagine if she'd eaten a capybara, she would have been 200 kilos. But my team caught her while we were filming this show. And again, we were told the show would be called Expedition Amazon. The call sheet said Expedition EA. Then when we were done doing our research in the Amazon, they said, look, fly to, I forget if it was like Kentucky or Louisiana. They said, fly to some state. There's a guy with a snake. No one will know the difference. We'll blur it out. And they said, do this little stunt. And so we'll put it the last five minutes of the show. just to show people. And then we'll hype it up in the news. They're like, we got you. A lot of handshakes, right? And the day before I was supposed to go on the Good Morning America show with Mr. Matt Lauer, who got mad at me for doing push-ups on the set. The day before I was supposed to go on the show, I'm like, I'm a kid. And I'm going, I think we got it. I think we did it. We caught the biggest snake ever. The footage of us catching that snake is insane. We're all jumping in the river and wrestling this kraken. and we catch the snake and we learned from her. We were, it sounds crazy, but we were developing field methodology for studying the species. And we learned all kinds of things about anacondas because we fed her a transmitter and we learned how she moves through the environment. This is research that had never been done before. For context, feeding her a transmitter is putting an electrical device basically in her throat that she eats, she consumes, and it stays with her until she dies so you can see what she's doing. It stays with her until she defecates it, which for snakes, thankfully, is months. And so we're doing this groundbreaking research. We caught this tremendous snake. We'd survived a six-week expedition in the Amazon. We had all this incredible footage. And the night before I'm supposed to go out on the morning shows, they showed me the film. It had none of the science. It had none of the conservation message that I was promised would be in the show. and instead they focused on the stunt at the end and they changed the name of the show to eaten alive and then they sent me out the door to do the shows and the public was mad because I didn actually get eaten and they felt like they were lied to PETA was mad because they felt like I had put a snake life in danger somehow somehow, somehow. The animal rights people were furious. And then the scientists were mad because they said, okay, you're just a shock person. You're just in this for the thrill, and you're not really a conservationist. So it put me out of work for years. Really? Yes. It set me back about 10 years. Really? I tried. I took a big swing because I thought it would help my forest. And I hit my head on the ceiling and fell down hard. The next day, the news, I mean, you know, all of the late night shows were making fun of it. Jimmy Kimmel was like, for your next stunt, you should try having sex with a hippo. I mean, people, the comments were just, I went to India and lived with a herd of elephants for a while. I mean, I had to get out. I couldn't. I literally couldn't. I said, my dream of being a conservationist is over. I was told by one prominent conservationist not even to come to South America. And again, the thing you have to remember through all of this is through the barefoot machete days, through going to the Amazon, the first 15 years of my 20-year journey, I had no support. So I was living out of a backpack, living out of a boat in the Amazon, barefoot, with no paycheck, no health insurance, no security, no pathway forward. Um, so it was, it was very uncertain times, you know, that you actually, I think it may have been on your show. There's this great quote where I think it was Alex Hormozy was saying that confidence comes from giving people irrefutable proof that you are who you say you are. And when I heard that quote, I thought that's great. And then the next thing I thought was, well, but you have to start building that proof in a direction. And for a lot of people, I think they find themselves standing on a high hill looking at a set of mountains and you have to choose which direction you're going in. And for me, I was a high school dropout who was never going to be a conservation biologist. And I was trained by the local people and sort of adopted by their tribe. And so I knew how to survive in the jungle and work with snakes and do all these crazy things. and I tried, I tried to take that message to television and I got Hollywooded hard. I got lied to and I got taken for a ride. But that failure ended up being the best thing that ever happened because what it did was it sent me right back to the drawing board. got Hollywooded hard. I got lied to and I got taken for a ride. But that failure ended up being got Hollywooded hard. I got lied to and I got taken for a ride. But that failure ended up being the best thing that ever happened because what it did was it sent me right back to the drawing board, said, you're not ready yet. And so sometimes the things that you want are not the things that you need. And it's this beautiful thing where life sort of moves aside. It says, I know you want that, but I'm going to give you what you need, not what you want. And so this was a case where I really, I took it hard. I mean, at the time it was a devastating loss. And it was the best thing that ever happened because it was the slap on the head that sent me back out into the jungle for years and years and years of more experience. Doubled down. What do you really care about saving the forest? Well, if you care about saving the forest, how the hell are you going to do that? And we had to develop a system to do that. We had to develop a new technology as a way to save the forest. What actually happened here? so we didn't i know you don't want to it sounds like you don't want to talk about it it's just wasted air time to talk about it because we we rolled around on in the mud with a 16 foot anaconda and nothing happened a lot of people will probably want to know why nothing happened and i think part of that is because of what you're wearing no the reason nothing happened is because they had snake handlers wrapping the snake around me while i was in this ridiculous suit um i mean the things i will do, the things I will do to protect this forest, that snake, if it was left on its own, would crawl off. Any snake would, if there was, if I had a black mamba in my hands right now and I put it on this table, it would slide off the table and find the darkest spot in the room and it would go hide. If I had a spitting cobra, same thing. No snake wants to deal with you. They just want to go hide. They want to go back to sleep. Most people are terrified of snakes. Most people are terrified of snakes. And that's why I think you're going to like what I have for you. What do you mean? I brought a friend today You brought a friend? I did bring a friend And I want you to meet him Now this Is a very Very small Ball python This is a baby And one of the first things I try to impress upon people When they meet a baby snake Is remembering that Even if you're scared of snakes You're the large apex predator And this is just a tiny little reptile that is all alone in the world. They're born and they have to fend for themselves. And for some reason ever since I was a little kid I was fascinated with snakes I thought they were beautiful I loved the way they moved I thought the way they can hold up their bodies and flick their tongues I find snakes calming and beautiful and fascinating. Is that snake dangerous? You could hand this snake to a baby. This snake is so harmless. I mean, the worst thing that this snake could do, if I was to, let's just say, pinch her and hurt her, She could bite me, but even that would barely break my skin. This is a snake that's going to look for baby mice, little birds, maybe a frog, and try and grow to a larger size. Now, have you ever held a snake before? No. You've never held a snake? I don't think so, no. Oh, wow. That's wonderful. Well, this is such an easy one to start with, and I'll give you a few pointers. My hands are sweating. Yeah. Yeah. So a few things is that even a baby, baby snake is going to interpret your inner state a little bit. If you're very nervous and jittery and the snake is going to pick up on that. But you see how she's sort of just fitting to my hand. She's done a few things here. She's got her anchor. She's got her tail around these two fingers. And the next thing is she's flicking her tongue to scent what's going on. She's looking around, but she's also not excited. She doesn't mind sweat. she doesn't mind sweat my hands sweat quite a bit as well and so i'm just gonna place her in your hand nice and easy and what you want to do is let her sort of grab on now now what are you feeling right now let's just see what you feel a little bit tense that's okay you can feel tense now if you feel tense the thing is she's probably going to return to me because she probably knows i love her and i think she's right yeah and that's okay why don't we just let her do that and then you can get a sense for how she moves and i'm going to give her a little hole to crawl through like that and so what they do is they have all these muscles running along their body and you can feel that right it's such a beautiful animal i do have to say yeah they're called ball pythons they also call them royal pythons for that that beautiful black and gold it's can i can i touch it with my thumb you can they don't love being pet that's one thing about snakes they don't a lot of people when they come around to suddenly loving snakes they go well i want to pet it the way i want to pet a dog and snakes will retract from that so if you do it touch her with your with your thumb see how she moves away she moved away yeah she moves away she doesn like that so usually with snakes my my my rule is you sort of have to be the tree Okay And is she a baby Absolutely This is quite small And so in the jungle on cold days, I'll find snakes like this and literally warm them up in my hands. I'll put them in here. And if you can just look at that, just look at how sweet she is. She'll just stay like that. She likes that? She likes that. She likes the warmth. We are endotherms. They are ectotherms. Like all reptiles, they depend on their environment for their body temperature. And so on the cold days, see that? I moved my hand closer. She got a little spooked. She went back into the... Again, this is just a tiny baby. There's another one that is a similarly awesome example. This is her larger relative. Same species, right? So this is a small ball python and this is a larger ball python. And notice that both of these, there's no risk, right? There's no danger here. It's not like I can't put these near my face. Again, both of these are sort of the golden retrievers of snakes. These are snakes that have been handled by responsible snake owners. So will that small one grow into the big one? Or are you saying they're the same sort of cousins? Yeah. This is a larger ball python. This is a smaller ball python. So this one will eventually be the size. Absolutely. And this one could grow to be double that size, really. I've seen ball pythons be double that size. Now this one, slightly different game for holding. But see, like that. Look who's scared here. Me. Well, and him. And so, look at that. He's beautiful. So look, I'll just give you a sense of, look at the power in a python. you think pull-ups are hard he's holding on with no no legs, no claws just strength and he's just going to climb back up onto my arm so what I'd like you to do is hold out your wrist yeah you got this just straight across the table hold that right like that Now remember, if he does bite... What do you mean if he does bite? I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Just hold him up high enough that he's not touching the table, yeah? And then I'm just going to coax him up. He's okay, you're okay, you're okay. So he just going to feel that power as he moves which he will eventually But see, you can feel the power on this snake. It's a little bit more of a, a little bit more musculature. They are stunning. You see that? That's it. He's like, okay, cool. You're holding me here. they're pretty relaxed animals so he'll go and eat a small prey item go back into his burrow and then digest for a week before going back out and now you which if you now if you want you can take your other hand and put it under him to support him and then he'll start to move over both of your hands why don't you try that put your other hand very gently right under his coil right there. He got scared of that. That's okay. Or you could put a thumb through the loop. Could do, couldn't I? Yeah, you could do that. You're loving all these suggestions. All right, now watch. Let's see what happens when we put him on the table, because I bet you anything he doesn't enjoy. You feel that power? You feel that little bit of power there? Yeah. Now, that's a snake this big. Wait till you see, like with an anaconda or something. Now, A table is sort of unfair. There's nothing for him to see this. He's going to flop a little bit. They're not supposed to be on a table. So this is what I'll do. I'll be the ground. See, look. Now he's pushing with all those little belly scales. See how he can cruise? That incredible snake locomotion. Now watch. If I take away his... Look, he holds on. They don't want to... Now he's got nothing to push off of. So he's going to do the inchworm thing. but you get a sense of how snakes move. They need that. They need the ground. They need pebbles. They need rocks. Now catch them. Oh, come on, Mike, catch them. No, seriously, not by the head. Start by the tail, just right here. Just pick them up. And then once you pick them up, you can give them to me, and then we can be done. But, Stephen, you have to catch the snake. Pick him up here. Just pick him up. He's not going to do anything. Now nice and slowly, too, because he's a friendly snake. You don't want to offend him. He seems to be tense. I mean he is side-eyeing you right now that's what I mean he's like I'm side-eyeing him he's side-eyeing me but I'm telling you that the snake all you gotta do is just pick him up and then when I pick him up what do I do? just pick him up and hand him to me that's all you gotta do and then this is all over oh my god I can't believe this just pick them up. just pick them up. And then when I pick them up, what do I do? Just pick them up and hand them to me. That's all you got to do. And then this is all over. Oh my God. I can't believe this. Oh my God. Beautiful. Right up, up, up, up, up, up. Amazing. Wonderful. Now I'm going to take them. All right. And then I have one more snake that I really need you to meet. Come here. this this is a different story and this is sort of the closest thing that we're gonna get to an anaconda i think the easiest thing i could do here is just let her get around so now what you don't want snakes to do is to close that gap right you don't want them to wrap around your neck could she kill you she could but then bring it over here well i thought I thought you wanted to meet her too. But what if she does something to me? No, no. So this is a different type of snake. This is a Burmese python. And when you talk about large constrictors, those are small constrictors. They're the ball pythons. This is a larger constrictor. And Burmese pythons get to be big. These can go up to 18 feet long. And now what I think you're going to really appreciate is the power that these things have. when you feel that power. Now just don't move. Yeah. Now give her your hand. Take her with your hand. Good. Very good. Now hold this hand out. Good. Just like that. Now be the tree. Just be the tree. That's great. You want to come this way, girl. Her tail is hot. Yeah? Why is the tip hot? Maybe she likes you. Okay, now she's just going to move behind your head. And I just want you to feel the muscles of that snake. What was that? Oh, yeah, that's great. Is she hissing? She's breathing. That's just her breathing because she's holding on. She's a ground snake. She's not really a tree snake. Now, Burmese pythons, they grow to be 18 feet long. They can take down deer. And so what you have right now is this beautiful granite Burmese python crawling on your shoulders. And you're doing great, by the way. You look very calm. Breathe. Don't forget to breathe. And she can kill a deer No no she grow She still a baby She still small She eventually be able to kill a deer You know I just I don want her to Now here the thing I think she likes you. So when I try to take her back... Wow, the strength. The strength, yeah. She could, like, break my pinky finger off. Yeah. So let's just see what we do. So we know a few things. We know that she's not going to hurt us. We know that she's not going to eat that banana. And know that she'd like to probably... come on you want to come up girl yeah see i think they come to me i think they know you hear that you hear that breathing have you ever done a podcast with a with a 10 foot snake across the table before no this is my first this is amazing it's such a it's such a joy to be here with a burmese python there so i really this is the closest i can get you to an anaconda i wouldn't bring an anaconda here their personality is a little different That personality is different. Oh, yeah. Different snake species. Just like you'd be a little bit more careful around certain dog species than you would others. Certain snakes. Now, notice. Look. Now, I'm pulling a good deal here, and she's not budging. So now what you're going to do is just massage the tail. What do you mean, massage? I would like you to massage the tail. Just maybe rub back and forth on her tail, and there's going to be an instant reaction. Yep, just keep doing that. She's not going to love that. Oh, she's hissing. Because there might be something back here that she can't see. Well, exactly. She doesn't want something interacting with her tail. She seems to be stuck to the diary. The diary itself. Okay, girl. Okay, girl. She doesn't like that. Well, actually, why don't you just lift that coil over up onto the table. You got this. Just like you lifted the other snake, you're going to have to do this to get through this. just lift no see the part that's hanging over just lift it up onto the table oh my gosh yeah oh my gosh it's so how would you describe it it's like really soft but then like he feels like pure muscle pure muscle yeah she's very she's this is a very very strong snake it's so heavy I can't even pull it up I need you to try I think she's resisting come on you're not going to hurt her just right around the edge of the table just up onto the table I can't It's too late. Okay, I'm gonna do it. Come on, you got this. You got this Believe in yourself But I saying she like really Pretend we in the Amazon She pushing back And this snake is strangling me to death And the only way to save my life is to take that snake tail up Stephen She gripping to this tape My eyes are popping out of my head. No, I'm being serious. She's like, I can't move her off. She's like. Yes, you can. Come on. Pull her out. Bring her around. You got this. Look at your arms. I know, I know. I'm scared. You got this. You got this. Believe in yourself. Come on. Get her up. Just do it. There is no try. She really doesn't want you. No, no, I'm going to do it. Don't make me come over to the other side of that snake and get her. Come on. You got some. Yeah. There we go. There we go. That wasn't so bad. She's wrapped around the diary again. She's got inside the diary. Okay, listen. The diary has to remain intact, girl. So, yeah. Wow. This is a beautiful, beautiful snake. But you sort of see how people have a misconception about snakes now. What she's trying to do right now, even this snake that knows what humans are, she's just trying to say, all right, get me out of here. You know, she's going, where can I go rest? And what does she eat when she grows up? What do these? Well, Burmese pythons, they get big. So she's going to start with rats and birds and frogs. And they start small. They start just like the ball python. But when she gets big, you're talking about, I mean, Burmese pythons, deer, dogs. Humans? Burmese pythons, I don't think, are confirmed eating humans. Reticulated pythons, which is actually the longest. Interesting fact, anacondas are the biggest snake on Earth. Reticulated pythons are the longest. And they're the only ones that are on YouTube having eaten humans. They're confirmed man-eaters. But these berms, they're just big, powerful snakes. And they're pretty placid. It's such a beautiful animal. Even though it is a little bit scary for some reason. I think maybe because we've all grown up watching films like Anaconda that we think of snakes as being terrifying, but it's such a beautiful, majestic... Oh, excuse me, with the table. Yeah, exactly. She's really latched on. All right, maybe you were right. This is interesting. Anacondas have bigger... Yeah, they don't like being touched on the head and they don't like their cloaca touched, the base of their tail, their vent. Should people be scared of snakes? I think people should be respectful of snakes the same way you're respectful of heights go get Stephen good girl good girl go get him go get the diary would she eat the banana no no they are what we call obligate carnivores They can only eat other animals But I mean whatever they can fit Unfortunately, Burmese pythons have been introduced to Florida, and there's no predators in Florida that can handle the Burmese python. So they're eating the alligators, the birds, the native wildlife. They've become a terrible invasive species, which is sort of bad PR for Burmese pythons. But when they're in their native habitat of Southeast Asia, they're just wonderful, big apex predator snakes. Can she bite? A hundred percent. They have big teeth. If she was to bite one of us right now, it would draw quite a bit of blood. I mean, she has to be able to latch on to her prey, right? So all the more credit goes to her for not doing that. Go get Steven. Good girl. Good girl. Maybe you should have the head down that end. I think, I think, see now what I'm doing is I'm massaging the tail because I know that she's going to go for you. Good girl. Yeah, right at him. Right at him. Now, come on, come on, let her go. Yes, good girl. Oh, this is so great. This Burmese Python wants to know what is inside the diary of a CEO. She's trying to hide. Yeah, she is trying to hide. And so, you know what? We're going to let her do that. She's been a very good sport. I'm going to take her. That's fantastic. It is such a majestic animal. Like I, slightly scary, but also. I'm going to hand her over the cameras. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. It's a great time to apply for an Apple Card. You'll love earning unlimited daily cash back on every purchase. That includes 3% daily cash when you buy the latest iPhone, AirPods, and Apple Watch at Apple. through this special referral offer. When you get a new Apple Card, you can earn bonus daily cash. To qualify, you must apply at apple.co slash get hyphen daily hyphen cash. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Offer may not be available everywhere. Terms and limitations apply. Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into the diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never shown. We have the briefs that are on my many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released. We have behind the scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never ever released and so much more. In the circle you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember for now we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So if you want to join our private closed community, head to the link in the description below or go to doaccircle.com. I will speak to you there. What would you say to a young person who's probably in the pursuit of a completely different dream? Are there anything that you consider to be transferable for anyone in the pursuit of their dreams that you learned in those 15 years in your barefoot machete days? Yeah, I think that you have to log your time as a beginner in order to earn your time as a master. and there's this beautiful saying that I start the book with which is that the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried and that to me is beautiful and so it's like when I went down there and began even trying to catch a fish you know I didn't know how to do anything and and and I would look at these conservation biologists and and just think my god I'm never going to be one of them because I'm never going to have the grades to be a conservation biologist. Now at the point we're at now where we are, we have this global movement around conservation. We have this huge conservation organization that's fighting to do something historic. I do get messages from kids all over the world that say, I really want your job, or I want to get out there and I want to do, I want to follow my dream. What would you say to them? Well, I had a kid recently that he messaged me and he said, I really want to study great whites. And he said, but marine biology is so competitive and none of the professors will give me, you know. And I said, listen, forget all that. I said, do your school. Get it done. I said, but go to the dock. Find out where the preeminent marine biologists are going to go do their great white research. Go to that dock. Help them with their bags. Get off your phone. Get off the internet. Stop asking permission. Get on your feet and go there to the waves. and sooner or later they're going to need help with their bags. Sooner or later they might invite you on the boat And after you been helping with their bags and invited on the boat maybe you take some pictures of a pivotal moment that they use to communicate their work to the world At some point you can find a way to make yourself useful to them And if you do that for long enough, you might just end up being somebody that's a core member of their team. People at those family barbecues must have asked you if you had a plan B. Are you a fan of plan Bs? I think, I actually think that I'm not the example to follow because I went so, I had, I burned the boats. I had no plan B. And, and, and now as I'm sitting across the table from you, it's very easy. I remember being younger and hearing these people and you listen to a successful business person go, you know, if I could do it, then anyone could do it. If it could happen to me, then shut up. You already made it. And it's like, if you, if you read the pages of that book and how many times I almost died, had infections, almost fell off a cliff, got bitten by animals. Also the internal struggle of then being 32, you know, 18, they say, oh, go follow your dreams. 25, they're like, yeah, that's cool. And then something happened when I was around 32, 33, that was sort of the lower point for me, right? My dad was dropping me off somewhere one day and my dad was always supporting me, bringing me to the jungle, taking me to the airport, bringing me home. I didn't have the money to get myself there with taxis and Ubers and stuff. But there came this moment where, you know, I'd written my first book, Harper College. I'd gotten a real publisher. The book came out, and it went nowhere. So even that, I'd tried to be, you know, on Discovery Channel. I'd tried to write a book. I wrote a good book. I knew people liked it. It had a high rating. It didn't do anything. That didn't change anything. I'd started an organization. I started Jungle Keepers. I'd turned loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers. We protected like 50,000 acres of rainforest. But still, there was some feeling like it just wasn't, you know, you're striking Flint. And I'm like, it's just not, the fire's not catching. There's something missing. It wasn't happening. My dad went, you know, we love you no matter what. And I went, don't do this. He said, no, no, no. You know, if you, eventually, he goes, if you need to jump ship and start over, he's Like, you know, we'll help you with whatever you need. And I said, what do you mean start over? And he was like, well, you know, I mean, what are you going to do this jungle guy thing forever? And I went, oh, God. Oh God Like no And you know and then he said and if you do need to do that forever it okay and it like but they didn they couldn conceptualize it and it was very soon after that that that that on that graph it was very very soon after that it was actually right at the point that I quit right before COVID and this is this is sort of the the lowest point that I was supposed to never tell anybody and I wrote about it in the book where before COVID when COVID hit I couldn't get to the jungle. Our whole team had COVID. Peru was the hardest hit country in the world. I mean, all of my staff, my friends, my family in Peru, they were all on oxygen tanks. Whose mother, whose sister, whose daughter was dying? We bankrupted ourselves sending money. We took the whole ecotourism business and sent all the money to Peru to get our friends oxygen tanks and to keep our family alive. And it was also during that time that I realized I have nowhere to go. Like in this world, I was like, I don't make sense in this world anymore. And I called my best friend, I called most of my best friend. I said, and I said, don't, I said, don't tell anybody what I'm about to say, but I said, I'm going to go get a job. I said, I've been doing this for so long. I tried really hard. I tried for 15 years. I said, I'm out of gas. I'm out of, I'm out of ideas. I have, I have been burning so bright. I've been making the fire myself. I said, I got no more ideas. And of course, he said, you shut up. He said, you inspired me. You started Jungle Keepers. I don't want to ever hear this from you. You're getting hung up on me. But I told him, I said, I quit. I said, I'm out. I'm done. I'm done. I have no hope left. And exactly a week after I made that phone call where I quit, our first big funder reached out. a billionaire named Dax De Silva had seen my video of saying the Amazon is destroying. We have the people, we have the plan, we have the infrastructure. All we need is the funding and we can save this river. And the week after I quit in the alchemy of the universe, that's when he called me and said, you know what? Green light. Let's do it. How about a five-year commitment where I fund jungle keepers and we turn the local ranger, the local loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers. We get you and some of your guys a salary, and we make this whole thing viable. And by the way, let's protect another 100,000 acres of forest. And if we hadn't spent years and years and years chipping at the same piece of granite just whether or not you can hammer through granite depends whether or not you continue to whack the hammer And so for me and JJ for Mohsen who was sort of the first iteration the first person that came and took the photos that allowed us to communicate all of those photos of burning forest and the wreckage He was the first. He came in the barefoot machete days. And he said, I mean, that was at a time where I didn't even know anything was ever going to happen. And he said, you know, what you guys are doing here is special. We have to show it to the world. And so on that graph, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then a little blip. All of a sudden, we had a funder. And then once you get a funder, when you're doing it all by yourself, nobody's rooting for you. And then once you start to get a little momentum, a little notoriety, all of a sudden, then everybody comes. So then I quit, and that was the lowest point. And then all of a sudden, he rescued us, and we started going up. And then we started sharing it, and then we got to the United Nations. And all of a sudden, we started gaining this momentum. And that magic that Jane had given us with her words also served as sort of a blessing that carried us forward. Because people said, well, if Jane Goodall gave you this Excalibur sword of her blessing, then go forth and save the Amazon. And everything changed. How do people know in the pursuit of their dreams whether they should throw in the towel or not? like how based on your experience there if someone came to you and said look i've been i've been doing something for a long time and i don't know whether to keep going or not is there a framework or an idea that you might offer them i think that in my case if i follow the rational advice i would fail if I was giving myself advice as a rational person, I would say after the first 10 years, cut your losses and stop. What are you doing? It doesn't make any sense. Cause then even after 15 years, what am I going to do? Go, go then enter the workforce with no skills and no resume and no nothing. It just, it was getting more and more extreme. And I was like, okay, well, I'm just going to be this Jack Sparrow jungle character. I don't know for, for, for everyone, it's going to be different. But I can tell you this much, if you're not willing to go all in, you're not going to win. Like you have to take that risk to get that reward. And so you go, okay, I've been doing this thing for 10 years and I just, well, you're 100% not going to get it if you stop. But at the same time, you're not going to get it reward. And so you go, okay, I've been, I've been, I've been doing this thing for to get that reward. And so you go, okay, I've been, I've been, I've been doing this thing for 10 years and I just, well, you're a hundred percent not going to get it if you stop. But at the same time, there's this haunting quote in the, in the razor's edge, this book where they say many are called and fewer chosen. And I think that goes for whether you're starting a business or a band or trying to be a writer or whatever it is. It's, you have to know when it's, when it ceases to be chasing your dreams and becomes sort of a sad suicide. And then, you know, at what point I was very worried that it was going to become my identity, that I was the jungle guy, so I'd just keep being the jungle guy. And then there's no getting out of it. I'd have to do it because I said I would. And so I think for people, maybe having an option B is a good idea. That might be one of the things that I learned, is that having some sort of an option B might be good. This is, as you've highlighted, the great risk of giving people advice when you've reached the top of the mountain. Because it's easy from the top of the mountain to recite how you managed to climb. But you, like, even when I think about myself as a podcast, like if someone came and asked me, how do you build a podcast? Or how do you build a business? Whatever. I probably won't point at the luck and the timing and the fortune as much. I'll point at the things that I did intentionally. And I'm completely unaware of the fact that actually, you know, even with the podcast, like starting a podcast in 2020 when we first came to YouTube was like, the perfect timing. Yeah. And at the time we didn't know it was the perfect timing. Yeah. We were just out there on the wave as it came into shore. And so you look at the statistics and go, look, there's a lot of people that want to be conservationists and there's lots of people that want to be podcasters or entrepreneurs, whatever. Most of them don't make it. Yeah. So they're not sat here talking. They're not here now. Yes. Because they, you know, something happened, they gave up, they couldn't make it, the business went bust. and there's a really interesting i'm probably going to butcher this but it's an interesting story i read about these fighter jets i think it was in world war one and um you might have heard the story these fighter jets come back with holes in them so everybody sat there all these engineers said well if we want to figure out how to make better fighter jets let's study where the bullet holes are because then we know where people are shooting so they took the jets down they looked at where the bullet holes were and they said we'll reinforce those sections an engineer at the back and I've forgotten his name, but I'll put him up on the screen, shouted out shouldn we look at where there isn holes Because where there isn holes those ones didn come back And this is the whole problem with survivorship bias Yes. Is actually maybe you should be getting advice from the people in the graveyard, not the people that came back. Maybe you should be looking at where the bullets didn't hit because that's the fatal area, if that makes sense. And I think there's a lot. It's really in the last couple of years I've got more cautious about giving people advice for the same reasons you said. Yeah. I mean, you got to remember every one of the frozen bodies on Everest were once a highly motivated rich person that thought they could succeed. And now they're an icicle. And so, I mean, it's surreal to be sitting here, especially today on the day that I got the news that this book is a New York Times bestseller. And again, now I'm immediately I'm having that reaction to myself. I'm going, don't give advice because they should not do that. I did very dangerous things there, very, very dangerous things, including risking my life. I don't mean risking my life with anacondas and risking my life with being hunted by narco traffickers. I mean risking spending my life doing something that would have no benefit. Risking spending my life simply just being an adventurer. Great. Okay. Well, how am I contributing? The whole thing was that I wanted to have purpose. I wanted to have a meaning and change things. and so I this is not a blueprint for people to do what I did it's a blueprint of oh look what this person did but people have to I mean that's the whole game right that's the other thing we've become very precious about you know curating our lives and making sure but you know what one thing that the uncontacted tribes are reading about the Comanches or watching an animal hunt you know you watch a tiger hunt and in every single hunt that the tiger goes on they are they're betting all the chips. Like a large deer can kick and split their skull or knock their front teeth out with a hoof. And that might be the last hunt that tiger ever goes on. But sort of betting the house is part of the game. And so that's part of where I got to, where I was so many years in. And once we got to a certain point, once we, you know, there was that dip where I said, maybe I'm not this guy. And you have to choose who you are, right? It's like, you know, the Oracle told, said to Neo, she goes, you know, you're not the one. And you go, okay. You know, and I did that to myself. I went, well, I'm not, this isn't going to work. But then once, then a few years later, if you talk to me, even if you talked to me two years ago I would have said I don care what happens I just gonna keep riding boats through the Amazon It be fine I didn know that it was going to go like this and that now we're all of a sudden, now we are the ones responsible for carrying on Jane's message of hope, of reminding people that you can turn around a seemingly terminal situation where the entropy of global modernization is destroying one of the largest ecosystems on earth, what could one person possibly do? Well, we found a way. There is something poetic in the idea that you were pushed to your edge of being able to survive. And at the moment when you got right to the edge of your own survival, the torch of helping the Amazon to survive was then passed to you. When I was a kid, you learn these stories, you hear the old stories where, the young man goes on an expedition and along the way he meets a beggar and he helps the beggar cross the bridge. And then he's going through this way and he meets some bird that's stuck in a net and he helps the bird. And then later on when he finds the princess and he's trying to fight the dragon and then all of a sudden the beggar helps and then the bird gets him out of the thing. And it's like, oh, these people come in and they help. That was the archetypal story that I got. And I think that that's also the archetypal story that then I ended up living where it's like, And, you know, JJ said, I'm local and we should protect this forest. This place we should protect. And I was like, that's amazing. And he had the keys to the Amazon. We got to go on adventures. And then it was like Mohsen showed up. He was like, I got the camera, man. I could show the world what you do. And then we had this guy, Stefan, showed up. And other people showed up. And all of a sudden, you know, you start to amass this team of Avengers where you go, wait, wait, hold on. These people are really talented. People that have – and we didn't realize, you know, JJ's the jungle man. Mohsen's the photographer. Stefan came in, he was running teams at Apple. Jane's the mentor? Jane's the wizard. Jane's the Gandalf. Jane was the one saying, this is what you've got to do. You've got to get the ring to Mount Doom. And then suddenly it happens. But you can't tell people that they're going to, you know, that whole thing in the movies where it's like, you know, there's 10 guys with guns. And you go, how are they getting out of this one? You know, and it's like, I've been in that situation so many times. And I think in order to have the luck of getting bailed out, you either better be a mega black belt and have some real good friends. And they better show up when it counts. And so it like you don want to give people advice to do that because then you telling them to take risks they shouldn be taking But coming from someone who took all the risks who bet my entire life on becoming a jungle keeper and saving a river and who bet my entire life on going on these expeditions and jumping on anacondas and running from elephants when I was in Africa and India, I happen to have made it. In my job as a podcaster, I meet lots of people who have climbed to the top of their proverbial mountains, whether it's in comedy or sports or business or as a conservationist. And I think one of the things they do all have in common is at some point in their hero's journey, they took an unusual set of actions for an unusual period of time. Yes. And so I think about that as a principle maybe that can be transferable, is if you do want an unusual outcome, whatever that means, unusual behavior of some sort is the precursor. And actually at moments in my life where I hit fatigue or things are more challenging, I always remind myself of that these days. I always say, this is probably like why most people don't get an unusual outcome because this is the logical moment to like fucking pack, throw it in, pack up the bags and go. And when I look at some of my great mentors in the different fields that I'm in, that's exactly what they did. They just persisted for like an unusual amount of time. And I think persistence in your story is such a through line. Yes, I would say relentlessness is the most powerful element if you're trying to achieve your dreams. Because you're going to get knocked down again and again. And you find yourself in the rain, lost in the forest, and you can't even see the trail. I always say that, you know, we didn't even know where we wanted to go. you know and it's like we just kept doing it it's like the painter who just goes i don't even know what i'm painting but i'm just going to keep learning how these colors work you know just just keep going because it's an obsession and you can't really you can't really fake an obsession right if you're going to spend 10 000 hours throwing a basketball through a hoop you're doing that because you love it and there's work and there's discipline and there's times where You're going to feel that dip and that rise. But if you're really doing it, if you're even in the game, it's because you love it. So if you can find something that you love, then you can start building that irrefutable proof of who you are because you can go, okay, well, I've logged a certain amount of time doing this thing I love. What is meaning? love, then you can start building that irrefutable proof of who you are because you can go, okay, love, then you can start building that irrefutable proof of who you are because you can go, okay, well, I've logged a certain amount of time doing this thing I love. What is meaning to you in your life? What is that? Is it responsibility? Is it something else? Well, there's that thing of that the more meaning, your meaning is directly correlated to how much responsibility you take on. That we've all heard a hundred times. But to me, it's, I've lived in a world where things are reduced to such an incredibly basic level. It's like I've lived in the mud with a machete and if I want to eat, I get a fish. And so like the truth of the rain and rocks has become my sort of religion and the way that I connect with God through the very simple chemical, physical elements of the universe. You believe in God? Absolutely. Absolutely? Absolutely. Have you always believed in God? And I think everybody goes through that period in their teens and 20s where you sort of go, I can believe in whatever I want or I can not believe in whatever I want. And then I think as you mature, I think a lot of people come back. It's also societally, it became very, very uncool for a while to say that. You almost couldn't say it. You almost had to sneak your ass to church. You know, if the people that wake up and go, all this is very unimpressive to me. I'm a walking miracle and I think there's no God and I'm unimpressed. It's like you have a lot of delusions, my friend. We are floating on a rock through space right now. Not a single person has an explanation of what we're doing here. All these incredible chemical processes are happening in the rivers in our veins. and in the Amazon, when I dip my hands into the river, I drink from the river, and you hold your arm up in the sun and you watch the vapor come out of your skin, the same moisture that you just drank, and it joins the clouds, rains back on the jungle and becomes the river again and you are part of the cycle. You just tend to believe in God because you feel like it's flowing. The river and the sky are flowing through you. And that's the nature version. I mean, it can also just be hugging your grandma. I wondered if your deeper understanding of science and evolution and all these things might have made you more atheist or agnostic No I think science is the language of God I don think that they opposing forces Do you believe in evolution and natural selection? It's not a matter of believing in evolution. We have animals in transitional forms. It's very clear through the fossil record that absolutely evolution is happening. I just think that everyone, I'm not sure where this black and white argument even came from. I don't think it makes sense. To me, the wild is the church. And so when I see trees cut down, I feel it. I feel like people are... If we have a role as humans, and you said what's meaning, if we have a role as humans on this planet, it is to care for each other and the other things. Seems like that's the game, right? There's drugs and addiction and cheating and stealing and lying. There's all these pitfalls that you can fall into so easily. The game is rigged so that all these things feel really good, right? Real good while you're doing them. But you can literally lose the game permanently. You know, you do a little bit of meth because it felt good. All of a sudden, you're a meth head. And all of a sudden, you're dead. And it's like, you can very quickly get, you know, a couple of drinks a day over the course of a couple of decades. And you miss a couple of birthday parties. And all of a sudden, you know, it's like you can very quickly, in the wild, it teaches you that fastidiousness. You know, if you don't check your boat every day before it rains, after it rains, make sure it didn't fill with water. It's like the line between survival and death is so small. And so I think that the meaning I found is that we are floating on a rock in space and there's only so many animals and people here and life is the antithesis to all of the frigid blackness that is the universe. And this is the only place that we know for certain that life exists, right? And we live at this moment in history when we're losing animals like elephants and polar bears and tigers and the rainforests and the ocean fisheries, the whales, and we still have a chance to save them. And if we save them, then our children have clean air, fresh water, beautiful places. The world continues to work as it always has. And so the relationship that we have to the people around us and to the creatures around us and to the environment around us is incredibly meaningful. There was a little meme I saw where it said, if you overwhelmed by the events of the world go outside and look at the birds You are as meaningless as a sparrow And I went man as an ecologist each animal plays a crucial role in the ecosystem You know, hummingbirds are transporting pollen, and the snakes are eating the rats, and the predators are regulating all of the prey animals, and the trees are providing shade, and the animals are engineering the forest, and the forest is engineering the animals. The birds are not pointless. Whoever wrote that was stupid. And the people reading it aren't pointless either, is the point. Many humans think that we are a dominant, more important species than the snake that you just wrapped around my neck or the sparrow in the trees. Do you believe that's the case? Do you believe that humans are more important than... If you were to remove humans from planet Earth, everything would get better. In like days, just like in COVID, like the national parks, the bears are frolicking on the trails and everything. If you were to remove ants from planet Earth, nature would collapse. Right? So if you want to talk about ecological importance, we're not that important. You'd have to think more holistically. We're just one of many different species. But we were able to rule the world because of our intellect. But we are the apex. The human brain is the most complex thing that we know of. And so in that way, we are the stewards. We are the jungle keepers. We are the ones that are supposed to be caring for the rest of this. And so again, whether or not we can, I mean, there's sort of this, people say that, you know, times are worse than they've ever been. And it's like, I go, I'm down in the jungle, right? So I'm down there. I miss out on a lot. I come out, I come up here and people are irate about some new news thing, right? What someone said to someone or what someone... And I always come up and I'm like, man, civilizations rise and fall. The health of our oceans, the existence of our rainforests. We're dealing with a one-way door in history right now. You think World War II was big? The ecological collapse of our planet is pending, but it's not too late. Jane was right. There's still hope. But we're the last generation that's going to have it. So it's like, first of all, if you feel meaningless, go put your boots on and help. You know, if Churchill the day before D-Day was going, oh it probably not going to work what would have happened And it like we are alive at the most exciting time in history Not only is there a million things that need to be done there people all over the world that doing it So one of the things I started telling to young people the advice that I can give is go find someone that you admire. Go find a master who's doing the work that you want to emulate and put five years in working for them. Don't go try to start your own project right away. Don't go try to start saving the world before you know how it works. Go find the guy that's tracking the snow leopards that's up in the mountains, find him, follow him, learn from him. If it's a business, go find the person that's doing whatever it is you want to do. Learn from them. I've seen brilliant people with great business ideas that don't have the people skills. Go learn those people skills. Go work with the people that have those people, that easy, common touch, where they can just shake your hand and all of a sudden you feel like they're your best friend. My whole thing, I mean, us starting an organization that can protect the jungle, Me and JJ could whack and machete and catch all the anacondas we want. Most of them was taking pictures of them. We had this team that was like doing, you know, the motor, it was going, but it wasn't starting. And then I mentioned the guy, Stefan, who was running teams at Apple. Now, this guy, this man knows how to run a spreadsheet. This man knows how to run teams of people. He knows how to organize things. So he came in and went, wait, what are you guys trying to do? You're trying to do this. Why don't you do it this way? You save a bunch of money by doing it this way. And he started running the teams. And so we realized we needed things that we didn't even know existed. And so, again, the relentlessness, you survive to another day. But for people going out, find those people. Because we learned things from these people that we meet. I mean, even from Dax, he came in and provided the funding. But also, this is a man that won capitalism. As a billionaire, he's someone that knows how to run a business. He said, OK, so this is how you're going to run your ranger program. Tell me how you're going to do this. Just as a friend and consultant, you end up learning so much from him. The very antithesis of what I saw when you played the video of the uncontacted tribe is some of the things going on at the moment in California and Texas with humanoid robots and AI. Yeah. It's like the opposite. Yes. You know, Elon's- We live in opposite worlds. I wondered if you had any thoughts about this world we're heading into where people might have microchips in their brain and will have humanoid robots. They're forecasting there'll be a billion of these humanoid robots in the future. And AI is now so intelligent that they're saying within a year or two, there'll be AIs that are smarter than every human that's ever lived. And even one example. humanoid robots in the future and ai is now so intelligent that they're saying within a year or humanoid robots in the future and ai is now so intelligent that they're saying within a year or two there'll be ais that are smarter than every human that's ever lived and even one example of the humanoid robot situation that blew my mind is when one of the robots learned something all of the robots learn it and obviously you were just talking up there about having to learn from mentors with humanoid robots and the future that we seem to be huddling towards um it seems like they might be the apex species. I wondered if you've thought much about the technological acceleration of the earth and the risk of that. And because it's the opposite of everything you're talking about in so many ways. It is and it isn't. I mean, I like, I love living in modern times. I think that like heart surgery and, and your iPad and the cameras, I think like, I love so much of modern technology. um flight my god how i love flight we can go anywhere would have taken them eight months um this new obsession that everybody has it not a lot of things get me biblical but it makes me think of the the you know thou shalt not with the false idols everyone is so obsessed about ai shut up go outside touch some grass don't worry about the robots we don't live in minority report yet And it's like, if it's coming, first of all, we are the engineers of our reality, right? It's us. So where are these robots going to come from unless we make them? And if they're so smart, well, then get on your knees and pray to them. You know, it's like, do whatever. But I think that as more and more people, like, rebel against the AI slop they see in their feeds, as more and more people appreciate real human art and what it takes a person to stare at a wall with some paint and create something that could move you to tears. I think that we're going through a period of delirious adolescence with a new technology, just like at Y2K. Everyone was like, everything's going to shut down and nothing's going to work. And it's like, okay, great. I'll be on a hike. The world's going to continue to work. And they've been saying we're going to have flying cars for how many years? We still don't have them. Everyone's like, we should go colonize Mars. We're like, great. Fuck Mars, though. Yeah? Let's fix this planet. Prove that we're capable of managing. It's like the kid going, I want to take over the company. And the father going get your room clean I think what you do might be hugely benefited by everything that going on with technology and AI in part because I think people appreciation for community for nature for things that are irreplaceably human is only going to increase. Yeah. I have a couple of wild hypotheses, and one of them is that people are going to want to, in a world where we no longer need to gather in cities for collective labour, which is basically why cities exist in large part, they will then want to be out in nature yeah because our maslovia need of being out in the trees and the all we get and the mental health benefits are going to remain the same even if there is robots yeah and actually if i don't need to be in a city where would i would rather be in beautiful nature in the beautiful nature i was saying to my friends the other day i think people are going to start buying up farmland and natural places because you notice that when everyone sort of makes it and gets rich enough that they can do what they want they go get a house in the country exactly where they can raise their kids breathe some air not just traffic exhaust and but what i'm what i'm not understanding though is why everyone's so worried about it i mean everyone's acting like it's the beginning of terminator 2 except no one's catching on right and and but but again if you listen to what's the guy's name who runs nvidia um jensen one yes his i listened to him on on joe rogan it was amazing because rogan has the ability like most like like which is why he's so good at it, he asked the questions we all want to ask. And he was like, when is AI going to take over? And Jensen was like, listen, AI is going to optimize how effective humans can be at their jobs. Right? Like he was like, I think he said it was radiologists. He goes, we thought we'd not need any more radiologists. He's like, it made radiologists better at their jobs. And it's like, I think that the hysteria of like robots taking over, it's like, well, that's good. Let's use some robots to deliver packages. Like, great. But I don't think that this anticipatory doom that everyone's feeling on these fallen times of everything's about to change. Again, literally, actually, guys, go touch the grass. I'm serious. I come back from the jungle where I'm fighting to save the trees that make the air that these people are breathing. And I'm a little bit shocked by the amount of hysteria that I'm seeing. And like I'm down there getting hunted by narco traffickers and running from the flames. And these people are like, you won't believe what I saw on the news today. And I'm like, I got it. I going back Do you consume this stuff Are you on social media No Do you have apps and social media apps on your phone It funny I got into a fight I sure that we get this reaction for this conversation, but people kind of get mad at me about this where I go, I don't want to. That sort of civilizations rise and fall thing, a lot of people get very offended because they're very invested in the news cycle and they're very hysterical and they almost want to hold on to their hysterics, right? And to me, it's very important. I was just sitting at a table with people and they said, you know, the world's going to shit. It's never been worse. First of all, live at the most peaceful time in history. There's better technology. We can save your life. We can almost, you know, cure so many different diseases. We've never, we've had this expanding compassion where our species has learned to be more compassionate, that differences don't make us less, right? And now we're even expanding that to understand like, oh wait, the other creatures on this planet matter too. We've never been more dedicated to compassion. I mean, I was just at a conservation conference and I was meeting people who were making period pads for girls in Africa who don't have access to them. I know people who are trying to save cheetahs. I'm seeing people doing amazing work all over the news. And you know what the news is reporting? It was, you know, that there's an assassination in the Philippines. We're tribal. We're supposed to only know what's going on in our village. Not doom scrolling through a thousand tragedies a day. Of course, it's going to send your brain on fire. So I have none of that. I go on to Instagram. I've curated so that it's my feed. I see conservationists rescuing elephants. I see a couple of artists that I really like. I have a couple, just all really cool stuff. I never go to that page that just shows you the internet. I never do that. Just don't do it. Just don't do it. It's bad for you. It's really, really bad for you. I watch people doing it. It's scary. When I did go to the Amazon, I went with my now fiancée, and she wanted to do some plant medicine. Yes. As I said to you before we started recording, I couldn't do it because apparently I hadn't followed the diet regime properly. Yeah. But I know that you did ayahuasca. And for anyone that doesn't know, ayahuasca is a powerful psychoactive brew from the Amazon used traditionally by indigenous cultures. how did your experience with ayahuasca change you what happened and how did it change you oh god again i don't know why i'm very because i'm just i'm just in a mood today um there's no filter i don't i don't know this is one of the chapters i didn't know if i should put in the book because i gotta take people through the whole thing because the shaman that we knew was the old shaman it was jj gr jj old father friend And so he an old guy who been mixing ayahuasca in the forest for decades and learned from the ancient guys. Now, the first time I did it, it wasn't such a big deal. I saw some geometric patterns I threw up. I had a conversation with a tree. It was okay. The problem is the old shaman at 80-something fell asleep while he was boiling the ayahuasca, and it became more intense in its potency. And so when we drank the normal dosage, we were receiving a megadose. And I went on a trip that I would never, ever ask to go on. I'm talking about the creation of the universe, the Big Bang. I mean, I went through worlds. For a while, I was shapeless in outer space between solar systems. I mean, it was like, it was horrifying. And when we woke up, the shaman was gone. You know, people drink ayahuasca and they go, I'm going to go on a journey. I'm going to focus on this. I want to, I have my intentions over here and I want to. This was, this was just wormholes and explosions and just, just craziness. And in the morning, we found the shaman, and he was laying in a stream naked, like the way they find E.T. at the end of the movie. And we said, what the hell happened? And he said, I overboiled the ayahuasca. And he said, by the way, I retire. And he retired as shaman for a whole week. But that was my experience, was that it was so intense that I was just happy to have physical form again. I felt like I died and came back. It is very, very powerful. You said in the book, I felt changed. I felt changed in the sense that I had never you know I'd come close to dying a bunch of times I'd come but I mean to be removed and you know if you go for surgery they put you out and it's black and then you come back this was I mean who the hell even knew it's like opening it's like you've lived in a gigantic mansion with 3,000 rooms your entire life but you've only ever lived in like one and then you take this stuff and all of a sudden you go, whoa, there's so many rooms and you have access to them and the doors are all open and you're being sucked through all of them at once. And so it was like, I mean, at one point I was, I mean, the jungle vibrates through you. I took the form of different animals. I mean, it was insanity. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. What do the local people think it is as a compound vibrates through you. I took the form of different animals. I mean, it was insanity. I wouldn't vibrates through you. I took the form of different animals. I mean, it was insanity. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. What do the local people think it is as a compound, as a psychoactive? What do they think is happening? Do they think it's a religious experience? Absolutely. Most of them believe that this is the gift of the gods to humans, and it is a link between the spirit world and our world. And they say that the Amazon was formed when the anaconda god slipped out of the Milky Way and carved the rivers, right? And if you take the 40,000 species of trees in the Amazon and did trial and error to try and figure out which ones would interact with each other, it doesn't really make sense that ancient peoples came to this by accident. And so the shamans say that the gods gave this to humans so that we could interact with the other side. What is Jungle Keepers? We've used the word several times now, and it's the word on the front of your new book, and I see it's written there on your chest. But for anyone that doesn't know what Jungle Keepers is, what the mission of it is, how they might be able to get involved and help, what is it? Jungle Keepers is the method we developed to find a way to save the Amazon. And what we did was this. We worked with the local people. We spent years understanding what the reality was on the ground. Jungle Keepers is the system with which we actually are saving the Amazon rainforest. It's how we employ the loggers and gold miners as conservation rangers, but it's the way that we do that. What we've done, usually conservation is done through grant writing and government deals. We've done this using modern technology, using social media for good. We've used, I mean, it was through Instagram that we got our first big funder. It was through Instagram and podcasts that we've reached a lot of our smaller funders. And today, Jungle Keepers is the most direct way for people around the world to help the indigenous people protect the Amazon. And what that means is we have a donor program. People go to junglekeepers.org and whether it's for five, ten, a hundred, some people do a thousand dollars a month, they can directly protect the land and provide jobs for the local people. and it's saving more animal heartbeats and endangered species and those entire uncontacted tribes, all because people all over the world care And they willing to part with the price of a starbucks coffee once a month so if people have been inspired by this conversation yes um they can go to junglekeepers.org and on the website i'm on there now yeah that you can give once yeah um in a small donation or you can give monthly anything from as you said the price of a coffee up to bigger donations if you're able to and um there's some superb information and resources and videos on the website that explains more about the work being done, I'm certainly going to sign up to a monthly subscription. Thank you, John. And donate. Yeah. No, it means a lot because it's the shopping cart principle. It's like if none of us do it, it won't work. Yeah. If all of us do it, it will work. We'll make history. Well, I'm going to sign up right now. Amazing. Definitely. And I'll give my monthly donation. And I implore anyone else that can, has the means to, to also do it. Because it's such an important, beautiful part of the world for all the reasons we've discussed in a way that I think is often unappreciated and not thought about enough. Because in part, these messages don't get out there. And most people don't realize that the oxygen we breathe comes from this part of the world. And many of the medicines we've discovered and the research that we continue to do originates from this part of the world. I mean, there's so many. I wanted to talk to you about this. There's so many medicines and sort of medical research taking place in this ecosystem that is incredible. Incredible. And I was hearing, I heard you talk about how one day you got an infection. Yeah. Antibiotics couldn't touch. And someone took you into the jungle, gave you some sap from a tree bark, and it killed the infection. Yeah. You see this where it looks like somebody put a cigar out on my arm right there, a little smooth bit? That was a very rare disease. I was living in a mud hut in India trying to track tigers. There's only 3,000 tigers left. Although now it's gone up to five. Tigers are coming back. So another success story. But I was living in a mud hut in India trying to track tigers. And I got this disease called tularemia. And it's so rare that when I got it, I brought it back to New York, went to the infectious disease doctor. When he figured out what it was, and I'd been in bed for like a month with this horrible infection in my arm, this deep pocket of pus. and I was on antibiotics and he went, this is so rare. He goes, do you mind if I call in my students, my fellows? He goes, guys, you're never gonna see this again. It's a disease that's tick-borne through rabbits and somehow gets into people and manifests with an infection on the right elbow He goes this is one of the rarest ones you going to see He goes this is rare They put me on double antibiotics I had already had a MRSA infection They were like, look, we got to really kill this thing. And it was 2012. And my parents said, whatever you do, do not go back to the jungle with an infection because the jungle is just going to make it worse. And of course, I went to the jungle. We had stuff to do. Our station was in danger of dying. So I had to go back with JJ and fix it up. And I showed up and he looked at my arm and goes, why is your arm taped up? And I said, well, I have this terrible infection. I said, I've been in bed for two months. I said, I have no energy. I'm on all these antibiotics. And he looked at me and went, this is OK. And he goes, no, no, come with me. We walked out. He marches out into the jungle, hits the tree with a machete, collects the white sap, rubs it over this. And now these saps have like a latex quality. And when you heat them, they form almost like a rubber. So it formed a rubber cap over the infection. Now, if you had pushed on it before, pus would leak out. He just went like this until it formed a seal. And then he put a little bit into a concoction of leaf juice that he made and made me drink that. Either way, next day I woke up and the infection was denatured. It was still a wound, but it was no longer infected. Killed the infection in one night. The antibiotics hadn't been able to kill for two months. And so stuff like that, where he not only knew what to do, he knew where to find it. Recently, when I was stung by a stingray and I was in agonizing pain, two of my friends collected bark, which was JJ's nephew and brother. It's good to be part of an indigenous family. They collected two different kinds of bark. They boiled it into a poultice and they sucked the venom out of my foot with plant medicine. It's incredible. And these are technologies we don't have. By the way, yeah, we're losing physical animals. We don't want to lose species. But we're also losing indigenous cultures. We're losing dialects. And anthropologists like Wade Davis will say that each language, each culture is a different manifest. He has a beautiful quote where he said, other cultures are not failed attempts at being you. Each of these is a different manifestation of the human, different blossoms on the same vine. And we're losing languages because what happens is roads come in to these communities. they'll learn to speak Spanish, let's say. So they stop speaking . And the same thing in India where you guys have seen this happening where like the kids in the village might speak a really local language And then all of a sudden everybody wants to go to the big city Everybody has the internet and Instagram and TikTok and wants to make a little more money And they go, and these, we're losing languages. And these, each of these languages is a different way of expressing ourselves. And so there's just this very interesting shift happening in the world right now where there's a lot of beautiful things that can still be saved. And that's why it's like, We're at this amazing time where there's still the old amazing things and we still have all this amazing new technology flooding in and more knowledge at our fingertips than ever before. And so the feeling of apathy I don't get. I don't understand how everybody isn't stoked. I see you've got a wedding ring on. Oh, this? Yes. I am, you know, I know you're recently married. Like, yes, two weeks ago. Two weeks ago. one would ask how it's possible for someone that spends so long living in the jungle to hold down a successful romantic relationship yeah um i think that the same thing happened with this that happened with the career where i said i think right around the time where i gave up i said it's never gonna happen because what girl as a what girl could keep up with repeated seven months in the jungle and all the bot flies and infections and anacondas and then forget now that we're being hunted by the narco traffickers and all this stuff. Nobody fit into the life. And then actually it was on a, I was giving a talk about the Amazon in California actually over a year ago. And I met this girl and instantly we had a connection and it was the same thing. It was like we kind of had both reached that same point where we both got, yeah, it's never going to work because of our different lifestyles. And then it just occurred, you just, when you know, you know. We got to know each other. And then the only way I could know if she was really the one was to take her catching. We went crocodile catching, caiman catching. First night that she arrived, she came up the river on the boat. And we went out and we caught a crocodile, held it together. I got to show her the nictitating membrane and the spikes coming out of it. And it was this beautiful, smooth fronted caiman. And then as we were floating down the river up to our necks in the black water with the Milky Way above us, and we were just sort of holding hands, and I just looked over and I was like, oh, I think this is it. And then I proposed to her in the treehouse. So on top of the jungle canopy with all the mist. and we were just sort of holding hands, and I just looked over, and we were just sort of holding hands, and I just looked over, and I was like, oh, I think this is it. And then I proposed to her in the treehouse, on top of the jungle canopy with all the mist and all the animals singing. But that makes me say I'm so glad that I waited. It's like you have to wait until the time where it makes sense on that thing, and I think you probably feel the same, where it probably took you a while to find the right person. And she comes on these expeditions with you now? She's way more than that, man. I mean, look, there's, like I said, there's a lot of things I'm not good at. The planes, trains, automobiles, the human world, the Ubers, the fact that you have to push a button. Apparently, like I learned on my way to you, the Tesla handles work differently. She knows all that. And so she's very good at keeping me organized. And when we go to the jungle, she's very good at being like, hey, don't forget to thank those donors. hey, don't forget, you think this is normal. It is not normal. Teach people about those leafcutter ants. And it's like, she's really good at, you know, so she's totally integrated, loves being in the jungle. It's just incredible. It's the most wonderful part of the journey so far. I'd love to actually, you just mentioned leafcutter ants, and I did watch your video on Instagram about the leafcutter ants. I think that was the moment, I said to you before we started recording that I really wanted to go and do some sort of survival expedition in the jungle. I could make this happen for you. I think you might be the guy. But I did take a moment of pause when I watched this video. One of the worst episodes yet of why you think you want my job, but definitely don't really. Right now, my tent is being dismantled by leafcutter ants. It's about 2 a.m. and I've been trying to sleep. And there's about 10 million leafcutter ants outside of this tent. And all they're doing is cutting leaf-sized holes out of my tent. They are carrying away the nylon into the night. And because the leafcutter ants are working to dismantle every single thing that I own, they're opening up holes big enough for me to put my fist through, which means everything else in the Amazon is coming into my tent. And because of that, I keep turning on the lights. I just woke up because there's a leafcutter ant using its pincer jaws to bite my ear to try and carry off a piece. And inside this tent right now are ants and termites and mosquitoes, some sort of centipede, hoppers, moths, and some insects that I can't even identify. This is one of those times where you know it four more hours until morning If you get out of the tent you going to get destroyed by mosquitoes It raining outside You going to get wet This is what camping in the wild is Sometimes you put your tent in the wrong place and the leafcutter ants and the gods of the jungle decide it's going to be the worst night ever. All I can do is try and get some sleep, and I wake up every few seconds to try and slap something off my face or something flies up my nose. This is one of those nightmare nights, man. I didn't think of ants as being the problem. the thing that might derail my journey to the jungle. But there's a lot of scary things in the jungle. That quote you read about life being a moment of stasis amongst the churning death march of the jungle, everything you see in the jungle is going to be eaten at some point. Every jaguar, every butterfly, every leaf. If the Amazon didn't have fungal mycelium growing through everything, it would bury itself in leaves and cease to exist. It is a recycling machine. And so, yes, every time a baby is born, they try to survive. You look at that baby snake. That baby snake might come out of its egg. Now, that's an African ball python, but you say like a baby boa constrictor comes out of its mother, starts crawling around the jungle, and it might just get eaten by a bird. Done. And this is sort of back to what you're saying about when should people give up on the dream. It's like, look, sometimes you get eaten by a bird right out of the hatch. But in the jungle, the ants, the mosquitoes, the fungus, the infections, it's all trying to take you down. You are calories. The leaves, which you don't realize the jungle is an energy economy, right? Those trees are stretching up to 160 feet because they're trying to reach above the other trees to get to the light because they want the sunlight. That tropical sunlight is what gives them the energy to grow those big trunks. and then all the other epiphytic plants, the orchids and the lichens and the pitcher plants, those are all growing on the branches. And then down there in the shadows, there's trees waiting. They have no access to light. Less than 3% of the sunlight in the rainforest hits the ground. And they're waiting beneath these titans. And they're waiting for a little bit of sunlight. And once a day, a little bit of sunlight comes by and they grow that much. And then when one big tree falls over and all of a sudden you have this rush of sunlight capital, all these trees shoot up. and now those trees shoot up and what's happening? The leafcutter ants are taking their little bits of those leaves that have heavy chemical compounds to stop the leafcutter ants from doing this, but they take it and they bring it underground and they farm it. They one of the only other species that farms They farm fungus off of the leaves that they eat But the entire thing is this vast interconnected matrix of competition for sunlight energy You carry so much. Our skin, we are these gods of energy. We're a large animal walking through the forest. So the mosquitoes and the leeches and the jaguar and all those things are like, man, if you died, you realize how many animals you'd make happy? like the jungle the jungle is saying come here come to me i'll i'll recycle you are you scared of anything i'm scared that people won't wake up quick enough to save the systems that keep us alive but i also i'm an optimist and i believe that we're at this point where people feel very lost and things look really dire and then it pulls back you know and i'm a big believer and i mean Tigers went from 100,000 tigers in 1900 down to just like 3,000 tigers. Now we're coming back up. We're up around 5,000 or 6,000 tigers. Humpback whales. Before whaling, you think you had like 130,000 humpback whales. They went down as low as 1,000 humpback whales. We almost lost humpback whales. Then they banned whaling, and now humpback whales are back to almost pre-whaling numbers. Same thing goes for bald eagles. There's been so many conservation successes. We had a hole in the ozone layer. Everybody forgets this. We had a hole in the only thing that protects us from being incinerated by the sun. And we found a way to fix it. So I'm an optimist. I'm not scared. And this is my best computation to the darkness. This is my best way of saying, look, that title, when they told me to, I didn't come up with the subtitle, though. What it takes, what does it say? What it takes to change the world. I didn't come up with that. But I thought it was too hefty. I didn't want it. I felt uncomfortable. But I do think that the idea that we can change the fate of things is an important thing to remember in these times. Jungle Keeper, What It Takes to Change the World. This book is about the profound power of saying yes. Yes to one's calling, yes to sticking with your dream when it comes at a high cost, and yes to taking a stand to save what might otherwise be gone in a generation. It's a story of vocation, connectedness, and hope. What a brilliant, beautiful, rare book. I'm going to link it below for anyone that wants to continue this conversation and wants to learn more and go deeper You a brilliant storyteller Thank you It one of your great skills I don know where you learnt it because I don think they do classes for storytelling in the Amazon but it certainly one of your great skills And it a very important skill to wield when you got a message you need the world to hear. It's a very important story. I think I learned it from Tolkien and from Arthur Conan Doyle and from Jane Goodall. I mean, those are the people my parents read to me growing up. We have a closing tradition, Paul, where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question left for you is if you only had three years left to live, what would you regret not doing? And are you working on that now? If no, why not? If I had three years left to live, I would very much regret not finishing the mission that I started. And so whether we like it or not, we're going to, we're either going to win and save it or we're going to lose. Three years would be like just barely able to see it. I would regret so much coming so far and then not coming to fruition. Because you mentioned before the idea of a wave and it's like so much has happened and we have come to this place where so much is possible. But we're still in the barrel. and we're not done yet. So if I had three years left to go, I know that all those heartbeats are depending on me. And that would be my answer. Paul, thank you. It's incredible work you're doing and I'm so glad that there's people in the world like you that are doing this. And if anyone has been inspired by your conversation, I really do highly recommend you go and make a donation or pledge support in some way over on the Jungle Keeper website because not all of us have the means or the ability to go out and do what you're doing on the front line of this issue. But as you say, it makes a huge amount of difference, even people donating small amounts of money because it compounds into something much more bigger. And those small gestures can save all the heartbeats that you're describing. Thank God for it. Thank you. Thank you. We're done. Thank you. Thank you. This year, most business owners have had one thing top of mind, which is how to make AI work for them, because its potential is limitless. 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