Paul Rosolie：亚马孙丛林中的未接触部落｜Lex Fridman Podcast #489

…were standing there. Everyone is waiting, because at any moment an arrow could just fly through your neck, and there are people holding shotguns. The anthropologist, this little guy, is standing there in the front, and he's going, “Enimole.” He's going, “Brothers.” And then it happened.

So fear, fear.

Fear. He's going, “Look there. He has a bow. He has a bow.” And we're looking up the beach, and there's just this clan walking down the beach with these 7-foot bows. They're hunched over and pointing at us. They're going, “Look at that one. Look, there's a gun there.”

You can see them communicating with each other, and the butterflies are swirling off the beach. They can hit a spider monkey out of the treetops at 40 meters. They can sneak up, and you will never know they're there. So when that arrow passes through your body, you'll only have a moment to realize it before you fall over.

In order for any of this to make sense, I have to show you this footage.

And this has not been shown ever before.

This is a world first.

The following is a conversation with Paul Rosolie, his third time on the podcast. Paul is a naturalist, explorer, writer and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest and celebrating the beauty of the natural world. He has a new book coming out in a few days titled Jungle Keeper that you should definitely go pre-order now. It tells some intense stories about his time in the jungle over the past several years, building up to a few epic recent events, including a new extended encounter with a non-contacted tribe that we discuss in this podcast. Both the book and audiobook are great. I highly recommend it. If you would like to support Paul and his team in their mission to protect the jungle, go to junglekeepers.org. You can help with donations or by spreading the word or checking out the gala that Paul is hosting in New York on January 22nd in a few days. They are doing all they can to help raise funds for the mission of safeguarding as much of the rainforest as possible, and I think it's a mission worth fighting for. The Amazon jungle is one of the most special and beautiful places on Earth. As an aside, allow me to look back briefly and mention something that I've been struggling with a bit. For context, I traveled to the Amazon rainforest with Paul a while back. It was an adventure of a lifetime, with lots of crazy twists and turns. We did record a podcast out there, literally in the jungle. Episode 429, if you want to go check it out. It was awesome. And we also recorded a bunch of disparate footage of the journey just for fun. And I would still love to somehow put all that together into a cohesive video in case it's interesting to someone. But I've learned just how difficult it is to organize and edit a pile of chaotically recorded footage like that. So, let's see if I can pull it off. But in any case, this kind of raw vlog-style video is something that I would love to be able to do more of as a way to celebrate amazing human beings like Paul and others, including everyday people who I meet on my travels. So, I'll keep trying, tinkering, learning, and I ask for your patience and support along the way. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Paul Rosolie.

We've survived a challenging time out in the jungle about a year and a half ago, and since then, your life has increasingly gotten more intense. So you've achieved the incredible feat of saving now more than 130,000 acres of rainforest, and the goal that you're working toward is protecting 200,000 acres more. You're doing so while facing extreme danger from narcos, narco-traffickers, and the so-called cocaine mafia in an escalating drug war.

This is insane. These are new developments. There are illegal loggers, as we've talked about before, gold miners, and the incredible recent encounter with an uncontacted tribe.

Your new book, Jungle Keeper, opens with the killing of 2 loggers by the warriors of an uncontacted tribe, the Mashco Piro, in August 2024. Then you reveal that you had your own dramatic encounter with the tribe 2 months later, in October 2024.

So, if I may, let me read the opening of the book:

“Far out on the western edge of the Amazon rainforest, deep in the Peruvian jungle, a pair of loggers plunged their chainsaws into the buttressed roots of an ancient ironwood. An ironwood, or shihuahuaco, of this size is a giant among giants, an emergent sentinel that reaches heights of 160 feet, towering over the rest of the canopy.”

I've read that many are over 1,000 years old, by the way. You've found ones that are 1,200 years old.

Incredibly old.

Anyway, you continue:

“This particular tree had started its life as a tiny sapling in the great jungle, a story that began before the Spanish reached Peru, long before the United States was even a dream. At a time when Leonardo da Vinci was still honing his talents in a faraway part of the world, through the Renaissance, the First and Second World Wars, and the birth of our grandparents, this tree was out there slowly charging upward, anonymous, just one pillar among the billions of others.

“But on this day, in August 2024, when the 2 loggers worked, this witness of the centuries came crashing down to the canopy with such cataclysmic power that it shook the earth.”

Then you go on to talk about how the shaking of the earth was felt and heard by the uncontacted tribe. You go on to describe how these particular loggers were killed by the uncontacted tribe of Mashco Piro. What do we know about these warriors of the uncontacted tribe?

We know that across the Amazon basin, there are still perhaps thousands of clans of uncontacted peoples—people who are living in nomadic isolation in what remains of the intact Amazon basin and want to remain that way.

What happened with these loggers was that local people told them, “Don't go out there. Don't go into these territories.” What happens is that people who aren't from the region don't believe that the jungle is as wild as the legends say. When they say there are calatos out there, there are wild people out there, these loggers from another region go, “Yeah, that's just some story. We're fine. We have shotguns.”

They don't realize that they're dealing with a civilization of people that is still nomadic, still uses bamboo-tipped arrows, still lives naked in the Amazon rainforest, has knowledge of medicines that we've yet to encounter or may never discover, and can hit a spider monkey out of the treetops at 40 meters.

While you're using a chainsaw, they can sneak up, and you will never know they're there. So when that arrow passes through your body, you'll only have a moment to realize it before you fall over.

And we're looking at something you posted on your Instagram: the arrows that they use, which are bigger than you. So they're like 6 or 7 feet.

6 or 7 feet. More like 7 feet.

Look how sharp that is.

It's incredibly sharp. They cure it over the fire, and they have a way of sharpening it. That edge of bamboo becomes incredibly knife-sharp. You can cut meat with it easily; I've done it.

These arrows—look at that. I mean, I'm 5 feet 9 inches. That's easily a 7-foot arrow.

For people who are just listening, this “arrow” is really a spear. Some people would think it was a spear, but they're shooting this thing with a gigantic bow. That's crazy.

Yeah, and to be holding that—look at that. They even twist the fletching so the arrow spins in the air. They have incredible craftsmanship. You see all the little string on there is plant fiber they've woven, and then this is them.

Yeah, the warriors of the tribe.

The warriors of the tribe. The fact that we're sitting here talking on microphones, and that we have airplanes and cell phones and all the things we have in the modern world, and that we still live in this age where there are, right now at this moment, people living out in the jungle who have been there since before history, is an incredible thing.

Let me look this up on Perplexity: What are the technologies we modern humans have that the Mashco Piro do not? It's interesting to think about the kinds of technologies we take for granted.

Energy and power, obviously: all the electricity generation, grids, batteries, solar panels, and electric motors. Metals and materials: mass-produced steel, aluminum, advanced alloys, plastics, composites, glass, concrete—all of those things. Tools, of course, and machinery. The infrastructure of roads, bridges, and buildings. The weapons of war—everything but the spears and arrows that they have—and medicine and biology.

Of course, they probably have complicated medicines that they've developed for their own use, which are available within the jungle.

That entire list is no.

No.

For metal, I think you have to be able to excavate into the earth and forge metal. As one of the local anthropologists, a Peruvian anthropologist, said to me, “People think of them as Stone Age tribes.” And he said, “They don't have stones.”

They don't know that water freezes because they've never seen it. They don't know that water boils because they don't even make clay pots. They just have their bamboo and their string. So they're living an incredibly simple life.

All of that—even a camera—is a miracle to them.

You have to bend your mind to even understand how far back they are. It's like looking into thousands of years ago, like the Stone Age.

When they hear the sounds of the chainsaws, the sounds of machinery in the distance, I wonder how they can possibly comprehend what that is.

I think they view it as a demonic, destructive force.

Yeah. That represents to them the danger and destruction that the outside world brings.

They see us as the destroyers of worlds.

So tell me about this encounter in October of 2024.

In order to tell you about that encounter, I think we need to orient people into where we're talking about. We're talking about this river that runs through the western edge of the Amazon rainforest, which you know well now after spending time there with me. It's a high tributary of the Amazon, where you have the main river channel and then smaller and smaller and smaller tributaries. The smaller you get, the less trafficked they are.

This river has remained wild through the centuries. Even during the '90s, when there was a mahogany boom and people went out for the trees, there were very few people going up this river. Twenty years ago, when I first got to the region and people told me there were uncontacted tribes out there, it was always in the realm of something—you know, it was like people saying, "There's Bigfoot," or, "Don't go there, it's haunted." It was almost like a tall tale.

Even the Peruvian government, when I first went to Peru in 2006, had the official position that the tribes were a myth. There was no such thing as the tribes. That was the official position. You would hear these stories of people who got shot. You'd meet someone high up a river, four days upriver, deep in the Amazon, who had an arrow. You'd look at this thing, and it had this mega gravity.

As we've created Junglekeepers, and now we're protecting 130,000 acres of this river, we're protecting the plants and the animals and the ancient trees, trying to preserve the ecosystem, counting the butterflies, and conducting ecological surveys. What we've inadvertently found ourselves the caretakers of is the fact that these people, in order to continue living, have to remain isolated and want to remain isolated. That's their one mandate as a civilization: the tribes of the Mashco Piro.

In October, as Junglekeepers, we're working with the Indigenous people. What we do is take loggers and gold miners and make them into rangers, give them better jobs, and try to protect the forest. The people who live up in the remote Indigenous community called us on a satellite phone and said, "Junglekeepers, you've been working with us and telling us you want to help us. The tribes are coming out. What do we do?"

So even they don't really know, when the tribes emerge from the deep jungle, what to do?

They were terrified.

What was your thinking when you got the phone call?

When we got the phone call, it was a mix of emotions, because we're over here trying to get land concessions and doing all this important work. Part of me was like, "That can't be real, so we're going to keep our heads down."

Bigfoot is emerging from the forest.

Like, yeah, sure. Then we hung up and said, "Okay, maybe tomorrow, if they're still there or something."

It was crazy because it was probably about noon, and we had an important day of meetings. We had a meeting with the police, a meeting with the landowner, and we were trying to do all this stuff for the conservation work. Then I got together with the core team of directors—J.J., Mohsin, and Stéphane—and we said, "Wait, if this is real, we have to get there now. Now, now."

We dropped what we were doing, canceled the meetings, and put other people on them. We got a boat and called Ignacio, our most hardcore ranger.

Who has been shot.

Who, in 2019, was shot in the head by an arrow and still bears the scar. He barely survived. We said, "Look, this is going down." He said, "I already know, because the whole river knows."

We said, "Can you get us there by tomorrow morning?" He said, "Look, it's a 2-day journey by boat, so no." We said, "Is there any way you can get us there?" He went, "I'll get you there."

We got a couple of sacks of rice, a couple of cans of tuna, our dry bags, and our tents. We got on a boat by 6:00 p.m. and started riding up the river.

Through the night?

Through the night. A 2-day boat journey that we were trying to flex into 1 night. I was at the front with the headlamp—with the torch.

The first few hours were clear. That comet—remember that comet that was going? There was that comet in the sky. I remember looking at it and going, "This is it." I knew this was it.

The first few hours were clear, the stars were out, and it was beautiful. Then it clouded over, the lightning started, and it just began to pour in an apocalyptic downpour. From midnight until 8:00 a.m., it was just the front of the boat with the light. It was a Star Wars vision of raindrops and galaxies and moths flying in my eye.

People don't realize you can get hypothermia in the tropics, but as you're going at night, even if it's 80 degrees outside, in the rain and the wind at night, in a lightning storm, you're freezing. By 2:00 a.m., I was convulsively shivering.

We were using the caiman eyes on the side of the river because it was so dark we couldn't see where we were going, so those shine back at you. I was finding the caiman eyes and then motioning with the light to Ignacio where to go. He knew how to find the channel, and we had to jump the waterfalls. We did the 2-day boat ride in 1 night.

We arrived at this community, and it was morning. The howler monkeys were calling over the jungle, and the little naked children were all by the side. Everyone was scared. We got a hug from this guy, Bacho, whom we know, and they were like, "Come in, come in, come in."

They said, "The tribe came out yesterday. We saw a few of them on the beach, and they're gone now." We collapsed and fell asleep. It rained the whole day.

That night, we went out and looked for them. There was this crazy moment where we were standing on this beach, and their footprints were there. The local Indigenous anthropologist was standing there, looking out into the Amazon beyond, and there was all this wreckage. It looked like something very Cormac McCarthy: a dark sky, iron clouds, and us standing there.

Everyone was waiting, because at any moment an arrow could just fly through your neck. There were people holding shotguns, and the anthropologist, this little guy, was standing there in the front, saying, "Nomole. Brothers."

There are only a few words that intersect between the languages. He was saying, "Brothers, we're here. We don't want to hurt you." He was speaking in the Yine language, saying, "Come out."

You could tell by their footprints—the trackers explained this—that you could see it was just the balls of their feet. Right as we pulled up to the beach, they ran. They were there listening to us.

He was saying, "Nomole, come out. It's okay. Lay down your arms. We'll lay down ours. Nomole." He just kept saying, "Nomole." Nothing happened. We went back to the village and went to sleep.

We woke up the next morning at 5:00 a.m. Again, we're trying to save the jungle. We're in a race against time to get these land concessions. My team, Mohsin and J.J.—Stéphane couldn't come because he was in town signing paperwork and interviewing loggers and landowners. He also didn't think there was any chance this was going to be real because, in his entire 50-something years in the Amazon, he'd never seen them.

We were getting ready to leave in the morning. We had tents on the boat, and Ignacio came up to me and said, "You're my director, right? You're my boss?"

I said, "Yeah."

He said, "I need to talk to you like a friend."

I said, "Yeah, shoot. Go."

He said, "You'd be an idiot to leave right now. They're coming."

He convinced us to stay. We pulled our tents off the boat. Stéphane and Mohsin went off with their cameras. They started shooting people—these are monkey eaters and fishermen, the community that we're in. Everything was quiet.

I opened my laptop and was working, writing my book. Then it happened. You start hearing people screaming, "Mashco! Mashco!" People were screaming, women were lifting children and running into the huts, and the dogs and chickens were going nuts.

So fear. Fear.

Fear.

Because we should say, the obvious thing is that, as far as anyone remembers, any minimal, small encounters with these tribes have been violent.

Extremely violent. These tribes have remained alive because of their violence. Like the Spartans or the Comanches, they seem to have adopted violence as a first response to contact.

Maybe you can correct me on this, but I read that in the late 19th century and early 20th century, there was documentation of encounters with these tribes by the private armies of the rubber barons. Those encounters were, from the rubber barons' armies' perspective, violent.

Maybe the lesson the uncontacted tribes learned is that any interaction with the outside world is going to have to be violent, because they have to defend themselves.

Yeah. You had colonial missionaries in the 1600s and 1700s. Then you had the rubber barons, from the late 1800s into the 1900s—just periods of extraction, domination, and cruelty.

These tribes—their grandparents must have told them, "When the outside world comes, you shoot first."

That’s the only thing that’s going to keep you alive.

Do you think the memory of those violent encounters is defining how they think about the world?

Yeah, because even in my lifetime there, in the 20 years I’ve spent in the Amazon, Ignacio was shot in the head. My friend Victor survived a violent encounter where they murdered somebody on a beach. They’ve shot numerous people. They’ve even shot people who were trying to help them—people who were trying to give them clothing and bananas.

They call it “porcupining” them, where they find a body on the beach with so many arrows that when they fall over, all the arrows are sticking up. They’ll do it out of curiosity, too. It’s like, “Hey, you’re wearing a suit. That’s weird. We’ve never seen anybody in a black-and-white suit.” The way Teddy Roosevelt would shoot a bird for science. They just want to look at you.

They’re operating on a different system. They don’t have the moral system that we have, or understand it. They’re truly wild.

How does Ignacio think about them? Because they almost killed him.

Yes. It depends on the mood you get him in, because if you ask him—one day I asked him, “If you could see the people who shot you in the head, what would you say to them?” He looked at me with that Ignacio look and said, “I wouldn’t say anything. I would kill as many of them as I could.”

He also had a time when he was in a really remote guard station working for the Ministry of Culture, and they showed up. He knew that they were going to kill him, so he climbed into the peak of the little structure there. Just like a dog in a car, with that greenhouse effect at the top at midday and the sun beating down, he was huddled over a mattress while they were walking on the deck, moving pots and pans and looking at our items and artifacts.

He knew that if he was found, they’d kill him. But if he stayed up there, he was literally frying. He said he was soaking the mattress. He could feel himself dying. For 2 hours, he had to stay there, and he was constantly making this decision: “If I come out, I die. If I stay, I probably die.” He’s like, “Probably die is better than definitely die.” So he was terrified.

As they’re screaming, “Mashco,” and everybody’s running, Ignacio comes and finds me. You can see in his eyes when somebody has that PTSD response. He’s breathing heavily, moving behind trees, keeping me close to him and going, “Look there. He has a bow. He has a bow.”

We’re looking up the beach, and there’s just this clan of naked men walking down the beach with these 7-foot bows. They’re hunched over, pointing at us. They’re going, “Look at that one. Look, there’s a gun there.” You can see them communicating with each other. The butterflies are swirling off the beach.

In these moments, you go, “Am I entering a moment that is—is this a one-way door? Is this an irreversible situation?” There’s an unfolding situation where they’re coming toward us. Are they going to attack? What do they want? Is there going to be a— I mean, I am soaked in chills right now talking about it, because I remember standing there going, “There’s no way this is real life.”

It’s burned into my memory, them walking down the beach with the bows. Of course, Stefan is up there firing off pictures, and Mohsin is down getting video. People in the community we’re with had— You hear shotgun shells loading ’em. They’re getting ready.

There’s this one guy, an anthropologist named Romel, who has been the only person who has communicated with them peacefully. He did it in 2013, when he stood on the beach and spoke to them. He knows enough of the local dialect that overlaps with theirs that he can speak to them.

As they’re coming down the beach, the butterflies are flying up, and we’re all waiting. With a shotgun, you’re talking about—how many meters? 30 or 40 meters? I don’t know the exact distance. For an arrow, you loose a 7-foot arrow that weighs nothing, you’re talking about 300 meters easily. They can shoot you from across the river.

So Ignacio was pulling me, and he was like, “Down. You go down. You stay behind this tree. Watch them from there. Watch out, he has an arrow.” He was watching everyone because you could see he was thinking, “This is how it happens.”

Did you think this might be the last day you have on this earth? Were you afraid?

I was, yeah. Of course I was afraid. I’m with my 2 best friends and people that I work very closely with. You’re in the middle of nowhere, there’s no help coming, and you’re with 26 people. There are 50 of the tribe that you can see, and you know they’re surrounding us. There are men on the other side of the river.

We had guns looking back toward the jungle because we knew we were being surrounded. Again, this is always the story of someone’s uncle, brother, or cousin telling a story that happened, and now it’s happening—not in the shadows, not in the middle of the night. It’s happening in broad daylight. They’re walking out onto the beach.

It’s like the first time they saw the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. You’re going, “There’s no way.”

And you are walking on the knife’s edge. It’s funny you say this about taking pictures, because there are 2 ways to think of this situation: “This is fascinating,” or “This is extremely dangerous.” It’s both. It’s a knife’s edge.

You could approach it one of 2 ways: “If I die, I die. I’m going to take some good pictures.”

But that was also our mission. As the directors of Junglekeepers, we work with this community to ensure their lifestyle can continue, and they’re saying, “Hey, that’s great, but as an Indigenous community, we’re dealing with people that raid our stuff, try to steal our women, and kill our hunters. Now they’re coming out. We want you to see it.”

Documenting it is part of our job. We have to show what happened that day. Those guys were shooting.

Mohsin’s wife and I always joked, “If the tribe ever comes out, you stand in front of him. You take the arrow. He has kids.” That day, we were strategically positioning ourselves, being like, “You, down. You cannot get killed.”

In those moments, you start to go, “Okay, where will I be safe from arrows? Where can I run to the river if they come over?” You start planning: “Okay, if I jump into the river…” I was going, “Okay, I’ve got my bag. I have a can of tuna. I have a flashlight.”

I was like, “If I jump into the river and float down and I live, I’m still days upriver.” You start going through all these things.

And of course, the Mashco Piro people are thinking exactly the same thing, probably.

Well, the interesting thing is that they’re initiating the contact, right? They’re the ones coming out of the jungle and confronting us.

And fundamentally, that contact is—at least they’re giving peace a chance. They’re trying the peaceful contact first, correct? Or was there a violent element? What did you sense in the caution of them emerging onto the beach?

Fear. As they came out, you could see fear on them, because of the way they were hunched over and the way they had their bows ready. They were worried.

Romel was standing there, closer than any of us, at the edge on one side of the river. It was like shirts versus skins. It was 2 tribes looking at each other with 1,000 years of civilization between them. Romel was going, “Put down your bows. Put down your bows, and we can talk.”

He was saying, “Nomole, Nomole.” He kept saying, “Brothers, brothers, please put down your bows.”

So “Nomole” means “brother” in a language that they might be able to understand?

“Nomole” means “brother” in a language that they do understand, and it seems like they refer to themselves as the Nomoles—the brothers.

So potentially, that’s what they call themselves as a tribe: Nomoles?

Exactly. The anthropologists that we’ve been speaking to post-event have been explaining to us that Piro is the group that they’re from, these various nomadic tribes. “Mashco” basically means “wild Piros.” One thing we know they call themselves is Nomoles.

So we might converge toward the name of this tribe being Nomoles versus Mashco Piro?

The Nomoles, yeah. It seems like the most current self-appointed identity is the brothers, Nomole.

Anyway, there are these shredded warriors on the beach. They’re gigantic.

With 7-foot arrows, and we’re all standing there. The first thing, again, you just think of the peace pipe in the old stories. The first thing is, “Let’s make them an offering of peace.”

So they got a canoe with no motor, and we piled it with plantains—16 feet of endless green bananas. The balls on this guy, the anthropologist—he gets into the river, takes the canoe, and it’s the dry season, so the river’s only about 3 or 4 feet deep at the channel.

He walks this thing out, this 1 man walking in the face of all these warriors. He takes the boat and pushes it toward them. They rush out, and they start grabbing the bananas. They’re not going, “Okay, we will unload these bananas and use them later.” They’re like, “They’re my bananas.” They’re fighting, yelling, and all grabbing them. Then they push the boat back, and he talks to them a little bit.

It’s not a perfect translation, so he’s saying, “Where have you come from? What do you want? Who’s your leader?” He’s trying to establish these things, and they all talk at the same time, like a flock of birds. It wasn’t like 1 man speaks. There were no women. The women were nowhere to be seen.

At one point, as we were preparing—I think it was while we were preparing the second canoe of bananas—there was a moment of absolute panic. It happened when there was a noise behind us, and you just hear shotguns swing behind us. Mohsin goes down. I go running away from the river because I want to see if there’s an attack coming.

I'm standing there. This guy and I were sharing a tree as cover, and he's got a shotgun and he's looking back into the forest. What was happening was that the women of the tribe had come silently, and they were just pulling yuca out of the ground and taking the banana plants and ruining the farm completely. They were raiding the farm behind us while the men were talking up here. So again, were they peacefully contacting us, or were they like, "Hey, go make a diversion and take the food out the back?"

So, you really were surrounded.

We were completely surrounded.

So they could have murdered all of you, probably.

Easily. We were outnumbered 5 to 1 at the least.

Yeah. Maybe they wanted peace, but part of the reason is they didn't know how deep this goes. They didn't know if you had backup.

They didn't know if we had backup. They also had questions. Some of their questions were incredible: "How do we tell the difference? How do we know who the good guys and the bad guys are?" Because to them, all you outsiders are the same. So why? Who were the ones cutting down the trees?

And those are the ones they know are the bad guys.

Well, the big trees seemed to have incredible significance to them. They're significant to us in a different way, but to them, it's offensive on an almost religious level to cut down a big tree, as if you're killing their gods.

So there's a spirituality to the trees for them.

It seems like that.

And so whoever's cutting them down is a source of destruction on a spiritual, existential level.

Spiritual, existential level. They ask, "Why would you destroy our home?"

In a deep sense, the uncontacted tribes represent the deep jungle. So if they're threatened, that means the jungle, the deep jungle, is threatened.

They are the human voice of the jungle, and they're asking questions and they're also demanding. They're clapping at us, waving, and saying, "Send more bananas." So they loaded up another boat and pushed it out, and this time they gave them some rope.

They all had rope tied around their waists, with their penises tied up. They love rope, and some of them were wearing rope that they had made, which was brown or reddish. Then some of them were wearing rope that they had clearly pillaged from logging camps or the communities, because it was modern nylon paracord. They had this wound around their waists like a thick belt. They took the second boat, and they had some rope and some plantains on there.

So some of these guys might have been the ones that murdered the loggers.

Could be.

From a couple of months before that.

Absolutely, could be. But what Romel said as he was talking to them—he turned to us and said, "The other groups call me the Grandfather." He said, "This group, I don't know any of these." He said, "This is first contact." He said, "This is the first time this group is talking to us."

You saw people from maybe 12 years old to what looked like 40-something, like a banged-up 40. There were no really old people and no women.

So this is a particular clan of the uncontacted—

It's a particular clan.

—a tribe who they've never contacted. Is there, just from your memory, anything interesting about the way they were trying to communicate? Like you said, clapping. From an anthropology perspective, from a human perspective, it's fascinating. How do you talk to people from an uncontacted tribe like this? Clapping, yelling. It's interesting to know that there's not a hierarchy where there's a leader who represents them. Or is that something we know for sure?

Before even coming to talk to you about this, we passed it through anthropologists and ethicists, and we said, "Look, is it even okay? Can we talk about this?" Because if you talk about this and tell people there are these uncontacted tribes, people have misconceptions. They go, "They're the last free people on Earth. We need to go join them. We want to see them."

There's all this bad stuff that happens, and all these people want to be left alone. So the last thing we want to do is kill the thing we're trying to protect by telling the world. But at the same time, they're speaking out. They're saying, "Stop cutting our trees. Leave us alone."

If we're not successful in the greater Junglekeepers mission of protecting this river, they cease to exist. Advocating for these people requires us to have this conversation. It requires us to have this footage and to show the world, and then leave them alone. In order for any of this to make sense, I have to show you this footage.

And this has not been shown ever before?

This is a world first. Up until now, the only thing you've ever seen are these blurry images of them from someone's cellphone, from 100 meters away, of the uncontacted tribes.

We're sitting there with 800-millimeter lenses, with a 2X teleconverter and R5s. This is us looking through the vines, anticipating the tribe coming. I'll put a little bit of volume on so you can hear it. Then you can see—this is the moment. This is us running when they're like, "They're out. They're coming down the beach."

Oh, wow. Oh, wow.

You see how many thousands of butterflies? But look at the way they move. Look at the way they point. Look at him with his bow.

Wow.

There it is.

They're trying to figure out what they're looking at.

They didn't know the cameras were there. This was the guys looking out the back. He's going, "There's something back here." He could hear the women in the farm. I'm looking in every direction because I'm going, "Which way is the arrow coming from?"

But see, he has his shotgun. This is just a farm shotgun. Even if he shot it, you have to use a stick to bang out the shell. As they come closer, he's laying down his bow and arrow. They understand.

So these are warriors, and the way they were moving at first, it really looked like they were ready for violence. Now they're all standing in a relaxed way. And they're smiling? Are they smiling?

Smiles come at some point. I would say that one of these guys seemed like he was in a leadership position. He did most of the talking.

What's with the different hand gestures? This, the holding your hand up to the face—all of this means something.

All of this means something. Some had red smeared on their faces. Some had yellow.

Did you have a sense of hierarchy at all, like who the boss was?

Again, there were just these 2 dominant guys. This guy and one other guy who looked almost like him, like his brother. There was a lot of gesturing.

Wow. This is incredible, Paul.

Yeah. You see the rope?

Yeah, I can kind of tell who the bosses are.

Right? But see, even that, as he's pointing—what are you pointing at?

You guys are nuts. You guys are nuts.

You see, though, they're rushing in. There's this desperation. They're hungry. They also—

Is that in the water, or is that Ramo in the water in that case?

In this particular video, it's a guy named Liner. But see these guys? They're fighting over it. It's not that we're all going to share it later. It's, "I get mine, you get yours." And so what does that mean?

Yeah. But here, they're in peaceful mode, for sure.

After we'd given them several boatloads of bananas, things did calm down. Ramo said to them, "Look, we've given you what we can give you. We gave you sugarcane. We gave you boatloads of plantains."

Then there came a time when things were a little more relaxed. They were walking around. We had a great moment where we'd given them the plantains and the bananas, and he'd said, "Look, that's it. We've given you what you asked for. You asked for bananas. We don't cut the trees here. All of us here are not tree-cutters. We're Indigenous people."

He couldn't explain who the hell we were, but they were like, "We don't cut the trees. We're not the loggers." And they're like, "Okay."

At some point, Ignacio went out and started doing this, and they'd do this. He'd dance a little bit, and they'd dance a little bit. Then there was this human moment of just joking.

So even Ignacio warmed up.

Even Ignacio warmed up. Once he realized no one was going to die that day, things did calm down. It was a false sense of security. Here, I'll show you. There's a couple more things that are relevant here, though. This is just them interacting with the boat.

This is truly incredible, man.

But then they don't have boats. They don't have stone tools. Imagine if you showed them ice.

This is historic.

I mean, it's the— You hear of Percy Fawcett encountering the tribes. We've heard of anecdotal accounts. This is the first time that the tribes have been filmed, that we can hear their voices, and that there's a documented interaction happening. Look how comfortable he's getting. He's so close.

They asked him for his shirt. He gave them his shirt. They asked him for his pants. He gave them his pants. He was in his underwear. You see this? The shirt that's over his shoulder? Ignacio took off his Junglekeepers shirt and threw it to the anthropologist, and then the anthropologist walked off and threw it to them. So over the shoulder of that uncontacted, naked warrior is a Junglekeepers shirt with the logo showing.

That's great.

So that's their second shirt.

You just upgraded that guy's status in the tribe. He's going to be the new boss with that shirt.

He's got a dope polo, and he didn't even have to order it. But yeah, this is in the aftermath, when things were calm. My moment with this that really stuck with me was when Ramo said to me, "You know, they're asking about you." And I said, "What are they asking?" He goes, "Yeah, they're asking about you."

Again, I'm not tall, but compared to the people in the village, I was a little bit taller and had big shoulders.

And he said, “They said you look like a warrior. Could you come forward? Show them that you don’t mean any harm. Show them your palms.” And so he pulled me up onto the beach, right before they left. I hold up my hands. Listen. And they sang back. They were singing. They raised their hands, and I raised my hands.

Then we were left watching them walk off the beach into the jungle with everything that we’d given them, and they were gone. We went downriver the next day, and the community said to us, “Okay, now you understand this is real. This is terrifying. You felt that fear. You have a duty, if you’re going to protect this river, to protect us from them and to help us figure out what future they want. If they want to come to us, if they want to learn farming, if they—whatever it is, that’s fine.” But they were like, “We need protection from you guys.”

In this video at the beginning, I’m narrating to the camera and walking around right as they’re coming up the beach. But you see this guy right there in the blue shirt? That’s George. He was very friendly and very confident about this. He said, “Don’t be scared. They’re not going to hurt us.”

The next day, we went back to town—a long journey back to town. We went to sleep, woke up in the morning, and found out that earlier that morning, our friends in the community had said, “Okay, the tribe is gone. We gave them sugarcane and bananas and said, ‘Please come back. You’re welcome here anytime.’”

George was driving a boat with people on board, and as they were going upriver, 200 of the tribe ran out, surrounded the boat, and started firing arrows. Everybody else hit the deck, got under the benches, and hid behind bags of rice. Jorge was driving as fast as he could, leaning back while driving. One arrow came in just above his scapula and came out by his belly button. He had that 7-foot arrow tip through him.

They pulled him out, and I saw the boat afterward. There were horrific amounts of blood all over the boat. He had to be medevaced out, and somehow he lived. We were able to help get him a helicopter and get him evacuated.

Again, you just go, “What?” These people came out of the jungle and asked for bananas. We gave them bananas and, in every way possible, said, “We mean peace. We want friendship with you.” Then the next day, they attacked.

What do you think happened? Why do you think their mind turned? Or maybe this has to do with the role of violence in their society. Maybe it’s so integrated into how they interact with the world that they don’t even see that as a fundamental shift in the interaction.

I don’t know. I don’t know what to make of it. The only thing I can think is that, the way they hid the women from us, you don’t know—for them, maybe we’re not allowed to see their women.

The one thing that we got was that, as George’s boat and this other boat were going upriver—which is how they live; it’s not like they were doing anything wrong—these people live in a community days into the Amazon, and they were going fishing. They came around a bend, and I think they spooked the tribe. The tribe might have just acted defensively and said, “We don’t know who this is.” The motors could have set them off. We don’t know. But they shot him.

The other thing is the necklace. I’ve asked anthropologists about this, and their answer was, “You know more than we do.” Two of them had the exact same item around their necks. It seems to be a Brazil nut and some casing around the side, and it looked like animal teeth positioned in there. What are you carrying? Are you carrying medicine? Are you carrying some sort of totem?

Both of them had them, and it’s not a comfortable thing to wear around your neck—grapefruit-sized or bigger.

Do you have a sense if that’s a container, or is it just a totem?

It seems like a container. If they didn’t let it get wet, they cared for it. The guy in this picture has this piece of tree fiber on him, and he’s gotten his hands on Brazil nut sacks—plastic sacks from one of the farms across the river. They just take. They take.

One of them got a machete, and he was walking. As they were leaving, during that period when they got friendly, he had the machete, playing with it and swinging it at butterflies. One of my friends, this guy Bacho, said, “Oye, deja mi machete.” He was like, “Drop the machete.” The guy just looked at him and was like, “Yeah, come and get it.” It was like, “Yeah, you cross the river and see what happens.”

Do you think he figured out, or they later figured out, how to use a machete?

Oh, they know the machete.

They understand the machete?

Yeah, they do raids for machetes.

They understand the power of sharpened metal.

It’s an Excalibur sword to them. That one has stuck with me because I wonder: What were they carrying in there?

What are some of the questions? If you could know everything you’d want to know about them, maybe in the space of communication and language, that’s really interesting. You mentioned that there are all kinds of calls, animal calls. They obviously know how to fake animal calls.

Yeah, they can use animal calls with enough complexity that they can do basic commands. They can speak in capuchin; they use tinamou calls.

Some of our rangers were upriver a few months ago. This is recently. They were upriver and found a Nomole trail, a Mashco Piro trail. It was Ignacio, of course. He made a secret whistle out into the jungle, and he listened. They whistled back. He and everybody on the team just ran back to the boat and got out of there.

At least they answered. They didn’t just shoot. He whistled, they whistled, and they said, “Out,” and he got out.

But we don’t know: Where are the old people? Do they not survive? What are the marriage rituals? How is reproduction handled? There are one or two children in the Amazon that I know of who have washed downriver on a log, been rescued by communities, and raised. They either learn the native dialect or Spanish, and then, at some point, somebody will go and ask, “What was it like when you lived with them?”

The answer is always the same: “I forget.” They don’t talk about it.

Maybe we know that they value secrecy. When you’re afraid of the outside world, part of that is confidentiality. They all sign NDAs.

Yeah, there are some really good NDAs.

It’s an understood NDA. There are no lawyers. There’s only one way to execute the law.

Yeah. It’s either a really strong NDA, or it’s savage living out there in the jungle, where you’re eating monkeys and turtles and you’re hungry for days on end. Your wife might get stolen by another tribe. Your baby might get stolen. Imagine the botflies and the things that they must put up with.

What we experienced in three days of living with modern camping gear, headlamps, and a sense of direction—they’re doing none of that. Put us out there naked, and it’s a very different story.

Yeah, the brutality of nature. Werner Herzog comes to mind. They have to live in that. But then there’s something about the jungle that serves as a catalyst for spirituality, so they must also have a religious component, a spiritual component that probably unifies them. There must be an ideology they operate under.

Oh, there must be. There are many things they must have. They must have a belief system. They probably have amazing origin stories. It would be amazing to know what things they have accurately and inaccurately guessed about us, about the outside world.

They’ve never heard of the country they live in, or of World War II, or any of it. Seeing them come across the beach was surreal because it was like this aperture into history.

By the way, you do have a certain look, so you realize that, as I’m speaking to you, your face is carved in some wood somewhere. There are a few of them gathering around, still singing about the great gringo with the—

The full beard and the big nose. They probably drew this like, “He’s got hair all over his face and a huge nose,” and they tell their children.

Yeah. And it could be anything. To the children, they could say, “This is the monster you should be afraid of,” or this could be the most beautiful encapsulation of the outside world. It could be everything in between. You don’t get to control the myths.

You don’t get to control the myths. God only knows.

That’s so interesting.

So now, in that 130,000 acres that we have, we know—and this is what we have to come out with—we are now protecting these people. The only way to do that is to make sure that they’re not contacted, let alone shot at with machine guns by the narcos, or that crazy hippie gringos don’t go down there thinking they’re going to join the coolest commune on Earth.

How much of the land that they move about is within the 130,000 acres of rainforest you’ve been able to save? How much of it is not? How much of it is in the extra 200,000 acres that you’re trying to save?

Most of the rest of that 200,000 acres that we’re still trying to protect is territory that is theirs. People always ask me this: “How could you buy the Amazon? That doesn’t make sense.”

I have bad news for you. Somebody already owns it, and we have to buy it from them so that they don’t log it. These landowners are going to sell their forest to the logging companies because owning 10,000 acres of the Amazon doesn’t help you if you’re a third-generation jungle man. Now it’s just something that’s up there, and you live in the city, so they’re going to contract either the narcos, the loggers, or the miners to go out there and use it, and they’ll get a little money.

And when those people see these people, they will kill them. That's for sure. In the end, shotguns and machine guns will win, not to mention the germs.

So all the money you're trying to raise and all the land that you're trying to save, it's all toward that: protecting the deep jungle. When you buy up the jungle, you just want to let it be, let the natural ecosystem come back to life in the cases when it was logged, or just flourish if it hasn't?

Again, we're talking about the last great jungle. I always called it the last endless forest because this place is so incredibly remote. The other question I always get is, "Well, why is this river so, so important?" For my whole career—20 years in the Amazon—it's been about the fact that it's massively intact forest. There are places like the ancient forest, where the trees have never been cut and have been growing since the dawn of time.

Thousands of species can be on a single shihuahuaco tree, and it's Avatar on Earth. You can see the sweat come off your skin and rain down, then drink it out of the river, and you're part of the chemical-physical reality there. It's one of the last places that's untouched.

This changed everything because we realized that along with the butterflies and the monkeys and the jaguars and the trees and the ecosystem, there's also a human culture that will, in the next few years, cease to exist, that will be exterminated if we don't protect them. When you look back at what happened to Indigenous cultures all over the world over the past few centuries—how they've been wiped out—we collectively now, because we know this, have a chance to undo all the injustices of the past by at least doing one thing right, by saying, "These people want one thing: to just be left alone."

Imagine if we just protected the river. Then it's not that they're this thing that's vanishing from reality, but they get to continue living that way. If they want to come out and contact us, great, and if they want to continue living like this for 10,000 years, they can. That's what we're working with now.

It's become so much more important than just trying to protect the environment. It's like, no, we're trying to protect things like Yellowstone and Yosemite and the sequoias that occur nowhere else on Earth. You protect the things that are unique and special, the crown jewels, and in both a biological way and an anthropocentric way, this has now become a river with global historic significance because this story is going to play out in the next 18 months.

You're trying to save more and more rainforest. The mission is clear because there's this deep jungle that's full of incredible life. Now we know that with uncontacted tribes, there are a lot of interests that don't care about the jungle they're pushing into. They want to cut it down and destroy it. The mission is pretty clear: you just want this whole territory to be preserved.

Yeah, and that's what makes it so beautiful: this is one of those crown jewels. This is one of those special places on Earth where it's a time capsule for nature, for human culture, for biodiversity, for climate services, for everything. I think people get overwhelmed when you say, "We have to save the environment. We have to save the ocean." This is one watershed. It's 300,000 acres, and we're already at 130,000. We've shown we can do it.

The loggers are happy to turn into rangers. People all over the world have become Junglekeepers supporters. We have several thousand people who every month give us between $5 and $1,000, and that keeps the rangers going and employs the local people. So it's not just drawing a line and making a park and saying, "Everybody stay out." It's like, no, you have the Nomole, you have the Indigenous people, and you have a future for the Indigenous people where their kids don't have to worry about eating monkeys. They can be park rangers.

I get blowback when I say, "People can even come see it through the treehouse." People go, "Oh, are you going to bring tourists into the wildest place on Earth?" It's like, look at that jungle. In those 300,000 acres, if you're talking about a football field, we're talking about 2 blades of grass that we access so people can see it, which makes a huge difference. The fact that we can share it with people is incredibly important.

Since the first time I came here and spoke to you, the number of people who listen to you and the extent to which you've made it possible for us to protect this place—the number of spider monkeys, jaguars, and giant anteaters, and those ancient millennium trees that you've made it possible to protect—is monstrous.

Thank you, brother.

No, thank you.

It's been an honor of a lifetime to be able to watch you. I tell this to people, there's certain people I'm glad exist in this world, because you've educated me and millions of people about the beauty of the jungle, and how important the fight to save the jungle is. So if you're listening to this, you absolutely must go. Please donate, post about it, and share it with friends: Junglekeepers.org. You're also doing a gala in New York at the end of January. So if you can, please go and donate to help save the jungle.

Yes, please do. And because our first conversation led to the first surge where people realized what Junglekeepers was, and because we got this surge of support, we were able to expand our work and protect more acres. A lot of our major donors and a lot of our small-scale donors came in because of that. These are people who went, "Wait, if Lex thinks it's a good idea, then we'll do it." I think, based on your trust, they came in.

I guess also I should say it's not enough to speak and communicate the importance of saving the rainforest. You actually have to have incredible people there making it happen. We've talked, and we'll talk more, about the dangers and complexities involved in how to navigate everything. One of the reasons I'm really excited about what you're doing is that I just got to meet the team, and it brings a smile to my face. Several of the people I know are extremely competent.

Stefan, somebody we've talked about—yes, he likes to take pictures of stuff, but primarily, the thing he does incredibly well is run everything and organize everything to make sure that stuff happens and happens quickly and efficiently. Those are all the kinds of things that are required to make stuff like this happen in the complex, sometimes lawless environment in which the jungle operates. The team is incredible, which is why, when you connect the money, the question is, how does the money lead to the solution of the problem? It's the team, and the team makes it happen.

I didn't know that people like Stefan existed.

Yeah, me neither. When I met him, he was a beautiful, wonderful human being.

I can use a machete to catch a fish. But his systems knowledge and ability are incredible. His bandwidth is the size of a country. It has its own area code.

Just as JJ opened the door of the Amazon and gave us that local Indigenous perspective, I told some stories about it, but Stefan came in and went, "Okay, you guys have good ideas, but you're both jungle guys. You're not helping each other." Running those systems, making the website, making it possible to connect the people who care with the Indigenous ranger program, and making sure the rangers have shirts and cans of tuna and that there's a person running the ranger team—these are things I couldn't dream of organizing. I can't even organize my life. I can't even make my bed. I can't even get that far.

Caveman want fish. Watching you hunt for fish with a machete is one of the most awesome things I've seen. You were literally able to catch a fish with a machete. That's what you're good at. And Stefan is good at everything else.

Everything else. You remember the meme of the most interesting man in the world? They say, "He once had an awkward moment just to see how it felt." It's like Stefan's to-do list doesn't exist because it's already done. It's just incredible.

Quick pause. Bathroom break.

Oh, 100%. Yes, sir.

And we're back. One thing I forgot to ask you is about the diet of the uncontacted tribes. You mentioned potentially monkeys and turtles, maybe eggs. What do we know about what they eat? What's the source of protein? Do they eat monkeys?

Their primary sources of food would be monkeys, turtles, turtle eggs, and small game like paca, the large rodent that's the size of a beagle. Capybaras—stuff they can shoot. They don't really fish.

We know these things because our Indigenous trackers and rangers find their camps. They'll find some of those little thatch structures they make on the beaches, and we see the bones. There'll be tapir bones, and there'll be turtle shells, which seem like their closest thing to a bowl.

The day that we interacted with them, they did find a bowl. We saw them walking away with it in one of the farms, and then days later we found it destroyed. They didn't seem like they saw much utility in the bowl.

A temporary container.

It's temporary. They make a fire. They must be amazing at making fire. I don't know how they do it out there.

It's very difficult because everything is wet.

I don't know how they do it. I'm a really good firestarter.

It's tough in the jungle.

It's almost impossible most of the year because everything is wet to its core.

So you think they cook the meat?

From a parasite standpoint, they have to be cooking their meat—everything. We know that they're cooking their meat. We see it. There aren't a lot of excess berries. Things like berries, nuts, and fruits—the monkeys, birds, and bats are getting to those first.

That's what fruit does, right? A tomato is green until its seeds are mature, then it turns red to advertise, "Eat me," so that you eat it and your gut transports that somewhere else.

It gets free transportation. In the jungle, that happens so quickly that we're never getting produce.

In the book, you have a picture of a native girl on the Los Piedras having monkey for lunch.

Yes.

It looks really strange when you have a monkey. It looks a little bit like cannibalism because it looks like a small human. I don't know what it is about monkeys. There's a human element to them—in their eyes, in their form factor, but even in the warmth they bring to the interaction.

Yeah, I was babysitting her. She was 6 at the time, Dira, and her parents went out, so we were left at camp. They said, “Keep an eye on her. Make sure nothing eats her.”

She was like, “Hey, I want lunch.” I said, “Great, what is there?” She pulls out this monkey head. She was like, “It's ready,” and she starts pulling at the ear. She's like, “Can you help me?” So I pulled off the ear with my teeth, and then I gave it to her.

We just shared this monkey head back and forth. We were sitting there, and I took a few pictures of her as she was eating. I have this video where I go, “What's your favorite food?” She said, “Monkey.” I said, “Not cake?” And she was like, “Monkey.”

She was pulling its lips off, and, like you said, you see the teeth and the eyes. It's sort of grilled in static agony. It looks like a tortured human, and she was just enjoying it.

Let me look it up on Perplexity. How many people in the world eat monkey? Does it taste good?

If it were prepared right, it would taste good, but they just throw it over the fire. Even if you took a perfectly good chicken and did that, it wouldn't taste great.

There's no reliable global count of how many people eat monkey meat, but available data suggests many millions regularly or occasionally consume primate bushmeat, especially in parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

I mean, she looks like that is her favorite meal: monkey.

Yeah, we had a great time.

Who are we to judge?

Who are we to judge? I mean, have a tuna sandwich or a monkey face, whatever.

She's loving it. That's awesome. That's a good picture there.

And she's adorable.

Yeah. Now that some time has passed, when you look back at that encounter, which I really do think is historic, with the uncontacted tribe, what do you think about? What lingers with you?

Honestly, I'm still processing it. I'll still find myself just staring off, remembering it or looking at the footage. But it felt like the voice of the jungle was speaking.

These people—there's that separation between humans and nature where we go, “We have to protect nature,” you know? It's like explaining what water is to a fish. We're part of it. We depend on it. And these are people that depend on it 100%.

As we sit here surrounded by technology, concrete, and civilization, they're still out there right now. The fact that we've been trying to protect their home without even really knowing that they were in it, because they're so elusive, gives you perspective on where we came from and how far we've come.

I look at simple things. You board an airplane or you take a picture and you go, “This is a miracle.” I think having that perspective from interacting with them makes you ask, “How much work does it take to make this?”

If you and I were standing in the jungle and somebody said, “You have to make this,” how many years would pass before we came up with it? How many rubber trees, and where would we get the metal, and what would we use as dye? How do we make the spring mechanism and figure out how to make it rotate? I don't know.

They're working with the bare essentials, and so it's an interesting reference point to start at in terms of how incredibly privileged we are. The other thing is that we have written text—so many different types of text. We have code, language, music, and we can communicate in all these different ways.

They have spoken word. They have oral tradition, and that's it. They're operating the way our ancestors did, through the power of what operated and is persisting in modern times. I think, for me, I come back to the world and it moves very fast when I see it, because I'm still stuck on whether or not you and I can drink out of that puddle. I'm thinking about that.

The big questions of life.

Yeah, I mean, you're right. From the perspective of the uncontacted tribe, going from the technological world to the jungle, you realize the majesty and the magic of the biological system that is the jungle, that is nature. But from their perspective, there is also a majesty and magic to the technological world: the human-created technological world of the pen, the computer, and the light bulb. That, too, is magical.

Absolutely.

So sometimes we don't give enough credit to both: the magic of the technological world, all the incredible things humans have been able to build, and the magic of the natural world.

I mean, what we've been able to achieve—I think you and I, and people that spend large amounts of time in the wilderness, especially somewhere as remote and fundamental as the Western Amazon, have a different perspective on it.

When you're born in it, you don't necessarily have the framework to appreciate how far we've come. You go, “Yeah, I got on the train today. I checked my phone. I FaceTimed my mom,” and you're like, “This is all normal.”

It's like we found a way to take things out of the ground and mix them together into magic devices that can do anything. It's mind-blowing.

There's a deep optimism to that. You write in the book, which I really like—I think somewhere in the beginning:

“Given all the death and destruction I've witnessed, it would be easy to slip into the popular anti-human narrative that we are a plague on the planet and there's nothing that can be done, but my career in conservation has given me a glimpse into an alternate narrative. I've met people who are proving more and more that something can be done. I'm talking about real heroes, people who have dedicated their lives to redeeming the evil that is capable of being waged by the human soul, people who are guarding the flame amidst the storm, proving every day what so many have forgotten. There is still hope.”

That speaks against cynicism and apathy, and the view that humans are a destructive force in the world. It speaks to the fact that humans, with all the technological elements that we have created, can actually do a lot of good.

I wrote in my notes here a quote from the great Jane Goodall: “The greatest danger to our future is apathy.” Caring about the world, having optimism for the world, and having hope for the world is the way to help have an impact and help save it.

On that, I have to ask you about Jane. She passed away on October 1st. Some humans in this human civilization of ours can open our eyes to the beauty of the world, and she is one of the best of them. She's had an impact on your life. Maybe you can speak to the impact that she's had.

When I grew up, my parents—being dyslexic, I couldn't read for a very long time. My parents read to us every night, which was amazing considering how hard they were working. They'd find the time to give us an hour of reading every night, whether it was The Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes, or Jane Goodall.

I grew up with Jane being this figurehead of conservation and adventure, and sort of a living historical figure, this legendary person. Then, one time, right around the time that I'd been going to the jungle for a few years, I got to go see Jane speak. I think it was at NYU.

Sitting in the crowd, I watched her, completely amazed. At the time, my cousins had been telling me that I should write down my stories—the stories of taking care of an anteater and stories of catching anacondas. They were like, “Write. These are such good stories.”

So I'd been writing them down, and I just remember after the talk—she did at least an hour on stage—hundreds of people lined up, and she sat there. Each of those people wanted a moment with this legend.

She had to take a picture, shake their hand, and they would say, “You mean so much to me.” She'd say, “Thank you,” and then they would move on and say, “We'll send you the picture.” “Okay, great.”

Then I got my moment. We waited in line, and I gave her this manila envelope with 2 chapters in it. One chapter was “Lulu the Giant Anteater” for Mother of God, and the other chapter was me, JJ, and Pico out on the river catching anacondas, just talking about how amazing the jungle was.

I said, “I'd love it if you could endorse my book that doesn't exist yet.” I felt like such a loser doing that. I felt so stupid, because I feel like everyone was probably asking something of her, and it's incredibly draining to talk to that many people, even if it is for a good reason.

Forty-eight hours later, she got back to me and said, “You know, this is incredible. I would love to write a recommendation for your book as soon as you find a publisher.”

What happened with that is that Jane—the way I think of it is, she waved her very powerful magical wand in my direction. She had the incredible compassion and presence to actually, after talking to that many people and being on the road 300 days a year and being Jane Goodall, this living-legend scientist, do something so mundane as look at some kid's writing.

Of course, when I went to publishers, they said, “Jane who? Who said that they would endorse your book?” Every publisher in New York had already said no.

Then HarperCollins took me on and said, “Well, if Jane Goodall thinks it's a good idea, then we think it's a good idea.” It became Mother of God, and then because of that, Junglekeepers, Dax, and everything else stemmed from that.

So, had Jane not been the legend that she is, truly, in every moment, my whole career would never have happened. That also means those thousands of heartbeats and thousands of acres in the Amazon wouldn’t be protected, because we never would have started Junglekeepers.

And she did that not because you’re special; she did that for everybody. Now just imagine the scale, the impact she’s had because of that. And guess what? You have a bit of that responsibility now as well. There are young people who walk up to you in that way, and you have the responsibility of seeing them, of giving them a chance, of seeing the potential in every single human being who walks up to you.

I would say that with Jane, we could do 4 hours just on Jane: what she did for humanity, for science, for women, for wildlife, the number of other people she inspired and gave careers to, and everything she did for me. But to me, that presence of mind, when you reach that level, to not be worried about your own travel and your own schedule, to not be busy with getting some rest, and to actually look at it—that has informed how I operate.

Indeed, like you say, at this point, as strange as it is, people will stop me on the street and say, “Hey, I watch your videos every night with my kids.” Or someone will say, “How do I get your job? I’ve been watching you for years, and I’d love to help conservation.” So it’s made it so that I follow her example. You stop what you’re doing and you pay attention, because you don’t know. That might be the next kid who’s out there saving a river, or the next person who makes an innovation that makes it possible to clean rivers, or whatever it is, whatever their dream is.

Jane was in the hope business. She always said that not losing hope was key to staying in the fight, and that we live at a time when apathy is a poison peddled by the darkness. They’re trying to make you feel disoriented, apathetic, and scared. Fighting back against that, and having conviction, passion, fire, and hope, are the only ways that we’re going to fight it. She understood that and spent her whole life spreading it, guarding the flame against the storm, and tipping her candle to others to light them. That was her whole thing.

What advice would you give to young people on how to do that? Those young people sitting there—and your life story is just incredible in that way. You’ve taken a leap into adventure, into the unknown. What would you recommend they do?

I think the thing that I try to communicate to them—and again, my inbox is filled with people from Finland, Spain, Georgia, saying, “How do I get your job? How do I get out there and do it?” And it really is just that: you throw yourself headfirst into adventure. You just do it.

I remember hearing people say, “If I can do it, you can do it.” I remember how hollow that sounds, because I’m like, “Yeah, you’re on a talk show, or you just wrote a book.” These are titans of their industries and innovators saying, “If I can do it, anybody can do it.” But now that we’re protecting all this rainforest, that I’ve lived with the animals and met the tribes, and it’s becoming this global movement, I can say that I didn’t have a PhD.

There’s a quote that someone less qualified than you is living your dream life and has your dream job right now, and I am the poster child for that. I went there when I failed out of high school, started taking unmatriculated college classes, and went to the jungle with my friend JJ, just doing it for the sheer love of it for years—almost a decade before anything surfaced.

The other thing is, there isn’t even a path. There was no path ahead of us. There was no, “Okay, you go to school, you get trained in this, and you’re going to become this.” I went there, and it was like, “You’re never going to be a conservation biologist because you don’t have the grades. You don’t have a PhD. You don’t have family money. You’re not going to be able to protect rainforests.”

So I said, “All right, well then, selfishly, I just want to see it.” Then I ended up getting trained by the Indigenous people. What happens so many times—you could use a restaurant example as the best one—is that you might start washing dishes, but at least you’re in the restaurant. Then, at some point, the manager’s going to need you to help with restocking and so on. After a few years, you’re going to be helping the new guy, and after a few years, you might end up being the manager. At some point, you might end up starting your own restaurant.

That’s the only way to do that. You can’t just search for it on a computer. You have to go sweat and bleed and do it.

And that said, especially if you fall in love with the journey, the path you take is full of difficult periods. I think you said somewhere that this just seems to be the nature of it: that there’s going to be pain and suffering along the way.

You have a really nice post that I recommend people watch about just this. When people ask for advice, you wrote:

“How honest can I be? What do I tell these kids who message me asking how they can do what I do? It’s not David versus Goliath. There’s no sword or sling that can hold back a dragon this big. You’re going against the current of global economic entropy and human apathy. Swimming against the current is tiring, a great way to drown. Every day we don’t win, we lose, and when we do, worlds burn. The more you know, the more it bleeds. The heartbeats all stop when the flames come through. Constellations of species turn to ghosts, and we’re the only ones saving them. Cupped our hands around a candle in the howling darkness.”

People want to be inspired. “Keep that social media going. Keep it up. You’re doing great.” They want to know we’re winning, and we’ve done a lot of winning, but not right now. We’re getting slaughtered. We’re at that part of the story. We’re almost at the endgame.

We can think positively, as positively as we want. Thoughts and prayers won’t stop a chainsaw, and the motor that’s carrying us against the current toward the miraculous goal only works when there’s gasoline in it. As soon as that stops, we drown. We drown.

We can take the warm light from all of those who help and not let it bother us that there are people who could buy a planet claiming to care. At some point, you realize what’s really happening.

“As a kid, you’d rather be Aragorn. You don’t want to actually carry the ring, not when you learn what it’s going to cost, even if you make it. How can you explain to Sam why you can’t get on the boats? Whatever it takes, whatever it takes. It’s that time of year again. Here come the flames. Whatever it takes, it’s coming.”

People should watch the video that goes along with this. But that speaks to the pain, the difficulty, the challenge, and the suffering involved when you’re faced with the possibility of destruction. That’s the other side of the sword of caring for something deeply.

Yeah, we’ve watched a lot of forest burn. We’ve pulled a lot of animals out of the flames.

I wrote that at a time when we were just getting hammered. Funding wasn’t coming in. There were miners. It was just months and months out in the jungle alone. That’s a Thom Yorke track that I’d been listening to again and again, and I was so low.

Then there was a huge new invasion where they burned the whole side of the river. It’s never going to come back. It’s part of the forest that I loved, and I knew the animals there, and it’s gone. We have to live through that on a weekly basis, at least on a day-to-day basis.

When you take on responsibility for something like this, you go to sleep thinking, “If we don’t do it, then worlds burn. If we don’t save it, then…” Every time you said the sadness that surrounds a happy moment—well, it’s like, how am I supposed to go to a party and talk with people about anything? How am I supposed to go to sleep when, if we don’t succeed at what we’re trying to do, if we don’t outrun the chainsaws and the roads, then those trees die—those millennium trees—and we’re the only ones out there protecting them?

When you see that black, scorched earth with nothing left, just ashes on the ground, and the cacophony of life is silenced, it’s this horrible, violent silence. It makes you sick. So, yeah, there’s a lot of weight that comes with that, because we’re not theoretically doing something. We’re practically doing it, in black and white.

So that’s the other side of the advice to young people.

Oh, yeah.

It’s not going to be easy.

No. When they say, “How do I get your job?” it’s like, “Well, you don’t want my job. You don’t want the botflies, and you don’t want the dengue, and you don’t even want to inquire what a normal life looks like.”

I lived out of a backpack for 20 years. Do you know how many monkey faces I had to eat because there was no other food? Seriously. Just that shot of being alone on the boat in the river, and how many days the motor didn’t work. You sleep out there, you get rained on because you don’t have any protection, and you have some leaves over your face.

Then you go home, and everyone’s got a job, everyone’s got kids, and everyone’s happy. They’re like, “What are you doing down there?” “I’m trying to save the rainforest.” They’re like, “Sure.”

Now we’re at this point where I’ve cared a whole lot for a long time. We’ve had rises, and then we’ve had falls. We’ve had wins, and then we’ve had failures. The last few years, we’ve had this rolling success of people finding out about our work and coming in.

We start to go, “Wow, if we protected 130,000 acres, we might actually be able to do this.” So there’s that moment in 300 where they show Leonidas, and they say, “Even the king allows himself a moment of hope that this might be okay,” right before they get slaughtered.

And someone very dear to me recently said, “In celebration of where we’ve gotten to, if it happened in any harder of a way, it would have actually killed you. And if it had happened in an easier way, it wouldn’t have been so divine.”

That slapped me in the face because it was like, “Man, it has been so hard, but look where we are. We might actually do this.”

It just has to be that way. Speaking of which, another complexity in all of this—you write about it in the afterword of the book—is the narco-traffickers that have moved into the river basin. They’re not the loggers that we’ve spoken about anymore. They’re growing coca for cocaine, and they’re building airstrips. So tell me how this came to be.

Like you said, the loggers—our whole life on this river, when loggers come in, JJ and I would walk up to them and say, “Hey, what’s up?” We’d sit down with them and have a beer or share a meal, talk to them, ask who their father was and if we knew them, and then hire them. They’re friendly.

They are, in a way, brothers, JJ. They’re the same. They come from the same people. They’re simple local people. They’re not evil. They’re just people who usually have a kid and a wife, and they’re looking for work.

So they work with the chainsaw because that’s what they know. And they work for $30 a day, if that, in very challenging, harsh environments. When we see clearings, I would always go with the drone and fly it over clearings. We’d get some intel, and then we’d bring that to the police.

Junglekeepers supports the police at this point because the Peruvian government has a hard time with resources, trying to manage Amazonia. When you’re 3 days from civilization, getting cops out there isn’t the easiest thing. So sometimes we’ll lend boats or gasoline or logistical support.

There was a moment in March, several hours upriver from home base. I’m with JJ on the boat, and I fly the drone. There’s this big new clearing, and I flew the drone over it and lowered the drone. A few times, I’ve had people come out and wave at the drone or say, “Get away.”

We’re out in the middle of the river, idling and staying in one place, and I lower the drone. I see these little huts, and we’re saying, “Okay, this is a big clearing.” I’m snapping images, snapping images. There are people on the boat with us, these visitors who had flown in, and I have my local team. All of a sudden, people come running out of the houses.

They run straight to their boats, and we’re already above where their boat is. Home is in the downriver direction. They get in their boats and start chasing us, and we start driving. We’re going at full speed. We have a 60-horsepower motor. They had a 40, and we’re driving up these—

We’re just doing this chase now, and our guests, who are going to be potential funders—at one point, the father looked at me and said, “Hey, this whole running from the Pirates of the Caribbean thing, it’s getting scary. You’re scaring us.”

He was like, “Can we—”

I’m like, “What are we doing?”

He goes, “When are you going to put the drone down?”

I go, “I’m flying the drone at full speed to keep up with the boat.” I just crash-landed the drone on the side of the river near a big tree. I said, “Forget it. We’ll get it later.”

I was like, “Fine. This happens all the time. They get mad. They chase us. It’s no big deal.” I smiled at him, and JJ was smiling. He goes, “This is so bad,” and he was smiling.

Then JJ looked at me, and the smile fell off him like a mask. He looked at me and said, “This is not good.”

We kept going upriver, and luckily, there was a camp of police that we’d worked with quite a bit. I went to a friend of mine, and I remember we got off the boat. I shook his hand. He said, “What’s going on?”

I said, “Look downriver.” There was a boat tearing upriver toward us. He did 3 things: He got the rest of the guys, they armed up, and they got on the boat with guns. They put ski masks on and got ready for combat. They told us to get down.

He also said, “Hey, turn on the sat-link. Call for support back home.” We turned our boat around. As soon as the narcos—which we didn’t even realize were narcos chasing us—saw the guns and saw us face them, they turned their boat around and went back downriver.

So we got escorted downriver, and I remember shaking my friend’s hand and saying, “Thank you for saving us today,” and telling the other guys they did a good job. I said, “Get back upriver.” We’d been brought home safely.

This was hours later. I said, “Good job. Thank you so much.” They went, and that night I’m sitting at the station that you know. I get a phone call from Stefan, and he goes, “Pick up the phone.”

I go, “I’m in the middle of a conversation.”

He goes, “Pick up the phone.”

My friend, whose hand I had just shaken, had gone back upriver. As they were unloading their boat and washing off in the stream, the narcos did a drive-by and shot him straight in the chest with a shotgun.

All of that enthusiasm—“We’re protecting the biodiversity,” and “This is so great,” and there are people from around the world—it’s like that scene in the movie where there’s a montage of success and hope and acres and winning, and then: gunshot.

I could still feel his hand in my hand. I had just shaken his hand. I said, “No.” I said, “Well, is he okay?”

He said, “He took a shotgun straight to the chest.”

They said, “He’s dead.”

I said, “Okay.”

I had to go out to dinner and not show the guests anything, just smile and laugh and talk to them about whatever and keep that in, which felt very, very difficult to do.

So what happened, as you said, was that the threat level escalated and we didn’t know it. The narcos had come in and started realizing that there was so much wilderness here that they could operate and there was no police. Then, when we flew the drone, they got mad.

So we realized this. We communicated with the police, and they said, “Oh, yeah, these are narcos.” Now we realize this is part of the serious drug mafia.

Then I had gone back to New York, again, to speak to donors to try and get this work to continue. You know how it works: We’re at the station, then you go to that little logging town, and then there’s a road.

Our pickup truck had come in on the road, and JJ was supposed to come down, get in the truck, and drive back to the city. JJ was on the river and went, “I forgot I was supposed to get more stuff at the city. I’ll go tomorrow.”

He went back up and sent the boat driver down. He told our driver, Percy, who was waiting with the pickup truck, “JJ’s not coming today. Go back and come back tomorrow.”

Percy starts driving down the road, and he sees a tree across the road. This is a single-lane road through the jungle; there’s nowhere else you can go. Men with guns come and stick pistols through the open windows, guns against his head. They pull him out and go, “Where’s JJ?”

They said, “¿Dónde está el gringo volador?” They said, “Where’s that shithead gringo who flew the drone?”

If either of us had been in the car that day, they would have killed us. They took our driver Percy’s phone. Thank God, they didn’t hurt him, but they sent a message to us. They said, “Let them know. We missed you this time, but we’ll get you next time. We’re going to get you.”

When JJ called me, he was howling. He just had the adrenaline and emotion of the fact that it almost happened. So that changed everything.

Since then, it’s not counting butterflies and taking ecological surveys. There’s a drug war being fought on our river. Now, when these roads come in, we can’t just go out and meet these people anymore and talk to them because they are actively looking to shoot us. They know our names.

As if all these other things weren’t enough indication, the police intercepted a phone from someone they arrested. In the WhatsApp chat, it said, “If you see JJ or the gringo, anyone in our network, please kill them. You’ll be rewarded.”

So we both have a hit out on us, and life on the river has changed. At the moment, I can’t just go out walking around, swimming, and driving my boat. You have to be looking over your shoulder at all times.

You can get as trained as you want with a pistol and sleep with it under your pillow, but the way these people work, they’ll catch you when you’re least expecting it. They’ll wait until you’re at a café in town. They’ll wait until your motor doesn’t work on the side of the river. It’ll just be a quick one, and they’ll go.

That feeling, on top of the weight of protecting the ecosystem and the animals, and the race to tell people about it and do all this—it’s like now we’re actively being hunted when we’re there.

And this is very directed at you and JJ? So they really don’t care about the others. They understand. Are you afraid? What’s it been like living with this, with the real fear of being murdered at any moment?

I wish I could say I handled it better than I’ve been handling it. I wonder how people in war zones do it. I wonder how some of my soldier friends, whom I have immense respect for, did it when they were deployed.

For me, once this happened, every phone call now, I think, “Did something happen to JJ?” Every time I go to sleep, my dreams are that I’m being shot. It really threw me. It really affected me.

When JJ called me, the way he was just shouting—I don’t even remember what he was saying. He was just shouting, “They almost got us! They almost got us!”

He was so terrified and angry, so, yeah, it’s—

There was a day not long ago when I was swimming in the river. I was right in front of the stairs at the station when a boat came around the bend. I remember thinking, “Do I run? Do I go underwater? Do I hide? What the hell do I do?” I didn’t have a gun near me, and the security people were up the stairs.

You go, “Holy shit.” It’s not the danger of, “If I jump on an anaconda, it might kill me,” or, “If I climb this, I might fall.” These are people who want to kill you. On top of that, when you see what your friend looks like after 3 days of floating in a river—what the body of a person you used to know looks like—that’s very viscerally terrifying.

There’s the tragedy of it: that person lost his life. He was younger than I was. He was a kid. He was in his 20s. It’s very hard, very hard to do anything because right now my hands are sweating. It affects me.

Even in the daylight, I can tell myself, “It’s fine. This is part of the thing. This is the adventure. People deal with this all over the world.” You can talk yourself tough, and then in those quiet moments you wake up at 4:00 AM and go, “Fuck. Why am I sweating? Why did I just have those dreams? Why is my heart racing?” It sinks its way into your subconscious, and it’s just not what we signed up for.

We wanted to protect this beautiful place, and this is a whole new threat. We’re not trained for this. We’re not a police or military force, and we’ve now seen violence on a scale that we were very unprepared for. Just 2 days ago, I was on my way to you when my phone rang at 9:00 at night, and it was JJ.

My heart was jackhammering. I had to pull over because I was thinking, “What news now? Did we lose another bunch of acres? Is it a new road? Did somebody die?” It really scatters you.

In some sense, it’s a twist that you didn’t ask for, and it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the fight you’re fighting, which is protecting the rainforest. But because it’s pristine and quiet and away from civilization, it also becomes a place where you can have airstrips. It becomes lawless in a certain way because it’s so far away from civilization.

Yeah. It’s the only place where they can operate with impunity. There’s no police out there. They saw us helping the police and went, “Cut the head off the snake.”

Chico Mendes, Dorothy Stang—the list of environmental defenders who are assassinated in the Amazon every year is huge. There are endless examples of it. It’s staggering. I forget the exact numbers, but every year we lose local leaders who are trying to stop an oil company or a drug cartel, and they just shoot them because they know that if you shoot the one person who’s able to rally that support, who has that voice, it usually ends the whole thing. Then they can go back to doing whatever the hell they want.

Right now, we’re working very closely with the Peruvian government. People assume that a Latin American government is automatically corrupt, but we found that these are really good people who want to help their citizens. The police have been working very hard to stop the narcos and protect the local Indigenous people, because with the narcos comes human trafficking.

When you have a team of male narcos out in the woods making drugs, they want prostitutes. How do they get prostitutes? They steal girls from Indigenous communities that don’t know any better. There are also reports that the narcos have made contact with the uncontacted tribes. Of course, they’re going to shoot machine guns at them. They’re not going to have a shotgun where it’s a fair fight. They’re going to mow them down, and the uncontacted tribes are going to have no idea.

That’s why I posted a video of me in the rain saying, “This is endgame.” There was a new road coming off the north of our territory, above the ancient forest. They had jumped over because we stopped it at the ancient forest. They’ve gone above the ancient forest, and now they’re trying to cut down to a new area.

...Trans-Amazon... Stefan made this map, of course. You can see the area that we’re trying to protect, loosely, so that we don’t give away anything—the area that we are protecting. The light green is the 130,000 acres, and then there’s this metastasizing network of roads just reaching out and trying to get in.

They’re trying to come in from the north, where that arrow is. They’re trying to come down, and the police are fighting them along this. It’s a full-on drug war right now. Stopping that means securing this northern boundary.

Again, just look at the power of what we have. When I posted this, I asked Stefan to show people the road and where it was going to go. We posted this video and said, “We have to protect this 100,000 acres right now.” All up here is uncontacted-tribe territory. From that one post, we got $150,000 in 48 hours and bought this concession. We stopped that road.

But now they’re up here, and they’re trying to come down. This is the thing: it’s great. Yes, you get to be an adventurer and live in the jungle, sure. But it’s like this Mission: Impossible thing where you might get lucky enough to pull off your psychotic mission—jump your motorcycle off the train, parachute down, and stop the bomb before it goes off. Great. How many of those do you get?

We’re having to do it every month. These amazing people who support the rangers allow us to patrol and protect this, because once we have this land protected, the interesting thing is that the police can go into any of the light-green areas. If anybody’s there, just arrest them. They’re on Junglekeepers’ land; they’re out. Eventually, that land will become a national park if we’re successful.

The problem with the land that isn’t protected is that it’s a gray area. It’s the middle of the Amazon—are they allowed to be here? Do they really have cocaine? They’ll plant papaya for acres, with a little bit of cocaine behind it. They’ll put the sacks there. They’re sneaky.

The police have to build a case, and it takes time. Then the road comes in. In that time, they’ll knock off a police officer. If we were just able to get this tomorrow, the whole problem would be solved. We could give the police 2 more boats, and then they could do all the patrolling they need.

So the mission is clear.

The mission is very clear. The problem is that right now we’ve been playing defense and sustaining losses. Either we need to inspire enough people that the donor program goes through the roof—instead of having several thousand donors, we have 50,000 donors—and raise the $20 million we need to save the rest of the corridor. With enough people, we could raise $20 million overnight.

Or we need one of these people who has the resources to come in like Batman and say, “I want the park named after me, and I’m just going to come in and give you the $20 million.” Then we do it tomorrow, and we make a documentary about how we saved a river, the tribe, and the monkeys.

Right now, we’re begging on the side of the road for enough change to buy bullets so that we can stay alive.

These narcos are a distributed network where a bunch of them are pretending to be farmers. They hold on to the land, then maybe they start planting cocaine on it slowly and build the airstrips. Are they trying to stay under the canopy with the airstrip?

It’s brilliant. First, they subsidize the poorest people and say, “Go up this river, turn left at the tree, and just start there.” They give them a few thousand dollars, and these people say, “I never had a few thousand dollars before.” Then they say, “Buy gasoline. Here’s a chainsaw. Go clear some land.”

They send these people up there, and when they show up a year later and these people have made an illegal farm out in the jungle, they say, “Hey, we need a safe house. Remember that time we gave you gasoline, and now you live here? You’re going to work for us now.” They’re kind of a friend of the people that way, and they have safe houses all over the jungle.

When the bosses come to collect what they’re growing out there, I mean, the police busted a narco operation in the middle of the jungle. It was days of hiking to the ancient forest, deep into the jungle. These people are going on foot with sacks and everything.

The way they do their airstrips is this: you think the canopy of the rainforest is 150 or 160 feet tall. If you clear the interior of the landing strip, the trees are still meeting overhead. You can’t fly over and see down, which is the same reason we didn’t know about the road that was going to the ancient forest. Overhead, the trees are meeting, so you’re not going to see it on a satellite, and you’re not going to see it from a plane.

These bush pilots fly in and just duck under the canopy, land their plane, load up, and fly out. They’re expert pilots.

So it’s impossible to detect.

It’s almost impossible to detect. We’re working with people now. It’s an arms race. They’ve been going okay, but there are drone programs. I talked to someone who has a different type of drone—a 16-foot drone that uses thermals to climb up, has solar panels on the wings, and flies for 2 weeks at a time. It’s like a glider that recharges itself.

It’ll keep constant imagery, so we’ll get almost up-to-the-moment data on disturbances in the canopy. That’ll be a firsthand alert system, but then we’ve got to get the police out there, which, as you know, is a 2-day expedition by boat. It’s the only way.

The local police force there may be dedicated, but putting people on a multiday expedition to go get shot at in the jungle is nobody’s idea of a good time.

Have you researched this whole other world of drug trafficking, cocaine trafficking? How big is the operation? Looking at Perplexity, a multi-thousand-ton, multi-billion-dollar global industry?

I mean, globally, it's a monster.

Colombia, Peru, Bolivia. And they move north and east through the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic to reach major consumer markets.

This is a machine fueled by a lot of money and a lot of brutality.

The number of cocaine users worldwide is about 25 million people.

Users.

Users.

Users. So there's a market. And when there's a market, you're going to find the way.

Quick pause. Bathroom break. All right, and we're back.

Me, as somebody who is afraid of heights—and I've had a chance to interact with you a bunch—you’re, in some sense, fearless. I've watched you climb a lot of trees. You've helped me climb a tree.

There's this wonderful part of the book where you talk about finding the tallest tree in the forest that you knew of at the time. It was something that you had passed and thought was impossible to climb, and you talk about climbing it. You take us through the experience of that, and that leads you to seeing the Mist River in the rainforest as the sun rises.

I was wondering if you could talk through the story of that, both for me, but even for you at that time—the terrifying process of climbing a tree like that for the first time, with J.J. at the bottom cheering you on—and what it felt like to see the Mist River.

That tree—you've met that tree. She's a good one. Her base is at least as big as this room, and she's probably about 160-something feet tall.

When you're looking at these giant buttress roots going up, which I'd been doing for 18 years at that point, I always said, “Man, if I could just climb it.” I'd never had the rope skills. I'd developed as a rock climber, I was working on strength, and I trained for it.

It's like most things: you can't just do it. I'd climb up 30 feet and go, “No way.” The trunk of the tree goes vertical for about 70 feet before branches even come out, so there's just this one big vine.

J.J. and I did it at, I want to say, 4:00 AM—really early. The howler monkeys had just started. You start climbing with the rope up this vine, and you have to—it's not technical. It's a strength climb. You gorilla up this vine, and it's all back strength.

I did it with no shirt and no shoes, straight up, and J.J. had the belay device. Every 30 feet or so, I would put in a piece of webbing and a carabiner. You go up another 30 feet, and you don't know what you're going to find. You're going up in the dark.

So when you say a lot of strength is involved, there are very few places to rest. You're essentially just lifting the whole time, so it's extremely exhausting.

Extremely exhausting. I really trained for a long time, and there is no rest. The only rest you get hurts. You have to cling to the tree, and your feet are smeared against the bark. You're holding on with your toes.

If you fall—you know, this is basically trad climbing—if you're climbing up and you put in a safety, a piece of rope with a carabiner, and you put my rope through that, it's dangerous because if you fall, you fall. Right before you put in the next one, you're going to fall double. If you climb 30 feet, you fall 60 feet, and your head's going to smack the tree.

As you climb, you don't know if you'll reach a wasp nest or a venomous snake.

And there's a lot of those in those trees.

A lot of those. It took me over an hour just to get to the branches the first time. It was full exertion, everything I had.

Then you get to where the branches are above you, each the size of a mature oak tree. They're just these huge branches, thick as a minivan. You're climbing up this straight tree that's like the World Trade Center. It's huge.

Then I had to traverse the tree on vines, and finally I got up into the crown of this tree. From there, I called down to J.J., and I just saw this little speck of light, 85 feet below me. Then I climbed up to about 120 feet, which is up here, and I sat there.

And you're doing all this still in darkness?

We're doing all this in the pre-dawn light. When I got up there, the howler monkeys were going and the jungle was starting to vibrate. You could hear the first macaws starting to chirp. Everything was starting to turn on.

In the east, the sun was coming over the jungle. When the first rays got line of sight to the canopy of the jungle, they started lifting the mist off the canopy. All of that moisture started coming up, and I'm sitting on this branch at 100-something feet above the ground, with the dark jungle below me.

All of a sudden, I see the river. I see the Mist River I'd always heard about. They say that there's a river above the Amazon, an invisible river with more moisture, and that more water is flowing above the Amazon than is flowing in the Amazon.

I'd heard this my whole life, and you think, “Okay, the fact that there's a molten core of the Earth or that black holes theoretically exist—it's just one of those things you're never going to see.” In this moment on this tree, sweating and just ripped apart and bleeding, I was sitting up there and I saw the Mist River.

It was flowing over the canopy in the golden rays of the morning. The macaws started taking flight, and there were monkeys below me looking up. You could tell they were confused. They were looking at me, going, “What is that?”

I just had this absolutely incredible moment. I wanted to share it with everyone. It felt like you were seeing God. I felt guilty afterward for having had a moment like that.

It felt like I had taken this insane risk and risked falling out of the tree or getting strung up on the ropes. Of course, it was just me and J.J., so if something goes wrong, no one's going to help you. Being out there on that branch felt suicidal because even then, if you fall, it's a giant swing back to the tree.

But the beauty that I saw up there was so intense that it sucked the air right out of my lungs. I had tears in my eyes, and I'm just watching this incredible process flow over the Earth—this legendary thing that I'd heard about, that scientists described, and now I'm seeing it with my own eyes.

It felt like the gift of the tree.

And you write:

“Now, in the branches of the greatest tree in the jungle, I watched as the Mist River caught the morning rays, illuminating golden currents, swirling as it rushed over the canopy like a stream from heaven. In the troughs and basins in lower areas, the river was deep blue. But then, as it flowed up and over the taller trees, slow rapids washing over the canopy, the Mist River became ignited, electrified in the gold magnificence of the sunlight.

“Scores of birds flew up, in and out of the churning currents. The life and breath of the Amazon was flowing from north to south along the basins of Las Piedras over the jungle. My God. My God. I thought of everyone I loved, of every creature contained in the leafy distance. The jungle itself was like a great being, a monstrous leviathan of warm green might.

“I wanted to call down to J.J. and tell him to find a way up. I wanted my mother to see it. I wanted the world to see it. The light filled my eyes, and I found myself wiping away tears.”

I should take the small tangent of saying the obvious, but the thing that needs to be said is, you're a great writer.

Thank you. Come on, I'm just describing what happened.

You mentioned macaws as part of the process of the jungle waking up. I read that when you first started in the jungle, that was kind of your job—studying them.

Me, as a fan of monogamy and birds: macaws are beautiful, but they're also monogamous creatures. They scream at each other quite loudly. What are some interesting things about them? Among other things, by the way, you write about how important the ironwoods are to their well-being, to their life.

When I went down there, like I said, for young people, if you want to get out there, go do it. I agreed to stay at the station and do 6 hours of macaw research every morning.

You'd wake up before dawn and go sit and stare at the side of the river. The macaws would show up, and like you said, they all scream and bicker at each other. It's just how they talk. It's very, very loud and very, very harsh.

But they do love each other. You can actually hear, when you walk through the forest, what the sound of macaws giving affection is. They make a certain kind of sound when they're preening each other's feathers, taking care of each other, and just nuzzling.

Then there's a different call altogether when they're yelling at other macaws or saying, “Let's go.” You start to learn macaw language.

What have you learned about relationships and successful marriage from listening to macaws screaming at each other in nuanced, different ways?

Never mind. You can skip that question.

It's interesting to see two animals sticking by each other's side and raising a chick. At the bottom of the stairs at the station, there is a macaw nest in an ironwood.

The relationship that you mentioned is that in the jungle, there's a limited amount of macaw real estate. Those are all ancient ironwood trees, at least 500 years old. They have to be thick—car thickness or bigger.

When a branch falls off, it creates a hollow, and the macaws use that to reproduce. Because there are only so many nest sites in the forest, only about 17% to 20% of the macaw population reproduces in a given year. So they have a slow replacement rate.

Macaws are one of the things that people come to the jungle to see. Along with gold mining and logging and all these extractive things, in our region ecotourism has been great. It's given the local people jobs as guides, cooks and chefs, and carpenters.

Macaws are a huge part of that because it's one of the last places where you can see these flying rainbows over the canopy. When you're on a branch from one of these trees and the macaws fly under you, you just hear the wind in their feathers. They look at you over their shoulder, like, “What?” and just keep going. They're just loud, and they'll keep going.

Then they'll join up with other macaws and fly across the horizon. It gives you this sense that you're seeing something from the dinosaur times. It just looks like wild jungle, and there's nothing human in sight. There's just this savage canopy to the horizon and these beautiful birds flying over. They're just magical.

You have this Instagram post with an anaconda around your neck. There are a million questions. Maybe you can talk about that experience, but also, how did you not die?

As you know, we've been studying the habits of Eunectes murinus for quite a while. The lowland green anaconda is the largest, heaviest snake on Earth. I've been practicing a lot for a long time, and this is the biggest one we've ever physically caught. This was just under 20 feet. It was 19 feet something.

You can see she's in the middle of shedding. The other interesting thing with her is that she had blue eyes because she was in the middle of shedding. The scale over their eyes turns blue right before it comes off, so I've never caught a blue-eyed anaconda before. But if you look at the size of my head and the size of my hands, you start to imagine that thing's head is bigger than a Great Dane's. It's huge.

The power on that—when we tried to lift her to measure her, we wanted to bring her up out of the stream and get her over to the side so we could straighten her out and measure her. We were just trying to take some simple data points and then release her. At one point, she just decided to flex her body, and you see 10 people fly this way, and then she's flexing the other way and 10 people fly this way.

Every time that mouth would open, she'd just reach back and be like, “Just let me do it.” You know that if she gets purchase, they wrap you so quickly and just crush the life out of you like you're a bag of chips. If you've ever seen a mouse in a mousetrap, when the trap goes down and the eyes come out—and anybody that's owned snakes and fed them mice knows this—sometimes, if they catch it right, the guts will either come out the back end or the front end. I'd imagine that the same thing would happen with a snake that's that big. That's bigger than I am around.

So, when you say “purchase,” they want a bite just to hold, and then they're good?

But again, all she wants is to be let go. In her defense, this massive snake—we named her Millie for the data entry—just wanted to go on her way down the stream. The comments on this are hysterical. People are like, “This is the worst example of white people shit I've ever seen.” Snoop Dogg shared it.

One guy goes, “Congratulations, you've touched enough grass. Go back inside.”

Yeah, somebody said, “Interesting use of free will.” I saw Killpopper007 commented—and maybe you can tell me if this is correct:

“Anacondas are ambush predators. If you approach them, they will usually try to flee and will not register you as food. There are other reasons too.”

This is in response to how Paul possibly didn't die from this: “There are other reasons too, but this is the main reason. They're pretty much apex at that size, so their fear isn't as prominent. He was calm, so the snake was calm. It's insane to do and still risky, but he might actually be the most qualified anaconda handler on Planet Earth. Paul is one interesting cat.” Hugging emoji. Is that accurate?

Yes. At that size, they're apex, so they're really not thinking about defense. They're just like, “Get off me.” If I was to hurt her—if I was to touch you in the arm with a needle—you'd react. If I was to do anything that hurt her, which I'm not doing, she would turn around and bite me to say, “Go away.”

But they also don't want to bite because their recurved teeth make it very difficult to detach. They're also putting their head at the source of the danger. It's not a good calculation. These giants—and I've had the privilege of interacting with 4 or 5 anacondas in the 20- to 26-foot range—all of them have been very Leviathan-like. They just don't want to move. They just want to keep going.

He's 100% right on all of that stuff. I've caught 90-something anacondas at this point, and many of them have been massive. Then there's the one that JJ and I didn't get at the Floating Forest because it was bigger than we could tackle, bigger than my hands. I couldn't touch my fingers. But every single one of them has chosen flight over fight.

Only the little babies and the smaller males get snappy. They'll come back at you like a normal snake, and if you grab their tail, they'll try to bite you and then go. But these big females, they're like dragons. They're like these big, legendary things that live in swamps, and the only reason they've gotten that big is because they have a reliable prey source in a secluded place away from humans. They've been there for decades, just pulling things down to hell and eating them.

The other thing—I mean, look, I have a team with me.

So, there are people holding the snake?

Yeah. Let's be real here. I would never do this. If I was out in the jungle by myself at night, doing this would be suicide, 100%, because for every second that I'm going, “Oh, I'm in this water and she's over my neck,” if JJ wasn't there to jump in and unwrap her, then I die. 100%.

Because she's continuously wrapping.

She's on her back saying, “Come in here,” and, “Let me armbar you. Let me squeeze the guts out of you.” She's just going, “Let it happen.”

And moving slowly.

Moving really slowly, with that assurance of power where she doesn't need to try and tap you quickly. She's going to get you eventually.

Although, to push back on something you just said, having known you long enough, let's be honest. You're saying you wouldn't be insane enough to do it. I think you would be. There's a line of insanity, and you, my friend, walk that line masterfully so far.

I think when you're able to sense the animal, whether it's crocodiles, caiman, or anacondas, and maybe radiate a sense of calm, I've seen you go into some dangerous situations and make it seem like it's not dangerous at all. Maybe when you become one with the ecosystem, you're not a threat to it, and maybe that's why you can survive. I haven't been able to make sense of it, really.

Look, I would say this. In the case of elephants, if we ever end up in Africa together, I can get incredibly close to elephants because I've spent enough time with them that, so far, it's always been a mock charge. You can be one with the elephant and learn their language enough that you respect their boundaries and also show them that this better be serious, because you're either going to have to kill me or just turn around and go back to eating. You can have that exchange with them.

With smaller snakes, I'll be careful. I can tell you with this that when you have both of your hands around an anaconda's neck, I truly—I mean, I've been known to surprise myself with the decisions I make, but doing this alone would lead to death, 100%. It's like laying down in front of an 18-wheeler with it in neutral. “It's going to roll over you.”

This is going to turn into anaconda handcuffs with this thickness, and then that's going to wrap you with this thickness, and then 6 more of those are going to go around your body and you'll get squeezed and turn into goop. Just like that guy said, she probably is in defense mode and not food mode, so she'll probably just neutralize the threat and then go back to sleep.

I have to ask you about the Floating Forest. You write about Santiago, once again beautifully, in the book—the time when he told you the stories, when your mind and eyes were still fresh and maybe skeptical, leaning more toward the Western-world point of view versus the jungle point of view.

“Santiago's eyes were glowing in the darkness. He watched the orange ember spark upward to join the celestial river of stars that arched across the night sky as if the memories were written there. He squinted, his face as wrinkled and weathered as an old map of the world. Vast experience whispered in the firelight, as ephemeral as the breath that spoke the words, but powerful enough to latch on and sink down into some deep part of me.”

This is Pico saying, “Papa, tell me about the anaconda on the blackwater stream.” He tells a story about that, and he talks about it being big and having horns. You write, once again, masterfully about your having doubts at that time. It sounds like bullshit, but now, more and more of the things you've seen in the jungle and the things you sense you have not seen yet—all of those stories seem to be true.

The one he was referring to was maybe 36 feet long—this big. He says, “The Floating Forest is the place you need to go, Gringo, if you want to be liberated of your doubts and skepticism.” So tell me about the anacondas you've encountered in the Floating Forest.

Well, the thing he's describing there is that he's saying they found an anaconda that had horns. In that moment, we were all hanging out by the side of the river, and I said, “That's enough.” I stood up. I was like, “Come on, there's no anaconda that has horns.”

If I've learned anything in 20 years of living with the Indigenous people in the Amazon, it's that they're not wrong. If they say there's a tribe of naked people with arrows out there, they're right. They're right.

And they know what an anaconda looks like. So if he says he saw an anaconda with horns, he saw something that ain't a normal anaconda. A smaller version of this played out recently, where one of the people who works at the tree house came and said, "I found a snake, and it was in the water tank." And he goes, "And it had green spikes on it." I said, "There's no snake that has green spikes."

I said, "Congratulations, you're an idiot." I made fun of him. And I said, "I know all the snake species that are here. None of them have spikes. There's no snake that has spikes coming off of it." And he said, "No, it had long spikes." He said, "The snake is this big and had spikes this long on it." And I said, "There's no snake with spikes."

Until finally, he came and got me in the night and said, "The snake with spikes is there." And I said, "Well, I'll get out of bed for that. Let's go." I said, "I guarantee it's not going to be there." We got to the water tank, and I shined my flashlight down. Sure as shit, there's a snake in there, and it's got thousands of green spikes coming off of it.

I could see the snake's head, and the spikes were coming completely perpendicular out from its body. For a second, I really was having this out-of-body experience. Then the snake saw us, got scared, and swam. All the spikes collapsed onto its body and became smooth.

Then I realized the snake had been living in the stagnant water for a while and had developed algae that was growing off of it. When it was sitting still, all the algae would settle out. If you looked straight down on it, it was a water snake with algae growing on it. It did look like a snake with spikes.

He's not wrong. It was a water snake. It was some sort of Helicops. But there's always an answer like that.

Amazing.

They're not wrong. So when they tell you something like, "There's an anaconda with horns," and multiple people have seen it, you make an expedition there. If somebody said there are giant ground sloths in this valley, I wouldn't be like, "They're extinct." I'd be like, "Where?" You start to listen.

After the tribe walked out of the forest, you could tell me anything. That day, if a Tyrannosaurus rex walked out behind them, I would've been like, "Makes sense."

Let's go to the floating forest. Do you ever think about what creatures are in there? I just had a conversation with Michael Levin at Tufts University. He's a biologist who creates biological life forms in the lab, but he also studies all kinds of weird, what he calls unconventional intelligences on Earth. He speaks about that from a perspective of just understanding the incredible intricacies and weirdness of biological systems.

The soup of organisms that's there in the floating forest is probably incredible. Do you ever think about what kind of weirdness is there?

Yeah. Along with giant snakes, there are animals existing in an ecosystem that's isolated, right? And so the tepuis—in the movie Up, those Venezuelan cliff jungles with the straight walls, like Angel Falls—you have this allopatric speciation occurring, where these isolated communities are departing from whatever's down there.

On the floating forest, you have this very unique ecosystem where animals are living on grassy islands and in the tops of palm trees. In that nightmare soup that exists beneath the rafts, there are probably insects and—I mean, I've seen lizards there that we have been unable to identify. There are things there in the... I can't imagine decay is happening. There's not a lot of oxygen in that water.

I've brought a few scientists there, and they've all just been like, "This is... this is..."

Yeah. How do you even...

"How did this form?" We've brought hydrologists there, and they're like, "How the hell did this thing form?" Trying to study what creatures live under that is amazing.

But the big anacondas, it's interesting because they truly are the apex, so they're unbothered. They're not really using their power for anything.

No, and I'm sure if I bit her, she'd turn around and kill me.

Yeah, but in a bored kind of way. It wouldn't even... It would just slowly kill you.

I wonder, though, once she killed you, if she'd just be like—

Just take a bite?

Would she bite? They swallow, right?

Well...

Once you collapse your shoulders, it's like if you killed a perfectly good hamburger and it was in your hands, dead, you'd be like—

Maybe I'll try it.

I mean, they need the calories.

Yeah, and then take a 6-month nap.

Yeah. They're truly incredible, majestic creatures.

Yeah, I love this picture. Again, look at the size. I want you one day to feel them. The wild ones are not like the captive ones, which are soft from sitting in a cage. These guys have been flexing every day. It's like you're hitting steel cables. It's just wild.

And even if it's just being chill, you can probably get a hint of the power it's capable of, right?

The one good thing about those really big ones is that when they do strike, it's like being in a fight with a big fat guy. That haymaker comes from way back here, and you're like, "Oh, good." You're like, "I'm gonna duck." And you get down.

Because they open their mouth and start accelerating, it's pretty easy to either get out of the way or catch it before it hits you—usually. Again, if you ever mess that up, just like the haymaker from the big guy, it's over.

Your level of knowledge and comfort with snakes is incredible. I think they—

Play with them a lot.

They sense that. I've seen you with snakes, and they must sense it because they must sense the camaraderie in you. You have a way of speaking to animals and about animals like there's zero danger.

From my outsider perspective, it seems like a lot of them are full of danger if you're not communicating with them correctly.

With snakes, I think it's more of a highway analogy: it's dangerous, but you can drive safely. I know what I'm doing, so if I'm working with a snake that can't envenomate me and is small, I can allow it to freak out. If I can get it into my hands, it goes, "Ooh, it's nice in here." Of course, as you said, I'm not scared. They are very sensitive to that, so it's going, "Okay, this isn't so bad." You can chill it out.

But I don't think snakes have any camaraderie. I think whales, monkeys, and elephants can sense. They can say, "Okay, this person's trying to help get me out of this net. I'm gonna relax and not kill them." In those cases, you have that dynamic.

Speaking of an animal that does have camaraderie, there's this incredible video on your Instagram where this spider monkey was drowning and you jumped in to rescue it.

Sure. We're coming downriver. It's 7:00 in the morning, so I'm cold. I'm sitting on the boat, and I'm wearing whatever. JJ's like, "Look, spider monkey." And I go, "Great, spider monkey in the river." That's normal.

But JJ's like, "No, she's having trouble." And I was like, "Why? They swim all the time." And he goes, "You should help." So the boat comes around. Then, sure enough, what you can't see in the video is that the river was so full that there were these little whirlpools and currents, and she was trying to get to the side.

All the animal rights people are very quick to be like, "Let nature take its course. Let the monkey drown." Or, "She doesn't need help. You're interfering." Sure, sure, sure. If you were actually there, you would know that she did need help and she was drowning. Her head kept going under. I saw that JJ was right, so we pulled around.

I took off whatever I could in the moment and jumped in with the paddle because, again, I trust monkeys, but I don't want her to bite me. She's going to be scared, so I thought, "There are 2 ways I can do this." I can grab her by the neck and the tail and take her out of the river, which is going to be scary for her.

Instead, I thought, "I know spider monkeys so well. I've raised so many of them." When you raise them, they curl up to your neck. If you have an orphan spider monkey whose mother got shot by poachers and you're taking care of her before we bring her to the animal rehabilitation experts, she'll curl up on your neck and go, "Oh, oh, oh, oh," and just talk to you in your ear.

I feel like I know a little bit of broken spider monkey. I pull up next to her and give her the paddle. We're in this rushing river moving at 10 miles an hour downstream, and I try to give her the paddle, but she smacks it away. She was like, "No, get away from me."

Then she keeps swimming and goes under again, and I give her the paddle again. She puts a hand around the paddle, and in that moment that you paused on, she looked back at me. She looked at me like—yeah, right there. She registered, like, "Oh, this is another animal with a face."

You guys are just looking at each other, and she's looking right at you. It's so cool.

She looked right at me, but then she went, "No." She was like, "Whatever you are, no." She was like, "I'd rather die in the river." She was so scared and drowning, and she looked at me, got scared, and jumped back in.

Then I lifted her up and went, "Oh, oh, oh, oh," and started talking in spider monkey. Then, in the next moment, you see it. She just goes, "Sure." She wraps her tail around the edge of the paddle. She puts her hand around it, and then I lifted her.

Because I'm taller than she is, I lifted her out of the river. So now, instead of manhandling her like a raccoon you're catching by the neck, she's holding on in her spider monkey way to the paddle, and she looks back over her shoulder. I'm sitting there going, "Oh, oh, oh, oh," talking to her in spider monkey.

And she looks at me, and you hear her. She goes—I can’t do the sound she makes, but she does this “Whoa!” spider monkey sound, like “Guh!” And she goes, “Fine.” Then she’s looking off the front end of the paddle at the jungle, and she looks back at me. You could just tell: she’s like, “I have no idea what’s happening.” But she accepted the help.

The difference is, it’s because I spoke her language in this case. I know that would be one of those stories people would nail me on every time if it wasn’t on camera. You can see the moment that she makes direct eye contact with me and goes, “Okay.” Then, as soon as we get to shore, she jumps off and runs off into the forest, but it was—

It’s so—just watching the video, it’s so amazing. She’s looking at you. You can see that there’s an actual connection, that there’s communication, a social connection—like the way humans might connect when you’re saving a human being who’s drowning or something like this. There’s that connection. It was beautiful to see, man.

I read a little bit that spider monkeys are very intelligent, but especially socially intelligent. They have social connections with each other, so they understand what that means. They understand what another entity means. You speaking it in a broken language is probably really important and a powerful way to indicate, “Wow, you’re in network.” Like a foreigner, but like—

It’s like you’re in a foreign country and someone goes, “Helping, helping.”

Yeah, exactly.

Like, “Helping.” And you go, “Okay, sure.” You’re not robbing me, you’re helping, right? No, they’re incredibly tactile. I’ve had orphan spider monkeys so many times, and they wrap their tail around your neck and hug you. You realize that connection they have with their mothers when they hold onto them in the canopy. When the loggers shoot the mother and then I’m taking care of this baby, they hold onto you. They need that love and that connection more than they need food. If you put food or warmth from a body in front of them, they’ll choose the connection over the sustenance.

Yeah, they really value the touching, that connection.

Very tactile. They’re very loving. They wrap their long spider monkey arms around each other. They’re very much like us. They hold their babies. When it rains, spider monkeys get together and huddle up. They’ll pull leaves down and all huddle up together. When it’s cold, they get close. It’s very cute.

Yeah, they’re distant relatives, but that’s true for a lot of our relatives. The apes, the chimps, all of them—they have this intricate social structure. They’re different, sometimes more violent, sometimes more loving, but social interactions are cool that way.

Yeah, you expect it from them. They’re practically us. To me, it’s when other animals show it. The times that I’ve been on a trail and a jaguar has walked by and just been like, “‘Sup?” and kept walking. It’s kind of cool of you not to eat me. I appreciate it.

Has that happened to you?

Yeah. I thought somebody was walking on the trail. I was doing a camera trap, and I put my finger up. I was going to say, “Could you walk any louder?” I was crouched because I was doing a camera trap. A jaguar walked by, literally just like, shoom, shoom, kicking leaves, just having fun, mouth open. He walked by, looked at me, and went, “‘Sup?” He never broke stride. Dead-ass eye contact, with the bottom teeth out and that jaguar look of just like, “Hey.” I was like, “Okay. Now I’m going to have a full meltdown.”

Your system starts sweating. You’re like, “Whoa.” They’re also so beautiful. When you see a jaguar, it’s bright yellow, and the teeth and the muscles—it’s—

What do you think you communicated to the jaguar that made it not kill you?

No, nothing. The jaguar was making the decisions. I didn’t do anything. It saved my life. It was just going somewhere. Because it was the king there, it just went, “Uh.”

Yeah, probably also not threatened.

Not threatened at all.

I think there is something to you just taking for granted the things that you’re putting out into the world. You’re probably radiating calm—or not calm, but non-threat.

Certainly non-threat. I also smell like an animal when I’m in the jungle. I shower in the river. I don’t use deodorant or shampoo or any of that stuff, so I don’t smell—imagine, to animals that have a sense of smell 4 times as good as ours, just your deodorant, your conditioner, whatever other products, the detergent on your clothes. We smell like Times Square. We smell like a fire alarm to them. They’re like, “What is this thing? It smells very foreign and scary.” Everything’s scary.

Speaking of scary, the jaguar was kind of friendly. He was like, “‘Sup?” It’s almost like he’d seen me before. He was like, “Oh, it’s just you.”

The one time I stood on the forest floor in India with a wild tiger and nobody else, the thing the tiger did that was so unnerving—and again, they’re so much bigger than you think. It’s like 4 jaguars. They’re so big. She wouldn’t look at me, and it was terrifying. She would look over there, she would look this way, she would look that way, and never make eye contact. It was like, “You’re as important to me as a stick.”

When you see 2 fighters square up, it’s all about eye contact. But you look through a person; you pretend they’re not even there. That tiger insulted me on such a profound and disarming level that I never forgot it. It was like, “You matter as much as a sparrow. You’re just not one of the things that I care about.”

She was just looking around and carried on doing it. She was like, “I’m going to walk this way.” I was just like, “Holy shit, I’m going to run.” It was profound insignificance from this god of an animal with paws the size of dinner plates. I was like, “Man, if she looks at me, I’m probably—”

That’s the end.

That’s the end.

Yeah, it shows how much more powerful she is. That’s probably the most terrifying animal on Earth. Tigers—

The rock-paper-scissors of land predators. I think the polar bear and tiger have to be the most scary.

Yeah, polar bears.

A polar bear’s pretty scary.

Yeah, you don’t mess with a polar bear.

I don’t think they’re as fast as tigers, but you’re not going fast on the ice. With a tiger, you can’t outrun it. If you climb a tree, they climb better. If you get in a car, they could smash the door. If a tiger decides it wants you, pretty much nothing can stop it. Even if you had a gun, even if you had a 9-millimeter, it isn’t going to stop a tiger that wants you.

In the jungle, have you ever felt in danger? Putting humans aside, were there animals? You’ve talked about how humans are really the source of danger. You often speak about animals as a source of beauty and wonder, elegance and grace, and all these things, which they are. But I’m sure you’ve felt danger.

I’m very aware that a hornet’s nest can kill you. They’ll kill you.

Oh, so the little guys.

The little guys suck. I always think, when we were going through the jungle, one machete whack—and again, people don’t realize how dense it is. You try to run, you get hung up on vines, you trip, you fall onto one of those trees with the black spikes. While you’re lying there dealing with all that, they’re just stinging you, and your body goes into anaphylactic shock and you die instantly. It can very quickly just take you out.

You’re right. Speaking of spikes, the biggest danger isn’t even the spikes. The spikes just create open wounds, and then that can lead slowly—

Infection.

—to infection. So really, that is the biggest danger.

In the Amazon, I’ve never heard of a human-directed violent jaguar in our region. They just don’t attack people. I’d say mosquitoes are the thing that comes after you. The snakes just want to be left alone, even the venomous snakes.

Again, I grabbed an 11-foot bushmaster by the tail, and he turned around and lifted up to about this high off the ground. If you could translate what he said, it was just, “Don’t make me do it.” It just said, “Make my day.”

See, but that’s the thing. You speak snake language.

Then I put the tail down.

You speak snake.

I went, “Okay.” I was sufficiently scared. The problem happens when you don’t know what you’re doing. I’ll give you an example. You want a dangerous animal story? I’ll give you one.

I was walking one time, and I was trying to be responsible. It always happens when I’m trying to be responsible—I get into trouble. I was trying to be safe, and you fall down. I’m in India. There’s a deep, like, 12-foot thing, and then a stream, and then on the other side there are elephants.

I’m walking, and I’m thinking, “I’m going to sit in a tree and enjoy these elephants. I’m going to make notes in my book like Jane Goodall.” Then I came up against a cement wall, and it was the back of a male elephant. In India, it’s a male elephant that’s been harassed and had fire thrown at it and God knows what else.

He turned around and, if I translate what he said, he just went, “What the fuck?” He looked at me like, “How dare you?” Then he smacked apart the tree, turned around, and that elephant was trying to kill me. That was not a mock charge.

I threw off my backpack and zigzagged through the woods. He broke apart trees. If I had a GoPro on my back to show you what I saw, it was just shrapnel and devastation as this thing bashed through trees. Every bush that I encounter is a possible trip.

Every vine is a possible hang-up. If they get you, he’ll step on you and crush you. So I threw myself off the edge of this cliff, rolled down into the stream, and the elephant got to the edge and almost fell on me.

He got to the edge and did one of these, then came back down on his hind feet. He picked up a stick and threw it at me. The stick just smacked down next to me in the stream. I remember I gave him the finger because I was alive, and then he just stormed off into the jungle.

I mean, there’s nothing like an elephant.

There’s nothing like an elephant anywhere. I loved listening. I was so excited when I put on your podcast with the dinosaur guy, because he was like, “When a baby is born, it learns, you know, elephant, giraffe, T. rex.” And I was like, “Holy shit.” Along with banana, water, and the sky being blue, somehow these are initial things in your first few months on Earth. These are the characters you’re introduced to. How the hell did T. rex get there? They don’t even exist anymore.

It was just such a fun experience. I could hear you smiling through the mic, and I was like, “Oh, this is going to be a good one.”

Yeah. The dinosaur world is incredible, but the fact that you have such a predator evolve with such a gigantic jaw and so much destructive power is weird.

It’s wild.

And then he broke my heart because he was talking about how the T. rex and Stegosaurus—he’s like, “All the books have them together,” and then, “They’re nowhere near each other. They did not exist at the same time.” And I was like—

I want them to battle with each other.

Yes.

Speaking of elephants, I feel like we’ll be up for an adventure at some point. After all this chaos is over, do you think we’ll be back in the jungle? Africa? India?

I think I would love to show you a herd of truly wild elephants in the African jungle. I think that us going on a boat trip through the Amazon—not a hiking one—where we’re going through areas where you can get permits to go through, where no one’s allowed to go. They’re completely protected areas, and you can just go for a week through areas where the animals have no idea what a human is.

So you can move through it, and it would be a little bit more of an enjoyable experience, not a survival situation. And go with J.J. in a boat and just travel through the Amazon. “Hey, maybe we protect this river.” Then the river’s mapped from north to south, and we just raft down with boat support.

It’s really incredible to see how it’s all connected. I mean, the river—it’s the thread that connects the whole story. It’s nice to see how it’s all connected, and that’s why us starting in the mountains is also really nice to see where it begins. But it keeps going. The story keeps going.

It keeps going. We did start in the mountains. An epic first day together.

And hopefully people get a chance to see that video. So I’ve got to ask you about the writing. I mentioned you’re an incredible writer. What’s your writing process like for this book, Jungle Keeper, for Mother of God, and for future books you’re writing? Are you like Stephen King? Do you go to some dark places in the basement? Do you write every single day? Do you take little notes?

Your notebook has a bunch of doodles and a bunch of writing. What’s your process like?

I try to journal every day for a number of reasons. It’s accountability. It helps me keep track. It’s fun to see your hopes and dreams. It’s fun to record the mundane moments that we all forget about, and that might be cooking in the kitchen with your mother. That might be a fun walk you had with your dog—little things that you think you’re going to remember, but you just don’t.

I have piles of notebooks, just piles and piles of notebooks in my room. When something happens, I write it down. If a cool story happens, I will write it down, or if I find a leaf from an extinct tree, I’ll make an etching. Anything that happens that I find remarkable in any way, either for my own personal memory or for writing, I’ll write it down.

When I go back to it later, A, I have a very good memory, and B, the facts are there. When something happens, like you rescue a spider monkey, or you get to spend time with someone that you haven’t in a long time and you get that feeling of, “Oh, that’s why I’m such good friends with them,” you write these things down, and then it’s always there.

I feel like whenever I don’t journal, I’m missing out on keeping my life and my memories. I don’t do that Stephen King quote about how, “Amateurs wait for inspiration, and the professionals, we go to work every day.” He’s like, “Ten pages a day,” or whatever it is. I don’t do that. I write when I feel like it.

I’ll start thinking, “Oh, this is a perfect way to start this scene,” because the moment this happened, I felt so intensely. If we bring people in and out, I’ll just be in a car or boat or something, and I’ll start thinking about it and I’ll go, “This is…” The thing is, you’ve got to carpe diem. Then I’ll go, “Okay, where did that happen again?” I’ll go to that page and go, “Okay, so what exactly happened?” Then you get the laptop, and yeah. So it’s brain to paper to laptop, always paper in between.

Well, how do you go from disparate notes to the final thing? It’s difficult to convey the experience through words, and you do that well. Do you edit a lot? Do you iterate?

That’s where Stephen King was right, because I look at writing like sculpting. You have to have something to sculpt. When you’re thinking of a story, a lot of it comes from listening to great storytellers. I actually love listening to bad stories, just like I like watching bad movies to see what they did wrong.

When you listen to someone who starts a story and has you hooked from the second they start, then you’re like, “Wait, but how did that happen? And why was that happening? What happened next?” They keep you going and drop the information perfectly. Every now and then, you figure that out in that moment of inspiration.

I have my facts written down here, and then I’ll do an outline on a page or something. But then I have to get it all out of me with a pen. I’ll almost close my eyes and write the story out. You’re literally making your clay, so you make the shape of the thing before you. Editing is giving it details.

So you do take passes like—

Oh, my God, yes. Dozens. That’s where writing sucks. When you’re finishing a book—and I’ll never do that again. What I’m doing now is, this last book covered so much. I was in the jungle, hiking for 10 hours a day, dealing with narcotraffickers, and then I’d have to edit at night. It was like, “This is no way to live.”

So now what I’m doing is writing chapters as I feel like writing chapters. When something remarkable happens, I go, “This is going to be its own chapter.” I write it, edit it, and then I send it to my sister, who’s an expert editor and has lived more in literature than most people live in real life.

She’ll let me know if it’s good or bad, if it needs to be tweaked. When I get it back from her, it’s marked up. Now what I’m going to do is just put those aside. Then, the next time I want to write a book, it’s not starting from scratch on 300,000 words; it’s just here, and it’s ready. Much easier.

What kind of books do you think you might write in the future?

Well, there’s Mother of God, and now Jungle Keeper. I’m already working on Endgame, because there is so much that has happened.

I think I told you when you were there, but right before you came, J.J. and I went to the back end, behind our river, to this horrible part of the Amazon that’s 10 times more lawless than where we are. Instead of no people, there are people. If you want to talk about Amazonian No Country for Old Men, it’s the oil companies, the missionaries, and the newly contacted tribes.

There’s a people called the Nahua, and they were recently contacted and ripped out of the forest. They’re standing there with their little bows and arrows. They’re tiny people. The normal ones are tall. The Nahua are small. We just saw brutality in this horrific place. It’s like Sicario. It’s just absolute lawlessness.

I remember the moment J.J. looked at me and said—and we both think of ourselves as tough, I think, until we get in these situations—and he looked at me and went, “We’re not safe.” We looked at the people around us at this side of the river port, 8 days up, and you could tell everyone looking at us was making a calculation about how inconvenient it would be to kill us.

They were like: camera, watch, clothing, backpack. They were like, “That’s a nice backpack.” You could tell they were just shopping. J.J. and I were like, “Where are we putting the tent tonight?” “We’re not staying here.” Then I was like, “Well, maybe we should stay.”

One of the little Nahua people came over to J.J. asking for food, and he made the mistake of explaining money. They’d never had money before. He gave him a couple of coins and said, “If you go over there, that man will sell you something and you can eat.” The guy was like, “Bow and arrow?” J.J. said, “No, give him this and he’ll give you food,” and it worked.

Then J.J. got swarmed by 60 of these little tribal people with bows and arrows, hands out. J.J. was running with all these half-naked people behind him. That chapter’s going to be called “River of the Dolphin Fuckers,” because everyone we met on the river kept telling us—I’d have my camera with me and I’d go, “Are there dolphins here?” And they’d go, “Yeah, there’s dolphins.”

And if you fuck one, be careful, because they'll pull you under.

I went, "Okay, weirdo," to the first guy. Then we got about 8 hours further upriver, met the next guy, and I had my camera out. I said, "Hey, are there any dolphins here?" And he goes, "Yeah. If you fuck any, be careful, because they'll grab on and pull you under." And I was like, "What?"

Then 4 more people told me the same thing, so I was like, "Okay."

The lesson we learned in the jungle: horned anacondas, believe 'em.

Believe 'em. On that river, they were all trying to be good Samaritans and warn me about the clear and present dangers involved with amorous dolphin encounters.

So stylistically, I mean, that is a bit Cormac McCarthy.

Ooh, he would've loved it.

There are writers you draw inspiration from like that. I mean, you're very close to him—

It's too big of a compliment.

You plug in every once in a while. You jump around stylistically, actually.

I do. It depends, because sometimes I want to sink in and flex a little bit, which I don't think people really enjoy, but I enjoy it. Talk about the—just use all those flowery words and make these beautiful metaphors.

But what I'm finding more and more is that modern readers aren't really looking for that. They want an easy read. For my style of storytelling, people really tend to thank me for more of an Anthony Bourdain style, where you're like, "So we found ourselves on the side of this river, and we knew we were in danger. The reason we were in danger..." And you just start telling the story. Forget the—maybe once every 2 pages you can throw in one of those beautiful little zingers, but nobody wants to watch you flex.

But also sometimes you go even more than that. I don't think Anthony Bourdain did Hemingway-like minimalism, where it's just word, period, word, like that. That's another way to flex that I really like that you do sometimes: less, and just power in the spacing, the silences. The unsaid is what does the driving.

I mean, that's what's so arresting. You read For Whom the Bell Tolls, and, you know, "The air was crisp, and the water was sweet, and the wine was good, and the afternoon was warm." And you're like, "I know what that's like." These are not complicated sentences, but when he puts them together into a paragraph, you go, "Oh, yeah. I want to drink wine out of leather and lie by the side of that stream." It sounds so beautiful.

Sometimes, just look at that. Look at that fire cracking on the horizon there. Sometimes the only way is just these simple statements.

Writing's beautiful. I love writing, I love reading it. Have you interacted with LLMs much? AI systems? ChatGPT? There's a bit of a scary and sad aspect to the fact that they can generate language extremely well. But something is missing, and it's very hard to put your finger on it.

My question to you is: I can pick out with stunning accuracy when someone sends me a message and they've passed it through ChatGPT. I know. Somehow I could tell, and I don't know how, but I could tell.

It's one of those things, like with the images, where we're at the point where we can't tell anymore, almost. I don't know if that's going to go away, or if, like you said, there's something—

One of the things that F. Scott Fitzgerald does so much is describe these incredibly human moments with such crystalline accuracy that you go, "It must have taken you a month. You must have studied life so much to be able to string those words together."

I think in a book he writes about someone screaming with such abandonment that at the highest register, her voice wobbled and cracked. And you're like, "Oh my God, I know that sound."

I wonder if—because you can say, for example, "Write me The Jungle Book, but make it sound like Cormac McCarthy wrote it." And it'll be like, "The jungle was dark and stern, and the boy was..." You know? It'll do it, and it's amazing.

But my question to you is: what are we picking up on in something as simple as a text message?

It is very difficult to define. But it's important to keep thinking about, because what makes us human?

You reassured me recently because I called you and I said, "Of the jungle, all anybody wants to talk about is AI." It's like people are walking themselves into the Matrix and asking to be hooked. Everyone's obsessed with this topic.

And you were like, "Man, human art and human literature is going to actually become so valuable as this other thing happens." I expected the opposite answer. I thought you were going to be like, "Yeah, man, this really is. Everything's going to change." And you were like, "Man, real artists are going to become more appreciated."

As more and more compelling and effective bots appear on the internet, we're going to value that less and less, I think. And we're going to value human interaction more and more.

Artists showing art at galleries versus on the internet, meeting in person—actually, it's going to force people to be more authentic and real and raw with each other. That's going to be the valuable resource.

I think already, AI aside, everyone's so—movies have become so polished. There's no weird, quirky stuff. There's no risky stuff anymore. It's all very, very curated.

I've almost stopped watching movies. I used to love movies. But it's fun when they take risks, when they're messy, when they're real.

I think Hollywood—the Hollywood stars, the Hollywood moviemaking process—has become less and less popular because of that. So I can't wait for movies to be reinvented—

Oh, I can't wait.

—for independent film. Just raw, edgy, dangerous, all that kind of stuff.

And all the actors we like are in TV shows on various streaming platforms. It's like they've all just gone home. They're not there.

I was literally like, "Man, I miss movies. What happened to movies?" I'm rewatching all the old movies that I like, and I was like, "Where is everybody? What are they doing?" It's like they all have a TV series on Hulu or something. It's like, "Fuck."

Yeah, I think it'll come. The raw, the dangerous, the edgy.

What we just described is almost perfect. There's a scene in Dead Poets Society where Robin Williams makes them open their books. The first page of the poetry book is like, "How do you identify a good poem?" He's like, "A good poem can be..." And he makes a graph. He's like, "By the subject of the poem and the accuracy with which it is described, you can tell whether or not it's a good poem."

The whole class is sitting there bored, and he's like, "Now rip that page out of your book." And they rip the page out. Then he's like, "Now stand up." And he's like, "Now describe something." He makes them bleat it and scream it. It's almost exactly what we're describing.

It's like, yeah, you can turn it into a graph if you need to, but it's something way messier than that.

Yeah. And Robin Williams, the person, is a perfect example of a complicated, beautiful human. I miss him. Whenever I see clips of him come up, it's just—

I still, to this day, can't make sense of the fact that a person like that can take their own life. Somebody who's brought so much joy to the world. It scares me, man. It scares me. I'm scared of my own mind in that way, you know? That he could be at the top of the world—

But he had an illness.

Yeah, that's what I understand. Dude, life is a roller coaster.

I'm telling you.

And you're living through it.

As scary as that is, since you mentioned Robin Williams, I'll give you this. My very close friend Gleb has a story. He was in New York City as a kid, and he saw Robin Williams walking down the street. He went up to him and went, "Oh my God, it's Robin Williams." And Robin was like, "Yeah."

He goes, "Can I have an autograph?" Robin said, "Do you have any paper?" My friend was like, "No, I'm 11." Robin Williams was like, "Go get some paper."

His manager was with him, and he was like, "Robin, we don't have time. We gotta get up there." And he was like, "Hold on. I told the kid I'd give him a thing. He'll be back."

My friend heard this as he was thinking, "Just please stay." His whole life depended on this thing. He ran into a diner, grabbed a napkin, and ran back out into the street. It took him a few minutes, and Robin Williams was still sitting there.

This irate manager was there, being like, "Come on, let's go." Robin had waited there and signed the napkin for him, and actually did it with a smile and a wink, you know.

Yeah, man. You can bring a lot of joy to the world. Never forget that. All those little interactions. I love it. I love it.

That was another one of Jane Goodall's amazing quotes that I couldn't reproduce, but it's that you don't realize the degree to which the things you do each day matter, even if it's just to the people around you.

You are, to the people around you, their entire life experience if they're your kids, your parents, or your partner. The things you do matter. If you can manage to put that extra energy where you put a little magic on it, where it is fun, it makes a difference.

You show up home with something, play with the kids in a way that surprises them. I had a good friend of mine, Vinnie. I called him and said, "What are you doing?" He said, "Oh, I have a whole plan set up. It's supposed to be really good stars tonight. I'm putting my daughter to bed."

He goes, "I'm gonna wake her up in the middle of the night. I'm gonna have a candle. I'm gonna take her up to the roof to go stargazing." He's like, "But I want her to sleep. Remember when you were a kid and you would wake up?"

He was curating a magical experience for her to see the stars, making warm tea and all this. Man, you can just make it so great.

Jane Goodall's the reason you met this guy.

That's right.

You've continuously spoken really highly of him, and he gave me this book that he has recently written, Echoes from Eden.

Signed it.

Yeah. Dax, A, saved my life, and B, is the example of what everybody wishes. Dax made an amazing company, amassed an amazing fortune, and then said, “I’m gonna use it for good.”

He’s given a lot of resources, a lot of love, and a lot of effort to helping the Amazon rainforest and the environment in general. He’s one of the only guys I know who has a sexier beard than you.

Yeah, he’s got me beat big time.

He wrote, “Thank you, brother, for your love of the wild. This book is about the heroes fighting on the front line for nature. Together we can protect Earth’s last wild places. Speak soon, Dax.”

He supported all these initiatives. He went to the Amazon with Jane. He supported Junglekeepers and Sea Shepherd. So he really went out and said, “Okay, what are the environmental projects that are doing the most good, and where do I want to put my resources?”

It’s like everyone always whines about that. “How come these guys don’t…” And it’s like, he did, and he got a lot done. Then he went and visited all those projects: sea turtles and Indonesian orangutans, and working with Jane. So that book is sort of a state of the union on where conservation is at.

There’s a lot of knowledge about how the different strategies— it’s so different protecting sea turtle eggs versus trying to save a river in the Amazon versus Jane’s global message of hope. And then he has a guy in there who’s trying to save a specific part of Sumatra, and it’s just amazing stuff.

The Congo.

The Congo. And then he actually took the time to go to these places and see the operations on the ground.

And are you still working with him?

Yeah. Well, that’s sort of the… The way it happened in my life was, the one time I quit conservation was right around the time COVID hit. I was going through a divorce, I’m 32 years old, and I had no job, no nothing.

JJ’s mom had COVID. Don Ignacio, the shaman, had COVID. Pico’s leg was coming off. Nothing was working. Nobody could go anywhere. And I called Mohsin and I was like, “I quit.” I was like, “We’re never going back to the jungle.”

The loggers just went out and were tearing down everything. I just said, “I got nothing.” In the absolute black depression, I called him and I said, “I quit. I’m gonna go get a job. I guess I’m just…” You know, “I guess I’ve been like Jungle Peter Pan, and it’s time to grow up.”

I was really embarrassed at the time that I did that. And then I spent like 4 days just laying in bed, with no idea what to do. The only thing I can do is this.

I had talked to Dax months earlier, told him my plan for protecting the river, for making a ranger team, and he’d been looking over the budgets and spreadsheets and seeing if this was real. He was still forming Age of Union. Then, 4 days after I quit, the phone rings and it’s Dax. He goes, “Hey, I looked over the budget. I’d like to make a 10-year commitment to Junglekeepers. Let’s go.”

He had no idea what I was going through, and he was just like, “Let’s go.” I was going from that depressed to that inspired in a single conversation. You could get the bends from that.

Yeah, and it’s not just the money—it’s that somebody believes in you.

No, it’s that he believes in us, that we can… Money, you know, that money means tuna cans and gasoline and being able to buy shoes. We never had those things before. We were just living in the jungle, watching our bodies decay.

He was like, “No, I know how to run a company, and I can tell what you guys need to run an organization.” He did that and then has stuck by us.

He came not that long ago to the Amazon, and we took him around. He just looked around and went, “I’ve never seen people…” Because he said, “You guys remind me of a startup.” He said, “You’re a mess.” And that was right before Stefan had come.

So now he’s seeing ranger teams and boats going up and down. We have complex systems and a donor program, and all these things are working well. We’re making progress, and we have annual reports and all this data.

He’s like, “Yo, you know, people have donor fatigue, where they donate money and don’t know where it’s going.” And he goes, “Here, they can see what’s happening.” So having someone like Dax in your corner is a miracle, really.

In the book, it’s gonna sound… A lot of the things that happened to me in my life sound like bad writing. You know, in movies, they have a gun to their head, and you go, “They’re not getting out of this one.” And then someone bursts through the door and saves them.

That’s just happened too many times to me. It sounds like bad writing, but it’s a really good life.

Since you mentioned Stefan one more time, one of my happiest moments in life—and I had many in the jungle with you—is just talking late at night after ayahuasca, funny enough, chatting with Stefan and Dan and you, giggling and talking about life and everything.

Dan is a guy I have to give a shout-out to. You should follow him on Instagram, Life with Dan. He’s an incredible wildlife photographer. I’ve seen him; he’s worked quite a lot with you.

He has a love of nature, a love of the wilderness, a love of beauty, and is extremely good at taking pictures, but just goes to the edges with you. He’s the only guy I’ve seen with the 2 giant cameras able to follow you into the darkness.

Well, Dan—first of all, that picture I showed you where I’m in the tree. I told you the story about JJ, where I climbed the giant tree. Well, this is years later; I climbed it with Dan. Dan was there, so he flew the drone up and got me in the tree.

But what Dan’s a really good example of is, like you were saying, “What would you say to the kids?” Dan listened to our talk, our first podcast, was living in Singapore, and he’s a young filmmaker. Again, just get out there.

He signed himself up to come on a Tamandua expedition with my company, and he showed up on the thing. Sure enough, their boat broke down, and I was off doing Junglekeepers stuff. Someone was like, “Yo, their boat broke down.”

So we show up, and I haul their boat. He comes up and says, “I’m such a big fan. I just wanted to say hi.” I said, “Well, great. Hello.” I said, “Let’s get you back on the river.”

Then someone came up to me and said, “He’s a really good photographer.” I said, “Everybody’s a good photographer today.” I said, “That’s great. Amazing. We have Stefan and Mohsin. What else do we need?”

Then someone I trust was like, “Hey, listen, look at his stuff. It’s not normal.” I watched a few of his videos and I went, “Holy shit.” And I went, “Would you ever think of coming down for a few weeks to film?”

At the time, he was like, “No way.” He was so amazed. And now we’re bros. We film together all the time.

But he put himself in the position where he has the skill, the insane skill. Some of his things—he’s doing tracking shots of a white-winged sparrow over the water, where he’s in the boat with an 800-millimeter lens, getting these insane shots. I’ve never seen a talent like him with video.

But wildlife photography and documentary filmmaking in general, it’s not just about the competence of being able to pull off a difficult shot. It’s about the patience required and the discipline to just sit there and wait. When we went out into the jungle, he waited.

Yeah. Even looking on this page, that shot of the emerald tree boa there—he got up before dawn to wait for the sideways light. He had a vision of lighting the snake from the side.

And then the macaws coming off the clay lick. How many days at the clay lick until he got the explosion of macaws? I’m up in the tree and he’s on the walkie-talkie.

Also, your lenses are going to fog. You have to be able to hike and do everything everybody else is doing, and your job. I mean, the dude is…

You attract a lot of incredible people because the mission is clear, and there’s a vibrancy and energy to the whole thing. It’s exciting. That’s why the best people come to work with you, come to hang out with you.

It’s become an amazing team. I look around at the people and I go, “How did this happen?”

But it is getting more intense and dangerous. I have to ask you the thing we’ve talked about. What do you think you’ll do when you’re getting older? This is pretty intense. Where do you see yourself years from now?

I want to protect this river. We have to protect this river in the next year and a half, or else we’ll lose the chance.

Either I’m going to have… First book, I got to the Amazon and it was wild. Second book, we went, we built this amazing organization, and we got so close. It’ll be like those movies, like Blow, where it’s like, “For a time it was amazing,” and then at the end, it’s not so great.

By the way, great movie.

Great movie. But I’m writing this story as it happens, and the endgame might be written by somebody else. Or we just got really close and then it all fell apart.

But we’re 130,000 acres of the way. If we make it to 300,000, I’m calling it now: I think enough people are going to learn about this. It’s going to tidal-wave. We’re going to make an amazing documentary about how we protected the wildest place on Earth.

Then I would love to have a few kids, get a PhD, and teach conservationists around the world how to do this—to save really wild places. Keep inspiring people, keep writing books, keep going on expeditions. I don’t have any problems with that.

I can tell you, I can’t do this much longer, because the pressure of wondering if it’s going to be okay—I’ve used all of it that I can. My Lord of the Rings analogy of carrying the ring: you can only do that for so long.

So I’m actually very excited to… I need to know that it’s safe. I mean, that monkey that I rescued out of the river, or the toucan, Lucas, who comes back to visit us. We just saw a giant anteater not that long ago with Dax in the jungle. I know these animals, and I’m responsible for protecting their home.

It would be so amazing to bring people to the treehouse and show them this amazing place and put out documentaries. I have no problem imagining a transition period. I'd like to transition out of Blood Diamond and go to more of a professor role after this.

You mean like an Indiana Jones type of professor?

Yeah. Running from the tribes. As long as it doesn't go supernatural at the end, I'll be very happy. That always kind of let me down.

Well, thank you for giving basically everything you've got toward this mission that you're doing. And thank you for being who you are. It's been an honor of a lifetime to be able to call you a friend and to have this conversation, brother.

This is the third time we've spoken. I think we'll talk at least 10 more times, and I think I speak for everybody in saying thank you, and please don't die in trying to save the rainforest.

I have to say thank you to you because our first conversation changed everything. It really did. In this story, it brought so many more people onto the mission. And I think it also lifted me up because, as we often acknowledge, this can weigh you down.

I often do get weighed down and lose hope myself. And then I get lifted up by moments like that, where someone I'm a huge fan of and who I respect so much reaches out and goes, “Do you want to come to Austin and do this podcast?” And I respond, “The Lex fucking Fridman Podcast?”

But you've really changed the narrative and allowed this to be a reality.

And everybody, go pre-order The Jungle Keeper, the book, available everywhere. And if you can, donate on junglekeepers.org. This is an important mission, an ultra-competent team, and this is such a beautiful part of the world that I really, really, really hope we protect.

So thank you for talking today, and now let's go eat.

Thank you, brother.