Ep. 934: Paul Rosolie on Uncontacted Peoples, the Amazon, and Junglekeepers

Steven Rinella talks with Paul Rosolie https://www.instagram.com/paulrosolie/ about the Amazon, crazy jungle critters, arguing with indigenous people, dolphin intercourse, Chinese in the Amazon, and more! Find Paul Rosolie’s book, Junglekeepers, here: https://www.junglekeepers.org/store Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:05Steven Rinella?

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• 1:50Speaker 04

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast, coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case underwearless.

• 1:57Speaker 05

  We're on the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything.

• 2:01Steven Rinella?

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• 2:24Steven Rinella?

  All right, everybody, we got it. We got an awesome guest right now who knows, who knows a ton of stuff about something I wish I knew a ton about. You're in a great position right now.

• 2:34Speaker 04

  You sure you want to learn about?

• 2:35Steven Rinella?

  Dude, I'm jungle curious, man. I'm jungle curious because I spent, I've been fortunate to spend, let me see, let me add it up. I've been fortunate to spend maybe like eight weeks, I guess.

• 2:44Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:45Steven Rinella?

  Scattered out, maybe eight weeks or so in the jungle in South America. Just enough to go like, I should have had more of this in my life.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:54Steven Rinella?

  Should have had more of my life. And it's like, it's a real miss of mine. If I, I don't want to go so far as to say, if I could do my whole North American life over again, I'd move it down to South America, but I'm way jungle curious.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 3:05Steven Rinella?

  So I'm gonna, I got a lot of animal questions for you. But Paul Rosley, so Paul's a naturalist and author. He's a jungle expert. Maybe most importantly, he's a founder of Jungle Keepers, a conservation organization in the Proven, Amazon. I'm holding his book here, Jungle Keeper, What It Takes to Change the World. We're gonna talk a bunch about jungles and we're gonna talk a little bit about

• 3:30Steven Rinella?

  something that our listeners are familiar with because it's just, it's thematic through all of our discussions. This being, you know, this is a very North American centric show. We spend a lot of time on issues that are centered around, that are peripheral to discussions of like, what we call, you know, the, the, the North American model of wildlife conservation. I think some people hear that and they just get bored just hearing the term. But it's, it's the system. It, it's a system that accounts for, in the United States, in Canada, right? It's a system that accounts for, how can we be so rich? And have 360 million people and be like military and technological innovators?

• 4:15Steven Rinella?

  And still have woods and wild places, right? That doesn't happen by accident.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  No.

• 4:23Steven Rinella?

  It doesn't happen by accident. We achieve that through a model that isn't always exportable. Right? It, it, it worked here and it's worked here, but it's, it's, it's a, it's a model that, as we just, as we discussed before, it's a model that like in Africa, there's a different take on that model.

• 4:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:43Steven Rinella?

  Right? And so I, I think a lot of people, as we get into this discussion, a lot of people will, as they're thinking about, they'll be like, oh yeah, for decades, I've been hearing about the Amazon, deforestation in the Amazon, illegal logging in the Amazon, illegal poaching in the Amazon, the Amazon's disappearing.

• 5:02Steven Rinella?

  One of the things I want to get in with you is, what does that look like? How does that happen? How does it, how do we stop that from happening? Right? Is our system applicable? Is there another system that's applicable? So we'll get to there.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  Great.

• 5:17Steven Rinella?

  But first I gotta ask you about some of my, can you handle some jungle questions?

• 5:21Speaker 04

  Uh oh. No, yes, yes, please.

• 5:25Steven Rinella?

  You don't need your notes for these jungle questions.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 5:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay, jungle, here's jungle question number one. This is like, again, I'm, I was, I've been fortunate to do a little dabbling down in.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  What country were you in?

• 5:37Steven Rinella?

  Well, so some was in, so I spent some time in Bolivia.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 5:42Steven Rinella?

  In the headwaters of the Amazon.

• 5:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:44Steven Rinella?

  Then I spent some time in what's sort of like cheating to call it the Amazon. But I was just over the ridgeline in Guyana. So if I took a piss, it would have flowed out into the Caribbean.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 5:54Steven Rinella?

  But if I went a little ways yonder and I took a piss, it would have made its way out the Amazon.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  You're sort of, so you're almost, were you in the Orinoco River Basin?

• 6:02Steven Rinella?

  Well, it was the, I'm trying to remember the main, the main system, the, um, the hell's that main river? I'll have to look it up, man.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  That's all right. Yeah, I get where you were though. And Guyana is beautiful.

• 6:13Steven Rinella?

  No, it's freaking gorgeous, dude. I went down there two times.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Untouched. I actually don't know much about it.

• 6:17Steven Rinella?

  We were in some wild country, man. We were in some wild country. It was amazing. But first off, have you been bit by those bullet ants?

• 6:23Speaker 04

  Oh, as soon as I got to the Amazon and I was like fresh off the boat, you know, fresh, I just, you know, New York kid got to the Amazon and they looked at me and they went, so you like the wild, right? And I went, yeah, you know, they saw me catching snakes and climbing trees. And they went, oh, so you're like a jungle man, right? And I went, yeah.

• 6:39Steven Rinella?

  Big jungle guy.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  And they went, come here. They said, we're gonna give you the initiation and that, you know, you take a bullet ant that's this big and you put it on your forearms. So what we would do is put it, you know, you just drop it on so it's not upset. And then me and you rub forearms together. It's sort of like Russian roulette with a bullet ant. And whoever it stings, it stings.

• 6:57Steven Rinella?

  Who's, who's doing this?

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Me and one of the guys. He just goes, you know, you want, you want to see what it's like? He goes, let's get this out of the way. That was my initiation.

• 7:05Steven Rinella?

  So, so homie, you're doing it and you're like, who's gonna get it?

• 7:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you just rub it between your forearms. It's like you sort of just have.

• 7:11Steven Rinella?

  So he gets pissed and grabs somebody?

• 7:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so they have huge pincers on the front, you know, their, their mandibles are for cutting and holding. And so he got me with the mandibles, which hurts. And I was like, oh, this is killer. Now he hadn't stung me yet. And then they sting you. And they use those mandibles to get leverage and get in on you. And they, and they inject you, I mean, there's a reason they're called a bullet ant. It hurts.

• 7:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  And the, you know, I've been stung by bees and wasps thousands of times and I just don't care. This thing, you feel like, it's almost like their venom is engineered to make you feel like something's wrong. Cause it's not just localized at the site. It like goes systemic and then you feel it in your lymph nodes and you feel it in weird places on your back and you start getting the sweats and you go, I'm having a bad reaction to this. And like, the truth is you just got hit with a bullet ant. And that spot's gonna keep throbbing and you're gonna have that back of the skull headache. And the first one really got me, like really got me. And I was for like 24 hours, I was feeling it and I felt terrible and I really didn't do much.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  I mean, now on number, you know, 12 or 13, I think over the years where it's like now, it's like, man, now my day is ruined. I'm gonna be in a bad mood, but it's not the end of the world.

• 8:24Steven Rinella?

  So you just ride it out?

• 8:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:25Steven Rinella?

  When I, when I had got bit by one of those, I didn't know, I knew it was a thing and I knew it was bad, but I had the extra anxiety of not having read up on it. So I didn't know what was going on. But then it went away.

• 8:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:39Steven Rinella?

  But then I heard about guys doing it like, doing it just to do it.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  The glove.

• 8:44Steven Rinella?

  Putting on gloves to have a minute.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  They have the native glove where they make it, it's like a basket woven into a, into a flat glove. And they stick their hand in there and the, the somehow these, this tribe is able to put their abdomens in the, in the mesh. So all the abdomens are facing in, I don't know how they do that.

• 9:01Steven Rinella?

  And then you stick your.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  To what end? It's an initiation ceremony for the young men. And that's a whole other topic about how we don't have those anymore for our young men. But they, they do that. And then as the young men are, I mean, I'm surprised that it doesn't just cause you so much, you know, like anaphylactic shock or something, just overwhelm your system. But as you're recovering from this and you're, you know, feverish and laying on the ground, they have, they pair you up with a young woman who cares for you. And it's supposed to be like a, yeah. So they knock you down and then they let, they let you get nursed back to health. That's what I understand. That's what I remember of it.

• 9:36Steven Rinella?

  Have you ever seen the, like, just for listeners, can you back up on, for listeners, what we're talking about here?

• 9:40Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 9:41Steven Rinella?

  Like, I mean, it's many. I've never, I've never seen this, guys just told me about it.

• 9:47Speaker 04

  I've seen it, you know, anthropology class in college. I remember they showed us a video of it and I don't remember if it was the Yanomami or the Kaipo or who was it did it? But I'm talking, I want to say like, you know, over 80 or close to 100 bullet ants, which 100 wasps would put you in bad shape.

• 10:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 10:03Speaker 04

  100 bullet ants. I mean, I would be worried about serious injury, you know, or systemic injury.

• 10:08Steven Rinella?

  Presumably some dude's gotta be, it's gotta over time has had to kill somebody.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  Oh, sure. I mean, people die from, you know, if you're allergic to wasps, I don't, I don't know if bullet ants are bad for people that have a wasp allergy. That's another thing, being in the Amazon and I've had people come down and they go, uh, you know, they get there and they go, you know, by the way, they see a wasp and go, oh, I gotta watch out for that. I'm allergic to wasps. And I'm like, you are in the Amazon. Like you should have not come, you know? And so I always have a, you know, EpiPen ready to go.

• 10:37Steven Rinella?

  On that wasp question, that was one of the things I was gonna get to.

• 10:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:40Steven Rinella?

  Well, finish up the bullet ant thing. You already answered my question, but just, I was getting it over with now. Then we'll go back to bullet ants. An observation I had in Bolivia and other guys I was with had it, it's like. Like in like in an American summer.

• 10:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:54Steven Rinella?

  Right? Now and then it's just now and then someone gets bit by a hornet or a wasp. Like in an American summer, this summer I got one wasp bite.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 11:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay. And I could talk about it and tell you when it happened and all that and you know how itchy it was. But to come out of your tent and just have it be that they're getting you like mosquitoes.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:17Steven Rinella?

  You'd be like, I know that when I walk out of this tent and just go down to get some breakfast.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:25Steven Rinella?

  In the other tent, I know that when I walk out of this town, I'll be greeted by a wasp that will bite me.

• 11:30Speaker 04

  You get used to it, man. I don't know. It's one of those things. And that's why the jungle is not for everybody. When I come North America and I'm doing some backpacking, I'm like, man, this is great. You know, this is great. There's like one or two mosquitoes and you can walk barefoot into some brush and not be worried about anything comparatively. I mean, I just, I just getting stung by a wasp was a daily occurrence. We just covered in wasp and when you're, you have sweat on you, they are so hungry.

• 11:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 04

  And so carnivorous, they'll, what I do now is I have a covenant with the wasps. And that is that if they want to sit on me and, and, and eat my sweat, great. I'll be sitting there doing something. There'll be a wasp on my wrist and I'll be like, fair play. You're not, I'm not going to bother you. As soon as a wasp stings me, I spend the rest of my day trying to get the highest body count I can. I start trying, I got gotten as high as 80 where it's like, I will just start newspaper whacking them and just.

• 12:22Steven Rinella?

  You'll slowly have an impact.

• 12:24Speaker 04

  If you, if you disrupt the covenant, I'm, I'm all for peace, but if you disrupt it, I'm coming for your kind and then I'll.

• 12:31Steven Rinella?

  Um, okay. We kind of, we, we covered it on bullet. Oh no, I was gonna tell you this about bullet ants. If listeners go way back, we had an episode, maybe Nate can pull it up, the name of it. We had a, the entomologist, Justin Schmidt.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 12:45Steven Rinella?

  On and Justin Schmidt.

• 12:49Steven Rinella?

  Studied venomous, everything, like anything that bites.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay. That was his specialty. So insect venoms and all that kind of stuff. And he, the reason I had him on is he famously, he came up with this thing called the Schmidt pain.

• 13:03Speaker 04

  The pain index. Yeah.

• 13:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And he put the bullet ant, the bullet ant sits at the highest, occupies the highest position on the Schmidt pain index. And he has these really descriptive, like say I put myself in a word trap, descriptive descriptions.

• 13:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:22Steven Rinella?

  Descriptions.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  Break through the wall.

• 13:23Steven Rinella?

  Of, uh, the bites.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:25Steven Rinella?

  You know, and his, his description of the bullet and is funny. I can't remember what it is.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:30Steven Rinella?

  But do you agree highest?

• 13:32Speaker 04

  Uh, I mean, the bullet ant sort of has a riveting bouquet of, of semi neurological effects and a, and a trembling sort of feverish aftershock. And it's, it's bad. It's real bad. However, there are some big, you know, there's a tarantula hawk.

• 13:49Steven Rinella?

  He talks about that.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  Uh, that's.

• 13:50Steven Rinella?

  I think it doesn't score as high.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  I don't know. I've never been bitten by one. They fly by carrying tarantulas. You're just doing something and this giant wasp is like three inches long. You know, they have that suit. It looks terrifying. It looks like a, a, like a sniper rifle for an insect or something. It's like that long abdomen with a big hangy stinger. And it just, it looks like it's made to cause pain, but what it's made to do is get into a tarantula and then they, and they carry them off. And those just look terrifying. The worst pain I ever felt was, there was a big caterpillar. With this vertical fluffy hair and it was orange. Uh, it looks a lot like Donald Trump's hair.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  And, and I caught this caterpillar and I knew it was bad news and I had it on a leaf and I was like, I am going to be so careful. I'm going to put it in this box and in the morning I'm going to take a look at it and try and get some pictures of it and figure out what it is. So I got it on this very sturdy leaf and I'm getting it in the box and right as I got it in the box, the leaf just gave way and the caterpillar fell against my hand.

• 14:51Steven Rinella?

  Oh, and that did.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  So underneath all that hair were these like Christmas tree spines. And when that hit me, I have never felt of an insect, we're not talking about stingrays, but of an insect. It was, it was un, un, it was shockingly horrible, way, way worse than a bullet ant.

• 15:10Steven Rinella?

  Maybe Schmidt didn't know about that one.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  Maybe he didn't know about.

• 15:13Steven Rinella?

  I think he might have passed Nate, can you figure, before I, did he pass away?

• 15:23Steven Rinella?

  What's type in Justin Schmidt entomologist?

• 15:25Speaker 06

  Passed away in 2023.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  I will never know.

• 15:28Steven Rinella?

  Dude got outproduced right there by an engineer.

• 15:32Steven Rinella?

  Um, all right, here's another one.

• 15:33Speaker 04

  Tell me.

• 15:34Steven Rinella?

  I was, so I was with a guy. I was with a, um, um, guy in Guyana. He's Makushi. Have you ever heard of Makushi? He's Makushi. He was explaining to me, we're sitting there looking at anaconda on the bank. He says to me, I mean, in all, these dudes that say a lot of things where they're not being like, they're not trying to wow you with like weird stuff. It's just like, like, you know what I'm saying? Like just a matter of fact statement.

• 16:09Steven Rinella?

  He said, if I touch that, I was asking him, is it okay to poke it? Okay, we got up. Like naturally. I know. Being like, you know, in America.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  Can I poke that?

• 16:19Steven Rinella?

  Being in America, I had the impulse that we would poke it to see what happened. And he mentions to me, he mentions to me that if you touch it with a bow. It will die in about 45 minutes. And it's a painful death.

• 16:37Speaker 04

  Wait, hold up. If you touch an anaconda with a bow.

• 16:40Steven Rinella?

  With a bow.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  Like a, like a bow.

• 16:41Steven Rinella?

  His, his art is bow.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. You touch the anaconda, the anaconda.

• 16:45Steven Rinella?

  Laid my bow on it.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:48Steven Rinella?

  It would, it would kill it. It would die in 40, about 45 minutes.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 16:52Steven Rinella?

  You ever heard this?

• 16:53Speaker 04

  No.

• 16:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  There are different parts of the Amazon. They have completely different local lore.

• 16:57Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  And I've heard everything from, you know, if you shoot a giant anteater, the bullet will ricochet off and it will always hit you back. So if you shoot a giant anteater, you'll die. Sure. Uh, I've caught over 90 anacondas in my lifetime and not one of them has died after. Now I've never touched one with a bow, but as rational humans, I would understand, you know, if I touched you with a piece of wood right now, there's not a lot of reason that you would die afterwards. Anacondas are tough. I've also seen from capybara that, you know, rodent family, those teeth.

• 17:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  If they get them, you know, on the stomach, the rodent turns around and will go to work just trying to chew that anaconda apart. And that's why they wrap them up like that as much as they can.

• 17:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  But I've seen anacondas with wounds that would cause us to go to the hospital.

• 17:43Steven Rinella?

  Well, to be clear, I don't think, I don't think.

• 17:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:47Steven Rinella?

  That the anaconda would die if he touched it with his bow. And I don't even care what I think about it. I just thought I, I was, I liked and was interested in that he didn't think this, but he knew it. Meaning I didn't feel compelled to, it's not my place to go argue with him about what is actually happening.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  Oh, see, I'm from New York. I would argue the shit out of that. I'd be like, what are you talking about?

• 18:13Steven Rinella?

  No, another white dude.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  Do it.

• 18:14Steven Rinella?

  Another white dude. I'd have been like, come on.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  Oh, so what, what is this? He gets some sort of exemption for being indigenous? No.

• 18:20Steven Rinella?

  Yes. Yes.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  No, I want, I want to see it proven.

• 18:22Steven Rinella?

  You got a huge exemption for me where I'm like, that's great. That's great. Let's not touch it with the bow.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  Not interested in that. I, I, so when, when.

• 18:28Steven Rinella?

  So you'll argue with guys?

• 18:30Speaker 04

  That's all I do is argue and I've learned a lot arguing. Um, they told me, you know, they said this root, all you gotta do with this root is crush it up and throw it in a stream. And you can have all the fish you want. And I said, how would a root do that?

• 18:42Steven Rinella?

  But that's true though.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  Well, that is true. Basket. Yeah, that's the thing. So that one turned out true and they picked up, you know, we'll, we ate fish for lunch that day. Cause he went, oh, I'm going to show you. Great. And then there's less verifiable ones like up this particular river. There's a type of anaconda that's triple the size of a normal anaconda. So instead of being 20 or 25 feet, they're like 45, 50 feet and they have ears.

• 19:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  I said, okay, produce one in front of me and then I shall believe it. You know, find me a skull, find me anything. Uh, this is what I tell the alien people too, you know, find me some evidence.

• 19:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 19:18Speaker 04

  And I'll be a lot more minimal to your wacko beliefs.

• 19:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 19:21Speaker 04

  And, uh, so far we're, we're still outstanding on that one. Uh, the other one was if you break an arm. You, you find a cane toad and they're native to the Amazon, unlike Australia where they're an invasive species. You find a cane toad, you square it up on the ground and you stomp on it real hard. So its guts go flying out its mouth.

• 19:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  And then you take the, this little skin wallet and you put it on the broken bone area and wrap it tight with a bandage. And that's supposed to make your bones heal faster. Now cane toads do have a very powerful poison in those, those poison glands on there, on there, just behind their eyes. Now maybe there is a compound there that helps.

• 19:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  But until I get a chemist to confirm that. I don't care.

• 20:03Steven Rinella?

  And you got, and you're, you're bold enough just to go down and you're like, you're in their neck of the woods and you're telling them what's up. See, I need to get, I need to get more bold.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  Well, I'm not telling them what's up. I'm saying, I really want to understand your perspective and understand what things are relevant or not, you know, but you know, growing up, people go, you know, don't go running in the rain. You'll catch a cold. I'm like, go to Bud's. You think they're, and also a cold is rhinovirus. So you tell me there's a virus in the rain?

• 20:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 04

  You know, I run in the rain all the time. I see a thunderstorm. I'm like, bet.

• 20:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  I'm going running now. And so these, these are these sort of old tales that, that have no basis in reality. And I like to undo those because I feel like, you know, science has led us to the place where me and you can get on a plane and go somewhere, or a relative can have a heart transplant. And like, there's, there's a lot that comes from this sort of logical way of thinking. And so when you're in the jungle, I want to know. Is this true or is this not? People say, you know, a bushmaster is the only snake that will attack you. If you see a bushmaster, it's gonna attack you. Okay. So I went out and I found a bushmaster, a big 11 foot bushmaster. I stood near it and it was all curled up, thicker than my arm. And they have crocodile spikes on their back. So the only snakes I've seen that has like physical features. It's terrifying,

• 21:14Speaker 04

  terrifying. That big angry face. They look like they want to kill you. But he was curled up on the ground and I sat there for a while and the bushmaster looked at me and I looked at the bushmaster and he flicked his tongue and was like, hmm. It was really peaceful for a while. And then I said, now I gotta poke it. Now I have to poke this 11 foot venomous snake. And so I went and I got a stick and I picked him up by the tail and, and then, and then, you know, the snake started moving in such a way and there's people nearby and we had to measure him because we were doing a reptile survey. So I got him by the head. And I had, you know, you have this snake with these giant fangs just out and, and your heart, you know, it's one of those things where you have to be concentrated because they could also close their mouth in anger and bite through their lower jaw and envenomate

• 21:56Speaker 04

  you. Or as you're holding it, I mean, they're so, their skulls are so malleable. If you don't, if you're not perfectly, if you don't have perfect form.

• 22:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  They could, you know, get you. And if you, that's all it takes. So I'm really concentrated on head. And so I have a body going over my neck. This is an 11 foot snake. And then the most terrifying thing happened. I feel a sharp point piercing my skin, but it's not where I'm looking. It's not at the business end. It's on my other arm. And I had a full body. I just felt my blood reverse direction in my veins. I got, I got so terrified. I was like, I've been envenomated. And I said, this makes no sense. And I look and on their tail, again, no other snake that I know of has this. I think it's the males have a spike at the end of their tail. Most snake tails just end in scales.

• 22:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 04

  This guy has a hard spike, like a nail. And it was driving it into my skin.

• 22:47Steven Rinella?

  It's like carrying, it's like carrying a derringer in your boot, man.

• 22:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. It scared the hell out of me. I, I, I would put that up there with like top five moments that I've been truly scared.

• 22:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 22:58Speaker 04

  I just didn't expect it, didn't know about it. It never read about it.

• 23:00Steven Rinella?

  Did it do anything to you or is it just a spike?

• 23:02Speaker 04

  No, no, just a spike. But it works.

• 23:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  It works. So if, you gotta imagine if a predator grabs a bushmaster and it's not able to defend itself with its fangs.

• 23:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 04

  Well, it's just gonna scare him with this secondary, you know, punch that's a stab. And any, any logical predator is gonna, gonna run from that. Not to mention, most of the animals in the jungle know that a bushmaster is bad news. Just like even elephants, you know, a king cobra will raise up its head. I spent a lot of time in India. A king cobra will raise up its head and look at an elephant. It'd be like, look, if you want it, I'll give it. The elephants know. They know. They're like, yeah, we're not gonna step on you. Don't worry.

• 23:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  We'll go around and that's fine. That's why they have the hood.

• 23:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Speaker 04

  It's to say, back off, just like a rattlesnake's rattle. It's just like, hey, man, I don't wanna.

• 23:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 04

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• 23:51Speaker 04

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• 25:19Steven Rinella?

  You know, here, here's one more we kind of solved yesterday when we were talking about you coming on. It was my, it was my, this is my second to last one, is I until yesterday.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:31Steven Rinella?

  Believed.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  Uh oh. I'm gonna have to make fun of you.

• 25:35Steven Rinella?

  I until yesterday believed that there was a little teeny catfish.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 25:39Steven Rinella?

  That climbs up your pecker.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 25:42Steven Rinella?

  And lodges into your urethra.

• 25:44Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 25:46Steven Rinella?

  I believe this so much that I was wondering yesterday, is this a female problem as well? Well, like, will it lodge itself in the female urethra?

• 25:52Speaker 04

  Hmm. What made you stop believing in this yesterday?

• 25:55Steven Rinella?

  Someone, while I was talking to you, might've been him, was looking online and they're like, that's not true.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  Uh, I think it is. The candiru is a fish.

• 26:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's him.

• 26:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. Candiru. So we have large candirus that we catch. It's so annoying, man, when you're fishing and you, I know what they feel like now and they're horrible. They're just, I mean, it's a junk fish. You can't eat it. They're foul. It's a parasite fish.

• 26:18Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 26:19Speaker 04

  And in the Amazon, they, they have these barely eyes. They're sort of light sensing organs. They're incredibly archaic looking.

• 26:25Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  And they grab onto your hook and they come up and they make a terrible noise. They make a terrible vocalization. Locals just kill them and throw them in the jungle. Let something else eat them.

• 26:34Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  Uh, but apparently there's a tiny species of candiru that swims up the gills of fish. So when there's rushing water, they, they, they can swim up there and latch like a lamprey.

• 26:45Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 26:46Speaker 04

  And then you won't get them out. So apparently in the annals of history, three or four people have been swimming in the Amazon, submerged in the, in the water and had one swim up their dick. This has happened and it is possible for women, although I'd imagine that the entry is a little more complicated. Um, but it's like, I'm way more worried about getting struck by lightning, getting in a car crash, getting bitten by a venomous snake. Yeah. Like this is about a thousand things I'm worried about, not dickfish.

• 27:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I, like, I don't want to overstay how, but hearing about it, I was, and I didn't like, I would never not go in the water because something like that. But in the water, I was definitely always like, how serious are people about this?

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:28Steven Rinella?

  The, the last one I'll hit you with, I know is not true, you know, but I loved it. Is these guys, so in Bolivia, these guys were telling me, they're like, hey, heads up. You know, they're saying this through a translator, but heads up, if you see a beautiful woman, you see a beautiful woman rise out of the water.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  Oh no. Yeah.

• 27:47Steven Rinella?

  Telling you she's drowning.

• 27:49Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 27:50Steven Rinella?

  Don't go help her.

• 27:54Steven Rinella?

  Cause she will, she will grab you and drag you under and they'll never see you again. Heads up.

• 27:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so, and that's as far as, that's as far as it went?

• 28:03Steven Rinella?

  And it, but it was like this, it was like the sirens from The Odyssey.

• 28:06Speaker 04

  Okay. Well.

• 28:07Steven Rinella?

  And when I say that, I mean Homer's Odyssey. I haven't been fortunate enough to watch the new Odyssey movie. But I want you to know, this is coming from a deeply literary perspective, not a contemporary film going perspective. It's like the sirens in The Odyssey.

• 28:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:20Steven Rinella?

  They beckon to you.

• 28:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I'm so, I'm so sorry to have to tell you that that's somewhat true.

• 28:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 28:29Speaker 04

  Okay. Because, because apparently there's, I was on a, on a river where, where they said, you know, there's pink river dolphins here. And they said, every now and then, a man will mistake a dolphin for a woman drowning.

• 28:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  And, you know, you'll see this sort of very human like skin and he'll rush out into the water and grab this, this dolphin, which doesn't sound realistic.

• 28:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  Dolphins are curious. And again, you know, and the, and the annals of the, in the, on all these tributaries.

• 28:56Steven Rinella?

  And push you under.

• 28:57Speaker 04

  They'll bump you along and push you under. And then there's. There's at least a few instances, they, they told me on the river, I don't want to have to tell you this, but they told me on the river, they said, you've got to be careful. We don't know, there could be people in the Amazon right now, listening to this. They said, you know, if, if a dolphin makes advances on you, whatever you do, don't have sex with the dolphin. And I went, thanks for the note.

• 29:20Steven Rinella?

  Noted.

• 29:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, next river. And then I was like, hey, are there, you know, I want to get a picture of a dolphin, you know, or I'd like to see you, I never saw one. And I said, you know, are there dolphins here? And the guy goes, yeah, he goes, but if you make love to a dolphin, you have to stay in the shallows, he goes, because if they take you deep, you'll drown and they, they won't really, they don't want to kill you, but they will out of pure passion. I went, how many of you are fucking dolphins? I said, why is everyone telling me this? And they all kind of laughed and they said, no, no, no, yeah, but at the end of the day, just be careful.

• 29:49Speaker 04

  And I was, this was serious to them, you know? One guy, one guy told me a halfway reasonable story where he said, this dolphin was coming close to his wife and his daughter while they were washing, but then they, they figured out over time that there was a cadence to it. They figured out that the dolphin was only coming at certain times in the month.

• 30:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 30:06Speaker 04

  They figured out it was the menstrual cycle.

• 30:08Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  So the dolphin was picking up on the smell.

• 30:10Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Coming in and the dolphin was just spending time with them, being really friendly or just like swim around to the point they could almost reach out and touch it. Dolphins being friendly, this freaked this guy out, so he shot the dolphin, which,

• 30:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  Which I think, you know, that's the coolest thing in the world. You have a friendly dolphin coming by, there's certain, there's, I don't think there's any records of dolphins, you know, attacking humans in a predatory way, at least the pink river dolphin. But they, the locals definitely have a complex relationship. And there's always been this sort of, you know, whether it's seals and silkies and, you know, this sirens in the ocean.

• 30:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  You know, when you're out there and you start hallucinating, I think pretty much anything can look like a woman.

• 30:50Steven Rinella?

  Is that, is that river dolphin, that pink river dolphin? Are they moving in and out of saline water or can, can they live their whole life and never touch salt water?

• 31:01Speaker 04

  Great question. So when the, apparently when the continents were connected, the Amazon and the Congo were touching. And so the original watershed flowed from east to west in this sort of proto Congo river system. The continents separated and then South America hit the Nazca Plate, which tilted the whole end up. You got the Andes Mountains. And then now it had, there was still a basin and so it had salinated water in it. And then as that started draining out, before the jungle ever formed, as the jungle formed, you had these, these species like freshwater stingrays, manatees, dolphins that gradually adapted to desalinated freshwater life.

• 31:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's real interesting. All them damn stingrays running around, it's crazy, man.

• 31:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Like, I mean,

• 31:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:48Steven Rinella?

  Hundreds and hundreds of miles from the ocean.

• 31:51Speaker 04

  Oh, no, I mean, they're just jungle stingrays and they're beautiful.

• 31:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 31:55Speaker 04

  But, but.

• 31:55Steven Rinella?

  So they've figured it out, like they.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  Totally, totally unrelated. I mean, where I work is thousands of miles away from the ocean. It's about as far away from an ocean as you can get. You know, there's only a few places where you're that far from an ocean. I mean, because you think you, you start in the Pacific, you're over the Andes, down into the Amazon. And then it's like four thou, at least 4,000 kilometers to Rio, you know? It's like you're, it's the whole Amazon basin to the Atlantic.

• 32:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 32:21Speaker 04

  So the animals that are living up in the little tiny tributary headwaters, like where you were in Bolivia, chock full of stingrays, no access. I mean, totally freshwater species for millions of years.

• 32:31Steven Rinella?

  You don't even need to comment on this, but I just invite you to think about it. I can't remember what the distance is over, so over a hundred miles away from where the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 32:44Steven Rinella?

  It's the bottom of that river is below sea level.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  How is that possible?

• 32:52Speaker 04

  We, we have a. Is this like a deep, a deep trench that?

• 32:55Steven Rinella?

  It, it, just hold that in your mind.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 32:58Steven Rinella?

  I don't know yet. We're going to interview a guy that, we're going to interview a guy that knows a lot about this subject though, yeah.

• 33:02Speaker 04

  Cause in the Amazon, from the headwaters where you, where I work and where you visited to the Atlantic, it's only a few hundred meters drop. Like it's not like thousands of meters over the whole continent. You're going thousands of miles and it's nothing. And that's why the rivers are, are squiggling like that. That's why they S up like a snake, because when there's a steep decline, river's going to flow straight.

• 33:26Steven Rinella?

  You know.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  The easiest path. When the landscape's that flat, it's kind of just finding the, the easiest path along the way. And that's why you get those, you know, as the crow flies in the Amazon, you go, that's just 60 miles. Well, if we're going by boat, it could be 300 miles, you know, totally different. Crow flies versus river miles, completely different thing down there.

• 33:46Steven Rinella?

  All right, let's get, let's get more serious.

• 33:49Steven Rinella?

  Not that it was, not that this problem with these ladies dragging the hunters is a serious issue.

• 33:52Speaker 04

  Big fish and dolphin.

• 33:54Steven Rinella?

  We'll get more serious.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:56Steven Rinella?

  Help me,

• 33:59Steven Rinella?

  help me and, and others that haven't been lucky to explore this area much. When, when, when, when we say the Amazon.

• 34:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:09Steven Rinella?

  What are we talking about? I mean, it's a river, it's a jungle, it's like all these different countries, like, like, help us understand what the Amazon or the Amazon jungle, like what does that mean?

• 34:20Speaker 04

  Oh, boy. What I can tell you is this, when I was a kid, I, I grew up, you know, my parents, they said, you're not allowed to watch anything. Nature documentaries is all right. So I got to watch nature documentaries and I would always gravitate towards the ones that were about the rainforest. There were those gorillas or, but the Amazon, it was like, they were like, this is the largest contiguous rainforest on earth. When you look at planet earth and you see South America there, it's this giant green patch. And so in my mind, I said, man, this is the largest wilderness, the some of the, some of the largest wilderness areas where there's just no people. And you say that, that system has been developing for 55 million years untouched.

• 35:01Speaker 04

  And so you talk about old growth, this is original growth, never touched in much of the Amazon. And you talk about species, you know, rainforests hold about half of the species, terrestrial species on earth, and they're only on 6% of the landmass. Half of the species on earth on 6% of the landmass.

• 35:18Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  Along the rainforest.

• 35:20Steven Rinella?

  Half the species on earth crammed on six, 50% of the species crammed on 6% of the space.

• 35:25Speaker 04

  It's wild. And so they're so mega biodiverse. And in the Amazon basin, and so, you know, I just, I just always had it in my head that it was almost mythical. And when I grew up.

• 35:36Steven Rinella?

  That's, that's what I have in mind.

• 35:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's sort of, you know, just mist and giant trees and undiscovered species and, you know, brightly colored birds and super dangerous insects and giant anacondas. And, and we think of, you know, we'll get to this, but you know, top down predatory ecology, you're talking about murderers row. It's not one, you got harpy eagles and giant river otters and anacondas and caiman and jaguars. And there's several in any given spot in the Amazon of these major predators. And then just the millions and millions, you think of a 160 foot tall tree that's a thousand years old. You do a time lapse on that tree from the time, from a thousand years ago to now, and that tree's been sitting out there.

• 36:17Steven Rinella?

  Thousand year old trees.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  You think of all those historical events, you go, just go to World War I, World War II, our great, great, great grandparents. That tree was standing out there in the middle of the jungle. And if you do a time lapse on that sapling, as it grows to be a tree that's bigger than this room, thousands and thousands of species moving up and down that thing as, as, as all the years pass by. And so this, this single tree that has thousands of species that have lived on it, and each of these trees are sort of a bio water pump, pumping water up. And so trillions of liters of water every day are coming off the Amazon rainforest and forming that weather system that makes it a rainforest.

• 36:56Speaker 04

  And my brain loved the ethos, just like we love the, the feeling of the mountains and antlers and clear water and sort of, there's a feeling that comes with the American wilderness, that feeling of the American wild. And everybody knows what that's like, even if you've never been there. And with jungle, there was sort of this drumbeat feeling of like raindrops and arrow frogs and, and then really sheltered green. You're underneath 100 feet, 120, 140 feet of, of canopy. And it's a 3D environment. You know, you're not just walking on a trail and you can look around. No, you're walking on a trail and you're on a little trail that's a tunnel.

• 37:35Steven Rinella?

  That's a great point, man, yeah.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  Some of the, 50% of the animals that live in a rainforest, live in the canopy or off the ground in branches and never touch the ground. So that's a whole 3D environment where all the wildlife is and you don't have access to it.

• 37:49Steven Rinella?

  That's a great point. Here around here, everything occurs at eye level.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 37:54Steven Rinella?

  Everything is at eye level.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so it's trippy, you're almost at the bottom of a green ocean.

• 38:00Steven Rinella?

  So that's a great point, man.

• 38:01Speaker 04

  So getting lost out there feels incredibly claustrophobic. And so people say, what's the most dangerous thing in the Amazon? It's honestly just the size of the Amazon. Because you get off a trail, you have no navigational points. You're just dead reckoning through the jungle, which most people can't do. And even if you are good, you come to a tree fall where there's two acres of trees that have come down and you can't make it through there. And there are wasp nests and venomous snakes and, and thorns. It's, and then you got to make it around that, which is a, you know, let's say a mile long detour potentially. And then you hit a swamp and then you got to make it around that. And all of a sudden you're going miles in the wrong direction. Or your other, your only other alternative is to hack your way through that dense thing.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  Open old growth forest, the, the canopy is so dense that it is kind of open in the, in the lower, under the, under story. But man, you just hit play. I've hit places on solos where for one or two days, you, you feel like you're never gonna get out. It feels like you're under just this impenetrable mess of branches and it's, it's kinda terrifying.

• 39:10Steven Rinella?

  One of the things that struck me is, um, especially in the evening or in the early morning.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:15Steven Rinella?

  Is you, you know, the, the stress of having just too lot of noise?

• 39:20Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 39:21Steven Rinella?

  It's all, you, when you think, well, most people think about that, you always associate it with, um, like music being too loud or, or a building having poor acoustics and it's too loud. But, um, such loud animal noise.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:35Steven Rinella?

  Especially you throw in the howler monkeys and everything. Such loud animal noise that you, I would just catch myself sometimes wanting to go like, everybody has to shut up.

• 39:48Steven Rinella?

  Cause like, like bewildering amounts of noise.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, that's the dawn chorus in the Amazon. It's funny because at night you, you hear the frogs going except times a million. And then there's this really quiet period around three 30 to four AM.

• 40:03Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Things get a little bit quiet and then all of a sudden you'll hear that first bird that goes, and then all of a sudden the macaw, you'll hear a set of macaws on the horizon, howler monkeys just before dawn at that purple, purple point. Oh, and you're like, oh, there they are. And then the other group will start answering and then the jungle starts rumbling and you hear the tinamus popping up and the macaws and the mot mots and everybody starts turning on. Spider monkeys start calling and all of a sudden the jungle turns on, sun comes over the horizon and it's just a party. And then everybody's up and everybody's trying to get to, it's great. Same thing in the evening, you get down and again, somehow it's the tinamus at the crepuscular transitions. And these, the undulated tinamus side, it's sort of the anthem of the Amazon.

• 40:45Speaker 04

  And you get to this point, you're like, wow, that, that was a beautiful, we get to a high point and go, that was a beautiful sunset. And then you hear that first, you hear that first frog and then you hear something else answer and you're like, oh man, they just, it's like someone switching on the lights at night. It's like, oh, we just switched over to the nocturnal chorus. And it's, it's, it's really beautiful. If we were in a swamp in the rainy season, when the frogs decide to mate, I would have to be screaming in order for you to hear me. Yeah.

• 41:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. It's like stressful. I'm sure you get used to it, but to me.

• 41:12Speaker 04

  I actually find it very, it's like a blanket, it's falling asleep to that.

• 41:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 41:15Speaker 04

  You know, people, people I find, uh, when I come back, people, you know, people like, oh, I, this is my noise machine. And I'm like, I'm gonna throw that out the window.

• 41:24Speaker 04

  I've fallen asleep to frogs my whole life and, and, and I love it. It's kinda like a blanket. When I come and stay in a hotel room and all you can hear is an air conditioner or that building sound, I, I get, I find it very, I'm the guy that'll put on rainforest sounds to go to sleep. You know, I got kinda used to it.

• 41:42Steven Rinella?

  Let me, uh, let me ask you about the Amazon in a different way. Um, I mean, you, you're, you talking about what it's like to be in it is, is, is puts you there and it's beautiful, but like, let me, let me try to express my question this way would be, if you, if you talk to Americans, you say, let's say you go, the Rockies.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay. The Rockies, right? People have a night, a picture comes in their mind. A picture, a, a mountain landscape comes in their mind, right? But then it'd be like, not many people that have visited the Rockies, it invokes an image in their mind, right? They might think of skiing, they might think of elk, whatever. They think of something when you hear the Rockies. But not many people would be able to come and say, from other parts of the country would be like, well, you know, the, the, the, the southernmost, right? They sort of begin whatever. I don't know. I don't even know. They sort of begin in New Mexico, right? The spine runs up, there's these ancillary chains coming off them. They go up into British Columbia, wherever the hell it is. Like we, we know what it means, but we don't know what it means.

• 42:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. The average person.

• 42:48Steven Rinella?

  So layout for me and sort of a, like in a layout for me in,

• 42:54Steven Rinella?

  not, not geologically, but like geopolitically with country boundaries or whatever, like, how big is it and what do we mean?

• 43:02Speaker 04

  So I always forget that there's so many numbers, you know, 20 trillion liters of water come off the, the Amazon every day. And well, look, I'll give it to you the best I got it. Brazil contains 60% of the Amazon.

• 43:13Steven Rinella?

  It does.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  It does.

• 43:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay. That's helpful.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  That is unfortunate. Uh, and so.

• 43:18Steven Rinella?

  Like they're not who you want to have 60%?

• 43:20Speaker 04

  Well, the problem, and we're learning this right now, and I'd love to ask you questions about it, but you know, in conservation, they say that the victories are temporary and the losses are final. Once you lose that old growth. And so, you know, the thing is you can say, well, all this is protected. Well, then the administration changes and they come in and they go, well, actually we're gonna use it all for oil.

• 43:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  And so Brazil, you know, the last few presidents, we've, we, you had, we had Lula who said, he got in and he said, protecting the Amazon is part of my mandate, my mission as a president. And then you had Bolsonaro that was going, we have to open up the Amazon. We gotta make new roads. I wanna develop. I think that, you know, try, he was, I mean, and this guy was coming out, this guy was coming for him. He was going, you know, tribal people are a relic of a time past and we need to, we need to get them to catch up. He wasn't like, oh, you know, the Warani and the Zingu people and all, you know, these are great assets to our country. Uh, Amerindian nations that need to be respected and into, you know, respectfully integrated into our ideas and national, as a country. He was like, we gotta get rid of them.

• 44:21Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  And he was saying it publicly.

• 44:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. He had a very like, yeah, very like,

• 44:25Speaker 04

  aggressive.

• 44:26Steven Rinella?

  mid 1800s view.

• 44:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it was strange. It was spooky to hear it. And he did a lot of damage.

• 44:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  And then Lula got in and it calmed down a little bit, but now I think there's a, either another Bolsonaro or the same Bolsonaro almost running again. It's, it's always terrifying for the Amazon.

• 44:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 44:42Speaker 04

  Uh, so that's, that's, that's.

• 44:43Steven Rinella?

  They got, okay, I didn't realize that. So they got 60% of what we, what, what, when I say the Amazon jungle and I'm picturing the, the scene you laid out, they're sitting on 60% of that.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  This big basin. Yeah.

• 44:54Steven Rinella?

  Colombia has some, right?

• 44:55Speaker 04

  Colombia has a tiny bit. They got a little corner of the Amazon, the upper Amazon. Ecuador has a significant portion.

• 45:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 45:01Speaker 04

  Peru has the next, next to Brazil, you have Peru and Peru, if you're looking at a map, Peru has the headwaters of the Amazon.

• 45:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 45:09Speaker 04

  So you, you know, this, uh, John Hemming describes as the, the tree of rivers. You know, you got the mouth and in the Atlantic, and then you have this giant, you know, just lay a tree down. You got the headwaters and you have this huge artery coming down. We, I work in the upper branches. I'm all the way up at the top of the tree.

• 45:26Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 45:27Speaker 04

  And because of geological features and isolation, you know, you've got the Andes mountains that are extremely, you know, incredibly intense to navigate. And then you have all this jungle that was always impenetrable. And so, you know, people could, you could take a ship from the Atlantic and drive straight up into Manaus. You could keep going into Laredo, Peru, which is, which is, I think, several thousand, it might be the, the, the furthest inland shipping port on earth. That's, I remember that's a superlative I heard. But it's like, there are tankers going in along the main Amazon channel now. Then from there, if they're from Iquitos, then it branches out into a lot of smaller tributaries. They do not connect to our part of the basin. They're separated. You know, there's different drainages, like, just like you said.

• 46:11Speaker 04

  So where I am, we're in the Madre de Dios, which is, which is, you know, you have the Manu River and you have the Tambopata River and the Madre de Dios River. And so these are these other major rivers.

• 46:21Steven Rinella?

  These are all Peruvian rivers.

• 46:22Speaker 04

  These are all Peruvian rivers and, and so the Amazon is this giant basin where everything is connected. It's this huge rainforest. And when I say everything is connected, I mean that the rivers all connect through political boundaries.

• 46:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  The Heath River runs between Peru and Bolivia and they've protected it on both sides. I believe it's Buahasenini National Park in the Tambopata and then Medidi on the other side. And they share the river as a border. Both countries have agreed that that is some of the most pristine rainforest on earth and has to be protected, which is, which is rare. And, um,

• 46:55Steven Rinella?

  So like that level of protection. So, so in this, all these countries that hold part of it, Bolivia holds part of it.

• 47:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:02Steven Rinella?

  And, and, and they have done, they have done forward thinking.

• 47:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:09Steven Rinella?

  Protections in alignment with a neighboring country and that cooperation is rare.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  That cooperation is very rare.

• 47:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 47:15Speaker 04

  There's so many examples that I could think of where you have this beautiful national park and then you have a boundary. And then on the other side of it is complete destruction.

• 47:24Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 47:24Speaker 04

  And now the other note on Brazil is I, in college, I did a study abroad with Columbia University. And we were out in the Atlantic forest and most people you say.

• 47:34Steven Rinella?

  What does that mean?

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Exactly. And so the Atlantic, you know, you think of the Amazon and to the north, you have the Orinoco River Basin, which is another incredible rainforest river basin. And then here below the Amazon, southern, in, in southeast Brazil, you had the Atlantic forest with a high endemism, a lot of species that occurred there and nowhere else. You had the golden lion, tamarin, all these other species. Different ecosystem in the Amazon. There's something like 4% of it left.

• 48:01Steven Rinella?

  Of, of, of, of that Atlantic forest was.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's gone.

• 48:04Steven Rinella?

  4%.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  4%. And so you have, you know, Rio and, and Sao Paulo and sort of Brazil, the country is developed in that area. That's where they developed. That forest is wiped out. There, there are, you know, there are conservation areas and little islands of biodiversity. But as a, as a functioning system, it's gone.

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• 49:56Steven Rinella?

  So Rio de Janeiro was that's in the rainforest.

• 50:02Speaker 04

  It was. I haven't been to Rio, so I can't speak in an educated way about exactly how it is. But I also know that there's quite a bit of forest right outside of Rio. I know it's from documentaries where they're like, sort of that boundary where like, here's the city. And then there's boa constrictors and macaws and like, I don't, you know, it's completely foreign to me. But when you think of this giant rainforest, it's, it's really hard not to just wax poetic about this. But it's not just something that's held in seven or eight Latin American countries. But it is this undeniable geographical feature where everything runs together. Where the rain that comes off, the, the mist that comes off the canopy creates the rain that, that makes this whole rainforest possible.

• 50:45Speaker 04

  And when you're there, I mean, you've seen it, but it's this whole system is water, water and forest and water and forest. And in the morning, there's all this mist coming off the, the canopy. And so with the Amazon, the re, aside from the fact that the, you know, there's undiscovered medicines and more species than anywhere else. 1500, no, 4,000 species of butterflies that we know of across the basin.

• 51:07Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 51:07Speaker 04

  Highest number of dragonflies, spiders, you know, there's, there's, I think Peru has more birds than any other country. So birding is huge there and you know, harpy eagles, macaws, everything.

• 51:19Steven Rinella?

  I saw one of those harpies.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  They're very hard to see.

• 51:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:23Speaker 04

  Cause they stay in the canopy.

• 51:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, we saw, I mean, I wanted to see it. We saw it and it was regarded as that we were lucky.

• 51:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:30Steven Rinella?

  By the, by the guides we were with.

• 51:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:32Steven Rinella?

  It was, we were lucky to see it.

• 51:34Speaker 04

  I think it's sort of harpy eagle is sort of like a Wolverine where it's like, you're not, they're uncommon throughout their range. A visual encounter with one is not something you can guarantee. And I mean, we only see, I'd say maybe one a year and that's when we're living out there.

• 51:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 51:48Speaker 04

  And, uh, but, but the Amazon is such a system and it's so complex. And on every acre, there's millions of species and then such complex botany and the trees. That as these Latin American countries begin to eat into the Amazon. The, the challenge here is that we've already destroyed 20% of the Amazon. And so as a, as sort of a global society.

• 52:14Steven Rinella?

  That's, that's the current estimate, 20% of it's gone.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  Roughly.

• 52:18Steven Rinella?

  I would, I would have almost, I would have expected you to say a higher number.

• 52:22Speaker 04

  You know, 20% is the established normalized number that we say.

• 52:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 04

  You know, it could, it could have been higher in the last few years, but I would think that with, you know, sort of satellite mapping and everything. We have a pretty clear view of that.

• 52:35Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 52:35Speaker 04

  Maybe it's 22% or 18, you know, but. With the Amazon, the worry is, and there's a lot of scientists warning about this. This is a pretty simple equation. If you don't have enough forest to keep that massive amount of moisture coming up off the trees. Well, then you're not going to have as much rain. And if you don't have as much rain, that forest is going to start to dry out in a snowball effect. And they're worried that we could pass a threshold that there is absolutely no going back from a sort of one way door. Where we've removed too much of the rainforest and no matter what we do, it's not going to replace that amount of moisture. And then it's not just the Amazon.

• 53:12Steven Rinella?

  I understand what you're saying.

• 53:12Speaker 04

  Creating its own weather system. It's also there's sand from the Sahara that's coming over the Amazon and delivering nutrients to the forest. And so there's sort of this, this interchange between Africa and the Amazon. And these, I just, you know, I've become so immersed in these complex systems. And, and in the beauty of, of deep wilderness, that to me, when I, when I hear about what's happening to the Amazon. And when I watch what's happening to the Amazon on the ground, where areas of forest that I loved, that I grew up exploring in my twenties. Get incinerated to the ground. Those thousand year old trees turned over, burned. I'm talking about million dollar mahogany trees just burned because they're just building a road.

• 53:57Speaker 04

  They're trying to get access. They want it, they want to do cattle farms or grow papaya or cocaine or whatever it is. They just want land and the jungle's in the way. And for all of history, it was the impenetrable jungle, the heart of darkness. Now they have excavators and they have the funding and the Chinese just built a giant shipping port in Lima. Because they want to start getting into the Amazon. They want to start extracting resources. And so they're talking about building a, a railway system either through or over the Andes to start sucking on the Western Amazon.

• 54:29Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 54:29Speaker 04

  Which is terrifying because whether you care about nature or, or, or you don't, we need this system. I'm sure that everyone that listens to this podcast knows that it without, you know, clean water and clean air, nothing else you're going to. Nothing else you're interested in is going to happen. And, and the Amazon, it seems like it's sort of puts it on a global challenge. This is not up to us. It's not about like, whether you believe in it or not, you know? Do you think that we should protect this monument to, no, no, it's about survival too.

• 54:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  This is not just, is it pretty? It matters to our health.

• 55:04Steven Rinella?

  The, the, the point you're making, I never thought about it at landscape scale, but there's this idea, like take the passenger pigeon, which went extinct in the early 90s. Well, officially extinct in 1913 or something, but there's an idea that

• 55:21Steven Rinella?

  there was no version where you could have a few.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 55:26Steven Rinella?

  You had to have all of them or none of them. Meaning their whole, their whole system, right? How they functioned and operated relied on there being millions.

• 55:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:39Steven Rinella?

  And there, there, there wasn't a way to have a hundred.

• 55:42Speaker 04

  No.

• 55:42Steven Rinella?

  And so to hear you talk about the Amazon as being that, that maybe you can't have a little.

• 55:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:49Steven Rinella?

  Because the, because the thing that, that generates the rainforest, like at a point, it's either you gotta have X amount or none.

• 55:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:59Steven Rinella?

  You can't just have a little patch.

• 56:01Speaker 04

  No.

• 56:01Steven Rinella?

  Down the road.

• 56:02Speaker 04

  No, and we can't turn it into an archipelago of like protected areas and desert, not, I want to say desert wastelands, but just wastelands.

• 56:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 04

  And so where we are.

• 56:12Steven Rinella?

  Maybe it has to be big.

• 56:14Speaker 04

  It has to be big. That's the thing. It must be. And so, you know, where we work in the Amazon, illegal gold mining, there's gold in parts of the Amazon. But you don't get gold nuggets. You get, you get sedimentary gold, like in the sand, you have to put it on your finger. And then you go, oh, there's, there's a little piece of gold, you know, it's much better with a magnifying glass. But if you were to cut down the forest, burn the forest, remove the forest, flood it even better, do it to a lake, drain the lake. And then use a hose and a motor to just suck the ground up. And then get the gold out of that.

• 56:47Steven Rinella?

  Plaster mining, yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 04

  Using mercury. And then you burn off the mercury with a blowtorch. You're left with this little bit of gold, but you have to deforest and destroy unbelievable amounts of land. And so not too far away from where I am, there's hundreds of kilometers that have been denuded and destroyed, turned into a wasteland. And I was down there with ABC News and we literally saw tornadoes of dust. There was a dust storm in the Amazon because that part has been destroyed so badly. And that sandy environment, the sun is beating down on it, the mercury pollution, you're not, you know? And even if you were, even if you were to leave it, thousand, thousand years, few thousand years before it becomes jungle again. Like this is irreparable damage we're doing to the earth.

• 57:34Speaker 04

  And, you know, when it's plentiful, you know, in the areas that, that I protect with jungle keepers, then you dip a hook in the river. Try not to come out with a fish. You know, it's just, it's so, it's original growth forest. And I think that, you know, I've, I've heard different accounts of how many, what the populations of animals were in the US. You know, prior to 1700, the numbers are staggering, you know, what there was.

• 58:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:00Speaker 04

  When there was habitat everywhere. And in the Amazon, it's like, man, just to, you know, you were in the Bolivian headwaters. I'm sure it was the same thing where it's like, there's just animals everywhere.

• 58:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:10Speaker 04

  And it's beautiful to have that. And I mean, but, but it's not, it's not, it's not an issue of whether or not it's beautiful or preferable, or some people want it. In this case, the system depends on that purity.

• 58:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  You can't remove all of these things. And that's, it's very dangerous. I think the information wars are very interesting. Where people go, like you and I were just speaking about this before we got on, where someone goes, you know, we, we could make an access road into Yosemite. And it'll be great because then more people can experience Yosemite. And it's like, you sir, are trying to destroy Yosemite. Like we're already having traffic jams, like you, you're just trying to get your, your resort access to Yosemite.

• 58:48Steven Rinella?

  Now they play it, yeah.

• 58:50Speaker 04

  They play it.

• 58:50Steven Rinella?

  They play a word game where.

• 58:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:53Steven Rinella?

  Axe, people, hunters, whatever anglers, people out in the outdoors, like access is a positive word.

• 59:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:01Steven Rinella?

  And so they, they, they rebrand certain efforts.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:04Steven Rinella?

  To be that it's access and happens. Right now we're going through a thing where they're rebranding a lot of efforts as fire mitigation, which is necessary. But they're, they're.

• 59:18Steven Rinella?

  Doing things that don't service fire mitigation, but just talking about that part. Cause that part's necessary or being like, oh no, it's access. I thought you guys loved access.

• 59:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 59:28Steven Rinella?

  Road building is access.

• 59:29Speaker 04

  Well, it's also, it's real easy to sell. Like you said, like people don't really know what the Rockies are. And so when you're selling America on a, on a, on an idea of what can be done in a wilderness area, you say, well, we got, we gotta make these, these fire stopping roads. Well, I want to stop fires. That sounds great. Support it. And it's like, yeah, no.

• 59:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 59:46Speaker 04

  You know, so you can tell people that have never been there, you know, we have to do that, you know, in this, they're not gonna, you know, I could say in the, in the, there's just so much rainforest. It never stops raining, you know, if you want, if you ever want to have the sun come out, it's like you could just, you could sell it a certain way if you wanted to, but fact is, is that we're at a very dangerous point in the history of the Amazon in 55 million years. Where the future of it is uncertain, and I am not a climate alarmist at all. But the Amazon rainforest does so much to stabilize global climate and to influence. I mean, what we're getting up here with hurricanes and what's happening on the ocean levels, there's so, there's such a tremendous influence that comes off the Amazon and those moisture systems.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  That supports the agriculture all over South America and those economies, which influence our economy. That to mess with this system is suicidal.

• 1:00:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Speaker 04

  And so what, what I've been doing over the last 20 years is working with the local people. You know, it's funny, I just, the other day I, I posted something about this new road that's coming in. And threatening the reserve that I'm trying to create. We're trying to make a national park. And there's this road that's racing in and there's our protected land and they're trying to get around us and in before we, before we're able to protect this land. And so it's a race. Can we raise the funding to protect this land before this road comes in? And, and someone commented and they went, if only there was a way that we could join the indigenous people and collaborate and get them the funding they need to protect that land so that it doesn't get destroyed. And I was like, that's what jungle keepers is. Like I've been doing that for, if only there was a way.

• 1:01:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 04

  You know, if there's only, there was a way that I could walk without always injuring the bottoms of my feet. Like, bro, you're gonna love shoes. We, and so I, but that's what we've done. I met this guy Juan Julio Duran, who is, he's an Eseha Indian. And so he grew up, no shoes.

• 1:01:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Tell me, tell me what that means. The, the, you know, can, can you hold that for a minute? Cause I want to ask you, you, you mentioned something.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:44Steven Rinella?

  No, I, I really want to get to your work. But I got another thing that I wanted to ask you about it. Cause this will help explain your work too. You mentioned, um, illegal, like illegal mining, illegal mining, illegal forestry, legal logging.

• 1:02:03Steven Rinella?

  I need you to help me understand that. Like here, there might be an unpopular mining project or an unpopular logging project.

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:12Steven Rinella?

  Right. But it's not illegal, right? It's, it's. So I have a hard time understanding the, the sort of logistics and scale of like, it would be laughable. That someone would sneak out into the national forest, the United States of America and start hauling out truckloads of logs. Illegally.

• 1:02:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I understand what you're saying.

• 1:02:37Steven Rinella?

  It might be a policy position that you don't like, but there's a way this happens. So help me, help me get like logistically.

• 1:02:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Steven Rinella?

  How it could be that you're filling ships with logs illegally. And in some version of a cop or whatever isn't able to go, but where did the, where are these logs from?

• 1:03:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Steven Rinella?

  Like, how does this happen?

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  It's, that's a great question and the answer's fun. In the Amazon, you, so, so you fly into Iquitos or you fly into Puerto Maldonado, or you fly into Manaus, you fly into an area with an airport.

• 1:03:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  And then you go three days by river for, and you, you end up at the last place with a town, the last place. I mean, once you leave the last place with an ATM, let's say, right?

• 1:03:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  You, you go sort of off, off the grid. And then you end up at the last place that will sell you cigarettes and a Coca-Cola.

• 1:03:32Steven Rinella?

  I got you.

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  And then you're just in the wilderness.

• 1:03:35Steven Rinella?

  And that might be three days by river.

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  That might be three days by river. And then you're just off the map in the sense that there's no one out there. And there's really no one out there. And so, you know, if you get into a dispute, me and you get into a dispute, whatever happens, happens because that's it. There's, you're, there's no, there are no cops out there. There's cops three days back that way. But they don't have the fuel, gasoline or inclination to come out and mix it up with us.

• 1:04:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  And so that's why you have the Amazonian backcountry, you know, the West is still being won. It's wild. So they might be within the territory of Peru or the territory of, of Brazil. But you're way past society. You're out in unconstructed dream space.

• 1:04:16Steven Rinella?

  But you're producing a product that's huge and it needs to be exported.

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. They haven't, they have an answer for that.

• 1:04:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:04:23Speaker 04

  They take the chainsaws and I think we call it an Alaska mill, but down there they just, they get those long steel chainsaws. And they put, you know, a rig on either side and they have the frame. And so they cut down a, a log where the, the trunk is standing nine feet high.

• 1:04:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  And then they'll just start ripping boards and they'll sit out there for a month ripping one tree, get it into boards.

• 1:04:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:04:46Speaker 04

  I mean, what these guys do is just.

• 1:04:47Steven Rinella?

  And this could be mahogany or something.

• 1:04:48Speaker 04

  Mahogany, ironwood, our, a lot of people in different countries have different trees that they call ironwood. It's a, just a common name.

• 1:04:55Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it.

• 1:04:56Speaker 04

  We have dip, dip, dip derricks, mycrantha. And it's just, they've just been going through a, a horrible period of extraction. They did the mahogany boom about 20 years ago. Where they got every mahogany that was within, you know, two kilometers of the river.

• 1:05:09Steven Rinella?

  Just hunting them down.

• 1:05:10Speaker 04

  Just hunting them down. They'd send out local, local tribe guys who really could walk in the forest with no map. Real, the real guys, barefoot. And they would go out there and they would go, okay, I know, I know where most of the mahogany trees are. And then the logging crews would go out and there'd be like one guy with a chainsaw.

• 1:05:28Steven Rinella?

  And they're milling them, they're milling.

• 1:05:30Speaker 04

  On site.

• 1:05:31Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:05:31Speaker 04

  On site. So they knock them down. They sit out there in the jungle, eating turtles and monkeys and piranha. For three, four weeks at a time, living in the jungle. And I'm talking about in a way that would make any American outdoorsman cringe. People, you know, I post stuff where I'll go, oh man, my boat sank and we have a 30 foot canoe. You get crazy rain for 40 minutes. It fills up the boat and the boat literally just sinks.

• 1:05:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah. While you're taking an app or something. Yeah.

• 1:06:00Speaker 04

  And people go, well, why don't you cover your boat? With what? You know, the nearest store is two days away. And even if I bring down a giant 30 foot tarp, it'll work for two months. And then what happens when it, you know, it's like, it's just nothing lasts in the jungle. So there's a reason we do things the way we do them. And the local guys, you know, your clothing's just gonna get wet. And then when it gets wet and sweaty and you hang it over a stick at night, the moths and the mosquitoes, they're gonna lay botfly eggs on it. You're gonna put your clothes back on and you're gonna have botflies burrowing into your skin. And so you know what? Forget the clothes. It's easier to just go bare, bare shirt, uh, bare chested. And so you just, you live out there and there's certain things that the ecosystem dictates. It kind of pushes you towards being naked, weirdly enough.

• 1:06:42Steven Rinella?

  Got it, got it.

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  Uh, and so we go up to these logging camps. And a lot of my local friends either are loggers or have been loggers at some point.

• 1:06:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:06:52Speaker 04

  And that's part of my work is turning them into rangers, giving them better pay. But a logging camp is an amazing thing because they're sitting out there with, you know, three chainsaws, a bunch of shotgun shells, one, you know, backyard shotgun where like they bought a pipe and they, they figured out a trigger and they have the, the shells. But they've made the gun.

• 1:07:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Speaker 04

  And so I refuse to shoot. I, I did it a few times and then I'm like, you know what? For the sake of my eyes. No, there's a lot of output right by your face, of course. And they're just living out there for weeks. And so they mill the wood up into these giant boards that, you know, 12 foot, 15 foot long boards. Then they carry them on their backs. And I'm talking about a 350 pound piece of wood. That's 12 feet long. They carry them on their backs to the edge of the river where they pile them up. And now this could take another two weeks. So now you're talking about two weeks to cut it, two weeks to load it to the edge of the river. And then they cut down a few balsa trees or they'll use like a big oil drum with no oil in it and they'll make this float.

• 1:07:56Speaker 04

  And then they attach, they, they take one piece and they'll, they'll drill through it, make a hole and drop a motor in there. And they'll literally make a logging boat with these big flat beams of timber.

• 1:08:07Steven Rinella?

  Ship it down.

• 1:08:08Speaker 04

  And they, and they'll go down river slowly. And so if you run a ground and you have, you know, 17 tons of timber, you have to figure out a way of winching that off the ground back into the channel. And these rivers are not deep.

• 1:08:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  And, and you know, or if you get stuck, if it's the, they generally don't log in the height of the rainy season, but in the height of the rainy season on those river bends, I mean, sometimes you get a 40 foot whirlpool that if you drive into it can be very bad news, very quickly. That can flip a boat. And so these guys will spend another week going down river with these logs where they'll get to the nearest place that has Coca-Cola cigarettes and shotgun shells. And there, then they unload it onto the dirt and there this truck's waiting. And those trucks will load up the wood, take it out on one of those roads, those access roads.

• 1:08:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  That are just kryptonite to the Amazon.

• 1:09:01Speaker 04

  And then when they get to the Trans Amazon Highway, now what you're talking about is like, how is someone not finding out that this is illegal? Well, what they do is they'll just put, you know, tree species like K-Poc or something that's just, you know, pulp wood that's not important. It's not an illegal, you know, mahogany at this point is illegal to cut mahogany. They'll just put the legal wood on top of the illegal wood. And it's so heavy that the, not to mention.

• 1:09:26Steven Rinella?

  But then you probably weaseled it. Yeah, you've weaseled it into where there is legal transport.

• 1:09:30Speaker 04

  There is legal, you've weaseled it in. And then there's just slipping the guy a hundred bucks. He's just saying, don't worry, just sign the papers. They sign the papers and it goes. And so everyone's making money, everyone's happy and the logs are just flying out. And we see these logs coming out of the jungle and sometimes they're in milled boards and sometimes they have these ancient trees, these giants piled onto the back of these trucks. And it's just horrifying. It just drives me crazy to watch this because each of those was a thousand year old story or at least a 500 year old story with all these animals living on it. And it's just being ripped out with no regard for, you know, I explain this to the locals

• 1:10:12Speaker 04

  where I go, you know, we still have deer in New York because we have a system. You are allowed to hunt a deer because they monitor how many deer there are. You know, we know there's a certain sustainable take and we manage the populations. Here it's just unregulated.

• 1:10:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:29Speaker 04

  And so then, you know, that's logging and then, you know, illegal gold mining. If we, me and you go far enough out, let's go six days out there. We'll set up a logging, a mining rig. We could work out there for seven months from year to year. Nobody's going to go out there.

• 1:10:42Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:10:42Speaker 04

  It takes an expedition and sort of a, a serious expedition, boats.

• 1:10:47Steven Rinella?

  So in the mining, there's just, the remoteness gives you an immunity.

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  Nobody can get to you.

• 1:10:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:53Speaker 04

  And then the other thing is that in the areas in La Pampas where they, where they've, you can see it from space. There's a big scar on the Western Amazon. It's just this sand pit. And, uh, now they've, they've developed this power where they're, they're like, we, you know, we have machine guns. We have, we, we guard the boundary of what we're doing. So when the Peruvian police, police are, you know, that's hilarious. We'll just kill them.

• 1:11:20Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:11:21Speaker 04

  You know, if the military comes in, they can go bag a bunch of these people, blow up their mining rigs. But even then, then they leave.

• 1:11:31Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:11:31Speaker 04

  And we come back.

• 1:11:32Steven Rinella?

  So they, they operate with a, with the might of a, like of a funded, organized criminal enterprise in some cases.

• 1:11:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. And Peru's been trying to, to Peru's credit, they've been trying to figure out how to get this under control because it's not just the, the forest destruction. It's not just the mercury contamination. It's the destruction of watersheds that provide stability to the country. It's also that when you have huge areas of, it's almost medieval rain, you know? These are not areas with, with the rule of law. It's the Wild West.

• 1:12:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:03Speaker 04

  So you have these teams of men working around the clock in mines. And so then you have drug problems and then you have human trafficking where they're going out into the native communities.

• 1:12:12Steven Rinella?

  To get prostitutes.

• 1:12:13Speaker 04

  To get prostitutes. And so it's just everything bad gets sucked into there. So it's in everyone's interest to stop the illegal gold mining. No one's come up with a good answer on how to do it though.

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• 1:13:58Steven Rinella?

  So in, I want you to explain Jungle Keepers, but I guess within that explanation, as you're considering how you'd explain it, I have this question. It'd be if they're, if they're rogue and illegal anyway. And you are able to start an organization that buys land, right? Um, how do you deal with the, how do you do with the illegal elements? They don't care who owns the land. They don't care if Jungle Keepers owns the land.

• 1:14:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Steven Rinella?

  So like within your explanation, I mean, it's two part, right? Like again, just to keep bringing it back for, you know, for Americans listening who understand law, like land ownership and stuff. A problem in the U.S. is not that you own land, but you can't control the people on your land stealing your wood, mining your gold. You just, you know what I'm saying? It's like, it's just.

• 1:14:50Speaker 04

  It's hilarious. Yeah. You can just make a call and it would be done.

• 1:14:52Steven Rinella?

  There's plenty of things wrong, but that's not a thing that's wrong.

• 1:14:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so people have this misconception where they go, well, nobody owns the Amazon. I go, we gotta buy this land and protect it. And you always get those like sort of bunny huggers that go, you know, nobody owns the Amazon. And I'm like, is it an imaginary place in your, in your mind?

• 1:15:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Speaker 04

  You know, it's not, it's not Avatar. It's the Amazon. It's re, it's on earth. And so what Peru has done is gone through and drawn these giant grids. And I guess in some situations, just squiggled with a pen.

• 1:15:22Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:15:22Speaker 04

  And been like, hey, let's, because you know, the idea that wilderness is not economically productive was a, it was a problem in all kinds of places. But they went through back in the day and they assigned lands to various stakeholders.

• 1:15:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:15:38Speaker 04

  So let's just say, uh, we, we, we give you, uh, 10,000 acres. Make it 20,000 acres and you go, great, I'll pay you $6 for it.

• 1:15:47Steven Rinella?

  But who, who am I that has?

• 1:15:48Speaker 04

  You're, you're a Peruvian guy. You went, when, when the, when the government formed, you, you went into the office and said, hey, you know, this, this land between the river so and so and the river so and so is really mine. You know, I've kind of always used that land. And they go, great, well, here, that's a concession. That's yours. Government owns it. You have a lease on it.

• 1:16:02Steven Rinella?

  Because I'm part of the political class?

• 1:16:04Speaker 04

  No, no, no. They gave it to local stakeholders. They really did.

• 1:16:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:16:09Speaker 04

  And they said, you guys can, you know, farm Brazil nuts. We have some mining and logging concessions.

• 1:16:13Steven Rinella?

  I have an interest here. I've been here.

• 1:16:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:16Steven Rinella?

  And they're like, now that we're assigning ownership, it sounds like you have basically squatters rights and we're going to formalize it.

• 1:16:21Speaker 04

  Exactly. That's huge in the Amazon.

• 1:16:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  And so, uh, indigenous nations like everywhere else have to fight for their titled land. So the community that JJ, my, Juan Julio, my friend, the guy that I've started Jungle Keepers with, he's from this community where he grew up barefoot and they were local fishermen and bows and arrows and all this. Now the introduction of the shotgun and the chainsaw, which only happened 50 years ago, changed that. And so he watched, they had stable population of peccaries. They had stable populations of spider monkeys, howler monkeys, all the game species like taper and, uh, fish, abundant fish in the rivers. And he watched his community go from this abundant place to all the big trees getting

• 1:17:05Speaker 04

  taken out, all the game species being annihilated because there was no bag limit. It was just like, we're going to go out and like, we see a herd of 70 peccary. They're like, let's just surround them and get them all.

• 1:17:14Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:17:15Speaker 04

  So you're annihilating herds. You're not taking one or two, you're just wiping them out at that point.

• 1:17:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:19Speaker 04

  And so he watched that happen. He watched a, a, a climax ecosystem become a silent forest secondary.

• 1:17:27Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  And so he said, I want to protect the wildest place. So he went up this river and chose a spot. Now out there in these really wild spots.

• 1:17:35Steven Rinella?

  And he's tribal, obviously.

• 1:17:37Speaker 04

  He, he, he's from an indigenous.

• 1:17:38Steven Rinella?

  Tell me the name of his, his.

• 1:17:39Speaker 04

  The Eseha.

• 1:17:41Steven Rinella?

  Eseha?

• 1:17:41Speaker 04

  E S E dash E J A, I think dyslexic, I can't spell. It's in there. It's in the book. Um, he asked me to spell restaurant. I still couldn't do it.

• 1:17:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. But, but that's admittedly a tough one.

• 1:17:53Speaker 04

  That's a tough one or camouflage. Um, but so out there, to answer your question is, is, you know, if, if you were, if your family at some point was awarded 20,000 acres and, and JJ's father, for example, had several thousand acres in an area that became a national park.

• 1:18:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:18:10Speaker 04

  And because they're local tribal indigenous, when the national, he got, they got grandfathered into the national park.

• 1:18:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:18:16Speaker 04

  Fair. And so what I grew up doing, and when I say that, I mean in my twenties, was going on these amazing hunting expeditions with these Amerindian guys. There's JJ's wild family. He has all these brothers and we'd go for 10 days up a river into the middle of nowhere. They'd be like, oh, that's, remember that bend? That's, you know, that's, uh, you know, Rio Tuncho, that's, that's this. And then we'd get past the point where I go, JJ, what's that stream called? And he'd go, we ain't got names for it.

• 1:18:43Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:45Speaker 04

  It's just, we're just out there now. Okay. And so we'd go hunting peccary and fishing for catfish and just surviving out there, open top canoe. And we would get to the land that JJ's father owned.

• 1:18:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  And I'd say, how do you know that this is the land that, that your father owned? They go, we've been coming here our whole lives. We know the river bend. You know, we just know it. Okay. And then we'd make camp. We'd always hack a new camp. You know, there's not like an official camp. We'd hack a new camp, set up two sticks, make a roof shape, stretch a tarp over it, put our tents under that.

• 1:19:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:20Speaker 04

  And spend a few days there walking trail, you know, there's like little game trails that were also sort of, you know, you could see a few machete breaks on them from last year. And, and so we grew up doing that. So that was Santiago's land. That was JJ's father's land. That's inside the national park. It's never going to be touched.

• 1:19:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:19:36Speaker 04

  Now, in the rest of the Amazon, there's these huge parcels of land. And so if your granddaddy got that land and, you know, he was, he used to be a trapper and a fisherman and a jungle man. And then his son, your father worked the land a bit, maybe collected some Brazil nuts, did some light timber, but never really into it. Now you got it. Actually, one even better one, your kid got it.

• 1:19:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:19:58Speaker 04

  So now you're dealing with a 25 year old Peruvian guy who's probably by now moved to the city.

• 1:20:03Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:20:04Speaker 04

  No longer cares to be eaten hand to mouth, does not want to eat a spider monkey, is, is, has been integrated into sort of more modern society, has a TikTok account and a bank account. You know, it's like, you know, this guy, you're going, you want to go eat some turtles? And he's going, no, I want to go to a restaurant in Lima. Like, and they're like, but you own 20,000 acres out there. Well, he's going to do what everybody else does that owns land. He's going to go, well, how can I make money off of it?

• 1:20:30Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:20:30Speaker 04

  Call the developers, call the loggers, call whoever. And so what they do is they'll talk to the loggers. The loggers go, hey, you own that land that's way up, up, up there? Yeah. He goes, it's completely illegal to, to, to log up there. And they go, yeah, but who the hell's out there? So, okay, I want, I want 30%. You guys can go to my land, log the shit out of it. Well, then they gotta go make a road. So then the road starts and then they talk to the various landowners. And so it's just a race between the loggers and us.

• 1:20:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Speaker 04

  Cause we've gone to landowners and me and JJ, cause you know, he's the indigenous guy. There's the, these people, and I've seen this in, in Virginia where it's, you know, are you, are you one of us? Are you local? Or you, are you from outside of here? Cause we know how things work here. And there's a skepticism to people from outside.

• 1:21:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:17Speaker 04

  And it's kind of beautiful. And in the Amazon, there's that same thing. If I show up as a foreigner, they're like, what does this gringo want? You know what gringos want? And it's never good for us.

• 1:21:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:26Speaker 04

  That's, that's what they know.

• 1:21:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  And so when I walk in with JJ, it's, you know, I say, hola, whatever else. Then JJ's the one that'll sit down and go, so, and it'll be the, usually it'll be the loggers. And we'll sit down at a logging camp and he'll go, oh, you shot a kukukunga spixes guan. And go, give me a leg of that. He'll sit there. He'll eat their food. He'll go, hey, I brought you.

• 1:21:45Steven Rinella?

  What is that animal?

• 1:21:46Speaker 04

  A kukukunga. It's a spixes guan.

• 1:21:49Steven Rinella?

  Oh, a bird.

• 1:21:50Speaker 04

  A bird. Yeah. It's kind of like a turkey.

• 1:21:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:52Speaker 04

  Um, very beautiful bird. It's dumb as hell. It's an indicator species because if you are going hunting, if anyone is hunting in this patch of forest, it's the first thing to go.

• 1:22:04Steven Rinella?

  I got it.

• 1:22:05Speaker 04

  They're loud and slow and terrible.

• 1:22:07Steven Rinella?

  I was with some guys that got a guan, but I didn't remember. I didn't know the name for it. But that's interesting. That's funny to be like, if he's around, no one's been through here lately.

• 1:22:14Speaker 04

  No one's been through here. Um, it's, they're kind of comical for that. We love them for that.

• 1:22:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19Speaker 04

  They're the ones that tell us we're in good forest.

• 1:22:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Speaker 04

  And, uh, we'll sit down with the loggers and go, what are you doing? And they go, oh, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna be here. There's about 35 ironwood trees that we're gonna get over the next two years. So we're gonna just live here and they'll have kids running around. And they'll go, we're just gonna live here and cut the wood and we have a deal with so and so. And we'll go, so who, who owns this land? And they'll go, oh, you know, Sanchez and my, and JJ will go, oh yeah, my dad knew his dad, you know, the, and that's that link. That, that, that, that, that link you can't duplicate.

• 1:22:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:22:50Speaker 04

  And so I could never do that. Cause they'd go, who the hell are you? And then they'd shut down the conversation. Whereas JJ is like, yo. And then you go, okay, Sanchez, yeah, you gotta get it. Okay. And then he goes and talks to Sanchez. He'll go find Sanchez in the, in the city and go, okay, hey, I saw the loggers on your land. They're just starting out. And the guy will go, yeah, you know, I don't go out there. I figure I'll make some money off it. And now with jungle keepers, what we do is we go out there and we go, how much is your land? 20,000 acres. How many years is it going to take you to get that, those ironwoods out of there? Uh, six or seven years, I'll probably make a few hundred grand. Great. How much? $350,000? Great. How about you get that today? By

• 1:23:31Speaker 04

  the way, here's some paperwork. You want it today. I, you, you're saying today instead of over five years, today. And then we just pay him, get the land. And then we go back out to those same loggers that were there. We go, guys, thanks for the guan the other day. The kukukunga was delicious. Now you've got two options. You either gotta get out of here and get your next logging job, or because we like you guys, and you seem to be jungle people, do you want to just come for work for us? And they're like, what's that like? And I usually have some jungle keepers, rangers with me at this point. And we go, well, we're gonna give you a super cool T-shirt and you're gonna get to drive a jungle keeper's boat. And your job is going to be to make sure that people are not cutting down the ironwood trees. And they're like, do I still get to fish? And we're like, yeah,

• 1:24:16Speaker 04

  you can still fish.

• 1:24:17Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:18Speaker 04

  And they're like, what does it pay? And we're like, three times what you're getting paid now. And you'll have medical benefits and you'll be part of a team. And we're gonna teach you a whole bunch of stuff. And you're gonna teach us a bunch of stuff because you probably grew up native. And they're like, I don't have to use a chainsaw all day? And we're like, no. And so your family's going to be better provided for. You can come in, out of the cold, or you can stay out there. We might build a ranger station. You already cut down some trees. We might as well build an outpost out there. And we've done that a bunch of times. Because for our rangers being two days upriver, that ain't great. It's much better if you have a little, you know, a deck and a roof for them to stay at. Um, and so this is what we've been doing. It's sort of this secret sauce that we figured out, which is like, these aren't bad people. They're not evil people. They're poor people

• 1:25:02Speaker 04

  that are logging, working for a, a larger enterprise who's probably connected to a Chinese, who's selling stuff to the Chinese companies that have taken out all of this timber. But if you stop it at the micro level, right down there on the river, we can stop it. So we're, we're, we're working on the last Pia Dros River, which is this incredibly wild watershed.

• 1:25:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:25:22Speaker 04

  And the reason it remained on, unprotect, unexplored and undestroyed is that there's a lot of uncontacted tribes there. And that's when I say, you know, the West is still being won. These are the Comanches.

• 1:25:36Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:25:36Speaker 04

  These are people that would just as soon kill you as shake your hand. You know, uh, we've, we've had situations in the Madre de Dios where anthropologists have tried to make contact with them. We've had situations where loggers have gone around the wrong river bend. And, you know, there's the, uncontacted is a, is a stupid word for them. That's just like their common name in society, but they're, they're the Mashco Piro. They're, they're voluntarily isolated nomadic people, people, they're tribes that have cho, chosen over the last few centuries to have as little contact as possible.

• 1:26:09Steven Rinella?

  That, that's a pretty important distinction there. And that's something that's like, that I've kind of come to understand.

• 1:26:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Steven Rinella?

  Is that, and, and maybe you can tell me this, that at this point, we're kind of beyond the idea that there would be people living in the Amazon who are sort of unaware, that, that would be unaware of the fact that, you know,

• 1:26:35Steven Rinella?

  civilization is out there and that there's cities and, you know, cities and economic interests encroaching on their area. Is it that they don't know? Or that some don't really understand that? They don't know that? Or is it that they're like, no, I, I know that very well, but I'm just choosing to not take part?

• 1:26:54Speaker 04

  No, it's, it's the, it's the weirder one. It's that they've been out there for so long. So the rubber boom, industrial revolution, there were rubber barons going down to the Amazon. We needed, you know, hoses and gaskets and tires and all this new stuff for the, for the industrial revolution and the war effort. And, and so we sent these people down. And the only way to get this was latex trees. And those only grew in the Amazon.

• 1:27:17Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:17Speaker 04

  And they only grew deep out in the forest. And Henry Ford tried to make Fordlandia, make a giant plantation of, of rubber trees and didn't work because of.

• 1:27:26Steven Rinella?

  I gotta plug the movie Fitzcraldo.

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  Fitzcraldo.

• 1:27:28Steven Rinella?

  By Werner Herzog. So anyway, it was going.

• 1:27:30Speaker 04

  Exactly. And that's exactly that time period. And he used like Machiganga Indians for that. He used the real deal. He went and talked to a bunch of my friends and said, you guys want to be in a movie? And they were like, hell yeah. You know, he's, and if you ever saw The Burden of Dreams.

• 1:27:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Steven Rinella?

  Herzog was on this show.

• 1:27:48Speaker 04

  Oh, really?

• 1:27:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:49Speaker 04

  I gotta watch that episode.

• 1:27:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no, or her, yeah, we interviewed, I interviewed Herzog at his house, but what's so hilarious, just for people, we'll get off this pretty quickly, but Herzog made this incredible movie about the rubber barons in the jungle.

• 1:28:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:02Steven Rinella?

  And it's called Fitzcraldo. And there was a movie about the making of Fitzcraldo, which is called.

• 1:28:08Speaker 04

  Almost better.

• 1:28:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Which is, yeah. It's the same thing with Apocalypse Now and the movie of the making of Apocalypse Now, which is Hearts of Darkness. And it's hard to tell which is better. It's hard to tell Fitzcraldo or Burden of Dreams is better. But in it.

• 1:28:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:21Steven Rinella?

  The funniest part about it is, one of the funny parts about it is Herzog is the director and he's working with a very volatile actor, Klaus Kinsky.

• 1:28:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:29Steven Rinella?

  And Herzog is always fighting with his actor, his lead actor. The indigenous people that are on set know that Herzog writes the checks. And so at one point, a guy comes to Herzog and says, I see how much this guy upsets you. Would you like me to kill him?

• 1:28:47Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:28:47Steven Rinella?

  He's like, no, please don't kill the actor.

• 1:28:49Speaker 04

  Please don't actually kill him. We're just disagreeing. I mean, but, but that, what, what, for people, if you go watch that though, it's like, that is the world that is still there.

• 1:28:58Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:28:59Speaker 04

  Where there's these indigenous people, I mean, there's a, there's a scene in Burden of Dreams where they, they, they wanted there to be a moment where these people come up on sort of untouched tribes and they cut the trees and they're falling into the river. I mean, it's just so incredible, but these uncontacted tribes, I'm just gonna call them that for convenience. These people still live, so during that rubber period.

• 1:29:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22Speaker 04

  There's a lot of tribes that got, if not annihilated, severely abused. It was a horrible moment in human history. And.

• 1:29:30Steven Rinella?

  Like they, they were just shooting people. Well, I mean, like you keep using Wild West, but it was like, it was very similar to us coming out in the 1840s, 1850s into the West.

• 1:29:39Speaker 04

  It was very, very bad. I mean, there were, there's a, there's a quote from one of the, uh, the priests, you know, these missionaries that were down there where they, they said, it's, it's, it's untenable. They said, these, these rubber barons would come in, round up the village and be like, y'all are gonna be working for us. And the village would be like, no, we're not. Like, we're, we're absolutely not gonna be listening to you. And they would just set a few people on fire in front of them and be like, you want, y'all want, do you want more? You know, and we're gonna take your wives, you know? This is, this is, this is not a joke. You're going to listen to us. It was horrible.

• 1:30:12Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:12Speaker 04

  And so during that time, there were some tribes that said, not us. And they moved deeper into the forest. And so since that time, you say, since the turn of the century, they've been living out there. And these are probably tribes that, what were they doing before that? Living out there.

• 1:30:28Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:30:29Speaker 04

  And then they had this one horrible interaction with the outside world.

• 1:30:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:30:33Speaker 04

  And they learned, the outside world is trying to kill you and they are savages. They will light you on fire and send you out for work for no reason whatsoever. Let's stay out here and you kill whoever comes because it's safer to kill them than to see what they want.

• 1:30:49Speaker 04

  So the uncontacted tribes have been out there for ages and some of the land that we protect now has them on it.

• 1:30:54Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:55Speaker 04

  And exactly what you were saying, they, you know, there's not really even planes that fly over where I work. It's so big. We've had a few narco trafficking, like little old Cessnas with a piece of duct tape on the wing. But even that, you know, imagine these tribes, they want, you know, they watch it go by, if they could even see it through the canopy.

• 1:31:14Steven Rinella?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:31:15Speaker 04

  They know there's other types of people out there, but the idea that they, they don't know about buildings or the internet or.

• 1:31:24Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:31:25Speaker 04

  You know, the.

• 1:31:25Steven Rinella?

  Legitimately, like today.

• 1:31:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's, in the book, there's pictures of these people, because we were, we were up working with a, a very normal contacted indigenous community that we work with, that we patrol with and interact with, our friends and, and colleagues. And this uncontacted tribe showed up on the beach and they showed up with bows and arrows. I'm talking six foot bows, six foot arrows with bamboo tips that are 18 inches long.

• 1:31:53Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:31:54Speaker 04

  And so when they fire these arrows, they'll go straight through a person and they can hit a spider monkey, you know, at wild angles as the spider monkey's going through the trees. So they're deadly accurate with these.

• 1:32:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05Speaker 04

  And they don't know and they don't speak a language that, that directly translates to any outside language.

• 1:32:12Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:32:12Speaker 04

  The guys that I was with, the, the community that I work with, they speak Yine. They were speaking Yine to, to the tribe, but there was a little bit of still a barrier. They're, they're, they're, they're related.

• 1:32:23Steven Rinella?

  But so in the, in the area you work. I'm, I'm guessing these people are nomadic to some degree?

• 1:32:30Speaker 04

  Uh, to a hard, to a, to a extreme degree.

• 1:32:32Steven Rinella?

  They move.

• 1:32:33Speaker 04

  They don't have houses.

• 1:32:34Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:32:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:35Steven Rinella?

  So in the area you work and the areas you're trying to buy, and, and, and just to point out to people, like you're buying areas of willing seller, willing buyer.

• 1:32:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Somehow, when I say buyer, both sides get upset. Um, the bunny huggers get upset where they go, you can't buy the Amazon. And then I'm like, no, no, no, we're conservationists and we're, it's indigenous led, like JJ and, and the local people are the people that are doing it. I'm the mouthpiece that can come up here. I'm from New York. I could talk all day and I've been down there and I'm amazed by it and so I'm helping.

• 1:33:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:04Speaker 04

  Right? And so.

• 1:33:05Steven Rinella?

  So yeah, I, I should, when I say you, I, I didn't mean you.

• 1:33:08Speaker 04

  No, no, no. And that's okay. I'm, I'm just, I'm just, I'm, I'm slicing into it because sometimes I do a public speaking gig and someone will stand up and I'll go, you know, on my river and someone will stand up and go, well, it's not really your river. And I'll go, well, is it really your house or is it just your turn in that house? And it's been there since the 1700s.

• 1:33:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24Speaker 04

  You know, and it's like, that's just how we talk.

• 1:33:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27Speaker 04

  And, uh.

• 1:33:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I understand.

• 1:33:28Speaker 04

  And we're not buying, you know, people go, well, then, uh, uh, you know, a, a white foreigner buying land in the, I'm like, listen, this is an organization that's Peruvian led, where we secure the land from the people that are trying to destroy it.

• 1:33:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:44Speaker 04

  And join it with the indigenous reserve that's protecting a watershed.

• 1:33:47Steven Rinella?

  So let me, let me reapproach my question.

• 1:33:49Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:33:49Steven Rinella?

  I, I, you, you're totally fair to clarify.

• 1:33:51Speaker 04

  You hear what I'm doing here? Yeah.

• 1:33:52Steven Rinella?

  No, I, I do, and it's totally fair.

• 1:33:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:54Steven Rinella?

  In the areas where.

• 1:33:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:56Steven Rinella?

  Jungle keepers is active.

• 1:33:58Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:59Steven Rinella?

  There are nomadic, there are nomadic groups of what we're, and you did a good job of explaining it. Nomadic groups of what we'll agree to call uncontacted people passing through these areas.

• 1:34:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:11Steven Rinella?

  And you, you don't go, you, your partner, other or, or other indigenous employees, members of the organization, you don't need to go and say, hey, you're cool here.

• 1:34:29Speaker 04

  No. They'll shoot you in the neck.

• 1:34:31Steven Rinella?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:34:32Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:34:32Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:34:32Speaker 04

  No, no, you can't do that. It was really funny. We were planning a gala as a fundraising event in New York City and, uh, it was funny because the planner, great, great human being, put on an amazing event, but he goes, you know, is there any way that we can get one of the, one of those uncontacted tribe to, to come here and represent? I was like, you, I was like, it's really hard to explain, but when you see the pictures of these people that I have in the book, um, or some of the footage that we've, we've shared of them, they're so wild. They're naked. They have their penises tied up with string. It's really the only thing they wear. They have bracelets. They like rope. Um, they don't really fish. You know, it's funny because I, I do see comments on the internet where someone goes,

• 1:35:14Speaker 04

  you know, I said, we never find fish bones in their camps. Cause we find their camps, you find like a little, a little fire.

• 1:35:20Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:35:20Speaker 04

  A few, a few palm leaves like this that they've sat under in the rain on the beach. They love turtle legs.

• 1:35:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:26Speaker 04

  So you see all the things that they've been doing. You find a few skulls, a few bones and a, and a bit of fire. And so we, we know a lot from that. We've never found fish bones. And when I say we, I mean, me and the indigenous trackers I wa, work with.

• 1:35:40Steven Rinella?

  Who know what they're looking at.

• 1:35:41Speaker 04

  Who know what they're looking at. And so they go, these people don't eat fish. They don't have access to them. Think about it. In that muddy water, how are you going to find fish? We have mud water where we are, brown water and.

• 1:35:52Steven Rinella?

  They're not using metal hooks.

• 1:35:53Speaker 04

  They don't have metal. They may have stolen a few machetes from loggers that they killed because they do kill loggers.

• 1:35:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:00Speaker 04

  There's been a few instances where, hmm, loggers are working.

• 1:36:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you're not, you're not gonna hear some dude.

• 1:36:05Speaker 04

  You're not even gonna see them. They're, they're, you know, right out of the, right out of the forest. Loggers are dead and then, and then they're like, we'll take the machetes. We have no idea how that hellish, you know, chainsaw works. Leave that there. Hmm. They don't even want the clothes. They're just like, you know, they'll take what they want. We, uh, you know, I, I shouldn't say we, the local people, just so I stay out of trouble. Um, you know, they said to them, so what do you want? They said, first of all, please put down your bows and what do you want? And the, the, we were on one side of the river and the other side of the river. We, we were short of the shirts versus skins. We, we were over there saying, what do you want? And they were on the other side. And we said, put down your bows, first of all. You know, we had, we had a ton of shotguns, but that was for self-defense.

• 1:36:48Speaker 04

  They're over there, you know, looking at us with bows and we're like, look, put your bows down. We had a guy, a local anthropologist who could speak to them. He said, we're not talking to you unless you put your boats down.

• 1:36:57Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:36:58Speaker 04

  So they put their bows down. They came out to the river and they're clapping and they're talking to us and they're gesticulating their, and, and he said, what do you want? And they said, we want plantains. We want rope. And so their wants are very, very basic. And so we pushed a boat with plantains and rope. We added in some sugarcane for good measure. And so they're all like eating the, you know, they're like taking the plantains and, and they're deconstructing the rope. That was so interesting. We get, what they got was some nylon paracord, you know, pile of it. Instantly they start deconstructing it, bringing it down to the fibers and expertly weaving it into, you know, to do, to do their fletchings.

• 1:37:34Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I got it.

• 1:37:36Speaker 04

  They, they just start making bow and arrows right there in front of us. Like as they're talking, they're going, yeah, yeah, yeah, send us some more. And they're making.

• 1:37:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, then that, that, the internal line inside the sheath on paracord.

• 1:37:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they were expert at it. It was amazing.

• 1:37:47Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:37:48Speaker 04

  Um, but, but they, they, you know, we, we had this exchange with them and, and the indigenous natural, uh, anthropologist was saying, you know, you don't have to be violent. Like we're friends.

• 1:37:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:58Speaker 04

  You know, and they're going, ah, we don't know about that. They're going, some of you cut down trees. We know some of you cut down trees. We know you got those chainsaw things.

• 1:38:05Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:06Speaker 04

  And they were like, why do you cut down the trees? For them, they're like, what, what are you doing with trees?

• 1:38:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10Speaker 04

  What could you possibly want with these giant trees? We don't like that. And that was their, that was their main message. So we had this three hour long interaction with them, which was incredible. I mean, absolutely. You know, it's like seeing a woolly mammoth or something. It's like, you just, you just go, this is something that I thought was from a different time.

• 1:38:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:31Speaker 04

  And you're seeing people that are living like the way that people would have lived a thousand years ago.

• 1:38:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:38Speaker 04

  Naked in, in nature with no, what do you do without a blade? What do you, you just have a peccary tooth? You know, how, how does that work? They don't even have rocks. There's no rocks in that part of the Amazon. And so, you know, we left that day, they went back into the forest and we went back to the community and nobody had died. It was a huge success. Me and the other directors of Jungle Keepers head down the river. There, there was a whole bunch of other, you know, secondary and tertiary things that had to happen now because the Peruvian government was like, okay, this tribe came out and there's reactions and they had taken all of the, the, the Yucca and the plantains from our friends in the indigenous community. So we had to get them supplies because now they were like, we don't have food.

• 1:39:18Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:39:18Speaker 04

  Like, yeah, we catch fish and stuff, but like our, our carbs totally gone. So we were like, let's get back, let's get a boat up as quick as possible. It's going to take two days. We were doing all that. One of the guys that we were literally with the day before, my friend George, he, he was driving a boat up the river and the tribe came back out, but this time he was driving a boat and we don't know what happened. Uh, there, I had a bunch of other friends on the boat, but there were, the tribe was on both sides of the river this time.

• 1:39:48Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 1:39:48Speaker 04

  And they started loosening arrows. These six foot arrows start flying on the boat and everybody else got under the edges of the boat. So they were sort of safe from these arrows. And he's driving though. So he's sitting up on the back of the canoe and an arrow went in just above his scapula and came out by his belly button, straight through his lung.

• 1:40:06Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:40:08Speaker 04

  And so they took him out of the boat and I saw the boat later on and it was just, just blood everywhere. And they took him up to the nearest spot they could take him. And then we actually got a military helicopter to go up and evac him.

• 1:40:21Steven Rinella?

  He survived?

• 1:40:21Speaker 04

  He lived.

• 1:40:22Steven Rinella?

  No way.

• 1:40:23Speaker 04

  With a pole through him. Somehow he lived. I mean, he's never going to be the same, but he lived. And, uh, so it's like, that's the thing. You can have a friendly encounter with these, these tribes and they still, they're not getting it. They don't know about the outside world. They don't know that if they would just be friends with the, the next indigenous community, they could teach them how to grow plantains.

• 1:40:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:45Speaker 04

  They don't even have agriculture. And so that's a, that's a complicated relationship that's going to have to play out.

• 1:40:51Steven Rinella?

  It is. And I was going to ask you like a half smart assy question, just to have like intellectual wrestling match about it, which would be, well, you answered it already.

• 1:41:00Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 1:41:01Steven Rinella?

  But it would be, it's like, I'm devil's advocating, like I'm playing the devil's advocate role in something would be, if you have a, if you have an uncontacted group or barely contacted group.

• 1:41:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:13Steven Rinella?

  And they want stuff. Is it fair to say, I'm not going to give it to you because I like how, I like thinking about you how you are.

• 1:41:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:25Steven Rinella?

  And even though you want it, I don't want you to have it because it's going to upset my view of you as a, as an ancient one.

• 1:41:31Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:41:32Steven Rinella?

  And it's fun for me to know that you're out there without this stuff.

• 1:41:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:37Steven Rinella?

  And, and I was going to, like I said, devil's advocate that idea, but when it gets into, when it gets into a people that.

• 1:41:48Steven Rinella?

  A people peoples that I don't want to integrate. Like, I don't want anything to do with you. I want to have, yeah, I want to like, I want to be here with my family, my people. I want you to stay out of my area. I'm not coming to you for these things. And I think it's different. And I think it's like, it's noble to respect it. Right? Unless you have something to say about the devil's advocate position is like, is it our place to tell people they can't have stuff they want?

• 1:42:17Speaker 04

  Uh, hell no. And it's funny, it's funny because this would cause so many people to go nuts. This sort of politically correct thing of, you know, uh, this is like another culture coming to us and going, well, I thought Americans drove, you know, used horses and, and, and drove across the plains and wagons, you know, you guys had, no, no, you should still be Americans. Like, go back to that. And us being like, what are you talking about? We've, we've, we've grown in this direction. And, you know, I mean, look, I think every-

• 1:42:43Steven Rinella?

  That's a funny point.

• 1:42:44Speaker 04

  Right? And it's like, everybody wishes, or at least I really wish that, you know, America formed, and then the Comanches still had so much power over so much land. Don't you just wish that they just stopped at that? And said, you know what? You guys maintain control over that. We got the coasts and like, you know, there'll just be the, the, the United States with a few less, and you guys, you guys keep it. It would just, we'd have Comanche, it would just be cool. And like, what's happening with the Mashko Puro? Or, or picture talking to Native American people today who's, you know, and saying, why don't you only live in buffalo skins? I like, I like that. Go do it.

• 1:43:21Steven Rinella?

  It happens to native people all the time here.

• 1:43:22Speaker 04

  I know.

• 1:43:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah. Like, you want to hunt whales? Well, why don't you do it with a, you know?

• 1:43:28Speaker 04

  You know, with a, you know?

• 1:43:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:29Speaker 04

  You can only do it with a stick.

• 1:43:30Steven Rinella?

  Because I don't need to.

• 1:43:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:32Steven Rinella?

  We have other ways of hunting whales now.

• 1:43:34Speaker 04

  Well, there you go. Um, and then it seems like the only way that that gets through is when they go, well, it's better, it's more humane for the whale to not be spirited to death. Um, but I think that here, uh, there's, there's, there's a few tribes in the Amazon, like the Warani and the Kaipo, I think, you know, who have, who have done, and the people in the Zinga River, who've done amazing jobs of maintaining their tribal heritage and still sort of like adapting their clothing to more modern, still a lot of feathers. And they really, you know, they still do their, we, women wear makeup. They, they were, they wear their tribal, um, certainly for ceremonies. And they've really proudly maintained their indigenous heritage.

• 1:44:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:44:17Speaker 04

  As their main thing. And they've even embraced ecotourism. And they're like, we're going to bring you out there. And we still do wear feathers and we're experts. And we always have been experts and we've, but they've, they've had the luck. These are the few tribes that have had the luck of getting some of their members educated enough in Western ways.

• 1:44:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:35Speaker 04

  To come in and make that jump before the damage is done.

• 1:44:39Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:44:40Speaker 04

  Because what usually happens is you have a group of indigenous people that are living out in the forest. And then one road comes through, one missionary comes through and goes, I don't want you, I don't want you believing in whatever you believe in. You need to believe in our God, in our way. And we're going to start, you know, put down the bows, you're going to start eating pigs and chickens. Because that's what we want you to do. And they strip them of their indigenous ways, which is just horrific. And what happens is that alcoholism, the, the, how to say it? Like, the, the, the tribes that I work with have a very strange relationship to money. They're like, why are you going here instead of just going in a straight line? Like, I want meat, so I should go get meat.

• 1:45:23Speaker 04

  Why would I have to work for the meat? Or am I just going to go out and shoot the meat?

• 1:45:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:28Speaker 04

  You know? And then when they get the money, they're like, well, you know, I'm going to get my family some soda and a thing and a thing. And they kind of like, well, they'll spend all the money.

• 1:45:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:36Speaker 04

  And they'll be like, shit, now I need more money. I don't have any gasoline, I got to get somewhere. It's like, that's because you got to save the money. And then they save some money under their mattress and it gets stolen. And it's like, well, this is, this isn't working. You know, it's like, this is not a great system for you. So, so with the, with the uncontacted tribe, which is such a, such an extreme example of this, some people say they've been running scared for, you know, oh, a few centuries, or at least a century.

• 1:46:02Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:03Speaker 04

  Someone should go bring them in.

• 1:46:05Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:46:06Speaker 04

  Now, that's happened in different places and it doesn't go well. Uh, there's one place where a, a child washed down the river in a, in a remote part of the Amazon. And they, they picked him up and he was one of them, one of the Mashko.

• 1:46:20Steven Rinella?

  Washed down alive?

• 1:46:21Speaker 04

  Washed down alive, yeah. They picked him up and, you know, he never went back. He stayed in this tribe who speaks Spanish and their local dialect. And, uh, I, the, the anthropologist that I work with, he went and he spoke to this kid. He said, well, what was it like when you lived out in the forest with the nomadic tribes? He said, I don't really remember. He got, he got a trauma response. He got like, I just, don't worry, don't worry about it. You know? It's okay. There's a, there's a wall of, of silence. It's not, you know, when you think about what are their infant mortality rates? What, how are their women treated? You know, is there intertribal warfare? What are their wrong beliefs? You know, you want to talk about like, what things do we believe, any scientific method?

• 1:47:05Speaker 04

  You know, are they saying that, you know, all illnesses are bad spirits? And so, you know, every time that you look at me funny, it's, I should kill you. It's like, you just don't know what they're operating on. One, I mean, after seeing with them, after interacting with them, and my interaction with them was very simple, you know, holding up my hands and they held up their hands. And we, we kind of just kind of smiled at how different we were.

• 1:47:25Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:26Speaker 04

  You know, and that was this very human moment at, you know, almost across centuries. Because you go, man, I, you have, I have no idea what's, what goes through your mind. You have no idea what goes through my mind. And it was just sort of like, you know, basic hello. And, uh, so, so interestingly, now coming back to our world, I come back up here and I write this book about the work that I'm doing with the local people. And there's these tribes and all this wildlife. And I'm just trying to protect it because the butterflies and the jaguars and the ancient trees should be protected. And I even want to protect the indigenous people, the uncontacted tribes. And then you get articles being written online where people go, you know, Paul Rosely comes

• 1:48:08Speaker 04

  back from the Amazon and releases footage of, of uncontacted tribes without their consent. And this is horrible. And you see, you know, the comments of people going, look at this, another white guy using this to sell his book and to push his organization. He's probably making millions. And what we did was, after that, most of it was people just, just experiencing awe at seeing this footage.

• 1:48:31Steven Rinella?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:48:32Speaker 04

  But they were the, the detractors. What, what's great though, is that through Jungle Keepers, we raised enough money to protect another 20,000 acres. And that's land that the tribe lives on. So now they're safe from loggers and gold miners and narco traffickers because we're protecting their land and they have no idea.

• 1:48:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:52Speaker 04

  And nor will they. Because if we have it our way, if they want to come out, they'll come out. But otherwise, it's their choice. And it's not that we want them to stay like that. It's that they've made it very clear they don't want us. On a trail, if you're walking and the Mashko Puro are there, they put an X over the trail. They'll cut two, I'm sorry, they'll cut two sticks and put it over the trail. And you know, you go past that, you're going to get shot.

• 1:49:18Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:49:19Speaker 04

  Fair. Like, that's great. And so, you know, they have their own respect system. You, you just don't want to surprise them.

• 1:49:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:27Speaker 04

  I mean, I could go on all day about horror stories about that. But they're, they're very, very happy to engage you violently if it'll mean that they're not in danger.

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• 1:51:08Steven Rinella?

  Is there a, with Jungle Keepers, is there a direct relationship, like an infinite direct relationship where dollars in?

• 1:51:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:19Steven Rinella?

  Dollars in?

• 1:51:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:21Steven Rinella?

  Will continue to be acres secured? Or is it, or is it that, um,

• 1:51:30Steven Rinella?

  there's, there's a finite amount of available acreage? So, I mean, could you just keep going and going and going and going?

• 1:51:37Speaker 04

  Great question. And this is what makes Jungle, there's two things, I think that, three things that make Jungle Keepers different than anything that I grew up on. When I was a kid, you know, you had these big organizations that go and send us donations and we'll send you like a, you know, a stuffed polar bear, you know, a teddy bear. But where's my donation going? Which project? You're saving the environment. Where, where is it going? So if I send you $5, $100, $5,000, where? And so first thing about Jungle Keepers is that all, our whole plan was developed by indigenous strategies to protect their land. Second, we developed a donor program that allows all the kids like me that are sitting at home wanting to save the Amazon.

• 1:52:20Speaker 04

  They can go join our team, which is giving $5, $10, $50 a month. And there's all these people, I keep telling people, for the price of a latte, once a month, you're helping us protect, you know, a lot of raindrops make a flood. You're helping us protect all these acres.

• 1:52:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:34Speaker 04

  So the fact that normal people, and we have our large donors that are going at the hundred thousand dollar mark. And so we're getting all this land and we're allowing people around the world, because that's the thing, these Latin American countries would say, you want us to protect our land? Who are you? You know, several thousand miles away in your other country to tell us what to do with our land? Help us. And so what we're doing is we're helping them. We're improving the lives of the local people. We're educating them. We're improving their standard of living. And we're doing this by asking all the people up here that go, yeah, I really care about species in the rainforest. Well, great. You know, you, you subscribe to Netflix. Well, help do something important with your money. Doesn't have to be a lot, but give us the consistency.

• 1:53:16Speaker 04

  And that allows us to keep blocking out pieces of this river and it's not a forever project. And that's the difference.

• 1:53:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:53:22Speaker 04

  We're not trying to protect the ocean or the environment. There's one watershed. This Las Piajeras watershed that we have identified is one of the wildest places on earth. Original growth, superlative biodiversity, nomadic, uncontacted tribes. And just this intact ecosystem, this rare crown jewel on earth. And so once we were at, we're at, we're at about 160,000 acres right now. If we can double that, we need about $15 million to do this. We got $15 million tomorrow, we could do it, which is, which is, that is the mission I'm on. That's why I'm in the U.S. right now, is I'm talking to large scale funders and also trying to talk to people like you who have these huge audiences. Cause out of the people that listen to you, there's gonna be those people that go, you

• 1:54:07Speaker 04

  know what? I want to protect the greatest wilderness area on earth. I want to be part of establishing it. And that's what we're doing. We're doing something historic. And so if we got that 15 million tomorrow from one donor, we could finish the park. We've had politicians in, in Peru, we spoke to what the Department of the Interior, Department of Labor, where they said, look, if you do all the hard work of securing the land and get it, we're not, we're never gonna do that. But if you guys can do it.

• 1:54:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:33Speaker 04

  We'll sign it over.

• 1:54:34Steven Rinella?

  Do you trust those guys?

• 1:54:36Speaker 04

  So incredibly, everyone assumes that everyone in Latin America, like the police are corrupt.

• 1:54:40Steven Rinella?

  Man, no, no, no. I don't assume that at all.

• 1:54:42Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:54:43Steven Rinella?

  I don't assume that at all.

• 1:54:44Speaker 04

  Politicians.

• 1:54:45Steven Rinella?

  No, I'm just saying.

• 1:54:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:47Steven Rinella?

  Does your vision, right? Like if it's a national park.

• 1:54:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:51Steven Rinella?

  You, you're sort of handing the deed over to a, a agency.

• 1:54:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:56Steven Rinella?

  And agencies' missions change. I'm not implying corruption. I'm just saying.

• 1:55:01Speaker 04

  Gotcha.

• 1:55:01Steven Rinella?

  All right. Political wins.

• 1:55:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:05Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I'm saying? Like is, do they have, let me, let me put it, I definitely don't want to imply that like, oh, it must be some banana Republican, they're crooked. I mean,

• 1:55:15Steven Rinella?

  is, do, do they do a thing in other places that you look at and you're like, yes, I want them to do that thing here?

• 1:55:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So they're already doing, they have a, they have a template for what you'd like to see.

• 1:55:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. Manu National Park, which is right near us, is sort of like just the neighbor over.

• 1:55:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:55:32Speaker 04

  Is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, incredible national park. You know, there's a little bit of, of issues at the borders, but it's a roadless area.

• 1:55:40Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:55:40Speaker 04

  No one's allowed in. I mean, there's a deep, deep, deep research station in there that you can get to.

• 1:55:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:55:46Speaker 04

  If you really want to see Manu, you can, but there's not, there's not, you know, you can't drive through it.

• 1:55:49Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:55:50Speaker 04

  You gotta go by river, which means you gotta be approved.

• 1:55:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:53Speaker 04

  So really, that's the only way to access it.

• 1:55:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So there's, there's like a thing.

• 1:55:56Speaker 04

  Oh, Peru has a great national park system. Yeah. So that's why I say I want it to be a national park. And if that proves.

• 1:56:02Steven Rinella?

  That means something.

• 1:56:02Speaker 04

  That means something. It's not just a paper park.

• 1:56:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:05Speaker 04

  Now, in the Tambo Pata, there's been, Tambo Pata National Parks, there's been a recent flare up in people that are piercing past the park boundaries and illegally mining. Now the question of, is there boots on the ground? Is there enough of a park service to go out and stop them? Not really. Cause it's guerrilla warfare. Cause if, you know, the park service shows up with their little badges and says, guys, you can't be here, you need to come with us. They're gonna say, yeah.

• 1:56:35Steven Rinella?

  I understand.

• 1:56:36Speaker 04

  We got more guns than you do. What?

• 1:56:40Speaker 04

  And so that's the problem with the Amazon is it's very Wild West. If you want to go in and arrest people, you better come with a lot more guys and better guns.

• 1:56:46Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:56:47Speaker 04

  And, uh, and so if we can establish this as a national park, it will be safe. And if by political winds, let's just say in six months or 18 months, we get there and we do this, and it's better as a private reserve, well, then we'll put it as a private reserve and, and have it as that, whatever, whatever works to protect the river.

• 1:57:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Like you could, you could choose that it wasn't the right.

• 1:57:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:57:13Steven Rinella?

  Wasn't the right time.

• 1:57:14Speaker 04

  I mean, look, as we've seen, administration changes and even the things you thought were locked away and sacred can be unlocked. And that's terrifying.

• 1:57:22Steven Rinella?

  Going through that right now.

• 1:57:22Speaker 04

  That is terrifying. And, uh, and so for us, the danger right now is we're in a race against time because we have roads coming. Right now, there's a road on our northern boundary that, you know, if we got, at the beginning of the year, we got a lot of funding because I was doing a lot of press. And that's what happens. I do a lot of press and a lot of people reach out and if, you know, $5, $10, $100 a month, great. But then you get those people that are like, we're gonna give you $300,000, we're gonna give you half a million dollars. Go get that piece of land. Let's just do it. So we get these funders on all levels.

• 1:57:56Speaker 04

  And then things quiet down. And so we have the landowners on another hundred thousand acres.

• 1:58:05Speaker 04

  The pen is, the contracts are drawn up. Our lawyers are waiting with the pens. We just gotta get the funding.

• 1:58:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:11Speaker 04

  15 million is not that much money.

• 1:58:12Steven Rinella?

  Be able to go like you did in that story you told where you're like, no, no, I'm talking today, man.

• 1:58:16Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:58:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:17Speaker 04

  And so right now there's a road coming and we don't have the money for that land. So we're a few, few million dollars short of that. That's, that's emergency right now money. And so we're just scrambling right now. And it's funny, cause the, the, last year at this time, the narco traffickers decided they were gonna kill me and JJ. That's what they figured. They said, well, this is, you're making it very difficult for us to work out here. We're gonna kill the two of you. And there was actually a day that JJ was in a car and they, they actually showed up asking for both of us. Sorry, it was a day that our car was driving, our driver was driving. They showed up asking for us and neither one of us was in the car. Cause that would have been it.

• 1:58:54Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 1:58:56Speaker 04

  We've dealt with that situation by collaborating with the Peruvian authorities. That's no longer a, a problem right now. But last year, we were dealing with that and it seemed like everything was gonna, everything was gonna die. Then we got some donations, we got some help, we worked the Peruvian police, we removed the narco threat, we got a bunch of land, we got them out. Great. Now this year we have this road and it's like every year something is coming. And it's like, if we could just, I mean, I just met somebody who, they were renovating their cafeteria at a zoo. And he said, we just spent 25 million on this new, new cafeteria. And I went, oh, that was so casual. Can you please tell me where you found that money? Because 15 million to protect the wildest place on earth? I'm shocked that I have to work this hard to get it.

• 1:59:41Speaker 04

  Like I'm, I'm writing books and I'm going on podcasts and we're bringing people down there. We own the tallest treehouse in the world. We put it up in one of those thousand year old trees. And so people can come to this luxury treehouse and watch the mist and the macaws and the monkeys and the Amazon. You know, so it's not even like you give the money and there's no way to see it. It's like people, you can come with us. And so we're, my job right now is to just go find the person that's willing to go, you know what? I want the park named after me. I don't, they don't, what's the thing that someone said? They said, you can get just about anything done if you don't care who gets the credit. I don't care who gets the credit. On my gravestone, I wanted to say that I protected more harpies than anybody else. That's it. You know, and, and, and I'm not doing this, I, I know your audience. I'm not doing this from a bunny hugger perspective.

• 2:00:25Speaker 04

  I'm, I, I love the abundance and I want to be able for the local people to be fishing and hunting and man fishing's good in the Amazon.

• 2:00:35Speaker 04

  But if we don't protect it, we're gonna ruin it. And, and I think it's really interesting being up here right now because, you know, hearing about what's going on in Yosemite and what's going on with the roadless areas. And, you know, growing up, me and my dad, when I was 18, we went to, I think it was called the Womenucho Wilderness Area. And, and just learning that, and we did a, you know, multi-day trip. And just learning that there are these areas in the U.S. that people before I was born said, this should be protected. These mountains, these ecosystems, these forests should be protected. And we've put roads and, and, and stores and polluted the crap out of everything. But let's just pick a few spots on, on the map.

• 2:01:18Steven Rinella?

  You know what it is?

• 2:01:19Speaker 04

  That we don't touch. 2%.

• 2:01:21Steven Rinella?

  2% is federally designated wilderness area.

• 2:01:24Speaker 04

  And, and, and is roadless even less than that?

• 2:01:27Steven Rinella?

  Roadless is, roadless.

• 2:01:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:33Steven Rinella?

  I don't want to get into this too deep, but there is a thing federally designated, like congressionally approved, like road, roadless areas, like wilderness with a capital W, 2%. We also have a lot of areas that happen to be roadless.

• 2:01:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:01:50Steven Rinella?

  And there's a debate right now about, um, do we sort of codify that roadlessness and, and recognize it and keep it that way? And it's been that way for 25 years. Or do we say, um, nevermind, there is no sort of like de facto protection of a roadless area. But the 2% that is wilderness with a capital W is very well protected.

• 2:02:18Steven Rinella?

  Uh, we could potentially grow that percentage if we choose to do that.

• 2:02:22Speaker 04

  Got it. But, but that is such an important thing, I think, to, to so many people.

• 2:02:27Steven Rinella?

  It's, it's, it's of, and, um, I like to knock around in those places, but I would argue that it is of economic, it's economically imperative that we protect these places.

• 2:02:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:02:41Steven Rinella?

  Because, uh, my, my gamble, my investment gamble is that these places will prove to be of incalculable value in the future, for future generations.

• 2:02:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:02:55Steven Rinella?

  So anyways.

• 2:02:56Speaker 04

  And not just on a, on a, on a beauty or appreciation level, but on a, on a, as a country.

• 2:03:01Steven Rinella?

  Just, yeah, I don't mean that we're gonna, I don't mean to do them later. I just mean that, um, as more of the world gets developed and laid over in concrete and polluted and, and spoiled, those places that are like that will be, will look and will continue to say, like we say of Theodore Roosevelt and others, we'll continue to say, what genius?

• 2:03:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:03:23Steven Rinella?

  What genius?

• 2:03:25Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:03:25Steven Rinella?

  Did that?

• 2:03:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and, and so that, you know, that's what we're aspiring to with this Jungle Keeper story. And so what the book is about is, you know, going from a kid that was born in Brooklyn and grew up in New Jersey and started doing solo expeditions in the Adirondacks and the Catskills. And I kept coming out on the other side, you know, I'd go into a 4,000 acre state park with my dog, you know, and like go looking for bears and, and foxes and just, you know, just tracking and having fun and camping and, and developing my bushcraft. But I was sick of coming out the other side and I hadn't really been out west yet. I didn't realize how big things were and that there's a lot up here. But, but my love of specifically animals and poking them, just like you, you know,

• 2:04:11Speaker 04

  I really want to interact with them.

• 2:04:14Speaker 04

  I was just like, man, the Amazon is it, I gotta see this before I go. And then, and then the urgency of like the rainforests are disappearing. I'm skeptical. You know, if a local person tells me, well, if I touch this with a stick, it's gonna die. Show me. And if someone says the rainforests are disappearing, we're losing 700 football fields a day. It's like, all right, I want to see. Is that true? What's really happening on the ground? I don't trust anyone. I want to go see for myself. And I went down there and I was like, oh shit. This is bigger, more beautiful and complex and incredible than I could have ever imagined. And the first few years was all just expeditions and, you know, climbing trees and getting to know these guys, it was just playtime, wilderness playtime, hardcore wilderness expeditions.

• 2:04:58Speaker 04

  And then we saw the road. The damn road and the smoke on the horizon.

• 2:05:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:04Speaker 04

  And then we realized, I realized, and I said to JJ, I said, who do we call? Cause I'm from the US, right? So I said, you know, who do we call that's gonna show up and stop this? This will not stand. I want to call the proper authorities and stop this.

• 2:05:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:17Speaker 04

  And he, in, in, in his incredible, beautiful, you know, almost perfect English, he went, you know, goes, you see anybody? He goes, look that way. He goes, look this way. He goes, we're the only people here. He goes, you want to do anything, you gotta do it.

• 2:05:32Speaker 04

  And, and, and then that ended up being the call to, to adventure in our lives. Like that ended up being the narrative. This is all I've ever done. I've never done anything else. I've never had a job. I've never, uh, nothing. I've been living in the Amazon, collecting botflies and scars and stories and just trying to convince people to protect this one wildest place on earth. And unlike every other, you know, yeah, I started an organization, but we're totally accountable. You said dollars to acres, uh, 80, 80% of every dollar that comes in, 80 cents on every dollar goes directly to land.

• 2:06:09Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 2:06:10Speaker 04

  And then there's, the rest is rangers and admin and gear.

• 2:06:14Steven Rinella?

  But that's, I mean, that's a great, that's a great nonprofit percentage.

• 2:06:17Speaker 04

  That is a great percentage. Cause a lot of them are like, 80% goes to advertising and the rest goes to, you know, paying the CEOs.

• 2:06:24Steven Rinella?

  80% to mission is commendable. I mean, it's good.

• 2:06:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's really good and we're very transparent and we're, you know, our, our, the people that become part of our team and our regular donors, a lot of them come down, which I also think is really cool. Cause it's not just sort of a faceless thing that you, you give to, say, no, no, come down, see what you did. Some people, uh, one guy, he, you know, he did a quarter of a million dollars, $250, $250,000 to protect this huge piece of land. And then he was like, I gotta see it.

• 2:06:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:52Speaker 04

  Let's go. We took him on this, you know, canoe top expedition out there to see it. And it was such a beautiful thing to see. You know, he goes, it was always just an idea in my head. And he said, I just one day said, I want to be part of something important. And I said, look at all these animals.

• 2:07:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:07Speaker 04

  They're all here because of you. This whole thing would be gone. And so the fact that it's not a forever project, if we can, if we can protect this river, this watershed, then we've done something incredible. And even better, we've come up with a blueprint that can be replicated in other rivers in the Amazon, in rivers in the Congo, in Indonesia, whatever, how to mobilize the indigenous people and empower them to connect with people around the world so that you can just save these rivers. We don't need to have this, this, this common narrative that every beautiful wild thing, every pristine stream, every great, you know, the salmon runs that somehow it seems like there's always a developer. There's always a mining project. There's always a, you know, there's always something trying to destroy the beautiful thing.

• 2:07:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:53Speaker 04

  And it's like, well, what if we just, you know, made it a little bit easier for people around the world to protect that thing, especially when it's their indigenous, and we use the word indigenous, whatever, when they're, when they're the local people that live there and depend on that ecosystem, um, they deserve to be able to fight those powers that come in from other places and go, well, we just, we're gonna put a factory upriver from you. You can't drink your water anymore. That's just, it just can't be that way forever.

• 2:08:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:20Speaker 04

  I feel like we can grow out of that and I want to be part of that movement.

• 2:08:25Steven Rinella?

  Well, man, thank you. Um, I, I, I'm probably guilty of, I, I sometimes describe myself as like an environmental nationalist. I'm, I'm like, you know, like a deeply patriotic American, and I look at most, I look at conservation through, through that lens in some ways. I'm very focused on America.

• 2:08:46Speaker 04

  I think we're the same on that. I'm very proud.

• 2:08:48Steven Rinella?

  But, but, uh, but what you're talking about in the world you're describing, like I said, I've, I've dabbled. It's gorgeous. Um, it, you, I think what you're doing is a great thing for people to support. I wish you the best of luck.

• 2:09:03Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 2:09:04Steven Rinella?

  And again, man, uh, everybody out there, well, thank you. And, um, Paul Rosely, check out the book Jungle Keeper, What It Takes to Change the World.

• 2:09:17Steven Rinella?

  And it was a New York Times bestseller. Congratulations.

• 2:09:19Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm shocked by that. For a kid that didn't do very well in school, that was a huge, uh, that was, that was a huge thing for me. But for people listening, you can come down and visit it. You can get, we'll give you a native guides and I mean, you, you should, you should come.

• 2:09:33Steven Rinella?

  Dude, you're, I'm already planning on hitting you up.

• 2:09:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. Tallest treehouse in the world. And, and this, this thing, you know, like I said, we can either get one big donor that lets us make the national park tomorrow, or we just reach so many people that we just let the people do it. And so if, you know, junglekeepers.org, we get enough people, then I, then I can stop doing this. Then I could just go explore the, explore the rainforest, describe some species. I, I'm, and I meant to tell you, you had this guy on that I listened to when I, when I knew I was gonna be on your podcast. The guy was doing top-down predator ecology. He sounded like a, like an old timer. He was talking about like coyote populations, how turkeys lay eggs. I was riveted, like that stuff. I just want to be out there collecting that stuff. I want to be learning.

• 2:10:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Be a man of the woods, man.

• 2:10:19Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10:19Steven Rinella?

  All right. One last time Jungle Keeper by Paul Rosely and check out the organization Jungle Keepers.

• 2:10:25Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:10:25Steven Rinella?

  All right. Junglekeepers.org?

• 2:10:26Speaker 04

  Junglekeepers.org.

• 2:10:27Steven Rinella?

  All right. Help, help these boys out with some cash. All right. Thanks, man.

• 2:10:31Speaker 04

  Thanks, Steve.

• 2:10:58Speaker 02

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• 2:11:43Speaker 02

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• 2:12:09Speaker 00

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