Paul Rosolie: Why first contact is an ethical emergency

1. 0:00 – 2:34

   Intro

   1. PRPaul Rosolie0:00

      This Burmese python wants to know what is inside The Diary Of A CEO.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett0:05

      Oh, my God!

   3. PRPaul Rosolie0:05

      It's beautiful. Now, what are you feeling right now?

   4. SBSteven Bartlett0:07

      Wondering why the [beep] I do this for a living.

   5. PRPaul Rosolie0:09

      Have you ever done a podcast- [laughing] - with a ten-foot snake across the table before?

   6. SBSteven Bartlett0:13

      No, this is my first.

   7. PRPaul Rosolie0:15

      Awesome. I'm gonna bring out the next friend.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett0:17

      Don't bring it over here.

   9. PRPaul Rosolie0:18

      Just don't move. [upbeat music]

   10. SBSteven Bartlett0:20

       Paul, what have you spent the last twenty years of your life doing?

   11. PRPaul Rosolie0:23

       Living out of a backpack in the Amazon rainforest, barefoot with a machete, to help the indigenous people save the Amazon. Whatever it takes. Which means crocodile bites, snake bites, very rare diseases, hunted by the narco traffickers. Like the picture of that guy, that scar is because he was shot in the head by a seven-foot arrow while he was trying to make peaceful contact with the uncontacted tribes. And this is actually a very important story.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett0:45

       I think I have a video of this.

   13. PRPaul Rosolie0:46

       Yeah, this is world-first footage. So a tribe isolated so deep in the jungle that they've never heard of a spoon, or the wheel, or Jesus, was coming out to make contact. So we do a two-day boat journey in one night through the worst thunderstorm I've ever seen. They were scared. We were scared, 'cause these tribes kill people all the time. And they had one question: "How do we tell the bad guys from the good guys?" You see, these people are being hunted by traffickers, and gold miners, and loggers, and boxed in by deforestation. But if our oceans and rainforests are vanishing, life on Earth is not possible. Now, it's not too late, but we're the last generation that can save it.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett1:20

       Paul, young kids are growing up attached to screens, and loneliness is at an all-time high. Is there anything that you learned in those fifteen years that a Westerner like me would find useful?

   15. PRPaul Rosolie1:28

       A hundred percent. So let's start with purpose. [upbeat music]

   16. SBSteven Bartlett1:34

       Listen, my, my team gave me a script that they asked me to read, but I'm just gonna ask you, um, in the nicest way I possibly can: Thank you, first and foremost, for choosing to subscribe to this channel. It is, um, it's been one of the most incredible, crazy years of my life. I never could have imagined... I had so many dreams in my life, but this was not one of them. And the very fact that these conversations have resonated with you, and you've given me so much feedback, is something I will always be appreciative of, and I almost carry a weight, a sort of burden of, uh, responsibility to pay you back. And the favor I would like to ask from you today is to subscribe to the channel, if you, um, would be so obliged. It's completely free to do that. Roughly about forty-seven percent of you that listen to this channel frequently currently don't subscribe to this channel. So if you're one of those people, please come and join us. Hit the subscribe button. It's the single free thing you can do to make this channel better, and every subscriber sort of pays into this show and allows us to do things bigger and better and to push ourselves even more. And I will not let you down if you hit the subscribe button, I promise you. And if I do, please do unsubscribe. But I promise I won't. Thank you. [upbeat music]

2. 2:34 – 5:32

   Why I'm on a Mission to Save the Amazon

   1. SBSteven Bartlett2:34

      Paul, you live an extraordinary life, a very atypical, extraordinary life. What have you spent the last twenty years of your life doing?

   2. PRPaul Rosolie2:44

      Trying to find a way to explore the wildest parts of the Amazon and figure out a way to save them.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett2:51

      The Amazon. For a lot of people that don't know anything about this part of the world, they'll, they'll think of it as a bunch of trees where lots of wild animals live. What is the sort of central misunderstanding of the true nature of the Amazon?

   4. PRPaul Rosolie3:03

      I think it's a, it's a problem of scale. People don't understand the importance of the Amazon. This is one of the most crucial things on our planet. It's one of the most physically defining features of our planet. If you look at Earth from space, you see this giant green belt over most of South America. That's the Amazon rainforest, and that's where one-fifth of our freshwater is contained and another fifth of our oxygen is produced. This system is irreplaceably valuable to all life on Earth.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett3:30

      And you live in the Amazon?

   6. PRPaul Rosolie3:32

      For the last twenty years, I've lived mostly in the Amazon. I've slept more nights outdoors than I have in in my adult life, because I befriended the indigenous people of the upper Amazon rainforest, and that's, that's what the book is about. It's I went down there at eighteen years old because I needed adventure, and then the quest for adventure led for this call to meaning, and then that led to the discovery that we were the only ones who could do anything to stop the bulldozers and the chainsaws from destroying the thing that we loved.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett4:03

      A lot of people have clicked on this conversation, for whatever reason. What are we gonna talk about today that you think might be interesting to them in their lives, and what is the wide variety of things from the conversations you have every single day that compels people? 'Cause I wanna give them a bit of a TL;DR before we get into the detail.

   8. PRPaul Rosolie4:21

      I think that what people are gonna find, and this is what I tried to write about, was that I didn't know where I was going at first. I just knew what I loved. And so over the last twenty years, it's been following a dream in a direction, and that dream was finding a way to relieve the, the incredible stress that I felt over the, the state of the environment. We live in these times where people feel like the world is ending, there's nothing we can do. Our oceans are collapsing, the rainforests are vanishing, elephants are being hunted to extinction, and I wanted to know: Are there solutions to these problems? Is there a way to change the narrative of conservation and come up with an alternative reality where everything's okay?

   9. SBSteven Bartlett4:59

      And do you think your message is more timely now than ever, with everything that's going on with technology, and AI, and this sort of great transition we're in?

   10. PRPaul Rosolie5:07

       I think that this message is timely now because whether we like it or not, we're alive at the most important moment in history. And the reason that that's true is because never before, as a global society, have we been all faced with the same problem. If our ecosystems collapse, life on Earth is not possible, and we are the last generation in history that's going to have a chance to restore those ecosystems and those sacred cycles before it's too late.

3. 5:32 – 11:25

   A Warning From 20 Years Deep in the Jungle

   1. SBSteven Bartlett5:32

      And as it relates to mental health, young kids are growing up attached to physical scr- to screens, and to technology, and all these things. You've lived almost the opposite life- [chuckles] ... it appears, for the last twenty years. I, I'm wondering if there's anything... You know, 'cause you said today on your way here that you, like, didn't know how to get out of the Uber [chuckles] and-

   2. PRPaul Rosolie5:52

      Yeah, no, it was a, it was a mess getting here. I almost got run over by a guy who recognized me and said, and said, "Get out of the road, Anaconda guy!" And then I'd never opened, uh, I guess I'd never opened a door with a button before, but I couldn't figure out how to get out of, out of the Uber. And then, uh, I had a, I had a whole adventure in the bathroom that should've been filmed. Um-... but no, I mean, I have lived, uh, we used to, we, we call it the barefoot machete days. You know, a lot of my early learning in the Amazon took place under the tutelage of indigenous experts, and these are people that, like JJ, who I meet when I first go down to the Amazon, he didn't have shoes until he was 13 years old.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett6:28

      Mm.

   4. PRPaul Rosolie6:28

      So he lived a life where if you wanted fish, you have to go to the river.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett6:31

      Mm-hmm.

   6. PRPaul Rosolie6:31

      And if you wanna eat, you have to go out into the forest, not to the supermarket. And so when you see kids today that are only using t- their thumbs, it's not too surprising when people are disconnected and disoriented and sort of don't know what's real and what's not real anymore. Because you go to the mountains, and the rain, and the sky, and the rocks will teach you what's real, real quick, and you all have to agree on it, or else you'll die. And the jungle's the same thing. It's sort of when you find yourself with these chemical, physical boundaries, life makes a lot more sense.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett7:03

      Have you been able to make sense of the life that someone like me lives more because you've spent time in the Amazon?

   8. PRPaul Rosolie7:13

      I don't-

   9. SBSteven Bartlett7:13

      Like, do you look at us differently? I know that sounds like a crazy thing to say-

   10. PRPaul Rosolie7:16

       [chuckles]

   11. SBSteven Bartlett7:16

       ... but in the same way that people might look at the way you choose to live your life-

   12. PRPaul Rosolie7:19

       Mm

   13. SBSteven Bartlett7:20

       ... and say, "This is very, very strange," do you look at people that, you know, like me, that work seven days a week behind a screen and think, "That's a very strange life?"

   14. PRPaul Rosolie7:27

       I just know that I couldn't do it. I, I, I depend almost, almost, uh... I'm so reliant on nature. I have to be around trees. I fall asleep to frogs. I, and I mean, even, even being in a city, I go seek out a place where there's a lot of trees. I am like a forest creature. If you take me out of my environment, I start to stress and die.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett7:50

       Die?

   16. PRPaul Rosolie7:50

       And, uh, there's a part of me that, yes, that starts to die. If you keep me in, locked in concrete, or if you were to, if you were to relegate me to a, a... I was just in a hotel last week on the book tour, and I realized nothing in the room with me was natural. The carpet, the table, the windows, the television, everything that was in this room with me was composite materials, and I couldn't even open the window to get to the outside air. And I- it did occur to me, I said, "I wonder if other people feel this type of, of, of societal claustrophobia," where to me, it's I have to have my feet in a river at some point. I have to, I have to, every night before I fall asleep, I have to look up. It's a ritual. I have to look up and s- and look at the stars. How else can you pray? And so for me, being in a city has become a very different reality to what I'm used to. I mean, just taking a shower, I mean, trust me, it's not as much fun standing in a cold tile box and spraying water on yourself as it is running through the jungle, diving into the river, and swimming, and the whole river rushing around you. It's a whole different experience, and so when I come back, I get a little bit... You know, I miss my- I miss the frogs, and the birds, and, and sort of my neighbors of, of, of the jungle.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett9:07

       Do you think there's, like, a collective delusion, uh, in terms of the way we live our lives? Do you, do you think we're- we've gone a bit crazy? Kinda like the frog in the frying pan, it's happened so gradually-

   18. PRPaul Rosolie9:15

       Yeah

   19. SBSteven Bartlett9:15

       ... this sort of technological creep of our lives that, you know, and we're looking at young kids that are more anxious and depressed than ever before. Loneliness is-

   20. PRPaul Rosolie9:24

       Mm-hmm

   21. SBSteven Bartlett9:24

       ... at an all-time high.

   22. PRPaul Rosolie9:24

       Mm-hmm.

   23. SBSteven Bartlett9:25

       More people are taking antidepressant medications than ever before.

   24. PRPaul Rosolie9:30

       I think that yes is the simple answer to your question, that, that, that sort of we're a species perpet- we're fish perpetually out of water, that is humans. Because we've taken ourselves away from forests, and away from deserts, and away from mountains and the ocean. I mean, we used to be fishermen, and we used to be farmers, and, and now the life that we live is so incredibly different than that. If you ask kids, where does their meat come from? There are kids that will say the grocery store. You know, they don't know that chickens exist before it's in the package. And, and so, you know, for, for- there was that generation, which I think that you and I are both a part of, where it was like we were the bicycle generation. We might be the last one-

   25. SBSteven Bartlett10:08

       [chuckles]

   26. PRPaul Rosolie10:08

       ... where it was like you went out in the morning, and you were on your bicycle, or you were running around with your friends, and you would come home for dinner, and I was incredibly lucky to have... You know, on the weekends, I would go to the woods. I would take a steak, and I would take one match, and I'd take my golden retriever, and we would go get lost up the side of a mountain, and, uh, we'd just go camping. My rule was no shelter, one match, one steak, dog, so you couldn't mess up the match.

   27. SBSteven Bartlett10:33

       At what age?

   28. PRPaul Rosolie10:34

       Uh, I would say 12 or 14, I was doing this. I had a little, you know, a little hunting knife on my side.

   29. SBSteven Bartlett10:39

       Not typical for a 12-year-old.

   30. PRPaul Rosolie10:41

       But I needed it.
4. 11:25 – 15:34

   The Wild Start to a Life-Changing Amazon Journey

   1. SBSteven Bartlett11:25

      setting off at, what, 17 years old with your Amazon research in Peru?

   2. PRPaul Rosolie11:30

      I-

   3. SBSteven Bartlett11:30

      You didn't go to university. You, you were actually really, really smart, I, I hear.

   4. PRPaul Rosolie11:35

      I was smart enough that they had me both suspended, and in, in detention, and in American Mensa. I was, I was, I was r- really all over the place, but... And, and the thing is, they make you feel stupid when you can't do the assignments. So they'd say: "Why are you failing math?" and, "Why can't you read this book?" and, "You didn't do your homework." But I was like: I know I'm smart, and in the forest I was good at tracking, and I could survive, and I could make it through a weekend, and I could build shelter, and so I always just gravitated towards that. And so I spoke to my parents. I dropped out of high school. You can take your GED and get out two years early with a, with a, with a, with a one-day test, and I did that. The rule was I did have to go to university, so I had to start taking semesters, but in between semesters-... I was free to go to the Amazon rainforest. And so I booked the most remote position that I could at a place where it took two days by boat from the nearest city to get to this tiny little research station, and it was run by this Peruvian guy and his partner, and his name was JJ. And that's the guy that opened the Amazon for me.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett12:35

      He opened the Amazon for you?

   6. PRPaul Rosolie12:37

      Well, JJ grew up in the Amazon as an indigenous person, so what he was learning, he, i- the, the first chapter in this book is called The Rarest of Species, because he's the only unicorn in the Amazon rainforest. He's an indigenous person, so he's been learning from his grandfathers, grandfather's grandfather's grandfathers, all the way back.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett12:56

      And indigenous means?

   8. PRPaul Rosolie12:58

      Indigenous means his family is from the jungle. Their heritage, their lineage going back, they are a jungle people. They're from the Ese'Eja tribe. And so his father, Don Santiago, there, they knew the medicinal plants. They knew how to fish for piranha. Then he can cut a piece of callus off of his foot and put it on a hook, using himself as bait to catch a baitfish. He can mash up a barbasco root and put it in a stream, and then all the fish float to the surface. He can track a deer, he can track a jaguar, he can track a person. So these people know everything about the forest, and they're the people that I came in with. And because I knew about snakes, he knew every- he knew everything about the forest: the medicines, the habits of the animals, the systems. The only thing I knew was, I said, "I know how to handle snakes." And he said, "I'm scared of snakes." And I said: "I could teach you snakes." I said, "You teach me everything else." And he goes, "You like snakes?" He goes, "Come with us." He said, "We go on a family hunting trip once a year, where we go on this expedition, ten days into the jungle, where no one's allowed to go, only people with indigenous status." He said, "You're our guest. You come with us." And so there I was, going up the river into parts of the world that have yet to be named, into the wildest places in the Amazon rainforest, and learning from these guys through experience how to catch fish out of the river, how to navigate through difficult parts of the, of the stream. When the storms are coming, how to survive them. And then we found anacondas. And so it was like this- I had this very, very un- in- unorthodox training and introduction into the jungle.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett14:28

      How big is the Amazon rainforest? Trying to get my head around the scale of it.

   10. PRPaul Rosolie14:34

       I'm bad with numbers. What I do know is that it's larger than the lower forty-eight states.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett14:39

       Wow!

   12. PRPaul Rosolie14:40

       It's, it's absolutely tremendous. It's the largest contiguous rainforest on Earth.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett14:44

       And are there parts of it that people have never been to?

   14. PRPaul Rosolie14:46

       Hundred percent. There are still parts of the Amazon rainforest that are unexplored. There's parts of the Amazon rainforest that no one's ever been to, and if you really wanna blow your own mind, the canopy of the Amazon rainforest is about a hundred fifty, a hundred sixty feet up above our heads, which is far.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett15:01

       Mm-hmm.

   16. PRPaul Rosolie15:02

       And half of the life in a rainforest exists in the canopy. So you're talking about the most mega biodiverse biome that has ever existed. There's never been more terrestrial wildlife anywhere on Earth than in the Amazon rainforest, and right now. In the entire fossil record, we- we're at the apex, the climax community of the Amazon rainforest. It's that brilliant, where the Andes rainforest, cloud forests, meet the lowland tropical Amazon. There it is. That's the most life we know of in the entire universe.

5. 15:34 – 19:58

   What It’s Like to Meet an Uncontacted Tribe for the First Time

   1. SBSteven Bartlett15:34

      And in terms of human life-

   2. PRPaul Rosolie15:35

      Mm-hmm

   3. SBSteven Bartlett15:36

      ... I hear there's lots of human life there that we've never contacted.

   4. PRPaul Rosolie15:41

      There are various tribes living through the Western Amazon, and you have the Ese'Eja and the Machiguenga, and you have the Yine. And, and then further out, beyond all of these, there were always rumors that there were uncontacted tribes. And, and for the first many years that I was there, it was always someone's uncle, someone's brother, someone's cousin, would, would come back with these crazy stories that someone had seen the tribes and that they were, that they were tall and naked, and they still hunted with bows and arrows, and they would... And then every now and then, somebody would come back with a seven-foot arrow, a spear tipped with bamboo, a huge bamboo tip this big, razor sharp, like a machete. And that was the only proof we had that they existed, until the day we met them.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett16:35

      When did you meet them for the first time?

   6. PRPaul Rosolie16:39

      So in order to explain how we met them, we should probably explain why, what, where we got to in- how the, how the eighteen-year-old researcher became the director of, of, of a major organization, but-

   7. SBSteven Bartlett16:51

      Please.

   8. PRPaul Rosolie16:53

      Okay. Well, so somewhere along the way, as we, as we, as we did these expeditions through the Amazon, and I became closer and closer with the indigenous people, you know, JJ, as a teacher, kept telling me... And that's, and that's what the, the first chapter of the book is about, is, you know, him just teaching me the incredible interconnectedness. There's this, there's this moment that I write about where he's going: "Look at this beach and tell me the news." And I said: "What?" And he said: "Yeah." He said, "Every day the ground is like last night's newspaper. It tells you what happened." So I look at the beach, and there's jaguar tracks, and there's like a mess of jaguar tracks and some jaguar scat, and I made no sense of it. And he was like: "This is where she came yesterday to drink. That's where she pooped. This is where she came today to drink. You can see the newer tracks." And then he's like: "And what you didn't notice, you didn't see the vultures above us." And I look up, and there's vultures above us, and he goes, "Notice they're not looking at us. They're looking at the jaguar, and so they're looking that way." Jaguar had a fresh deer kill and had continually been eating and then coming to the river to drink, and so he can decipher all of these incredible things. And so as he's taking me through these worlds of butterflies and interconnected species, where there's a misty river flowing over the rainforest, this, this avatar on Earth, and then we- then they burned it down.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett18:10

      Who burned it down?

   10. PRPaul Rosolie18:11

       The loggers.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett18:13

       Mm.

   12. PRPaul Rosolie18:14

       And so the first time I saw ancient forest, a place that I love, with trees significantly bigger than this room-... vanished. There's this cacophony of life, this orchestra, this symphonic roar of life that you get in the mor- especially in the morning in the Amazon. And then at night, there's the night chorus, and when you hear that silenced, it's one of the most horrific things that you can experience because places that we loved, trees that have been standing for a thousand years, species that had never been described by science, were all incinerated. And I said to JJ, I said, "How do we... This, this, this can't be allowed. This can't, this can't possibly be something that's permitted." And I said, "Isn't there somebody that we can call?" We were standing on the side of the river, and he, he leaned forward, and he looked this way, and he looked that way, and he goes, "Do you see anybody?" He goes, " 'Cause I don't see anybody." He goes, "You have to do something." I said, "I have to do something?" I said, "I'm nineteen, twenty years old." I said, "What am I gonna do? I said, "I don't have a PhD. I don't have a trust fund. I don't have a media presence." I said, "I don't have anything." I had a machete, and I had bare feet. We both had machetes and bare feet, and so that was the start of the journey, where we said, "The thing we love is being destroyed." We could see the smoke on the horizon. The trees that we had explored and become to love were laying, smoldering on the ground in front of us, and we said, "Okay, now we have to figure out a way to change the narrative. The wildest place on Earth is about to be destroyed, bulldozed, and burned. How do we save it?" And so that's where when you ask the question of how does life in the jungle sort of translate to what your listeners are going to find interesting, it's taking on a task that's so gigantic that at the start of it, we couldn't even come up with a... We couldn't even conceptualize how it could be possible, even with the right tools-

6. 19:58 – 26:36

   Why This Ancient Rainforest Is at Risk of Vanishing

   1. SBSteven Bartlett19:58

      To save the Amazon.

   2. PRPaul Rosolie19:59

      To save the Amazon rainforest, let alone for two guys with zero qualifications, bare feet, and machetes. And so we started behind zero, and today, we're at the point where we've turned loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers. We're protecting one hundred and thirty thousand acres of the river. We're on the cusp of creating a national park. Me and JJ are the directors of Junglekeepers, and we're about to make history because we're gonna save the entire watershed and all the trees and animals and heartbeats that are left, and that's the story that I'm trying to tell. That's the whole reason for my existence. That's why I... That's what I wake up and do every day.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett20:37

      And you've really taken on that responsibility in a very personal way, I can tell.

   4. PRPaul Rosolie20:41

      Yeah. Yeah, there's a, there's a point where, you know, I remember- 'cause you grow up... I mean, I was born in Brooklyn, and then we, you know, I grew up in Jersey for a while, and then we moved to the Hudson Valley, but when you start, you start going to the Amazon for months and months and months out of the year, and you come back with scars and stories where a jaguar is breathing on your neck, and you, you go out on a solo, and you come back, and then suddenly standing and making conversation at a barbecue feels different. It's, it's almost like I imagine- I have a lot of veteran friends, and sort of you, you almost get addicted to the action, and then you also get addicted to the, the, the, the team. You know, uh, Sebastian Junger writes about this, about the, the addict- the, the, the need for community, the tribe, and sort of the, the mission, and I think that that's one thing that people are missing today, where they, they, they don't know... You know, we've been disassociated from religion and community and, and, an immediate sort of connection with other humans, and so then, well, then what else is there? How do, how do you- where, where, to what do you moor your existence? What do you... W- what's your, what's your purpose? What do you wake up and do every day? And so I think, you know, in the old days, it was like, you know, we have to, we have to defend ourselves from the outside world, from warring communities, you know, or, or even just providing for your family. We have to bring water every day. We have to chop wood every day. We have to figure out how to survive, and then today, I mean, when I'm here, I wake up, and I go, "Well, there's, there's water in the fridge, so I don't have to do that," and I'm like, "The air conditioner is on," and the... I'm like, "So I, I guess I'll check my phone," [chuckles] like, you know? And so I, you know, I think we have, like you said, become... Somehow we've gotten really far away from what we are built for. And one of the beautiful things that happens when you go into the wild, and this can be any wild, is that it starts to change you. And so you go into the wild, and you start picking up logs and throwing them. You start splitting firewood, and the first day, you're gonna have calluses on your hands, but then after a few weeks, you're gonna have tough hands. You start walking barefoot, same thing. The sun starts to make your skin thicker and tanner and more resilient, and then the rain will hammer that home, and you start to get- your eyes start to get sharper, and you start to pay more attention to what you're hearing. And so you start going through this whole transformation, where you start to be- almost become a different animal. You become the jungle version of yourself. You become the mountain version of yourself. Your legs start to get strong again, and so, so the wild puts you through this gauntlet of transformation, and you become connected to your environment, and then that feeling of disassociation tends to alleviate a little bit.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett23:19

      I heard about this particular part of the brain that changes as well. You talked about transformation.

   6. PRPaul Rosolie23:24

      Yeah.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett23:25

      Um, they discovered something not so many years ago called the anterior midcingulate cortex.

   8. PRPaul Rosolie23:31

      Mm-hmm.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett23:32

      Andrew Huberman, I heard him say that-

   10. PRPaul Rosolie23:33

       Yes

   11. SBSteven Bartlett23:33

       ... he thinks it was one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience of the last century. The anterior midcingulate cortex is a part of the brain sitting between your emotional brain and your executive control center that essentially grows when you do hard things.

   12. PRPaul Rosolie23:47

       Mm.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett23:48

       Not when you do things that, um... Specifically, when you do things that you don't want to do-

   14. PRPaul Rosolie23:54

       Yeah

   15. SBSteven Bartlett23:54

       ... but you do them anyway. So not running a marathon because you enjoy it.

   16. PRPaul Rosolie23:57

       Right.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett23:57

       Things you don't want to do, and you do it anyway, and it went through- some of the studies I saw said that younger people that have been born into this sort of doomscrolling generation have smaller ones. If you are, um, obese, it's smaller. Um, athletes have bigger ones, and people who live longer have even bigger ones.

   18. PRPaul Rosolie24:14

       Mm.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett24:14

       And it's- they kind of call it, like, the muscle of the brain of doing hard things, and so when you were talking about that physical transformation, I weirdly thought about, I think it's Roosevelt, who-

   20. PRPaul Rosolie24:21

       Yep

   21. SBSteven Bartlett24:22

       ... after losing his mum and his wife on the same day-

   22. PRPaul Rosolie24:25

       Yes

   23. SBSteven Bartlett24:26

       ... after his baby girl was born, he went out to the Badlands and spent two years doing pretty much what you said.... putting himself in intentional discomfort.

   24. PRPaul Rosolie24:34

       Yeah.

   25. SBSteven Bartlett24:34

       And he came back, and all of his friends described him as being transformed.

   26. PRPaul Rosolie24:37

       Yeah.

   27. SBSteven Bartlett24:37

       He went on to become the youngest president in American history. He got shot and carried on doing the speech. He led the charge, um, uh, I think it was the, the Spanish Crusades or something, the Spanish War, and-

   28. PRPaul Rosolie24:48

       Yeah, the Rough Riders.

   29. SBSteven Bartlett24:48

       Yeah, the Rough Riders. And they all pointed at the moment when he went out to the Badlands.

   30. PRPaul Rosolie24:51

       Mm-hmm.
7. 26:36 – 28:56

   How the Jungle Changed Me Over the Last Decade

   1. SBSteven Bartlett26:36

      If I sat 18-year-old you at this table, he sat there-

   2. PRPaul Rosolie26:40

      Mm.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett26:41

      -and you know, this version of you at, what, 37?

   4. PRPaul Rosolie26:44

      38.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett26:44

      38. You will sat there, so 20 years difference.

   6. PRPaul Rosolie26:46

      Yeah.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett26:47

      What would the notable differences be between these two men?

   8. PRPaul Rosolie26:50

      [exhales] Um, well, he didn't know how to fish with his feet. Um, [chuckles] that's for sure. His machete skills would be terrible, but the, the noticeable difference would be that that 18-year-old, his greatest dream was to alleviate the environmental stress that he grew up with, escape the world of rules, find purpose in life, and to just have adventures. My, my greatest dream was to see the Amazon rainforest. I looked at people like Teddy Roosevelt and Jane Goodall, and I said: Man, they had such incredibly, i- like, extraordinary lives. And I said: How come my life can't be like that? I'm over here in detention. You know, I'm over here being told that I didn't do my homework. And I'm like, I wanna chop wood and carry water. I wanna go to war. I want to f- uh, be scared. I wanna be challenged. And so for me, it was- I, I was... That would be the difference, is that I would be hungry for all of that. Whereas the person sitting across from you today, my body is a Jackson Pollock painting of scars, crocodile bites, tiger bites, infections, times that I've been almost crushed to death by elephants. I've been hunted by the narco-terrorists, and at this point, the responsibility... That kid got to see all the things he wanted to see. We found the biggest anacondas. I lived through the amazing adventures, and that's great. The person sitting across from you today is responsible for protecting millions of animal lives, and my job is to explain to people that we, that everyone reading this message or listening to this message, has the chance to help the indigenous people save the Amazon before we lose it forever. And so that's the main difference, is that at that age, I was just- I just wanted some swashbuckling adventure, and now I've found that adventure became meaning. I found it along the way, and then now I'm on a whole other journey. Now it's, now it's: Can we bring it home? Now it's: Can we achieve something that we thought was impossible and change the narrative of how it's done?

8. 28:56 – 42:04

   The Moment We Discovered the Uncontacted Tribes

   1. SBSteven Bartlett28:56

      And I guess this kind of brings us back to this question about the uncontacted tribes.

   2. PRPaul Rosolie29:01

      Yeah.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett29:02

      You said you and JJ were talking about how you might go about saving the Amazon. Was highlighting the unc- uncontacted tribes in the Amazon part of the mission there?

   4. PRPaul Rosolie29:13

      No. Very much no. That's a great question because what we started doing was we looked at this river basin, and we said, "Okay, we, we, we love this, this one really wild river." And then we said, "Why, why has this river been so wild?" You know? So you think of the Amazon as a, a tree of rivers. You have the main Amazon channel and then all these millions of branches, and so the upper Amazon, the uppermost branches of the Amazon rainforest, those tip, tip tops, people are only just getting to them now. You know, the main Amazon channel is a shipping port, and then you have these huge tributaries going off of it, and you can get in as far as Iquitos with a steamship. Like, you can go all the way through Brazil, thousands of miles, and get all the way to Iquitos, Peru-

   5. SBSteven Bartlett29:54

      Mm-hmm

   6. PRPaul Rosolie29:55

      ... to the almost the back end of the Amazon.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett29:56

      I've been there.

   8. PRPaul Rosolie29:57

      And, and it's beautiful.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett29:58

      Mm.

   10. PRPaul Rosolie29:59

       We are at the southern edge in the tributaries down there, and there's one tributary-

   11. SBSteven Bartlett30:04

       What's a tributary?

   12. PRPaul Rosolie30:05

       A tributary is, is an offshoot from a larger river.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett30:07

       Okay.

   14. PRPaul Rosolie30:08

       So a stream is a tributary of a larger stream, which goes into, and it's, you know, then eventually you reach the Hudson River.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett30:13

       Mm.

   16. PRPaul Rosolie30:14

       And so this is a tiny little tributary, and the we, we- what we've discovered is that the reason people hadn't developed this tributary, the reason other indigenous communities hadn't formed, was that for hundreds and hundreds of years, this particular river had been protected by-... the violent, mysterious Mashco-Piro nomadic, uncontacted tribes, and that had kept it wild. They were the original jungle keepers. But by the time I got there, they were sort of just a myth, and so they were something that-- they said they lived really far upriver, past the last indigenous community. And I-- when I say indigenous community, I mean people that we can talk to, people that we can interface with, that I can speak a little Spanish to, and they'll understand me.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett30:58

       I think that's an important distinction.

   18. PRPaul Rosolie30:59

       Yes.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett31:00

       Because can you make that distinction between indigenous and these tribes?

   20. PRPaul Rosolie31:05

       Yes. So within Peru, you have Lima and, and, you know, Michelin-star restaurants and all this amazing food, and then you travel down to Cusco, where you have Machu Picchu, and you have the Andes and all of that incredible culture. And then you go down to the jungle, and that's a little bit like going to the back end of Alaska. That's where it's like you are very far away from LA or New York, like, but it's the same country. And out there you'll reach these communities where they are indigenous. And so in the reserve that we currently protect as Junglekeepers, there's two indigenous communities there, and we work with them to sort of support them. 'Cause as these loggers and narco traffickers and gold miners come in, they see them as, as a mark. They'll go in and say: Oh, there's these helpless indigenous people. How can we exploit them?

   21. SBSteven Bartlett31:51

       Mm-hmm.

   22. PRPaul Rosolie31:51

       How can we get their trees, their fish? They'll go and take those things from them, or they'll, or they'll sell them something that's not worth what it, what they think it is. And so we've been working with these indigenous communities to say: Do you want the loggers to come in and cut down all of your trees? And they go, "No." And they go, "But at the same time, we need a little bit of gasoline, because what if we're having a baby and we have to get our daughter to a hospital in town?" And so we've been working with them to provide sustainable jobs as rangers, protecting their own land. It's such a simple solution-

   23. SBSteven Bartlett32:20

       Mm-hmm

   24. PRPaul Rosolie32:20

       ... whereas otherwise they would go and be loggers to get that cash. And so we're working with these communities, and now they're rangers and boat drivers and guides and handymen. And they called us about a year ago, and they said, "Something incredible is happening, and it's gonna be dangerous, but you are the directors, and you're part of this family, and you're part of this story, and we need you here for this. But the tribes are about to come out of the forest." And we were in town, and we're, what, you know, what we do now is, you know, we... and we can explain this later, but we raise money, and we bring it to the Amazon, where we-- the local people have the opportunity to set aside huge acreage of A- of the Amazon to protect it. We're ch- we're changing the narrative of destruction, where we just protect it before they get to it. And so we were in town with JJ, who's now the director of this major organization, and we're talking to our lawyers, and we're in the office, and we get this call that the tribe is out.

   25. SBSteven Bartlett33:13

       The tribe is out?

   26. PRPaul Rosolie33:14

       The tribe is out.

   27. SBSteven Bartlett33:16

       What does that mean?

   28. PRPaul Rosolie33:16

       It means the mythical, uncontacted tribe, that when I arrived in Peru, the president of Peru had been saying, "These are a myth. They don't exist, and it's just-- it's the boogeyman. It's been made up as a story to scare the loggers." So their existence was contested. They were almost on the fringes of imagination.

   29. SBSteven Bartlett33:35

       Could we not have flown a plane over there or something? Is there-- you know, uh, this sounds like a dumb question, but presumably, we have satellites-

   30. PRPaul Rosolie33:41

       Yeah
9. 42:04 – 46:01

   Rare Footage of Tribes the World Wasn’t Meant to See

   1. SBSteven Bartlett42:04

      I think I have a video here of this.

   2. PRPaul Rosolie42:06

      Yes. Yeah, this is world-first footage.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett42:10

      I'll let you, um... You know how to use an iPad, right? [chuckles]

   4. PRPaul Rosolie42:16

      [chuckles] Um, there we go. Yeah, so this is- this was- this is just a random moment from the earlier days, but this is that moment where everyone starts screaming, "Mashco!" And we're all running, and this is what I was talking about, where they are moving across the beach, and you can see the, sort of the posture they're using there. I mean, he's got... They have their bows and arrows in hand, and then they showed up, and see they're pointing.... they were worried that our cameras were guns, and so they were asking to put down the cameras. They were curious about various members of our tribe, and they were all talking at the same time, so it was very difficult to understand what they wanted.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett42:53

      What's he doing with his finger there? He's doing-

   6. PRPaul Rosolie42:55

      This.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett42:56

      Yeah.

   8. PRPaul Rosolie42:56

      I don't know. This is the moment that we gave them the bananas, and what's haunting about this is the desperation that you see on them, where they're all rushing to get the bananas, and they're not necessarily taking them like they're going to share later. They're taking them like, "I get my bananas, you get your bananas." You see this, they're all rushing to get this little boatload, and these are people that don't have boats. And as they're doing this, they're all talking at the same time. It was like a flock of parrots. It was just a cacophony of, of sound. And they're all fighting over these plantains, and, and then once they get them, each person held their own. They have rope and plantains, and this interaction went on for several hours, and we negotiated with them. And this is just the footage... This is the footage that we're allowed to release right now, and this is them moving back off into the jungle. There's a lot more that happened, and again, that's where- that's why, that's why we're releasing this now, I should say that. That's why we waited a while to release this footage, because footage like this is incredibly sensitive for a number of reasons. A, you don't want people to think that we went out and contacted these people that want to be left alone. You also don't want to encourage other people to indulge their misconceptions. People, "Oh, these are the last free people on Earth. They live p- perfectly in balance with nature." No. People will go looking for them, whereas for hundreds of years, these people have asked for one thing and one thing only: to be left alone. And they've enforced that, kind of like the Comanches, with arrows. And on this day they said, "Please give us food. Please give us rope." And they had one other question. They said, "How do we tell the bad guys from the good guys?" And we said: "What do you mean? Who are the bad guys?" And they said, "Some of you shoot at us with the chuchuxu, with the fire sticks," the guns. And we're going, "Who, who does that?" We said, "We are not the bad guys." And they said, "No, you also," they said, "we know you cut down our trees." They're speaking to all of us. There was nothing- there's no like, you know, white guy, brown guy, Peruvian, foreigners, none of that. It was just, "All of you outsiders, stop cutting down our trees. Our trees are our gods." It was sort of like, you don't do that. And then when they left, just a few weeks ago, we learned that the narco traffickers view them as a threat, and there was actually a mass grave found of a similar clan. And so these people are being boxed in by deforestation and hunted by narco traffickers and gold miners and loggers. And so I think that them coming out of the forest was their way of saying, "Hey, we're trying to get a read on what's going on in the outside world. Who is it? Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys?" They don't know that Junglekeepers is protecting the land that they live on.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett45:41

      Mm-hmm.

   10. PRPaul Rosolie45:42

       They've never heard of a spoon or the wheel or Jesus or World War II, l- or the country of Peru. And so, so they're coming out with so many questions, and the only way to care for these people and to give them the, the, the rights that they deserve is to protect the forest they live in.

10. 46:01 – 47:06

    When the Tribe Women Took Our Food—And Why It Mattered

    1. SBSteven Bartlett46:01

       Do you know w- why some of them seem to be touching their nose?

    2. PRPaul Rosolie46:06

       It's funny, I didn't notice that. Yeah, I think this is, this is-

    3. SBSteven Bartlett46:09

       Right

    4. PRPaul Rosolie46:09

       ... this is gonna be your discovery to anthropology. I did not notice that, but it does... You see this, a lot of them are doing this. Yeah.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett46:16

       And the, the outfit, um-

    6. PRPaul Rosolie46:18

       The outfit.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett46:19

       W- what is this outfit? This, it looks like there's kind of rope tied-

    8. PRPaul Rosolie46:23

       Mm-hmm

    9. SBSteven Bartlett46:23

       ... around their midriff with their penises out.

    10. PRPaul Rosolie46:25

        Mm-hmm. Yeah, the, the, the, the head of the penis is covered by rope.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett46:28

        Oh, they've got the penis up into the rope.

    12. PRPaul Rosolie46:30

        Up.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett46:30

        Ah.

    14. PRPaul Rosolie46:30

        No, the head of the penis is up and protected, and, and that makes sense given the jungle where there's mosquitoes and botflies and sandflies. That, that's a smart move. And then rope seems to be, I mean, what is... It goes like fire, rope, ladders, like, I think it's like man's second invention.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett46:46

        Mm-hmm.

    16. PRPaul Rosolie46:46

        They are obsessed with rope. That's how they make their bowstrings, that's how they make their arrows, that's how they lash things together to make the, the, the limited structures that they make. And some of what we know about them is, you know, we find their camps after they leave, so we know what they eat. They eat primarily turtles and monkeys. They don't fish. They don't have fish hooks.

11. 47:06 – 54:20

    Do Uncontacted Tribes Really Eat Humans?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett47:06

       They, they don't eat humans, do they?

    2. PRPaul Rosolie47:08

       They do not eat humans.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett47:09

       Okay.

    4. PRPaul Rosolie47:09

       They are not cannibal tribes.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett47:11

       That's a rumor people have talked about before. People have said-

    6. PRPaul Rosolie47:14

       Yeah, there's even a couple versions of my voice in AI saying that on the internet, but it is not true.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett47:19

       And their haircuts, they all seem to be... have this sort of mullet-style haircut from the '70s.

    8. PRPaul Rosolie47:25

       It seems like they all grab the front and just find a way to cut it. There might be, like, one guy with a machete who just does the haircuts.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett47:32

       And for a lot of them, this is the first time they've seen a human.

    10. PRPaul Rosolie47:35

        So actually, this was first contact. The anthropologist who came to the scene, who managed this interaction, he said he had met an uncontacted tribe before in the region. He said none of these were men that he'd met. And the other thing, notice they're all men.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett47:53

        Yeah.

    12. PRPaul Rosolie47:54

        The women were hitting, hidden in the forest, and while the men were making a distraction in front of us, the women were raiding the farm behind us.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett48:01

        Raiding?

    14. PRPaul Rosolie48:02

        Raiding the farm.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett48:03

        Your farm?

    16. PRPaul Rosolie48:04

        The indigenous people's farm, our community's farm.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett48:07

        So the women went to steal while they were distracting you?

    18. PRPaul Rosolie48:09

        That's right.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett48:10

        And did you catch the women on tape?

    20. PRPaul Rosolie48:12

        No. No, no, no, no, no. Everyone was... We were all huddled up very, very close. I mean, this was an incredible encounter, but let me explain. The prevailing emotion during this entire thing was fear on both sides. They were scared. We were scared. The indigenous people naturally have shotguns anyway. Everyone had their shotguns out. They all had... Some of them had put their bows on the beach, but they had other- they had archers waiting. And so everyone was sort of, you know... It was like, "Put down your guns and we can talk," but nobody really wanted to put down their guns.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett48:45

        And how do you know the women were-

    22. SBSteven Bartlett48:47

        ... stealing from your farm?

    23. PRPaul Rosolie48:50

        Because after this was all over and we went to the farm, everything had been pulled up. All the yuca, all the plantains, all the sugarcane, the entire farm was ruined.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett49:01

        How'd you know it was the women?

    25. PRPaul Rosolie49:03

        The women in the village told me it was the women. They went, "Ah, that was the women."

    26. SBSteven Bartlett49:06

        [chuckles]

    27. PRPaul Rosolie49:06

        Also, you see the smaller footprints. These men have wide, big men. They're from walking barefoot their whole lives, their feet get ancho. They get really thick, and so... And I have jungle feet like that now, but these guys have almost duck feet at this point. Like, big, fat, calloused feet that get wider. You ever see a farmer's hands?

    28. SBSteven Bartlett49:26

        [chuckles] Yeah.

    29. PRPaul Rosolie49:27

        Where they just, they just grow.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett49:28

        Yeah.
12. 54:20 – 59:13

    How Many Uncontacted Tribes Are Still Out There?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett54:20

       do we believe are in the Amazon rainforest?

    2. PRPaul Rosolie54:23

       Several thousand little tribes, little clans, that move nomadically through the Amazon.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett54:28

       Were they tall?

    4. PRPaul Rosolie54:30

       They looked like they were at least, you know, 5'9", 5'10". They were pretty tall, especially because the, the, the Peruvians and the indigenous communities that we work with tend to be on the smaller side.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett54:42

       Mm-hmm.

    6. PRPaul Rosolie54:42

       They, they, they are taller than the average, uh, some of the other tribes. There's another tribe that we ran into down there called the Nawa, and those people were, were absolutely tiny. They were s- like, below 5 feet, all of them. Um-... these guys are tall. Yeah.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett55:00

       Um, is there a leader here? Is someone in charge?

    8. PRPaul Rosolie55:03

       Another great question. It seems to be that there's two... They look like brothers. There seems to be two guys who do most of the talking. One in particular, who seems to be doing the most gesticulating, and he was communicating more forcefully. He, he had a smile- that guy, he had a smile on his face at certain times.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett55:19

       This one?

    10. PRPaul Rosolie55:19

        Yeah, I think so. And, and he was the one that would walk the furthest out into the river. Yeah. And he seems well-muscled, healthy.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett55:30

        He's the biggest as well-

    12. PRPaul Rosolie55:31

        Yeah

    13. SBSteven Bartlett55:31

        -big size, by the looks of it.

    14. PRPaul Rosolie55:32

        Yeah.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett55:33

        Okay. These tribes have been known to kill people?

    16. PRPaul Rosolie55:39

        These tribes kill people all the time. The, the day after this happened, we went downriver, and one of the people who had been maintaining the peace during this negotiation across the river was my friend George, and George kept saying: "Don't worry, it's gonna be okay. Don't worry, no mole." And he'd say: "Let's get them more bananas." And he said, "You stay behind the trees." Say, "Hey, please put down your camera. They don't understand that it's not a gun." He was making sure that everyone was calm. Well, George was driving the day after this in the river, as he does every day, and he rounded one river bend, and the tribe was out again. They were further upriver, and usually when they leave, they go deep into the jungle, but on this day, they had been walking up the river, which nobody expected. And so when his boat came around the river, they hadn't expected it, and they open-fired. Everybody else on the boat was able to get down under the, the benches, which is made out of heavy, thick wood. As he was driving, he caught an arrow over the scapula, came out by his belly button. So it collapsed his right lung and cut through his whole body, and he had to be helicopter evacuated out of the indigenous community, and somehow he lived. But he's never gonna be the same. And there's, there's a hundred stories I could tell you of people that have been killed by them, but now and more and more, there's stories of that they are also being exterminated. So their violence is in response to the fact that the outside world has been cruel to them, and the only way that they can ensure that they survive is by keeping the outside world out.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett57:19

        This is a, uh... might be a bit of a dumb question, but there's no consequence to that, is there, from the Peruvian government or anything? The go- Peruvian government aren't trying to, um... You know, if they, if this uncontacted tribe kills somebody, they're not necessarily gonna go there and try and [chuckles] enforce any kind of, like, law?

    18. PRPaul Rosolie57:38

        That's actually a great question 'cause it illustrates something that I think a lot of people fundamentally don't understand about this, is that, you know, if this banana is the last town, and then you imagine just our river is the size of a football field-

    19. SBSteven Bartlett57:55

        Mm-hmm

    20. PRPaul Rosolie57:56

        ... right? How are you gonna get to the other side of it? In the jungle, it takes you about, about an hour to cover half a mile through, through dense jungle. If me and you were going with machetes right now through dense, dense jungle, about an hour for every half mile. That's with no trail. With trail, you can go a little faster. With a boat, you can go a little faster, but the police have no jurisdiction outside of the city. The only reason the police have power is because everyone has agreed that there's a government and that they have power and that there's this... But it's all made up, and when you get out in the jungle, you realize that there is no law in the wild. It's just whatever happens. It's who has a bigger stick. And so they're still playing by that game. They've never heard of a law, and so they, they've been known to find something interesting just the way... And, you know, today, if we're interested in a bird, we take a picture of it, and then we study it, or we can capture it, and we can study it. You know, sometimes people will criticize Teddy Roosevelt for being a hunter, but a lot of the species, if he saw a new species, he would shoot it so that he could study it. That was what they did back then, but they do this with humans. They'll be like: "That's an interesting pair of pants." They seem to think about life and death very differently.

13. 59:13 – 1:01:39

    Can These Tribes Really Talk to Monkeys?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett59:13

       And I was watching something, um, a podcast that you did, where you said that they also speak the same language, some of these uncontacted tribes, as the monkeys?

    2. PRPaul Rosolie59:23

       Yes. Um, so what they do is they will emulate capuchin calls, bird calls. The undulated tinam- tinamou goes [whistles] . Um, the capuchins, I can't do their call, but they... These guys have it down perfectly.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett59:37

       Capuchins being?

    4. PRPaul Rosolie59:38

       Capuchin monkeys. [capuchin monkey squeaking] And they'll use those sounds. And JJ's father, Don Santiago, had told us years and years ago, so we thought he was just trying to scare us. He said: "If you're ever in the forest, and you hear the animals sound a little off, if you ever just feel like something's not right about the way the animal..." He said, "They've surrounded you, and they're all watching with their bows and arrows."

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:03

       The tribes have?

    6. PRPaul Rosolie1:00:04

       Yeah, and so they'll go, [whistles] , and you'll go, [whistles] and he'll go, [whistles] and you go, "Wait, wait, so you don't hear three tinamous in a row. That's not how it works. The one tinamou talks to the other tinamou, and all of a sudden, I got five tinamous around me? Uh-uh." And then you know that you got the tribe around you. And so this is where the local people know how this stuff works, and to anyone from the outside, they go, "There's no such thing as uncontacted tribes, and they don't communicate." Yeah, they do. And one of my friends was in that exact situation, where they were communicating with animal calls in a circle while he was in a stream with his father, and unfortunately, they shot his father in the stomach, and his father died. And then he ran for it, and he lived to tell the tale. And the next day, the, his community, our friends, came back, and they found this guy who had just bled out through his stomach, and why they killed him, we do not know.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:01

       ... so they pretend they're animals, um, by- well, they, they use animal sounds to communicate with each other?

    8. PRPaul Rosolie1:01:07

       Yes.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:09

       Because then the prey, which in this case might be a human-

    10. PRPaul Rosolie1:01:12

        Yeah

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:13

        ... won't know that it's-

    12. PRPaul Rosolie1:01:14

        Exactly.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:15

        Okay.

    14. PRPaul Rosolie1:01:15

        So if I'm going... If we go, "Okay, let's split up and surround," we're, we're, we're uncontacted tribes now.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:20

        Mm-hmm.

    16. PRPaul Rosolie1:01:21

        And we go, "Okay, there's loggers over there. Let's split up, surround them. We'll see how many of them there are," and-

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:25

        And use the monkey's language so we can-

    18. PRPaul Rosolie1:01:27

        We use the monkey language, so they don't think anything of it. They'll just keep doing what they're doing, and then when we give the go-ahead, everybody, phew, we just slice them with seven-foot arrows, and they're all going down.

14. 1:01:39 – 1:03:25

    Are They Just Searching for Happiness Like Us?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:01:39

       [chuckles] I was, I was gonna ask about happiness, but I don't even know the context in which to ask the question about their happiness.

    2. PRPaul Rosolie1:01:45

       Yeah. No, I think, I think that there's some, some Cormac McCarthy quotes that would probably do better justice to their reality than the idea of happiness. I think that they are living in a world where they're more concerned with calories. They're more concerned with how much blood does it cost to walk a mile. They're more concerned with stealing the women from other tribes. They're not concerned with happiness. It's more Apocalypto than, uh, Downton Abbey. You know, it's, it's, they're, they're, they're, they were in a state of desperation. You could see it in their face, and that's where there's a further anthropological question of what happens in the future for these people? But one thing that we know for certain is that rapid contact destroys them. It's happened before. All of this has happened before. You know, when the outside world reaches an uncontacted tribe, the pathogens kill them. When the outside world reaches even an indigenous community, alcohol, outside pathogens, money can destroy an indigenous culture and take away their language in a single generation. So, so these types of, of severely isolated cultures, if they want to come out and make contact with the indigenous co- communities that are their neighbors, that has to happen over time, and w- and they have to have the agency to do it, which means their forest needs to be protected. And so that's, that's... And that's all we know. You know, we don't know what their birth rates are, what their infant mortality rates are, where their old people are, what, what, what, what are their creation myths? What are their beliefs? We have no idea.

15. 1:03:25 – 1:06:40

    Do Tribal People Still Live in Huts? Here’s the Truth

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:25

       Do we even know where they live in terms of do they live in huts, houses? Do we know that?

    2. PRPaul Rosolie1:03:29

       No, they don't. In fact, at this very moment right now, uh, I would imagine that there's several of them hunched around a campfire in the darkness beneath 160 feet of canopy. You know, 'cause when you're in the jungle, there's, there's these, these pillars going up, but then it's a, it's a 4D environment 'cause it's just... You're walking-- It's like you're walking along the bottom of the ocean. You're this tiny thing, and above you is all of this slithering life, and frogs, and things moving through the branches, and so they're, they're huddled down there in the, in below the Amazon rainforest, and somehow they've figured out how to make fire. Which if I handed you a lighter and a full cup of gasoline-

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:08

       Mm

    4. PRPaul Rosolie1:04:08

       ... and said, "Have all the sticks you want in the jungle," you still couldn't make me a fire right now.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:13

       How do you know they can make fire?

    6. PRPaul Rosolie1:04:15

       Because we see them cook stuff. We find their camps.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:19

       Hmm.

    8. PRPaul Rosolie1:04:19

       But it's also conceivable, because they don't have pots, it's conceivable that the, that they some of these people haven't seen water boil, right? They just drink water, and it falls on them from the sky. They certainly don't know that water freezes.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:38

       On this point of happiness, you said that you saw desperation in their faces.

    10. PRPaul Rosolie1:04:41

        Mm.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:41

        But does that mean that you think they're not happy, or do you just think that that isn't even a sort of a paradigm that they even consider? It's all about survival.

    12. PRPaul Rosolie1:04:52

        I think that we have... We're inbuilt to enjoy moments of joy. I think that humans enjoy moments of interaction, moments of play, and not just humans, I think that animals in general. You look at, you know, two puppies chasing each other, they're having fun. You know, even on, even on this day with shotguns loaded and bows cocked and... We still found the time to smile a little bit at each other and say, "Give me that machete." "Yeah, come and get it," and we kind of like, you know, it was kind of like, "You're just as scared of us as we are as you," and it's... It was a, it was we were on the same level for that smile.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:21

        Mm-hmm.

    14. PRPaul Rosolie1:05:22

        You know? And it was like, "Oh, okay. Yeah, none of us want to do that."

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:26

        Mm.

    16. PRPaul Rosolie1:05:27

        Um, and so there's, there is happiness there, but I'm saying, you know, uh, knowledge comes with benefits. You know, there's a lot of things that they may believe that- I, I remember when I was in college, reading about an anthrop- anthropologist group that got to somewhere in New Guinea, and all the people were hiding in trees 'cause they'd, they'd gotten to a point in their civilization where they, where they believed that everything w- that bad, that was bad came from magical spells. You know, if I fall and break my leg, it's 'cause you said a magical spell on me, and if I get sick, it's 'cause of a magical spell, and everybody was so scared of upsetting each other, that they'd all just started living in the trees and hunting, and they were living in this constant fear state.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:03

        Mm.

    18. PRPaul Rosolie1:06:04

        And so, you know, y- you at times like that, you need someone to go, "Okay, guys, look, here's what, you know, here's what's happening. Let's get, let's get, let's get on the same page," and they may... Maybe they would be helped by having a small plantation of plantains, and so if they have a bad week of hunting, they can just come in, and they can, they can take some of their own... m- get some of their own food. They don't need to start being agricultural. They can still be nomadic hunter-gatherers, but maybe having some supplemental food out there in locations that they know about would help. But these are things for the local people and for anthropologists to figure out over time.

16. 1:06:40 – 1:09:26

    The Most Haunting Stories I’ve Heard in the Jungle

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:40

       I heard you say that children from the tribe who were raised by outside communities claimed to remember nothing about their time in the tribe.

    2. PRPaul Rosolie1:06:47

       It's haunting.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:50

       W- what do you mean by that?

    4. PRPaul Rosolie1:06:52

       I mean that a child washed down river on a log to one of the very, very remote communities in the Amazon rainforest and was adopted by an indigenous community, people that speak, uh, an indigenous language as well as Spanish, and-... when he was old enough to be asked questions, someone said: "Hey, by the way, when you were living with Los Calatos, with the, with the naked people," that's what they called them, "um, what was it like?" And he just went, "I don't remember," and walked away. But, I mean, when he came down, he was eight years old. You can't tell me you don't remember anything. And but it was a, it was a, it was a, it was a guarded, "I don't remember." It was a, "I don't remember. No. Access denied." It doesn't- I mean, you gotta, you know... And that's what people get wrong, where they go, "Oh, these people still live, you know, in communion with nature." And it's like, yeah, and there's a lot of rape, and murder, and warfare, and probably needless death from infections and disease, and, and, and they're living a very different lifestyle. But it certainly is fascinating that they're out there, and I think that it only goes to illustrate that we- what we're protecting here is truly that wild. 'Cause a lot of people will say to me, "Well, how come you guys are so focused on pro- protecting this river? There's thousands of tributaries in the Amazon. Why protect this three hundred thousand acres right there?" And it's like: Well, this is the wildest part. John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt on a camping trip when he wanted him to protect the Yosemite Valley and the Sequoia tri- trees, and he said, "You have to see this." And so he took Roosevelt and showed him how amazing it was. I mean, Sequoia trees like that exist nowhere else on Earth. They're the biggest trees on the planet. If he, if they hadn't protected them, they'd be gone. And so the- them having the foresight to protect those trees then, we still have Sequoia trees, and so that's what we're doing on this river. It's like by protecting three hundred thousand acres of forest, we ensure that those millennium trees, those skyscrapers of life, continue to have monkeys, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, that these tribes continue to live out in the far reaches. And then again, to use the football field analogy, in this vast expanse of wilderness, we've found a way to use just, like, a little pinprick to actually bring people and let them see this amazing place. And so we, you know, the whole ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the thing is wild, and we... That's why we built that tree house, to let, you know, some of our donors, some of our people- 'cause now people from all over the world are helping us save this river.

17. 1:09:26 – 1:10:18

    Why I Had to Stop Right Then and There

    1. PRPaul Rosolie1:09:26

       And the tree house, that was a dream. You know, there's a, there's a mist river that flows above the Amazon that's invisible, and it's larger than the Amazon River itself. There's an invisible mist river above the Amazon that's larger than the river.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:40

       Mist?

    3. PRPaul Rosolie1:09:41

       Mist.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:09:42

       Okay.

    5. PRPaul Rosolie1:09:43

       And so the first time I saw it, I had climbed the tallest tree in the jungle, which took hours, and I was standing on a branch at dawn, and I saw the sun illuminate the mist river going across the canopy, and I went, "I have to share this with people." And so we built that tree house on a promontory at the edge of the terra firma, looking out over the jungle, so that people can see the reserve, see all the forests that they're protecting. Because at this point, the way we've... See this? And see that picture below it, that's the wasteland. That's what happens when you don't protect the Amazon.

18. 1:10:18 – 1:11:35

    Could You Live Like an Uncontacted Tribe?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:18

       Are you at all, on some level, jealous of how these uncontacted tribes live? Is there any part of you that wants to go and experience their world for a day or wishes you could spend some time living how they live?

    2. PRPaul Rosolie1:10:37

       No.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:10:38

       No?

    4. PRPaul Rosolie1:10:38

       No. I really enjoy just hanging out with my Native friends, like when spending a day piranha fishing. Um, but I also really love my camera roll, and doing photography, and having modern medicine, and being able to FaceTime my mom when I'm in the jungle. Like, you know, I, I don't, I don't, I don't, I- no romanticism about their state. That, that seems like stress and destiny. I don't, I don't need to... I don't want- I certainly don't wanna do that, no.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:02

       Is there anything that you learned or gleaned from them that, I don't know, a Westerner like me, who's spending a lot of time on, on their screens and stuff, and the way we live our lives, might find useful?

    6. PRPaul Rosolie1:11:14

       I don't think that the, the- we're at the point where they're imparting lessons. I think we're at the, we're at the point where we're learning which questions we want to ask. That was first contact, and so at this point, our job is to figure out how do we, how do we move forward? What do we- what do they need? How do we ethically proceed in protecting this forest?

19. 1:11:35 – 1:13:53

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    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:36

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    2. PRPaul Rosolie1:13:42

       What have you got?

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:43

       [chuckles] I mean-... in so many of these photos, you're holding massive snakes. And when I say massive snakes, I don't mean the snakes y- you guys listening are

20. 1:13:53 – 1:15:53

    How I Almost Got Crushed by a Giant Snake

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:53

       thinking about. I mean, anaconda-sized snakes, like-

    2. PRPaul Rosolie1:13:57

       Oh, yeah. This was, this was me and JJ's first, first big anaconda that we-- "big anaconda" we caught. It was only about 12 feet. And, uh, yeah, that one, that one, this was a great snake because I'd never caught a big snake before. I'd always been, you know, you catch a small snake, and I'd learned from Steve Irwin, you know, you catch a, catch a snake by the tail, and it's-- and it might try to bite you. If you don't get it by the tail, snake's gonna run away every time. Snakes are not never going to attack you, period. So I learned you catch a snake by the tail, and then it's-- once you get it by the tail, it's gonna come back at you and try and stop you from grabbing its tail.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:32

       Mm-hmm.

    4. PRPaul Rosolie1:14:32

       Great. And if you need to, you can get it by the head, and you've got control of the snake. But if you have the head, you have the snake. So that first snake, I mean, I'm talking about a twelve-foot snake that's, you know, that's at least as thick as my leg. And I ran in there, and I said: "JJ, you come from that side. I'm gonna come from this side. We get the snake, we're gonna measure it," just because we thought it was so fascinating. I ran in, and I dove, and I grabbed the snake by the head. Big mistake. Wraps around my arms, and the first thing that I realized was I had an anaconda handcuffs now. I couldn't, I couldn't release the snake if I wanted to because it was around my wrists. And then the second coil came around my shoulders, and now I'm feeling the... I can actually hear my collarbone start to flex the way a stick sounds right before it snaps. And JJ grabbed the snake by the tail and pulled the tail off, and then his other brother, they got to me right as I was about to-- I mean, literally, the eyes were gonna come out of my head. It was gonna crush you. That's what happens. And so he pulled that right off at the last second, so that was about as close as I came to knowing what it feels like.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:34

       I think-

    6. PRPaul Rosolie1:15:34

       But that's not even a big one.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:36

       I think you came a little bit closer.

    8. PRPaul Rosolie1:15:39

       [chuckles] Yeah. No, that's, that, that's, uh-

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:43

       Explain this to me. So for anyone that can't wa-

    10. PRPaul Rosolie1:15:44

        Yeah

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:45

        ... can't see it-

    12. PRPaul Rosolie1:15:45

        Yeah

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:45

        ... I would highly recommend you look at the screen now.

    14. PRPaul Rosolie1:15:47

        Yeah.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:47

        Um, this is-

    16. PRPaul Rosolie1:15:48

        Oh, please look away.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:49

        [chuckles]

    18. PRPaul Rosolie1:15:49

        Look away. Don't listen to him.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:51

        This is a-

    20. PRPaul Rosolie1:15:51

        Yeah

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:51

        ... an absolutely crazy story.

21. 1:15:53 – 1:18:06

    What It’s Like Being Eaten Alive (And Surviving)

    1. PRPaul Rosolie1:15:53

       Yes.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:15:53

       What- what's going on in this photo, and why did you do that?

    3. PRPaul Rosolie1:15:55

       Sure. This is actually a very important story. You know, you hear these people talk about how if you're gonna succeed at anything, you have to become very familiar with losing. You almost gotta learn to love it. And, and so as we set out on this journey to explore the Amazon and to build relationships with the indigenous people, and to study anacondas, and to find a way to protect this place, at around twenty-four years old, I got approached by Discovery Channel, and they said: "Kid, we've never seen one like you. Let's do a show where we take people into the Amazon rainforest and show them anacondas." And I said: That'd be amazing! I said: "I would love to do that. I could teach people about the forest. Let's, let's go." They said: "Great. The o- the only thing is," they said, "you know, it's not a good enough show if we just show them the science that you're gonna do." 'Cause we wanted to use as the apex predators of the ecosystem, they're... You know, if there's mercury in the system, they're bioaccumulating. They're-- any toxins that are in the Amazon, they're going to absorb. It's gonna get into the fish, and then into the caiman, into the birds, into the anacondas. They're the apex predator. We were doing groundbreaking research on anacondas. They said that wasn't good enough. They said: "Imagine if..." They said: "No one's... You know, reticulated pythons have eaten people." They said, "No one's ever had on record an anaconda eating a human." And I said: "It happens. It happens. I know a few people whose grandmother or uncle was eaten by an anaconda. It happens, but it doesn't happen where people-- no one's taking a picture of it." And so they said: "Well, if we make you a really expensive suit, will you get eaten by an anaconda?" I said: "I'll try." I said: "It's not gonna eat. Snakes are sweethearts. It's not gonna try to eat me." And they said: "But look, w- we'll call the show Expedition Amazon, send you out there with a team of scientists. We'll film the whole thing." Long story short, I agreed to it because what I thought at the time was, I keep seeing forests getting burned. I keep seeing my millennium trees go down. All of those monkeys and birds and snakes and beautiful animals that are getting incinerated, and they're telling me all I gotta do to get a TV show that will reach millions of people and let me get that message out there, all I gotta do is, at the end, do this silly stunt to show people that snakes aren't that bad. And so we filmed this show for six weeks.

22. 1:18:06 – 1:22:09

    How Jane Goodall Ended Up Saving My Life

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:06

       You agreed to what?

    2. PRPaul Rosolie1:18:08

       I agreed to potentially be eaten by an anaconda.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:11

       Hmm. Okay.

    4. PRPaul Rosolie1:18:16

       I mean, if it want, if it wanted to. I had a breathing tube, and I had a, um... It theoretically could have eaten me, but I knew it wouldn't, 'cause I know snakes. But the producers were very... You know, these are people that have never left the, the, the office building and have watched too many movies, and they wanted to see a guy get eaten by a snake.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:18:35

       And you volunteered? [chuckles]

    6. PRPaul Rosolie1:18:36

       Of course, I'd volunteer. I would've cut off my foot to save the forest. I'll do anything to save the forest. And so when somebody gives you a chance like this... And it's funny, I actually spoke to Jane Goodall about this. I said: "There's this chance I have, and I think I could use-- I think I can navigate this in such a way that, that at the... You know, we take people on an expedition through the Amazon, and at the end, I'll go, I'll get in the pit in a special suit, and I'll let the snake wrap around me, and I'll show people that anacondas are really just, you know, sweethearts." And she said, "I don't think it's gonna go well."

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:05

       For anyone that doesn't know who Jane Goodall is?

    8. PRPaul Rosolie1:19:08

       Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist, the earth-shattering scientist who redefined humans from man, the toolmaker, to what we are now, the one who did more for conservation, wildlife, women, science, than just about anybody else.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:19:23

       And she's also the, um, person that quoted on the front of your book, saying, "On behalf of the forests that I love, thank you, Paul, for writing this book." Clearly, from reading through your story, she's, um, she's quite a hero of yours and has been for a long, long time.

    10. PRPaul Rosolie1:19:37

        Yeah, I mean, and going from when my parents were reading us, me and my sister, they'd be reading us stories at night. You know, Jane Goodall and Gombe with the chimps, and how she, she didn't listen to the rules. She named them, even though her, her colleagues said, "You never name your study subjects." And she said: "They have names. They're, they have personalities. They have names." She broke all the rules. And, and so I grew up with Jane as sort of this historical-... figure, but she was still, like, a living historical figure. And so then when I, when I, when I actually met her, it was so incredible because I, I met her at a talk that she had given. And this, this informed the rest of my life. The, the, the grace and wisdom that she showed changed me as a person. Because I met her at a talk that she was giving in New York City, and I had printed out a couple of chapters. I'd printed out one of the chapters that became my first book, where I'm taking care of a baby giant anteater. And I had printed out a chapter where me and JJ were looking for our first anaconda, this story. And I put those together with a little cover and letter that just said, "Hey, I love wildlife. I've been working in the Amazon for, like, five years, and you've always been an inspiration to me. If I write a book, would you endorse it?" And so I gave this to her in the manila envelope while there was a line of five hundred people, and, you know, we- you take the picture, and she said, "Thank you very much." She puts it aside, and I said, "All right, you know, I tried my best." And forty-eight hours later, her, her team reached out and said, "Jane read the material. She read the chapters, and she thinks that they're wonderful. And if you find a publisher, let them know that Jane will endorse your book." And so then I went to the publishers, and I said, "I have the endorsement of Jane Goodall." And they said, "Well, that's basically Mother Earth herself."

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:21:20

        [chuckles]

    12. PRPaul Rosolie1:21:21

        And they said... So, so that's what got me in the door to become an author with my first book, was Jane. You know, she's- she was this titan of conservation, this legendary figure. And her just-- First of all, for someone that was on the road three hundred days a year, that's an icon of science and conservation and hope, for her to have the presence of mind and the patience and the sense of responsibility to actually read something that some kid handed her, that's incredible. That's magic to me, even to this day, and it, and it matters to me, and it informs how I act, even to this day. But without Jane sort of waving her wand in my direction, I would have no career. There'd be no Paul, no Junglekeepers, no book. We wouldn't be sitting at this desk today. Jane Goodall saved my life.

23. 1:22:09 – 1:29:36

    The Show Meant to Help the Amazon That Went All Wrong

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:10

       She's, uh, an iconic scientist, as you say, um, known for her groundbreaking research on chimpanzees and her work generally and globally on, on conservation. Um, so you, you decide that you're going to be eaten by an anaconda.

    2. PRPaul Rosolie1:22:23

       Oh, yeah, that was a tangent. Yes. [laughing]

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:25

       [laughing] So is this a wild anaconda, or is this a, uh, an anaconda held in captivity?

    4. PRPaul Rosolie1:22:31

       No.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:31

       How did you get the anaconda to eat you?

    6. PRPaul Rosolie1:22:33

       So let me see that next one on the picture.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:22:35

       This one?

    8. PRPaul Rosolie1:22:36

       Yeah. This is a snake called Eleanor, and we a- we named her this after my dear grandmother, who was an incredible woman and, uh, and, uh, the matriarch of our family. Now, Eleanor is the largest snake ever measured at the time, verifiably, scientifically measured. She was eighteen feet, six inches, and over, over a hundred kilos, and she was skinny. She hadn't eaten in a while. But imagine if she'd eaten a capybara, she would've been, you know, two hundred kilos. But, um, my team caught her while we were filming this show, and again, we were told the show would be called Expedition Amazon. The call sheet said Expedition EA. Then, when we were done doing our research in the Amazon, they said: "Look, fly to..." I forget if it was, like, Kentucky or Louisiana. They said, "Fl- fly to some state. There's a guy with a snake. No one will know the difference. We'll blur it out." And they said, "Do this little stunt, and so we'll put it in the last five minutes of the show, just to show people, and then we'll, you know, we'll hype it up in the news." They were like, "We got you." A lot of handshakes, right? And the day before I was supposed to go on the Good Morning America show with, uh, Mr. Matt Lauer, who got mad at me for doing push-ups on the set. Um, the, the day before I was supposed to go on the sh- I mean, again, I'm a kid, and I'm going, "I, I think, I think we got it. I think we did it. We caught the biggest snake ever." The footage of us catching that snake is insane. We're all jumping in the river and wrestling this kraken, and we catch this snake, and we learned from her. We did-- We were-- It sounds crazy, but we were developing field methodology for studying the species. And we learned all kinds of things about anacondas because we fed her a transmitter, and we learned how she moves through the environment. This is research that had never been done before.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:13

       For context, feeding her a transmitter is putting a trans- uh, an electrical device-

    10. PRPaul Rosolie1:24:17

        Yeah

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:18

        ... basically in her throat, that she eats, she consumes-

    12. PRPaul Rosolie1:24:19

        Mm-hmm

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:20

        ... and it stays with her till she dies, so you can see what she's doing.

    14. PRPaul Rosolie1:24:22

        It stays with her until she defecates it, which for snakes, that lu- thankfully, is months.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:24:27

        Okay.

    16. PRPaul Rosolie1:24:28

        And so we're doing this groundbreaking research. We caught this tremendous snake. We'd survived a six-week expedition in the Amazon. We had all this incredible footage, and the night before I'm supposed to go out on the morning shows, they showed me the film. It had none of the science. It had none of the conservation message that I was promised would be in the show, and instead, they focused on the stunt at the end, and they changed the name of the show to Eaten Alive. And then they sent me out the door to do the shows, and the public was mad because I didn't actually get eaten, and they felt like they were lied to. PETA was mad because they felt like I had put a, a snake's life in danger somehow, somehow, somehow, the, uh, animal rights people were furious, and then the scientists were mad because they said, "Okay, you're just a, you know, a, a, a shock person. You're just in, in this for the thrill, and you're not really a conservationist." So it put me out of work for years.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:25

        Really?

    18. PRPaul Rosolie1:25:25

        Yes, it set me back about ten years.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:25:27

        Really?

    20. PRPaul Rosolie1:25:28

        I tried-- I took a big swing because I thought it would help my forest, and I hit my head on the ceiling and fell down hard. The next day, the news, I mean, you know, the, all of the late-night shows were making fun of it. Jimmy Kimmel was like, "You should, for your next stunt, you should try having sex with a hippo." I mean, people, the comments were just... I went to India and lived with a herd of elephants for a while. I mean, I had to get out. I couldn't, I literally couldn't. I said, "My dream of being a conservationist is over." I was told by one prominent conservationist not even to come to South America. And, and again, the thing you have to remember through all of this is through the barefoot machete days, through going to the Amazon, the first-... 15 years of my 20-year journey, I had no support.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:26:13

        Mm.

    22. PRPaul Rosolie1:26:13

        So I was living out of a backpack, living out of a boat in the Amazon, barefoot, with no paycheck, no health insurance, no security, no pathway forward. Um, so it, it was, it was very uncertain times. You know, that you- actually, I think it may have been on your show. There's this great quote where I think it was Alex Hormozi was saying that confidence comes from giving people irrefutable proof that you are who you say you are. And when I heard that quote, I thought, "That's great." And then the next thing I thought was, "Well, but you have to start building that proof in a direction." And for a lot of people, I think they find themselves standing on a high hill, looking at a set of mountains, and you have to choose which direction you're going in. And for me, I was a high school dropout who was never gonna be a conservation biologist, and I was trained by the local people and sort of adopted by their tribe. And so I knew how to survive in the jungle and work with snakes and do all these crazy things, and I tried, I tried to, to take that message to television, and I got Hollywooded hard. I got lied to, and I got taken for a ride. But that failure ended up being the best thing that ever happened, because what it did was it sent me right back to the drawing board. Said, "You're not ready yet." And so sometimes the things that you want are not the things that you need. And it's this beautiful thing where life sort of moves aside, says, "I know, I know, I know you want that, but I'm, I'm gonna give you what you need, not what you want." And so this was a case where I really... I took it hard. I mean, at the time, it was a devastating loss. And it was the best thing that ever happened because it, it was the slap on the head that sent me back out into the jungle for years and years and years of, of more experience. Doubled down, what do you really care about? Saving the forest. Well, if you care about saving the forest, how the hell are you gonna do that? And we had to develop a system to do that. We had to develop a new technology as a way to save the forest.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:13

        What actually happened here? So we didn't... I know you don't wanna... It sounds like you don't wanna, don't wanna talk about it.

    24. PRPaul Rosolie1:28:19

        It's just wasted airtime to talk about it, 'cause we, we rolled around on, in the mud with a 16-foot anaconda, and nothing happened.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:27

        A lot of people will probably want to know why nothing happened, and I think part of that is because of what you're wearing.

    26. PRPaul Rosolie1:28:33

        No, the reason nothing happened is 'cause they had snake handlers wrapping the snake around me while I was in this ridiculous suit. Um, I mean, the things I will do, [chuckles] the things I will do to protect this forest. That snake, if it was left on its own, would crawl off. Any snake-

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:28:48

        Ah.

    28. PRPaul Rosolie1:28:48

        -would, would... If there was a, if I had a black mamba in my hands right now and I put it on this table, it would slide off the table and find the darkest spot in the room, and it would go hide. If I had a spitting cobra, same thing. No snake wants to deal with you. They just wanna go hide. They wanna go back to sleep.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:29:05

        Most people are terrified of snakes.

    30. PRPaul Rosolie1:29:06

        Most people are terrified of snakes, and that's why I think you're gonna like what I have for you.
24. 1:29:36 – 1:44:24

    What Handling Snakes Taught Me About Control

    1. PRPaul Rosolie1:29:36

       you're the large apex predator, and this is just a tiny little reptile that is all alone in the world. They're born, and they have to fend for themselves. And for some reason, ever since I was a little kid, I was fascinated with snakes. I thought they were beautiful. I loved the way they moved. I thought the way they can hold up their bodies and flick their tongues. I find snakes calming and beautiful and fascinating.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:02

       Is that snake dangerous?

    3. PRPaul Rosolie1:30:05

       You could hand this snake to a baby. This snake is so harmless. I mean, the worst thing that this snake could do, if I was to, let's just say, pinch her and hurt her, she could bite me, but even that would barely break my skin. This is a snake that's gonna look for baby mice, little birds, maybe a frog, and try and grow to a larger size. Now, have you ever held a snake before?

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:30

       No.

    5. PRPaul Rosolie1:30:30

       You've never held a snake?

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:31

       I don't think so, no. [chuckles]

    7. PRPaul Rosolie1:30:33

       Oh, wow, that's wonderful. Well, this is such an easy one to start with, and I'll give you a few pointers.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:38

       My hands are sweating a little bit. [chuckles]

    9. PRPaul Rosolie1:30:40

       Yeah. So a few things is that even a baby, baby snake is going to interpret your inner state a little bit. If you're very nervous and jittery, and the snake is gonna pick up on that. But you see how she's sort of just fitting to my hand?

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:30:55

        Yeah.

    11. PRPaul Rosolie1:30:55

        She's done a few things here. She's got her anchor, she's got her tail around these two fingers. And the next thing is she's flicking her tongue to scent what's going on. She's, she's looking around, but she's also... She's not excited.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:07

        She doesn't mind sweat?

    13. PRPaul Rosolie1:31:09

        She doesn't mind sweat. My hands sweat quite a bit as well. [sniffs] And so I'm just gonna place her in your hand, nice and easy, and what you wanna do is let her sort of grab on. Now, now, what are you feeling right now? Let's just see what she does.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:23

        I feel a little bit tense. [clears throat]

    15. PRPaul Rosolie1:31:24

        That's okay. You can feel tense. Now, if you feel tense, the thing is, she's probably gonna return to me because she probably knows I love her, and-

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:33

        I think she's right.

    17. PRPaul Rosolie1:31:34

        Yeah. And that's okay. Why don't we just let her do that? And then you can get a sense for how she moves. And I'm gonna give her a little hole to crawl through, like that. And so what they do is they have all these muscles-

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:44

        Wow

    19. PRPaul Rosolie1:31:44

        ... running along their body, and you can feel that, right?

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:46

        Such a beautiful animal, I do have to say.

    21. PRPaul Rosolie1:31:48

        Yeah. They're called ball pythons. They also call them royal pythons for that, that beautiful black and gold.

    22. SBSteven Bartlett1:31:56

        It's... Can I, can I touch it with my thumb?

    23. PRPaul Rosolie1:31:59

        You can. They don't love being pet.

    24. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:01

        Okay.

    25. PRPaul Rosolie1:32:01

        That's one thing about snakes, they don't... A lot of people, when they come around to suddenly loving snakes, they go, "Well, I wanna pet it the way I want to pet a dog," and snakes will retract from that.... So if you-- do it. Touch her with your, with your thumb.

    26. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:14

        Okay.

    27. PRPaul Rosolie1:32:14

        See how she moves away?

    28. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:15

        She moved away, yeah.

    29. PRPaul Rosolie1:32:16

        She moves away. She doesn't like that. So usually with snakes, my, my, my rule is you, you sort of have to be the, be the tree.

    30. SBSteven Bartlett1:32:23

        Okay. And is she a baby?
25. 1:44:24 – 1:46:18

    Should You Really Be Afraid of Snakes?

    1. PRPaul Rosolie1:44:24

       vent.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:25

       Should people be scared of snakes, do you think?

    3. PRPaul Rosolie1:44:27

       I think people should be respectful of snakes, the same way you're respectful of heights. Go get Steven. Good girl! Good girl. Go get him. Go get the diary.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:37

       Would she eat the banana?

    5. PRPaul Rosolie1:44:39

       No. [chuckles]

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:44:40

       No?

    7. PRPaul Rosolie1:44:40

       No, they are what we call obligate carnivores. They can only eat, uh, other animals. But, I mean, whatever they can fit. Unfortunately, Burmese pythons have been introduced to Florida, and there's no predators in Florida that can handle the Burmese python, so they're eating the alligators, the birds, the native wildlife. They've become a terrible invasive species, which is sort of bad PR for Burmese pythons. But when they're in their native habitat of Southeast Asia, they're just wonderful, big, apex predator snakes.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:13

       Can she bite?

    9. PRPaul Rosolie1:45:14

       Oh, 100%. They have big teeth. If she was to bite one of us right now, it would draw quite a bit of blood. I mean, she has to be able to latch on to her prey, right? So all the more credit goes to her for not doing that. Go get Steven. Good girl. Good girl.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:32

        [chuckles] Maybe you should have the head down that end.

    11. PRPaul Rosolie1:45:34

        I think, I think... See, now what I'm doing is I'm massaging the tail-

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:37

        To annoy her

    13. PRPaul Rosolie1:45:37

        ... because I know that she's gonna go for you. Good girl. Yeah, right at him.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett1:45:43

        [chuckles]

    15. PRPaul Rosolie1:45:43

        Right at him. [chuckles] Now, come on, come on, let her go. [chuckles] Yes, good girl. Oh, this is so great. This Burmese python is- wants to know what is inside the diary of a CEO.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:00

        She's trying to hide.

    17. PRPaul Rosolie1:46:01

        Yeah, she is trying to hide, and so you know what? We're gonna let her do that. She's been a very good sport. I'm gonna take her and put her away.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:10

        That's fantastic. It is a beau- it's such a majestic animal. Like, I... Slightly scary, but also-

    19. PRPaul Rosolie1:46:16

        I'm gonna hand her over the

26. 1:46:18 – 1:47:41

    Ads

    1. PRPaul Rosolie1:46:18

       cameras.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:46:19

       [paper rustling] This message is brought to you by Apple Card. It's a great time to apply for an Apple Card. You'll love earning unlimited daily cash back on every purchase. That includes 3% daily cash when you buy the latest iPhone, AirPods, and Apple Watch at Apple. Through this special referral offer, when you get a new Apple Card, you can earn bonus daily cash. To qualify, you must apply at apple.co/get-daily-cash. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Offer may not be available everywhere. Terms and limitations apply. [paper rustling] Make sure you keep what I'm about to say to yourself. I'm inviting 10,000 of you to come even deeper into The Diary of a CEO. Welcome to my inner circle. This is a brand-new private community that I'm launching to the world. We have so many incredible things that happen that you are never shown. We have the briefs that are on my iPad when I'm recording the conversation. We have clips we've never released. We have behind-the-scenes conversations with the guests and also the episodes that we've never, ever released, and so much more. In the circle, you'll have direct access to me. You can tell us what you want this show to be, who you want us to interview, and the types of conversations you would love us to have. But remember, for now, we're only inviting the first 10,000 people that join before it closes. So if you wanna join our private closed community, head to the link in the description below or go to DOACcircle.com. I will speak to you there.

27. 1:47:41 – 1:55:50

    What 20 Years in the Jungle Taught Me About Life

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:47:41

       [paper rustling] What would you say to a young person who's probably in the pursuit of a completely different dream? W- are there anything that you consider to be transferable for anyone in the pursuit of their dreams that you learned in those 15 years in your Barefoot Machete days?

    2. PRPaul Rosolie1:47:53

       Yeah, I think that, that you have to log your time as a beginner in order to earn your time as a master. And there's this beautiful saying that I start the book with, which is that the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried, and that, to me, is beautiful. And so it was like, when I went down there and began even trying to catch a fish, you know, I didn't know how to do anything. And, and, and I would look at these conservation biologists and, and just think, "My God, I'm never gonna be one of them, because I'm never gonna have the grades to be a conservation biologist." Now, at the point we're at now, where we are... We have this global movement around conservation. We have this huge conservation organization that's fighting to do something historic. I do get messages from kids all over the world that say, "I, I, I really want your job," or, "I wanna get out there and I wanna do... I wanna follow my dreams."

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:48:50

       What do you say to them?

    4. PRPaul Rosolie1:48:51

       Well, I had a kid recently that he, he messaged me, and he said, "I really wanna study great whites." And he said, "But marine biology is so competitive, and, and none of the professors will give me, you know," pretty... And I said, "Listen, forget all that." I said, "Do your school, get it done." I said, "But go to the dock. Find out where the preeminent marine biologists are going to go do their great white research. Go to that dock. Help them with their bags. Get off your phone, get off the internet, stop asking permission, get on your feet and go there, to the waves. And sooner or later, they're gonna need help with their bags. Sooner or later, they might invite, invite you on the boat. And after you've been helping with their bags and invited on the boat, maybe you take some pictures of a pivotal moment that they use to communicate their work to the world. At some point, you can find a way to make yourself useful to them. And if you do that for long enough, you might just end up being somebody that's a core member of their team."

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:46

       People at those family barbecues must have asked you if you had a plan B.

    6. PRPaul Rosolie1:49:50

       Yeah.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:49:50

       Are you a fan of plan B's?

    8. PRPaul Rosolie1:49:52

       I think... I actually think that I'm not the example to follow because I went so... My- I had, I burned the boats. I had no plan B. And, and, and now as I'm sitting across the table from you, it's very easy. I remember being younger and hearing these people, and you listen to a successful business person go, "You know, if I could do it, then anyone could do it. If it could happen to me, then..." Shut up. You already made it. Like, and it's like, if you, if you read the pages of that book and how many times I almost died, had infections, almost fell off of cliffs, got bitten by animals. Also, the, the internal struggle of then being 32-... you know, 18, they say, "Oh, go follow your dreams." Twenty-five, they're like: "Yeah, that's cool." And then something happened when I was around thirty-two, thirty-three, that was sort of the, the lower point for me, right be- my, my dad was dropping me off somewhere one day, and, and, and my dad would always, always supporting me, bringing me to the jungle, taking me to the airport, bringing me home. I didn't have the money to get myself there with taxis and Ubers and stuff, and... But there came this moment where, you know, I'd written my first book. Harper College. I'd gotten a real publisher. The book came out, and it went nowhere. So even that, I'd tried to be, you know, on Discovery Channel. I'd tried to write a book. I wrote a good book. I knew people liked it. It had a high rating. Didn't do anything. That didn't change anything. I'd started an organization. I started Junglekeepers. I'd turned loggers into-- and gold miners into conservation rangers. We protected, like, fifty thousand acres of rainforest, but still there was some feeling like, like it just wasn't... You know, you're striking flint, and then, like, it's just not-- the fire's not catching. There's something missing. It wasn't happening. He-- My dad went: "You know we love you no matter what." Oh, and I went: "Don't do this." He said, "No, no, no, you know, you know, if you..." Eventually, he goes, "If you need to jump ship and start over," he's like, "you know, we'll help you with whatever you need." And I said: "What do you mean start over?" And he was like: "Well, you know, I mean, what, are you gonna do this jungle guy thing forever?" And I went: "Oh, God. Oh, God," like, "no!" And, you know, and then he said: "You know what? And if, and if you do need to do that forever, it's okay." And it's like, but they, they didn't-- they couldn't conceptualize it, and it was very soon after that, that, that, that on that graph, it was very, very soon after that. It was actually right at the point that I quit, right before COVID. And this is, this is sort of the, the lowest point that I was supposed to never tell anybody, and I wrote about it in the book, where before COVID... When COVID hit, I couldn't get to the jungle. Our whole team had COVID. Peru was the hardest-hit country in the world. I mean, all of my staff, my friends, my family in Peru, they were all on oxygen tanks. Whose mother, whose sister, whose daughter was dying? We bankrupted ourselves, sending money. We, the whole-- we took the whole ecotourism business and sent all the money to Peru to get our friends oxygen tanks and to keep our family alive. And it was also during that time that I realized I have nowhere to go, like, in this world. I was like: I don't make sense in this world anymore. And I, I called my best friend. I called Mohsin, my best friend. I said, and I said: "Don't," I said, "don't tell anybody what I'm about to say," but I said, "I'm gonna go get a job." I said: "I've been doing this for so long. I tried really hard. I tried for fifteen years." I said, "I'm out of gas. I, I'm out of, I'm out of ideas. I have, I have been burning so bright. I've been making, making the fire myself." I said, "I got noth- I got no more ideas." And, of course, he said, "You shut up." He said: "You inspired me. You started Junglekeepers. You know, I don't wanna ever hear this from you again," and he hung up on me. But I said-- But I told him, I said, "I quit." I said, "I'm out. I'm done. I'm done. I have no hope left." And exactly a week after I made that phone call where I quit, our first big funder reached out. A billionaire named Dax da Silva had seen my video of saying the Amazon is destroying, and we have the people, we have the plan, we have the infrastructure. All we need is the funding, and we can save this river. And the week after I quit, in the, in the alchemy of the universe, that's when he called me and said, "You know what? Green light. Let's do it. How about a five-year commitment where I fund Junglekeepers, and we turn the local ranger, the local loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers? We get you and some of your guys a salary, and we make this whole thing viable. And by the way, let's protect another hundred thousand acres of forest." And if we hadn't spent years and years and years chipping at the same piece of granite, just, just whether or not you can hammer through granite depends whether or not you continue to whack the hammer. And so for me and JJ, for Mohsin, who was sort of the first iteration, the first person that came and, and took the photos that allowed us to communicate all of those photos of burning forest and the wreckage, he was the first... He came in the barefoot machete days, and he said-- I mean, that was at a time where I didn't even know anything was ever gonna happen, and he said, "You know, what you guys are doing here is special. We have to show it to the world." And so on that graph, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then a little blip. All of a sudden, we had a funder. And then once you, once you get a funder, when, when you're, when you're doing it all by yourself, nobody's rooting for you. And then once you, once you start, once you start to get a little momentum and a little notoriety, all of a sudden, then everybody comes. So then, then I quit, and that was the lowest point, and then all of a sudden, he rescued us, and we started going up, and then we started sharing it, and then we got to the United Nations, and then we got to... And all of a sudden, we started gaining this momentum, and that, that, that, that magic that Jane had given us with her words also served as, as sort of a blessing that carried us forward. Because people said, "Well, if Jane Goodall gave you this Excalibur sword of her blessing, then, then go forth and save the Amazon." And everything changed.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:45

       How do people know, in the pursuit of their dreams, whether they should

28. 1:55:50 – 2:12:17

    How Do You Know When It’s Time to Walk Away?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:55:50

       throw in the towel or not? Like, how-- Based on your experience there, if someone came to you and said, "Look, I've been tr-- I've been doing something for a long time, and I don't know whether to keep going or not," is there a framework or an idea that you might offer them?

    2. PRPaul Rosolie1:56:07

       I think that in my case, if I follow the rational advice, I would fail. If I was giving myself advice as a rational person, I would say, "After the first ten years, cut your losses and stop." Like, what are you doing? It doesn't make any sense, 'cause then even after fifteen years, what am I gonna do? Go, go then enter the workforce with no skills and no resume and no nothing? It just, it was getting more and more extreme, and I was like, "Okay, well, I'm just gonna be this Jack Sparrow jungle character." I don't know-... for, for, for everyone, it's gonna be different. But I can tell you this much, if you're not willing to go all in, you're not gonna win. Like, you have to take that risk to get that reward. And so you go, "Okay, I've been, I've been, I've been doing this thing for 10 years, and, and I just- " Well, you're 100% not gonna get it if you stop. But at the same time, there's this haunting quote in the, in The Razor's Edge, this book, where they say, "Many are called, and few are chosen."

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:57:10

       Mm.

    4. PRPaul Rosolie1:57:11

       And I think that goes for whether you're starting a business or a band or trying to be a writer or whatever it is. It's you have to know when it's- when it ceases to be chasing your dreams and becomes sort of a sad suicide. And then, and then, you know, at what point... I was very worried that it was gonna become my identity, that I was the jungle guy, so I had to just keep being the jungle guy.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:57:32

       Mm-hmm.

    6. PRPaul Rosolie1:57:32

       And then there's no getting out of it. I'd have to do it 'cause I said I would. And so I think for people, maybe having an option B is a good idea. That might be one of the things that I learned, [chuckles] is that having some sort of an option B might be good.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:57:45

       This is, um, as you've highlighted, the great risk of giving people advice when you've reached the top of the mountain.

    8. PRPaul Rosolie1:57:52

       Yeah, I don't like this. [chuckles] Yes.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett1:57:52

       Because it's easy from the top of the mountain to recite how you managed to climb. But you, you- like, even when I think about myself as a podcaster, like if someone came and asked me-

    10. PRPaul Rosolie1:58:00

        Yeah

    11. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:00

        ... "How do you build a podcast?" or, "How do you build a business?", whatever, I probably won't point at the luck and the timing and the fortune-

    12. PRPaul Rosolie1:58:08

        No

    13. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:08

        ... as much.

    14. PRPaul Rosolie1:58:09

        No.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:09

        I'll point at the things that I did intentionally. Um, and I'm completely unaware of the fact that actually, you know, even with the podcast, like, starting a podcast in 2020 when we first came to YouTube was, like, the perfect timing.

    16. PRPaul Rosolie1:58:19

        Yes.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:20

        And at the time we didn't know it was the perfect timing.

    18. PRPaul Rosolie1:58:22

        Yeah.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:22

        We were just out there on the wave and the, as it came into shore.

    20. PRPaul Rosolie1:58:25

        Mm-hmm.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:26

        And so, y- but you look at the statistics and go, look, there's a lot of people that wanna be conservationists, and there's lots of people that wanna be podcasters or entrepreneurs, whatever.

    22. PRPaul Rosolie1:58:34

        Yeah.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:35

        Most of them don't make it.

    24. PRPaul Rosolie1:58:39

        Yeah.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:39

        So they're not sat here talking. They're not, they're not here now-

    26. PRPaul Rosolie1:58:42

        Yes

    27. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:43

        ... because they, you know, something happened, they gave up. They couldn't make it. The business went bust.

    28. PRPaul Rosolie1:58:47

        Yeah.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett1:58:47

        And there's a really interesting... I'm probably gonna butcher this, but it's an interesting story I read about these fighter jets. I think it was in World War I, and, um, you might have heard the story. These fighter jets come back with holes in them, so everybody sat there, all these engineers said, "Well, if we want to figure out how to make better fighter jets, let's study where the bullet holes are because then we know where people are shooting."

    30. PRPaul Rosolie1:59:08

        Yeah.
29. 2:12:17 – 2:16:06

    Are Humans Really the Most Important Species?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett2:12:17

       think that we are a dominant, more important species than the snake that you just wrapped around my neck or the sparrow in the trees. Do you believe that's the case? Do you believe that humans are more important than-

    2. PRPaul Rosolie2:12:31

       If you were to remove humans from planet Earth, everything would get better in, like, days, just like in COVID. Like the national parks, the bears are frolicking on the trails and everything. Um, if you were to remove ants from planet Earth, nature would collapse, right? So if you wanna talk about ecological importance, we're not that important. That- you'd have to think more holistically. We're just one of many different species.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett2:12:56

       But we're able to, you know, rule the world because of our intellect.

    4. PRPaul Rosolie2:13:00

       But we are the apex, or the human brain is the most complex thing that we know of, and so in that way, we are the stewards. We are the Junglekeepers. We are the ones that are supposed to be caring for the rest of this. And so again, whether or not we can... I mean, there's sort of this, this- people say that, you know, the, there's, times are worse than they've ever been, and it's like, I go, I'm down in the jungle, right? So I'm down there. I miss out on a lot. I come out, I come up here, and people are, people are irate about some new news thing, right? What someone said to someone or what someone... And I always come up, and I'm like: Man, civilizations rise and fall. The health of our oceans, the existence of our rainforests. We're dealing with a, with a, a, a one-way door in history right now. You think World War II was big? The ecological collapse of our planet is pending, but it's not too late. Jane was right. There's still hope, but we're the last generation that's gonna have it. And so it's like, first of all, if you feel meaningless, go put your boots on and help. You know, if Churchill, the day before D-Day, was going, "Oh, it's probably not gonna work," what would've happened? And it's like we are alive at the most exciting time in history. Not only is there a million things that need to be done, there's people all over the world that's doing it. So one of the things I've started telling to young people, the advice that I can give, is go find someone that you admire. Go find a master who's doing the work that you wanna emulate and put five years in working for them. Don't go try to start your own project right away. Don't go try to start saving the world before you know how it works. Go find the guy that's tracking the snow leopards, that's up in the mountains. Find him, follow him, learn from him. If it's a business, go find the person that's doing whatever it is you wanna do. Learn from them. I've seen pe- brilliant people with great business ideas that don't have the people skills. Go learn those people skills. Go work with the people that have those people, that easy, common touch, where they can just shake your hand, and all of a sudden you feel like you're, they're your best friend. My whole thing, I mean, us starting an organization that can protect the jungle-... me and JJ could, could, could whack and machete and catch all the anacondas we want, and Mohsen was taking pictures of them. We had this team that was, like, doing, you know, the motor k-k-k-k-k-k-k it was going, but it wasn't starting. And then I mentioned the guy Stefan, who was running teams at Apple. Now, this guy, this man knows how to run a spreadsheet. This man knows how to run teams of people. He knows how to organize things. So he came in and went, "Wait, what are you guys trying to do? You're trying to do this. Well, why don't you do it this way? You save a bunch of money by doing it this way," and he started running the teams. And so we needed-- we, we realized we, we, we needed things that we didn't even know existed. And so, again, the relentlessness, you... The relentlessness, you, you survive to another day. But for people, go out, find those people, because we learned things from these people that we meet. I mean, even from Dax, he came in and provided the funding, but also, this is a man that won capitalism. As a billionaire, he's someone that knows how to run a business. He said: "Okay, so this is how you're gonna run your ranger program. Tell me how you're gonna do this." Just as a friend and consultant, you end up learning so much from him.

30. 2:16:06 – 2:23:15

    How AI and Robots Might Change the Jungle Forever

    1. SBSteven Bartlett2:16:06

       The very antithesis of what I saw when you played the video of the un- uncontacted tribe is some of the things going on in, at the moment in California and Texas with humanoid robots and AI.

    2. PRPaul Rosolie2:16:18

       Yeah.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett2:16:19

       It's like the opposite.

    4. PRPaul Rosolie2:16:21

       Yes.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett2:16:21

       You know, Elon-

    6. PRPaul Rosolie2:16:22

       We live in opposite worlds. [chuckles]

    7. SBSteven Bartlett2:16:24

       Yeah. [chuckles] I, I wondered if you had any thoughts about this world we're heading into, where people might have microchips in their brain-

    8. PRPaul Rosolie2:16:29

       Mm

    9. SBSteven Bartlett2:16:29

       ... and we'll have humanoid robots, and they're forecasting there'll be a billion, um, of these humanoid robots in the future.

    10. PRPaul Rosolie2:16:34

        Mm.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett2:16:34

        And AI is now so intelligent that they're saying within a year or two, there'll be AIs that are smarter than every human that's ever lived. And even one example of the humanoid robot situation that blew my mind is when one of the robots learns something, all of the robots learn it.

    12. PRPaul Rosolie2:16:49

        Mm.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett2:16:49

        And obviously, you were just talking up there about having to learn from mentors.

    14. PRPaul Rosolie2:16:52

        Yes.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett2:16:53

        Well, with humanoid robots and the future that we seem to be hurtling towards, um, it seems like they might be the, the apex species. I wondered if you've thought much about the technological acceleration of the Earth and the risk of that, and... 'Cause it's the opposite of everything you're talking about in so many ways.

    16. PRPaul Rosolie2:17:13

        It is, and it isn't. I mean, I, like, I love living in modern times. I think that, like, heart surgery and, and your iPad, and the cameras, I think, like, I love so much of modern technology. Um, flight, my God, how I love flight. We can go anywhere. Would've taken them eight months. Um, this new obsession that everybody has, it, it... Not a lot of things get me biblical, but it makes me think of the, the, you know, thou shalt not with the false idols. Everyone is so obsessed about AI. Shut up! Go outside, touch some grass. Don't worry about the robots. We don't live in Minority Report yet. And it's like, if it's coming, first of all, we are the engineers of our reality, right? It's us. So where are these robots gonna come from unless we make them? And if they're so smart, well, then, get on your knees and pray to them. You know, it's like, do whatever. But I th- I think that as, as, as more and more people, like, rebel against the AI slop they see in their feeds, as more and more people appreciate real human art and what it takes a person to stare at a wall with a, with some paint and create something that could move you to tears, I think that we're going through a period of delirious adolescence with a new technology. Just like at Y2K, everyone was like, "Everything's gonna shut down, and nothing's gonna work," and it's like, "Okay, great, I'll be on a hike." The world's gonna continue to work, and, you know, they've been saying we're gonna have flying cars for how many years? We still don't have them. Everyone's like: "We should go colonize Mars." Like, great. Fuck Mars, though, yeah? Let's fix this planet. Prove that we're capable of managing... It's like the kid going, "I wanna take over the company," and the father going, "Get your room clean."

    17. SBSteven Bartlett2:18:59

        I think what you do might be hugely benefited by everything that's going on with technology and AI, in part because I think people, uh, people's appreciation for community, for nature, for things that are irreplaceably human-

    18. PRPaul Rosolie2:19:11

        Mm

    19. SBSteven Bartlett2:19:11

        ... is only going to increase.

    20. PRPaul Rosolie2:19:13

        Yeah.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett2:19:13

        I have, you know, I have a couple of, like, wild hypotheses, and one of them is that people are gonna want to, in a world where we no longer need to gather in cities for, um, collective labor, which is basically why cities exist in large part-

    22. PRPaul Rosolie2:19:26

        Mm

    23. SBSteven Bartlett2:19:26

        ... they will then want to be out in nature.

    24. PRPaul Rosolie2:19:28

        Yeah.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett2:19:29

        Because our Maslovian need of being out in the trees, and the awe we get, and the mental health benefits are gonna remain the same, even if there is robots.

    26. PRPaul Rosolie2:19:36

        Yeah.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett2:19:36

        And actually, if I don't need to be in a city, where would I rather be? In-

    28. PRPaul Rosolie2:19:40

        In beautiful nature.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett2:19:41

        In the beautiful nature. I was saying to my friends the other day, "I think people are gonna start buying up farmland and natural places because..."

    30. PRPaul Rosolie2:19:48

        You notice that when everyone sort of makes it and gets rich enough that they can do what they want, they go get a house in the country-
31. 2:23:15 – 2:27:22

    I Saw the Birth of the Universe on Ayahuasca

    1. SBSteven Bartlett2:23:15

       When I did go to the Amazon, I went with my now fiancée-

    2. PRPaul Rosolie2:23:18

       Mm.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett2:23:19

       -and she wanted to do some plant medicine. [chuckles]

    4. PRPaul Rosolie2:23:23

       Yes.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett2:23:25

       Um, uh, as I said to you before we started recording, I couldn't do it because apparently I hadn't followed the diet regime properly.

    6. PRPaul Rosolie2:23:29

       Yeah.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett2:23:29

       But, um, I know that you did ayahuasca, and for anyone that doesn't know, ayahuasca is a powerful psychoactive brew from the Amazon, used traditionally by indigenous cultures. How did your experience with ayahuasca change you? It- what happened, and how did it change you?

    8. PRPaul Rosolie2:23:45

       Oh, God, again, I, I don't know why I'm, I'm very... 'Cause I'm, I'm just, I'm just in a mood today. Um, there's no filter. I don't, I don't know. This is one of the chapters I didn't know if I should put in the book, 'cause I go, I take people through the whole thing, because the shaman that we knew was the old shaman. It was JJ's gr- gr- JJ's old father's best friend, and so he, he, old guy, he was, been mixing ayahuasca in the forest for decades and learned from the, the ancient guys. Now, the first time I did it, it wasn't such a big deal. I saw some geometric patterns. I threw up. I had a conversation with a tree. It was okay. The problem is, the old shaman, at 80-something, fell asleep while he was boiling the ayahuasca, and it became more intense in its potency. And so when we drank the normal dosage, we were receiving a mega dose. And I went on a trip that I would never, ever ask to go on. I'm talking about the creation of the universe, the Big Bang. I mean, I went through worlds. I, for a while I was shapeless in outer space between solar systems. I mean, it was like... It was horrifying. And when we woke up, the shaman was gone. You know, the people drink ayahuasca, and they go, "I'm gonna go on a journey. I'm gonna focus on this. I wanna... I have my intentions over here, and I wanna..." This was, this was just wormholes and explosions and, and, and just, just craziness. And in the morning, we found the shaman, and he was laying in a stream naked, like the way they find ET at the end of the movie, and, uh, we said, "What the hell happened?" And he said, [chuckles] "I overboiled the ayahuasca." And he said, "By the way, I, I retire," and he retired as shaman for a whole week. But, but, like, that was my experience, was that it was so intense that I was just happy to have physical form again. I feel, I felt like I died and came back. It is very, very powerful.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett2:25:41

       You said in the book, "I felt changed."

    10. PRPaul Rosolie2:25:44

        I felt changed in the sense that I had never... You know, I'd come close to dying a bunch of times. I'd come- but I mean, to, to be removed- and, you know, if you go for surgery, they put you out, and it's black, and then you come back. This was... I mean, who the hell even knew? It's like, it's like opening- it's like you've lived in a gigantic mansion with 3,000 rooms your entire life, but you've only ever lived in, like, one. And then you take this stuff, and all of a sudden you go, "Whoa, there's so many rooms," and you have access to them, and the doors are all open, and you're being sucked through all of them at once. And so it was like, I mean, at one point I was ex- I mean, you, the jungle vibrates through you. I took the form of different animals. I mean, it was, it was insanity. I don't- I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett2:26:29

        What do the local people think it is, as a compound, as a psychoactive? What do they think is happening? Do they think it's a religious experience?

Episode duration: 2:46:14