Joe Rogan Experience #2441 - Paul Rosolie

Joe Rogan 0:00 [upbeat music]

Joe Rogan 0:02 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

Speaker 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. [upbeat music] Hello, jungle man.

Paul Rosolie 0:13 What's happening?

Joe Rogan 0:13 Good to see you, my brother.

Paul Rosolie 0:15 It's been a while.

Joe Rogan 0:15 What's going on? You got books, you got notes.

Paul Rosolie 0:16 I got books. I got the-

Joe Rogan 0:17 Marshall's here with us.

Paul Rosolie 0:19 I got this for you.

Joe Rogan 0:20 Ooh.

Paul Rosolie 0:20 Yeah, a little, little note in there-

Joe Rogan 0:21 Oh

Paul Rosolie 0:21 ... you can read later.

Joe Rogan 0:22 Junglekeeper, buddy.

Paul Rosolie 0:23 Yeah, the brand new... That's what- back from the Amazon with that.

Joe Rogan 0:27 Nice. Marshall, say hi to everybody. Come up here.

Paul Rosolie 0:29 I love that you bring Marshall. Have you- has Marshall gone on other podcasts, or is it just-

Joe Rogan 0:32 Yes, he's been on a couple.

Paul Rosolie 0:33 You're a good boy. You're a good boy. We should-

Joe Rogan 0:36 I just have to keep him from, uh, going under the wire. Hello, buddy.

Paul Rosolie 0:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:40 I gotta keep him from, uh, getting under the... Come on up. Come on up here. Say hi to everybody.

Paul Rosolie 0:45 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 0:47 Aw. He's the best.

Paul Rosolie 0:49 He is the best.

Joe Rogan 0:51 He's a good sweetie.

Paul Rosolie 0:51 He's soft, man. He's got-

Joe Rogan 0:52 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 0:52 ... he's got amazing coat.

Joe Rogan 0:54 Big sweetie. Well, he gets groomed. Oh, thank you. Thank you for the kisses. Okay. [kisses] Okay, lie, lie down, please.

Paul Rosolie 1:01 Lie down.

Joe Rogan 1:02 Lie down, please. So, uh-

Paul Rosolie 1:04 Oh, my God.

Joe Rogan 1:05 You re- you released that video. I saw the video of, uh-

Paul Rosolie 1:09 Yes

Joe Rogan 1:09 ... the uncontacted tribe.

Paul Rosolie 1:10 Yeah, hitting send on that was scary, 'cause-

Joe Rogan 1:12 Ooh!

Paul Rosolie 1:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14 Wild.

Paul Rosolie 1:14 I sent you, I sent you a message that day-

Joe Rogan 1:16 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 1:16 ... when that, [chuckles] when that happened.

Joe Rogan 1:17 Yeah, you did.

Paul Rosolie 1:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:18 That is crazy. I've shown it to a few people, but we've never showed it live-

Paul Rosolie 1:21 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:21 ... but it is... So Marshall, you gotta lie down, buddy. You can't be, uh-

Paul Rosolie 1:26 Come here

Joe Rogan 1:26 ... climbing under the wires.

Paul Rosolie 1:27 Come here.

Joe Rogan 1:27 Lie down, bubba.

Paul Rosolie 1:28 Sit, sit, sit. Come here. Good boy, good boy, good boy.

Joe Rogan 1:30 Um, that experience has to be so insane to-

Paul Rosolie 1:34 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:34 ... to contact, like, legitimately uncontacted people. There they are.

Paul Rosolie 1:38 Yeah. Yeah, and so-

Joe Rogan 1:39 Ladies and gentlemen, do not look at their dongs.

Paul Rosolie 1:41 Do not. Well, I mean, you know, but also maybe take a style tip from them and tie them up.

Joe Rogan 1:45 Weird how they got their waist wrapped up, but they don't have their dongs wrapped up or their butthole.

Paul Rosolie 1:52 Well, the, it, it seems like they're-

Joe Rogan 1:54 Strange choice

Paul Rosolie 1:54 ... they're trying to protect or they're trying to keep lots of rope. I think rope is, like, their main-

Joe Rogan 1:59 Oh!

Paul Rosolie 1:59 ... things. That's how they carry all their rope.

Joe Rogan 2:02 Interesting.

Paul Rosolie 2:03 And, and, and-

Joe Rogan 2:03 They carry the rope around their waist.

Paul Rosolie 2:05 They carry their rope around their waist, and they just want rope. They want rope and bananas.

Joe Rogan 2:10 Is- do bananas grow in the Amazon?

Paul Rosolie 2:13 So bananas don't grow unless people plant them, so there's certain human settlements where, you know, you can find old bananas growing. But these, you know, plantains really is what this is.

Joe Rogan 2:22 Mm-hmm.

Paul Rosolie 2:22 And they were requesting them, and what you see happening here is-

Joe Rogan 2:25 They request them?

Paul Rosolie 2:26 Yes. They come out, and, I mean, these are people coming out 1,000 years late to society, and they're out on the beach holding up their hands saying, "Nomore, we are the brothers." Nomore means brothers.

Joe Rogan 2:35 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 2:35 And so now we actually think that they call themselves the Brothers.

Joe Rogan 2:39 Whoa!

Paul Rosolie 2:40 And their first thing was, "We want, we want bananas." And so the local anthropologists that we were with, we were just there to, to work with the communities that we work with, and these, these guys came out across the beach, and you see them. They're holding the... You know, they're holding their bows, and those bows are six-foot bows, seven-foot arrows. And we were said... You know, the anthropologists were saying, "Put down your weapons. Put down your bows before you talk to us. This is- does not need to be violent." Because their first instinct is to defend themselves.

Joe Rogan 3:09 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 3:09 And so there's maybe 20, 30 of us, and the local guys had a couple of shotguns just in case for protection because we were not initiating contact. That's the thing I've been explaining to everybody. We were just there working in the community. They came out to us.

Joe Rogan 3:23 So they knew you were there, and they came out to you, and how... Does someone speak their language?

Paul Rosolie 3:28 There's one guy in the community that kind of speaks a little bit. They speak... In the community, they speak Yine. The Mashco-Piro speak a, a derivation of that, and so he's- they're speaking in broken, in broken terms across, across the river.

Joe Rogan 3:42 Wow.

Paul Rosolie 3:42 So they were sh- sort of shirts versus skins. We were on this side of the river; they were on that side of the river. And then I... I mean, the, the, the courage of this guy to get in the river and go, you know, 10 feet from them and push the, the canoe. There was no contact, no physical contact made-

Joe Rogan 3:57 Mm

Paul Rosolie 3:57 ... but he gave them these, these, these plantains, and then they- you notice when they take them, it's not like, "Oh, yes, take the plantains. We'll go back in the jungle and divvy them up." It's like, "What I get, I get." They're fighting over them, and they were all screaming and fighting over them.

Joe Rogan 4:10 Ooh.

Paul Rosolie 4:10 So there's desperation there.

Joe Rogan 4:12 Yeah, well, like, I mean, I guess food is fucking hard to come by, right?

Paul Rosolie 4:16 I know.

Joe Rogan 4:16 I mean, the jungle is filled with life, but it's still... It's gotta be difficult to source, and you've got to do it every single day.

Paul Rosolie 4:24 Every single day. And so to feed-

Joe Rogan 4:25 Yeah, I mean, there's no refrigeration-

Paul Rosolie 4:26 No

Joe Rogan 4:26 ... there's no pres- preservation.

Paul Rosolie 4:28 No, so everything is instantaneous. You shoot a monkey, you gotta cook it and eat it. You know, you get a turtle, you gotta, you gotta eat it. You gotta open it and eat it. And so there's, you can, I mean, you can see there, there, there, there's, there's more- there's that, that questioning look on their face. They don't understand who really, who we are, and, and the really, the only communications that we got was, "We need, we need more food," and, "Stop cutting down our trees."

Joe Rogan 4:52 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 4:53 They wanted to... They said, "Who are the bad ones?" They said, "Of you, who are the bad ones? Why are you cutting down our, our, our biggest trees?"

Joe Rogan 5:00 Well, not just cutting down the trees, but also killing the indigenous people that-

Paul Rosolie 5:03 Yeah

Joe Rogan 5:04 ... protest it, that get in the way of it.

Paul Rosolie 5:06 Yep, yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:06 If their tribe is centrally located in an area where they're chopping down the trees, they kill those people.

Paul Rosolie 5:11 Yeah. Yeah, and so right now what we have is we have the loggers and the gold miners coming in, and so since, like, the last time I saw you, it was, it was... We were, we were nailing all these successes, adding acres to the reserve, 'cause what we're doing is trying to create this corridor, which is gonna become a national park. We're trying to save this one river in the headwaters of the Amazon, and we had been on this success run, you know, from, from people hearing the stories, from things like this, people coming in and helping us do that. And then it started to change, where we realized, okay, we're protecting so much land, that the logging mafias and the narco traffickers started pushing back. And so now it's getting more serious. As we're getting closer to the finish line, it's getting harder because they're going, "We want this to remain wild." And we're going, "We're trying to protect this," and the local communities are going, "This is our forest." And the loggers and the narcos and the miners are coming from other places, and they're cutting down this forest.... and so it's just, you know, I mean, everyone knows the Amazon is the lungs of the Earth. Everyone knows it's got a, a- it, it produces a fifth of our o- oxygen on our planet. It contains a fifth of the oxygen, of the fresh water on our planet, so it's vital to global planetary stability. But we've already destroyed 20% of it, and so we're seeing the moisture cycle get broken.

Joe Rogan 6:29 20%?

Paul Rosolie 6:29 20% of the whole Amazon rainforest.

Joe Rogan 6:31 That's insane-

Paul Rosolie 6:32 And that thing is-

Joe Rogan 6:33 So big

Paul Rosolie 6:33 ... 2.7 million square miles, and I think the lower 48 is three-point-something million square miles.

Joe Rogan 6:41 Wow!

Paul Rosolie 6:42 It's gigantic.

Joe Rogan 6:43 Wow. And they've already killed off 20% of it?

Paul Rosolie 6:47 20% of it's already gone.

Joe Rogan 6:48 Is it, um, mostly cattle running? Like, what is... What are they, what are they doing it for?

Paul Rosolie 6:54 Cattle ranching accounts for 60% of Amazon deforestation, and then it's just development, roads. China has a new shipping port in Peru that they wanna, you know, create a, I think, an- a railroad over the Andes Mountains or through the Andes Mountains so they can start getting access to the Amazon for Asian markets.

Joe Rogan 7:12 Is it true they carved out a giant pathway through the Amazon for a climate change conference?

Paul Rosolie 7:18 You know, I've been trying to figure out if that's true. I saw that go all over the internet, and-

Joe Rogan 7:21 But it's one of those things, it's like, who knows if that's real?

Paul Rosolie 7:24 That, and then the other one is the, like, a s- you know, Swedish billionaire bought this much of the Amazon, and it's like, but what's his name?

Joe Rogan 7:31 Right.

Paul Rosolie 7:31 They keep saying that, and I'm like, I don't-

Joe Rogan 7:32 Well, let's put it into Perplexity and find out if that's true.

Speaker 7:36 Which one?

Joe Rogan 7:37 The, uh, whether or not they carved out a pathway through the Amazon for a climate change summit-

Paul Rosolie 7:42 That seems-

Joe Rogan 7:42 'Cause that sounds like horseshit.

Paul Rosolie 7:44 That just sounds too, too ridiculous.

Joe Rogan 7:46 There's no way they would do something that stupid.

Paul Rosolie 7:48 I don't know, but I did see people-

Joe Rogan 7:49 But also, why would they have a climate change summit in the Amazon? You gonna do it in a tent? Like, what are you-

Paul Rosolie 7:54 No, I think they did it in Manaus. I mean, there are cities in the Amazon.

Joe Rogan 7:56 Sh-

Paul Rosolie 7:56 There's Iquitos, there's Manaus.

Joe Rogan 7:57 Right, sure.

Paul Rosolie 7:58 So-

Joe Rogan 7:58 But you can fly into those cities.

Paul Rosolie 8:00 Yes.

Joe Rogan 8:00 You don't need to carve out a fucking pathway-

Paul Rosolie 8:02 But I-

Joe Rogan 8:02 ... through the jungle

Paul Rosolie 8:02 ... I remember seeing a video of this guy, and he was saying, like, "This is where the jungle used to be, and now it's just this big road." And I was like, but again, who in charge of the cli- unless they were gonna have a climate conference, and just local administrators and politicians said, "Well, we better get ready and clear this area," and like, maybe it wasn't intentional, I don't know.

Joe Rogan 8:21 This stuff is from March?

Paul Rosolie 8:21 I mean, if they have pictures of it.

Joe Rogan 8:24 Whoa, it's on the BBC.

Paul Rosolie 8:25 There you go.

Joe Rogan 8:25 Amazon forest felled to build road for climate summit.

Paul Rosolie 8:28 There you go.

Joe Rogan 8:29 Oh, my God, it's real. [laughing] Oh, my God. "A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belém." Oh, my God.

Paul Rosolie 8:48 So it wasn't Manaus. No.

Joe Rogan 8:49 That is so crazy. "It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will help climate." [chuckles]

Paul Rosolie 8:54 It's easier to drive when there's no trees.

Joe Rogan 8:56 "Which attracts more than 50,000 people, including world leaders, at the conference in November. The state government touts the highway, highway's sustainable cred..." I love how they use that term. Sustainable is one of those wonderful terms-

Paul Rosolie 9:07 Yeah

Joe Rogan 9:07 ... you can just throw on things. Sustainable! Uh, credentials, but lacks local and conservation- uh, but some local and con- locals and conservationists are outraged at the environmental impact. Yeah, duh. That's crazy.

Paul Rosolie 9:22 Yeah, look at that.

Joe Rogan 9:22 You're, you're chopping down trees to protest chopping down trees. That's fucking insane.

Paul Rosolie 9:27 Sounds amazing.

Joe Rogan 9:28 I just-

Paul Rosolie 9:29 You know. [inhales]

Joe Rogan 9:32 [sighs]

Paul Rosolie 9:32 I mean-

Joe Rogan 9:32 At what point in time are people gonna wake up?

Paul Rosolie 9:34 At one point in time, people are gonna wake up, and I think that that's, you know, that's sort of, as I've been... I've just started this book tour and everything else, and it's... The thing I'm trying to impress, I was just talking about this the other night, is like, we've had world wars, we've had great famines, we had the, the Dust Bowl. It's like, there's never been a time in history, though, before where we're looking at, is there going to be ecological collapse? The thing that I'm talking about with where they've cut 20% of the Amazon, scientists are warning that if we cut too much of the Amazon, that moisture cycle... I think the, the thing was that 20 trillion liters of water every day are pumped into the air from the Amazon, and that becomes the cloud system that rains back down-

Joe Rogan 10:13 Mm

Paul Rosolie 10:13 ... and creates the Amazon rainforest. If you cut too much of that, you break the cycle, and that forest has been growing for something like 55 million years. I believe it formed in the Eocene. And so we are the generation that's gonna decide, do we find a s- sustainable way to keep the animal- the Amazon rainforest functioning, or are we gonna break that cycle? And once we lose it, it's not gonna come back.

Joe Rogan 10:37 It's so crazy. It's so crazy that people are so shortsighted. They're like, "We wanna, uh, have cattle ranches."

Paul Rosolie 10:45 It's-

Joe Rogan 10:45 Just-

Paul Rosolie 10:45 ... I- it is, it is disorganization and apathy. It's like we, we, we have the ability to organize incred- I mean, if you can organize an airport, you can, you can figure out a way to protect a forest. But the fact that it's in numerous Latin American countries, Brazil wants to develop. In Peru, you have the illegal gold miners coming in, and now you have the pressure from the Asian markets. And, you know, we've found that if you just... I mean, that's what we've been doing over the last 20 years, is going to these gold miners and loggers and going, "How much do you make?" And they go, "$20 a day." And you go, "Do you wanna make 60? And you get a cool shirt, and you get health benefits-

Joe Rogan 11:18 [chuckles]

Paul Rosolie 11:18 ... and you get to ride a boat, and you get a team."

Joe Rogan 11:20 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 11:20 And they're like, "Yeah, that sounds so much better." And they're happy to come over, but they need the opportunity.

Joe Rogan 11:25 Yeah, we've, we've talked about you doing that, and I think that is really amazing. It's just crazy that it takes a person like you and your organization to, like, put some sort of a dent in this, that this isn't some sort of a, a gigantic global effort. That there's not a lot of people-

Paul Rosolie 11:42 Yeah

Joe Rogan 11:42 ... that are recognizing this issue and saying, "Hey, this is a huge problem if this goes away."

Paul Rosolie 11:48 I think, though, that there... I th- I see, in the world that I exist in, I see that all over the world there's people doing conservation projects, and that we are at this point where there's enough happening where, I mean, you had, uh, E.O. Wilson advocating for the half-Earth policy, where it's, you know, at least half of the Earth has to remain ecosystems. If you break too much down, if you ruin our ocean fisheries, if you cut the rainforests and the forests, you're gonna ruin the weather.

Joe Rogan 12:12 Right.

Paul Rosolie 12:12 The stuff that comes standard with life on Earth is going to be-... depleted.

Joe Rogan 12:17 Right.

Paul Rosolie 12:17 And so I think, you know, you see tiger numbers going up in India. You see that there's actually been a, an increase in forest cover globally, but in some of the most important areas, like the Amazon, it's just wild. And, I mean, that's what we're doing is, you know-- The guy, JJ, that I work with, who's local, he's been trying to-- He's been saying this for years. I mean, since we saw each other, he got-- Which I don't know how this happened. I don't know how some of this stuff happens, but we got a, we got an email one day from Time, and they were like: "We're selecting our, you know,, uh, hundred, hundred climate leaders of 2024." And they're like: "JJ's one of them." And I, I have no idea how the people at Time select this, but they chose this-- I mean, JJ grew up in an indigenous community barefoot. He didn't have shoes until he was 13, and it was because he saw his forest get destroyed and because he saw the fish vanish from the rivers as nets came in, and then as chainsaws came to the region, he saw the trees go down, and he went, "We've got to protect the next river."

Joe Rogan 13:19 Mm-hmm.

Paul Rosolie 13:19 And so he's the one that, you know-- When I went down there at 18 years old, he's the one that was like, "Look, you've got to help me protect this." And of course, at 18 years old, I was like, "How? How do I do that? How, how on earth is that possible?" And then, when we started seeing the smoke on the horizon, and we started hearing the chainsaws, and it got more urgent, I started telling these stories, and then the anaconda stories and the everything else, the first book that I wrote. And little by little, Jane Goodall, um, people helped along the way. Joe Rogan helped along the way.

Joe Rogan 13:49 Well, I'm happy to get the word out 'cause I, I, I mean, it, it's, it's kind of insane that it's happening, but it's also, that place is such a magical place, and it has such an insane history that we're, we're just starting to understand the history of the people that lived there.

Paul Rosolie 14:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 14:07 I mean, through the use of LIDAR, they're just starting to understand that the entire place was massively populated and that a lot of the plants that exist in the Amazon are actually agriculture plants that went, you know, went rogue when the people were depopulated because people brought in smallpox.

Paul Rosolie 14:27 I, I gotta push back on that. That's, that's-- I feel like that's a theory that's been becoming prevalent as a theory-

Joe Rogan 14:33 Mm-hmm.

Paul Rosolie 14:34 And then-

Joe Rogan 14:34 Well, sure, there was a jungle-

Paul Rosolie 14:35 Yeah

Joe Rogan 14:36 ... before.

Paul Rosolie 14:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 14:36 Because even in the Lost City of Z, I mean, even the, the talk-- What is it, Percy Fawcett?

Paul Rosolie 14:40 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 14:40 I think that's his name.

Paul Rosolie 14:41 Yeah, Percy Fawcett.

Joe Rogan 14:41 All the pe- the people that went there-

Paul Rosolie 14:42 Yeah

Joe Rogan 14:43 ... they talked about the-

Paul Rosolie 14:44 Yeah

Joe Rogan 14:44 ... Amazon being a lush rainforest.

Paul Rosolie 14:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 14:47 Uh, but, and these enormous cities w- that were incredibly complex-

Paul Rosolie 14:52 Yeah

Joe Rogan 14:52 ... before the jungle swallowed them up. So it's, it's clear that there was some form of jungle there already.

Paul Rosolie 14:58 Hundred percent.

Joe Rogan 14:59 But that these plants that they grew for agriculture were the ones that had, uh, you know, once people stopped tending them-

Paul Rosolie 15:08 Mm

Joe Rogan 15:08 ... and taking care of them, they overwhelmed the rest of the forest.

Paul Rosolie 15:11 Yeah. A, a friend sent me a clip, and you were, I think you were talking to Tom Segura, and you went, "You know, and the crazy thing about the Amazon..." Uh, and you went, "It, it's, it's largely man-made." And I was like, [claps] and I, like, threw something, and I was like: "No, this is not!" [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 15:22 Well, let's find out why we said that. Let's, uh, pull that up. Um, put- run that into Perplexity and see what articles we get.

Paul Rosolie 15:30 So-

Joe Rogan 15:30 Because what they're saying is that these plants, the, the number i- if, I believe, if I'm not misstating, the numbers that they exist in are, are not natural.

Paul Rosolie 15:41 But that's only around these ancient sites, and so I went and did a deep dive into this, and the sites that they've studied are along the watersheds. And so in the Amazon, you have terra firma, which is sort of dry forest, and then it dips into the river basin, and you have floodplain. Most of these cities existed on floodplains, and so where the scientists are able to go is up the rivers, and they go to the edges of these floodplains, where they find ancient human settlements, and that's where you find terra preta soil, which is human-engineered.

Joe Rogan 16:07 Mm-hmm.

Paul Rosolie 16:07 And that's where you find there'll be, like, a higher incidence of certain trees or certain plants.

Joe Rogan 16:12 Right. What are these trees?

Paul Rosolie 16:13 And so, like, bananas, for example, or s- sometimes they'll plant a higher amount of Brazil nut trees.

Joe Rogan 16:19 So here it is, our sponsor, Perplexity, which is always accurate. "Estimates suggest that roughly 10 to 15% of the Amazon standing forest shows clear signs of being man-made or strongly shaped by long-term indigenous management, not planted as uniform tree farms, but modified over thousands of years. Much of the Amazon that looks wild has been influenced by pre-Columbian indigenous agroforestry, soil enrichment, uh, Amazon dark earth," that's terra preta-

Paul Rosolie 16:46 Yeah

Joe Rogan 16:47 ... uh, "and species selection, rather than being a purely untouched wilderness. These systems differ from modern plantations. They are diverse, semi-natural forests, enriched with useful trees and crops, rather than rows of single commercial species." So the, the idea of the terra preta was that a lot of the Amazon soil is not good for agriculture. Is that correct?

Paul Rosolie 17:09 It's barren.

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Paul Rosolie 18:22 It used to be a vast inland sea.

Joe Rogan 18:24 Crazy!

Paul Rosolie 18:25 Yes. When it, when it separated from Africa, the, the, the, the Congo and the Amazon used to be joined in some sort of proto-Congo system, and then when they, they separated, the Amazon, South America hit up against the Nazca Plate, the Andes Mountains shot up, and then the salinated water drained out, and that's why we still have, uh, inland freshwater stingrays, manatees, pink river dolphins.

Joe Rogan 18:48 Oh, that makes sense.

Paul Rosolie 18:49 And so that happened-

Joe Rogan 18:50 That makes sense

Paul Rosolie 18:50 ... over millions of years as the, the salinated water-

Joe Rogan 18:52 So over millions of years, the saltwater dolphins adapted to freshwater.

Paul Rosolie 18:55 Exactly, and changed.

Joe Rogan 18:56 And is that why they became pink?

Paul Rosolie 18:58 They became pink, I think because they've lost their pigmentation. They have terrible eyesight.... um, they almost don't need to see, because you don't- in the, in that sediment-rich water, they're using s- they're using sonar.

Joe Rogan 19:11 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 19:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:11 Whoa! That's crazy.

Paul Rosolie 19:13 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:14 Wow, so they become almost blind?

Paul Rosolie 19:17 Yeah, like, all the fish. You pull out these giant catfish, they hardly have eyes. They have, like, light-sensing organs.

Joe Rogan 19:22 Whoa!

Paul Rosolie 19:23 There's... You can't see- I mean, there's- there are clear rivers in the Amazon, which I would love to-- I've never been to one. And, like, the streams are clear, but the Amazon River itself is nothing. Everyone's like: "Oh, you should bring a GoPro in the river with you." And I'm like: "For what?"

Joe Rogan 19:35 Well, I understand.

Paul Rosolie 19:35 You're not gonna see anything.

Joe Rogan 19:36 It's just sediment.

Paul Rosolie 19:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 19:38 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 19:38 But the thing that, that, that the, that this, this theory about the, the Amazon is even human-engineered is wrong. Because when you look at the size of the Amazon, you look at that 2.7 million miles, it's, it's that they've said that what they're not getting is that in the areas that these people have been studying with LiDAR and through this anthropological digging, they're saying it's more than we thought. There's certainly more human settlements than we previously thought. There maybe were a few million people there before Pizarro and, and, and the explorers came. But when you don't-- what you don't realize is that between the rivers, between each river, which is the majority of the Amazon, is this terra firma giant jungle with hundreds of miles between the rivers. Nobody's been there. And so I just was reading a scientific paper. It was saying they went out and sampled those areas, and it showed absolutely no sign of human engineering. And so most of the forest-

Joe Rogan 20:34 In terms of the growth of the plants-

Paul Rosolie 20:36 And in-

Joe Rogan 20:36 But did they do LiDAR to see if there's previous structures?

Paul Rosolie 20:38 Well, the good thing with the LiDAR is that they fly over.

Joe Rogan 20:40 Right.

Paul Rosolie 20:40 And so the LiDAR confirmed that over those human areas, like you get like a river confluence where two rivers are coming together-

Joe Rogan 20:46 Mm-hmm

Paul Rosolie 20:47 ... there'll be a human settlement there. And in those areas, they find that the terra preta, they'll find that the plants occur in different abundance and diversity than in the other places. But that the, this, this message that the Amazon itself was engineered by ancient humans or prehistoric humans is not actually accurate. It was a wild jungle.

Joe Rogan 21:05 So you think they're saying it for clickbait?

Paul Rosolie 21:06 I think they're saying it-

Joe Rogan 21:07 Did they make those articles for clickbait?

Paul Rosolie 21:08 ... because people build their careers on, you know, if you come out and say, "I have a new theory about how this formed," it gets attention.

Joe Rogan 21:15 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 21:15 There's even a-- And nothing against, um, what's his name? Graham Hancock.

Joe Rogan 21:20 Mm-hmm.

Paul Rosolie 21:21 Um, for a while, everyone was like: "Oh, Paul Rosolie needs to debate Graham..." No, I don't- I got nothing against Graham Hancock. He's great. Um, but, but it's just the messaging isn't, is, is becoming that the Amazon was kinda man-made. And then, so what happens is you get leaders like in Brazil going: "Well, if the Amazon was really man-made, then we can manage it now."

Joe Rogan 21:39 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 21:39 And that it's just not-

Joe Rogan 21:40 I see

Paul Rosolie 21:40 ... it's just not accurate.

Joe Rogan 21:41 I see. I see what you're saying.

Paul Rosolie 21:41 If you look, if you look at the... And even Smithsonian did an article where they said, "These are the current things that are coming out. These are the theories." And then it went, "Yeah, but these theories discount the fact that 95% of the Amazon rainforest has not been surveyed in this way," and most of it shows that these are just wild ecosystems that have been growing since the dawn of time, for the last 55, 30 million years, and it's just been speciating and growing and evolving on its own. And it's only in these tiny areas that humans have done this sort of engineering, where there were, there were tribes... The first one to come down the Amazon, he mentioned that, um, there were tribes that had sectioned off parts of the river, and they were growing the giant river turtles, and that was their prime source of protein, so they figured out how to get protein-

Joe Rogan 22:25 How big is a giant river turtle?

Paul Rosolie 22:25 Oh, tremendous. They're, like, three or four feet across from the carapace.

Joe Rogan 22:29 Show, show me a giant river turtle, Jamie.

Paul Rosolie 22:31 Oh, they're huge.

Joe Rogan 22:32 Ooh.

Paul Rosolie 22:32 They're monstrous. Absolutely, we, we don't have them where we are.

Joe Rogan 22:35 Like, bigger than sea turtles? Like those sea turtles that you get in Hawaii.

Paul Rosolie 22:38 Oh, sea turtle, sea turtle-size. They're huge. They're absolutely monstrous.

Joe Rogan 22:40 Right.

Paul Rosolie 22:41 And then we found fossil- we were there. We were on a beach. We found fossils of an eight-foot river turtle. Yeah, but see, like that.

Joe Rogan 22:47 Oh, okay.

Paul Rosolie 22:47 These are huge.

Joe Rogan 22:47 So just like the ones you find in Hawaii. Those sea turtles are like... If you go to the Big Island-

Paul Rosolie 22:52 Yeah

Joe Rogan 22:52 ... you could swim with them. It's pretty dope.

Paul Rosolie 22:54 Yeah, these guys don't have flippers, though. They still have, they still have claws.

Joe Rogan 22:58 Okay.

Paul Rosolie 22:59 I mean, those are monster turtles, man.

Joe Rogan 23:00 Massive.

Paul Rosolie 23:01 And so, and so-

Joe Rogan 23:02 And so they were growing them, farming them for food.

Paul Rosolie 23:04 They were farming them. And so in areas like that, you're gonna see agriculture, you're gonna see pottery, you're gonna see terra preta, you're gonna see things where there was a small civilization by the edge of the river, and then in the other 98% of the Amazon, no one's ever been there.

Joe Rogan 23:19 Have you had sea turtle before? Have you... This kind of turtle, whatever it is, have you eaten it yet?

Paul Rosolie 23:23 Oh, sea turtle? No. This? Yes.

Joe Rogan 23:25 This turtle? Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 23:26 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 23:27 What is it like?

Paul Rosolie 23:28 Uh, uh, uh, it's kinda slimy. It's not like anything. It's very strange, 'cause you-- they cook it and just, you know, everyone, everyone always go: "How could you be a conservationist and eat the animal?" Because when you go to someone's house, and they live on the side of a river, and they go, "We're having dinner," that's what they're serving.

Joe Rogan 23:43 You gotta eat with them, yeah.

Paul Rosolie 23:43 You gotta eat with them.

Joe Rogan 23:44 I wouldn't do that, man. You're ruining the Earth.

Paul Rosolie 23:46 Yeah, how could you?

Joe Rogan 23:47 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 23:47 Let me throw paint on it. [laughing]

Joe Rogan 23:49 [laughing] Let me glue myself to this shell.

Paul Rosolie 23:51 Yes, that's what I'm gonna do next time.

Joe Rogan 23:53 [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 23:53 Um, I mean, I showed you that video where I'm sharing the monkey head with the girl.

Joe Rogan 23:57 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 23:58 It was like I was babysitting a six-year-old, and she was like, "It's lunchtime." And I was like, "Well, what did your parents leave you for lunch?" She, like, opens this pot and pulls out a monkey head, and she was like, "This." So we put it on the fire, warmed it up, and then we both sat there, just, like, rip- I would, like, rip off a piece for her, 'cause I was stronger, and give it to her, and then she was like: "No, no, no, I want the ear." And she, like, she would rip off the ear.

Joe Rogan 24:17 Whoa!

Paul Rosolie 24:17 Like, we just sat there eating a monkey face. And so the turtle, they cook it in the shell. They'll just, like, you know, they'll just, like, slit its throat, throw it on the fire, and so it cooks in the shell. Then they part the shell, and then you kinda just, like, it's like a slow-cooked, like, when the meat falls off the bone.

Joe Rogan 24:31 Oh, wow!

Paul Rosolie 24:32 You just throw a little salt on there-

Joe Rogan 24:34 And it's kinda-

Paul Rosolie 24:34 ... and have it with rice.

Joe Rogan 24:34 How do they get their salt? Is that something they trade for?

Paul Rosolie 24:36 They trade for it. They trade for it. I mean, the people I'm dealing with have access to the outside. Even the really remote communities that are two days upriver, they, they, they trade with the outside world. They have some interaction with money.

Joe Rogan 24:50 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 24:50 And so that's one of the things that we're doing as an organization, is saying, "Okay, what do you want your future to look like?"... because right now you have a couple shotguns, you got a couple chainsaws, you got a couple boats, and those things make you want money, but you also want to eat fish out of the river every day.

Joe Rogan 25:05 Right.

Paul Rosolie 25:05 You also wanna eat monkeys every day, and these are your staples. And they're like, "You know, i- if, if you cut down more of these trees, there will be less monkeys. If you shoot too many..." Like, it's not like they have deer tags, where it's, like, a monitored thing. They just, they- they're not understanding this. You know, when it was a bow and arrow, it was kind of a fair game.

Joe Rogan 25:22 Right.

Paul Rosolie 25:23 Now, the shotgun, it's like you can go and shoot whatever you want.

Joe Rogan 25:25 Yeah, every time you point at a monkey, it's dead.

Paul Rosolie 25:27 Yes.

Joe Rogan 25:28 Yeah, it's not a tricky hunt.

Paul Rosolie 25:30 And so we're work- these guys are, you know, working with us as rangers, and we're building this dev- developing this relationship with the local communities of saying: "How do you-- do you wanna continue living this way? Do you want your kids to live this way?" And the answer usually is, "Yes, but with better health and education."

Joe Rogan 25:46 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 25:47 So we wanna-

Joe Rogan 25:47 So yes, but... Okay, that's interesting.

Paul Rosolie 25:49 Yes, but.

Joe Rogan 25:49 So they like that way of life. They want-

Paul Rosolie 25:52 Oh, yeah

Joe Rogan 25:52 ... they wanna continue that way of life because it's the only thing they've known. I mean, has- have any of these people ever gone to, like, any of these other cities that are fairly close or that they could reach and, and seen what that life is like?

Paul Rosolie 26:05 Yeah, we brought, we brought one of the communities. They were having trouble with the Peruvian government getting recognized as an indigenous community, and they were having this trouble for 15 years. And we, we used... You know, now we have lawyers and, and people, and we have an office and all this stuff in Peru, and so we, we went and sat down with them, and we said, "Okay, why are you having this trouble? I mean, you clearly are an indigenous community. What's, what's the hold up?" And the hold up was that it takes two days for them to get to the nearest town. When they get to the nearest town, they're scared of the traffic. They have no idea what to do with paperwork.

Joe Rogan 26:37 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 26:37 They have to sit in an office. I mean, these are people that are, like, putting their bows and arrows and guns down and walk- walking into an office and sitting there in the air conditioning. And they're like, "Next," and they're like, "Sit." And they're like: "Do you have form, like, I-227B?" And they're like, "I two what ba-ba? "

Joe Rogan 26:49 Oh, boy!

Paul Rosolie 26:49 And they're like, "What's your Social Security number?"

Joe Rogan 26:51 Oh, my God.

Paul Rosolie 26:51 And they're like, "Ah!"

Joe Rogan 26:53 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 26:53 And they, you know, they got some, like, fish shells in there, you know?

Joe Rogan 26:56 [chuckles]

Paul Rosolie 26:57 Um, and so what we realized is, was that they were just having trouble with the administrative part, and so we put our lawyers on it, and we got them their indigenous title land. And so now no one can take that away from them. And so for that, we brought them all to the city. We had a big conference, and we had a big celebration about it, and they were all had the feathers on their head, and they were all celebrating, and now they're safe. And s-

Joe Rogan 27:17 Do they g- uh, is there any pushback? Like, is there any, like, political influence by the, whatever it is, miners, ranchers, anyone who tries to stop that from happening, bribe people to try to take over the land of these people?

Paul Rosolie 27:31 Absolutely. I mean, the Amazon is a war zone of, of influence, and so you have... I mean, the, the miners, if anybody tries to protest the gold mining, they kill you. So one of the lawyers that I was working with, his father had come out and said, "Look, as a local Peruvian person in the jungle, I want this to stop. They can't-- they're destroying..." There's a-- Jamie, there's a, a, a photo in the folder that says, I think it says Sandstorm or something, but it's just... It's not even... Again, deserts are, are actually ecosystems. This is a wasteland. They've, they've destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres in the Peruvian Amazon. You can see it from space. It's this horrible scar, and they've cut the trees, burned the forest, and then they've sucked the land up, and then they, they take the bottom of the sediment, and they use mercury to bind the gold out of the sediment. And then they burn the mercury off the gold, releasing it into the air.

Joe Rogan 28:23 Oh, great.

Paul Rosolie 28:24 Oh, yeah. So that then in the rain, it comes down as mercury rain, which gets into the fish-

Joe Rogan 28:28 Oh, God

Paul Rosolie 28:28 ... which gets into the people.

Joe Rogan 28:29 And then also the miners must be getting mercury poisoning.

Paul Rosolie 28:32 The miners all have mercury poisoning, birth defects-

Joe Rogan 28:35 Oh

Paul Rosolie 28:36 ... health problems, respiratory issues.

Joe Rogan 28:38 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 28:38 I mean, it's-

Joe Rogan 28:40 Wow!

Paul Rosolie 28:40 Yeah, that's some of the fires. Um, that's, that's-

Joe Rogan 28:44 Is that you?

Paul Rosolie 28:44 That is me. That is me running out there with my-

Joe Rogan 28:46 So you're right there?

Paul Rosolie 28:47 Yeah. I mean, as soon as we see forest burning, we, we, we run towards it.

Joe Rogan 28:52 And it rains there a lot, right?

Paul Rosolie 28:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:54 So, like, how long does this forest fire last?

Paul Rosolie 28:56 Well, they do it in September, when the- so like, it's like, uh, July through September when the forest is at its driest. They come in, and they cut the forest, and they leave it down.

Joe Rogan 29:06 What was that picture you just showed me, Jamie?

Paul Rosolie 29:07 That's a horrible picture. That's-

Joe Rogan 29:09 Is that animals burned alive on a tree?

Paul Rosolie 29:11 That's two baby jaguars that were burned alive.

Joe Rogan 29:13 Oh, God.

Paul Rosolie 29:14 Yeah. And so people-

Joe Rogan 29:15 And they're just stuck on the tree, burned alive?

Paul Rosolie 29:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 29:17 That's crazy.

Paul Rosolie 29:19 People talk about, you know, we're losing ecosystems, and it's like, it's not just about us.

Joe Rogan 29:23 Oh, wow.

Paul Rosolie 29:23 These animals live there. They have nowhere else to go, and so there's massive individual suffering for an- I mean, there's millions of animals on a single tree. And so then when you have this, these, these f- fires, where they cut the forest and just burn everything, this... I mean, those trees would have been filled with monkeys and birds and, and, and, and the snakes, you know, they, they get scared. They burrow deeper into their hole, and then they're, then it burns.

Joe Rogan 29:46 And so this is all for gold mining?

Paul Rosolie 29:49 This was the- this was for cattle ranching, this one. This was invaders on our river that come in from other places. They would- they set up cows. They set up papaya. And I mean, this is what it's supposed to look like. It's supposed to be this lush, verdant, ancient rainforest filled with wildlife. I mean, the cacophony of sound. When you, when you're, when you're going to sleep in your tent at night, and you're out in a place like that, it's just this throbbing, pulsing symphony. It's incredible. The magic of that place-

Joe Rogan 30:17 Mm

Paul Rosolie 30:17 ... of real wilderness is wild. I mean, this is pl- that, that particular shot was... It's- we had to go for days to reach that spot. You know, all day on the river, camp, all day on the river, camp. You know, you're going up rapids. You're going up the waterfalls to get to these places that nobody can go. And there's a, there's an example of, it's-- that was a, a, a specifically a location where they've studied, and they've found that there's never been a human settlement there. It's just a corner of the Amazon-

Joe Rogan 30:43 Ever?

Paul Rosolie 30:43 Ever.

Joe Rogan 30:43 Have they done lidar in these areas where they say that people have never been?

Paul Rosolie 30:46 I, I don't, I don't know for sure.

Joe Rogan 30:47 That's where it gets weird, right? Because, like, they've done lidar on some of these places that were, like, very lush and tropical, and then they find these structures underneath it.

Paul Rosolie 30:55 Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 30:55 They find these areas that-

Paul Rosolie 30:57 Yeah

Joe Rogan 30:57 ... clearly had, you know, some sort of pathways and s- like, uh, b-... geometric patterns that indicate foundations of buildings.

Paul Rosolie 31:07 Yeah. No, I mean, those, those are there. I just think that right now the problem is that it's getting grossly overstated how much of the Amazon... If you take it, take it as a football field, and you go, "Man, I thought it was only in this much of the football field," you know, in a few inches of it, and then you find out there's actually 10 feet of the football field that was-

Joe Rogan 31:24 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 31:24 There's, there's still the rest of the football field-

Joe Rogan 31:26 Right

Paul Rosolie 31:26 ... is still wild.

Joe Rogan 31:27 Right. Right.

Paul Rosolie 31:28 And so what- I think that's the, the message that's getting lost is they're going, "There's a lot more here than we thought." That doesn't mean the whole thing.

Joe Rogan 31:34 I watched a documentary once on this guy who was losing his mind. He was a scientist, who was a, a biologist, who's convinced that the giant sloth still existed in the Amazon-

Paul Rosolie 31:44 Yeah

Joe Rogan 31:44 ... and they couldn't find it.

Paul Rosolie 31:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:46 And that these people who lived there were telling him, "We see them-"

Paul Rosolie 31:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:50 "We know what they are. We have a name for them." And this guy had been there for years, and he was losing his mind because he couldn't find it, and he sort of staked his academic reputation-

Paul Rosolie 31:59 Yeah

Joe Rogan 31:59 ... on the idea that this sloth existed. Couldn't find anything, but it doesn't mean it's not there.

Paul Rosolie 32:04 It doesn't mean it's not there.

Joe Rogan 32:05 Because there's so much.

Paul Rosolie 32:07 There's so much, and the, the locals are never wrong.

Joe Rogan 32:11 Like, imagine if you were looking for a coyote, and you had to look through the entire... Like, there was 1,000 coyotes in the center of the United States, and you started in Pennsylvania, and you were hiking your way like, "I don't see any fucking coyotes."

Paul Rosolie 32:24 I don't see any.

Joe Rogan 32:25 But there's 1,000 of them that are in North Dakota-

Paul Rosolie 32:27 Yeah

Joe Rogan 32:27 ... and you've gotta find this. Like, that's essentially-

Paul Rosolie 32:31 That's a great, that's a great way of thinking of it. I- it's the same thing with rattlesnakes. When I was a teenager, I was exploring the mountains of, of New York, and I was going, "It says there's rattlesnakes here." So I was just walking around, finding every kind of snake, and I'd be like, "Well, where are the rattlesnakes?" And you don't realize that wildlife occurs in populations, and so the rattlesnakes were all near rattlesnake dens.

Joe Rogan 32:51 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 32:51 And so then I started making friends with other guys that were into snakes, and they were like: "Yeah, we know where they are. It's only on... You see that mountain right there? It's like it's on the side of that."

Joe Rogan 32:59 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 32:59 "Go to that in the morning when there's sun, and you'll see them basking." It's like you gotta go to where they live.

Joe Rogan 33:04 Right, and you have to talk to the people that actually know.

Paul Rosolie 33:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:07 Well, this guy was trying to do that-

Paul Rosolie 33:09 Mm

Joe Rogan 33:09 ... but y- y- there was this, this one scene of exasperation where he was, like, sitting down, saying, "Did I stake my entire reputation on horseshit?" You know?

Paul Rosolie 33:18 Did he, did he-

Joe Rogan 33:19 Buddy, do you have to pee?

Paul Rosolie 33:20 [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 33:21 He keeps getting up, which is unusual for him. Can you tell Jeff to come, uh, and get him? See if he can... He might have to pee. He's generally n- he, he's happy to chill.

Paul Rosolie 33:31 He'll just... Yeah, he'll just lay down.

Joe Rogan 33:32 He, he keeps getting up, and he's huffing.

Paul Rosolie 33:33 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:34 Which is like, he communicates that way.

Paul Rosolie 33:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:36 Like, when he wants to eat, he comes up to me-

Paul Rosolie 33:37 Yeah

Joe Rogan 33:37 ... and he huffs, [chuckles] you know? My buddy is the best. [chuckles] [laughing] He's the best.

Paul Rosolie 33:43 No, but I think that that's, that's, that's the truth is that it's, it's... People think it's like you can just go find this stuff, and it's... The, the, the secrets in this world are hidden for a reason, and even if there is a tribe that knows about the giant ground sloths, they're not gonna tell us.

Joe Rogan 33:59 Right.

Paul Rosolie 34:00 They're not gonna tell-

Joe Rogan 34:01 Right, right, right

Paul Rosolie 34:01 ... someone from the outside. So it might be like-

Joe Rogan 34:02 For sure

Paul Rosolie 34:03 ... one, one valley between two mountains where there's still a population.

Joe Rogan 34:07 Just take him to go to the bathroom and bring him back in here. I'm pretty sure he has to go. Thanks, Jeff. Um-

Paul Rosolie 34:14 I wouldn't, you know-

Joe Rogan 34:15 I mean, there's gotta be a bunch... Well, there, there's so many plants that they find there. That- this is an interesting statistic. Um, find out what percentage of pharmaceutical drugs, the compounds emanate from the Amazon.

Paul Rosolie 34:28 Mm.

Joe Rogan 34:28 It's an enormous percentage.

Paul Rosolie 34:30 It's huge. Yeah, yeah. A lot of the base drugs, quinine, came from the Amazon, the first cure for malaria. I know captopril, which was a blood pressure medication, came from bushmaster venom. That was in the '90s. There's, there's so much. I mean, I just got whacked by a stingray hard.

Joe Rogan 34:45 I saw that. It got your foot, right?

Paul Rosolie 34:47 Ah, it was brutal.

Joe Rogan 34:48 What was that like? What happened?

Paul Rosolie 34:49 That was brutal. I mean, that in-

Joe Rogan 34:51 Bro, you've been hit by everything.

Paul Rosolie 34:52 I, I had this- [laughing] Dude, I, I- my body is a Jackson Pollock painting of scars.

Joe Rogan 34:57 Do you, do you ever get checked for parasites? 'Cause you must have all of them.

Paul Rosolie 35:00 I do. I do. I have to.

Joe Rogan 35:00 Estimates typly- typically say that about 25% of modern, modern pharmaceutical drugs are derived from rainforest plants, and many of the, of those known examples come from the Amazon, but there's no precise peer-reviewed percentage-

Paul Rosolie 35:15 Mm

Joe Rogan 35:15 ... just for the Amazon alone. Um, most popular figures, you see, like, 25% of medicines come from the Amazon, actually refer to all tropical rainforests, not specifically the Amazon. But the, the thing is, like, uh, how much of the Amazon has not been explored, and how many potential pharmaceutical drugs or... You know, here's, that's the term, right? Pharmaceutical drugs. What about natural remedies exist in the Amazon-

Paul Rosolie 35:39 Yep

Joe Rogan 35:39 ... that aren't, you, you don't need to patent them and sell them at a fucking pharmacy and-

Paul Rosolie 35:45 Yeah, I mean, look, so we have, you know, we have, we have Neosporin. You get a cut, it looks a little infected, you put Neosporin on it.

Joe Rogan 35:52 Mm-hmm.

Paul Rosolie 35:52 It might work. Down there, we have a tree that if you get... We, we tested this, and it, it murders bacteria. It's like 100 times more potent than Neosporin.

Joe Rogan 36:02 What's it called?

Paul Rosolie 36:02 The sangre de drago. It's not even a big secret. Like, people know about this. Every time I post about it, everyone's like: "Yeah, we know about that. We use it."

Joe Rogan 36:10 No kidding!

Paul Rosolie 36:11 But, but, but no one's ever turned it into a cream.

Joe Rogan 36:12 Can it grow in Austin?

Paul Rosolie 36:13 [chuckles] Probably.

Joe Rogan 36:14 Can I get some sangre... How do you say it?

Paul Rosolie 36:16 Sangre de drago, the dragon's blood.

Joe Rogan 36:17 Sangre de gr- de drago.

Paul Rosolie 36:19 Sangre de drago.

Joe Rogan 36:20 Sangre de drago.

Paul Rosolie 36:21 Yes, dragon's blood tree.

Joe Rogan 36:22 I'm watching, uh, Game of Thrones again. That sounds like something Khaleesi would say. [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 36:27 [laughing] The Mother of Dragons, um-

Joe Rogan 36:29 [laughing] I mean-

Paul Rosolie 36:31 But-

Joe Rogan 36:31 ... and, uh, by the way, Khal Drogo could have used that, 'cause he died of an infection.

Paul Rosolie 36:34 I mean, right, the thing that took him down.

Joe Rogan 36:36 That didn't make any sense to me. I thought that was a plot hole.

Paul Rosolie 36:38 No, see, it is.

Joe Rogan 36:38 There it is.

Paul Rosolie 36:38 That's, that-

Joe Rogan 36:39 Dragon's blood. Sangre de drago.

Paul Rosolie 36:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:42 Wow!

Paul Rosolie 36:42 Yeah, but is it good?

Joe Rogan 36:43 You could buy it.

Paul Rosolie 36:43 Is it, is it sourced well?

Speaker 36:45 Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of-

Joe Rogan 36:45 Right, it's probably made by some asshole.

Paul Rosolie 36:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:47 It's probably, like, 1%.

Paul Rosolie 36:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:48 The rest of it's corn syrup.

Paul Rosolie 36:49 'Cause we just go, we just hit the tree with the machete-

Joe Rogan 36:52 Right

Paul Rosolie 36:52 ... and then you have a spoon.

Joe Rogan 36:53 Right.

Paul Rosolie 36:53 And then you put it on your thing, and actually exactly that, when I saw that, I thought the opposite. I was like: Oh, this great warrior. I was like, "That's such a great plot twist that just a, a nick kills him." I mean, I just had a staph infection in my leg-

Joe Rogan 37:05 Mm

Paul Rosolie 37:05 ... from one mosquito bite that just-... got itchy, and then it spread, and it spread, and it spread until I had to be on double antibiotics. They cultured it, and it was MRSA.

Joe Rogan 37:15 Ooh.

Paul Rosolie 37:15 And it's like, I would've died!

Joe Rogan 37:17 MRSA in the Amazon.

Paul Rosolie 37:18 Well, I got MRSA a l- years ago at, um... I had dengue, and I'd gone to a, to a clinic in the city, which MRSA usually lives, like, in, like, the hospitals in the human areas.

Joe Rogan 37:29 Right, because it's a medication-resistant staph infection.

Paul Rosolie 37:32 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 37:32 That's what, that's what MRSA stands for, right?

Paul Rosolie 37:34 Yep. And so I had gotten it, and so I have a tendency now. I've been a little bit compromised in terms of infections, 'cause living 20 years in the jungle. And, uh, so I had already gotten it, so chances are that's where... It doesn't exist- and that's the thing. You see in the, in the wild jungle, you don't have malaria, you don't have rabies, you don't have dengue, because the human population is so low that it doesn't spread. A mosquito bites you here, the next person it's gonna bite is me or Jamie. S- mosquito bites me in the city, and then I go out into the rainforest, there's no one else for it to bite. It's gonna bite a, an anteater.

Joe Rogan 38:08 Right.

Paul Rosolie 38:08 And so it's not gonna spread like that, whereas-

Joe Rogan 38:10 Got it

Paul Rosolie 38:10 ... if we have a town of loggers... That's why when you go to these, like, logging and mining camps, the diseases.

Joe Rogan 38:15 Ooh.

Paul Rosolie 38:16 They're just-- I mean, there's this thing called, this type of flea called a piqui, that go- burrows into your feet and lays eggs.

Joe Rogan 38:22 Ugh.

Paul Rosolie 38:23 There's leishmaniasis, there's malaria, dengue, um, what's the, the bird? Zika virus. There's all these crazy things, but we don't have that out in the jungle, because, I mean, the, the ecosystem, the frogs eat most of the, the, the mosquito larva. The mosquito larva like, like bromeliad cups or puddles. Well, bromeliad cups and puddles are filled with tadpoles, and then of course, there's turtles in the puddles eating the tadpoles, and then there's other things eating the turtles. Everything's eating everything.

Joe Rogan 38:51 Ecosystem.

Paul Rosolie 38:52 Ecosystem regulates it.

Joe Rogan 38:54 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 38:54 And when you ruin that, so then you cut down the forest, now you have puddles sitting in the sun, and they're all twitching with mosquito larva, so then you have tons of mosquitoes.

Joe Rogan 39:02 Oh, wow!

Paul Rosolie 39:02 And so that's how nature... They say, you know, mangrove forests will stop tsunamis from destroying a town, because they'll stop the, the rush of the water.

Joe Rogan 39:11 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 39:11 Well, forests will keep you safe by not only producing rainfall that'll come down on your crops, but also making sure that the ecosystem's not out of balance, so you're not covered in mosquitoes and parasites.

Joe Rogan 39:21 When I, uh, lived in LA, I moved into a house in Encino that I was renting, and the... No one had lived there in quite a while, and they had left the water in the pool.

Paul Rosolie 39:31 Oh.

Joe Rogan 39:31 And, uh, when I was going out to look at the pool-

Paul Rosolie 39:33 Wow

Joe Rogan 39:33 ... the pool was completely green-

Paul Rosolie 39:36 Yeah

Joe Rogan 39:36 ... and there was things swimming in it, like, I mean, like, schools swimming.

Paul Rosolie 39:41 Geez.

Joe Rogan 39:41 And I go, "What is that?"

Paul Rosolie 39:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:43 And the guy goes, "That's mosquito larva."

Paul Rosolie 39:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 39:45 I was like, [gasps]

Paul Rosolie 39:45 Ugh.

Joe Rogan 39:46 I'm like, "No way!" And he's like, "Yeah, we have to kill them. We have to drain the pool." And w- like, I, I was just thinking about-

Paul Rosolie 39:53 Oh, that's horrible

Joe Rogan 39:53 ... how many times I was gonna get bit-

Paul Rosolie 39:55 Yeah

Joe Rogan 39:55 ... once these things hatched. It was crazy. Like, it was like watching little fish-

Paul Rosolie 39:59 Yeah

Joe Rogan 39:59 ... swim around.

Paul Rosolie 40:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:00 Little hatchlings.

Paul Rosolie 40:00 Yep, and then thank God for dragonflies, 'cause they'll lay, they'll lay their, their young in the same thing, and dragonfly larva will go merc those things.

Joe Rogan 40:07 Ah.

Paul Rosolie 40:07 They're savage. And then you get tadpoles, um-

Joe Rogan 40:10 You got a wild kingdom right in your pool. [chuckles]

Paul Rosolie 40:12 Right in your pool, right in your little cup. But, but when I got stung by the stingray, it was crazy, 'cause... So the, the... I had been walking-

Joe Rogan 40:18 Oh, your back, buddy.

Paul Rosolie 40:19 I'd been walking with shoes in this stream. I took my shoes off, 'cause I was like, "Oh, I'm at a waterfall. I know this waterfall. I love this waterfall." Playing in the waterfall, and man, it's the one thing... Bullet ants, caiman bites, snake bites, I've, I've had it all. The stingray bite was the one thing that-

Joe Rogan 40:33 Worse than bullet ants?

Paul Rosolie 40:35 A thou- a hundred thousand times worse.

Joe Rogan 40:37 Really?

Paul Rosolie 40:38 Yes, and I'd seen one guy get, get stung by a stingray, and he had nerve damage, a h- a systemic infection up his leg and his whole body, and he didn't walk for months. So when I got hit, I felt... This is what I felt. I felt, in a, the flash of a second, I felt the stingray barb go into my foot, and it wagged its tail under my skin.

Joe Rogan 40:57 [inhales sharply]

Paul Rosolie 40:57 So it flayed the skin off the arch of my foot and came out.

Joe Rogan 41:02 Oh! And it has venom?

Paul Rosolie 41:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:05 Look at your foot.

Paul Rosolie 41:05 So there, all the skin is l-

Joe Rogan 41:07 Oh, man.

Paul Rosolie 41:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:09 That is nasty.

Paul Rosolie 41:10 So I s-

Joe Rogan 41:10 Did you put the skin of the dragon or whatever the hell it is?

Paul Rosolie 41:13 Better. So I, I, I, I, I s- I sat, and of course, my first thing was just like, "Okay, I gotta document this." [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 41:17 Oh, man, getting dragged out?

Paul Rosolie 41:18 I'm unconscious. I'm unconscious at this point.

Joe Rogan 41:20 It's that... You're in that much pain?

Paul Rosolie 41:21 Yes, I was blacking out.

Joe Rogan 41:23 Josh is freaking out. He's like, "What is happening?"

Paul Rosolie 41:24 Yeah, I mean, I was literally...

Joe Rogan 41:25 "What's happening to Paul?"

Paul Rosolie 41:25 I knew, I knew people were filming, and I was like, I didn't... You know, you wanna be tough. You wanna be like, "All right, I just got bit by a stingray. It's gonna be fine." I was not tough.

Joe Rogan 41:33 You s- it says, "I don't remember any of this."

Paul Rosolie 41:35 Yeah, so that, that first thing right there, I started taking a video, and my friend comes up to me, and he was like, "Hey, man." He's like, "We gotta... You gotta stop." He's like, " 'Cause in a minute, you're gonna go under." And I was like, "What do you mean I'm gonna go under?" And he's like, "Once the venom hits your system," he's- he goes, "You're not gonna be able to walk, and we're, we're still a few miles from the river." And he's like, "We gotta get you to the boat, and we can't carry you."

Joe Rogan 41:55 Whoa.

Paul Rosolie 41:56 And so they got me back to the station. I don't remember any of it. They had me laying on my back, and I was in so much pain, I couldn't put my foot down. I mean, I was making deals with God. I was going, "If I... If you, if you just make the pain go away," I was like, "I'll go to church every day." I was like, "I'll never smoke a cigarette again."

Joe Rogan 42:10 What is that thing on your foot?

Paul Rosolie 42:11 So that's the plant medicine. That's where I'm going with this.

Joe Rogan 42:13 Never smoke a cigarette every day, that's funny.

Paul Rosolie 42:16 They... That, that pack there, they went to two different trees, and they removed compounds from the tree. One was the bark, and one was the fiber, and they put it into a leaf pack, and they cook it on a pan, and they heat it, and it makes this plant poultice. And they put this boiling hot piece of plant material, it's like a, it's like a fish cake, and they put it against the wound, and even that burned, but it felt better than the, than the venom, and it starts to j- suck out the venom. And so when they took it off my foot after, like, tw- this is, this is them getting the, getting the plant material ready. They know the medicines, and that's been handed down-

Joe Rogan 42:49 Whoa

Paul Rosolie 42:50 ... through the generations.

Joe Rogan 42:51 So they're just shaving it off with a knife-

Paul Rosolie 42:53 Yes, you see there's a few different colors

Joe Rogan 42:54 ... and then they make, like, a cake of all this stuff?

Paul Rosolie 42:55 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 42:57 Wow.

Paul Rosolie 42:57 And then they heat that up until it's scalding.

Joe Rogan 43:00 But-

Paul Rosolie 43:00 Press it against your foot.

Joe Rogan 43:01 And you've been in the Amazon for a long time. Is th- this is the first time it's ever happened to you, you've been stung by a stingray?

Paul Rosolie 43:06 This is the first time.

Joe Rogan 43:07 Now, how does it happen?

Paul Rosolie 43:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:08 You just, you step in the wrong place?

Paul Rosolie 43:10 JJ's nephew, so he knows. He's got the indigenous training. He knew exactly what to do.... Yeah, and so that's all the venom. So now-

Joe Rogan 43:18 Whoa, it pulls the venom?

Paul Rosolie 43:18 -all that black stuff is all the, all the, the, the denatured blood that came out of my foot. And so for about four hours, I was in this state of just level 10 pain, just white-hot pain. I couldn't talk to anybody. I couldn't do anything. People were coming to me, and they were like: "What can we do?" And I was like: "Just leave me alone." I was like: "I don't want you to look at my face." You know, I was coming in and out, and then, and then by nighttime, it had, it had gotten... This was at night, where I was like, okay, the pain had subsided, but I didn't get nerve damage, and I didn't get a huge infection because they had this indigenous plant medicine to save me.

Joe Rogan 43:50 Wow!

Paul Rosolie 43:51 The last guy that I knew that got it, he'd went straight to the hospital, and they had no idea how to deal with it. The locals know how to deal with this stuff.

Joe Rogan 43:58 Wow.

Paul Rosolie 43:58 Look at that.

Joe Rogan 43:59 That's crazy.

Paul Rosolie 44:00 That's tree medicine.

Joe Rogan 44:01 That's crazy. So w- what happened? You just stepped in the wrong spot, that's all it is?

Paul Rosolie 44:06 I mean, I've stepped on stingrays before, and you feel them flutter, and I- one time I even felt the barb go, like, past my foot-

Joe Rogan 44:12 Hmm

Paul Rosolie 44:12 ... but it didn't penetrate. I do not know how. I mean, it must have been a small one or something, but it, it just, right up through the, through the arch of my foot. And what's funny is that just-

Joe Rogan 44:22 I would never walk barefoot, ever.

Paul Rosolie 44:24 I walk barefoot all the time, but, but, but just days before-- not days before that, about a month before that, I'd fallen off of something like a 50 or 60-foot cliff and just rolled down, and bruised ribs and gotten all banged up. I'd climbed up this cliff, thinking I could... I was like, "Oh, I see this route up there. I can get up to the top." And at the top, my strength just ran out, and my feet were pedaling, and I had no footholds, and I just went tumbling down this thing.

Joe Rogan 44:49 [exhales]

Paul Rosolie 44:49 And I just went, "You know what?" I said, "I've had infections, I've had crocodile bites, I've had, I've had dengue." I said, "I'm-- I got a week left in the Amazon." I'd been in the Amazon for six months, and I was like, "I'm doing nothing dangerous, no tree climbing, no anaconda hunting, no croc diving, none of that stuff." And I was just swimming in a waterfall, bam!

Joe Rogan 45:08 Wow.

Paul Rosolie 45:08 Just, just-

Joe Rogan 45:09 How long ago was this?

Paul Rosolie 45:09 ... put me out of the game. That was actually in April. I waited to post it until now, but everyone's, everyone's messaging me, going: "How's your foot?" And I'm like: "It was months ago," but I was like, "It is better."

Joe Rogan 45:18 How long did it take before it was better?

Paul Rosolie 45:20 Honestly, two days. I was on my feet in two days.

Joe Rogan 45:22 Wow!

Paul Rosolie 45:22 It was fine. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:23 And if you went to the hospital?

Paul Rosolie 45:25 I did not go to the hospital.

Joe Rogan 45:26 But if you did go to the hospital-

Paul Rosolie 45:27 I mean, the guy that-

Joe Rogan 45:28 -how long would it take?

Paul Rosolie 45:28 ... the guy that went to the hospital didn't walk for two months, had the necrosis, and, and had a huge infection that he had to go get treatments for. I mean, he went back to his home country-

Joe Rogan 45:39 Wow

Paul Rosolie 45:39 ... and had to continue being treated for months. I felt terrible. And him, too, watching, watching someone roll back and forth in that type of agonizing pain, like Braveheart pain, like when they're just, like, opening him up.

Joe Rogan 45:50 Uh.

Paul Rosolie 45:51 I mean, I just didn't know there was pain like that, you know? I mean, I've, I've, I've ripped open every part of my body, and, and I, I, I just... This was- it's from the inside, and it's pulsating, and you just go... The other thing is, you go, "How much, how much of my year did I just miss?" You know, am I gonna... It's like the, the one time I almost chopped my knee, uh, I almost cut the tendon that holds your kneecap on, and I was just like: "Man, did I just take myself out of the game for a year?" You know, just like, "Come on." And so when that happened, I was like, "This is gonna be so bad."

Joe Rogan 46:20 And meanwhile, a couple days later, you're walking around-

Paul Rosolie 46:22 Well, because-

Joe Rogan 46:22 ... because they understood the medicine

Paul Rosolie 46:23 ... the local guys know. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:24 Wow.

Paul Rosolie 46:25 That was awesome.

Joe Rogan 46:26 Did you ask them how they know this stuff?

Paul Rosolie 46:28 Yeah. Their father taught them, and their mother taught them, and their grandparents know. And so that's the thing with knowledge, indigenous knowledge all over the world. If you, if you listen to authors like Wade Davis, who writes a lot about indigenous wisdom, you know, this is stuff that's been one at a time gleaned from nature. And, you know, you, you know better than most, you know, you're living out there. Who's the first person that figured out ayahuasca? You know-

Joe Rogan 46:54 Right

Paul Rosolie 46:54 ... if we take this and this, we take this vine, and then we take this, and we boil them together, how many trials and errors, how many dead guys were there before one worked?

Joe Rogan 47:02 [chuckles] Right. And what was the motivation?

Paul Rosolie 47:05 And what was the motivation?

Joe Rogan 47:06 They said the jungle taught them how to do it.

Paul Rosolie 47:08 They did. They, the, the prevailing thing is that science and, and sort of, uh, the, like, the statistics of, of trial and error are incomprehensible, given 40,000 plant species and all the different flowering, and orchids, and trees, and so it would take millennia if it, if you did trial and error.

Joe Rogan 47:26 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 47:27 And the cost to human life, to any civilization, would make it too high, and so when they say that the gods gave us ayahuasca, that's the prevailing best thing we got, is that it's a link between our world and the spirit world that the jungle gave us.

Joe Rogan 47:42 Right. And, and the, the, you know, the other thing is, like, how much of our senses have atrophied by modern civilization?

Paul Rosolie 47:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:50 Like, what kind of communication do you actually get from the forest? Like, is there... Is it instincts, intuition? Are there senses? Does- is there a feeling that you get, where you get an understanding of combining two things because the jungle's actually got a way of communicating with you that's a non-verbal way?

Paul Rosolie 48:10 I think the, the jungle... I mean, I view it as almost a, you know, it's like, it's godlike. It's, it's almost like a, a giant, complex, sentient being. And so you, if you listen to, if you watch, you know, if you walk the jungle with JJ, an indigenous tracker, he'll tell you, "You listen to the birds, they'll tell you how fast you're allowed to walk."

Joe Rogan 48:29 What?

Paul Rosolie 48:30 And what he, what he means is, you're walking through the forest on a sunny day, it's the afternoon, and everybody's chirping and making tons of noise, then all of a sudden, everything goes quiet. And then you gotta figure out, you know, is that because there's a weather system coming in, and we're about to be in a thunderstorm, or is there a jaguar right over there, and everything around me knows? And it's like the, the, the birds are the messengers of the forest. And so you- even that, you start to become attuned to the frequency of the forest. And I notice when I bring people in that, you know, have never been in the wild before, they, they walk loud, they're talking the whole time. They're not paying attention to that sort of-

Joe Rogan 49:04 Right

Paul Rosolie 49:04 ... you know, holistic view of where you are.

Joe Rogan 49:06 We're so clunky.

Paul Rosolie 49:07 ... you know, modern civilized life has made us so clunky when it comes to the woods.

Joe Rogan 49:12 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 49:13 You know, just when I take people in the woods, if people have never hunted before-

Joe Rogan 49:17 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 49:17 ... they're stepping on branches, snap!

Joe Rogan 49:19 Snap, yeah.

Paul Rosolie 49:20 Kicking rocks over.

Joe Rogan 49:21 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 49:21 Like, da, da, da, da, da, da.

Joe Rogan 49:22 Talking-

Paul Rosolie 49:22 Talking loud.

Joe Rogan 49:23 My favorite is walking in front of you, and then when the stick snaps back, like-

Paul Rosolie 49:26 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah

Joe Rogan 49:26 ... you know, having the sensitivity to, like-

Paul Rosolie 49:27 They don't catch it.

Joe Rogan 49:28 You know.

Paul Rosolie 49:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:28 They don't catch it, like, come on.

Paul Rosolie 49:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:30 Just get [claps hands] smacked in the face.

Paul Rosolie 49:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:32 Thanks.

Paul Rosolie 49:33 Well, it's just a lack of awareness, you know?

Joe Rogan 49:34 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 49:35 I mean, it's like if you've never been, you don't understand. But, I mean, I would imagine it's that times a million in the Amazon, and then all the different things that are communicating. One of the things that they've found out with, uh, with monkeys, is that monkeys have some sort of a language-

Joe Rogan 49:52 Mm-hmm

Paul Rosolie 49:52 ... where they can say a sound that means an eagle is there.

Joe Rogan 49:56 Yes.

Paul Rosolie 49:56 And that they will play tricks on other monkeys so that they can get to fruit.

Joe Rogan 50:00 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 50:01 So they will say that an eagle is there when an eagle's not there.

Joe Rogan 50:05 Uh-huh.

Paul Rosolie 50:05 And then they'll go and steal the fruit.

Joe Rogan 50:07 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 50:08 So they will lie- [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 50:10 ... about an eagle being there-

Paul Rosolie 50:11 Not surprising

Joe Rogan 50:11 ... so they can get access to fruit.

Paul Rosolie 50:13 Lying monkeys does not surprise me. [laughing] Um, it's African vervet monkeys that I, that I've read about, that they have different calls, different words-

Joe Rogan 50:20 Uh-huh

Paul Rosolie 50:21 ... for land predator, lion, eagle, and they can communicate these things, so, I mean, they're speaking.

Joe Rogan 50:26 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 50:27 They're speaking.

Joe Rogan 50:27 Yeah. As are crows, I'm sure.

Paul Rosolie 50:29 Oh, God, yes.

Joe Rogan 50:30 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 50:30 Oh, yes.

Joe Rogan 50:31 They're super intelligent.

Paul Rosolie 50:32 Yeah. Oh, I don't know how we'd pull this up. I, I have it on YouTube, but there was this thing where we were coming downriver. It was, like, 7:00 in the morning. We'd been up at our... This is a communication with monkeys theme. As, as we're coming downriver, it's, like, 7:00 in the morning, and I'm, I'm c- I'm always cold, so I'm sitting on the boat, and I'm cold, and I'm just, like, listening to music or something, and JJ is like: "Look, look, look!" He's like: "There's a spider monkey in the river." And I was like: "There's always a... You know, spider monkeys cross rivers. That's okay." And he's like: "No, no, no, the river's high right now, and there's all these whirlpools and currents," and so, yeah, I jump into the river.

Joe Rogan 51:03 To save the monkey?

Paul Rosolie 51:04 To save the monkey. She couldn't get to the side, so I give her my paddle, and she looks at me, and she goes: "No." She's like: "I'm scared of you." And then I spoke to her in spider monkey.

Joe Rogan 51:12 What did you say?

Paul Rosolie 51:14 [monkey sounds] Like that.

Joe Rogan 51:16 She thinks you're gonna eat her.

Paul Rosolie 51:17 She thinks I'm gonna eat her, but as soon as I started going [monkey sounds] "Look, look," she's looking at me 'cause I'm making the sound, and all of a sudden she goes: "Wait, wait, wait. You, you speak me language."

Joe Rogan 51:26 Whoa!

Paul Rosolie 51:27 And then-

Joe Rogan 51:28 Do it like you would do it.

Paul Rosolie 51:29 [monkey sounds] See, I'm making it right there, and she's looking at me.

Joe Rogan 51:33 She trying to bite you or nothing?

Paul Rosolie 51:33 I'm talking right to her. No, no, no, no, no, and then I'm like: "Look, it's okay," and they like their tail to be supported.

Joe Rogan 51:39 Wow.

Paul Rosolie 51:40 [monkey sounds]

Joe Rogan 51:40 That's crazy, dude. She let you hold onto her.

Paul Rosolie 51:42 And so then now she's relaxed. [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 51:44 That's crazy, dude, you saved a monkey.

Paul Rosolie 51:48 Only because I spoke her language, and I learned her language from some of the orphans that I've rescued.

Joe Rogan 51:52 That's crazy, man. Look at that.

Paul Rosolie 51:53 And then she, she was like: "Well, if you let..." 'Cause I could have grabbed her like, you know, like animal control, like, grabbed her by the neck.

Joe Rogan 51:57 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 51:57 And I was like, you know what?

Joe Rogan 51:58 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 51:58 Look, she's looking at me 'cause I keep talking to her.

Joe Rogan 52:00 And then you got her over to the, to the shore?

Paul Rosolie 52:02 Yeah, got her over to the side. [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 52:04 Wow!

Paul Rosolie 52:04 And she kept looking at me like, "What is... What?"

Joe Rogan 52:07 What happened when you put her down?

Paul Rosolie 52:08 I put her down, she ran away.

Joe Rogan 52:09 She just ran away?

Paul Rosolie 52:10 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:12 But not fast. She didn't run away like she was in terror.

Paul Rosolie 52:15 Yeah. Oh, yeah, that... I- when, when I, when I first did it, I went, [monkey sounds] and she looked at me, and she went, "Uh!" She looked at me, and she, like, responded. She was like, "What?

Joe Rogan 52:24 That's crazy.

Paul Rosolie 52:25 You speak it!" [chuckles] You know?

Joe Rogan 52:27 That's crazy.

Paul Rosolie 52:27 It was wild. And that's one of those stories where if it wasn't on video, and I said, "I spoke to a spider monkey, and she responded," people would be like, "Yeah, bullshit."

Joe Rogan 52:34 Right, "I saved a spider monkey." Like, bitch, that was your pet.

Paul Rosolie 52:36 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:37 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 52:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:37 That looked like a pet. That looked like you had a relationship with it. Like, wh- as you're holding onto the tail, like it knew you.

Paul Rosolie 52:42 Wh- when she was looking back, I mean, she was like: "Hey, thanks for the branch," you know?

Joe Rogan 52:46 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 52:46 I was... She- 'cause she was drowning. We saw her head go under a few times.

Joe Rogan 52:49 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 52:50 She was really struggling. She was exhausted, and I know that the spider monkey, their tail is their fifth limb. They have this incredible finger pad that's, like, 12 inches long, and so it, it just, it just wraps. They always had their tail anchored on a branch.

Joe Rogan 53:05 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 53:05 And so I, I held her tail, and I was like: "I got you. Now hold onto the stick." I was, like, explaining it to her. [monkey sounds] And she's looking at me going, "How the hell are you...?"

Joe Rogan 53:15 That is so wild!

Paul Rosolie 53:16 Yeah, it was, it was really cool. That was a... I originally, I was like, "JJ," I was like: "I don't wanna get wet. She'll be fine." He was like: "Go get her. [chuckles] Go catch her." I was like, "Okay."

Joe Rogan 53:24 Wow!

Paul Rosolie 53:25 That was great.

Joe Rogan 53:25 Meanwhile, you've eaten spider monkey, haven't you?

Paul Rosolie 53:27 Well, sure. [laughing] That doesn't mean I don't wanna save them. [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 53:32 Right. I would save a deer.

Paul Rosolie 53:34 Hmm. There you go.

Joe Rogan 53:36 I mean, a deer. But it- does it feel... It must feel really weird eating a primate.

Paul Rosolie 53:41 I wish I could say it did. I don't care.

Joe Rogan 53:43 Really?

Paul Rosolie 53:44 No. I mean, I've- we've become very callous to certain things, but, I mean, when people serve turtle now, I'm like: "Well, which one is it?" You know, it's like I don't, I don't really... You know, it's like r- ribeye or T-bone? Like, what are we, what are we eating? It's like, when you-

Joe Rogan 53:55 Is turtle good? Like, would you, like, order it at a restaurant?

Paul Rosolie 53:57 All right, so the problem is that the way they c- [chuckles] the way they cook it down there, these are people that live just hand to mouth, right? And so when they cook a turtle, if you get salt, you're lucky. It's not like they're sprinkling some cilantro on it-

Joe Rogan 54:11 Right

Paul Rosolie 54:11 ... and, like, marinating it.

Joe Rogan 54:13 Right.

Paul Rosolie 54:13 It's... You know, so if you just, like, took a chicken and threw it on a fire and then, like, ate a piece of it, it's not great. And so a lot of times that you eat this, this food way out there in the bush... I mean, I've been there where they've shot a spider monkey, grilled it up, and I've been like to, you know, "I'll just eat rice," and then I'm like, "I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be tired tomorrow. There's no pro- I haven't had protein in a week," and I'm like: "Give me an arm," you know? [laughing]

Joe Rogan 54:36 [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 54:37 You just, like, eat the hand, and I'm like, "All right," and it just tastes awful. Just tastes like char.

Joe Rogan 54:41 My friend Steve Rinella, he was in the Amazon with the Yanomami-

Paul Rosolie 54:44 Yeah

Joe Rogan 54:45 ... I suppose, and he said that that's their preferred food.

Paul Rosolie 54:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 54:47 That they like that above everything.

Paul Rosolie 54:49 Yeah. Yeah, and I, but and I see no, I see no conflict between, you know, we're trying to protect the ecosystem and save the monkeys, and I love the monkeys, and I've rescued a lot of them personally, but again, when you're, when you're in Rome-

Joe Rogan 55:03 Right

Paul Rosolie 55:03 ... you know, if you don't eat with them, they go, "That gringo," you know, they think that they're-

Joe Rogan 55:07 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 55:07 Whereas they're like, "Oh, you're one of us."

Joe Rogan 55:09 Right, you have to.

Paul Rosolie 55:10 You know-

Joe Rogan 55:10 You have to

Paul Rosolie 55:10 ... and you show them you know how.

Joe Rogan 55:12 ... mm-hmm

Paul Rosolie 55:12 -you know, little, little things or, or re-

Joe Rogan 55:14 Must be chewy as fuck, right?

Paul Rosolie 55:16 Nah, it's, it's, it's kind of smooth. It's kind of like if it's well-cooked, it's kind of like mutton.

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Paul Rosolie 55:59 It's gamey.

Joe Rogan 56:00 So you have to slow cook it, long cook it? Is that what it is-

Paul Rosolie 56:03 Ideally, yes-

Joe Rogan 56:04 ... you cook it for a long time?

Paul Rosolie 56:04 -but a lot of times, it's just they, they tie it to a cross-

Joe Rogan 56:06 Mm

Paul Rosolie 56:06 ... like it's little monkey Jesus, and they throw it on the fire and shh.

Joe Rogan 56:10 Yeah, I've-

Paul Rosolie 56:11 Mm.

Joe Rogan 56:11 When I saw them cook it, they singed the outside.

Paul Rosolie 56:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:14 They singed all the hair off, and then they cooked it... I think they cooked it inside banan- see if you can find Steve Rinella eats a monkey. [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 56:25 [laughing]

Joe Rogan 56:27 Um, I think they-- and then they boiled some of it in, like, a soup.

Paul Rosolie 56:32 I don't enjoy boi- boiled meat.

Joe Rogan 56:34 No?

Paul Rosolie 56:34 I'm never excited by boiled meat.

Joe Rogan 56:36 But stew, right?

Paul Rosolie 56:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:37 Isn't stew kind of-

Paul Rosolie 56:38 Like beef barley stew is good.

Joe Rogan 56:39 Yeah, I mean, they... if you-

Paul Rosolie 56:41 Yeah

Joe Rogan 56:41 ... if you sear it first, and then you-- I mean, it's kind of boiled.

Paul Rosolie 56:44 If you sear it first-

Joe Rogan 56:45 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 56:45 ... right?

Joe Rogan 56:46 Yeah, you gotta-

Paul Rosolie 56:46 'Cause, like, just boiled chicken to me- Yeah, just eating it ... just like think of white, like- Just eating it.

Joe Rogan 56:50 Yeah. So here he's just eating two-

Paul Rosolie 56:52 Yes, you like, they're, like, having a really good time.

Joe Rogan 56:54 Yeah. Initially, he was like: "I'm not doing that."

Paul Rosolie 56:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 56:56 And then once they started doing it, he was like, "Okay." He said it's, it tasted like smoked turkey.

Paul Rosolie 57:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:03 My boy, Giannis. Yeah, it is, uh, it's i- interesting because if you live there... Like, uh, my friend David Choe, he was in, uh, Africa, and he hunted with the Hadza.

Paul Rosolie 57:13 Mm.

Joe Rogan 57:14 And they eat baboons.

Paul Rosolie 57:16 Geez.

Joe Rogan 57:16 And he said one of the craziest things is when you hit the baboon with an arrow, they grab it-

Paul Rosolie 57:20 Mm

Joe Rogan 57:22 ... like a person.

Paul Rosolie 57:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 57:23 Like, if a person gets shot with an arrow, and he's like-

Paul Rosolie 57:24 Yikes

Joe Rogan 57:24 ... "Dude, it's fucked."

Paul Rosolie 57:26 Yikes.

Joe Rogan 57:27 Yeah, but that's what they eat. They don't have a lot of food.

Paul Rosolie 57:31 Mm.

Joe Rogan 57:31 And, you know, it's like you were saying also, when it, it, they don't have a sense of wildlife conservation. It's not like, "Hey, we-

Paul Rosolie 57:38 Mm

Joe Rogan 57:38 ... we have an accurate assessment of how many baboons are here or how many deer are here-

Paul Rosolie 57:43 Yeah

Joe Rogan 57:43 ... or duikers," or whatever the animal is that they're hunting. They just eat whatever they can, and sometimes they eat them almost to extinction, and then they have to move on to baboons.

Paul Rosolie 57:51 Yes.

Joe Rogan 57:51 And baboons were, like, the only thing that was left. And there's also, like, other people have encroached, and settlements, and, you know.

Paul Rosolie 57:59 That's the way my guys-- because we have a lot of wildlife in our region, and people from other regions will come as loggers, and they'll go, "Oh, my God, my dad told me that it used to be like this where we were."

Joe Rogan 58:09 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 58:09 And now we have people from other watersheds in the Amazon, like, you know, 150 miles away, coming to us, and they're going: "Can you guys bring junglekeepers over?" And they don't understand, you know, we're, we're killing ourselves just to protect this river. And they're going: "Can you do this where we are?" They're like: "We have no more food."

Joe Rogan 58:24 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 58:24 Because they don't have any regulation on this. And so what we're doing with the tribes in our area is just teaching this basic thing of like, you know, don't hunt, you know, at these times of year when they're having their babies.

Joe Rogan 58:35 Right.

Paul Rosolie 58:36 Don't overhunt. Monitor how many monkeys you're bringing into the, into the, into the village. And so we're trying to develop this with them, where if you're gonna keep eating monkeys, do it in a way that there keep being monkeys.

Joe Rogan 58:46 Especially once they've gotten firearms.

Paul Rosolie 58:49 Especially once they've gotten firearms. The, the-- one of the older guys said to me, he goes: "Man, it's so sad." He goes, "We grew up..." He goes, "You could just pull fish out of the river, and there was monkeys in the trees, and there was turtles." He goes, "You could eat whatever you wanted out of the forest." He goes, "Now," he goes, "we're eating sparrows."

Joe Rogan 59:04 Ooh.

Paul Rosolie 59:04 And he was like, "We've just, we've eaten everything down to the smallest birds."

Joe Rogan 59:07 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 59:07 He was like, "It's just sh- destroyed." And it was... Where he is, is, like, something, it's like Cormac McCarthy's nightmare. If Cormac McCarthy was still alive, I would show him the, the, the-- I went to a part of the Amazon that, that really no one goes to, up this horrible river, and, and the- there were recently contacted, uncontacted people, just, just this tribe that had just come out of the forest, and they still had their bows, and they had no idea... Me and JJ went for, like, a three-week expedition, plane to plane to plane, to three days on a boat, to two days on a boat, to finally reaching this last settlement, and the missionaries had pulled this tribe out of the forest. They'd tricked them. They said, "Just come with us for a ride," and pulled them out. But then they said, "Well, if you want to go back, you've got to pay for your gasoline." And the tribe was like, "Well, how do we-- pay with what?" And they were like, "Money." And the tribe was like, "What's that, and where do we get it?" And so these little people were stand- these were not tall people like the Mashco-Piro. These were little, tiny people, and they were standing there with their bows. And so we showed up with our tents and our gear, and we were trying to go up this river in our boat, and these little people came up to us, and they were like... They were making the gesture for food. And so there's some loggers over there, and so JJ just didn't, didn't think, and he was like: "You want some food, you gotta go pay for it." He was like, "Money." And, you know, he's-- through a guy who was translating, and these people are going, "But we don't have any money." And JJ took some coins out of his pocket and was like: "Just go buy some bread." And he gave them some coins, and they went and they tried it, and they got some bread. And then all of a sudden, there's 50 of them coming at us, and they were surrounding JJ, and they were grabbing at him, and they were like, "He's the guy with these tokens that allow us to eat."

Joe Rogan 1:00:43 Oh!

Paul Rosolie 1:00:43 And we had to get out of there 'cause it was causing a problem.

Joe Rogan 1:00:46 Oh, wow.

Paul Rosolie 1:00:47 But, I mean, these people think they, they, they're with their bows and arrows, and there's no more animals to hunt-

Joe Rogan 1:00:52 [exhaling]

Paul Rosolie 1:00:52 ... and no one's gonna give them money, and they live at the edge of the world.

Joe Rogan 1:00:55 And they're probably tiny 'cause they don't have any protein.

Paul Rosolie 1:00:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:00:58 Wow!

Paul Rosolie 1:00:59 It was horrifying. It was one of the worst things I've ever-- I've seen poverty all over the world. This was, uh, again-

Joe Rogan 1:01:07 A hunter-gatherer tribe-

Paul Rosolie 1:01:08 ... McCarthyan-

Joe Rogan 1:01:08 -with no food

Paul Rosolie 1:01:09 ... With no food and no way of getting back to forest where they could be a hunter-gatherer tribe. Now, they were in this, in this wasteland where the loggers and the gold miners and the oil companies... There was, there was even, there was even a barge with oil, and it was like, this is where the Amazon is being eaten.

Joe Rogan 1:01:23 [exhaling]

Paul Rosolie 1:01:23 And it was out of sight. You have to go for days just to get there. There's no foreigners there. Actually, they did say... We were talking to one logger, and he said-... He goes, "You know, a few years ago," he goes, "there was a- we saw some rafts coming down river, and then they stopped at this beach up river, and they, they, they made camp." And he's like, "So we all talked about it, and we said, 'Well, we have a feeling they're organ harvesters.'" And they-

Speaker 1:01:45 What?

Paul Rosolie 1:01:45 They were scared of these, of these incomers, right? And so-

Speaker 1:01:48 The, the organ harvesters-

Paul Rosolie 1:01:49 That's what-

Speaker 1:01:50 -visit the Amazon?

Paul Rosolie 1:01:51 No. And so but that's what they were... They're sitting around the campfire, and someone was like: "What if they're organ harvesters?" Like-

Speaker 1:01:56 Well, why would they think that?

Paul Rosolie 1:01:57 I don't know.

Speaker 1:01:58 But, but that must be a thing that gets-

Paul Rosolie 1:02:01 I don't know. But, but the dude I was sitting with told me, he goes, "You know, we got real scared sitting around the campfire. Everyone was telling these stories," and he's like, "So we figured the safest thing would be to go kill them." So they went, and they killed them, and they were a couple of European, like, hikers on a mega expedition in the Amazon.

Speaker 1:02:19 Oh, God.

Paul Rosolie 1:02:19 And they just got murdered by the locals preemptively in case they were dangerous.

Speaker 1:02:23 Oh, God!

Paul Rosolie 1:02:23 And this dude was like: "Yeah, we fucked up."

Speaker 1:02:26 Oh, man.

Paul Rosolie 1:02:26 And I'm talking to him, and I was like: "So who did the-

Speaker 1:02:29 Killing.

Paul Rosolie 1:02:29 -killing?" I think, was it... You know, I was like, [chuckles] "Shit, man." But, I mean, this place was dark. Like, you know, I, I- in, in the next book I write, I'm gonna have to do a deep dive into this one, 'cause it was just... It was, it was heavy. And we also- we knew we- for the first time, you know, when you're in the jungle, we're like, "We're safe." This place, it was like people are looking at you, and they're like, "That's a jacket and a watch, you know, like a camera and a tent and a packraft." They're like: "You..." They're like, "If we killed him, we'd get all kinds of stuff." They're looking at you like, "Man, that's a, that's a lot of opportunity." And you could just see them being like, "Well, let's separate him from the herd."

Speaker 1:03:04 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 1:03:05 Yeah, it was rough. It's like you think, like, the cowboy days, like, when it was really wild-

Speaker 1:03:09 Ooh

Paul Rosolie 1:03:09 ... like Blood Meridian.

Speaker 1:03:11 Well, not only that, but there's probably a ton of stories about people that have come down and done horrible things.

Paul Rosolie 1:03:16 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1:03:16 So it's not like you're thinking, like, "These are wonderful people that come to give us plantains."

Paul Rosolie 1:03:20 No.

Speaker 1:03:20 No, you're thinking, "These are the type of people that would do horrible things to us-

Paul Rosolie 1:03:25 Yeah

Speaker 1:03:25 -so we have an opportunity to get something from them," and-

Paul Rosolie 1:03:28 Yeah

Speaker 1:03:28 ... pure desperation.

Paul Rosolie 1:03:29 Pure desperation, and so, like, the, the communities that I've worked with in s- my region of the Amazon, they're all, you know... You show- I've showed up on a packraft and been like, "Hey," and they're like: "Where'd you come from?" And I'm like: "I'm just this foreigner who does work here," and I talk to them, and they're like: "Oh, camp here. You'll be safe." They're really nice. They're caring. They're families. This place that we were at was this outpost, and it was all extractors. It was all gold miners, petroleum people, loggers, and it was, like, all the men who were in the dark, the, the, the black market people, were all in the same place. So there was, like, a brothel. There was these displaced n- natives, and then there was, like, this one really scary missionary. This man looked insane. He had crazy eyes.

Speaker 1:04:12 Yeah?

Paul Rosolie 1:04:12 And he wouldn't come anywhere near us.

Speaker 1:04:14 Um, from where? Where is he from?

Paul Rosolie 1:04:15 I couldn't, I couldn't tell where he was from, but he was dressed in the robes. It was like the mission-

Speaker 1:04:20 Whoa

Paul Rosolie 1:04:20 ... except he was evil. Like, you could tell he... You could tell. He looked at us and just vanished, and he had this little settlement that he had cleared, and he was bringing his children in-

Speaker 1:04:30 Oh, God

Paul Rosolie 1:04:30 ... and pulling them out of the forest.

Speaker 1:04:32 Was he a white guy?

Paul Rosolie 1:04:33 He looked like a white guy.

Speaker 1:04:34 Oh, my God.

Paul Rosolie 1:04:34 But, like, it was hard to tell. He had, he had, you know, like a bea- he looked like Rasputin.

Speaker 1:04:39 Oh, wow!

Paul Rosolie 1:04:39 And these poor people are sitting there, and you could see them, like, they were all, like, breastfeeding their babies and, like, like, trying to eat rats, and, like, it was just... We stayed there for one night, and we all- we didn't sleep. We were- we slept back to back. We were just in our tent, just awake all night, and then the next day, we got in the boat, and we kept going further upriver, and we finally made it into the- into past the edge of human civilization, into, into just uncharted jungle. But it was really dark.

Speaker 1:05:05 [exhales]

Paul Rosolie 1:05:05 And so at least where we are, it's like we're, we're working with these tribes to make their lives better, to educate them, and there's this feeling, there's this good feeling. We have Junglekeeper shirts. I mean, now we're on the river, and we see Junglekeepers boats going by, where, where, you know, we had gold miners just a few, just a few weeks ago, we had gold miners. Everyone, the whole team was calling each other. We sent our, we sent our ranger team out there. We brought the police. They arrested the gold miners. They brought them to town. They offered them jobs, and they said, "You just can't be doing that here." And so they only cleared, like, half an acre of forest, and then we got them, so they didn't destroy anything. And so that's how we're keeping the river safe.

Speaker 1:05:39 But someone hired them to mine gold, right?

Paul Rosolie 1:05:41 See, that's the thing, that no one hires them. They, they get it in their head. They go, you know, "Hey," to their cousin. They, you know, they'll go, "Why don't we go make some money? Let's go up there and see if there's gold." And they'll launch a little expedition, and they'll bring, like, a 16-horsepower motor and go for three days, and they'll, they'll sneak past us on... I mean, now the government's getting involved because we've been having this success. We're gonna get a park guard station on our river, so we're not gonna have this problem. But they'll go up the river, and they'll just set up, and they'll, you know, they'll start panning, and they'll go, "I see a, this little flake here," and they're like, "Cool, let's burn some forest, and then we'll start sucking it up. We'll run it through the big motor." And they, they'll bring their wives and their kids, and it's, it's artisanal. They're very... And so what they do is they get the gold, and then they have to take it in their little boat back to the town, and then here's the problem: there's one store where you go to sell the gold, and guess who's waiting outside that store? The people that rob you at gunpoint and take your gold and then give it to the actual people.

Speaker 1:06:38 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 1:06:39 And so it's, it's really sad, artisanal gold mining. They're not organized, and it's the same with the narcos. We've been having a problem with narcos, and everyone's like, "Dude, you can't mess with the narcos. Like, you're gonna lose the fight." And it's like, yeah, but these are, these are people that are like, "We're just gonna grow a little bit," and then try and sell it.

Speaker 1:06:57 What are they growing?

Paul Rosolie 1:06:57 Coca. They're... I mean, we busted- we helped the police bust a, a... We saw a clearing, uh, on deep, deep, deep, deep, way upriver, days upriver, there was a clearing out in the jungle, and so we sent our rangers. The rangers came back, and were like, "We can't deal with this. There's something scary going on up there." And so we told the police, and the police were like, "Yeah, we'll try and get up there." Now, at the same time, I'm with JJ one day, and we always do the same thing. When there's... There was a, there was a bad patch of deforestation along the river, and we said, "How the hell did this happen? They did it so quick." And so I put up the drone-... and I flew it over, and I'm just going, "Who is- you know, who are these people? Are they loggers?" We're just trying to get a sense of what's going on. Fly the drone down, and usually when we see loggers, they'll run into these little palm-thatched huts. They'll run into them to hide from the drone.

Speaker 1:07:46 That's crazy! They know what a drone is.

Paul Rosolie 1:07:49 Well, these people came running out, and they had guns, and we had already, on the river, we had passed their settlement and flown the drone back. Their boat came out after us, and we started going, and I was like: "JJ, you could just talk to them like normal," and he looked at me, and he went, "Not this time." And we had a, we had a 60 horsepower, and they had a 40, and we were just blazing ahead of them, and I had the drone in the air, and so this, you know, this is a fuck-$5,000 drone. And so I'm driving the drone, and I was like: "Can we, can we, like... I gotta get this drone," and they're like, we- the- JJ looked at me, he's like, "We're not stopping." And I, it, it dawned on me that it was like we're, we're... If we get caught, we're getting killed.

Speaker 1:08:28 Oh, man.

Paul Rosolie 1:08:29 And we arrived at our-

Speaker 1:08:29 Are you armed?

Paul Rosolie 1:08:30 At this point, nobody on the boat had a gun. And so we arrived at a place where the police were camped out, where the guard- they had been dispatched to go check out that other site. And so we arrived, and the police force that we work with was there, and we pulled up, and we're like: "Yo, we got bad guys coming in," and they, they masked up, loaded up. They got on our boat. We turned around, and then as soon as they saw us coming back at them, they left. And then days later, they went to that same police force and assassinated one of the guys.

Speaker 1:09:00 Oh, man.

Paul Rosolie 1:09:02 So the narcos are different. The narcos are scary, and that clearing that we originally found, they were actually producing sacks of white powder. The Peruvian military went in and actually raided that camp, arrested everybody. It was so big that the American DEA knew about it. They were notified. And so this is now what's happening on this river, where it's because it's the last wilderness, they're coming. And so we're, we're, we're trying to... You know, we're relying on the Peruvian authorities to stop this from happening, so that we can create this park before it's too late. 'Cause they're also blazing roads. They're bringing in loggers. They're smart. They bring people, and they'll send the loggers ahead of them, and then when the loggers clear the land, they'll just start growing coca. [inhales] And so it's gotten, it's gotten scary. I te- I texted you when it was at its, uh... When I first started having to travel with security, um, I remember texting you because I was like, "This is, this is a different game," you know? It used to be like we're, we're counting the butterflies, and we're-

Speaker 1:10:00 Yeah, you wanted to learn h- where to train.

Paul Rosolie 1:10:02 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:10:04 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:10:04 'Cause it's scary walking around. Well, the thing is, the, the police intercept off to one of the people that they arrested. On the phone, it said: "If you see JJ or that shithead gringo that flies the drone," they said, "If you kill them, we'll reward you."

Speaker 1:10:18 Oh, man.

Paul Rosolie 1:10:19 So they found this message on WhatsApp. They showed it to us, and they were like: "You guys have a hit on you." And then a few days later, they, they... JJ was supposed to get in the car at the side... You know, you take the boat downriver to the car, and he was supposed to get in the car and go back to the town. He actually came downriver in the boat and then went, "Oh, I forgot, I forgot that I wanted to finish up something at the station. Take me back." He went back to the station, so our driver, Percy, started driving back along this little dirt logging road by himself, and they had trees across the road. Masked guys with guns, they put the guns in the windows. They pulled him out, and our windows are tinted, and they said, "Take JJ and Paul out." They were gonna do it.

Speaker 1:11:01 [inhales]

Paul Rosolie 1:11:02 And so it just so happened that JJ wasn't in the car.

Speaker 1:11:06 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 1:11:06 Just by pure luck, he was not in the car that day, and they roughed up our driver. They took his driver's license, uh, they took his cell phone, and they just said: "Just let them know we missed him today, but we'll get him soon."

Speaker 1:11:20 Oh, man.

Paul Rosolie 1:11:22 And so we went... Of course, we went to the police, and we're like: "Look, you- we're gonna need a lot more protection." They're like, "It's getting..." I mean, we're, we're just trying to save the rainforest, man. Like, we're not trying to... And these people are going, "Well, we're just trying to grow drugs, and we want to do that where there's no police." And the wilderness is only s- the, the wilderness is becoming a finite thing now, so it's becoming this battlef- battleground. Jamie, on there is a map. I'm wondering if you could pull up the map, 'cause I could explain to you-

Speaker 1:11:49 What's the status of this right now? Are they still after you guys?

Paul Rosolie 1:11:53 They are still after us, but it's been... For, for about eight months, it was really bad. It was-

Speaker 1:11:59 Eight months

Paul Rosolie 1:11:59 ... really scary. It was horrible. Like, every day, anytime JJ called me, I'd, I'd have a panic attack. But you see, the, the, the yellow on the right is the Trans-Amazon Highway. That's the big, that's the big artery. That's what the Chinese and Brazil built. But then that smaller thing going up, that's, that's the roads that the loggers and the narcos are making. And so that big red arrow, they're trying to make a road that goes in through there. And so the, the white line outlines what we're trying to protect, and then that light greenish-blue is the area that we have protected. That's that 130,000 acres that we have protected, and so that's what we're doing right now. It's a race against time. If we can fill in that area, if we can fill that whole thing in, we save the land, and once it's ours, once it's under Junglekeepers protection, it's Indigenous protected, the-

Speaker 1:12:47 All right, we're back.

Paul Rosolie 1:12:48 Yeah.

Speaker 1:12:48 Um, so where are they dr- growing the drugs in this map?

Paul Rosolie 1:12:52 So right at the upper tip of that arrow, sort of the outside, they had cut a little, a little road filament into there, and again, these little, tiny trail roads, they, they go under the forest. The forest is 160 feet tall.

Speaker 1:13:04 Is there a way you can communicate with these guys, saying you're not trying to stop this?

Paul Rosolie 1:13:08 I mean, right now, what we're doing is putting signs on, on all of these little, tiny... I mean, these are jungle roads, where just to go on the road, you're going out to where, you know, if anybody finds you out there, they'll just kill you, and your body will be decomposed and recycled within 48 hours by the jungle. So you're, you're, you're past where there's police. This is just Earth. It's the Wild West.

Speaker 1:13:28 [exhales] More than the Wild West, right? Because the Wild West was never this dense.

Paul Rosolie 1:13:33 ... Well, it's the Wild West, and you can't see 10 feet in front of you.

Joe Rogan 1:13:36 Right.

Paul Rosolie 1:13:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:36 That's what I'm talking about.

Paul Rosolie 1:13:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:13:37 Like, this is more wild than the Wild West.

Paul Rosolie 1:13:39 I, I guess so.

Joe Rogan 1:13:40 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:13:40 You still have- you have, you have Indians with arrows, and now you have these narcos that are, that are straight-up evil that are coming. I mean, they're taking girls from indigenous communities to work in their brothels. They're growing cocaine-

Joe Rogan 1:13:52 They have brothels up there?

Paul Rosolie 1:13:53 You got men working out in the jungle, and so they go to the communities, and they tell them, "Hey, your d- your daughter's very pretty. She'd be a great waitress. You know, we can educate her while she trains and helps people," and then they, they never see them again.

Joe Rogan 1:14:06 [exhales]

Paul Rosolie 1:14:06 And so it's all that darkness, and, and at the same time, what we're doing is bettering the lives of the community, making friends with these people. We have these amazing rangers, and, I mean, we have different ranger stations along the river, and if we make this into a park like, um, Teddy Roosevelt... No, John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt on a three-day camping trip and showed him Yosemite and, like, Sequoia and all this stuff, and he was like, "We've gotta protect this. Like, it's special here. Look at the size of these trees. Look at the beauty of this valley," and then they protected it. There's nothing as wild as this river on Earth today, and so if we protect this now, the, the, the, the 200 indigenous people that live on this river get protected from the narcos. They continue having abundant fish and resources, and then they'll work as park guards and educators and chefs and boat drivers to maintain this gigantic pr- protected area, and then Peru will have this crown jewel of the Amazon. So they love it.

Joe Rogan 1:15:02 But how can you protect them from the narcos? I mean, it seems like-

Paul Rosolie 1:15:04 The police-

Joe Rogan 1:15:04 ... the amount of money that's involved-

Paul Rosolie 1:15:06 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:15:06 ... in trafficking cocaine-

Paul Rosolie 1:15:08 Mm

Joe Rogan 1:15:08 ... would make it a real problem.

Paul Rosolie 1:15:11 But the good thing is that these are the little artisanal ones. These are the guys that go-- These are not like mafia bosses. This isn't like the Mexican cartel. These are like these little clans of people that go, "You know what? We could just grow some cocaine, and then we'll sell it to the big guys," and so they're just... They're like mom-and-pop cocaine growers, and so-

Joe Rogan 1:15:30 But they're also murderers.

Paul Rosolie 1:15:31 Well, of course, and so when the, when the cops go out there, the cops just arrest them and take them straight to jail, and so the cops have been supp- Everyone assumes that Latin American police, no matter what, are gonna be corrupt, and, like, the police force we've been working with has been keeping us alive, and they want this park protected as much as the indigenous people do. It's amazing how many good people are out there. They're actually helping.

Joe Rogan 1:15:55 And how many narco organizations, artisanal narco organizations, are out there?

Paul Rosolie 1:16:01 Peru has become... It's, it's, it's not great. Peru, I think, has become, if not on the same level as Colombia, I think they might have surpassed Colombia in terms of cocaine production. They're, they're not doing great with that right now, and so we're at this very, very, uh, crucial juncture there. But, you know, it's funny 'cause in, in doing all this, you know, with, even with the book coming out, and I've, I've been talking to people, and people go, "Well, you have narcos now." They're like, "So you're gonna fail," and it's like: Man, you're not even the one on the ground. Like, I'm the one on the ground. I'm telling you we're not gonna fail, and the police have been successful at clearing them out, and it's getting better. Just like the whole thing with, "Yeah, the Amazon's disappearing, but we can still stop it." It's like you gotta... You think, like, before D-Day, if Churchill was like, "Ah, we'll probably lose," like, you can't have that mentality, and so it's very, very encouraging seeing the, the, uh, the local people stand up for what they believe in, and, and, and the job is dangerous. There's a, there's a video on there that, I think it says Sandra Tree Crush, but we- I got woke up a few m- a few weeks ago, and, uh, one of my managers came running at, like, 3:00 AM. I see a flashlight coming through the jungle, and so I'm thinking the worst, and then he comes. He's going, "Paul!" He goes, "A tree..." And I was-- I told you the last time I was on here, I said, "The most dangerous thing in the rainforest is the trees falling."

Joe Rogan 1:17:23 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 1:17:23 He said, "A tree fell on the ranger station," and it's raining, and I'm talking about rain... You know, when you're at the airport, and you hear that sound where it's like there's no sound louder. Your ears can't handle it. It was raining so loud, and he's screaming into my ear that this tree fell on the ranger station. He goes, "And one of the rangers was, was crushed." And I'm going, "But dead or alive?" And he goes, "We don't know yet." And so it's 3:00 AM, and we get in this boat, and we're going upriver, and there's lightning flashing, and there's rain falling, and I'm looking with the flashlight, and I'm, I'm navigating by the crocodile eyes 'cause we don't know where the edges of the river are-

Joe Rogan 1:17:56 [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 1:17:56 ... 'cause they sh- you know, the eye shine. And so we have footage of this, and we arrive at the ranger station, and sure enough, this tree had fallen, crushed the roof, all the beams, and, and all the, all the scaffolding under the roof, and fallen on this woman's face while she was in bed. And so she was crushed under this, and she couldn't even scream because it was raining so loud. And so we get there, and I, I stick my hand into the rubble, and I hold her hand, and I'm like: "Are you okay?" And she was like, "Hey, Paul." She's like, "I have no idea," and she was amazingly, like, like, buoyant. She was like, "I have no idea if I'm okay." She's like, "But I'm alive." I was like, "We're gonna get you out of here," and we started chainsawing, I mean, like, 16 feet of tree debris over her and all this gnarled roof material, and we had to pull her out of there, and she had a scratch on her ankle.

Joe Rogan 1:18:42 Wow!

Paul Rosolie 1:18:43 We got this great video of her sitting in a hammock at, like, 6:00 AM, and she's smoking a cigarette, and she's like, "I'm alive."

Joe Rogan 1:18:48 [chuckles]

Paul Rosolie 1:18:49 She's going, "I'm alive," and she didn't quit. She's still a ranger.

Joe Rogan 1:18:53 Wow.

Paul Rosolie 1:18:53 And it's like, she's out there right now-

Joe Rogan 1:18:55 Wow

Paul Rosolie 1:18:55 ... driving up and down because she wants that forest protected for her kids, and it's like, these people care.

Joe Rogan 1:19:01 It sounds like the adventure of this is very addictive to you. This is what, what I'm getting.

Paul Rosolie 1:19:07 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:19:07 I think you love it. I think you love the forest.

Paul Rosolie 1:19:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:19:11 I think you love protecting it, but I think there's something about the danger of it and the chaos and the wildness of it all that's, that seems to me... I'm looking in your eyes. You're smiling 'cause you know I'm right. [chuckles]

Paul Rosolie 1:19:25 I know, yeah. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna deny that. That's... When I was a kid, I remember sitting in school and being like, "Why did..." Like, you read about, like, Roosevelt and Jane Goodall, and, like, these people had these amazingly adventurous lives, and I was sitting in school getting detention after detention and getting yelled at and being like, "Can I go to the bathroom?"... and I was like: "Why do they get to do that, and I have to do this?" And then, like, my, you know, everyone around me was like, "You know, when you, when you get a job, then you're really gonna love your desk." One of my friend's mom said that to me. She goes, "You think-

Joe Rogan 1:19:52 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 1:19:52 She goes, "You think you hate your school desk?" She goes, "Wait till you get your real desk." And I was like, "Oh, man." And so yeah, riding on the, on the, on the boat at, at, at 4:00 a.m. with the lightning is incredible. Showering in the river-

Joe Rogan 1:20:05 Navigating by crocodile eyes?

Paul Rosolie 1:20:06 Yeah, man. [laughing] I mean, with the wind in your hair and the, the feel... I mean, you know the, you know the magic of the mountains and like the-

Joe Rogan 1:20:13 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 1:20:13 ... and the jungle has its own vibe. You watch that mist snarling up off the, off the canopy, and it's like, it's so wild that you just, you feel better. You feel healthier. And again, you know, that whole thing of, of, um, what's that thing they say? Like, a, a, a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace, and it's like the, the beauty of that, you know, you drink from the river, and then you sweat it out, and you watch your sweat be- join the steam and rain back down onto the jungle. You are connected to your environment, and every single day, you don't know what's gonna happen, you know? I, I, I opened... There was one day where I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna stay on the station. I'm not gonna do anything." I'd been hammering myself in the swamps for, for a week, and I was like, "I'm just gonna, like, drink coffee and, like, do office work on my computer." And so I was, like, at the station, and my team comes running, and they're like, "Anaconda!" [laughing] And I was like, "Where?" I was actually, like, annoyed. I was like, "Where-- How big, how big of an anaconda?" And they're like, "No, it's a pretty big anaconda." So we go down to the thing, and then sure enough, there's this big-ass anaconda on the-

Joe Rogan 1:21:11 How big?

Paul Rosolie 1:21:11 ... on a log. Like, 11 feet. You know, not, not a monster. But so then I started doing this thing where I was like... 'Cause they were all like, "Be careful!" And I was like, "Of what?" And they're like, "It's-- It could bite you." And I was like, "It's, it's asleep." I was like, "She's just trying to get the sun." So then I started, I took out my phone, and I started doing this thing. I was like, "People are scared of snakes," and I was like, I was like, "If you're scared of snakes," I was like, "there's an 11-foot anaconda." I was like, "Do I appear to be in danger yet?" And then I kept getting closer, and I was like, "How about now? How about now?" And then I was like: She's not waking up. So I get on the log with her, and the anaconda still doesn't get up. And so then I, I, I, I turned around, and her coil is here, and her head's, like, you know, 10 feet over there, and I just put my head on her. And now I'm laying on the snake, and I'm still taking a video, and I'm going, "See? This snake doesn't care that I'm here, and even if she wakes up, you know what she's gonna do? She's gonna jump in the water. She's not gonna bite me." And she never woke up, and I figured, "You know what? Why bother her?"

Joe Rogan 1:22:06 [exhales] She never woke up when you rested your head?

Paul Rosolie 1:22:09 She woke up. She, she, she, she moved her tongue, but she never, she never freaked out.

Joe Rogan 1:22:14 Well, they're the king.

Paul Rosolie 1:22:15 You know, they-

Joe Rogan 1:22:16 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 1:22:16 ... and she was-

Joe Rogan 1:22:17 It sounds like they don't really have any natural predators, right?

Paul Rosolie 1:22:20 Uh-

Joe Rogan 1:22:21 Do they?

Paul Rosolie 1:22:21 When they're small. When they're small, I-

Joe Rogan 1:22:23 Crocodiles, right?

Paul Rosolie 1:22:24 Uh, the crocodiles, the herons, the piranha.

Joe Rogan 1:22:27 Oh, right.

Paul Rosolie 1:22:27 The... You forget, you forget that, like, pelicans and herons can eat, like, a baby alligator.

Joe Rogan 1:22:32 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 1:22:32 They'll just, like, throw it back.

Joe Rogan 1:22:33 Sure.

Paul Rosolie 1:22:33 Just, just take it down their throat. And the, uh, I was just-

Joe Rogan 1:22:37 Herons are crazy.

Paul Rosolie 1:22:38 Herons are, they're amazing hunters. Pelicans are disgusting, the way they'll, they'll take, like, a whole bullfrog and just glut it down, so you know that thing's, like, alive in their chest.

Joe Rogan 1:22:47 I've seen videos of them-

Paul Rosolie 1:22:49 Ugh

Joe Rogan 1:22:49 ... doing it to pigeons or seagulls.

Paul Rosolie 1:22:51 God, yes, the one where he swallows the seagull.

Joe Rogan 1:22:53 Whole.

Paul Rosolie 1:22:54 Ugh! And the seagull's, [chuckles] like, getting smaller-

Joe Rogan 1:22:56 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 1:22:56 ... as it goes down. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:22:57 And the, the, you realize, like, that crazy mouth that they have is just so that they can swallow things alive.

Paul Rosolie 1:23:04 Yeah, it's, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:23:05 I mean, this weird-looking, funky thing. You're like, "Oh, that's a monster."

Paul Rosolie 1:23:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:23:08 That's a monster that just swallows things alive.

Paul Rosolie 1:23:11 Yeah, you don't think of birds as, uh, as, as savage as they are.

Joe Rogan 1:23:14 What are you laughing at, Jamie?

Paul Rosolie 1:23:15 Just pictures of pelicans just trying to eat shit on the screen, trying to eat a dog.

1:23:18 Oh!

Joe Rogan 1:23:19 Oh, God.

Paul Rosolie 1:23:20 Oh, come on.

Joe Rogan 1:23:20 Marshall.

Paul Rosolie 1:23:21 [chuckles] Marshall, look out.

Joe Rogan 1:23:22 Oh, wow, trying to get a cat.

Paul Rosolie 1:23:24 [chuckles] He's trying to eat a cat.

Joe Rogan 1:23:24 Oh, my God. Yeah, they, they basically can eat almost anything that's near their size.

Paul Rosolie 1:23:32 Good Lord, that one, just fly out. [laughing]

Joe Rogan 1:23:35 Wow, it's too late.

Paul Rosolie 1:23:37 Oh, man.

Joe Rogan 1:23:38 Yeah, they're monsters.

Paul Rosolie 1:23:39 He's trying to eat another p- God, that's, that's, uh, I call bullshit on that one.

Joe Rogan 1:23:42 That was fake.

Paul Rosolie 1:23:42 No way this pelican was trying to eat a bear. I believe that, though. I've seen that video, where-

Joe Rogan 1:23:47 What are those things called again?

Paul Rosolie 1:23:47 Those are baby capybaras.

Joe Rogan 1:23:49 Capybaras, right. Those are, uh, they've... Uh, are those the things that have made their way into Lu- No, it's a different animal that's made their way into, like, Louisiana, and they have to go out and shoot them?

Paul Rosolie 1:24:00 Javelinas. Those are pigs.

Joe Rogan 1:24:01 No, no, no, no, no, no. It's a type of large rodent, because-

Paul Rosolie 1:24:04 Oh

Joe Rogan 1:24:04 ... Dave Attell used to have a TV show-

Paul Rosolie 1:24:06 Mm

Joe Rogan 1:24:06 ... called, um, Insomniac.

Paul Rosolie 1:24:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:24:09 And he went out at night one time with them in Louisiana-

Paul Rosolie 1:24:12 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:24:12 ... and they're hunting these things that they're, they're an invasive rodent, a giant rodent. And it was like, uh, Dave would do his shows, and then aft- It was a Comedy Central show. It was a really good show.

Paul Rosolie 1:24:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:24:23 And then he would find things to do in the town-

Paul Rosolie 1:24:25 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:24:25 ... 'cause he can't sleep, 'cause he's up all night.

Paul Rosolie 1:24:27 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:24:27 And so he went out with these people that were... God, I can't remember what the animal was, but it's a, a large, invasive rodent that exists in the South.

Paul Rosolie 1:24:37 I mean-

1:24:38 Nutria.

Joe Rogan 1:24:39 Nutria.

Paul Rosolie 1:24:39 Nutria.

Joe Rogan 1:24:39 That's right.

Paul Rosolie 1:24:39 Geez.

Joe Rogan 1:24:40 Yeah, and people eat them.

Paul Rosolie 1:24:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:24:42 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:24:43 I mean, the rodent, I mean, capybara is-

Joe Rogan 1:24:44 See if you can find that video, 'cause it's kind of crazy. 'Cause, uh-

Paul Rosolie 1:24:47 Nutria

Joe Rogan 1:24:48 ... they're out there hunting them with .22s.

Paul Rosolie 1:24:50 With .22s? [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 1:24:51 Yeah, I mean, they have to. There, there's, they've, they're a completely invasive species, and they're huge.

Paul Rosolie 1:24:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:24:57 They're like a, a small dog.

Paul Rosolie 1:24:58 That's something I le- yeah, I left off the list. We eat those all the time. Like, they-

Joe Rogan 1:25:02 Nutrias?

Paul Rosolie 1:25:02 ... we have something called a paca.

Joe Rogan 1:25:03 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 1:25:03 It's like a small capybara with spots.

Joe Rogan 1:25:06 Uh-huh.

Paul Rosolie 1:25:06 And those, I mean, you know, it's like squirrels, but they're big. They're like, you know, cat-sized and fat. People eat them all the time. Those are delicious.

Joe Rogan 1:25:14 What's your favorite thing to eat in the jungle? Well, the-

Paul Rosolie 1:25:17 P- piranha.

Joe Rogan 1:25:18 Piranha?

Paul Rosolie 1:25:19 Fuck yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:25:20 Really?

Paul Rosolie 1:25:20 Oh, my God, they're delicious, and when you fry a piranha, you know, you slit, you know, make the slits along, you just fry the whole thing. You just pull it right off of its skeleton, and the, the, the fins become like chips, like little salty chips.

Joe Rogan 1:25:32 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 1:25:33 Oh, they're so good.

Joe Rogan 1:25:33 You just put salt on it and fry it?

Paul Rosolie 1:25:35 We just, just, just a little bit of salt and then fry it up. And then, be- better than the piranha is the paco, the big vegetarian-

Joe Rogan 1:25:41 In the piranha species, yeah. Those are invasies of- invasive species in America as well.

Paul Rosolie 1:25:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:25:47 People catch them all the time.... Yeah, they catch them when they're like 40 pounds.

Paul Rosolie 1:25:52 They're so good. They're huge!

Joe Rogan 1:25:52 Yeah, someone caught a world record pacu-

Paul Rosolie 1:25:54 Powerful. Really powerful.

Joe Rogan 1:25:56 Pacu, P-A-C-U, right?

Paul Rosolie 1:25:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:25:58 Um, I wanna say in Georgia? Georgia or Florida, somewhere in there, and fucking huge.

Paul Rosolie 1:26:05 Yeah. No, they're powerful. We, we, we fish for them... You have a, you have like a 10-foot pole with a rope on it.

Joe Rogan 1:26:11 You- yeah, there's a pacu.

Paul Rosolie 1:26:12 Yeah, damn, those things-

Joe Rogan 1:26:13 Yeah, look at the size-

Paul Rosolie 1:26:14 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:26:14 ... of that thing, man. That's crazy, 50 pounds! World record-sized pacu caught in Florida. There it is, 50 pounds. That's nuts.

Paul Rosolie 1:26:22 Dude, those are so- they're so nutritious. When you eat them, you feel like you're just gaining muscle.

Joe Rogan 1:26:27 Really?

Paul Rosolie 1:26:27 Yeah. Like, you used to- you still eat a lot of elk?

Joe Rogan 1:26:30 Oh, yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:26:30 Like, don't you feel like it's like a superfood?

Joe Rogan 1:26:32 Uh-huh. Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:26:33 This is how I feel.

Joe Rogan 1:26:34 That's wild.

Paul Rosolie 1:26:34 I live on these things.

Joe Rogan 1:26:35 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:26:35 I feel like I just-

Joe Rogan 1:26:36 You live on piranha.

Paul Rosolie 1:26:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:26:38 Piranha and pacu.

Paul Rosolie 1:26:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:26:40 Wow. How do you catch the pacu?

Paul Rosolie 1:26:42 10-foot pole. You have a piece of rope, and you put, like, a piece of, like, last night's dinner. You just do, like, a piece... You tie a bunch of rancid chicken, you leave it out in the sun, make it smell bad. You go out at 6:00 in the morning-

Joe Rogan 1:26:53 So they're not vegetarians?

Paul Rosolie 1:26:54 Well, they'll eat anything.

Joe Rogan 1:26:55 Ah.

Paul Rosolie 1:26:55 They specialize on the nuts. That's why they have the human teeth.

Joe Rogan 1:26:59 Oh!

Paul Rosolie 1:26:59 Those are the ones that have the human teeth.

Joe Rogan 1:27:00 Right.

Paul Rosolie 1:27:00 When you open their mouth, they have, like, molars and then, like, a few, like, front teeth. And so we go with this 10-foot pole, and nobody can make a sound on the boat. You're just floating with the river. You're, like, invisible, and you wait for a feature in the river, like a, like a rock or a place where the r- water's rushing, and you smack it against, 'cause they like that, that falling, falling fruit or falling seeds.

Joe Rogan 1:27:20 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 1:27:20 And when they hit... I'm talking about, like, a four-inch hook. When they hit that hook, this is the thing, 'cause you're doing this for... You're doing it for an hour, and you're like: "All right, there's no, there's no pacu in here." Well, guess what? When they do hit it, they'll pull you right out of the boat. I mean, I've been dragged straight across the boat, where, like, you've gotta use one hand to stop yourself, and the other hand's holding this pole, and then your friend's gotta pull you back. You get this fish on the thing, and it's going ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, flying.

Joe Rogan 1:27:44 How big are they, that you're catching?

Paul Rosolie 1:27:46 You saw, they're big. They're like-

Joe Rogan 1:27:47 You're catching them that big?

Paul Rosolie 1:27:48 Yeah, they're huge. And, and then you gotta, you gotta have a hammer, 'cause you gotta, you gotta shut them off somehow.

Joe Rogan 1:27:53 Right.

Paul Rosolie 1:27:54 You gotta crack them right on, you know, between the eyes, 'cause otherwise they'll just either jump out of the boat or injure someone.

Joe Rogan 1:27:59 Or destroy everything. Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:28:00 Well, that's the other thing. We were going upriver a few months ago, we're... at night, we're all just quiet in the boat, and we're g- we're gonna go up to this tributary to explore it. And, and I had, I had a group of tourists with me, and this girl was sitting on the front, and all of a sudden, I feel something go past me. There's something... And all of a sudden, I got, I got wet, and then all of a sudden I hear ba-bang, ba-bang, ba-bang, ba-bang in the boat. I go, "What the fuck is going on?" Turn on my headlamp, and there's a pacu in the boat, and the girl that was sitting on the front, her head is bleeding. One of those huge-ass pacus jumped out of the river in the night, hit this girl in the head, and then fell into the boat.

Joe Rogan 1:28:33 Whoa!

Paul Rosolie 1:28:34 And so we just-

Joe Rogan 1:28:35 Ate it

Paul Rosolie 1:28:35 ... grabbed- yeah, we just ate it. [laughing] But, I mean, that pacu was in the middle of the Amazon at night, just jumping around, enjoying itself-

Joe Rogan 1:28:42 Wow

Paul Rosolie 1:28:42 ... and it just jumped in the wrong boat.

Joe Rogan 1:28:44 Wow, wow! So-

Paul Rosolie 1:28:46 Two-foot fish flying through the air.

Joe Rogan 1:28:47 And that's your fav- that's your favorite thing to eat?

Paul Rosolie 1:28:50 Absolutely. That-

Joe Rogan 1:28:50 What else is really good to eat?

Paul Rosolie 1:28:52 [inhales] There's these little cup mushrooms that are really good. You fry them up with garlic. You do that and pacu, that's, that's... Now you're talking good.

Joe Rogan 1:28:59 Mm.

Paul Rosolie 1:28:59 My friend Roy is a chef. He's, he's really, uh... He's one of the Junglekeeper- he's the president of Junglekeepers right now. He's a local guy, and he's- he focuses on Amazonian cuisine, and so he goes and he picks all the right flowers and funguses, and he'll take pacu, and then he'll, he'll flavor it with a type of orchid thing, and, like, all of a sudden you have this amazing food. And, like, Lima, they have... You know, Peru's become this amazing place for food. Peru, Peru has great food.

Joe Rogan 1:29:24 Wow!

Paul Rosolie 1:29:24 He does the jungle version.

Joe Rogan 1:29:25 Wow.

Paul Rosolie 1:29:26 So it's not like nasty monkey soup. It's, it's-

Joe Rogan 1:29:28 Not turtle

Paul Rosolie 1:29:29 ... it's the, it's the curated, you know, five-star version of, of jungle cuisine.

Joe Rogan 1:29:33 So that's number one?

Paul Rosolie 1:29:35 Pacu's number one, 100%, I mean, even right now.

Joe Rogan 1:29:37 Even beat crocodile?

Paul Rosolie 1:29:39 Uh, I think I tried alligator once, but it didn't leave, leave an impression on me. I, I haven't really... I also, I feel like they're my friends. I don't-

Joe Rogan 1:29:45 Really?

Paul Rosolie 1:29:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:29:47 How so?

Paul Rosolie 1:29:47 Like, I, I like them.

Joe Rogan 1:29:50 Just 'cause they're cool?

Paul Rosolie 1:29:51 Well, I mean, I work with them a lot. I'm always catching caiman. I always see them on the side of the river. You know, nobody's serving me... If they were serving me caiman, then it would be just like the monkey, where it's like: "All right, I gotta eat it." But-

Joe Rogan 1:30:00 Right

Paul Rosolie 1:30:00 ... nobody's serving me caiman, so I'm not gonna-

Joe Rogan 1:30:02 So that's not a, a staple of their diet?

Paul Rosolie 1:30:04 No. In, in the, in the north, in Iquitos, they eat a lot more caiman, so you don't see caiman.

Joe Rogan 1:30:10 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 1:30:10 On our river, there's still, there's a caiman on every beach. There's, there's jabiru storks, there's cacoy herons, there's just macaws everywhere. It's just, there's just so much life. It's Avatar. It's just, just pulsing life.

Joe Rogan 1:30:22 Wow!

Paul Rosolie 1:30:22 It's incredible.

Joe Rogan 1:30:23 Did you find that video of, uh, Dave Attell?

Speaker 1:30:25 No, uh, [clears throat] it weirdly is, like, not online.

Joe Rogan 1:30:28 Huh.

Speaker 1:30:29 I found a picture of the episode, but not a video of it.

Joe Rogan 1:30:32 Yeah. [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 1:30:33 [laughing] And they're just-

Joe Rogan 1:30:36 Shooting nutria. Yeah, I think they eat them, too.

Speaker 1:30:39 See one of them caught it, but I can't find it.

Joe Rogan 1:30:42 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:30:44 And he was actually on the episode, just-

Joe Rogan 1:30:46 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 1:30:46 ... just walking with him?

Joe Rogan 1:30:46 Yeah, yeah. This is a long time ago. This was back when Dave was drinking.

Paul Rosolie 1:30:50 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:30:50 So this is like... Dave's been sober for, I wanna say 15 years at least, somewhere in that range.

Paul Rosolie 1:30:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:30:58 Yeah, and this is back when, you know, he would just drink at the comedy club, and then stay up all night, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee.

Paul Rosolie 1:31:05 Never end.

Joe Rogan 1:31:06 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:31:07 Wow.

Joe Rogan 1:31:07 I mean, he's the most unhealthy and also the most hilarious guy alive.

Paul Rosolie 1:31:11 You've stopped drinking, right? For the most-

Joe Rogan 1:31:12 I drink a little every now and then now.

Paul Rosolie 1:31:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31:15 I, I went, like, eight months with no drinking, and, uh, I, I started having, like, a glass of wine with dinner-

Paul Rosolie 1:31:20 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:31:20 ... and, uh, a cocktail or two. But I, I have not had more than, like, two drinks-

Paul Rosolie 1:31:24 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:31:24 ... in a night since.

Paul Rosolie 1:31:26 Yeah. Feels good, doesn't it?

Joe Rogan 1:31:26 It was the- the... It was a good break.

Paul Rosolie 1:31:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31:29 The, the eight months, I felt really good, and I was convinced I was never gonna drink again. And then I drank a glass of wine, I was like: "Ooh, I like this. I miss this."

Paul Rosolie 1:31:35 But the wine, that, that's the one thing, the wine is good.

Joe Rogan 1:31:37 Yeah. Uh, wine with a steak, oh!

Paul Rosolie 1:31:39 Oof, red wine.

Joe Rogan 1:31:40 So nice. Um, yeah, a little-

Paul Rosolie 1:31:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31:42 I think it was important to just recognize that I was doing it, a- and I wasn't an alcoholic. I was just... I have a club.

Paul Rosolie 1:31:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31:50 I'm there all the time, and, you know, you're out with friends, "You want a drink?" "Yeah, sure, let's have a drink."

Paul Rosolie 1:31:54 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:31:54 Go to dinner, have a drink, have another drink. It just got to a point where I was like-

Paul Rosolie 1:31:58 It's just constant

Joe Rogan 1:31:58 ... I was feeling like... And I, I'm too healthy.

Paul Rosolie 1:32:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:32:01 I work out all the time, and I was like: "Why am I doing this to myself?"

Paul Rosolie 1:32:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:32:04 You know? But now I realize, you know, it's a little moderation-

Paul Rosolie 1:32:08 Little moderation

Joe Rogan 1:32:08 ... it's not bad.

Speaker 1:32:09 ... but, uh, drinking is essentially fun poison.

Paul Rosolie 1:32:12 Fun poison.

Speaker 1:32:13 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:32:13 It's weird, after, um... Lex ruined drinking for me.

Speaker 1:32:18 Lex gets saucy. [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 1:32:19 Well, this is the thing, when he came, when he came to the am- when he came to the Amazon, he, he goes: "I wanna do ayahuasca." And so we called, you know, JJ's oldest brother, he's 70-something, we called this shaman in, and he's like, you know, with the Lex voice, he's like: "Brother, you have to do this with me." And I was like: "I am not drinking ayahuasca." I, I... There's a chapter in the book about when I did it with the old master, and he, he, he over-boiled it, and we all, like, saw God in the uni- we were there for the Big Bang. It was awful.

Speaker 1:32:47 Yeah, nice.

Paul Rosolie 1:32:48 It was hard. No, it was not.

Speaker 1:32:49 No?

Paul Rosolie 1:32:50 No, no.

Speaker 1:32:50 Why?

Paul Rosolie 1:32:50 It was like taking a mega dose. It was-

Speaker 1:32:52 Oh, I like.

Paul Rosolie 1:32:53 Sure. It was awful. It was traumatic.

Speaker 1:32:54 You don't like to get scared?

Paul Rosolie 1:32:56 I was terrified, man. [laughing] Yeah, I know. So I was like, "I have retired."

Speaker 1:33:01 [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 1:33:01 I was like, "I'm not doing it." And Lex was walking around in circles for two hours, and he comes up to me, and he puts his hand on my shoulder, and he goes: "I came all the way here for you." He goes, "Now, you do this for me." He goes: "Don't leave me alone in the dark." And I went, "God..." I said, "All right, I'll do it."

Speaker 1:33:15 Yeah. [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 1:33:15 And we drank right next to each other, and the guy's smoking his pipe, and, you know, he has the feathers on, and he's singing to us, and you're drinking, and you're going deeper-

Speaker 1:33:23 Icaros

Paul Rosolie 1:33:23 ... and deeper into the hole, and God! Um, it was interesting, though, we both, um... The shaman said that, um, you know, he was talking about what Lex was going- afterwards, he was talking about what Lex was going through on his journey, and he, he does, goes in and does this deep work of the things he sees coming off of you.

Speaker 1:33:41 Uh-huh.

Paul Rosolie 1:33:41 And this is a guy, the shaman, I've known for 20 years. He's like my uncle. And, and so he would come up to me, and he'd go... I'd be laying down, you can't, you can't get up, and he'd come up to me, and he'd go, "One more cup?" And I'd be like: "Sure." [laughing] Like, "Why not?"

Speaker 1:33:57 [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 1:33:57 And he'd, like, give me, like, a, like, a kiss on the forehead-

Speaker 1:34:00 Ah

Paul Rosolie 1:34:00 ... and throw it down my throat. And then he'd go to Lex and go, "One more cup?" And Lex would be like, "Yes." And then, l- you know, give it to Lex, and he said that, he said that he wasn't worried about my spirit. He said I was, I was there to protect Lex.

Speaker 1:34:12 Oh.

Paul Rosolie 1:34:12 And he said Lex was there to, to, to do some real work. And so, what's interesting is that we both reached this sort of, um, we, we both reached the pinnacle of, of, of what was happening at the same time, where I felt myself about... I felt it coming. I was like: "Oh, no, I'm gonna throw up, I'm gonna throw up." And all of a sudden, my, my consciousness lifted six feet above my body, and I was looking down at me and Lex, and I got this overwhelmingly calm sensation, and it... Without speaking, the shaman said to me, he said, "You're not gonna feel this. I know you don't like it." He said, "You're just here to support him, so you can vomit now." And so Lex started vomiting, and I started vomiting, but I was watching myself, and I was watching him, and I was just like, "This is fine. It doesn't hurt a bit." And it was very, very comforting. And then he came, and he started with the, you know, shaking the leaves and singing louder and, and really cultivating, making sure we gave everything, that we purged all of it. And then, and then he brought the crescendo down, and then he, he, he calmed, and then he began singing, and then we, we came... We, we, we settled back into the, the, the symphonic throb of the night. And then the trip went on for some time, but it was, it was interesting that things heightened at that moment and that we went through it together.

Speaker 1:35:22 Wow!

Paul Rosolie 1:35:22 Yeah.

Speaker 1:35:22 So why did he think that you were there to protect Lex? Is it just, like, something he felt?

Paul Rosolie 1:35:26 That's what he said. That's what he said to me. Um, you know, and then, and then, and then, you know, it was very interesting watching Lex go through his journey because he, he... By the end of it, he just got happier and happier. [laughing]

Speaker 1:35:39 [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 1:35:39 He just, he just liked it more and more. And around, around, I think, cup six, I, I tapped. After the, after the vomiting, after that thing, it was sort of... Again, there's these energies floating around, and he's singing. It's great, you know, understanding a little bit of the language, 'cause, you know, he's singing to his grandfather, he's singing to the spirit of Santiago and the spirit of the anaconda and using the old words for them.

Speaker 1:36:01 Ooh.

Paul Rosolie 1:36:01 You know, not even saying anaconda, he's, he's saying the other things, Amaru Mayo, and, you know, he's saying Shuwa Wako, and he's talking about the... So he's doing this and shaking his thing, and you hear the frogs throbbing, and it's all moving through your skin. And so I, yeah, I, I tapped out after a while, and Lex kept going. He's got an amazing constitution. I think that's the Russian thing. [laughing] Um, but since then, I can't drink.

Speaker 1:36:25 Really?

Paul Rosolie 1:36:26 I can't drink. I could have a cup of wine, maybe. If I have more than that, I feel sick.

Speaker 1:36:30 Interesting.

Paul Rosolie 1:36:30 Like, I feel damaged. I have not been able to drink... I haven't had a beer since, since two years ago.

Speaker 1:36:36 So what do you think it is? Did it just, like-

Paul Rosolie 1:36:38 I don't know

Speaker 1:36:38 ... let you know what it's doing to you?

Paul Rosolie 1:36:41 I have no idea. It's just a weird side effect. I keep trying it.

Speaker 1:36:44 [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 1:36:44 I'll, like, sm- I used to love whiskey. I'll, like, I'll, like, smell some whiskey, and I'm like, "Blah!" I'm like, "No."

Speaker 1:36:49 Really?

Paul Rosolie 1:36:50 Oh, just-

Speaker 1:36:50 So we crack the bottle right now, you would-

Paul Rosolie 1:36:51 ... turned off.

Speaker 1:36:53 I don't have any in here.

Paul Rosolie 1:36:53 I wouldn't. [laughing]

Speaker 1:36:55 You, you would, uh... It would make you feel sick?

Paul Rosolie 1:36:57 It just, I mean, I could take a sip of it, but my body would be like, "No. Red light, red light. No."

Speaker 1:37:01 Yeah. Well, that's... Your body's correct.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:03 Yeah.

Speaker 1:37:04 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:04 But it made me su- it made me hyper- hypersensitive. I noticed from that moment onwards.

Speaker 1:37:08 Did it have the effect with Lex? No.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:09 I don't think so.

Speaker 1:37:10 He gets, he gets still boozed up.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:11 I don't think so. I'm sure he's-

Speaker 1:37:12 Lex goes hard.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:13 I'm sure he's-

Speaker 1:37:13 We went to Andrew Schultz's wedding with Lex.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:15 Yeah.

Speaker 1:37:16 And then we had a flew- we flew with, uh, Whitney Cummings was doing a gig in Vegas.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:20 Yeah.

Speaker 1:37:20 And we said: "We'll go with you."

Paul Rosolie 1:37:21 Yeah.

Speaker 1:37:21 So it was me and my wife and Whitney and Lex, we flew to Vegas.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:25 Yeah.

Speaker 1:37:26 And then we hung out with David Goggins. I called him up.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:28 [laughing]

Speaker 1:37:28 I was like: "Come meet us at the hotel."

Paul Rosolie 1:37:29 Does he party?

Speaker 1:37:30 No.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:31 No?

Speaker 1:37:32 No.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:32 I gotta get my reps. [laughing]

Speaker 1:37:32 No, him and Lex were doing pushups. They were doing drunk... Dr- Lex was drunk, and-

Paul Rosolie 1:37:37 Uh-huh

Speaker 1:37:37 ... David wasn't, and-

Paul Rosolie 1:37:38 Uh-huh

Speaker 1:37:39 ... d- Lex wanted to have a pushup competition.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:41 With Goggins?

Speaker 1:37:42 With Goggins.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:42 That's amazing. [laughing]

Speaker 1:37:43 [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 1:37:43 I mean, but that's why he's Lex, right?

Speaker 1:37:45 At the Encore.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:46 'Cause he's, 'cause he's, 'cause he's willing to try everything.

Speaker 1:37:48 Yeah. Oh, he's an animal.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:50 You know, I mean, the fact that-

Speaker 1:37:52 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 1:37:52 ... pushup competition with David Goggins, that's great.

Speaker 1:37:53 He's just silly.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:54 That's hysterical.

Speaker 1:37:55 He's quite a character, that Lex.

Paul Rosolie 1:37:57 He's, uh-

Speaker 1:37:57 He told me he's going to Dagestan to train.

Paul Rosolie 1:38:00 With, uh-

Speaker 1:38:00 He's gonna go to Dagestan and train with, like, Khabib's team.

Paul Rosolie 1:38:03 Yeah.

Speaker 1:38:03 I'm like, "Good Lord, dude!"

Paul Rosolie 1:38:04 Yeah, [chuckles] good Lord.

Speaker 1:38:05 You're, like, 42. Like, what... How old is he?

Paul Rosolie 1:38:08 Uh.

Speaker 1:38:08 Lex's gotta be in his 40s.

Paul Rosolie 1:38:10 His... But early 40s.

Speaker 1:38:11 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:38:11 I think he's still very young. Um-

Speaker 1:38:13 Yeah, but, like-

Paul Rosolie 1:38:14 Yeah

Speaker 1:38:14 ... you're, you're gonna go there and train with-

Paul Rosolie 1:38:16 But how, but how-

Speaker 1:38:16 ... savages.

Paul Rosolie 1:38:17 How, how old is Khabib?

Joe Rogan 1:38:18 ... uh, well, Khabib's retired, but he's-

Paul Rosolie 1:38:21 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:38:22 ... probably 35, if I had to guess?

Paul Rosolie 1:38:24 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:38:25 You know, somewhere around there.

Paul Rosolie 1:38:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:38:27 You know? But it's a different thing than-

Paul Rosolie 1:38:29 He's the one, "Let's talk now."

Joe Rogan 1:38:31 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:38:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:38:31 "Let's talk now." [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 1:38:33 [laughing] I don't wanna-

Joe Rogan 1:38:34 Well, he's training those guys now

Paul Rosolie 1:38:36 ... we wanna train with him.

Joe Rogan 1:38:36 He's training, you know, Islam Makhachev and, uh, Umar Nurmagomedov-

Paul Rosolie 1:38:41 Yikes

Joe Rogan 1:38:41 ... his cousin. He's training some of the best guys alive.

Paul Rosolie 1:38:43 That's-

Joe Rogan 1:38:43 So he's running a, a camp down in Dagestan.

Paul Rosolie 1:38:46 'Cause he's kind of like... So, so did he... It seemed like, at least, I don't- like, I wasn't really following his career, but it seemed like he came in like an assassin.

Joe Rogan 1:38:54 Mm-hmm.

Paul Rosolie 1:38:55 Did some big stuff, and then walked.

Joe Rogan 1:38:57 Well, his dad died.

Paul Rosolie 1:38:58 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:38:58 His dad died during COVID.

Paul Rosolie 1:39:00 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:39:00 And, um, after his dad died, he promised his mother that he was gonna stop fighting.

Paul Rosolie 1:39:06 Got it.

Joe Rogan 1:39:06 Yeah, his dad was his trainer. You know, his dad, uh, his dad, uh, was, uh, legendary.

Paul Rosolie 1:39:12 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:39:12 Legendary trainer-

Paul Rosolie 1:39:13 Mm

Joe Rogan 1:39:13 ... and trained Islam, trained Khabib, and, uh, when he died, uh, Khabib made a promise to his mother. He fought Justin Gaethje, beat him, defended his title, and that was it. Done.

Paul Rosolie 1:39:26 Mm. But I mean, he's, he's very well-regarded now for-

Joe Rogan 1:39:29 Oh

Paul Rosolie 1:39:30 ... his accomplishments in fighting, right?

Joe Rogan 1:39:31 One of the greatest of all time.

Paul Rosolie 1:39:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:39:33 I mean, there's an argument of who the greatest of all time is.

Paul Rosolie 1:39:35 Sure.

Joe Rogan 1:39:35 It's very subjective.

Paul Rosolie 1:39:36 Sure.

Joe Rogan 1:39:37 But he's certainly in the conversation.

Paul Rosolie 1:39:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:39:39 You know, of- he's one of-

Paul Rosolie 1:39:41 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:39:41 ... I don't think there is a, it- maybe Jon Jones is the greatest of all time, just ba- based on his accomplishments and also undefeated-

Paul Rosolie 1:39:49 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:39:49 ... but also the time that he's been... I mean, Jon won a world title at 23 and is still, uh, like, up until he, he relinquished his heavyweight title recently, um, he's 36, 37 now.

Paul Rosolie 1:40:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:40:05 No one's beaten him. Crazy.

Paul Rosolie 1:40:08 That is wild.

Joe Rogan 1:40:08 I mean, no one's had a run like that. No one's had a run like that.

Paul Rosolie 1:40:11 That's insane. How big is, how big is he?

Joe Rogan 1:40:13 Jon's a heavyweight.

Paul Rosolie 1:40:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:40:14 Geez, uh, Jon, I think, is 6'3" or 6'4", you know, and now he's about-

Paul Rosolie 1:40:18 Gosh

Joe Rogan 1:40:18 ... 240-ish, but-

Paul Rosolie 1:40:19 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:40:20 ... he used to fight at 205. That was his main weight class.

Paul Rosolie 1:40:24 That's crazy.

Joe Rogan 1:40:25 Yeah, and so, you know, the conversation of who is the greatest of all time, in my, my book, Mighty Mouse is in that conversation, too. It, it's also-

Paul Rosolie 1:40:33 Who's Mighty Mouse?

Joe Rogan 1:40:34 Mighty Mouse is Demetrious Johnson.

Paul Rosolie 1:40:35 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:40:35 He's a flyweight. Uh, the problem is, he was a v- very small guy, and so a lot of people disregard the smaller guys in that conversation. But skill-wise-

Paul Rosolie 1:40:46 Skill-wise, yeah

Joe Rogan 1:40:46 ... in terms of the expression of mixed martial arts excellence, I put Mighty Mouse in his prime-

Paul Rosolie 1:40:52 Mm

Joe Rogan 1:40:52 ... right up there with everybody.

Paul Rosolie 1:40:54 Do you think that... Now, you, your arms are significantly bigger than mine, and I, I feel like, like, the guys who are good at striking have smaller arms, right?

Joe Rogan 1:41:03 Mike Tyson, giant arms.

Paul Rosolie 1:41:04 Giant arms, there you go.

Joe Rogan 1:41:05 Yeah, it's... That's not it.

Paul Rosolie 1:41:06 Don't you feel like you're swinging around some weight, like, I, I'm noticing-

Joe Rogan 1:41:08 Well, you are, but you also have a lot more power behind it.

Paul Rosolie 1:41:10 Yeah, yeah, so when you do connect-

Joe Rogan 1:41:12 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 1:41:12 ... that's true.

Joe Rogan 1:41:12 I mean, it's, it's conditioning.

Paul Rosolie 1:41:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:41:14 You know, like the whole thing of swing- It's like, did you develop those arms just doing bicep curls?

Paul Rosolie 1:41:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:41:19 Or did you de- develop those arms doing functional things?

Paul Rosolie 1:41:22 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:41:22 Like constant, constant training that-

Paul Rosolie 1:41:24 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:41:24 ... gives you muscle endurance. You know, it all depends. But if you see, like, a big, bulky-

Paul Rosolie 1:41:29 No, no

Joe Rogan 1:41:29 ... bodybuilder guy, yeah, that's not good.

Paul Rosolie 1:41:31 No-

Joe Rogan 1:41:31 At all

Paul Rosolie 1:41:31 ... but for like our level, where we're still athletic and stuff and going-

Joe Rogan 1:41:34 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 1:41:34 ... but man, I don't want, I don't want to put on more... I wanna get stronger, but I don't wanna put on more mass.

Joe Rogan 1:41:38 Yeah, I don't do really anything to try to put weight on.

Paul Rosolie 1:41:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:41:41 I don't, I don't lift anything heavier than 70 pounds.

Paul Rosolie 1:41:44 So, so many dudes just wanna just look big.

Joe Rogan 1:41:45 Yeah, they just wanna look big. Yeah, I don't do anything like that.

Paul Rosolie 1:41:48 No.

Joe Rogan 1:41:48 I don't... Like I said, the heaviest thing I lift is my body weight.

Paul Rosolie 1:41:52 Yeah, everything-

Joe Rogan 1:41:52 You know, I do a lot of bodyweight stuff. I do a lot of chin-ups and dips, and sometimes I do it with a vest, you know, and I do... You know, but m- with kettlebells, like the heavy, occasionally I'll throw around a 90-pound kettlebell, but the heaviest I really train with-

Paul Rosolie 1:42:05 Mm

Joe Rogan 1:42:05 ... is 70.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:06 Yeah. But that's plenty.

Joe Rogan 1:42:08 But I don't, like I said, I don't train for size.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:10 Oh.

Joe Rogan 1:42:10 I just train for function.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:11 Strength and function, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:42:12 Yeah, it has... To, to me, uh, it's silly. If I don't have range of motion function, like, what am I doing?

Paul Rosolie 1:42:18 No, you-

Joe Rogan 1:42:18 I don't-

Paul Rosolie 1:42:18 You have to, like, train special ops

Joe Rogan 1:42:19 ... Yeah, I'm a martial artist.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:20 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:42:20 Like, my, my whole thing is-

Paul Rosolie 1:42:22 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:42:22 ... to being able to use my body.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:42:23 It's not to make it look like I can use it.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:42:25 I'd rather be smaller and, and more functional than bigger and-

Paul Rosolie 1:42:31 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:42:31 ... just look like a big, goofy toad.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:42:35 You know?

Paul Rosolie 1:42:35 I, I, I bulk too easily.

Joe Rogan 1:42:36 Mm-hmm.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:37 I actually, I actually try to put on this way-

Joe Rogan 1:42:38 Italian

Paul Rosolie 1:42:38 ... I only do-

Joe Rogan 1:42:39 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:39 Uh, I mean, we, yeah, we're-

Joe Rogan 1:42:41 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 1:42:41 ... Italian-Irish. I mean, come on, we're-

Joe Rogan 1:42:42 You get thick.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:43 Yeah, you get thick quick.

Joe Rogan 1:42:44 Yeah. [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 1:42:44 [laughing] You got, you, you gotta watch the pasta.

Joe Rogan 1:42:47 Long line of people.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:42:48 Long line of thick people.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:49 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 1:42:49 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:50 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 1:42:50 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:51 Um, can I take a quick pee, pee, pee break?

Joe Rogan 1:42:52 Yeah, yeah. Take a break.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:53 Let's do it.

Joe Rogan 1:42:53 We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen.

Paul Rosolie 1:42:55 You've been, you've been murdering it. Like, you've been having just tons and tons of pe- you just, do you do them every day? You do-

Joe Rogan 1:43:01 I just keep... I mean, it's not any different pace than before.

Paul Rosolie 1:43:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:43:05 It's usually four a week.

Paul Rosolie 1:43:06 It seems, it's just like fitting, like maybe it's 'cause I'm in the jungle for a few weeks, and then I'll, like, come back and, and look, and I'm like, "Whoa!"

Joe Rogan 1:43:12 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:43:12 Like Johnny Knoxville and Matt Damon, and like, bang, bang, bang, bang.

Joe Rogan 1:43:16 It's... The key is just keep going.

Paul Rosolie 1:43:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:43:18 You know?

Paul Rosolie 1:43:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:43:19 Like, you've run 1,000 miles, right? But you didn't run 1,000 miles in a day.

Paul Rosolie 1:43:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:43:23 You know, you run 10 a day-

Paul Rosolie 1:43:25 You keep going

Joe Rogan 1:43:25 ... and then days go on-

Paul Rosolie 1:43:27 It's incredible, though

Joe Rogan 1:43:28 ... and on, and on, and on.

Paul Rosolie 1:43:29 You get to meet everybody.

Joe Rogan 1:43:30 You meet a lot of people.

Paul Rosolie 1:43:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:43:32 You definitely develop a better understanding of human beings, 'cause, you know, you're limited by the amount of human beings you interact with, your scope, your understanding of people.

Paul Rosolie 1:43:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:43:42 The more you can talk to, the more different people, the more you get a different sense and...

Paul Rosolie 1:43:46 Yeah, well, you're in a very, you're in a very unique... I mean, again, I always go back to the bee lady. Remember that? The, the, the-

Joe Rogan 1:43:52 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 1:43:52 ... she relocates the bees?

Joe Rogan 1:43:53 Sure, sure, sure. She's cool.

Paul Rosolie 1:43:54 Yeah. And then you have people like Knoxville on, and you guys are talking. I, I just heard you guys talking about, you know, when he gets, when he got hit by the bull. I was always wondering if that was real. [inhaling] And then I remember the first time I came in here, I was asking you and Jamie, I was going, "The one question was the David Blaine thing," where, 'cause he had you shove-

Joe Rogan 1:44:09 Uh-huh

Paul Rosolie 1:44:09 ... that thing through. I was like, "Come on!"

Joe Rogan 1:44:09 Oh, I shoved it through. Yeah, that was real.

Paul Rosolie 1:44:11 I was going, "Come on, they got him. That can't be."

Joe Rogan 1:44:13 Nope, that was real.

Paul Rosolie 1:44:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:44:15 I mean, 'cause I did it once, and I hit a nerve, and he made me back out.

Paul Rosolie 1:44:18 And he had to restart it, right?

Joe Rogan 1:44:19 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:44:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:44:19 He made me back out and shove it right through. But it's not a trick, you know?

Paul Rosolie 1:44:24 It's a-

Joe Rogan 1:44:24 It's just pain. Like, I, I could do that. If I wanted to do that, I could do that. I could shove a needle through my arm.

Paul Rosolie 1:44:30 How bad do you want it?

Joe Rogan 1:44:31 I don't wanna do that.

Paul Rosolie 1:44:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:44:32 I don't-

Paul Rosolie 1:44:32 Well, I mean-

Joe Rogan 1:44:32 ... understand why I would do that.

Paul Rosolie 1:44:34 And I feel like that's a little bit of what Knoxville was saying, where he was like, "Look," he's like, "I got a response," and he's like-... this is what I started doing.

Joe Rogan 1:44:40 Yeah!

Paul Rosolie 1:44:40 'Cause, you know, and it's like, one way or the other, how are you gonna get the attention?

Joe Rogan 1:44:44 I mean, that's what brought him to the dance-

Paul Rosolie 1:44:45 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:44:45 ... is just getting hurt all the time. But when he told me he had been knocked unconscious 16 times, and then the last one-

Paul Rosolie 1:44:52 Isn't that, isn't that-

Joe Rogan 1:44:52 That's really bad. And then the last one was the bull one, that he landed on his head, and he was depressed for months-

Paul Rosolie 1:44:59 Wow

Joe Rogan 1:44:59 ... and he had to get on medication. I am very averse to head injuries-

Paul Rosolie 1:45:05 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:45:05 ... which is kind of hypocritical, because I'm a combat sports commentator, you know?

Paul Rosolie 1:45:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:45:10 It's weird, and I've also been hit in the head a bunch of times. But I just think it's really fucking bad for you, overall. I stopped sparring when I was in my late 20s, really.

Paul Rosolie 1:45:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:45:21 Kickboxing sparring.

Paul Rosolie 1:45:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:45:23 And then I did it a little bit when I was supposed to fight Wesley Snipes. I went back and started sparring again.

Paul Rosolie 1:45:28 Did, did you fight Wesley Snipes?

Joe Rogan 1:45:29 No, Wesley Snipes was-

Paul Rosolie 1:45:30 I think that would be hysterical.

Joe Rogan 1:45:31 It was in... I was in my mid-30s-

Paul Rosolie 1:45:33 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:45:33 ... and I was like, "This is the last chance I get to do something like this."

Paul Rosolie 1:45:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:45:37 And then, um, I got contacted by, uh, Campbell McLaren, who was one of the producers of the early UFCs. He's like, "This is gonna sound crazy," but, uh, Wesley, he was in tax problems. He wound up going to jail for tax evasion. Apparently, he had some crazy guy who was telling him, "You know, you don't have to pay taxes." You know, there's, there's those guys that are like-

Paul Rosolie 1:45:56 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:45:56 What do they call them? Sovereign citizens. Is that what they call them?

Paul Rosolie 1:45:59 I think so.

Joe Rogan 1:46:00 There's a lot of people that give really bad advice, you know?

Paul Rosolie 1:46:04 And he got in with someone like Wesley Snipes.

Joe Rogan 1:46:05 Uh-huh. And, you know-

Paul Rosolie 1:46:07 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:46:07 ... they tell you, like, "They can't prosecute you. You- it's not in the Constitution."

Paul Rosolie 1:46:11 And he believed it because he didn't have access to other people.

Joe Rogan 1:46:13 I don't know. I never talked to Wesley.

Paul Rosolie 1:46:15 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:46:15 I don't know. I don't have anything against him.

Paul Rosolie 1:46:17 You sure he just wasn't scared of fighting you, so he made up this whole story?

Joe Rogan 1:46:20 No, I think Wesley also might have been embarking on a journey of cocaine. [laughs]

Paul Rosolie 1:46:25 Oh, [laughs] that-

Joe Rogan 1:46:26 Which gives you a very distorted idea-

Paul Rosolie 1:46:29 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Joe Rogan 1:46:29 ... of what you can and can't do.

Paul Rosolie 1:46:31 Everything.

Joe Rogan 1:46:31 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:46:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:46:32 You think you can do everything. I don't know if that's the case.

Paul Rosolie 1:46:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:46:34 I, I think it might have been just... Well, he's a very legitimate martial artist.

Paul Rosolie 1:46:37 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:46:38 I mean, Wesley, if you look at his, like, skills, like from the movie Blade and-

Paul Rosolie 1:46:42 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:46:43 ... like, he's a really good martial artist. He knows how to fight.

Paul Rosolie 1:46:46 Yeah, you kind of have to be to do those movies, hey?

Joe Rogan 1:46:47 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:46:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:46:48 Um, but my thought was just, "I'm gonna grab him and choke the life out of him."

Paul Rosolie 1:46:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:46:52 Like, "How is he gonna stop me?"

Paul Rosolie 1:46:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:46:54 Like, also, I know how to stand up. Like, I was a-

Paul Rosolie 1:46:56 That would've been awesome

Joe Rogan 1:46:57 ... I was a kickboxer.

Paul Rosolie 1:46:57 That would've been awesome. If you could, uh, if you could fight one person, dead or alive, full fight.

Joe Rogan 1:47:02 I don't want to do that.

Paul Rosolie 1:47:03 No.

Joe Rogan 1:47:03 I mean, I wouldn't even... No. The problem with it, it really, really-

Paul Rosolie 1:47:06 No, but, like, theoretically, not you as Joe Rogan, the dad, and, like, just Joe Rogan-

Joe Rogan 1:47:09 No, I don't... It would not be one person.

Paul Rosolie 1:47:11 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:47:11 What it would be is start fighting again. It would be fight whoever. It was... The whole thing would be competing.

Paul Rosolie 1:47:17 See, I think-

Joe Rogan 1:47:17 But obviously, I'm 58. That's never gonna happen again now.

Paul Rosolie 1:47:20 No, no, no, no. I'm saying, like, but, like, Wesley Snipes, it's like, you know, you say, like, "Oh, I'd want to fight," you know?

Joe Rogan 1:47:24 Well, I just thought it would be an adventure.

Paul Rosolie 1:47:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:47:26 And I, I trained for, like, six months. I was tr- was training with Rob Kaman-

Paul Rosolie 1:47:29 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:47:30 ... who's a, like, a legendary kickboxing, a Dutch kickboxing champion.

Paul Rosolie 1:47:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:47:34 So he was my kickboxing coach.

Paul Rosolie 1:47:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:47:36 And so I was training with him in the mornings, and I was training jujitsu at night. It was hard. It was really hard. I was doing it for six months. I was training twice a day for six months.

Paul Rosolie 1:47:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:47:45 It was really brutal, and I was so tired. I was tired all the time.

Paul Rosolie 1:47:48 And that's where you got those leg kicks that you were teaching George St-Pierre?

Joe Rogan 1:47:51 Nah, I, I learned, learned how to do that when I was a kid.

Paul Rosolie 1:47:54 Now, my question is, now he's such a legendary-

Joe Rogan 1:47:56 Mm-hmm

Paul Rosolie 1:47:57 ... MMA guy. Like, he was... Did, did he not have-

Joe Rogan 1:48:01 Well, I was a taekwondo specialist.

Paul Rosolie 1:48:02 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:48:02 You know, and I was a multiple-time state champion in taekwondo, and I won a bunch of national tournaments.

Paul Rosolie 1:48:08 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:48:09 I... And I, I was really good. I was really good at taekwondo. Like, I had fought at a very high level, and I have, uh, a lot of, uh, really good instruction that I got from... I, I got very lucky, uh, and I stumbled upon a school in Boston called the Jae Hun Kim Taekwondo Institute.

Paul Rosolie 1:48:30 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:48:30 Just randomly walked in the door one day, and it turned out to be one of the best taekwondo schools in the world.

Paul Rosolie 1:48:35 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:48:36 And so I had trained with, uh, some of the very best people in the world, just by fortune.

Paul Rosolie 1:48:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:48:43 And I was physically gifted. I was very lucky in a lot of ways. I had a lot of natural power.

Paul Rosolie 1:48:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:48:48 And, um, I learned technique, and, you know, which is the most important thing, like, perfect technique. And so, uh, when... It was funny, it was 'cause it, it came about [chuckles] because of John Danaher. I had a conversation with John Danaher, who was George's jujitsu coach-

Paul Rosolie 1:49:03 Mm

Joe Rogan 1:49:03 ... who's maybe the greatest martial arts coach in the world, maybe of all time. Really, legitimately, like, a brilliant man. He was a, a philosophy major from Columbia, who, uh, got... I think he p- was a professor for a bit, but then he got obsessed with jujitsu, and was just teaching jujitsu, and training jujitsu, and sleeping on the mats, and-

Paul Rosolie 1:49:24 [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 1:49:24 Like, literally.

Paul Rosolie 1:49:25 Literally?

Joe Rogan 1:49:25 Literally, teaching all day-

Paul Rosolie 1:49:26 Communing with the mats

Joe Rogan 1:49:26 ... training all day-

Paul Rosolie 1:49:27 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:49:27 ... and sleeping on the mats. But, but a brilliant man.

Paul Rosolie 1:49:30 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:49:30 And we were having dinner one night, and he's like: "George needs some help with the finer points of the spinning back kick. Do you know anyone who can help him?"

Paul Rosolie 1:49:40 Oh.

Joe Rogan 1:49:41 And I said-

Paul Rosolie 1:49:41 Uh, no.

Joe Rogan 1:49:42 "This is gonna sound crazy."

Paul Rosolie 1:49:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:49:43 I go, "But I have, like-

Paul Rosolie 1:49:45 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:49:45 ... the best spinning back kick you're ever gonna see in your fucking life."

Paul Rosolie 1:49:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:49:48 I go, "I know it sounds crazy-

Paul Rosolie 1:49:49 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:49:49 ... 'cause I'm a comedian." I go, [laughs]

Paul Rosolie 1:49:50 [laughs]

Joe Rogan 1:49:51 "Find a, a bag. I could show you."

Paul Rosolie 1:49:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:49:53 "I could show you what I could do." And then I brought... There's a video of me-

Paul Rosolie 1:49:58 Oh, I saw it.

Joe Rogan 1:49:58 Okay, it was me taking-

Paul Rosolie 1:49:59 I, I... The sound is imprinted in my mind.

Joe Rogan 1:50:01 George-

Paul Rosolie 1:50:02 Wah!

Joe Rogan 1:50:02 This is when we were at Legends.

Paul Rosolie 1:50:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:50:03 Legends MMA, uh, in, um, LA, which is where I trained. It was where, uh, Eddie Bravo had, uh, 10th Planet Jiu-Jitsu. And, you know, I go, "Okay, let's go downstairs to the Muay Thai part-

Paul Rosolie 1:50:16 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:50:16 ... and I'll show you." And then I, I kick the bag, and he's like: "Man, what the fuck?"

Paul Rosolie 1:50:20 [laughs] Man.

Joe Rogan 1:50:20 "Can I film this?"

Paul Rosolie 1:50:22 Man.

Joe Rogan 1:50:22 And, like, it's, he-

Paul Rosolie 1:50:23 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:50:23 ... he's filming with a flip phone-

Paul Rosolie 1:50:24 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:50:24 ... which is crazy. Like, that's how long ago this was.

Paul Rosolie 1:50:27 That's crazy.

Joe Rogan 1:50:28 This is, I, I don't know, it's probably 2005 or something like that. I had hair. And, uh, and it was, uh, it was funny-

Paul Rosolie 1:50:34 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:50:35 ... 'cause it was, like, this thing that's like... 'Cause I don't do it. It was, even back then-

Paul Rosolie 1:50:39 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:50:39 ... it wasn't like I was training in kickboxing.

Paul Rosolie 1:50:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:50:42 I wasn't training in taekwondo. It was just, I just-

Paul Rosolie 1:50:44 It's just, it's just in there

Joe Rogan 1:50:45 ... still had it in me.

Paul Rosolie 1:50:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:50:46 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:50:47 Um-... do you still, do you still, do you keep it?

Joe Rogan 1:50:50 Did it today.

Paul Rosolie 1:50:50 You did it today?

Joe Rogan 1:50:51 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:50:51 Nice.

Joe Rogan 1:50:52 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:50:52 That, that was an impressive video, and you just go: "Jesus, he's, he's- if he's showing this to, to George St. Pierre, how good is he at this thing?" It's like, you know-

Joe Rogan 1:50:59 I used to be really good.

Paul Rosolie 1:51:00 Yeah, I believe you.

Joe Rogan 1:51:01 But I realized when I was, like, 21... Well, I realized when I was 19 that I was gonna have to stop.

Paul Rosolie 1:51:09 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:51:09 Because I, I fought in California. I was living in Boston at the time, was traveling all over the country and, and fighting, and I fought in the nationals in California against this guy who was the Illinois State Champion, and I knocked him out really bad. It was really bad.

Paul Rosolie 1:51:24 Uh.

Joe Rogan 1:51:24 I hit him with a wheel kick in the head, and my heel was sore for days afterwards.

Paul Rosolie 1:51:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:51:29 Like, I had a hard time walking-

Paul Rosolie 1:51:31 Mm

Joe Rogan 1:51:31 ... from his fucking head.

Paul Rosolie 1:51:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:51:33 And he never got up. He, he went down face first, was snoring, and back then, my thing was, if I knocked anybody out, I would just act like it was no big deal.

Paul Rosolie 1:51:44 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:51:44 I would just turn around and walk away.

Paul Rosolie 1:51:45 Sure.

Joe Rogan 1:51:45 No celebration. I just walk away like, "That- that's- I'm gonna do that to all you guys."

Paul Rosolie 1:51:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:51:49 And so I walked away, and then I turned to my friend, Jungsik, who was, uh, my corner guy, and I said, "Is he getting up?" He goes like, "He's not getting up. He's not gonna get up. He's out." And, and then they took him, and they put him in a, a... They, they took him, and they put him in a stretcher.

Paul Rosolie 1:52:04 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:52:05 And then they were taking care of him, and for, like, a half hour, he was still unconscious.

Paul Rosolie 1:52:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:52:09 And then they took him to the hospital. I have no idea what happened to him, but I realized-

Paul Rosolie 1:52:13 Mm

Joe Rogan 1:52:13 ... it was so bad. It was... 'cause he came forward. So what happened was, he did... Do you know what a switch kick is?

Paul Rosolie 1:52:21 No.

Joe Rogan 1:52:22 A switch kick is you're standing with your left leg forward, and you switch legs, and you come, like, with the left kick. So it's like-

Paul Rosolie 1:52:29 You think he's repositioning and then he-

Joe Rogan 1:52:31 He's-

Paul Rosolie 1:52:31 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:52:31 ... moving forward-

Paul Rosolie 1:52:32 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:52:33 ... but he telegraphed it, and it's his left leg. So I saw that his left leg was coming this way, so I spun-

Paul Rosolie 1:52:40 Uh-huh

Joe Rogan 1:52:40 ... with my right heel, and I hit him in the head as he was running forward.

Paul Rosolie 1:52:43 Pow!

Joe Rogan 1:52:44 So it's, like, multiple f- the force itself of a wheel kick is so powerful.

Paul Rosolie 1:52:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:52:49 And then when you're running into a wheel kick-

Paul Rosolie 1:52:50 It's-

Joe Rogan 1:52:51 ... it's crazy. It's like-

Paul Rosolie 1:52:51 Like two cars driving at each other.

Joe Rogan 1:52:53 It's like getting hit with a baseball bat that fucking, you know, Mark McGwire's swinging.

Paul Rosolie 1:53:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:53:00 It's crazy how much power there is in it, 'cause it's your legs. Your legs carry you around all day-

Paul Rosolie 1:53:05 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:53:05 ... and the torque of your whole body, you're whipping around, and, and you're hitting with the heel, and you, you know, there's no padding on your heel, and it's not-

Paul Rosolie 1:53:12 Mm-mm

Joe Rogan 1:53:12 ... right- I hit him right on the fucking cheek-

Paul Rosolie 1:53:14 [inhales]

Joe Rogan 1:53:14 ... like, right on the side of his head.

Paul Rosolie 1:53:16 Whoosh!

Joe Rogan 1:53:16 He went out.

Paul Rosolie 1:53:18 Yikes.

Joe Rogan 1:53:18 And then I came back to my instructor, and I... And he wasn't there at the tournament. I went back to Boston, and he's like... He goes, uh, "I heard you had a really good knockout." And I said, "Yeah." I said, "I was... It was scary." I go, "I thought he was dead." He goes, "Sometimes they die."

Paul Rosolie 1:53:37 [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 1:53:37 And then he walked away from me.

Paul Rosolie 1:53:39 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:53:39 And I was like, "Fuck, man!"

Paul Rosolie 1:53:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:53:41 "Sometimes they die?" I'm like, "That's me." I'm like, "I'm-"

Paul Rosolie 1:53:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:53:44 And I had no health insurance.

Paul Rosolie 1:53:45 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:53:45 I was 19.

Paul Rosolie 1:53:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:53:46 I was broke.

Paul Rosolie 1:53:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:53:47 I was training for the O- I wanted to be on the Olympic team.

Paul Rosolie 1:53:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:53:49 And I was two years from there, and I, I lost a lot of my steam at that moment, 'cause I was like, "What am I doing?"

Paul Rosolie 1:53:56 This is serious.

Joe Rogan 1:53:56 "I'm fighting for free."

Paul Rosolie 1:53:58 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:53:58 "I don't have any money. I have no insurance, and I'm doing this thing," and I'm- I knew, uh, uh, back then, I was getting some brain damage, for sure.

Paul Rosolie 1:54:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:54:08 Um, and then I, then I started kickboxing, like, right after that, and then I really kind of lost my feeling for taekwondo because I realized it was so limited. You know, that, like, when I was, uh, sparring with kickboxers, I was realizing, "Man, God, my hands are so limited." So then I started working with this guy, Joe Lake, who was a boxing coach, and that's when I was doing a lot of boxing and a lot of, uh, a lot of kickboxing. And I was like: Man, I'm getting my brains beat in, and I don't know why I'm doing this.

Paul Rosolie 1:54:36 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:54:37 You know, I'm like, "There's no professional..." It wasn't like the UFC existed at the time.

Paul Rosolie 1:54:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:54:42 I got offered a kickboxing fight for 500 bucks, and I was like, "500 bucks? So for 500 bucks, I lose my amateur status. I can never fight in the Olympics-

Paul Rosolie 1:54:50 Mm

Joe Rogan 1:54:50 ... and there's no money in it as a professional." I'm like, "What is my future?"

Paul Rosolie 1:54:53 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:54:53 "Am I gonna be one of the..." And then I knew guys in the gym that I used to train with, like, when I was 19, and then by the time I was, like, 21, I was seeing brain damage in these guys.

Paul Rosolie 1:55:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:55:03 I was seeing the, them slurring their words-

Paul Rosolie 1:55:06 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:55:06 ... forgetting what they were saying, repeating themselves.

Paul Rosolie 1:55:09 It's not worth it.

Joe Rogan 1:55:09 The weird thing is they, they'll tell you a story-

Paul Rosolie 1:55:11 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:55:11 ... and then they'll tell you the same story-

Paul Rosolie 1:55:13 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:55:13 ... like, two minutes later, and you're like, "You just fucking told me that story."

Paul Rosolie 1:55:16 That's terrifying.

Joe Rogan 1:55:16 Like, they don't remember. They don't remember anything.

Paul Rosolie 1:55:18 And, and now, but now, you know, George St. Pierre is a good example of someone. I feel like he made it out of fighting before-

Joe Rogan 1:55:24 Yes.

Paul Rosolie 1:55:24 Like, he looks very healthy.

Joe Rogan 1:55:25 He's fine.

Paul Rosolie 1:55:25 He looks like he's fine.

Joe Rogan 1:55:26 He's fine, but he's, you know, he's a very intelligent guy. He does, also does a lot of things to keep his mind very active.

Paul Rosolie 1:55:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:55:32 He plays chess.

Paul Rosolie 1:55:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:55:34 You know, and he's very, like, proactive about it.

Paul Rosolie 1:55:37 Yeah, but he seems... Like, even, like, I've just seen him on social media, where he's like, "Hey, guys, this is how I do..." Like, he's just, like, a very-

Joe Rogan 1:55:43 Oh, yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:55:43 Seems like a very positive, fun, you know, does not seem-

Joe Rogan 1:55:45 He's the best-case scenario for both... Another guy in the argument for the all-time great.

Paul Rosolie 1:55:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:55:51 Uh, for an all-time great MMA champion who has a successful and happy life outside of it.

Paul Rosolie 1:55:58 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:55:58 You know?

Paul Rosolie 1:55:58 Didn't end up with the-

Joe Rogan 1:56:00 Nope

Paul Rosolie 1:56:00 ... the shakes.

Joe Rogan 1:56:00 Nope. No, he's fine.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:56:02 I mean, I've hung out with him a bunch. I've hung out with him recently.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:56:05 He was great. We c- he came to the comedy club. He was actually playing my friend James McCann. They were playing chess in the green room-

Paul Rosolie 1:56:10 Mm

Joe Rogan 1:56:10 ... at the Comedy Mothership.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:56:11 It was so cool. We were filming it.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:13 The last time I came, I think he had been in there the night before, and I was like, "Ah!"

Joe Rogan 1:56:16 Ah!

Paul Rosolie 1:56:16 So that would've, I would've been- that would've been a trip to meet him.

Joe Rogan 1:56:18 He's amazing. He's-

Paul Rosolie 1:56:19 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:56:19 ... but he's such a sweetheart of a guy.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:56:21 You would never imagine that he's this fucking killer-

Paul Rosolie 1:56:24 It seems like it

Joe Rogan 1:56:24 ... inside the octagon.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:56:25 He's such a sweet guy, and-

Paul Rosolie 1:56:26 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:56:27 ... but it's just like, for him, it was just this i- incredible challenge, and he was really good at it.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:33 Yeah, this is the art.

Joe Rogan 1:56:33 And he just figured out a way to express himself that way, and, you know, is a legend.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:38 Like, I don't imagine that he was, like, big on, like, the trash talk before fights-

Joe Rogan 1:56:41 None

Paul Rosolie 1:56:41 ... and everything, right?

Joe Rogan 1:56:42 None.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:42 He was probably just like, "Look, we're just gonna..."

Joe Rogan 1:56:44 No, there was no trash talk.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:45 No.

Joe Rogan 1:56:45 He was very respectful.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:46 No.

Joe Rogan 1:56:46 Unless someone was disrespectful to him, and, and, you know, and even then-... he wasn't trash talking.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:53 No, he always seemed like he was cool.

Joe Rogan 1:56:54 He's like, yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:56:55 He was just doing his thing.

Joe Rogan 1:56:56 No, he was, uh, one of the best representatives of the sport of all time, if not the best.

Paul Rosolie 1:57:01 No, I like that. He's classy.

Joe Rogan 1:57:02 Like, never got into trouble outside the octagon.

Paul Rosolie 1:57:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:57:05 Never, you know, was never drunk driving-

Paul Rosolie 1:57:08 Mm

Joe Rogan 1:57:08 ... or beating people up, and, you know, just a great guy. And if I would have to tell people who he is-

Paul Rosolie 1:57:14 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:57:14 ... like, he would, uh, he's like: "Who's your friend?" I was like: "What do you think he does?

Paul Rosolie 1:57:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:57:18 What do you think my friend does? "

Paul Rosolie 1:57:19 Yeah, yeah, yeah. [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 1:57:20 And he's like: "I don't know, he seems cool." I was like-

Paul Rosolie 1:57:21 How big is he?

Joe Rogan 1:57:22 "He's one of the... Uh, he's about 5'9", 5'10", maybe."

Paul Rosolie 1:57:27 Yeah, sure.

Joe Rogan 1:57:27 "And now he probably weighs 180 pounds, 185 pounds maybe."

Paul Rosolie 1:57:32 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:57:32 "Fought at 170."

Paul Rosolie 1:57:33 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:57:33 You know, he's not, like, a scary-looking person.

Paul Rosolie 1:57:36 No, no.

Joe Rogan 1:57:36 I'm like: "That's one of the greatest fighters-

Paul Rosolie 1:57:38 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:57:38 ... that's ever walked the face of the earth."

Paul Rosolie 1:57:40 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:57:40 He's like: "No way."

Paul Rosolie 1:57:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:57:41 I'm like: "Yeah!"

Paul Rosolie 1:57:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:57:43 I mean, he's like: "Hey, how you doing, man? What's going on?"

Paul Rosolie 1:57:45 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:57:46 Like, he doesn't seem rough.

Paul Rosolie 1:57:46 He's like, he's, like, jovial. No.

Joe Rogan 1:57:47 Yeah, he's a sweetheart.

Paul Rosolie 1:57:48 No, he's not trying to intimidate, like, uh, you know, Khabib looks like he's... You know?

Joe Rogan 1:57:51 He's really smart.

Paul Rosolie 1:57:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:57:52 I mean, he's really-

Paul Rosolie 1:57:53 Yeah, yeah

Joe Rogan 1:57:53 ... he's always, like, watching documentaries and reading books.

Paul Rosolie 1:57:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:57:57 He's fascinated by ancient history and-

Paul Rosolie 1:57:59 Interesting

Joe Rogan 1:57:59 ... dinosaurs and [chuckles] he's really into aliens. [chuckles]

Paul Rosolie 1:58:01 He loves dinosaurs. Um, no, it's just, it's crazy, man. You, you've, you've gotten to this... You've, you've met everyone. Did you ever have Jane Goodall on here?

Joe Rogan 1:58:10 No, I did not, unfortunately.

Paul Rosolie 1:58:12 [chuckles] I wanted to make that happen.

Joe Rogan 1:58:13 And I w- I wanted to, and I wanted-

Paul Rosolie 1:58:14 I wanted to make that happen.

Joe Rogan 1:58:14 She's gone, right?

Paul Rosolie 1:58:15 She just died.

Joe Rogan 1:58:16 I wanted to talk to her-

Paul Rosolie 1:58:17 We just lost her

Joe Rogan 1:58:17 ... about Bigfoot, 'cause she was convinced [chuckles] that Bigfoot was real.

Paul Rosolie 1:58:21 What?

Joe Rogan 1:58:21 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Rosolie 1:58:22 She was convinced that Bigfoot was real?

Joe Rogan 1:58:23 Uh-huh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she did this interview.

Paul Rosolie 1:58:25 Find me-

Joe Rogan 1:58:25 She said she's certain of it.

Paul Rosolie 1:58:27 Come on.

Joe Rogan 1:58:27 Yeah, yeah. We'll find it. Jamie, see if you can find that.

Paul Rosolie 1:58:29 I, I... Not that I don't believe you, but I just don't find-

Joe Rogan 1:58:33 I know

Paul Rosolie 1:58:33 ... Jane Goodall.

Joe Rogan 1:58:34 I know, I know, I know. I was stunned. I was like, "What?" And this is by the time I had been convinced that Bigfoot was fake.

Paul Rosolie 1:58:40 Yeah, I'm in that camp.

Joe Rogan 1:58:41 But I, this is-

Paul Rosolie 1:58:42 There's camera traps.

Joe Rogan 1:58:42 But this is the camp. Um, there was an animal that e- that coexisted with human beings for sure-

Paul Rosolie 1:58:49 Sure

Joe Rogan 1:58:49 ... that was called Gigantopithecus.

Paul Rosolie 1:58:50 Yes, fine.

Joe Rogan 1:58:51 You know the whole story?

Paul Rosolie 1:58:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:58:52 So Gigan- Gigantopithecus, they found bones in an apothecary shop in China in the 1920s or '30s, and an anthropologist found these molars-

Paul Rosolie 1:59:04 Mm

Joe Rogan 1:59:05 ... and said, "Where did you get this? These are primate molars, and they're fucking enormous."

Paul Rosolie 1:59:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:59:10 Like, whatever this thing was, was absolutely huge. So they went to the site where they got it. [lips smack] They found, uh, mandible bones that indicate it was bipedal. Um, so it was an upright, walking chimp, um, uh, a walking primate that was 8 to 10 feet tall.

Paul Rosolie 1:59:25 Oh.

Joe Rogan 1:59:25 Like, what the fuck is this? And so I'm sure you've seen the images of what-

Paul Rosolie 1:59:29 Yeah

Joe Rogan 1:59:29 ... a Gigantopithecus looked like-

Paul Rosolie 1:59:31 Gigantopithecus

Joe Rogan 1:59:31 ... in comparison to a human being.

Paul Rosolie 1:59:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:59:33 It's in the orangutan family. And, um, so that thing existed, and also existed in Asia, right? So you look at the Bering Strait, and you look at the Bering land bridge that we know existed during the Ice Age, and so we know that humans migrated from Siberia into North America. We know that for a fact.

Paul Rosolie 1:59:55 Mm.

Joe Rogan 1:59:55 You know one of the reasons we know that for a fact? 'Cause Mormons were convinced that Native Americans were part of the Lost Tribe of Israel. Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 2:00:04 [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 2:00:04 So some rich Mormon guy did a DNA test on Native Americans-

Paul Rosolie 2:00:10 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:00:10 ... and find out, found out that they emanated from Siberia.

Paul Rosolie 2:00:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:00:14 And so it was incorrect.

Paul Rosolie 2:00:15 Yes.

Joe Rogan 2:00:16 So we know humans came down from there. Why wouldn't other animals?

Paul Rosolie 2:00:20 Sure.

Joe Rogan 2:00:20 We know they did.

Paul Rosolie 2:00:21 Right.

Joe Rogan 2:00:21 We know short-faced bear-

Paul Rosolie 2:00:22 Yes

Joe Rogan 2:00:22 ... a bunch of different a- uh, animals, that they find their bones in Alaska.

Paul Rosolie 2:00:26 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 2:00:26 And they know that they probably made their way down through North America. It just stands, it just makes logical sense that if you have a variety of different megafauna-

Paul Rosolie 2:00:36 Of different primates

Joe Rogan 2:00:36 ... that, uh, probably-

Paul Rosolie 2:00:38 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:00:38 ... one of those primates or a bunch of those primates lived in the Pacific Northwest-

Paul Rosolie 2:00:43 Sure

Joe Rogan 2:00:43 ... which is the area where they would be, right? And then you have incredibly dense forest, right?

Paul Rosolie 2:00:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:00:49 So Jane Goodall-

Paul Rosolie 2:00:49 Jane Goodall won't rule out-

Joe Rogan 2:00:50 ... won't rule out the existence of... But no, no, no, w- find the video where she says-

Paul Rosolie 2:00:54 Well, I-

Joe Rogan 2:00:54 ... "I'm convinced."

Paul Rosolie 2:00:55 "I'm convinced."

Joe Rogan 2:00:56 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 2:00:56 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:00:57 'Cause she was talking-

Speaker 2:00:58 I didn't seriously say that.

Joe Rogan 2:00:59 Oh, no, no, I've s- I've heard it.

Paul Rosolie 2:01:01 I... Come on.

Speaker 2:01:01 I'm not saying she- no, I'm not saying she didn't-

Joe Rogan 2:01:02 Okay, just find it, 'cause it exists. [chuckles]

Paul Rosolie 2:01:04 It doesn't exist. [chuckles]

Speaker 2:01:05 I can't, I can't listen to the videos.

Paul Rosolie 2:01:06 I got muscle motion on this one.

Joe Rogan 2:01:06 No, no, no.

Speaker 2:01:07 We'll record.

Joe Rogan 2:01:07 Go, go to video.

Speaker 2:01:08 I d- I just said-

Paul Rosolie 2:01:09 Dude, she would've been awesome on-

Speaker 2:01:10 ... I can't check that one while we're recording

Paul Rosolie 2:01:10 ... You should, I, I'm so sad.

Joe Rogan 2:01:12 Jane, Jane Goodall on how Bigfoot might be real.

Paul Rosolie 2:01:13 You-

Joe Rogan 2:01:13 That's it right there.

Paul Rosolie 2:01:14 You need to check that.

Joe Rogan 2:01:14 Put the, put the headphones on. Listen to this.

Speaker 2:01:16 It's a four-minute video.

Paul Rosolie 2:01:17 Headphones.

Joe Rogan 2:01:20 Here we go.

Speaker 2:01:22 [gentle music] I climbed into the hills.

Paul Rosolie 2:01:24 Oh, there's Jane.

Speaker 2:01:28 This was where I was meant to be.

Speaker 2:01:30 I wanna talk to you about something that, uh, some would say is fictional, but y- you would say, "Hold up, we d- we don't know for certain," and that's Bigfoot. You-

Speaker 2:01:38 [chuckles]

Speaker 2:01:39 You-

Speaker 2:01:40 Everybody talks to me about... I, I would, I'm a romantic. I would like Bigfoot to exist. I've met people who swear they've seen Bigfoot, and I think the interesting thing is, every single continent, there is an equivalent of Bigfoot or Sasquatch. There's the Yeti, there's the Yowie in Australia, there's the Chinese wild man, and, and on, and on, and on. And, you know, I've had stories from people who y- you have to believe them. So there's something, I don't know what it is. I'm always open-minded.

Speaker 2:02:15 What about other mythological creatures?

Joe Rogan 2:02:17 Pa- pause for a second.

Paul Rosolie 2:02:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:02:19 So they're, they're saying that to her, he's saying that to her, and she said that in reaction to a previous interview that she did.

Paul Rosolie 2:02:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:02:26 The previous interview that she did, she said, "I'm convinced that it exists."

Paul Rosolie 2:02:31 Uh, I don't know.

Joe Rogan 2:02:33 Well, you know, you gotta realize this is a lady that lived with primates-

Paul Rosolie 2:02:37 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:02:37 ... in a, an inaccessible area-

Paul Rosolie 2:02:39 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:02:39 ... where there's very few human beings, and she had these interactions with them. I, I don't agree with her, but I think that it existed at one point in time. One of the other reasons why I think it exists is that different Native American tribes-... um, put this into Perplexity: How many different Native American terms were there for a hairy wild man or Bigfoot? And I believe-

Paul Rosolie 2:03:04 Hmm

Joe Rogan 2:03:04 ... there's more than 80.

Paul Rosolie 2:03:06 That's wild.

Joe Rogan 2:03:07 Now, they don't have a lot of mythological creatures-

Paul Rosolie 2:03:09 No

Joe Rogan 2:03:09 ... in Native American culture.

Paul Rosolie 2:03:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:03:11 Right? And so in, in different tribes, right? But they have a name for this hairy, wild, giant man that lives in the woods.

Paul Rosolie 2:03:20 A Wookiee.

Joe Rogan 2:03:22 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 2:03:22 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 2:03:22 They also have-- The other thing that's really fascinating is giants. There is, uh-

Paul Rosolie 2:03:27 Hmm

Joe Rogan 2:03:27 ... a lot of, uh, ancient cultures have stories about giants, and-

Paul Rosolie 2:03:32 Hmm

Joe Rogan 2:03:32 ... Native American tribes have ancient stories of giant red-haired men.

Paul Rosolie 2:03:39 Hmm!

Joe Rogan 2:03:40 Which, you know, God, they're in the... It's in the Bible-

Paul Rosolie 2:03:43 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:03:43 ... it's in a bunch of... Okay, 40 to 50 separate terms across different languages and regions. Hairy, wild, giant man. No single agreed-upon count, but dozens of distinct Native American names for hairy, wild, giant man beings, easily over 40 to 50 separate terms across different languages and regions. Interesting.

Paul Rosolie 2:04:03 Wow. I still- I would love to see the clip eventually of Jane Goodall saying, "I believe in Bigfoot," 'cause she's-

Joe Rogan 2:04:08 I'm convinced

Paul Rosolie 2:04:08 ... sitting there, she's like, "I'm open to the idea of it."

Joe Rogan 2:04:11 Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's saying that, and as re- the reason why she's saying that-

Paul Rosolie 2:04:13 That's why she's dialing it back? [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 2:04:14 ... is because he had... Exactly.

Paul Rosolie 2:04:15 He'd seen the... Yeah, yeah, yeah

Joe Rogan 2:04:16 'Cause he had seen the previous interview.

Paul Rosolie 2:04:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:04:18 See if we can find another interview with her talking about Bigfoot. Um-

Paul Rosolie 2:04:21 Yeah, she was, she was awesome. You know, she-

Joe Rogan 2:04:22 She was awesome, yeah

Paul Rosolie 2:04:24 ... she, she's the reason I have a career.

Joe Rogan 2:04:26 Really?

Paul Rosolie 2:04:27 Her being awesome, I always, I, it's two stories I tell people. If I go, first of all, 'cause everyone goes, "What's Joe Rogan like?"

Joe Rogan 2:04:33 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 2:04:33 And I... No, it's true, 'cause everyone wants to know, and you're controversial, and so I always go, "He's the nicest fucking guy in the world." I go, "Like I s- said, the first time I came in, you sent me a message, and you said something about like, 'Hey, don't worry about a thing, like, I'm even gonna bring my dog.' Like, you were, you were... It was very nice. It was a little pat on the back." 'Cause you go, "Yeah." Jane Goodall, I went to a talk when I was like 22, something, and I was just writing chapters of my first book, Mother of God, which didn't even have a name yet, and I had chapters in a m- manila envelope, and I went to a talk that Goodall was giving, and, I mean, I'd been read stories and seen the black-and-white pictures, so this is like, he, you know, like Einstein, Abe Lincoln, Jane Goodall.

Joe Rogan 2:05:10 Right.

Paul Rosolie 2:05:10 It's like a living historical figure.

Joe Rogan 2:05:12 Right, right.

Paul Rosolie 2:05:13 And so now she's talking in front of me, and I had brought these chapters, and b- I wanted to ask her, 'cause I'd already sent the chapters to publishers, and they'd all been like: "Kid, none of this is true. You know, no way did you jump on a giant anaconda. No way did you raise an anteater." They just didn't believe me. And then I, I- when it was my turn after hundreds of people, I get to her, and, you know, she goes, "Hello." She goes, just takes a little picture with you, and I said, "Would you read these chapters?" I said, "I, I, I, I would love it, 'cause I, I loved your stories as a kid." She goes, "Thank you," and she puts it to the side. 48 hours later, her staff gets in touch, and they go, "Jane actually read what you gave her, loved it, and said, 'Finish the book, get a publisher, and I will write you an endorsement.'"

Joe Rogan 2:05:54 Whoa!

Paul Rosolie 2:05:55 She waved her magical wand in my direction and gave me a career.

Joe Rogan 2:06:00 That's so cool.

Paul Rosolie 2:06:02 And what's really great is that earlier this year, I emailed her, and it was because this book was coming out, and I, I, you know, I said it would be amazing to have... I mean, I said, "At this point, no one's, you know, the conservation mo- the voice of Mother Earth." Um, and she just, you know, she was just, she just said, "You know, just keep protecting the Amazon."

Joe Rogan 2:06:22 Wow.

Paul Rosolie 2:06:22 "That's, that's your mission." She was always very... It was like, you know, "Luke, believe in yourself."

Joe Rogan 2:06:27 [laughing]

Paul Rosolie 2:06:27 It was like, you know, she was just like, "You, your job is to protect this forest," and it was incredible.

Joe Rogan 2:06:32 Wow. That's amazing.

Paul Rosolie 2:06:33 And so yeah, right, right, me- you know, about six months ago, I got to tell her. I was like, "Look," 'cause the last time I'd spoken to her, we were protecting, I think it was, like, 100,000 acres, and then in the last year, we added 30,000 acres to the reserve, and so I said, "You know, we're, we're making strides forward," and she just... It was good that I got to tell her that, and then, and then, uh, you know, recently we found out that, that she died, but what a legacy.

Joe Rogan 2:06:58 What a legacy.

Paul Rosolie 2:06:58 What a legacy.

Joe Rogan 2:06:59 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 2:06:59 She's incredible.

Joe Rogan 2:06:59 I mean, we know so much about primate behavior because of that woman.

Paul Rosolie 2:07:04 We still know so much about... I mean, man, the tool maker, before her, we said there was humans that used tools, and now we know that, you know, capuchin monkeys use rocks.

Joe Rogan 2:07:14 Mm-hmm.

Paul Rosolie 2:07:14 We know that otters use rocks. I mean, I've seen elephants use a stick to scratch. I've seen, I've seen, I've seen camera trap footage of an elephant using a, a, a tree to knock over an electrical fence.

Joe Rogan 2:07:25 Mm-hmm.

Paul Rosolie 2:07:25 Like, animals use tools.

Joe Rogan 2:07:27 Oh, yeah.

Paul Rosolie 2:07:27 But she was the first one. I mean, she went out there when she was, what? 20-something years old.

Joe Rogan 2:07:31 Mm-hmm.

Paul Rosolie 2:07:31 Middle Africa, blonde girl.

Joe Rogan 2:07:32 Crazy.

Paul Rosolie 2:07:33 And then spent the whole rest of her life... But the lesson that I take away from that is that even as famous as she was, that she was traveling 300 days a year, I mean, she'd been, you know, a, a, an icon for decades, and that she still took the time to actually read something that some kid handed to her, to-- That's un- unfathomable grace-

Joe Rogan 2:07:57 Yeah

Paul Rosolie 2:07:57 ... to do that, and then literally, if that didn't happen, I never would've published Mother of God. I never would've started Junglekeepers. I never would've been protecting the rainforest. She, she, she empowered that. She did that with her magic. It was in- and, and I think that that's incredible.

Joe Rogan 2:08:12 That's so cool.

Paul Rosolie 2:08:14 Absolutely incredible.

Joe Rogan 2:08:15 That is so cool. Did you find any other... No? I guarantee it exists.

Paul Rosolie 2:08:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:08:20 But it's okay. You have to trust me.

Paul Rosolie 2:08:22 [chuckles]

Joe Rogan 2:08:22 Um, I don't think she's correct, but, uh, I do think, not Bigfoot, but I do think that it's entirely possible that there is a small, hairy, uh, primate-like, human-like primate that exists still.

Paul Rosolie 2:08:40 [laughing]

Joe Rogan 2:08:40 That's like the hi- the Hobbit people from the island of Flores.

Paul Rosolie 2:08:43 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:08:44 You know, there's um-

Paul Rosolie 2:08:45 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:08:45 ... th- there's the thing called the Orang Pendek. Have you heard of that?

Paul Rosolie 2:08:48 No.

Joe Rogan 2:08:49 The Orang Pendek, uh, [exhales] I think, uh, Indonesia, perhaps Vietnam, there's a bunch of places that have th- this creature that gets sighted on multiple occasions.

Paul Rosolie 2:09:01 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 2:09:01 And they used to think of it as like, just silly legend, but now, because of the discovery, which was-... Was it in the '90s that they discovered the Hobbit people on the island of Flores? You know about that, right?

Paul Rosolie 2:09:16 I've heard of them, yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:09:17 Yeah. Homo-

Paul Rosolie 2:09:18 And those are real.

Joe Rogan 2:09:19 Floresiensis. Yes.

Paul Rosolie 2:09:19 But those are real, real.

Joe Rogan 2:09:20 Yes.

Paul Rosolie 2:09:20 We have their bones.

Joe Rogan 2:09:21 Very real.

Paul Rosolie 2:09:22 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:09:22 Very real. It was a very small, um, like, hobbit-like creature-

Paul Rosolie 2:09:28 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:09:28 ... that was a type of primate that was bipedal, um, that was like a little, tiny, hairy human being-

Paul Rosolie 2:09:35 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:09:35 ... that lived at least on the island of Flores.

Paul Rosolie 2:09:39 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:09:39 But most likely lived in many other places as well, and, um, there's, there's a possibility that it still exists. And it's not me saying this, it's, like, some actual anthropologists that believe that this thing might still be alive. Because you're dealing with incredibly small populations.

Paul Rosolie 2:09:58 But are those... I mean, are those islands so small that no- like, unlike the Amazon that's gigantic-

Joe Rogan 2:10:02 They're not that small

Paul Rosolie 2:10:03 ... but, like, how could there be a population of-

Joe Rogan 2:10:05 They're incredibly dense.

Paul Rosolie 2:10:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:10:06 Incredibly dense forest, and no one's going out there.

Paul Rosolie 2:10:09 So they're just down in the bushes.

Joe Rogan 2:10:10 Right. It's like the Tasmanian tiger.

Paul Rosolie 2:10:12 I was just gonna say that.

Joe Rogan 2:10:12 Yeah.

Paul Rosolie 2:10:13 Like the thylacine, where it's like-

Joe Rogan 2:10:14 Yes

Paul Rosolie 2:10:14 ... they're just, they're just hidden.

Joe Rogan 2:10:15 Exactly.

Paul Rosolie 2:10:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:10:16 Exactly. Small population. Like, there's a lot-

Paul Rosolie 2:10:18 Mm

Joe Rogan 2:10:18 ... of sightings of the thylacine, you know?

Paul Rosolie 2:10:21 Yeah, but somehow all these sightings, it's never on a- it's never clear.

Joe Rogan 2:10:25 No, no.

Paul Rosolie 2:10:26 No. That was the-

Joe Rogan 2:10:26 Well, the- it's also, there's no one there.

Paul Rosolie 2:10:28 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:10:28 Here's the thing. I mean, let's pretend that you saw a wolverine in the Montana woods, like-

Paul Rosolie 2:10:35 Pull out your phone

Joe Rogan 2:10:36 ... dense Montana woods-

Paul Rosolie 2:10:37 Snap a-

Joe Rogan 2:10:37 ... and it's 100 yards away. You see it briefly for a second, get your phone. You're not gonna... You might have seen it-

Paul Rosolie 2:10:43 That's a good point

Joe Rogan 2:10:43 ... you might have seen it traveling-

Paul Rosolie 2:10:44 You really saw it, yeah

Joe Rogan 2:10:44 ... between the trees. But, like, how are you gonna get it off your phone?

Paul Rosolie 2:10:47 No.

Joe Rogan 2:10:47 You're gonna have to... Unless you have a Samsung, where you have a really good zoom-

Paul Rosolie 2:10:50 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:10:50 ... you're not gonna be able to zoom in enough.

Paul Rosolie 2:10:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:10:52 You know? Like, you'd have to have, like-

Paul Rosolie 2:10:54 And then it's got two hands

Joe Rogan 2:10:54 ... there's only a few phones that are-

Paul Rosolie 2:10:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:10:55 Yeah, you're not gonna get good footage.

Paul Rosolie 2:10:57 No.

Joe Rogan 2:10:57 But we know that wolverines are real.

Paul Rosolie 2:10:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:10:59 But finding a wolverine in the woods... I've talked to, God, I've talked to hundreds of men-

Paul Rosolie 2:11:05 Mm

Joe Rogan 2:11:06 ... who spend a giant portion of their life-

Paul Rosolie 2:11:08 Trying to see a wolverine

Joe Rogan 2:11:08 ... in the woods, and only a few have seen wolverines.

Paul Rosolie 2:11:11 I would love to see a wolverine.

Joe Rogan 2:11:12 Well, or how about mountain lions?

Paul Rosolie 2:11:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:11:13 They're everywhere.

Paul Rosolie 2:11:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:11:15 I've only seen three of them in my entire life.

Paul Rosolie 2:11:19 That's wild.

Joe Rogan 2:11:19 But I've probably been around 100 of them-

Paul Rosolie 2:11:22 Yeah

Joe Rogan 2:11:22 ... and not known it. You know?

Paul Rosolie 2:11:23 You know, that's what, that's the reaction we got with the, the tribes, was that if you look at uncontacted tribes... My whole life, you look at photos of uncontacted tribes, it was, like, blurry-

Joe Rogan 2:11:34 Right

Paul Rosolie 2:11:34 ... crappy, 'cause-

Joe Rogan 2:11:35 Right

Paul Rosolie 2:11:35 ... who was out there? It was, like, a logger.

Joe Rogan 2:11:37 Right.

Paul Rosolie 2:11:37 Right? Or it was somebody running.

Joe Rogan 2:11:39 Right.

Paul Rosolie 2:11:39 And even when I saw them the first time, when I was out on a solo, it was 10 days deep in the jungle, I saw them, and I ran for my life. And everyone went, "You didn't see them." I mean, I'm a- I'm- I don't mind that. If I have pics, or it didn't happen.

Joe Rogan 2:11:51 Right.

Paul Rosolie 2:11:52 Right? Um, and so with this, when we started, when we started actually showing people what we had, it was like, "This has never been..." It's like, it's like a vision into the, into the Stone Age.

Joe Rogan 2:12:03 Right. I mean, the-

Paul Rosolie 2:12:04 I mean-

Joe Rogan 2:12:04 Like, really not even the Stone Age. Like, they're not even-

Paul Rosolie 2:12:06 Not even the Stone Age

Joe Rogan 2:12:07 ... using stone tools.

Paul Rosolie 2:12:08 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 2:12:08 They're using sharpened sticks.

Paul Rosolie 2:12:09 Yeah. I showed it to an anthropologist, and he was saying, "You know, Stone Age isn't necessarily accurate here," he said, "because they're not using stone. They don't have clay pots." He goes, "This is something, this is..." But I mean, it... Then think about it. It's actually like a time machine because you're, you're, you're- I mean, we were standing across the river, look- talking to these people, and it's like,