Order of Man - PAUL ROSOLIE ｜ Guard What You Love, Or You'll Lose It

00:00:00.120 What does it mean to truly protect something you love?

00:00:03.500 And what are you as a man willing to sacrifice in order to do it?

00:00:08.420 Today's guest has gone further into the wild than most men ever will.

00:00:12.820 Not for the thrill or ego, but to defend one of the most threatened ecosystems on earth.

00:00:18.720 From the depths of the Amazon rainforest to the front lines of conservation,

00:00:23.440 this is a conversation about courage and responsibility and confronting fear head on.

00:00:30.000 My guest today is Paul Rosalie, a renowned explorer.

00:00:33.880 He's a conservationist.

00:00:35.040 He's a storyteller whose life's work is rooted in protecting and preserving the Amazon and the creatures that live there.

00:00:43.560 We talk about what the jungle teaches you about yourself, the modern war on nature,

00:00:49.300 and his powerful new book, Jungle Keeper, which challenges us to stop outsourcing responsibility

00:00:56.540 and start defending what we believe matters.

00:01:00.000 Both personally and even globally.

00:01:02.500 You're a man of action.

00:01:03.820 You live life to the fullest.

00:01:05.260 Embrace your fears and boldly chart your own path.

00:01:08.220 When life knocks you down, you get back up one more time.

00:01:11.560 Every time.

00:01:12.680 You are not easily deterred or defeated.

00:01:14.980 Rugged.

00:01:15.740 Resilient.

00:01:16.700 Strong.

00:01:17.720 This is your life.

00:01:18.820 This is who you are.

00:01:20.220 This is who you will become.

00:01:21.940 At the end of the day, and after all is said and done,

00:01:24.980 you can call yourself a man.

00:01:26.900 Gentlemen, welcome to the Order of Man podcast.

00:01:30.300 Glad you're tuning in today.

00:01:31.420 Very excited about this one.

00:01:32.920 Paul Rosalie is joining me on the podcast,

00:01:34.700 and he's gained a lot of traction and notoriety over the past decades for his very unique life

00:01:41.500 as he lives in the Amazon to protect and preserve over 130,000 acres of the Amazon forest.

00:01:49.960 We're going to get into that in just a minute.

00:01:51.880 I'm sure that Paul would attest to this, although we didn't talk about it,

00:01:56.020 but he's probably got some great tools as he's in the Amazon,

00:01:58.900 and one of the tools that I'm sure he has and uses frequently is a good knife.

00:02:03.760 And guys, if you're looking for a great knife,

00:02:05.500 and you're looking for something 100% made and sourced in America,

00:02:08.720 you need to look at Montana Knife Company.

00:02:12.160 I'll be up there in a couple of months for their grand opening of their new facility.

00:02:15.360 Very state-of-the-art, very incredible,

00:02:17.620 all the machinery and equipment and everything else they have there.

00:02:19.940 But make sure you check them out, montananifecompany.com.

00:02:23.640 If you're looking for a good tool,

00:02:25.560 whether you're going to spend decades in the Amazon like Paul,

00:02:28.100 or you're just looking to cut carrots a little better in the kitchen for your family,

00:02:33.060 you need a Montana Knife Company knife.

00:02:35.760 If you go over there and pick up any of their products or knives,

00:02:38.620 make sure you use the code ORDEROFMAN at checkout.

00:02:42.340 All one word, ORDEROFMAN at montananifecompany.com.

00:02:47.680 All right, guys, let me introduce you to Paul.

00:02:49.480 He is a wildlife conservationist.

00:02:52.480 He's an author.

00:02:53.840 He's also, I think more than anything, an explorer.

00:02:56.660 And he's known for his immersive work in the Amazon rainforest,

00:03:00.260 including an encounter with a previously uncontacted Amazon tribe.

00:03:05.920 We talk about that in the podcast.

00:03:07.840 He's also the co-founder of Jungle Keepers.

00:03:09.820 And he spent years living deep, deep in the jungle,

00:03:12.560 working to protect endangered land and species from illegal logging and poaching and exploitation.

00:03:19.820 His approach to conservation is very raw.

00:03:23.840 It's obviously very direct.

00:03:25.660 It's personal for him.

00:03:26.780 And it's grounded in the belief that his real protection over the forest requires him being present,

00:03:33.620 him making sacrifices, moral clarity.

00:03:36.440 And in his latest book, Jungle Keeper, it's partly a memoir, but it's also a call to arms.

00:03:43.100 And in it, he shares wild experiences, harrowing experiences from the rainforest while confronting a really deep question that I think all of us should ask.

00:03:54.740 What kind of men are we becoming in a world that consumes more than it protects?

00:04:02.600 Jungle Keeper isn't just about saving the Amazon.

00:04:05.140 It's about reclaiming your own responsibility, embracing hardship in your life,

00:04:09.340 and choosing to stand guard over things that cannot, frankly, defend themselves.

00:04:15.040 Enjoy.

00:04:16.840 Paul, what's up, man?

00:04:17.820 Thanks for joining me on the show today.

00:04:19.460 Glad to have you here.

00:04:21.040 Brian, thanks for having me.

00:04:22.180 I saw, I've been following your work for, gosh, probably years at this point,

00:04:27.440 but I think there was a pretty cool video that I had seen the other day where you and your crew had contacted a previously uncontacted tribe in the Amazon.

00:04:39.000 Is that right?

00:04:41.120 It's almost right.

00:04:42.220 We were up doing some work with the indigenous communities that we work with for Jungle Keepers,

00:04:48.860 and the tribe contacted us, and that's an important distinction because if we'd gone out looking for them,

00:04:53.960 that would be not exactly the best practices.

00:04:59.300 That's not what anthropologists want.

00:05:01.020 We're actually trying to leave them alone, and we were out upriver, extremely remote, days upriver,

00:05:07.520 deep in the Amazon rainforest, working with the indigenous communities, and these people just came out.

00:05:12.560 And they had messages for us.

00:05:16.040 What were the messages, and how did you guys communicate?

00:05:21.020 Because I'm sure it's not a well-known language that they're speaking in if they're uncontacted by the outside world.

00:05:28.420 Yeah, not at all.

00:05:29.340 They're speaking a language that very few people speak.

00:05:32.960 Only a couple hundred people speak this yine dialect.

00:05:36.640 And then, you know, they're the Mashko Piro, which really means the wild Piro people.

00:05:42.460 And they – so even the local anthropologist who was speaking to them was only speaking in approximations.

00:05:48.860 This is a local person who knows the native dialect.

00:05:51.880 But when it comes to the uncontacted tribes, you know, the translation is not perfect.

00:05:56.580 It's like, you know, me as a Spanish speaker speaking to an Italian person, we get there.

00:06:01.100 But it's not 100%.

00:06:04.000 And, yeah, they came out of the forest.

00:06:08.000 And, I mean, the first order of business was we had to get them to put down their bows.

00:06:12.420 You know, they came out of the forest, and there's naked warriors with six-foot long bows, seven-foot arrows.

00:06:21.340 And very proficient, I imagine, with them.

00:06:25.020 Incredibly proficient with them.

00:06:26.400 They can hit a spider monkey in the tops of the trees and, like, the tree branches, you know, the tops of the trees in the Amazon are 160 feet in the air.

00:06:34.780 That's a long shot, and it's a vertical shot.

00:06:38.640 And they can do that.

00:06:40.320 So hitting us from, you know, 30, 40 meters across the river, not difficult.

00:06:47.680 So we were all on high alert as they came out.

00:06:49.860 And then the anthropologist was saying, you know, no more, brothers, put down your bows.

00:06:56.140 That was the first thing.

00:06:57.200 We cannot negotiate if you're armed.

00:06:59.020 You know, we are not going to be armed.

00:07:00.600 You cannot be armed.

00:07:02.120 And so that was the first thing, was communicating to them, we are not interested in a violent encounter.

00:07:07.000 And you can kind of see in the footage when they come out, you know, they're crouched low.

00:07:12.620 They're trying to assess.

00:07:14.460 They're pointing at us.

00:07:16.040 You know, they're not treating us necessarily like brothers yet, even though that's the word that everybody kept using right away.

00:07:22.360 No mole, brother.

00:07:23.500 So both sides started saying brother.

00:07:26.420 And the anthropologist was saying, put down your bows.

00:07:29.420 And, you know, in the footage that was shot, you can see them putting down their bows and very cautiously coming over to the side.

00:07:36.280 They're terrified of the outside world.

00:07:39.440 Is it because they – is it just the uncertainty of it or have they had experience trying to be conquered?

00:07:44.900 I mean, I imagine these are – I don't know if they're still warring tribes, but I imagine they're protecting their resources, protecting their village and their women.

00:07:53.440 I don't know what that's like.

00:07:56.100 Yeah, and I mean what we know is that during the rubber boom around the turn of the century, 1900s, you had the Industrial Revolution.

00:08:03.100 So for the first time, rubber became incredibly important to northern societies.

00:08:09.140 You needed machine belts.

00:08:10.760 You needed rubber – you know, copper wires needed tubing.

00:08:13.840 You needed bicycle tires, car tires, everything.

00:08:16.420 And the only place that you could get rubber was the Amazon rainforest, the only place it grew, rubber trees.

00:08:21.440 And the only way to get the rubber trees was to go out and tap the rubber trees because you can't grow a plantation of rubber trees.

00:08:29.340 Henry Ford tried.

00:08:30.560 He tried to build Fordlandia where it was just thousands and thousands and thousands of rubber trees.

00:08:35.440 And there's some sort of leaf blight that knocks them out.

00:08:37.960 So the only way for these people to go down and the rubber barons, they called them, these people who were willing – who figured, okay, this is – I can go down and get all this rubber and then sell it and get rich.

00:08:49.000 But in order to go down to the Amazon and get that rubber, they had to get the local people to go out and tap the rubber trees, which the local people did not want to do.

00:08:58.160 They were not financially motivated.

00:08:59.860 They didn't use money.

00:09:00.600 They had everything they needed.

00:09:02.420 They had piranhas and monkeys and trees and they just didn't understand the capitalist framework of work, work, work, work, work, work, work.

00:09:11.880 And so these people went with option B, which was light them on fire and burn their villages and just – it was a huge period of genocide.

00:09:21.540 And so the Amazon tribes suffered hard.

00:09:25.840 It's one of the worst periods in human history.

00:09:28.820 And it happened in the jungle.

00:09:29.980 So very few people know about it.

00:09:31.840 And during that time, the uncontacted tribes said not for us until they moved deeper into the jungle, away from indigenous communities, away from outsiders, away from the loggers, gold miners, narco traffickers, rubber barons, everybody.

00:09:48.720 And they've been out there for a few hundred years hiding, making sure the outside world doesn't get in.

00:09:55.420 And so the problem now is my organization, Jungle Keepers, we're protecting 130,000 acres of rainforests.

00:10:03.320 And within that vast wilderness, we're trying to keep it a wilderness.

00:10:06.140 And the issue now is that as they're – we're racing against these roads to protect the ancient forest because that's where the local people – that's where the uncontacted people live.

00:10:17.400 That's where all the endangered species live.

00:10:19.060 That's where all the ancient trees are.

00:10:20.540 And I think that they're feeling that pressure because as the narcos come in from different areas, these people are sort of running out of space.

00:10:27.980 There's only so many places that are wild enough for these people to still exist.

00:10:31.160 Yeah, that is intense.

00:10:34.640 Is there any estimation about how many – I don't even know how you would know, but how many uncontacted tribes are in the – you said 180,000 acres of the Amazon forest that you're operating in?

00:10:48.600 Oh, no, no.

00:10:51.360 We're protecting 100 –

00:10:52.920 I was going to say it sounds low, so I must have misheard that.

00:10:56.500 Yeah, we're protecting 130,000 acres, which is a teardrop in the ocean.

00:11:05.360 Right.

00:11:05.940 The Amazon itself is bigger than the continental – the lower 48.

00:11:10.820 The Amazon forest itself is something like 7 million miles squared or something.

00:11:17.580 It's ridiculously big.

00:11:19.100 Yeah, yeah.

00:11:20.340 And encompassed by I think eight or nine different Latin American countries.

00:11:24.020 But, I mean, we're protecting this tiny, tiny, tiny little bit, but that's still important because it's the crown jewel.

00:11:30.460 It's one of the wildest places.

00:11:31.780 It's one of these tributaries.

00:11:32.940 I always tell people if you think of the Amazon – the main Amazon River as a tree and then all the tributaries, the thousands and thousands of them as branches, we're just up on one of the highest branches, which is one of the hardest to reach, which is why it's remained so wild through the centuries that we still have this opportunity to protect it.

00:11:54.040 And that's also why, like a human time capsule, I mean, we were able to stand – we're standing there on one side of the beach with professional cameras and iPhones and shotguns.

00:12:05.780 And on the other side of the beach, they're standing there with bows and arrows naked with rope, like I think fire rope.

00:12:13.600 I think that's mankind's second invention.

00:12:15.840 Yeah, no tools, no stone tools or metal or anything like that it sounds like, right?

00:12:22.380 No, they're pre-stone age.

00:12:24.240 They don't have stones.

00:12:26.660 What – did you have any opportunity to communicate with them about their – I don't know if – I don't even know if happiness is a metric they would even consider.

00:12:38.700 I don't even know if that's on their radar or their standard of living or how they feel about the way they live.

00:12:46.280 I guess they don't know any different.

00:12:47.660 So what would they compare it to?

00:12:49.920 Yeah, I think happiness is a very Western idea.

00:12:54.780 I don't think that these people have happiness on their bingo cards.

00:12:59.220 I think they're trying to shoot a monkey, find a turtle, survive.

00:13:04.600 Warring tribes is a huge problem as civilization encroaches on them.

00:13:10.040 Different clans of Mashko-Piro are – and different clans of other groups of uncontacted tribes that I might not know the name of.

00:13:17.980 They do raids on each other.

00:13:20.760 They raid for women.

00:13:22.200 They raid for – maybe one tribe will have some machetes that they found in an abandoned logging camp.

00:13:27.520 Well, machetes are gold.

00:13:28.580 Machetes allow you to move through the forest faster.

00:13:30.640 They allow you to make more tools.

00:13:32.200 And so if you can get a machete, you have a cheat code to the forest.

00:13:39.800 Yeah, huge advantage.

00:13:41.300 And so I don't think happiness is something that – they don't look very happy, to be honest.

00:13:46.460 They look pretty miserable.

00:13:48.160 They look pretty desperate.

00:13:49.240 And the first thing they asked for when they came out of the forest was food.

00:13:54.700 They wanted plantains.

00:13:57.240 They wanted food.

00:13:58.080 And when we gave them to them, we put them in these canoes that we pushed across the river because you can't make contact with these people.

00:14:06.880 If you or I was to go shake their hands, just the germs on our skin, the germs in a single sneeze of ours.

00:14:17.320 We grew up interacting with other people, building our immunities.

00:14:21.620 I mean, hell, I grew up holding subway poles at times.

00:14:24.820 And, you know, we come from a society.

00:14:28.860 They've been isolated for centuries.

00:14:32.220 And so they – common cold has wiped out entire tribes in the Amazon rainforest.

00:14:37.960 It has happened.

00:14:38.840 That's how we know that that's possible.

00:14:41.700 So there's no contact that can be made.

00:14:44.180 Yeah, it's really dangerous.

00:14:45.800 And, you know, one of the things was that we wondered, you know, with releasing this footage, the last thing that you want is, you know, some of the first reactions that we get is people go, wow, these are the last truly free people.

00:14:59.680 No government, no bills, no spreadsheets.

00:15:02.640 They've never been on a Microsoft Teams meeting.

00:15:05.400 And it's like, yeah, sure.

00:15:06.840 But they also have gang rape and women raids and constant famine and intertribal warfare.

00:15:12.500 And God only knows what they do as initiation rites for their young men.

00:15:15.900 It's a brutal existence that we know nothing about that takes place in the shadows of the jungle.

00:15:21.720 Who knows what their infant mortality rate is.

00:15:24.120 Like, it's very, very hard life.

00:15:25.960 They're living the way humans lived thousands of years ago.

00:15:29.680 And so we're sitting there with – able to capture it for the first time, I think, ever with modern technology.

00:15:35.740 But how many centuries separated us across that river?

00:15:39.060 You know, we're talking to people that we can just raise our hands and sort of gesture to them.

00:15:44.180 You know, they were terrified of the cameras.

00:15:45.960 They – we said put down your bows and they were like, well, you put down those things, whatever they are.

00:15:50.180 They didn't like being pointed at.

00:15:52.460 They didn't know what it was.

00:15:53.240 They thought it was something.

00:15:54.020 Right.

00:15:54.280 They know gun.

00:15:55.300 They know gun.

00:15:56.020 They said the word chichiksu.

00:15:57.180 So they thought it was – they thought it was a fire stick, chichiksu.

00:16:00.060 Yeah, it's – I think there's this common thing that we do where we have these romanticized versions of what it would be like to live in another era.

00:16:13.260 And I kind of like air conditioning.

00:16:15.700 I kind of like having a car.

00:16:17.220 I kind of like having some technology to be able to have conversations like this.

00:16:20.780 I wonder what the balance is though for the average person because you do often talk about how disconnected the modern man is from nature and the wild.

00:16:30.900 And I think there's obviously a case to be made for incorporating that into a man's life too.

00:16:36.520 Well, that's the thing.

00:16:37.520 We've gone the other direction.

00:16:39.020 You know, you don't want to be skinny.

00:16:40.500 You don't want to be too fat.

00:16:42.400 They're too skinny.

00:16:43.800 We're too fat.

00:16:44.800 Yeah, and like most people – most people today, I shared with like on like a close friend's chat.

00:16:53.260 I shared – I was like, oh, my phone usage was – because I was in the Amazon.

00:16:57.100 I was like how refreshing my phone is.

00:16:58.920 You know, my phone usage was down to like, you know, 42 minutes for the – at the daily average.

00:17:04.280 And my friends just, you know, came flying back with like 13 hours, 14 hours, 12 hours.

00:17:10.720 Like that's on your phone.

00:17:12.660 So you're going to – eventually you're going to die one day and you're going to let your life take place staring at your phone.

00:17:20.680 There are people climbing mountains and rafting rivers and exploring the earth and looking at the faces of their children and you're going to stare at your phone for 12 hours.

00:17:31.880 And so we're – we have a different kind of sickness and so there's definitely a balance there to be had.

00:17:37.640 And I think it's not that difficult to achieve, you know, as long as you have access to the outdoors and half a brain, you know, and that time lock on your phone.

00:17:47.940 I know.

00:17:49.800 You know, because everything goes through it.

00:17:51.320 You can go out this afternoon for a hike and wherever you are, you can drive – you know, I'm pretty remote and rural so I can get outside.

00:17:58.000 I can go walk out back and go on a hike.

00:17:59.820 But even if you're in the city, drive an hour and you're going to be in nature.

00:18:04.620 Well, that's the great thing about New York City.

00:18:06.420 You drive an hour, you're in beautiful nature.

00:18:08.480 You're in amazing forests and mountains and streams and they protected the whole Catskill watershed so that New York would have clean water.

00:18:15.100 So there's a huge conservation legacy there, the Hudson River.

00:18:17.880 One thing I realized as I've been doing podcasts and interviews and with the book out and everything is that people are reading about these adventures that I've had both in the Amazon and like literally like I walk out my door in New York and there's – I'm in the woods.

00:18:34.180 There's foxes and owls and deer right there.

00:18:36.060 I always forget how many people live in cities and they're 20 stories up and so it's a little bit harder for them and so it has to be a little bit more deliberate for them to get out into the snow, into the mud, into the stream and how important that is.

00:18:55.500 What would you say is some of the – it's kind of a funny question to ask because you're so immersed in it significantly more than I am.

00:19:03.760 But I spend time in nature and I hunt and I love to be outside and I love to travel and see what there is.

00:19:09.320 But what would you say are the biggest benefits to somebody just getting outside every couple of days or every weekend and going to explore the mountains or a hike or the forest or whatever it might be?

00:19:22.460 I mean first of all, just the nature of walking.

00:19:25.420 You can't – just last week just being on a book tour, I found myself indoors a lot, which is shocking.

00:19:33.760 It's strange for me and like walking on even surfaces where you don't have to balance.

00:19:39.640 You're not worried about slipping because everything has been curated for humans and like of all types, right?

00:19:46.680 So everybody has to be able to walk on the sidewalk, wheelchair accessible.

00:19:50.220 And so you are so unchallenged and if you fall down, an ambulance will come pick you up.

00:19:55.960 And it's like society can just make you into something pretty useless pretty quick because it doesn't use – I mean I notice it myself.

00:20:05.940 When you go to the jungle and your skin starts getting sunburned and your hands get rougher and thicker and you walk barefoot and the calluses on your feet change.

00:20:13.800 And you get leaner and you get tougher and you get stronger and it's just – the wild shapes you so quick.

00:20:20.640 And so getting outdoors changes your entire physical self, which is your – the vehicle through which you experience reality.

00:20:29.600 So fundamentally, these are the wild places that have the capacity to shape us.

00:20:36.760 And I mean we are a wild species that has currently optimized itself to live in a society which has created – we are a fish perpetually out of water.

00:20:49.520 And so everyone is wondering why they're – you know, why the phones are so loud and the music is turned up and the sound of the leaf blowers and the subway and the garbage trucks.

00:20:59.900 And it's like, yeah, because you're supposed to be listening to crickets.

00:21:03.800 Yeah.

00:21:04.620 Good point.

00:21:05.600 That's it.

00:21:06.760 I remember when I moved to Maine, we did some workouts in the driveway.

00:21:11.400 We'd like flip tires and had sledgehammers and kettlebells and I had my gym out in the garage.

00:21:16.840 And I went down to the convenience store and the woman had become just a family friend.

00:21:22.320 And she said, do you know what people call you?

00:21:24.900 I'm like, no.

00:21:25.900 I'm a little worried.

00:21:26.940 She says, we call you the weird workout people.

00:21:30.120 And I was like, what?

00:21:31.340 Yeah.

00:21:31.560 I was like, why do you call us – and she was joking but serious.

00:21:34.100 And I'm like, why do you call us the weird workout people?

00:21:37.280 She's like, I've never seen like people work out with like gym equipment and tires and sledgehammers.

00:21:43.900 I'm like, well, don't you need to stay in shape?

00:21:45.500 She's like, well, yeah.

00:21:46.220 We go out and we chop wood and we hike and we hunt and all of the things that they were doing in rural Maine.

00:21:52.980 And I thought that's actually a good point.

00:21:55.920 We are the weird workout people because we have these perfectly symmetrically balanced weights and sledgehammers when they're out living life in the same way.

00:22:05.580 Well, I mean, yes.

00:22:06.360 That is – and what you're doing though is you're adapting to – you're doing a driveway workout with friends.

00:22:11.740 That's fine.

00:22:12.480 I do bodyweight workouts wherever I go.

00:22:14.960 Right.

00:22:16.000 You know, my standard workout is push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, running, push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, running, rinse and repeat a million times.

00:22:23.800 That's it.

00:22:25.960 And then days where you end up, you know, carrying the boats, days when you end up wading up a river, days when you end up carrying wood, great.

00:22:34.740 The more of that you can incorporate, but I think a lot of people struggle to find – again, if you live rural, then you do it every day.

00:22:42.500 I think that, you know, the – you could almost make a – you could almost make a sort of resort adult summer camp where you just have piles of wood and you invite frustrated city people to come carry the wood from here to there.

00:22:57.540 Right.

00:22:57.680 They'd probably enjoy it.

00:22:58.720 You could offer a hand-ruffing station where you can carry pine.

00:23:02.860 You could even get them to do your chores.

00:23:07.420 Get them to chop your wood and everything else.

00:23:08.940 You could already see that.

00:23:09.880 People pay good money to go to like axe-throwing places in the city, I've become aware, where once again, that's just called a tree.

00:23:17.860 You know, it's like you can just – you can just go throw an axe at a tree.

00:23:22.560 So, yeah, I think that for people – a lot of people, it has become something that is a little bit like water where they're parched for it.

00:23:29.840 And so they have to go deliberately find it.

00:23:33.300 There's nothing wrong with that.

00:23:35.000 But I think it's definitely something that we need more than we may imagine.

00:23:39.560 Have you – and I say this with all due respect to you.

00:23:44.500 Have you ever felt like or had these questions of whether or not this mission that you've decided to engage in is even something that can be accomplished when it comes to preserving the rainforest?

00:23:57.260 I mean, is it inevitable or is it we're just trying to slow this down or how do you feel about that moral dilemma I guess you must have, I imagine?

00:24:10.160 No, I don't have a moral dilemma.

00:24:12.360 I feel like I'm on a sacred quest.

00:24:16.700 I mean, picture if Churchill the night before D-Day was going, it's inevitable.

00:24:20.320 They're going to win.

00:24:21.440 We'll just throw some more bodies at it.

00:24:23.200 It's like, no, man, you have to believe that you're going to win.

00:24:27.540 And also, if you look at it factually, it's a little bit indulgent.

00:24:32.700 Everyone's gotten – and it's not anybody's fault because the media hypes things up until it's at level 1,000 because that's how they get clicks.

00:24:40.100 And me having worked in the media for so long and using social media as a tool, I've seen it myself.

00:24:49.080 I can post the most beautiful frog, beautiful snake, most incredible picture of any type of wildlife.

00:24:55.120 It will not get as much engagement as if I post a picture of an elephant getting shot in the head and I go, this is horrifying.

00:25:04.140 Skyrocket engagement.

00:25:06.060 Yeah.

00:25:06.240 So, of course, the news goes – I mean, yes, it's true that the environment is being destroyed.

00:25:12.120 It's true that we've lost 50% of the wildlife on our planet since 1970.

00:25:15.700 It's true that water has never been more polluted.

00:25:18.020 It's true that we're losing our ocean fisheries.

00:25:20.200 But it's also true that where I live in the Hudson Valley after the 1970s, bald eagles are back.

00:25:26.400 It's also true that humpback whales are almost at pre-whaling numbers.

00:25:29.300 It's also true that people all over the world are realizing this trend of environmental degradation and they are working to stop it before it's too late.

00:25:37.680 So while it is true that we are the last generation in history that will have the chance to save the Amazon rainforest, and if we do lose it, it will send our planet into post-apocalyptic nightmare.

00:25:49.660 It will be a very different place because the weather will change and then farming will change and droughts and famine and political things.

00:25:57.560 Everything will shift if we lose the Amazon.

00:25:59.640 But that doesn't need to happen.

00:26:04.000 And I think that one thing I see when I come back is, you know, I'm over there, like, wiping mud and blood off my face and being like, you know, we need more bullets.

00:26:11.140 And everyone's like, it's too late.

00:26:13.380 We should just lay in the streets and die.

00:26:15.420 Like, let's just hold each other as the meteor approaches.

00:26:18.760 And I'm like, how did you people get this hopeless?

00:26:22.500 Oh, because you're staring at the phone screens all day long.

00:26:26.200 You're listening to what other people are telling you.

00:26:27.900 You're not going out and looking for yourself.

00:26:30.640 And it's like, we are not in that catastrophic of a time.

00:26:35.320 It's never been a more peaceful time in history when you want to talk about global wars and destruction.

00:26:40.800 There's never been a time in history when more humans on Earth are concerned with understanding different races and equality for genders and understanding even the fact that the animals that we share this planet with also have consciousness and rights.

00:26:55.820 There's never been a time on Earth of greater compassion.

00:26:59.700 But again, we've got the little black mirrors in our hands that want you to believe the opposite.

00:27:06.740 And so I've spent most of my life.

00:27:08.760 I've spent my entire adult life.

00:27:10.040 I dropped out of school when I was 17 years old.

00:27:13.160 I went to the Amazon when I was 18 years old.

00:27:14.880 I am 38 years old now.

00:27:17.020 I have lived with herds of elephants.

00:27:18.480 I've lived in the Amazon rainforest.

00:27:20.000 I've lived in India.

00:27:21.080 I've been in Africa.

00:27:21.980 I've been to the front lines of conservation.

00:27:24.340 I had to see for myself because I was so distressed by all of this that I couldn't sleep.

00:27:31.040 I was existentially depressed because I believed that we were at the end of times because all I grew up hearing was that we're losing species.

00:27:38.420 We're losing everything.

00:27:39.500 There's no going back.

00:27:40.480 It's all going to die.

00:27:41.260 And we are a plague on the planet, which creates, especially for children, this weird sense of anti-human sentiment where you go, well, we're bad.

00:27:49.740 And I went to environmental college where kids wouldn't use straws or they wouldn't drive their cars or they would bike from interstate to go see their grandparents.

00:27:59.440 They would get on a bicycle and launch an expedition.

00:28:01.900 I mean, it makes you, like, hate yourself and modern life and turns you into a sort of, like, Luddite who worships the uncontacted tribes.

00:28:14.120 And, like, you should just go run naked into the forest and see how easy it is.

00:28:17.860 But, I mean, seriously, go do that.

00:28:19.880 Try that out.

00:28:20.660 Go do that.

00:28:21.460 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:28:21.960 Tie your dick up to your stomach.

00:28:23.900 Run out into the jungle and see how long you last.

00:28:26.780 That will teach you all kinds of good lessons.

00:28:29.980 But, no, I do hate that idea.

00:28:31.600 The idea of plague on the planet, though.

00:28:33.100 It's like, you know, we're part of the cycle of life.

00:28:36.900 We're part of nature.

00:28:38.560 Yeah, we can do it responsibly, and we ought to based on the position that we're in.

00:28:42.720 But we're part of this, and we don't get to extract ourselves from nature in the wild.

00:28:48.000 We're part of the deal.

00:28:49.200 It's a package deal.

00:28:51.460 Yeah, actually, the opposite is true.

00:28:53.440 I mean, not the opposite.

00:28:54.600 I'm saying exactly what you're saying.

00:28:55.660 We don't get to extract ourselves.

00:28:57.320 Exactly what you said.

00:28:58.120 We're part of it.

00:28:58.880 And so sort of the radical responsibility is going, all right, our population is tremendous

00:29:04.500 right now.

00:29:05.800 There's not, you know, eight billion people on Earth.

00:29:09.880 You know, if you're in a colony, you're a hunter, you know.

00:29:12.620 I mean, there's millions and billions of worms and salamanders, and then there's, you know,

00:29:18.400 sparrows and rats.

00:29:19.800 And then there's a few eagles and a few herons, a few foxes, a couple of coyotes, a bunch of

00:29:26.620 deer.

00:29:27.040 It's like, and as you go up to the apex predators, the sort of food pyramid of the ecology gets

00:29:34.640 smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.

00:29:36.380 And as the pinnacle of the food chain, the top of the pyramid globally, we should exist

00:29:44.640 in smaller numbers, right?

00:29:47.540 And now if you look at all the big industrialists, you look at people like Elon Musk and all these

00:29:51.180 AI people that want to, you know, get to other planets and fuel their billions and their global

00:29:57.100 takeovers, what they're trying to do is encourage, they say, there's not enough people on Earth.

00:30:01.020 Well, that's, that's, that's called human farming.

00:30:03.880 That's when they say, we need more.

00:30:05.860 I need more customers is what we need.

00:30:08.280 There's way too many people on Earth for the carrying capacity of ecosystems.

00:30:12.900 Speaking as an ecologist, you can only have so many tigers in one patch of boreal forest

00:30:18.060 before there's too many tigers and they eat all the deer and then the ecosystem collapses.

00:30:22.200 Just like you can only have so many elephants.

00:30:25.000 Even from a conservation point, as a hunter, you know, you have wildlife departments looking

00:30:30.020 at how many deer need to be harvested that year based on the population.

00:30:34.240 And sometimes it's fewer and sometimes it's more, you know, so.

00:30:40.680 And so like looking at that and looking at humans, we're, we're not living in, in any,

00:30:48.040 with any kind of respect to the laws of nature in terms of that we've just reproduced until

00:30:55.860 we cover the Earth.

00:30:57.000 Now, 70% of the, I, the, the Earth that's not under ice is, is under human management.

00:31:02.820 It's roads, farms, cities, something, you know, where, where the ecologist E.O.

00:31:07.820 Wilson, who discovered something like 300 species of ants and wrote all kinds of ecological

00:31:13.080 literature had the half Earth theory that at least half of the Earth needs to be ecosystems

00:31:17.740 as it always was.

00:31:19.260 It was always, nature was big, tribes of humans.

00:31:23.960 Nature is big, cities of humans.

00:31:26.200 And in between those cities was supposed to be nature.

00:31:29.980 And the tree, the trees make the rain, the rain makes the rivers, the rivers make the salmon,

00:31:35.860 we eat the salmon, we get the rain on our crops.

00:31:38.460 There's balance.

00:31:39.140 And the thing is, we've thrown that all out of balance.

00:31:41.560 And so we, we can restore that balance.

00:31:44.100 But, but right now I think everyone, everyone is very, very delirious because they're all

00:31:49.060 on TikTok.

00:31:51.200 Man, I want to take a step away from the conversation very briefly.

00:31:54.280 I've talked a lot about the men's forge.

00:31:56.520 This, guys, we're doing this in April.

00:31:58.180 It's not just another event.

00:31:59.260 It's a crucible.

00:32:00.100 It really is.

00:32:01.100 It's for men who are ready to step out of their distraction, their, their comfort in life,

00:32:06.640 passive living, those men who want to build strength and purpose and conviction.

00:32:12.480 And over this transformative weekend, we're gathering together to sharpen one another

00:32:16.520 through really difficult and challenging, confrontational, adversarial, even type conversations,

00:32:22.980 very deep, intentional connection frameworks that turn good intentions into actually commitments

00:32:29.780 and action.

00:32:30.340 And this isn't about surface level motivation.

00:32:33.940 It's about confronting the realities of responsibility.

00:32:37.140 Like we're talking about today on this podcast and leadership and legacy and courage and, and

00:32:42.920 discipline.

00:32:43.900 This year's forge is going to be even better because we just, uh, secure Dwayne Noel for

00:32:51.680 the event.

00:32:52.900 And he's a leader whose life reflects all of the resilience and accountability and integrity

00:32:57.980 that, that we champion here.

00:33:00.660 But he brings a powerful voice.

00:33:02.340 It's all about lived experience, teaching men how to wrestle with pain and own their story

00:33:06.800 and transform their struggles into strength and conviction and success.

00:33:12.620 So men should definitely intend not to escape their challenges, but to confront them.

00:33:18.300 You're going to be able to forge deeper brotherhood.

00:33:20.160 You're going to be able to strengthen your capacity as a man and your, in your family and

00:33:23.480 your community and in yourself.

00:33:24.620 And, uh, we're going to walk away with a clearer sense of what it means to be a man that has

00:33:31.180 fulfillment in his life and a man worth following.

00:33:33.580 Check it out at themensforge.com.

00:33:36.180 That's themensforge.com, April 23rd and 26th of this year, 2026.

00:33:42.380 All right, guys, let's get back to it with Paul.

00:33:45.980 How do you, so is this something that you think though?

00:33:48.940 And I've had this thought and I'm sure you've pondered on it a lot more than I have, and it

00:33:52.460 actually worked towards the solution to it.

00:33:54.540 Are these types of things with, like you're saying, overpopulation of the planet, do they

00:33:59.220 self-correct, you know, between famine and disease and war and genocide?

00:34:05.620 And I'm not advocating for any of that by any means, but that seems like it will naturally

00:34:09.800 take place as resources become more scarce.

00:34:12.960 And there's more and more people fighting over the same resources.

00:34:18.920 I mean, this is, this seems like what would happen in nature.

00:34:22.500 Yeah.

00:34:22.940 But that in our, in our, in our, again, like you said, like I, we like to have friends and

00:34:28.220 sledgehammers and cameras and Netflix.

00:34:30.820 And like, there's certain things about being a human right now that are awesome.

00:34:34.100 Heart transplants.

00:34:35.060 Like, you know, we like that sort of stress and destiny, ecosystemic Serengeti, like nature

00:34:43.860 will regulate you sort of thing.

00:34:46.080 The dark ecologists will say that, but again, we have to grow up.

00:34:51.540 There's not, we don't, we don't want to wait until the world is in post-apocalyptic meltdown

00:34:57.760 and different countries go back to, you know, there's that, that haunting statement where

00:35:02.120 they're like, world war three, what is it won't be on TV.

00:35:06.560 There won't be any TVs.

00:35:07.720 And it's like, you know, in world war four where we fought with sticks and it's like,

00:35:11.240 great, that sounds really scary.

00:35:13.580 Or we could just optimize.

00:35:15.680 We're super smart and just start making sure that we don't continue to overpopulate, respect

00:35:20.720 the ecosystems that we still have rain, manage our farmland, protect our ecosystems and

00:35:27.500 our forests and our wildlife.

00:35:28.940 They're the reason that we have fresh air and drinkable water.

00:35:32.120 Our ocean fisheries, no more dragnets, the oceans.

00:35:35.260 And this is the thing that people don't realize.

00:35:36.820 If you don't take a chainsaw and cut down a tree, chances are it ain't going to fall over.

00:35:40.740 If you don't go massacring tigers, they're not going to forget how to hunt deer and die.

00:35:47.540 They've been here for millions of years.

00:35:49.680 And the Amazon's been around for something like 50 million years.

00:35:53.620 And it's been providing climactic stability and a fifth of our planet's fresh air and a fifth of our planet's fresh water and a fifth of our planet's oxygen and all of the medicines that come out of it and all the endangered species that live in it.

00:36:08.160 And then you have, again, you have people trying to scramble and confuse.

00:36:14.780 You have new people coming out with new theories and they go, what if the Amazon was man-made?

00:36:20.280 And then they write a paper about it and then they get a career from it.

00:36:23.540 And that's a whole thing right now.

00:36:24.540 There's a show out called Ancient Apocalypse where the guy goes and says, there's more settlements in the Amazon than people thought.

00:36:31.600 The Amazon is man-made.

00:36:34.040 And you go, oh, wow, that changes everything.

00:36:36.740 If the Amazon's not an ancient forest, well, then it's just a human garden.

00:36:40.880 And I've never seen it because I live in New York City.

00:36:44.320 And first of all, fly to the Amazon.

00:36:47.080 And they'll say the Amazon's explored.

00:36:49.340 Yeah, fly to the Amazon.

00:36:52.040 Yeah.

00:36:53.040 Find a river.

00:36:54.540 From that river.

00:36:56.440 Now fly directly up in a helicopter and look straight.

00:36:59.160 All you see is forest from horizon to horizon.

00:37:01.560 And the next river might be 100, 150 miles away.

00:37:04.900 No one, certainly no one modern from our tribe with our education, our scientists, has made it more than two hours that way.

00:37:15.800 That's how difficult it is.

00:37:17.140 You can't see 10 feet in front of you.

00:37:18.780 And walking with a machete, you go about one kilometer an hour.

00:37:21.860 Even with the most expert trackers and jungle people.

00:37:26.940 And so if you think that people have been multiple day expeditions into the middle of the – in between the rivers, the terra firma forests, they have not.

00:37:35.800 And so the problem is, is because people can't see it for themselves.

00:37:41.220 Whoever controls the narrative on the Amazon, they say the Amazon was man-made.

00:37:44.660 You go, wow, damn, I didn't know that.

00:37:46.460 It's not true.

00:37:48.320 The Amazon is not man-made.

00:37:49.620 What they found was that there are more –

00:37:51.480 What does that even mean?

00:37:53.080 Well, what they said was that they found there's more geoliths like earth sculptures and there's terra preta, which is ancient farming materials.

00:38:03.540 Farming, gardening.

00:38:03.840 Sort of black soil.

00:38:05.080 Yeah.

00:38:05.240 And, of course, by the confluence of rivers where you had large villages and small civilizations, there are – they've planted certain trees more, like fruiting trees and bananas and some Brazil nut trees in those areas.

00:38:21.540 Right.

00:38:22.020 Makes sense.

00:38:22.400 Makes sense.

00:38:22.540 And there's – you can still see that.

00:38:24.700 And they say, well, there's more of that than we had previously thought, which is great.

00:38:29.700 That's what they're discovering.

00:38:31.340 But if you imagine a football field and you flip a penny onto the football field and you go, that's the amount of human habitation we thought used to be in ancient Amazonia compared to a football field.

00:38:43.880 They're going – they're throwing five more pennies onto the field and they're going, wow, it's a lot more than we used to think.

00:38:49.520 Like, and then somehow by the time it gets to the news, it's – the entire thing was made by humans.

00:38:56.100 Wild.

00:38:57.780 Wild.

00:38:58.500 And so people – there's this thing today where people are forgetting the simple truths that we all used to know, like the basics.

00:39:05.580 You know, I just – there's a lot of this conspiracy thought and people are, you know, just flying off the handle with like, you know, not really being tethered to – you know, like you have like the moon landing deniers,

00:39:16.800 even though you can look in a telescope and see the debris on the moon.

00:39:20.620 Like this is really easily solvable, guys.

00:39:22.520 Like get off the internet.

00:39:24.440 Get outside.

00:39:25.300 Once again, get outside.

00:39:26.880 Get a telescope.

00:39:27.780 And better yet, find an old guy with a telescope who knows things that you can learn from.

00:39:32.720 Yeah, good point.

00:39:34.300 So is your concept – and I'm not doing this justice when I say this.

00:39:39.240 You had said something earlier.

00:39:40.760 I can't remember what exactly you said, but it reminded me or made me think that maybe your thought is, hey, we can just leave this alone.

00:39:48.400 We don't have to manage it.

00:39:49.900 We don't have to do anything with it because how arrogant is it for us to believe that we can go in and manage an ecosystem like the Amazon or any other wild habitation and do it better than the tigers is the example you used.

00:40:03.440 Yeah, and so I always mix – I mix my elephants and tigers and everything because I've worked with elephants and everything in Africa.

00:40:11.340 But in the Amazon, we have jaguars.

00:40:13.240 But yes, in a lot of cases – now, anybody who's in the conservation world right now, there's someone who's slamming their hands on the desk and going,

00:40:21.780 we have to restore the populations of endangered turtles.

00:40:24.660 They need human – yes, yes, yes.

00:40:26.340 There's certain times you need human intervention to bring back a threatened population.

00:40:30.560 But when you come to a wild area of wilderness like the Amazon, exactly, the challenge becomes enforcing that others of our species leave it alone.

00:40:43.940 That's the conservation challenge.

00:40:45.560 My job is making sure that my species doesn't destroy the forest.

00:40:51.240 If I do nothing, if we do nothing to that forest, those thousand-year-old trees will continue to grow and make more trees.

00:40:59.300 And the birds will keep transporting pollen and flowers and the bats and the jaguars and the anteaters, the reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals.

00:41:06.200 Everybody will continue doing their jobs for the rest of time.

00:41:10.040 It's only when the stupid humans come in with a bulldozer and knock it all over and burn it to the ground and decide that we need to grow papayas on it or some more cocaine, then you have a problem.

00:41:21.880 And so my job is making sure that it's left alone because it's been left alone since long before we got here.

00:41:30.000 And it's only now that with our – as technology improves and as population expands and that pressure from – that there's – Latin America is growing and you have these people that go, I don't know how else to make money.

00:41:41.280 And I got two kids and I got a wife to feed and they go, you know what?

00:41:44.800 My dad was a logger.

00:41:46.020 And I'll go out there and cut some more trees and sell them.

00:41:48.260 And, of course, now China just built a shipping port near Lima in Peru.

00:41:54.640 Oh, really?

00:41:56.220 Yeah, and they want to start sucking the resources.

00:41:58.240 For wood in particular?

00:41:59.780 For wood, gold, resources, everything, medicines from the Amazon.

00:42:03.280 I mean it's going to be a lot like – remember that movie Independence Day where the aliens show up and they're like, we just go from planet to planet taking all of its resources and then we move on.

00:42:12.100 It's – it's – the idea of Asian markets having a direct access line to the Amazon is horrifying.

00:42:21.620 That's like giving a vampire access to your arteries.

00:42:25.400 Yeah, but I mean again, unless somebody stops it, it's just going to happen.

00:42:29.180 I mean that's – yeah, that's a – okay, so how do you stop it?

00:42:34.260 I mean I know there's – is it legislation?

00:42:36.920 Is it awareness?

00:42:37.920 Is it – I mean I know it's multifaceted.

00:42:39.780 Obviously, you've been doing it for what, two decades at this point.

00:42:43.520 What are the most potent ways to protect the Amazon?

00:42:47.740 I mean most potent ways that we found is storytelling.

00:42:54.280 One of my favorite examples was Hunt Oil and I think it was Chevron at the time had gone to this really high valley right at the edge of the Amazon where it meets the Andes Mountains.

00:43:06.080 And it was this beautiful valley, the Condamo Valley where they said no one had ever been in terms of that no civilization, no tribal group.

00:43:13.800 There was no fossils.

00:43:15.220 The few archaeologists and scientists that went up there, they said this place, as best we can tell, has never been – had humans in it.

00:43:23.980 Not for any significant period of time.

00:43:25.640 Maybe someone had rafted a river.

00:43:27.160 But this forest in either direction for thousands and thousands of miles, this basin is completely virgin.

00:43:33.840 Of course, an oil company showed up and they go, we want to drill right in there.

00:43:38.280 And the conservationists are 10 years into making a national park.

00:43:41.080 They're trying to protect this, convince the government, convince the locals, get the funding, buy the land, all this stuff.

00:43:47.860 Oil company comes in and goes, well, we want to drill right in the middle of it.

00:43:52.980 Conservationists were smart.

00:43:53.900 They said, listen, if you drill in the middle of it, don't build a road.

00:44:01.100 Just don't build.

00:44:01.800 So instead of making enemies and like protesting and like throwing paint on their bulldozers, like all that.

00:44:08.100 That just pisses everybody off.

00:44:10.060 That just pisses everybody off and makes them want to punch in the mouth.

00:44:13.500 Yeah, now you're an enemy.

00:44:14.700 Instead, they went and sat down with the executives at the oil company and said, look, use a helicopter to bring your stuff in.

00:44:23.900 Make your well.

00:44:25.380 If you find the oil, we'll talk about next steps.

00:44:28.440 And maybe we could just make a direct pipeline.

00:44:30.260 But no road.

00:44:30.940 If you make a road, all the local people are going to go in, the gold miners, loggers, the narco traffickers.

00:44:35.140 They can't get through the jungle.

00:44:36.660 So if you guys go in with the helicopter, explore for your oil, see what happens.

00:44:40.320 And the environmentalists were so helpful.

00:44:42.780 I mean, you had big, you know, Conservation Internationals, the Andy's Amazon Fund.

00:44:46.840 You had some real people working on this.

00:44:48.360 And at the same time, while all this was happening, they made a documentary.

00:44:52.900 And they got some local people and they sent them there.

00:44:55.060 And they just made this beautiful film about the Condamo Valley and three friends going camping in the wildest place on earth.

00:45:02.400 And it was the most played documentary ever in Peru.

00:45:07.280 It was pretty much 24-7.

00:45:08.600 And Peru was like, we had no idea this amazingly wild place was in our country.

00:45:13.980 We're so proud of it.

00:45:15.180 And at the same time, the oil company didn't really find the oil they were hoping for.

00:45:19.460 And they actually helped double the size of the park when it was made into a national park.

00:45:24.040 And it exists to this day.

00:45:26.500 But there's an example where it's like it just takes forethought.

00:45:31.100 It takes a lot, a lot of work.

00:45:32.540 But it can be done.

00:45:33.640 John Muir brought Teddy Roosevelt out to the Yosemite Valley and showed him the sequoias.

00:45:38.280 And showed him Yosemite and said, we got to protect it.

00:45:40.280 Because if we don't, they will cut down these giant trees and we'll never get them back.

00:45:46.600 And now we still have sequoias.

00:45:48.640 Yeah.

00:45:49.180 We're just doing that.

00:45:50.640 It is cool.

00:45:51.440 It is cool, though, because you don't hear that side of it.

00:45:54.140 You mostly what we hear, and this might be, like you said, social media, where you hear the protesters tying themselves to trees and equipment and pouring paint on everything.

00:46:03.660 And it's like, you know, why are you creating enemies now?

00:46:07.380 And now everybody hates you.

00:46:08.840 Even the people who believe in your mission hate you because you're a miserable person.

00:46:12.340 But this is interesting, though.

00:46:13.540 I like this idea.

00:46:14.660 It's a very pragmatic approach, and it seems reasonable.

00:46:17.720 Like, we are humans, and we do require resources, and we are consumers.

00:46:22.580 But it seems like a more reasonable, intelligent approach to meet the needs of, well, all of our needs.

00:46:28.980 Having the rainforest and having access to products that drive the world and innovation.

00:46:36.100 Yeah.

00:46:36.540 Yeah, you just can't be extreme.

00:46:38.020 Like, nobody likes watching.

00:46:39.240 Like, I don't even like, I mean, I'm from, I'm a New Yorker.

00:46:41.220 I don't like walking anywhere where there's protesters, let alone environmental protesters, where they're, you know, chaining themselves to the street or pouring blood on themselves and acting like a sea lion.

00:46:53.440 And like, that's, that doesn't get me on your side.

00:46:56.120 That just makes me want you to be arrested.

00:46:59.060 Like, I just am not interested.

00:47:00.360 And like, you know, or like, when I meet people, and now I'm working with a lot of big funders and, you know, publicly facing conservationists, and I'll go shake hands with someone, and I'll say, I really want to save the Amazon with you.

00:47:13.040 I'll go, thank you so much.

00:47:13.980 And they'll go, you're a vegan, right?

00:47:15.620 And I'm like, whoa.

00:47:18.460 That, that was like, what else do you want to know?

00:47:22.440 And, and first of all, no.

00:47:25.080 It's like, it's like I eat monkey face when I'm in the Amazon.

00:47:28.280 I'm not even close.

00:47:30.680 But yeah, no, that, that type of, of activist environmentalism is not interesting to me.

00:47:36.740 I'm way more with the, the, the, the scientists I know who are at the cutting edge, who are doing the real work in conservation, are working with ecology numbers.

00:47:45.320 They understand you have to sit down with the industrialists and figure out a solution that works for everybody.

00:47:50.080 Sometimes you have to protest.

00:47:51.480 There's a place for that.

00:47:52.180 I mean, look, if I found out that somebody was going to, you know, bulldoze Sequoia National Park, you know, the administration change, we're going to disband the national parks, and we're going to just burn it down.

00:48:03.900 I mean, I would be right there in front of the bulldozers, guerrilla warfare, let's go.

00:48:09.080 Sometimes you have to protect, you know, direct action.

00:48:12.220 But to me, like going to the middle of a city and like trying to raise awareness by spreading distress for something that's happening thousands of miles away is not, is not, that's not it.

00:48:22.680 Well, I hope he's really going to buy into it.

00:48:24.660 Like there's, do you know Donnie Vincent?

00:48:28.440 Donnie Vincent.

00:48:29.680 Yes, I do know Donnie Vincent.

00:48:31.160 I've even messaged with him a little bit.

00:48:33.500 Yes.

00:48:33.860 Yeah, he, he's incredible.

00:48:35.140 He's, he's an avid hunter, but he's, he's a conservationist, a conservationist as well.

00:48:39.080 So, yes, and he, he is, he's great.

00:48:42.460 And he, I can't remember exactly how he phrases it, but he says, you can't fix problems from the fringes.

00:48:48.520 Like you have to actually be in the environment to fix problems.

00:48:52.320 And I'm, and I'm butchering the way he said it.

00:48:54.100 He said it much more eloquently than I did, but I thought that was really powerful because it's really easy to sit in my office and sit here or, you know, and, and, and talk about what needs to be changed and what needs to be fixed, but then not really willing to do anything about it.

00:49:07.380 That's actually part of the reason I like hunting.

00:49:09.920 I wouldn't say I'm actively engaged in the, the battle conservation efforts, but I pay taxes on my, my firearms and my, my bullets and I pay licenses and registrations and all of that goes towards conservation.

00:49:24.940 I'm actively engaged in it where most people are just talking about it.

00:49:28.240 A hundred percent.

00:49:30.620 And I mean, hunters, that's the thing that people don't understand is like hunters are one of the reasons that we still have wild lands on this, on this, in this country.

00:49:39.960 And, and, and all these, all these irate city people who are like, you know, living on adaptogens and trying to, you know, be a vegan.

00:49:48.520 They've never had an elk steak and they've also never gone on a hike with a hunter who's been out there for 40 years and learned from his father.

00:49:55.020 Um, and never understood that, that those are the people that are advocating to keep those lands wild.

00:50:02.200 Yeah.

00:50:02.560 And so it's, uh, it's, it's very interesting to me because I, I get, I get it, I get from both sides, you know, of course, of course, I mean, there's sort of, I look at this, like the scientific conservationists, there's the emotional conservationists, and then there's the hunters.

00:50:16.920 And it's like, and then you have like, you know, this, this different, this, cause like the scientists are like, look, I mean, I just, I just messaged someone who's like one of the arch wizards of conservation.

00:50:26.620 He's protected more land.

00:50:28.600 He's like nine times the amount of land that I have.

00:50:30.900 He's one of the guys I look up to.

00:50:32.600 And I was like, you know, they're taking our river.

00:50:34.620 And he was like, look, man, like, you just gotta, you gotta do this.

00:50:37.480 You gotta do this.

00:50:37.980 You gotta do this.

00:50:38.500 You're going to lose a bunch of your dipteric species, your iron woods.

00:50:41.740 He's like, but then that, that market's going to collapse eventually in five more years.

00:50:45.900 And he's like, then you're going to do this.

00:50:47.280 And I was like, whoa, it's like listening to a general be like, look, you gotta take that hill.

00:50:53.520 You're going to lose 45 of your men.

00:50:55.260 But once you take that hill, you can get the cavalry down there.

00:50:57.640 And it's like, he's not losing his mind.

00:51:00.520 It's only when you get out into the public where you see people like literally losing their mind with grief and, and, and this panic.

00:51:10.380 Right.

00:51:10.780 Where it's like, no, no, no, just again, just, just either start helping pick up a shovel or shut up.

00:51:17.380 That's a, there was this big, um, there was a big, it was, I think it was middle of last year sometime, maybe the beginning of the year, a big public lands dispute.

00:51:25.260 Um, here in Utah.

00:51:26.320 And I think there was other five state, five other States involved.

00:51:28.720 I don't know how much acreage, but there was such an upheaval from the hunting community, uh, that they, the government said, all right, fine, we're not doing it.

00:51:37.940 And it was a huge thing for public lands.

00:51:41.260 Yes.

00:51:41.700 I remember that because I remember in the morning of, of day one, whatever it was, somebody told me like, yo, in the, in the U S they're opening tons of public lands to development.

00:51:52.500 And they were like, this is the end of days.

00:51:54.860 Like even the things that were protected, I was like, God, that's horrible.

00:51:57.540 And then like three days later, they're like, yeah, that's done.

00:52:02.040 That's not happening.

00:52:02.740 That's done.

00:52:03.120 Next.

00:52:03.620 Yep.

00:52:03.920 That was amazing.

00:52:05.860 So that was cool to see.

00:52:07.020 And there was a lot of really powerful, influential people.

00:52:10.840 Um, you know, like, like Joe Rogan got involved, Cam Haynes, like these, these guys who are very influential, loud voices in the, in the world.

00:52:19.400 And you know, when they get, when you get people like that involved, things start to change.

00:52:23.680 Was there a, uh, you said you, you went into the Amazon when you were 18 years old.

00:52:28.600 Was there a, a catalyst moment for you or was it, you saw enough and you gradually got introduced or, or had you been introduced to the Amazon or was it like, Nope, I'm doing it.

00:52:40.120 And just burn all the boats and let's get after it.

00:52:44.060 It was definitely burn all the boats.

00:52:46.140 I dropped out of high school.

00:52:47.640 Yeah.

00:52:48.620 I mean, I dropped out of high school and, um, went there as a research volunteer just cause I had to see it.

00:52:56.380 I grew up obsessed with it.

00:52:57.940 I grew up absolutely obsessed with this idea that there was this really wild place.

00:53:04.680 Cause I used to do wilderness solos in upstate New York and I'd go out for a whole weekend with just a steak and a golden retriever.

00:53:12.600 And we would, you know, get lost.

00:53:14.660 But it's like, again, you couldn't drink from the streams that bothered me.

00:53:18.720 They're like, no, the streams are polluted.

00:53:20.320 They'd be like, you couldn't even eat the snow.

00:53:22.140 They're like, snow is, I was like, how is snow polluted?

00:53:25.740 It comes from the air.

00:53:26.840 Like I just was so indignant about, I was like, man, imagine telling the Native Americans, like, you can't eat the snow.

00:53:33.240 You can't put some maple sap on the snow and eat it.

00:53:37.360 That's one of the greatest, simplest joys on earth.

00:53:39.540 And, and like, that drove me crazy.

00:53:42.820 And so I was like, you know what?

00:53:43.960 And then also I was always in detention.

00:53:45.900 I was always suspended because I didn't want to sit in a classroom.

00:53:49.740 And then there was kind of two catalysts.

00:53:51.580 One, one of my friend's mothers, she said, you know, you think you don't like your desk now?

00:53:55.500 She goes, wait till you get out into the real world and get your office desk.

00:53:58.960 And I was like, I'm not going to get in.

00:54:00.220 She goes, everyone does in the end.

00:54:01.880 And I was like, I was like, not me.

00:54:06.420 I dropped out of high school.

00:54:09.360 My parents said I had to go to college.

00:54:10.840 So I was like, yeah, I'll be back for a semester.

00:54:12.620 But I went to the Amazon and I started doing, acting as a research volunteer at this extremely remote research station.

00:54:21.020 I made sure I found a place where there were no rules.

00:54:23.740 There was absolutely no rules.

00:54:25.800 There's a two day boat journey to get there.

00:54:27.680 They're like, you're going to risk your life to get there.

00:54:29.520 It's like going to Antarctica.

00:54:30.520 They're like, it's very, very hard to reach.

00:54:33.260 And once you get there, there's no communication with the outside world.

00:54:36.340 So if you're in for that and you can do like six hours a day of staring at birds and not jotting down the weather and how many birds and climate data and stuff, I was like, I'm bad.

00:54:44.880 And then what the rest of the day, like the rest of the day, you can go do whatever you want.

00:54:48.360 If you die, it's on your time.

00:54:49.820 I was like, well, that's great.

00:54:51.860 I mean, that's every young man's dream.

00:54:53.720 Endless adventure.

00:54:55.640 And no one to chase you and whine, you know.

00:54:58.020 You know, even in Africa, it's like, you know, it's like you drive around in the game drive vehicles and you're like, there's an elephant.

00:55:04.020 And it's like, yeah, if you ever step foot on the ground, you have like game wardens.

00:55:07.840 You get thrown out of that country.

00:55:09.180 You get fined for putting everybody at risk.

00:55:11.980 The liability.

00:55:12.980 Was it respectful to the animals?

00:55:15.340 Really?

00:55:15.620 Got to the Amazon.

00:55:17.020 Got to the Amazon.

00:55:18.820 There's nothing.

00:55:20.220 You can do whatever you want.

00:55:22.020 And that sort of thing where it was like, man, you want to raft down that river and see what's over there?

00:55:26.980 And I was like, uh-huh.

00:55:28.300 And people would be like, well, we don't really know what's over there.

00:55:30.640 So like, go for it.

00:55:32.280 Let us know when you get back.

00:55:34.520 Yeah.

00:55:34.760 But also like, no one's like, hey, man, I'm accountable for your safety.

00:55:37.620 Like, I'm going to need you to sign a waiver.

00:55:39.160 And like, you know, even like when you go to a national park, you have to fill out the backcountry waiver that's like, you know, if you don't come back, they'll come looking for you, which is a nice system.

00:55:48.940 But I think at that age, I think that what a lot of kids feel is you're 17 years old and you have this philosopher's brain and you have the body of a warrior and you got this drive to go out and do something.

00:56:05.880 And I think that as a species, that's why Native American cultures would send children out on a vision quest, go out in the wilderness and survive and only come back when, you know.

00:56:17.060 And so I think I needed to do that.

00:56:19.420 And I did a bunch of those.

00:56:20.500 And I did a bunch of solo expeditions.

00:56:22.240 I just started spending time out in the middle of nowhere.

00:56:26.820 And that felt really, really good.

00:56:28.700 And I could drink the water from the stream and I could hunt fish for piranha.

00:56:32.300 And I could, you know, just that feeling of seeing nothing human and there's no one around.

00:56:37.660 And I mean, this is a basic thing.

00:56:39.880 This is what Thoreau was sort of trying to get to when he was living in that cabin.

00:56:44.080 He was like, I just want the simple life where I chop wood.

00:56:47.800 And it's like, great.

00:56:48.680 I wanted it even simpler.

00:56:50.140 I wanted a life where I have no wood.

00:56:52.180 I wanted to run from thunderstorms and raft down the rivers and just try to catch fish with my hands.

00:56:56.920 I wanted to go uncontacted tribe level.

00:57:00.040 And I did.

00:57:00.740 Man, that is what I'm sure you've had tons of close encounters.

00:57:05.960 Is there is there a moment where you thought this is the end?

00:57:10.240 I'm I'm going to die right now and I need to make peace with that in the next several seconds or minutes because it's over.

00:57:19.620 Yeah, lots of those.

00:57:21.200 The first one that comes to mind is the first time I caught a large anaconda.

00:57:27.320 I grabbed its head.

00:57:29.760 Because, you know, you catch a rat snake or something.

00:57:31.480 If you want to control it to show it to someone, you just grab it right behind the head and control it.

00:57:36.060 And there's no issue.

00:57:36.840 So you control the head.

00:57:38.340 You control the snake.

00:57:39.140 And so with a big anaconda that's as thick as, you know, this one is significantly bigger than my leg.

00:57:46.280 I would say not quite waist girth.

00:57:48.140 But big, 12 foot snake, 13 foot snake.

00:57:52.320 And I ran in and just grabbed it by the head.

00:57:54.400 And the first thing it did was wrap a pair of anaconda handcuffs around my arms.

00:57:58.600 And now my wrists were stuck together.

00:58:01.720 And I'm holding this dragon head that's, you know, the size of a dog.

00:58:05.780 And then I was like, I don't want to do this anymore.

00:58:08.300 I want to get out.

00:58:09.920 And I can't get out.

00:58:11.680 And now the snake is like, oh, you wanted me?

00:58:13.500 You got me.

00:58:14.080 Now let's go.

00:58:15.160 So the snake's trying to drag you to hell, take you down into the water and suffocate you.

00:58:19.460 The next coil went over the head and the neck and took the shoulders and started pulling the collarbones closer and closer and closer together.

00:58:28.420 And I was trying to call for help.

00:58:29.880 My friends were running.

00:58:31.460 And I could hear my collarbone, you know, like the way a stick sounds right before it snaps.

00:58:35.760 I could actually hear that sound.

00:58:38.640 And the only thing I could hear was my heartbeat, that sound.

00:58:41.360 And there was no breathing because you, you can't expand your lungs because they're like steel cables coming down on you.

00:58:47.200 And so I got within inches and seconds of being crushed by an anaconda.

00:58:52.040 And then my team came and started unwrapping that thing.

00:58:55.040 And I got to take this amazing gasp of air.

00:58:58.440 I mean, that was one of the closest.

00:59:00.200 That was, that was, that was a, that was a, that was scary.

00:59:03.040 I'm glad that I have that perspective.

00:59:07.960 I, uh, I pulled up your name as I was thinking about our conversation, just, just getting some information and seeing what angles we wanted to take and everything.

00:59:15.740 And it was funny.

00:59:16.740 I typed in Google, I typed, I typed something like, was Paul, you know, I put, put something like that in autofill that says eaten by an anaconda, eaten by a jaguar, eaten by, it was like 10 animals.

00:59:28.640 I'm like, I don't think he was eaten by him because he's going to be on the podcast this morning.

00:59:32.180 But it was pretty funny to see that, uh, you have a, uh, a history.

00:59:36.760 It sounds like of encountering dangerous predators, dangerous predators, dangerous herbivores.

00:59:43.420 I mean, elephants I've gotten in myself into trouble.

00:59:45.660 You have to be very careful there.

00:59:46.960 They're herbivores, but they don't want you scaring.

00:59:49.720 Like if you, if you make an elephant uncomfortable, they'll just crush you.

00:59:52.820 They're like, don't freak me out.

00:59:54.920 And if you freak me out, I'll just crush you.

00:59:57.400 Like everyone, everyone else in the jungle knows why aren't you getting it?

01:00:01.780 It's very good.

01:00:02.940 But, but no, man, I, I think that, that some of the, some of the points you brought up though are really important and haven't been sort of the thing that I've, you know, everyone wants to know the, the crazy stories and the uncontacted tribe.

01:00:14.640 And, and I think that this moment right now, like this, this sort of time in the journey from when I got to the Amazon, I was just a kid looking for adventures.

01:00:25.520 And now I'm the director of a major organization that's protecting so much of the Amazon with the local people.

01:00:31.860 Um, you know, that's, that's why I came out with the book that I wrote now.

01:00:36.100 And now have you, have you gotten to take a look at that?

01:00:38.960 I've, I've, I've perused it.

01:00:40.940 I've skimmed it.

01:00:41.500 I haven't read it yet.

01:00:42.180 I just got it a couple of days ago.

01:00:43.840 Yeah.

01:00:45.020 But for people listening, it's like, this is a story about someone that was wound up and felt caged in modern society and went to the wildest place on earth.

01:00:55.620 And this is now 20 years later that we've caught the Anacondas and gone on the solos and, and made deep connections with the local people.

01:01:04.880 And somehow we've been able to protect all this acreage and we're on the cusp of making a national park.

01:01:10.920 And so right now, as, as me, as me now, as no longer the kid that needs to go out and prove himself as, as the director of jungle keepers, I'm, I'm trying to tell people that we are almost halfway.

01:01:23.540 We're at 130,000.

01:01:25.560 We need to protect 300,000 acres.

01:01:28.520 And if we do that, the proving government says they will sign this entire river over into a national park.

01:01:35.500 Whoa.

01:01:36.060 And so that sort of pragmatic hope, you know, I met Jane Goodall in my, in my travels and Jane, Jane's message was always hope, hope, hope.

01:01:47.660 She went all around the world.

01:01:49.300 Her main message was hope and teaching the children hope because we live in times when people want to steal your hope.

01:01:58.660 And despair is the poison peddled by the darkness to take that away from you, to make sure that you are easy to control.

01:02:05.340 Because if you are hopeless, you will crawl into a, onto, into a ball on the floor and be, and just listen to what the people in the box tell you to say.

01:02:13.920 And so what Jane was saying was, no, continue to fight, continue to have hope and to look optimistically at things.

01:02:21.100 And I think that what we're doing is carrying on that legacy because we're, we're making a national park, we're protecting the tribe, we're protecting all the millions of heartbeats in the ancient trees and the wildest place on earth.

01:02:31.340 And we're doing it by connecting people to it.

01:02:34.860 And that's what my organization, Jungle Keepers does is we have, you know, a lot of organizations have donors, but we've become the most direct way to protect the Amazon rainforest.

01:02:44.780 We publish all of our data, all of our, all of how we use our donations.

01:02:48.960 And so I have, I just read this morning, a message from a woman, she said, she said, I'm a mother, I work two jobs.

01:02:54.760 She goes, but we give $5 a month to Jungle Keepers.

01:02:57.020 And it's like, well, that's, that's boots and tuna and gasoline for my rangers to protect the forest so that the bad guys don't get it.

01:03:05.140 And those rangers would be the bad guys if I wasn't giving them a good job.

01:03:09.720 That's a good point.

01:03:10.680 That's a very valid point.

01:03:12.480 We're getting people to be part of, instead of feeling upset about the world's dying, we're like, well, listen, you can help.

01:03:18.960 How do you, how do you move from protecting 130,000 acres to 300,000 acres?

01:03:26.720 Is it just a matter of the Peruvian government acknowledging that you have the manpower and resources and funding to do it?

01:03:33.520 Because why, why is it that you can't just say, we now protect these 300,000 acres?

01:03:37.880 Like, what does that actually mean?

01:03:39.240 No, no, no.

01:03:40.800 What people don't realize is, is even in the Amazon rainforest, at least in the region we work in, there are some ownership laws.

01:03:49.060 And so there are, you know, let's say there's a person that has a giant Brazil nut area and it's, you know, 20,000 acres.

01:03:58.000 And he might have just owned this from when Peru was forming as a country.

01:04:03.100 And now he's not making money off of it.

01:04:06.220 And maybe the government's taxing him every year on the massive land that he owns.

01:04:09.860 And so he's going to go, well, I want to earn something off of there.

01:04:13.080 So he's going to go contact a logging company and go, you know what, why don't you guys go cut down a bunch of trees?

01:04:17.920 I'll get the money.

01:04:19.460 Right.

01:04:19.980 And, and, and you guys get the wood.

01:04:22.080 And, and so he'll make a deal.

01:04:23.660 And so it's just like, it's just normal development.

01:04:26.180 And we just come in and go, look, all you loggers, you, Mr. Landowner, how much are you going to make off these loggers?

01:04:32.760 And he'll go, oh, I'm going to make, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars over the next five years off of this 20,000 acres.

01:04:37.360 And we go, listen, we'll pay you today, but no loggers.

01:04:42.020 And he goes, bet.

01:04:43.600 I love that.

01:04:44.460 Absolutely.

01:04:45.040 Yeah.

01:04:45.260 And, and cause he's going, instead of over five years, I get it today.

01:04:48.220 And we go, yes, but you have to help us protect it.

01:04:50.220 Sign over to jungle keepers, indigenous led organization.

01:04:53.140 It's protected.

01:04:54.220 And then for all the people all over the world, all the children that are like me growing up, who are worried about the rainforest, who feel bad about the fate of the planet.

01:05:03.920 We have people, $5, $10, a hundred dollars a month, people just giving us little bits.

01:05:08.620 I always say for the $5 one, it's like you spend at Starbucks every single day.

01:05:13.840 What if we had enough people giving us $5 a month, we could buy enough land.

01:05:19.160 We've been buying the land is the answer to your question.

01:05:21.220 We buy that land as a nonprofit.

01:05:23.760 We buy that land.

01:05:24.840 And as a Peruvian NGO, we keep it safe and let our rangers patrol it.

01:05:29.900 And then once we, once we amass the whole thing, we have to collect all the pieces.

01:05:34.320 Then the government said, if you can do that, then we'll help you.

01:05:38.360 So we're, we're fundraising and we depend on the people that, that send us those donations every month.

01:05:43.920 And that's how we make the loggers and gold miners turn into rangers.

01:05:46.920 That's where their salary comes from.

01:05:48.480 That's where the ability to buy land comes from.

01:05:51.380 And because we publish our, you know, how we use the, you know, 40% goes to land acquisition and then 30% goes to ranger pay.

01:05:59.080 And then here's admin.

01:06:00.240 And whereas like, I think people are also very let down by the fact that a lot of organizations, if you go in and look at what they do, name any, name any big organization.

01:06:10.260 It's like the, the, the, the top five people get paid half a million dollars a year and 90% of their budget goes to advertising.

01:06:18.620 So if you're giving a dollar to save the ocean or whatever these organizations want to do, right.

01:06:25.860 How much of your dollar is going to go to, to on the ground action.

01:06:29.580 And so we flipped that too.

01:06:31.120 We just said, look, we're going to, we're going to, you can see what we do and we're going to turn the loggers and gold miners into rangers.

01:06:37.240 And then we also went and built the tallest tree house on earth.

01:06:40.240 So if people want to come down and see it, they can stay in the canopy of the Amazon.

01:06:43.700 And yeah, it's like, we built this mega tree house.

01:06:47.040 It's got, you know, we have a bed, we have a shower, we have a toilet.

01:06:50.820 It's like a, it's a little luxury tree house in the top of the Amazon overlooking this really wild place.

01:06:56.820 And so for a lot of the people that, that help us protect it, then they go, well, I want to bring my family down and see it.

01:07:02.540 I don't just, I don't want to just be a bystander.

01:07:04.760 I don't want to just, you know, send your money every month and then not know what we're doing.

01:07:08.620 We're like, no, no, no, come see.

01:07:09.700 And then we have larger donors as well.

01:07:11.300 We have people who've helped us protect, you know, hundreds, you know, a few hundred acres at a time, thousands of acres at a time, 5,000 acres at a time.

01:07:20.280 Larger donors, you know, at like the hundred thousand dollar level who entire patches of the forest are protected because they themselves gave this one donation.

01:07:30.500 Yeah.

01:07:31.140 And so we bring, we bring them down and take them on a boat drive and show them the forest that's standing because they, they chose to use their resources to save it.

01:07:39.180 That's really cool.

01:07:40.060 Again, that speaks to the pragmatic magnetism of, you know, the tree house and, and having it, like having options and things like that available, I think make it a big appeal and draw.

01:07:49.940 And I'm glad that you clarified too, because yeah, I, I guess I just assumed much of the Amazon was just owned by the government.

01:07:58.020 I, I would not have known that.

01:07:59.820 So that's interesting.

01:08:00.540 I'm glad you clarified because that, that answers a lot of questions for me.

01:08:03.500 Yeah.

01:08:04.400 Yeah.

01:08:04.800 It's funny.

01:08:05.340 Cause I, I Instagram, I post a lot and I'm trying to, I'm trying to move towards YouTube.

01:08:09.820 Cause I can, I can, I can tell the stories with a little bit more context and with a little bit more time, but there's times where I'll be like, we just got, we just bought 20,000 new acres of the Amazon rainforest.

01:08:21.380 And most people are like, hell yeah, thank God it's safe.

01:08:24.860 We're happy to support.

01:08:25.860 Like I'm a jungle keeper.

01:08:27.240 Like this is the mission.

01:08:28.060 And there's always that one person that's like, how can anyone own the Amazon?

01:08:31.920 And I'm like, man.

01:08:33.460 Yeah.

01:08:35.440 You got a lot of work to do.

01:08:37.720 Yeah.

01:08:38.120 It's a real pretty idea.

01:08:40.800 But again, like modern world, when you get down there, it's like, thank God we have, we get it instead of the oil companies and the, and the narco traffickers.

01:08:48.240 And, um, but that's, again, it's the context, right?

01:08:51.880 It's trying to make people understand that there is an alternative to just being stressed about the fate of the world.

01:08:57.140 And that's, it's funny.

01:08:58.200 The publisher made me put on my book.

01:09:00.140 They made the, you know, I was like, I have to call this book jungle keeper.

01:09:03.820 Cause that's, that's the, the ethos.

01:09:06.040 That's the organization is jungle keepers.

01:09:08.400 And then they were like, they wanted the subtitle to be what it takes to change the world.

01:09:13.260 And I was like, that's a big subtitle.

01:09:16.460 And I was like, I don't know.

01:09:17.440 I was like, I don't know if I feel comfortable, you know, taking that on personally.

01:09:22.400 And they were like, no, but they're like, if you read this story, they're like, you were distressed child.

01:09:30.180 Now you are running an organization and working with the locals and employing all these people and taking this message global that it is not too late.

01:09:39.520 And now that we have the proof of the bald eagles and the humpback whales and tigers that are on the rise.

01:09:44.300 And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, people got it all wrong.

01:09:46.880 And so there really does need to be a recalibration and how people look at the fate of the world, especially the fate of the natural world and what their own individual responsibility and sort of call to action is what their own adventure is going to be.

01:09:58.140 Because we've never lived in a more exciting time in history.

01:10:01.820 Everything is possible and everything is about to – everything is threatened.

01:10:07.800 And we're that last generation that's going to be able to save these ecosystems.

01:10:10.760 And so that's a very challenging, very immediate and urgent threat that is going to require all hands on deck and everyone's innovation and everyone's sweat.

01:10:22.160 And that's not such a bad thing because we might actually end up healing as a global society and sort of transcending to the next level where we go, okay, wait.

01:10:31.400 Now we have all this technology and we have all these wild abilities and we can get from one side to the other side of the world in hours.

01:10:38.360 But now let's not kill all the polar bears and ruin all the fish.

01:10:44.320 Yeah, amazing.

01:10:46.040 You know, we have all this stuff.

01:10:47.360 And so I think we're at an amazing time in history.

01:10:50.040 So I appreciate you.

01:10:52.780 Yeah.

01:10:53.320 Of course.

01:10:54.240 Thank you.

01:10:54.620 Like I said, I've been following you for some time now and to be able to have the conversations on or for me.

01:10:58.580 Tell the guys where to connect with you.

01:11:01.120 Obviously, they can pick up a copy of Jungle Keeper.

01:11:03.740 But where would you like to direct them so they know more about your work and what you're up to?

01:11:08.360 Yeah, please check out my book, Jungle Keeper, What It Takes to Change the World, I think is the subtitle.

01:11:15.520 But the book is great.

01:11:18.080 I put 20 years into it.

01:11:20.740 Junglekeepers.org for everyone that – and I keep telling people – we have thousands of donors at this point.

01:11:26.660 But for every couple of thousand people that hear the message, it's only one or two that actually join the team.

01:11:34.260 And again, for the price of a cup of coffee a month, you can direct action.

01:11:39.640 And then after you're with us for a certain amount of time, you get a T-shirt.

01:11:42.500 And after you're with us for a certain amount of time, you get to come to the Amazon.

01:11:45.660 But junglekeepers.org to join the team.

01:11:49.060 Picking up the book helps a lot because it helps get the message out there.

01:11:52.480 The more publicity we get around that and the more we spread this story, it's absolutely incredible to be at this point now where we're on the cusp of doing something so big.

01:12:02.520 But I keep telling people it's like we fought so hard.

01:12:05.480 We're at the Super Bowl.

01:12:06.600 There's no guarantee we're going to win.

01:12:07.980 We still have to raise $20 million more to protect the rest of the Amazon – or the rest of this river basin that we're trying to save.

01:12:16.900 And we have to do that before the loggers and gold miners get there.

01:12:20.080 So we're in a race against time.

01:12:21.800 This is an unfolding battle.

01:12:23.460 We've come farther than we ever thought we were going to come.

01:12:26.140 But now we need help.

01:12:27.360 So we need people to come on board.

01:12:29.140 We need people to go to junglekeepers.org.

01:12:31.120 And we need people to not have the pessimism to go, oh, at the end of the day, all he wants us to do is like, dude, no.

01:12:37.080 This is not a forever project.

01:12:39.300 We're trying to get this done in the next year or two years.

01:12:42.600 And then we either win or we lose.

01:12:46.280 And so that's why I appreciate you having me on because the more people that hear about this, the more of a chance we have.

01:12:52.580 So very much appreciate it.

01:12:55.080 I mean I'm happy to help in some small way.

01:12:56.960 So we'll get this out to the guys.

01:12:58.580 Paul, I appreciate you and your hard work.

01:13:00.200 You're a really good example of what it means to pursue something meaningful.

01:13:03.440 I wish more people found some purpose in life, whether it's protecting the Amazon or doing something like this or whatever their thing is.

01:13:13.520 And I think you're shining as an example for guys to do that.

01:13:17.440 So I appreciate that from you.

01:13:18.620 Thanks for joining me today, man.

01:13:20.520 Thank you very much.

01:13:21.860 We'll talk again.

01:13:22.980 I'll see you in the Amazon.

01:13:24.480 Yes, I'd love to.

01:13:25.500 We'll make it happen.

01:13:26.280 Thanks, Paul.

01:13:26.640 There you go, gentlemen, my conversation with the one and only Paul Rosalie.

01:13:32.320 I hope you enjoyed this one.

01:13:33.720 This one was fascinating, so different.

01:13:36.320 But this is a man who lives by what he preaches.

01:13:38.960 He walks the walk.

01:13:40.080 He doesn't just talk it.

01:13:41.320 And I can respect a man like that.

01:13:44.020 I'm really excited about the work that he's doing.

01:13:46.100 And it was pretty enlightening to hear about contact with uncontacted Amazon tribes and what it actually means to own part of the Amazon, which was new and enlightening information for me.

01:13:58.240 And if you want to support what Paul's doing, definitely pick up a copy of his book because some of the proceeds go to his organization, Jungle Keepers.

01:14:04.920 And if you want to support directly and connect with those guys directly, then Jungle Keepers.org is the resource for that.

01:14:12.500 I hope you enjoyed it.

01:14:13.600 We've got some really, really great conversations coming up over the next several weeks and months.

01:14:17.440 And I would encourage you and ask, please humbly, that you share this podcast, you let other people know what you're listening to, and you get the word out.

01:14:25.440 Guys, we will be back tomorrow for our Ask Me Anything.

01:14:28.500 In the meantime, I hope you signed up for the Forge event.

01:14:30.600 Again, that's April 23rd through the 26th, 2026 at themensforge.com.

01:14:37.260 Come see me, Larry Hagner, Dwayne Noel, and we're going to have an incredible weekend.

01:14:42.840 All right, guys, we'll be back tomorrow.

01:14:44.280 Until then, go out there, take action, and become the man you are meant to be.

01:14:48.260 Thank you for listening to the Order of Man podcast.

01:14:51.200 If you're ready to take charge of your life and be more of the man you were meant to be, we invite you to join the order at orderofman.com.

01:15:00.600 Thank you.

Order of Man - February 03, 2026

PAUL ROSOLIE ｜ Guard What You Love, Or You'll Lose It

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript