In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with my good friend and environmentalist, Marshall McElroy, to talk about why he went to the Amazon rainforest, what it was like, and why he decided to go there in the first place he ever thought of going to the rainforest. We talk about how he got there, why he did it, and what it's like to live in the Amazon. It's a wild ride, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did making it. This episode was produced and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Build Buildings. The music featured in this episode was written, produced, and performed by Mark Phillips. It was edited and produced by Haley Shaw. We are working on transcribing this episode and putting it on SoundCloud. If you like what you hear, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and/or wherever else you re listening, and we'll make sure to include it in the next week's episode. Thank you so much for all the amazing work you've done so far! - Thank you for listening and supporting us in the podcast! - Your support is so appreciated, we really appreciate all the support we can't thank you enough, it really means a lot to us. - and we really do appreciate it. Thank you. xoxo, Sarah and Marshall. Timestamps. Love you, Sarah, too much, Kaylauren. <3 - Emily, Kristy, Ben, too, Rachel, and Jack, and the rest of the crew, too. -- Thank you, Emily, and so much so much, and thanks for listening to this episode, so much love you, and all the work you do so much more. XOXO, thank you, bye. Sarah, Caitlyn, Rachael, and Joe, and everyone else. Thanks so much. Cheers, Caitie, Jen, AJ, Natalie, and Gage, Margo, and Ben, etc, and Matt, and Jaxon, etc., etc., and so on. . - . . . (Thank you, Matt, JUICY, etc. , etc., and thanks, Sarah.
00:01:20.000I think it was in the House of Reptiles where there's all these scientists and they're holding a giant snake and they're doing research and they're protecting these places.
00:01:27.000And so I always had it in my head that I want to see these places before they're gone.
00:01:32.000I grew up with a lot of environmental stress.
00:01:34.000I really felt like this message of we're losing the rainforest, we're losing elephants.
00:01:43.000My parents would read me Jane Goodall's books as a kid, and again, things like the Bronx Zoo, Steve Irwin, and You know, and I loved, I grew up, you know, and having access to, like, New York and New Jersey.
00:01:56.000I mean, there's such incredible forests there.
00:01:58.000It's really, the New York, New Jersey forest thing.
00:02:01.000Like, people, for whatever reason, that don't live around there, they think New Jersey is, like, some vast wasteland.
00:02:07.000New Jersey's like more bears per capita than anywhere else in the country.
00:02:14.000I grew up like, you know, and then like you, by like 13 years old, I was like, you know, I had like a hunting knife and I would do one match and I'd bring my golden retriever into the woods and we'd do like a mini solo, two nights, you know, and I have to make a fire with that one match.
00:02:27.000And it's like, I was always doing shit like this.
00:02:29.000So you always had like a call to that kind of life.
00:02:32.000I always just rivers, streams, forests, tracking bears, trying to figure out where the fox's hole is.
00:02:39.000I liked spending time with animals in nature, and then it just drove me crazy that no matter how deep I would go in eastern forests, you always come out the other side.
00:02:49.000And I always was just like, I want to find somewhere where it's truly wild, where there's no limit to it.
00:02:56.000What's the highest you can turn this thing?
00:02:59.000And I was terrible in school, failed all my classes, severely dyslexic, all that.
00:03:03.000Actually, my wonderful parents were like, you do know that you can take a GED, skip the last two years of high school, and go straight to college.
00:03:31.000I mean, it's like they're telling you that there's Jurassic Park.
00:03:33.000There's literally anaconda dragons in these monster swamps, and there's harpy eagles taking howler monkeys, and there's all this incredible bustling life, and it's all vanishing.
00:03:42.000And I was like, well, I want to see it before it's gone.
00:05:50.000And again, the jungle is a place where there's a lot of stories.
00:05:54.000And so like you always hear stories about like who got bitten by a snake and this happened, who got, you know, and so like they have the snake Loro Machaco, which is they know it's a green snake.
00:06:04.000That's all that like the average logger or the average gold miner knows.
00:06:07.000I was just like literally two weeks ago I was out in the jungle and I was out and it was raining and there was a Loro Machaco next to my head with flicking its tongue next to my head and I was like oh cool I gotta bring this back and show them so I very carefully caught this viper and brought it back and they were like that's not it that's the boa and I was like oh god I can't help you people.
00:06:26.000But the rule is just kill every snake.
00:06:28.000And so I've always been this ambassador for snakes trying to get people to be like, you know, you have black snakes and gopher snakes and garter snakes and you show them to kids.
00:09:09.000And so it was like small time, just bringing some tourists to the jungle, showing them around, taking them on night walks, doing stuff like that.
00:09:23.000I wasn't like, I'm going to be a jungle keeper.
00:09:24.000I just went down there and was like, this is amazing, and I want more of it.
00:09:28.000And then at that age, people were like, what are you going to do for a job?
00:09:31.000And I was like, I don't know, but I'm going back to the jungle.
00:09:34.000And then as we saw more of the forest getting destroyed, The Trans-Amazon Highway cuts straight across the Amazon rainforest.
00:09:45.000You can drive from like Rio all the way to Lima.
00:09:47.000And so for the first time in history, they opened up a land trade route through the heart of the Amazon rainforest.
00:09:53.000And the final segment of the Trans-Amazon Highway was over the Madre de Dios River, which is right where we work.
00:10:02.000And so we saw the amount of cars in our region go from like 400 a day to like 800 a day to 2000 a day and all of a sudden these offshoot roads and all of a sudden the burning and all of a sudden places that used to be pristine and wild, all of a sudden we're seeing this horrific burning.
00:10:17.000Ancient trees cut down, entire ecosystems wiped out.
00:10:20.000And so then at that point I'm going, okay, it's not a joke anymore.
00:10:23.000We someone's got to do something about this and then you know you look And you realize you're in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.
00:10:29.000There is no one there's no help coming like these these ecosystems are gonna be bulldozed if nobody does anything so What regulations if any are in play obviously there's people that are gonna violate those but are there regulations that are designed to protect those areas is there is there like some sort of a process that someone has to go through before they start cutting logs like and The thing is,
00:10:54.000there's national parks, there's protected areas, there's indigenous reserves.
00:10:58.000I mean, we're in the country of Peru, and it's like, there's plenty, there's a lot of protected land.
00:11:02.000Peru's done an amazing job of protecting a lot of its rainforests.
00:11:06.000They have the most crucial part of the Amazon, because it's the western Amazon.
00:11:08.000It's where the Andes Mountains, the cloud forests, into the lowland Amazon.
00:11:12.000The most mega-biodiverse terrestrial habitat that's ever existed.
00:11:17.000They've done a great job of protecting it, but there's still millions of acres that are just jungle.
00:11:23.000And you're at the edge of human presence on our planet.
00:11:25.000So you're talking about like, okay, so you have a little city, and you have the police, and you have the forestry department, you have whatever else.
00:11:31.000The things around the city they can deal with.
00:11:33.000But if you tell them that two days upriver...
00:11:37.000Way out there, there's somebody cutting some forest that technically shouldn't be cut.
00:11:53.000So unless it's near them, unless it's in their jurisdiction, nobody does anything.
00:11:58.000And as we've found out now, even when it is in their jurisdiction, half the forestry department just got arrested in Peru for actually helping the loggers.
00:12:09.000Yeah, and then of course, down there you still have uncontacted tribes and you have places where there's giant anacondas and you have different territorial reserves.
00:12:16.000It's just like, it's such a weird landscape that the idea of like enforcement, like when we've had problems, when we've had issues where we have to bring law enforcement out there...
00:13:01.000That was when the Amazon fires went mega viral.
00:13:05.000And, excuse me, I threw up a video of me in the fires just like screaming and crying and being like, this is happening every fucking day and screaming.
00:13:16.000It went viral and at that time we had created jungle keepers and we had tried to protect, we had a little bit of rainforest we were protecting.
00:13:23.000I think we had like one or two rangers.
00:13:26.000And then you shared it on your Instagram.
00:13:29.000And then it hit this level, it like went to the next level of virality.
00:13:33.000I remember because my cousin Michael called me and he was just like, Joe Rogan just shared it!
00:13:37.000And I was like, that's not, there's no way that happened.
00:14:24.000I'm not going to be able to stay here long because this fire is spreading, but everything behind me right now is the forest that I've been working to protect for the last 13 years.
00:14:51.000So, when they're starting these fires to make clear cuts so they can raise cattle, like, what are they doing?
00:14:57.000Yeah, it's basically their space, so we're going to use it.
00:15:00.000And so, like, ideally a person, if they wanted to use that forest, you could harvest the ancient hardwoods there and make millions off of it.
00:15:08.000You could use that forest to do, like, multi-tiered agriculture where you're producing tons of produce.
00:15:31.000A lot of it is, they call it like Brazil nut concessions where it's just like areas where like you're supposed to be harvesting Brazil nuts.
00:15:38.000But a lot of times it is private land, but people, there's people coming from other parts of South America and they're just coming in and they're clearing these areas and it's happening fast.
00:16:21.000And so that's why that whole story was so important was because I was, you know, By that point, I was like 14 years into doing this with no support, no funding, no backing, no nothing.
00:16:31.000It was just me and the local guys, machetes, and bare feet.
00:16:34.000And then after that video went viral, after you shared it, we got contacted by Dax.
00:18:25.000Yeah, he went with them and they did that thing with the fish where they grind up the plants and they throw it in the water and the fish just get conked out.
00:19:03.000And we did a thing where we got into the gold mining areas, where that's a whole other thing, where they're clear-cutting the rainforest for gold mining.
00:19:26.000And so, yeah, you go there, there's like sort of this machine gun limit where, you know, you drive towards this area and then they have guards.
00:19:32.000And inside there, they have these, see there's that big hose going out.
00:19:35.000They have to cut the forest, burn the forest, suck up the land, and then the gold comes in the sediment in the sand.
00:19:41.000And so they have to use mercury to bind the gold out of the sand and then they burn that off.
00:21:01.000And our lawyer, or the guy that used to be the lawyer for Jungle Keepers, his father was very vocal locally about the gold miners and standing up to them.
00:21:15.000A really good friend of mine on the river, his father had moved out deep into the jungle like 20 years ago and raised his two boys out there.
00:21:25.000And then when this Trans-Amazon Highway came through, Uh, they saw the logging and the burning and that, you know, they wanted to live at the edge of the world.
00:21:34.000And so, uh, old man Satuko was like, you know, we're, we're gonna, we got to figure something out, either move deeper or move away or whatever.
00:21:41.000And like, they were trying to figure out what to do.
00:21:43.000And there was this one summer I spent a lot of time with his son.
00:21:54.000And then you have some of our guys now who are conservationists who used to be loggers who have shot at the uncontacted tribes and been shot at by arrows.
00:22:05.000One of my rangers has a scar on his head from a seven-foot arrow from the uncontacted tribes.
00:22:16.000Yeah, so they use the river cane, and then they take bamboo, and they get an incredible edge on the bamboo, and they can, it's like they temper it over the fire.
00:22:25.000So the river cane doesn't weigh anything, so they make these monster arrows, and they can actually, like, nail a spider monkey out of the trees from, like, you know, 40 meters.
00:23:20.000And he went out to the middle of the river and he pushed this thing and he said he saw the arrow coming straight at his eyeball and he just moved his head to the side.
00:23:26.000And it just gave him that, cut him right to the skull.
00:23:30.000Yeah, there's that one and then there should be one more where he's just looking right at us.
00:23:41.000One time he was at a remote guard post and the tribes came and he'd already gotten, I think he'd already gotten shot.
00:23:48.000And he said he went up into the roof and like hid in the rafters like and wrapped himself and he said it was the middle of the day and he was baking and he said he could hear the the uncontacted tribes underneath him and he was like trying to make the decision of do I kill myself like a dog in a car in this heat like he knew he was gonna die or do I go down and let them rip me apart and it was like it was just the most terrifying story but yeah like that how did he get out of it he waited it out I mean he'd already been shot in the head so he was like I know what's gonna happen if I go down there Also then,
00:24:18.000I'm also going to get, I'm going to get, everyone's going to come after me for calling them uncontacted.
00:25:44.000So the only way to get rubber was to start a full-scale genocide where they sent down these rubber barons that beat and whipped the native people and sent them out into the jungle to go collect rubber from the rubber trees for gaskets and hoses and everything that we needed.
00:26:23.000It is really fascinating that there's still people living essentially the exact same way they were living thousands and thousands of years ago.
00:26:40.000Yeah, they're very strange to deal with.
00:26:42.000Like, there was a guy who had started leaving them, like, bananas, and then he left them, like, a shirt.
00:26:47.000You know, he would just very carefully, because they don't, they can't speak, they don't speak Spanish, they don't even speak, like, Piro, like, or anything, like, or Yine is the dialect that we deal with on our river, and...
00:28:38.000You're out in the Amazon for a week by yourself and you're camping on a beach and you wake up and you walk upriver and you camp on a beach and you wake up.
00:28:46.000To me, it was almost like the world melted away.
00:28:51.000It was like that Will Smith movie where you're the last person on Earth.
00:28:54.000It's like you are in this jungle paradise where there's macaws and there's jaguars and the animals up there don't know what a human is.
00:32:20.000JJ has like 17 brothers, and they're like, come with us.
00:32:22.000And it's literally just a dugout of canoe, like a little 16-horsepower motor, and you just go up for 10 days, 12 days, to places where you go...
00:36:27.000And so the snake, and, you know, I always say, like, you know, Pixar, it didn't happen, but this was the middle of the night.
00:36:33.000I jumped on the snake, and as I'm holding it, the one measurement I have is that I was holding onto the snake, and my fingers couldn't touch.
00:40:50.000There's a shot coming up where we kind of have her stretched out for a second.
00:40:53.000But with this one, we put a radio transmitter down her throat, and we were able to track her movements to learn about the home range as a female anaconda.
00:46:14.000They eat a lot of monkeys, and so one of the ways to tell when there's a harpy eagle around, like we'll be walking through the jungle and you just find a pile of bones.
00:46:21.000Because up in that nest, 150 feet up, they're just dropping monkeys and sloths and the babies are ripping them apart and then they just chuck the bones out.
00:46:28.000So you'll see like a little bone yard in the jungle.
00:49:11.000So when you wake up in the morning and look out from there, it's gotta be insane.
00:49:15.000I mean, first of all, the sun coming up in the east, and you have red apocalypse, beautiful mist coming off the jungle, and you have spider monkeys excited, because that's a ficus, and so everyone's excited to eat.
00:49:28.000So all the animals are coming to the treehouse, and so you have howler monkeys, spider monkeys, capuchins, squirrel monkeys, I can't even name all the birds for you.
00:52:10.000And so making it so that people can actually come and see the Amazon rainforest in a way that's safe and bug-free and air-conditioned and everything else.
00:52:19.000And it's like, you can just wake up and look at it all.
00:53:04.000There's a type of shark that's literally from the 1700s that's still living.
00:53:09.000They also pulled a spearhead out of a, I want to say a right whale, where the same thing, and they dated that spearhead back to, like, the 1830s or something.
00:56:21.000Like when we go in there to do research, we're like looking at frogs and shit and it's like we put our socks over our pants to like make sure because otherwise shit gets up there.
00:56:30.000One girl got bitten like 16 times by this giant aquatic water spider thing that like Went up her leg, just going like Morse coding her, just like, got, [...
00:56:43.000Emotionally, I think it was worse than the pain, because the pain gave her some Benadryl, and she like slept it off, but like, she was just like, God, it was so horrible.
00:56:49.000She was like, I was like slapping my leg, trying to get this thing to stop biting me, and it was just getting more scared, so it was biting her more.
00:57:48.000Yeah, I mean, under then, I really got scared, because then I was like, okay, do I have to get out of the forest?
00:57:54.000So we went in with forceps and moved the hair, and underneath the hair, it has these Christmas tree barbs, and the hair is covering those barbs.
01:01:07.000And there's like a drag mark, huge black caiman, like monstrous, like a two foot thick stomach.
01:01:13.000And then these monster hands on either side, you know, the feet as it's walking.
01:01:16.000And we're like following this thing and it comes to the water and floating in the water is the bodies of all these dead peccary, all these dead wild boar floating in the water.
01:01:25.000And I'm like, What am I looking at here?
01:01:27.000And we got a stick and we brought him in and we realized a whole herd of pigs had tried to swim across this water.
01:01:34.000And this monster-ass Godzilla black caiman had just gone and just took down like 10 of them.
01:02:03.000Are those similar to the ones they have in like Costa Rica?
01:02:07.000Costa Rica, I believe, this is outside of my expertise, but I think you have American crocodiles and I think you have spectacle caimans there.
01:02:13.000I don't think you have black caiman in Costa Rica.
01:02:15.000We saw some big crocodiles in Costa Rica.
01:04:51.000A study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found the sightings of medium-sized mammals are down drastically as much as 99%.
01:05:01.000In some cases in areas where pythons and other large non-native constrictor snakes are known to be lurking.
01:05:27.000There that's the funny thing with the jungle is like it's everything is so there's so many There's so many predators everything is eating each other.
01:05:35.000So it's like you don't have any one thing The balance is in Amazon in the Amazon.
01:05:40.000That's the thing about the invasive species that get introduced into an ecosystem that you know nothing's there to eat them Which is crazy these Python hunters that are finding these massive pythons and in the Everglades is a It's so crazy to watch how many of them there are and how they keep finding them.
01:05:59.000I see kids on social media going out and literally finding Burmese pythons.
01:06:21.000How could they possibly eradicate them?
01:06:24.000There's, I mean, cane toads in Australia.
01:06:26.000I mean, there's so many examples of this where we've transported something, or I think it was cats in New Zealand that devastated house cats.
01:07:05.000Again, what we've learned about anacondas is like, They can be around you and you don't know it.
01:07:11.000They'll go in the sand in a river and they'll stick their nose up and they'll just be resting and they'll be like, I ate last week, I'm just going to chill here.
01:07:19.000And so we'll be walking up a stream and if that snake, once snakes have radio transmitters in them, we're like, oh my god.
01:07:25.000We have none of the equipment required to find them.
01:07:28.000So the babies, they're in the leaf litter, they're in the swamps, they're like, we're never going to get them out.
01:09:21.000Uh, apparently a fly catches a mosquito and lays its eggs on the mosquito or moths.
01:09:27.000We think it's the moths in our region because usually every time I get bot flies, it's when I'm doing such intense work that I don't have time to wash my clothes.
01:09:37.000It's directly linked to how clean you are.
01:09:39.000Because, like, I'll take off a sweaty-ass shirt, throw it over a stick, go to bed, wake up, and then be like, boom, throw it back on, and go.
01:09:46.000And then, like, a week later, you get botflies.
01:09:48.000And it's, like, because the moths are covering your shirt at night, and the mosquitoes are all, they're all, like, this sweat.
01:09:52.000And so you see all these bugs at night all over your shit.
01:10:58.000There's a great book on parasites where they said something like, the number of parasites for every species on Earth, how many parasites exist specifically for that.
01:11:06.000And it's like, there's more parasites than there are animals on Earth, and it's...
01:15:00.000I mean, look, the Amazon's so important that it's like to me, of course, as a conservationist, I'm like, we need all of these crazy creations to be doing that, to create that ecosystem.
01:15:29.000And you just go through the swamp and there's all these frogs and snakes and night monkeys and anacondas and black caiman and all this shit.
01:15:35.000And you see eyes looking at you through the darkness and it's jaguars.
01:17:22.000I like slept in the hammock but this is like as I was learning so I didn't realize that the hammock that I had bought had a mosquito net on top but the back was not mosquito proof so they could stick through so my back was being destroyed by mosquitoes as I'm trying to sleep and like a couple of nights of that and so I finally fall asleep and I wake up in the middle of the night and I hear breathing right next to my face and I like wanted to turn my headlamp on and I just hear like Right
01:20:23.000You have to keep your skin clean or else you just get infections.
01:20:25.000But, like, for the most part, like, my clothing, everything, like, I don't use anything that's scented because of that, because I want to be out there and...
01:20:46.000And so like not that long ago I was checking a camera trap and I heard, I thought it was a, we had students at our research station at the time, and I heard like the leaves going, and it was like September, so the jungle was dry.
01:20:57.000And I turned around, and I was going to scare this person, because I was going to be like, who walks that loud in the jungle?
01:21:02.000Like, have you never, you have no respect?
01:21:04.000And I turned around with my finger up, and this jag walked right by me on the trail, and just went, what's up?
01:21:08.000I just kept walking, and I was like...
01:21:14.000I took that as good because at least my scent trail was so that he didn't know I was there.
01:21:33.000And I think they're, you know, with big cats, the mothers teach the young how to hunt.
01:21:38.000And I think they're so oriented, like with tigers, they're so oriented on horizontal, you know, get the neck from underneath, break the neck from up top.
01:21:45.000And it's like when they see a vertical animal walking by, I think they're like, first of all, I don't know what this is.
01:23:51.000Like, if there was a bunch of tourists right there and J.J. wanted me to come over and, like, chill with him and we wanted to go hang, he would just do that and get my attention.
01:23:57.000And, like, I know that it's not a tin of mine.
01:23:59.000I know it's J.J. And so it's like they've taken that to a whole other level where they can communicate.
01:24:04.000And so there was a group of guys who was upriver, and they got surrounded.
01:24:08.000They heard monkey calls coming from different directions.
01:24:11.000And they realized that they were completely surrounded.
01:24:13.000At least one of the guys was telling it to me, he got in the water and crawled like a turtle and escaped.
01:24:21.000And then the tribe showed up, and there was this whole showdown where they actually shot one of the community members.
01:24:28.000And then one of the guys who knows some of their language was saying that they...
01:24:41.000And there was a whole discussion happening while these people were huddled in the stream waiting to see if they got killed too.
01:24:49.000So it's like, I don't really, you know, because when you get these loggers going in there, it's like, yeah, we'll pay you to protect the rainforest.
01:25:13.000We'll basically be helping to establish one of the largest protected areas in the Amazon rainforest, which will encompass these uncontacted people and they can stay uncontacted and they can stay safe and do whatever they want to do in the jungle, guarding the secret pyramids and the giant ground sloths or whatever the hell it is that they do.
01:25:46.000And the other thing is the conversation so often gets turned to like they're, you know, violent and that they're people that live out in the jungle.
01:25:54.000And I have no idea how they do it either because, you know, at night we need headlamps.
01:27:29.000It's not universal, and there was someone in our region who, like, captured a child from the uncontacted, raised them in a very remote community, and people have tried, anthropologists have tried, they've been like, hey, so what was it like when you grew up?
01:28:08.000Then last year, some loggers went to a place they shouldn't have gone, and they got whacked.
01:28:13.000Sort of like the WhatsApp underground in Peru.
01:28:17.000Everyone was sending each other pictures, because one of the cops sent to his family a picture of what the bodies looked like on day six, laying on the beach with arrows in them and shit.
01:31:32.000Saying how he was like, yeah, and he goes, you know, the jungle is basically a human-made garden.
01:31:36.000And then, of course, I went and talked to, like, every scientist I knew because I was like, come on.
01:31:40.000And they're like, look, you know, in the areas around the rivers, there were complex, there was no debating it.
01:31:45.000There were complex civilizations, sometimes larger than we think.
01:31:49.000But in those areas, you see a higher prevalence of like, like he said, like they'll plant Brazil nut trees, they'll plant, you know, whatever.
01:31:56.000I don't think bananas were there at that point, but where there was some gardening happening.
01:32:00.000But what worried me then was then like Smithsonian came out and put out like an article and they were like, is the Amazon created by humans?
01:32:08.000Because like, then you're changing it from a designation of like this incredible complex wild ancient ecosystem to If people don't understand the context of what he's saying, that people engineered it in places.
01:32:21.000And then the headlines went to, the Amazon was made by people.
01:32:25.000And then you have people like Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, who's no longer in office, but just being like, well, if we made it, we can manage it, right?
01:33:06.000They found a stone axe head in the jungle.
01:33:10.000At a site from the uncontacted, but what that means is that the uncontacted tribe had a stone axe head that they've been holding on to since Inca times.
01:33:23.000And so you're talking about civilization carrying around something from a previous civilization that they don't know where they got it from.
01:34:06.000So the thing about the Lost City of Z was that there was a previous expedition that had encountered these cities and these incredible, beautiful, complex cities, and they described how elaborate their clothing was and their culture,
01:34:35.000Yeah, and I mean, Oriana was the first person to go descend the Amazon, which the thing that always drove me crazy about that was that they came down the Andes, made their way down the entire Amazon, and then looked at the stars, figured out where Spain was, built a whole other ship, and sailed home.
01:35:19.000Like, they had information that we don't have because they needed to be able to navigate using the stars.
01:35:24.000And they didn't have to deal with the kind of night pollution that we have.
01:35:28.000The light pollution that we have at night is...
01:35:30.000It's one of the greatest tragedies about modern civilization is that we've blacked out one of the most spectacular things you could ever see.
01:35:37.000The thing that really centers us and humbles us, which is the view of the stars.
01:35:42.000I went to the Keck Observatory a few years back.
01:36:05.000There's no light pollution on the island because they have diffused lighting for all their street lights.
01:36:10.000Specifically designed so that it doesn't fuck with the telescopes.
01:36:13.000And so when you're up there, I'll never forget it.
01:36:17.000The one time that I went, which was at least 15 years ago, maybe 16 years ago, that one time was so spectacular that it changed my view of, like, Earth in the relationship to the cosmos.
01:36:42.000And then I was thinking, God, this is everywhere.
01:36:45.000This is what the ancients used to see before we figured out electricity and blunted it all and ruined our relationship with the cosmos visually.
01:37:23.000So they're very careful at the observatory.
01:37:25.000There's no lights that get in the way of anything.
01:37:27.000So when you get outside of the building and there's just people lined up on the roads and on the hills, they're just staring up at the sky.
01:38:27.000Yeah, they're targeted for the big tusks.
01:38:29.000So the big tusk ones are getting killed, and so somehow in response to that, they're developing smaller tusks because they're less attractive?
01:38:37.000To the point that they're even having no tusks.
01:38:39.000It's like it genetically bottlenecked them so quickly because over the last hundred years, The humans were all going for the big tuskers, and now these monster tuskers, like the really big ones where they touch the ground, there's only a few of them left.
01:39:12.000I feel like there's a thing about mountain communities, ocean communities, where you're confronted with nature that's on such a scale of beauty and magnificence that you're overwhelmed by it.
01:39:27.000You're automatically humbled just by your environment and your surroundings.
01:39:42.000And the sky is supposed to do that, too.
01:39:44.000There's a relationship that we have to the cosmos when you look up that is like, okay, yeah, this is the real mystery of life and of existence, that we fly through infinity.
01:41:23.000What the jungle does is it brings you back to those chemical physical truths.
01:41:27.000It removes the cataracts of society from your eyes so that you're confronted with whether or not the river's rising, whether or not the sun is going to be...
01:41:36.000When we're on an expedition, it's like it rains for six hours and we freeze.
01:43:57.000Which means, can you disassemble the motor and put it back together?
01:44:00.000Because eventually that's what you're going to have to do.
01:44:02.000And so it's like, if you go take your bush plane and go live out in Alaska, it's like, well, how long until you have to call someone for help?
01:44:08.000It's like, we rely on other people so much.
01:44:10.000And that's the beauty of being, you get so humbled being out in nature because you go, my God.
01:45:06.000And so balsa, you can pretty much take your machete and just cut into the tree and it grows really quick.
01:45:11.000You can peel the bark off of it and pretty much use that as rope.
01:45:16.000But if you want to take it a step farther, you can tie that and then like braid it or twist it and it has all these juices in it that like solidify.
01:45:41.000When JJ first taught me this, the first thing I did was march up to a Cecropia tree and whack it with my machete and start trying to get the bark off.
01:45:49.000And the Cecropia ants landed on my face and I came back and I was like, what happened?
01:46:35.000It's definitely saving water is a purpose of them.
01:46:37.000And so what we do is we can, when we're out in the bush, it's like you just, you cut off one of those canisters and so you have like a sweet little bamboo cylinder and then you tie it with balsa and throw it over your back and it's like you're carrying a map.
01:46:47.000It's like you just have this, like a water bottle from the jungle.
01:46:51.000There are ways of getting things done.
01:46:53.000Then, what you do is, what JJ will do, we'll go and you take a serrated knife, and when you walk barefoot, you get that big callus on the back of your heel.
01:47:01.000You cut the callus off your heel, stick it on a hook, catch a few piranha, cut them up into pieces, catch some more piranha, and then stuff the piranha into the bamboo, take some leaves, salt, stuff the leaves in the bamboo, and then throw the bamboo canister filled with piranha onto the fire,
01:49:42.000We also just, you know, I mean, usually we had now, whether we're on a scientific expedition or whether we're bringing, like, tourists into the jungle or whether we're out with the Jungle Keepers Rangers, whatever we're doing, we have a chef with us.
01:50:06.000To be honest, living off the land is something that we do when we go out on these ceremonial hunts or when we go out on expeditions to really uncharted places.
01:50:42.000But, like, J.J.'s father once apparently killed an electric eel, removed the nerve.
01:50:48.000Again, I don't know anatomically if this makes any sense, but this is how the lore goes.
01:50:52.000That he killed the electric eel, removed the nerve that generates the electricity, then cut his own arm open, put the nerve in it, and slapped a dead frog on top of it, and then bandaged that up.
01:51:06.000And he said that that would give him strength until the end of his days.
01:51:09.000He lived to 87 years old, alive in the jungle and healthy, and he died one day at a barbecue just like...
01:51:15.000He just like leaned over on his grandson, smiled, and died.
01:51:40.000I came home from India, went to doctors in New York, and for two months I was in bed, and I had no energy, and they put me on this antibiotics, and that, and this, and that.
01:51:48.000And these, again, New York City infectious disease doctors couldn't heal this thing.
01:52:21.000Now think about how many thousands of years are needed or at least centuries are needed in order for him to have that knowledge.
01:52:28.000How many people living out in the jungle had to try how many things to have that medicinal knowledge handed down through the generations and then to be in the presence of a person that has that type of knowledge and to have access to it and to witness it working.
01:53:08.000As soon as I see, like, a little something, like a mosquito bite that just doesn't look right and is, like, getting too much of my attention...
01:53:50.000People will discover a compound in the Amazon and then export it.
01:53:53.000It'll be like thousands of years of wisdom from ancient cultures handed down and then someone will give that knowledge out to a corporation and they'll Take it, profit off of it, and then that's it.
01:54:05.000But it's like we, at this point, one of the things we're trying to do is work with the indigenous communities to try and help them to preserve that knowledge.
01:54:13.000Because we're also seeing now that as the roads come in and you have the problems with the fires and it's changing, you know, at the edge, at the edge where the jungle is being destroyed.
01:54:24.000They, the younger people have to decide, do they want to live the way their parents lived?
01:54:31.000Fishing, hunting howler monkeys, eating howler monkeys, or do they want to go out into the world and do something else?
01:54:39.000And it's like, well, then you start with like, well, what else?
01:54:41.000You know, it's like, it's very, very complex being at the edge of living in like a tribal subsistence community and then being confronted with like the modern world.
01:55:42.000But he went to the Yanomami, married one of them, brought them to the U.S. She couldn't handle it because she was like, I want to go back to the jungle.
01:55:53.000Like when I was a kid and then that she had gone back to the jungle but that this anthropologist had had like Yanomami children that he raised on his own in the US. And then last year I was at a dinner party and I met David Good who is that guy.
01:57:26.000If you could speak their language and be immersed with them for a long time and get an understanding of what they know, it must be amazing.
01:57:35.000That's what makes him so interesting, is that he's doing it and he's working on it.
01:57:41.000But think about how much we're losing in terms of, like, what you said, the connection to the stars and then the realization on a daily basis that we're part of, like, this massive march of life and that we're connected to these systems and the rivers and the rain and,
01:58:23.000You have to wake up and milk the cows.
01:58:26.000I feel like what's happening, so many people, it's just like, you know, you wake up and you're like, what do I do now?
01:58:33.000You know, it's like you get so disconnected from the systems that we're a part of.
01:58:37.000It's like, it's amputating us of the thing that connects us to whatever is running this machine, like the gears that work the game.
01:58:46.000And that's what these people still remember.
01:58:49.000They're still connected to that reality.
01:58:51.000None of these people are going, are we living in a simulation?
01:58:53.000They know what reality is because they're living in it every day.
01:58:59.000So I think that preserving these last wild places while they're still here, I truly believe that we're at the most crucial moment in history, not because of nuclear war or anything like that, but because never before has there been a global threat.
01:59:15.000Right now, we're on the cusp of we're going through this extinction crisis, and you can talk about climate change, but our rivers and our ecosystems are being tested to the point where our oceans are collapsing, our rainforests are vanishing, we're losing species faster than we can even count.
01:59:33.000And we have all the knowledge and technology and ability to stop it.
01:59:37.000We've seen that humpback whales, they were up at around 120,000 pre-whaling, and they went down to 5,000.
01:59:45.000And then we banned whaling and now they're back up to like 115,000 humpback whales globally.
01:59:53.000If you just stop annihilating these animals and murdering their habitats, they will continue to make the ecosystems that have been our home on this planet for millions of years.
02:00:03.000Like, they literally have made our lives possible.
02:00:06.000And so, like, to me, there is nothing more important.
02:00:10.000And I think that when I was a little kid, I actually think I had some semblance of an idea that my mission was, I'm here to protect rainforests.
02:00:21.000And that's why I had to get there quickly before it was too late.
02:00:25.000And I had the incredible luck of meeting a teacher who could unlock that world for me.
02:00:31.000And now we have the chance, the historical chance, you talk about those sharks, there are trees on the river that were there before the Spanish touched South America.
02:00:42.000So the World Wars, everything that we know, our grandparents, all of this, that tree was a sapling standing there in the Amazon rainforest while pretty much everything that we're familiar with took place in history.
02:00:53.000And we have a chance to protect the incredible complex ecosystem of thousands of species that are living on this tree.
02:01:02.000You're talking about a millennium tree with leafcutter ants and reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, mosses, lichens, cactus, everything living on this skyscraper of life.
02:01:12.000And we can cut it down for nothing and grow some papayas or we can protect.
02:01:16.000And we have the chance to protect it and no one else is gonna have that chance and as a global society it's like we can protect black rhinos before they go extinct.
02:01:26.000This incredible ancient monstrous megafauna animal that we have the privilege of experiencing.
02:01:32.000There's no reason for this to happen, that people falsely believe that their horns are medicinal when they're not.
02:01:38.000And so it's like, I think we are at the most exciting time with the most exciting opportunity because the natural world, you know, we could get through this and people will look back on our time and just go, what were they thinking?
02:01:49.000You know, like the way, like when the Industrial Revolution came around and they put all the kids in the factories and they were getting like crushed in the gears and choked out by smoke.
02:01:56.000And it was like, we just made regulations and fixed it.
02:01:58.000It's like, we don't need to be killing life on earth.
02:02:23.000And so we have to protect them, and so that's the mission that we're on.
02:02:27.000And so incredibly, the local people of the Amazon And everybody at Jungle Keepers.
02:02:34.000And so, like, somehow that mission formed.
02:02:39.000And then you became a part of that march when you retweeted that and helped us find Dax, who helped us protect it.
02:02:45.000And now we're, like, moving towards creating this giant protected area.
02:02:50.000Well, this podcast, I'm sure, will energize that even further.
02:02:54.000So what can anybody do if they're hearing this?
02:02:57.000I mean, obviously, this resonates with everyone.
02:03:00.000Your story is so incredible and just this calling that you have to that and the fact that it really has happened and you've become a part of protecting it.
02:03:10.000What can anybody do that's listening to this?
02:03:15.000We have ways to get involved with the local people that are now protecting their rainforest.
02:03:20.000This is totally an indigenous-led effort.
02:03:25.000I don't know how these other organizations work.
02:03:28.000What I do know is that when I went down there and JJ was like, we have to protect this, we started Junglekeepers as a way to just take guys that were loggers and give them a different job.
02:03:49.000Some people give us money and they're like, look, I don't ever want to go anywhere near the jungle, but I'm glad it exists.
02:03:55.000Now we're trying to take people up into the canopy and even that, we're providing people with jobs as chefs and boat drivers and guides and taking a small, sustainable amount of people into a really beautiful place.
02:04:08.000Instead of ruining it with trails and people and garbage, it's like, we're just going to do it right and keep it pristine and keep it wild.
02:05:22.000I think it's just, it's throwing a fish back into water.
02:05:24.000I think that we belong out there, and I think that we've amputated ourselves from that, and so when we go back out into wild places, we're like, yes!
02:05:31.000Yeah, despite our evolution and the...
02:05:34.000Technological innovation, we're still biologically that same creature that coexists with nature.
02:05:43.000Which is removed from the experience for the most part.
02:06:29.000You know, like if you're going after something and it's like in terms of being productive, in terms of just continuing to chase the thing.
02:06:35.000And it's like when you start something like trying to stop the global march of destruction of wildlife, it's like you are going to fail.
02:06:47.000The fact that we, in this tiny little place, are notching a wind, that is incredible.
02:06:51.000But it takes an extreme toll, having so much uncertainty that I'm going to leave here and fly back down there and go running into the Amazon fires and just broadcast that to everybody because that's what gets people excited.
02:07:03.000That's what gets people to understand what we're losing.
02:07:05.000Because you have to show them the beauty and then show it being destroyed and be like, we can stop this.
02:07:10.000And so my plan is I want to, in the next year, protect the rest of this river.
02:07:15.000Now, how much do you have to worry about your own personal safety now?
02:07:18.000Because what you're talking about with the gold miners and this, they know who you are and people know who you are now.
02:07:25.000And the more you get this message out, the more you're going to become a problem for them.
02:08:50.000First of all, getting conservationists paid because I know incredible conservationists all over the world who are doing this work, protecting species, and no one's paying them to do it.
02:09:00.000They're just out there doing the work.
02:09:04.000And then allowing local people to find a way of being supported Yeah.
02:09:30.000And so finding that solution and exporting it.
02:09:32.000So if we save this river, if we're successful in saving this river, the true change then will come in sort of applying that to somewhere else.
02:09:42.000Well, then maybe there's a river in the Congo where that's going to happen.
02:09:44.000We're going to lose all the beautiful, pristine...
02:10:11.000I don't think anybody's on, you know, not too many people are going to say that and say, look, we can save the ecosystems and all the beautiful things.
02:13:50.000You listen to a Bad Company song, and all of a sudden they're suggesting a Pink Floyd song, and then you're listening to all this stuff that, as a 13-year-old with modern playlists, you probably wouldn't be Really introduced to.
02:21:22.000It's an amazing thing, but it's also weird.
02:21:24.000It's like, what a beautiful creation, but also so strange that we have subverted nature in some bizarre way that's turned this predator, this hunting pack predator, into Into this family creature that's like literally one of the family.
02:21:41.000Like Marshall, he's one of my children.
02:21:44.000The only time that gets too much for me is when you get down to like those little bulldogs that can't breathe.
02:22:15.000It's so weird, but at the same time, I think it's great that we can have this incredibly loyal, like, I was just reading something that chimps don't take IQs from humans.
02:22:28.000Like, dogs, you know, you look at your dog, you just look at the leash, you look at the door, and the dog's like, really?
02:22:40.000And, like, I've seen an elephant identify a pregnant person.
02:22:43.000I saw an elephant walk up to a woman, touch her on the stomach, and then, like, call the other elephants and be like, yo, this one's pregnant.
02:22:49.000And they all started, they knew shit that we don't know.
02:23:23.000I've seen them do things that are so intelligent.
02:23:25.000I've seen them be so compassionate that I think that we are just not smart enough to understand how smart that they are.
02:23:32.000Just because they're not changing their environment and typing things and we just have a distorted idea of intelligence.
02:23:39.000I think that, yeah, well, like you said, your intelligence is the ability to interact with your environment and survive in it.
02:23:45.000And it's like they've gardened all of the habitat that they exist in.
02:23:50.000Like when you watch an elephant twisting branches and creating that environment.
02:23:55.000And they're going and grazing around on everything and moving that forest.
02:23:58.000And there's mushrooms growing out of the piles of shit that they leave.
02:24:02.000And it's just like there's so much elephant dung and there's so much complex structure.
02:24:07.000And the thing is, as a human, usually what we do is we watch...
02:24:11.000Either we watch elephants in the zoo, where you're looking at basically like a mentally deranged elephant that's been kept in a box its whole life, or you're in like a game drive vehicle and you drive up to elephants in the field and they're like, ah, shit, humans, and then they like walk off.
02:24:26.000Very rarely do we get to see elephants alone in nature problem solving.
02:24:32.000And so like, then you'll get these articles where scientists will be like, we gave elephants like a key and a lock and so many of them couldn't figure it out.
02:24:40.000It's like, well, that's, you're giving elephants a human problem to solve.
02:24:42.000You're not giving them an elephant problem to solve.
02:24:46.000One time I had a jeep and it had a whole thing of bananas in it.
02:25:33.000But yeah, he took the Jeep and he shouldered it, put it up on two wheels, made dead-ass eye contact with me and he was like, you going to give me the bananas or not?
02:27:58.000So this elephant, he puts the paintbrush in the elephant's trunk, and the elephant walks up to the palette, to the canvas, and starts painting.
02:30:18.000I was just looking this up because somebody told me and I didn't believe them.
02:30:21.000But there's a plant that helps induce labor in some African tribes that they chew when mothers are like right on the cusp of giving birth.
02:30:28.000And this one researcher found elephants eating a ton of this stuff and then having babies and then went back and studied it again and again.
02:31:05.000I think what I'm struggling to get out here is that you can train a dog to do very complex tasks, like a sheepdog, or like that guy who has like 400 different things and he goes, you know, get the ball, get the sponge, get the thing.
02:31:18.000But like that to me is still a gimmick, whereas like the fact that they have...
02:31:37.000But it's like, if we spend that time or the fact that they do the low vibration communication where they can communicate through the earth, where they rumble, And they can send, like, you know, there's water over here.
02:34:11.000We were talking about the things we eat in the jungle, and I was talking about the bamboo and the things and the other things, and I wanted to show you.
02:35:18.000I get that thing where people, it's like, I've devoted my life to protecting the rainforest, and then people are like, how could you pick up that snake?
02:35:46.000We get to this community and they come out with macaw feathers and robes on and shit.
02:35:50.000And they give us this bowl and they're like, welcome, eat.
02:35:54.000And the bowl, we looked at it, we were all, like, side-eyeing each other, and we were like, oh, shit.
02:35:58.000And it had a monkey hand, it had a piece of a taper, it had a piranha, and it had the foot of a yellow-footed tortoise, which looks like Bowser's foot from Super Mario.
02:36:08.000Like, it was this big, scaly, gnarly thing with rice.
02:36:49.000And so we're all just like sitting there in this really, really remote community worrying about getting shot and just like playing with all the different animals in our bowl.
02:37:38.000So somebody cooked me monkey, and then I ate it, and then I walked out back, and I was like, is that the other half of the monkey you just cooked me?
02:38:21.000She actually, I saw her, the last time I saw her, she was, she took an axe and she like broke open this log and she pulled out this grub that was bigger than my thumb.
02:39:15.000The worst thing about a grub is that if you don't cook them, or when you start to cook them, when the nematodes come out of them, when the parasites that are living in the grubs come out.
02:39:25.000Nothing seems to happen, usually, I think.
02:41:21.000It's my pleasure and I thank you for what you're doing and I thank you for coming here and I hope more people understand and more people get involved now because of this conversation.