#2013 - Paul Rosolie
2023-07-27 02:42:59
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
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Hey Marshall, come here. This is one of the rare times that Marshall's been in studio during a show.
Come here, say hi to everybody.
He's the best. He is the best.
They're the best dogs. They're like universally sweet dogs.
They're such sweethearts. I just, I love that. like my dogs, I can literally take a piece of meat out of their mouth and they'll be like, is something better coming? Like? they're just, they're so friendly.
Yeah, just no, like worry about protecting themselves or survival. My friend calls them love sponges. It's the best way to describe them.
They're perfect creations.
We're going to be in here. So, dude, first of all, I'm in your book right now. I just started it. It's, it's insane. How the fuck did you even get the idea to do what you did?
How does this take me through? Take me through the first like seeds of the thoughts that had you go to the Amazon.
Uh, when I was a kid, I like, I remember, I remember very far back. I remember being a kid and like going to the Bronx zoo and looking, they had, they had an exhibit. I think it was in like the house of reptiles, where there's all these scientists and they're holding like a giant snake and they're, they're doing research and they're, they're protecting these places. And so I always had it in my head that, like, I want to see these places before they're gone. I grew up with a lot of like environmental stress.
I really felt like this message of like, we're losing the rainforest. We're losing elephants, as like, I. just, how did you,
how did you develop that feeling?
I don't know. I mean, my, my, my parents. would, you know, read me Jane Goodall's books as a kid. And again, things like the Bronx zoo, Steve Irwin, um, you know, and I loved, I grew up, you know, and having access to, like New York and New Jersey. I mean, there's such incredible forest there.
It's really the New York, New Jersey forest thing. It's like people, for whatever reason, that don't live around there, they think New Jersey is like some vast wasteland. Like New Jersey is, like more bears per capita than anywhere else in the country.
Yeah. Yeah. No, it's wild. Amazing forest. there.
I 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, 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. And it's like, I was always doing shit like this. Like,
so you always had like a call to that kind of life.
I always just rivers, streams, forests, tracking bears, trying to figure out where the, where the Fox's hole is. Like I liked spending time with animals in nature. And then, like, it, just drove me crazy that no matter how deep I would go, you know, in Eastern forests, you always like come out the other side. And I always was just like, I want to find somewhere where it's like truly wild, like where there's no limit to it. Like what's, what's the max, what's the highest?
you can turn this thing. And I was terrible in school, failed all my classes, severely dyslexic, all that. And so I tried. actually, 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. And I was like, I did not know that.
So I did that. And then, as I was doing that, I just said, you know what? I was like, I'm going to go to the Amazon rainforest. I had a professor that showed me a piece of wood and he made a joke. Like, Oh, this is probably like teak from the Amazon.
And like, I was like, Oh yeah, I gotta get down there before it's too late.
That's what it was.
That is what it was.
I gotta get down there before it's too late.
Yeah. I mean, it's like, they're telling you that there's Jurassic park, there's literally Anaconda dragons in these, 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. And I was like, I want to see it before it's gone. The greatest show on earth.
And so how much of an understanding did you have about the Amazon, about how to get around, how to, it seems like you just kind of just dove in.
I did dive in. I found the most remote research station I could find. And of course, nobody wants to take it like a 17 year old kid from Brooklyn, from New Jersey, and put them in the rainforest. I had no qualifications, but I went with people that were doing research on macaws and I was out there for weeks at a time. But the luck was that I met this guy named JJ.
Juan Julio Duran, local essay high Indian, grew up in the forest barefoot and met the dude. The dude has libraries of information in his brain, medicinal plants, how to track animals, places in the forest that nobody knows about. And then he just started, he was just like, you're funny. You really love this. He's like, let's go out all night.
We don't come back until we find three snakes. He was terrified of snakes. He's like, let's go find three snakes. Cause. he was like, why, why, why does this gringo keep catching snakes?
It's like, what the hell is the matter with you? And so he was teaching me everything. And then I was just like, look, dude, this is how you figure this. Like, this is how you do snakes. This is how you figure out if they're venomous.
This is how you handle a snake. I could teach him one thing. He taught me the entire Amazon rainforest.
So he didn't know, I mean, he must've known like what venomous snakes there were, right?
No, because what they'll do is they'll be like, Oh, that red one, it's venomous. They chop it in half. That's not how you identify a snake. That's like saying like every, you know, uh, it's like identifying cars by color. Like it doesn't make any sense.
It's with snakes. You can have like, for example, like an Amazon tree boa, you can have one mother giving birth to, like a rainbow of babies. There'll be like gray ones, green ones, yellow ones, like all these different morphs. And so people will be like, Oh, those are those red ones. They'll get you.
Those are coral snakes. It's like, no, you know, I just, it's, it's a constant battle. You know, with the locals, I'm always like, do you think this is venomous or not? And they're like, Hmm. And I'm like, would I be holding it if it was venomous?
That's crazy that they don't know, but I guess it's like safer to assume that they're all venomous or anything bright colored.
Yeah. And again, the jungle is a place where there's a lot of stories. And 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. That's all that. like the average logger or the average gold miner knows.
I 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 got to 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, that's like, I can't help you people. I'm literally showing it to you. But the rule is just kill every snake. And so I've always been like this, like 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.
Snakes are wonderful. Like I love snakes.
They're a part of the whole ecosystem, especially in something as complex as the Amazon. Yeah. I mean, you know, when I lived in the Hollywood Hills, people would always complain about coyotes. Yeah. I'd say, yeah, yeah.
But how many rats do you see? Yeah. You don't see a lot of rats. It's a reason for that. The coyotes are the cleanup system.
Um, yeah.
Later I got to show you the video I took yesterday, the day before yesterday, a coyote walking through my front yard in New York.
In the middle of everywhere. Now they're everywhere. It's wild. Big one. Have you ever read coyote America?
Uh, no. It's a really good book by this guy, Dan Flores. He's been on the podcast a couple of times. He was, uh, my friend, Steve's professor in college and, uh, he stayed in touch with this guy and he's a wildlife historian. And he wrote a book about coyotes.
and it's the story is insane. Like coyotes, they're originally persecuted by the gray wolves. The gray wolves were extirpated and killed off by the people that settled. And then coyotes, when they were prosec, when they were persecuted, what they would do is expand their range. Yeah.
So they're in every single city, in every state now. And that's only over the last few decades. I mean, the fact, I mean,
I think in a lot of places you can hunt a coyote like daytime, nighttime, anytime, anytime, with like any message.
It does the opposite of what it's intended to do. Because when you kill a coyote, then the females, when they do roll call, they realize a coyote is missing and they have more pups. Yeah. Yeah. It's a wild animal.
No, it's a really, it's a really clever too. Yeah.
No, they're crazy. This one comes trotting across my front yard every day. And it's like, I went, I opened my front door and I went, Woo. And he just stopped and looked at me and I, just like, took a picture on my phone.
Wow. Yeah. It was crazy. New York city coyotes.
It's an amazing animal. But so, so, when you went down there, what kind of gear did you bring? Like, how, like how prepared were you for this?
Uh,
shoestring, but yeah, student dropped out of high school, saves up money from working at like the YMCA. Like I went down there wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
Like. did you plan on trying to find some sort of a job? Like? what were you going to do for food? No.
So this was the thing.
I went down there as a, as a, as a volunteer, just to experience it, you know, like, and then, and then, basically, as I became friends with JJ, it was like, he was like, could you, could you come back? He's like, you have access to, like gringos and people that travel. He's like, bring us tourists. He's like, we're trying to protect this river. Like now, while it's still completely pristine.
And at the time I was like, well, that's, that's, that sounds great. So I started bringing people, we started Tam and do expeditions. And 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. Um, but it, it, it was a very much like, there wasn't a plan. I knew what I loved.
I didn't have a plan. I wasn't like, I'm going to be a jungle keeper. Like. I just went down there and was like, this is amazing. And I want more of it.
And then, you know, at that age, people are like, you know, what are you going to do for a job? And I was like, I don't know, but I'm going back to the jungle. Like, and then it was, as, you know, then, as we saw more of the forest getting destroyed, as we were, we're. the trans Amazon highway cuts straight across the Amazon rainforest. You can drive from like Rio all the way to Lima.
And so, for the first time in history, they opened up a land trade route through the heart of the Amazon rainforest. And the final segment of the trans Amazon highway was over the mother to Dios river, which is right where we work. And 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. ancient trees cut down, entire ecosystems wiped out.
And so then, at that point I'm going, okay, it's not a joke anymore. We, 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. There is no one, there's no help coming. Like these.
ecosystems are going to be bulldozed if nobody does anything.
So what regulations, if any, are in play? Obviously, there's people that are going to 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 the,
the thing is, there's national parks, there's protected areas, there's indigenous reserves. I mean, we're in the country of Peru and it's like, there. there's plenty, there's a lot of protected land. Peru has done an amazing job of protecting a lot of its rainforest. They have the most crucial part of the Amazon because it's the Western Amazon.
It's where the Andes, mountains, the cloud forests into the lowland Amazon, the most mega biodiverse terrestrial habitat that's ever existed. They've done a great job of protecting it, but there's a still millions of acres that are just jungle. And you're at the edge of human presence on our planet. So 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, the things around the city they can deal with. But if you tell them that two days up river way out there, there's somebody cutting some forest that technically shouldn't be cut.
They don't care. They're not going to put resources towards going out. They're not, they're not going to risk getting shot. They're not going to risk getting, you know, bitten by a Bushmaster while they travel out into the jungle. There's just not on anybody's radar.
So, unless it's near them, unless it's in their jurisdiction, nobody does anything.
And as we've, as we found out now, even when it is in their jurisdiction, half the forestry department just got arrested in Peru for actually helping the loggers. They had sort of like infiltrated.
Yeah. 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. It'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, we have to bring them out there. Like we have to get the boat, the gasoline, the food, provide them with, you know, it's like, we have to like basically take them on a tourist trip out into the jungle and then be like, no, go, do police work. It's very difficult.
And so like when you, when you hear this stuff, you know, like, which, like, again, what we actually, we have to have to, eventually we have to tell, we have to tell the people this story, um, how we got here. How did, like, what made you reach out to me when you did?
Well, um, I had seen a clip of yours that we talked about. Yeah. What was the clip?
So, yeah, that was the, that was the 2019 clip. That was when the Amazon fires went mega viral and, excuse me, I, 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 screen. And it went viral. It went viral. And at that time we had created jungle keepers and we had tried to protect.
So we had a little bit of rainforest we were protecting. I think we had like one or two Rangers. And then you shared it on your Instagram and then it hit this level. It like, went to the next level of virality. I remember cause my cousin Michael called me and he was just like, Joe Rogan just shared.
And I was like, that's, that's not, there's no way that happened. And he's like, no, it did. And, and the, the amount of attention that we got from that led to eventually people reaching out. Um, this guy, Dax De Silva, reached out and he was like, Hey, listen, you guys, every year, with the burning forest and the loss of habitat. He's like, I want to help.
What can we do? What is, what is, what, what do you need to make this work? How do we save this ring? for there? It is.
Yeah. That's that. That's the clip. Yeah. We're going to go.
welcome to the fucking Anthropocene.
Jesus.
And what, what puts those fires out? Do people actively try to put those fires out or they just wait till it?
rains? No, the people start them. That's, that's the funny thing. Is it, is it? I'm not going to be able to stay here long, cause 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.
It's burning like this every day. There are literally millions of animals in this forest that cannot escape right now. And if you think our planet can survive this every day in the Amazon, you have another thing coming. We have all the resources to protect this, to stop what's happening behind me right now. And people, let it happen every day.
Welcome to the fucking Anthropocene.
So when they're starting these fires to make clear cuts so they can raise cattle, like, what are they doing?
Yeah, it's, it's, it's basically their space. So we're going to use it. 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. You could use that forest to do like multi-tiered agriculture, where you're producing tons of produce. These are people that are coming in.
They're just clear, cutting the forest. They're planting, like cacao, papaya, grass for cows. Like it's, it's literally burning down your house to cook a meal.
And who owns that land?
Well, that's the thing. A lot of it is indigenous land. A lot of it is the, they call it like Brazil nut concessions, where it's just like areas where, like you're supposed to be harvesting Brazil nuts. But a lot of times it is private land, but people there, 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.
And no one is there to protect. There's not enough resources to keep an eye on. It's just the vastness of it all.
There's a, there's a vacuum in conservation. There's a problem with conservation. No one's going to pay you to go protect, to go out into the wildest places on earth and protect these things. Like, for the most part, it's very difficult. You can go get a job as a conservation biologist.
You can go study things academically, but to, to go and actively do the work of protecting a rainforest or protecting a marine area that's sensitive, that's crucial to species. It's very difficult. And so that's why the, 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. It was just me and the local guys, machetes and bare feet. And then, after that video went viral, after you shared it, we got contacted by Dax.
And then he basically was like, look, I'm, he started a company called Lightspeed and then he transitioned into conservation. And so now he's helping the sea shepherd and he's helping the nature conservancy in Canada. And he's Jungle Keepers was his first project. And all of a sudden we could actually do it. And so now, these local people who used to be loggers and gold miners, we were like, yo, do you want a job protecting this forest?
And so, like guys had been cutting wood for like the last 15 years, guys had been like fighting the uncontacted tribes. All of a sudden we were like, do you want to, just like, you know, help us patrol, just protect it, do nothing. And they're like, do nothing. And we get paid and benefits, and it's, and it's a huge success. Like we were protecting 50,000 acres.
now, millions and millions of heartbeats in there. Like spider monkeys, troops of giant river otters, jaguars, Harvey Eagles. I mean just more biodiversity than you could list. And we need to protect 300,000.. I need to protect 300,000 acres in the next year because now there's, like Chinese machinery coming in where they're coming in with those, those giant earth moving things that like take out the trees.
And so it's just like this, this race against time, because we had this incredible treasure trove of biological, incredible wealth.
Medicine's running through every, every one of these things. I mean, there's, there's, there's, you go out with the local people. And if you have something wrong with you, there's a SAP for that. They can cure an ear infection. They can cure whatever it is.
If they want to go fishing in the stream, they have Barbasco. They have a root that they can crush, throw it in the stream. It'll stun the fish. You take the ones you want, take it out. And the other fish will swim away.
It's like, they have a pharmacy that we don't have access to.
Yeah. That fish thing is wild. That's the thing is. my friend Renella did that. Yeah.
Yeah. How do you say those? The guy's name's from Guyana. Yanomami. Yeah.
The Yanomami. Yeah. He went with them and they, they did that thing with the fish. They grind up the plants and they throw it in the water and the fish just got conked out.
Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty wild. It's like magic. Yeah.
It's like magic. It's like a cheat code in the video game.
So this is a dangerous proposition, right? Because, clearly, the people that are moving into these areas, they want to burn things down and grow things. And someone who gets in the way of this is getting the way of their financial success.
Yeah. In, in the case of gold mining, um, there's, there's a picture in there, Jamie. I think it just says gold mining. I went down there with Matt Gutman and we did a thing where we got into the gold mining areas, where that's a whole other thing. where they're, they're clear, cutting the rainforest for gold mining.
That thing like this, that's the Western Amazon.
Wow. So they just gutted it.
There is a sandstorm behind me in that picture and they are, that's the Amazon rainforest. And there's a desert there now. Wow. You can see it from space. Wow.
And so the, you go there, this, there's like sort of this machine gun limit where you know, you drive towards this area and then they have guards. And inside there, they have these, see this at that big hose going out, they have to cut the forest, burn the forest, suck up the land. And then the gold comes in the sediment, in the sand. And so they have to use mercury to bind the gold out of the sand. And then they burn that off, which then is going into the atmosphere and raining back down.
I mean, this is like, this is, this is horrendous. And the police can't stop it because you have to go in there with like the military, the police will just get killed if they go over there. Oh, my God. So yeah, we got, we got in there this one day with some Russian gold miners. It was very strange.
And actually, uh, you got in there to investigate. We got in there, we went, we went in there with, with, with Matt Gutman's crew, and we actually, we actually filmed in the gold mining areas, which no one does. And while we were in there, one of the Russian gold miners was like, Hey man, listen, he goes, you're, you're that guy with the Instagram. Right. And I was like, what the fuck you talking about?
And he goes, you see those guys over there? And I was like, yeah. And he goes, they just said your name. And I was like, Oh, and then, uh, yeah. Like a week later, those guys pulled up and it was annoying.
Cause the guy like acted like he had a gun, but he didn't show me. And he was like, Hey, no more posts about gold mining. And I was like, the gold miners follow me on social media. Like, are you fucking serious? Like, but no, that, that area is dangerous.
Our Lord.
That had to be terrifying.
Um, yeah. I mean, for a second I was like, is this, is this, is it happening? Right. Um, cause the way they pulled up, you know, I was like walking on the street and they like, they like, you know, cut me off, you know? And they were like, Hey, Paul Rosley.
And I was like, Oh.
And, uh, our lawyer, or the guy that used to be the lawyer for jungle keepers, um, his father was very vocal locally about the gold miners and standing up to them. And they just whacked him. just that easy. No consequences. No consequences.
A really good friend of mine on the river. Um, his father had moved out deep into the jungle like 20 years ago and raised his two boys out there. And 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. They wanted to be deep in the jungle. And so, uh, old man, Satoko was like, you know, we're, we're gonna, we gotta figure something out, either move deeper or move away, or whatever.
And like, they were trying to figure out what to do. And there was this one summer, I spent a lot of time with his son. His name was also Paul. And, uh, he got, he got murdered by gold miners too.
And so like, it's just like a, it's just a war zone. And then, and then, you have some of our, 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. One of my Rangers has a scar on his head from a seven foot arrow from the uncontacted tribes. There's a picture of that too. I think it says uncontacted, Ignacio.
Yeah. 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. So 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. Really?
Yeah. So check this out. So this is one of my Rangers, um, Ignacio, he's, he's local, indigenous, and, uh,
And that's the scar on his head from the arrow. Yeah. He was trying,
so the uncontacted came out and they were pretty fresh.
You're going to have a scar on your head. That's a good spot. That was good.
Yeah. Someone's got a picture of it when it happened, but he was, he was saying they were trying to, they were trying to push bananas, because these people don't know, you know, these people are out there and they're naked and they're in the jungle and they've been there for, you know, a few hundred years. And he was there and he was actually working for the ministry of culture. And he was like, let me try and be friendly. Let me try and like extend an olive branch.
And so he's trying to push a boatload of bananas towards them. And the scariest thing was they were, they didn't want anyone to understand them. And so they were actually speaking in capuchin monkey, monkey calls. And he's out in the middle. He's brave, this guy.
And 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 and it just gave him. that cut him right to the skull. Yeah, there's that one.
And there should be one more where he's just looking right at us, but yeah, he's, he's. he's lucky. He's really lucky. He's got worse stories in that too. One time he was, he was at a remote guard post and the tribes came and he'd already gotten, I think he'd already gotten shot.
And he said he went up into the roof and like hid in the rafters, like 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 them. 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 going to 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 going to happen if I go down there.
Also, then I'm also going to get, I'm going to get, everyone's going to come after me for calling them uncontacted. Apparently, that's an outdated term. Apparently, the correct parlance these days is voluntarily isolated, indigenous, nomadic persons.
Let's stick with uncontacted.
Can we just call them uncontacted?
Oh, fuck you, man. Fuck you for making me remember all that shit. That's so silly. Yeah. Uncontacted is not a pejorative.
No, it's just, and then people like, well, they technically have contact if they shot your friend. And I'm like, yeah,
well, sort of, I guess. I guess. Peripheral.
Sure.
It's. it's gotta be horrifying for them, right? I mean, if they've been there for thousands and thousands of years of living like that and then slowly but surely they see this encroachment of machines and how much they understand of this Western culture that's infringing upon them.
I don't, it's weird, because these guys that they don't have, they don't have boats, and so like they don't have, like the wheel, like all these, like simple inventions, like they've, just, they don't, they don't work with metal. And so I believe that the current theory says now that basically, these people were living extremely isolated around the time of the industrial revolution. They were already very remote. And then, when you had the demand for rubber, the Amazon was the only place that you could get rubber. And Henry Ford found out when he did Fordlandia, you can't make a plantation out of rubber.
It'll get leaf blight and die. So 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. These are the people that fought. These are the people that remained unconquered, stayed back further in the deepest parts of the forest. And so you think these people's grandparents, grandparents, must tell them that those outsiders will set you on fire.
They will skin you alive. If you see one of them, kill it before it kills you. So they must be just running scared.
It is really fascinating that there's still people living essentially the exact same way that they were living thousands and thousands of years ago.
Yeah. They have a couple of machetes that they stole off. some friends of mine. Like they sacked this village one time and they took pots and machetes. They killed all the animals.
Yeah. They're, they're, they're very strange to deal with. Like, like. there was a guy who had started leaving them like bananas and then he left them like a shirt, you know, he would, just very carefully. Cause they don't, they can't speak.
They don't speak Spanish. They don't even speak like Piro or anything like, um, or Yine. is the, the, the dialect that we deal with on our river. And, um, they murdered him too. And like, he was friends with them for a few years and no one has an exploit.
I just spoke to a eminent anthropologist about this. I was like, what was the reason for that? And he was like, no one knows.
So he had made some sort of contact with them and was he had regular things and was he in contact physically with them?
Uh, I think, like he, he would be in the same space. Like he could have spoken to them, if he could speak to them. But I think it was sort of like a, like. I leave you this and then I back up and then they would come forward and then, you know, it would be like this very, very careful exchange. And that went on for a few years.
And then everyone was like, Oh, there's this guy and he's been able to develop this. It was like, it was special. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't, um, it wasn't in any way, it wasn't like a bravado thing. It was like, he was actually trying to be like, can we make friends with these people? Can we, can we, can we make a relationship here?
Maybe bring them in, maybe do they want to come in? Are they scared? Do they need help? Maybe we could just help them with some stuff. Um, and then they found him with seven foot arrows in him.
So yeah. No explanation.
No explanation. So yeah, the, the one time that I saw them, I ran for three days. I like ran down river. I jumped in my boat. I went all night.
I just, I, absolutely, I realized I'd gone, I'd made a wrong turn and ended up somewhere I shouldn't have been. And I was completely alone. Cause then that was after the, the learning days and the jungle keepers days came, the days where the locals were like, okay, so you know, the jungle, like start going out on your own, see if you could really do it, go survive. And I personally wanted to see if I could experience living. I wanted to know, it's like, it's like being told you can go to Mars and walk around all by yourself.
Whoa.
You're out in the Amazon for a week by yourself and you're camping on a beach and you wake up and you walk up river and you camp on a beach and you wake up. To me, it was almost like the world melted away. It was like that Will Smith movie where you're the last person on earth. It's like you, you, 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. It's like the Galapagos.
You are in a place where animals are unfamiliar with the shape of a human, so they don't mind. And there's giant anacondas, like. it's different. It's different. out there.
There are still places where, from century to century, nobody goes and the animals have no idea. And when you're out there, it gets, it gets really freaky. Like. I noticed my brain losing touch with, like, like I would start to get worried. Like, like, it.
was this just my reality. now. Could I go back? You know, you're so far out there and the Amazon's friendly. The Amazon's, not, the jungle itself, there's nothing that's going to eat you.
A jag's not going to eat you. And unless you go swimming in a lake at night, a black caiman or an anaconda is not going to mess with you. And it's like, piranha tastes good. They actually, you know, that's like how you survive. So it's like, it's pretty chill as a wilderness experience until something goes wrong.
And so you get a big thunderstorm and the river rises 20 feet and there's entire trees, this thick as school buses flying down river in the rapids. Then, then you're in trouble.
That was one of the scary things about your book, the way you described that when trees fall, that they're so intertwined that acres of land might fall.
Yeah. Yeah. I, I, everyone has, you know, what's the most dangerous thing in the Amazon? Is it the snakes? Is it the Jaguars?
It's like, dude, Jack, you don't even see a Jaguar. When you hear a pop like that big cannon shot pop with, like an old tree, pops in the, you run, you run. Because when that comes down, it's laced into the canopy with the other trees. And so it's going to pull down other things. I was with loggers one time and they were cutting a tree and it was going to go that way.
So we were standing behind it. And I, you know, I'm always like, okay, I got to document this. I got to document this. And so this tree is going to fall away from us. And this tree is probably about as thick as this room.
and this tree, you know, talking about 160 foot tree. and this tree starts falling over and it grabs another tree, and we all realized it at the same time, but the other tree broke and snapped in our direction. And there's like a 30 foot shard of timber, like a fucking Oak tree, flying at us. And we all just scattered, and then all like, it was, just like the world ended. There was there's vines and giant things coming down entire, entire trees falling out of the sky and flying and splinters.
It was cataclysmic. Like it was, it was out of control. I would never, ever, ever stand that close to a tree falling in the Amazon again. I put a GoPro on it and run away. Wow.
Jesus Christ.
I would argue that that's crazier than the moon. You know, like you say, going to Mars and running around, there's nothing on Mars. You're just going to see a bunch of dirt. It's going to be sad. It's going to be like going to the, to death Valley, but there's no people ever.
Yeah. It's just nothing. What you're seeing is almost more crazy, because there's so much life and it's so alien to you, you know, it's nature and it's a part of the earth that we live on, but it's not a part of the earth that we live on, where humans are. So that's why it's so fascinating and unique about the rainforest.
It's so wild. And so like, that's where, like our thing with, you know, even with the anacondas, it was like, you know, it started with the snakes and they'd be like, you know, teach us about the snakes, snakes. And then, after a while, I was like, guys, where are the anacondas? You know, like this is supposed to be the Amazon. Where the hell are they?
Yeah. And so they were like, well, once a year we go on these like hunting expeditions up rivers. They're like, come with us. And there's this family of brothers. JJ has like 17 brothers and they're like, come with us.
It's literally just a dugout, a canoe, like a little, you know, 16 horsepower motor. And you just go up for 10 days, 12 days, to places where you go, where are we? And they're like, no, no, it doesn't have a name. We're just on river. You just out.
And so, you know, we were hunting and fishing, and we're just like surviving off the land, going up to thing. And then we started catching, there's anacondas basking on the sides of the river. And so we just started jumping on these snakes, grabbing them by the neck. The first one I did, I fucked up though. The first anaconda I ever caught,
the first anaconda I ever caught, I really fucked up because I was like, okay, I know how to catch snakes. I've handled big snakes. I know what I'm doing. You know, they were going to come in from the bottom. I was going to come in from the top.
I ran in and I grabbed the snake by the head and she went and wrapped my hands and my wrists are together. And I was like, oh shit. Oh no. I was like, now I can't get out of this if I wanted to. And the next coil came over my shoulders and it's a 200 pound snake.
So I'm on my knees. And so I'm, I, I went to scream, JJ and all I got, I got nothing out. And so I'm sitting there wrapped in an anaconda, with my clavicle, like turning into a V, my shoulders were almost touching and I could feel my ribs just about to go. Oh boy. And three of my friends jumped on.
They started untying it from the tail and everything like that. But I came that close. Like, oh boy, I really fucked up.
Oh boy. Look at the size of that thing. Is that the one? That is not the one that is. Oh, look at the size of that thing.
And that's not even, that's not even as big as I get.
How big is that one?
That one is 18 feet, six inches. That's so big. This one, this is the largest, uh, scientifically wild caught, verified anaconda that we have in scientific literature. I mean, there's people have records of bigger ones. I've seen bigger ones.
Um, this is, we named her Eleanor after my grandmother. That's the 18 foot one. This is the 18 feet, six inches. She was 220 pounds, but she was hungry.
She was. look at the size of that thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So if, if that one that got ahold of you, that's not this one.
No, that was the one that got ahold of me. was, you know, five feet shorter than this one. This, this, this, this thing is a drag.
This thing is like the crack and there's no way. No. What, how big do they get?
That's JJ, by the way, I keep talking about. Um, okay. So here's my measurement. Um, and actually, somebody recently sent me a video of you and, uh, Forrest Galante talking about this, about how big can an anaconda get. Me and JJ were out on this place called the floating forest one night.
And I, you know, I was trying to like, I was thinking about like getting on the cover of national geographic. I was thinking about, like, you know, getting attention at that time. Right. And, uh, but we, we, we had gone deeper down the Amazon rabbit hole than, like anyone had ever gone. I found this place, the floating forest, where you're walking on, on rafts of floating grass and you're walking past treetops.
So there's a forest underneath the lake, but you're walking on the surface of it and the anacondas love it.
Wow.
Because they can sit on these, on these grassy islands. And if anything comes, the whole thing is like a giant tympanic membrane. As soon as something takes a step, they're like threat and they go down. And, just like any big fish, just like any ancient giant crocodile, those shrewd old motherfuckers that have been there for a century, they, that's where they live. And so we were out there like two o'clock in the morning and we're walking on these grassy rafts and JJ's going, this is anaconda.
And I went, that is not anaconda. Cause the red, the grass was pushed down, but it was like, it was this big. I was like, this, this can't be anaconda.
You know, the feet, I was like, it just can't be. And then at like middle of the night, the stars are shining in the, in the, the black water and everything. And we're just by. the tops were in the canopy of a forest on top of a lake. And we see two anacondas.
One of them is so big that I would say it was probably 24, 25 feet. Gigantic. That was an 18 footer. Then there was like another, like a 16 footer on it. And my first response was we have to catch this snake.
And so I jumped on it. I just didn't think about it. I just jumped on the snake.
Oh, my God.
And, and 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. I 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. That's how, that's how big this thing was. And so it dragged me to the edge of the grass.
What? That big.
Oh my God. Oh my God. Your fingers couldn't touch. Oh my God. Oh my God.
Dude, that's so big. It's so fucking big.
And people said, oh, did it eat something? And I was like, no, that was, that was the, that was how big the snake was. And I know, because when she got to the edge, to the edge of the grass, I dipped in head first. This snake could have turned around and just eat me. She didn't, her head was like bigger than a Rottweiler.
It's bigger than Marshall's. Oh, my God. But she dove into the water. Her idea is just escape, you know, stay alive. So she goes down and I, my face, poked into the water.
And I was like, fuck that. You know, you start, you look straight down into hell down there. And I was sitting there holding onto the grass, with this giant Anaconda rushing by me, you know, 25 feet of Anaconda slithering past me. And I put my hand on her. and as she went by, my hand eventually went.
and then her tail slipped by me. And I was just, just alone in the dark and the Amazon. And I just seen this dragon. And then I turned around and went, what the fuck happened to JJ? And JJ is just standing there and he turned completely white.
And he was just, his circuits were blown. He was like, and I was like, you could have helped. I was like, you could have helped man.
So can you just help me out here? So the treetops, essentially there's water under the treetops. So you're walking on the treetops. So how deep is the water below you?
Like 30, 40 feet.
So you're essentially walking on grassy islands, floating vegetation. Is it like the, in this video, is it the same, similar terrain?
So, yes. And thank you for not playing the sound on this, because, but yeah, it's basically exactly like this. It's, see those islands over there? Yeah. There's floating grass.
And so this is actually how we caught the big one.
You know, everyone starts, Jay sees, do you see JJ? JJ has unlocked everything. JJ's like, there's an Anaconda, there's an Anaconda. Nobody else saw it. And then I'm the only person that's willing to fuck with the head.
And so they, they get the boats. This is literally how we caught the biggest Anaconda has ever been caught. So the camera guy, I was like, get the fuck out of here. And I just remember in this moment being like, do I really want to do this? Do I really like, did I, do I really want to do what I signed up to do?
Do you see it in the grass?
I can see it here. I can see it here. And I'm just going, please, I wish, can I, can I, can I turn back?
And so for the people, just listening, you're standing on the edge of the boat, you jump off into the grass and you run.
And thankfully I have a good GoPro on. And then you see, there's my team. Boom, boom, boom. Everybody jumping in. So we had all these people that have all handled big snakes before coming in.
And see, I don't have the head. We didn't have the head. JJ had the tail. JJ got the tail. This guy, Jonas, had the tail.
Mohsen had the tail. Lee had the tail. Everybody's holding onto the snake. We're using the boat to keep ourselves up. And then I got the head.
And then, as soon as I get the head, I know I'm going to get wrapped again. Oh my God. I mean, this is like, look at it. This is like.
And this is the 18 footer?
Yeah, this is the 18 footer.
Look at the size of this thing.
Yeah. So when people are like, why don't you catch the 25 footer?
I'm like, well, look at this. The difference in just like, I'm seeing how big this is. It's unbelievably big. And the idea that something was almost 10 foot bigger than this. Yeah.
And much thicker around.
Much, much thicker around. This girl is skinny. Oh my God. Yeah. In a second, in a second, they'll show us walking with her.
That is so wild. And you get a sense of really how big she is.
And you got to keep a hold of that. That bitch is going to swallow your head.
Oh, my God.
Look at it. Look at. What is that feeling like where you're holding onto the head of that thing?
Yeah. No, it's completely, completely wild. And it was just, I. honestly, in that moment, it was like, you want your best friends there. Cause man, that was, that was scary.
That was very scary.
And so what is the plan? What do you do with this? once you capture it? Do you measure it and then let it go?
Yeah. So for this one, um, here, look, there's a shot, there's a shot coming up where we like, we kind of have her stretched out for a second, but with this one, we put a radio transmitter down her throat and we were able to track her movements, to learn about the home ranges of female anacondas.
So she swallows it?
Yeah. It's just like a, like a big pill.
Oh, wow. How big?
Like a Zippo lighter? Sure.
Yeah. Look at that. Look at that head.
Oh my God. Look at the teeth.
Yeah. They were like, that's the queen of the Amazon. Um, but yeah, she was old. She had so many scars. And so we measured her 18 feet, six inches.
And then, uh, the friendly people at Discovery Channel changed it to 19 feet, six inches on the show, which was always interesting. How dare they? How dare they?
Um. That sounds like Hollywood.
Yeah.
Just got to juice it up just a little bit.
Just a little bit. Just turn it up. Um.
It's impressive enough, you folks. Look at that thing. Look at that thing. It's so immense. I just can't believe there was one that much bigger than that.
Yeah. What is, what is the folklore? Like, what do they say when they say what's the biggest one?
Uh, I mean, I have people that told me that they found a 60 foot anaconda. Oh! That guy's a drunk.
Yeah, but maybe he's telling the truth. Nah.
Pixar didn't have it.
Remember the movie with Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube?
I remember that there was one.
John Voight, John Voight had, like the worst Brazilian accent ever. It didn't even sound Brazilian.
I can't actually watch that movie. I really feel like I should. It's a terrible movie.
Is it? Oh, it's terrible. But it's great. It's like one of those, I think it was like.
There's nothing wrong with a good, bad movie.
I want to say it was like 90s, right? Oh, shit. What year was that? It's so dumb.
But the actual big anaconda, look at the size of it, the one that's come behind Ice Cube. The actual big anaconda was like. That.
I've seen that image before, yeah.
John Voight. Jeez.
You should hear his Brazilian accent, too. It's crazy. It doesn't even make sense.
Wait, does he eat two people at once?
Yeah, bro. Oh, shit. It's a movie. Wow. One person is not scary enough.
Gotta be tied together somehow. You and your family.
Tied together. somehow. The snake wraps. So they say they've seen a 60-foot one. Sure.
But do they have an age limit? It seems like when they get to a certain size, nothing's hunting them.
No, they're an apex predator.
So it's just disease or old age. No.
So in the Amazon, the cool thing with the Amazon is it's the greatest natural battlefield on Earth. It's literally just this churning death march. Life is like a momentary stasis in this recycling of death. And it's like, you fight for it. And a snake that's getting big, like that one that we just caught, like Eleanor.
So we learned that she moves around this swamp and has a home range. And then eventually, after a few months, she passes the transmitter. She'll poop out the transmitter. But one of the guys on the team, Pat, is actually, I think, through Acadia University. We've been continuing this, and we've learned that there are so many more anacondas than we thought.
And everyone said, the traditional literature said that they're ambush predators, that they only wait. And it's like, no. They're going to places where there's mineral licks. In the Amazon. And they stake out them.
Like, they're more strategic than we thought.
Oh, so they wait for the animals to lick the minerals.
Yeah, so there's places where there's like a salt deposit. And so you get all the herbivores coming there for the salt. But the anacondas will go up streams and strategically target those places. And so one time we saw an anaconda eating a peccary. Which is, for everybody that doesn't know, is a wild boar.
Like a javelina. Yeah. And like, I was at a stream trying to take a picture of a butterfly, and I heard this. And I looked down, and there's like a 16-foot anaconda. And it just bent this peccary in half.
And it was just looking at me. And I was like. And then it split. And so, once a snake leaves its meal, it's very unfortunate. But once a snake leaves its meal, it's not going to come back to it.
So the snake left. Because we had gotten, unknowingly, we got too close. So we had wild boar that night. We just threw it on the barbecue.
Wow.
Speaking of eating things, Jamie, could you, there's a, I think it's just called monkey head. I've been dying to show you this.
Can I ask you a question, though? Yeah. How old did they get? Like, the one that you got, that was 18 feet, how old do you think she was?
The thing is, they have indeterminate growth. So you take a baby anaconda. They're live-born, by the way, not in eggs. So you get a brand-new, slimy little anaconda. And they come out.
And their food, for, like the jabberoo storks, for other caiman, for even fish. The fish are brutal, man. I just, I caught a baby caiman the other day. He had no toes, because the piranhas were eating his toes off.
Whoa.
But the anaconda's interesting because it's, it has this outsized impact on the whole ecosystem, because they start off basically as prey. They're just, you know, these little two-foot worms. But then, as they grow, then all of a sudden they can eat bigger things. Then they can eat the caiman back. Then they can start eating the birds.
And then all of a sudden they're eating capybara. And then you get to the big mamas, where they're the top of the ecosystem. They're the top of the food chain. And so you have, like black caiman, anaconda, jaguar, harpy, eagle, giant, river otters. And like those are your, like, you know, top contenders for apex predator in the Amazon.
The harpy eagle's. amazing. What a wild-looking creature.
They're talons.
They're so big, too. Is that the biggest eagle?
I don't, I don't think it's, I think the, I think the Philippine eagle or the stellar sea eagle, but the harpy is just unreasonably large. Like when you see them, you go, that, that's, that's what that is.
And they eat a lot of monkeys.
They 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. Because 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. So you'll see like a little bone yard in the jungle. Wow. Yeah.
It doesn't last too long, because nothing lasts long. It just keeps recycling everything. But, um, when I was a kid, you know, in the rainforest books, they'd say, 50% of the life in a rainforest is up in the canopy. And it's, like, you know, silly cat bullshit. It is.
It is. There's more stuff up there than there is down there. So when you're walking in the Amazon, you're under 150 feet of green. 3% of the sunlight is hitting the ground. Most of the action is happening above you.
Wow.
The birds, the monkeys, the bats, the snakes, the frogs, everything is moving up there. There's cactuses and bromeliads, and vines, and it's all interconnected, and there's this whole network. The Amazon canopy keeps changing the, the, like. when you say how many species are on earth, and it's like, they're like, we really don't know. Because nobody, nobody, can spend time up in the Amazon canopy.
There's people that have used hot air balloons. There's people that have used giant nets. Um, you can climb up with a rope, but then, like you're kind of limited to one tree. Um, I just, we just spent the last two months building the tallest tree house in the world. It's like above, see, can you, yeah, can you do tree house?
It's, it's, it's insane. I slept up there for one night. Look at this, look at this coming out of the mist. I just slept up there for one night. And in the morning, I couldn't believe what I saw.
We woke up and it was like what they tell you in the rainforest books. It was like, there was like three species of monkeys, like 15 different species of birds. There was things just moving all over the place. What a cool little tree house. Little, it takes like 10 minutes to walk up there.
That's badass. Yeah, apparently it's the tallest tree house in the world. It's in the middle of the Amazon now, and we got solar panels up on there.
So how many feet up is it?
I think it's about, I think the floor is about 110 feet up.
And how long did it take to build this thing?
A couple of months, took like three months actually. We brought in some expert tree house builders. These guys are the tree house community and they.
That's insane.
They build tree houses all over the world. But this one, it was like, we had to figure out. like, how do you even build a stair? The staircase was half the project. How do you build a staircase to get up to the top of this tree?
It's amazing. You guys did an amazing job. I love it.
Yeah.
The electricity up there, that's fucking badass.
Yeah. Yeah, no, it's, it's really cool.
And that's still there right now?
Still there. No, like it, just got there. You see how fresh that wood is. It's like, it's not even done. Like, um, I left there to come here.
You sleep there. when you're there? That's your spot?
Yeah. Me and my girlfriend just slept up there and we woke up in there.
Oh, my God, you talked to a girl when you're going up there?
She must be an angel.
Crazy. Um, dude, if you're going to hang out with me, there's a lot of snakes, a lot of climbing.
Oh, I can imagine. You got to go to the tree house.
Um, but now.
So when you wake up in the morning and look out from there, it's gotta be insane.
I mean, first of all, you, the sun coming up in the East, and you have, like red apocalypse, beautiful, like mist coming off the jungle. and you have spider monkeys, like excited. Cause that's a fig, that's a ficus. And so everyone's excited to eat. So all the animals are coming to the tree house.
And so you have, like howler monkeys, spider monkeys, capuchins, squirrel monkeys. I can't even name all the birds for you. It'd just take too long, but there's just, it's like cacophonous. Like I couldn't talk to you cause we wouldn't be able to hear each other. Wow.
You have to scream. And there's like fruit falling on you and animals are shitting all over the place. And there's like leafcutter ants are starting up their day. And then there's like bullet, ants fucking around, being like, who can I, who can I take down today? Like it is wild, but it's like, that's why we were like, okay, we got to, cause.
otherwise you climb up on a rope and you're like holding onto a branch and you look around and you go down. And it's just like, now you, now you can go up there and like, take it in, and it's a whole other world. It's wild. And we put it like right in the middle of the 50,000 acres. And so it's just mega remote wilderness and you're actually comfortable.
And so you have solar panels. So do you have batteries up there? Do you have like, how are you running that?
Well, one of the guys on my team, Stefan, is a complete psychopath and a intense problem solver. He put solar panels, um, hot water, a bathroom. So this is not, this isn't just a tree house. This is like a luxury tree house.
A bathroom? Like running water?
A shower.
Whoa. So you have pipes that go down the side of the. Yeah.
Yeah. So there's pipes. The idea is that, like, you, can't bring a high volume of tourists into a pristine rainforest. And, like, tourism is a major help for, for helping us protect this place. So it's like, we went with like the African model.
Like the guys I work with in Africa at Vetpaw, they were like, you know, they work on a, on a hunting reserve. And the owner of the reserve explained it to me like this. He was like, look, no, one's going to pay $30,000 to take a picture of a Buffalo, but they might pay $30,000 to shoot a Buffalo. And that like stuck in my head. And it was like, how do we, how do we get less tourists at more value?
And it's like build the tallest, most remote, comfortable, luxury tree house in the world. And it's like, so now, so now we can invite people up there and be like, you can, like literally live stream, like wifi. We got, we got Starlink up there and we carried some Starlink out there. Yeah. So when you messaged me, I was out there.
That's how I got it. I got it on Starlink. I was out in the jungle and I was like, I was like, oh shit guys. It's like, I got to go back to the U S for a minute. Like, wow.
So you could have like the ultimate experience going to, you could make a bunch of those. Yeah. And people would pay an insane amount of money to go there.
Yeah. I mean, that's the idea. So we're going to see if it works. Um, because since the beginning, like when I started with JJ, it was like, we bring people to the jungle and you camp out with us, you live in the tent with us. And it was like the market for that is like really small.
Right. There's like six people that want to do that. Nobody wants to do that. And like, and the people that do want to do it, ask them in the morning if they still want to do it. Right.
They don't. Um, and so, so making it so that people can actually come and see the Amazon Rainforest in a way that's, that's like safe and bug free and air conditioned and everything else. And it's like, you can just wake up and look at it all. And it's like, so it's that, it's a, it's a, it's an amazing thing. I can't believe that I got to sleep up there.
So it's like, it's, it's pretty cool. That's insane. Yeah.
So back to the anacondas, I'm trying to figure out how old they get.
They get old, man. I think, I think like I'm, I'm, I would say 70.. So. Cause, when you have like a bull python, you're talking like 30 years or something like that.
But do they know that they have a lifespan? Do they know that they die of old age? Is that a thing that happens with them? or they just keep going? Like there's some animals that live on earth.
Like, I think there's a shark that's older than the United States. that's still alive. It's like a type of, what is it? A Greenland shark? Yeah.
There's a, there's a type of shark that's literally from like the 1700s. Yeah. That's still living.
They also pulled a spearhead out of a, I want to say a right whale. Where the same thing, and they, they dated that spearhead back to, like the 1830s or something.
How long do Greenland sharks live? Like science says, Greenland shark lives at least 250 years. They may live over 500 years.
And that thing is just down in the black abyss. Just moving.
Just blind.
Just swimming around. When our grandparents were alive. It was just doing that.
Yeah. People were riding horses. That thing's just swimming around. The internet comes around. It's still swimming.
Chat GPT. Still swimming.
Holy shit.
Yeah. I just wonder how old anacondas get. And so the folklore about them, the 60 foot ones, like I wonder if that's real. One of these just keep growing.
I think, I wouldn't be surprised if they're well into the thirties. If you told me that somebody found a 35 foot anaconda, I'd be like, absolutely.
What is the world record that they've ever discovered?
I don't know. Again, we have the scientifically verified. Captured. 18.6 is not that big.
Not as big.
No, I've seen bigger. I know other people that have seen, like people I trust that have seen bigger. Um, there's bigger anacondas out there, for sure. Yeah.
And there's no way to know. There's so, you're talking about so much territory.
Yeah. And so much territory. Cause in between those rivers is just eons of unbroken forests. Like we have, yeah, we have to worry about the Amazon. It's being cut down, but there are still places.
Is that one real?
That's a dick pic.
That's. This is the one that keeps popping up. There's only a few pictures online. The largest ones. It's like 30 feet.
So is that a perspective thing? Like when someone holds a fish in front of them like this. That's it.
Yeah. And that, and that's why, that's why I said that. Cause like they're holding that so much closer to the, to the camera, and that's a retic. So that's Indonesia. That's a, that's somewhere in Southeast Asia, but.
It's still big.
It's still big, but it could be like 11 feet, which is kind of a puppy still.
So there's other ones where it shows like an anaconda wrapped around a giant tractor. Are those fake?
I think those are fake. There's one, though, where they're cutting an Indonesian farm worker out of a reticulated python. That's real. A hundred percent. Yeah.
I mean, people do get eaten by snakes. I mean, that's not, you know, it's like that. And like, I remember, cause, like when I was like, I'd say even up until like five years ago, it'd always be like, are these videos real? And then, like two years ago or so, they're like, watch this. And like, you see the guy fall out of the snake and you're like, okay, that one's real.
Yeah. Yeah.
It does happen.
It does happen.
How often does it happen? Is it something that they worry about, or is it just like a very rare occurrence of someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
You gotta be pretty, I mean, as a human, you gotta be pretty stupid to get eaten by an anaconda. You gotta be doing something really stupid. Really? Yeah. I mean, cause like you're walking through the jungle, like, you know, you know, not to go up to your chest in certain swamps.
I mean, dude, I was.
I'm just feeling, walking around, knowing there's giant snakes around, being up to your chest in water.
Fuck out of here. Forget the giant snakes. When you fall into that nightmare soup at two in the morning and you get that black water on you and there's, there's things going up your pants. There are insects in the water. There are tarantulas walking on the water, eating the frogs.
It's like you are in a festival of sex and death when you're in the Amazon night. Like it is falling into that water. Like 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. Cause otherwise shit gets up there.
One girl got bitten like 16 times by this giant aquatic water spider thing. Went up her leg, just going like Morse, coding her. Just like, got, got, got, got, got, got, got, got, just like pumping venom into her. Oh, yeah.
How bad did she get fucked up?
Emotionally, I think it was worse than the pain. Cause the pain gave her some Benadryl and she like slept it off. But like, she was, just like, God, it was so horrible. She 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. And it's like, you don't even know what it is. It could be a new species.
Wow.
You don't even know what it is.
No. It's wild.
They don't have a real accounting of all the different species.
No, no, no, they don't. And so, like people say, oh, like a bullet ant is the most painful insect bite. And it's like, dude, I've been bitten by, stung by bullet ants like eight times. They hurt. They suck.
But I found a, a caterpillar that was like, you know, I don't know. Again, maybe like two Zippos. And I had it on a leaf and I was trying to put it in a terrarium. And the leaf like bent under the thing's way. It was like yellow.
It kind of looked like Trump's hair. And it like fell on my hand. And I was plunged into immediate, like electroshock, like pain waves. Way worse than a bullet ant. Way worse.
Whatever this caterpillar did to me fucked me up for days.
Wow. It was horrible.
Some kind of venom.
Yeah. I mean, under, under. then, then I like, I really got scared. Cause. then I was like, okay, do I have to get out of the forest?
So like we went in with like forceps and like moved the hair and like underneath the hair, it has like these, like Christmas tree barbs, and the hair is covering those barbs. Yeah. Something, something like that.
What the fuck, man? Yeah. Look at that thing.
Yeah. That, that was, I, I, I was not laughing. Like when we get bit by a bullet ant, we're like, oh shit. Like your day's over. It's funny.
That's, that's not funny.
Is this about your work? Is this, this from you?
No.
This image. This is another one. This is in Florida. This is, it's a pus caterpillar. Oh my God.
In Florida. I've never heard of it. So is that an invasive species? Cause so many of those in Florida.
Most venomous caterpillars in the U.S.
So what does it say? What'd you say? This right over here says most venomous caterpillar in the U.S. Oh, wow. It says it's like a bee sting though.
So is it a bee sting, only worse, pain immediately rapidly gets worse from being stung. It can even make your bones hurt.
So does that exactly what got you or something similar?
It was something in that family, something related to that. Oh, dude. I hate that feeling. I hate even thinking about that feeling. It's horrible.
And so that's the worst one that you've experienced.
That's the worst insect bite. Yeah. Yeah.
What about other bites?
Well, I mean like crocodiles hurt.
You got bit by a crocodile? Yeah.
Really? Yeah. I just, uh, I, one time I got, I was, I was catching a caiman at night. Um, and it was like a, you know, usually you catch a caiman and they're not that big. I caught one that was a little bit too big and she like, I couldn't get an arm over her.
I had her by the neck and I couldn't get an arm over her tail, cause her tail was like over here. And she thrashed out and I, stupid, stupid, stupid. I like grabbed one of her hind, you just let her go. You know, there's no reason for this. I just, I grabbed, like a hind leg and I was like, oh, I'm going to re.
She just came around whack and just nailed me and snapped my watch in half. Like she just like put a nail through the watch I had, which was great, cause it saved me. And then I still have this, uh, like a, something in my arm, in my hand, just like a, a bone knot. But like. then her other tooth went in there and came out there, and it's like, it was just stupid.
Now I'm more careful when I catch crocs.
How big is that, caiman? Um, they're fairly small in that family, right?
Well, you have the, we have four species where we are. We have the smooth fronted, we have the dwarf, which are both, like, you know, like three feet, five feet. And then you have spectacled, which can get up to, like, you know, eight, nine feet. And then you have black caiman that can be 18 feet long. Really?
Black caimans are real. Black caimans are real thing.
Really?
Oh yeah.
18 feet long.
Yeah. Oh yeah. No, like a black caiman skull, is like, oh my God. No, they're huge.
Let me see what that looks like. I always thought I was under the impression that caimans were the smaller ones. I didn't know they got that big.
You know, black, black caiman looks like an alligator. Like it's, it's, they're monsters.
A big alligator. They get 18 feet long.
Holy shit, man. So you encountered those?
Yeah, I've encountered those. What the fuck, dude?
Dinosaurs.
Oh, they're huge.
Holy shit.
Dude, there was one spot that we were, we were exploring. This is again, one of those places where you're way past, like the edge of civilization. And we were, we found this like swamp, and again, it's always JJ that finds everything. He goes, oh no. And I went, what?
And he goes, look at these. And there's like a drag mark, huge black caiman, like monstrous, like a two foot thick stomach. And then these monster hands on either side, you know, the feet as it's walking. 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.
And I'm like, what am I looking at here? And we got a stick and we brought him in and we realized a whole herd of pigs had tried to swim across this water. And this monstrous Godzilla black caiman had just gone and just took down like 10 of them.
Wow.
And so we just were like checking out his refrigerator. Like they were just there for later. They're just like floating there.
So he's in the area.
He was in the area. And we were like up to our knees and I was like, oh, I was like, we, we should probably, we should probably go, dude. Let's go. Oh my God. Yeah.
No, they're scary big. They're scary, scary, scary, scary big.
Are those similar to the ones they have in, like Costa Rica?
Costa Rica. I believe this is outside of my expertise, but I think you have American crocodiles and I think you have spectacle caimans there. I don't think you have black caiman in Costa Rica.
We saw some big crocodiles in Costa Rica. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, big for me. Yeah.
I don't know how big they are. I didn't measure them, but they were, we were on a boat trip and we're going down this river and you see them sliding into the water. So there's ones that were sunning on the side and then you see them just slide in the water. It was very creepy. Cause the water's brown and you can't see shit, and you know, they're there.
They don't bother you, though. Like I, just stepped on a caiman, the other, like a small one. I stepped on a caiman the other day and it was, like, you know, he freaked out.
Okay. Costa Rica crocodiles, they weigh between 800 and 1200 pounds. They get between 13 and 16 feet long. Yeah. Those are the ones that we saw.
So that's a different, American crocodile. Yeah. So it's the same as the ones that they have in like Florida. Is that, that true?
I don't know. Florida has fairly. American crocodile and Costa Rican crocodile. Yeah. Something different.
Can get very big indeed. So, so I think they're saying it's the same thing. Is that what they're saying? Cause? I know the American crocodiles, they're smaller than the alligators, but much more aggressive.
You know, they've spotted Nile crocodiles in the, in the Everglades. No. Yeah. No. They've got a kill on site order for Nile crocodiles.
They've at least spotted one. They don't know if it's breeding. I don't know if there's more than one.
That's so much worse than Burmese pythons.
It's the Florida thing is so God damn crazy. It's so wild. It's so wild. What's happened down there that there's literally 99% of all the mammals are missing from the Everglades.
99%.
99%.
Yeah. Google that. I found four since the 90s. Yeah. Okay.
That's even worse, cause they're out there.
So you know they're in there. You know they're in there. They found Nile, crocodiles. Jesus Christ.
Yeah. I guarantee it's some asshole with a pet. Yeah. Let him go. Now they're breeding.
Oh, but that's so much scarier. I mean, just the smash power that they have to take down a wildebeest, to rip the head off a zebra. Like.
I played a video on my Instagram that I found of one snapping a pig in half.
Yeah.
It just has the pig. Yeah. It just snaps. Yeah. And just chucks down the leg.
Yeah. But see if you can find that statistic on the Everglades that there's 99% of the mammals are missing. It can't be. I think it's true. It can't be.
I think it's true. I think it's 99% of all the raccoons. 99% of all the deer. Everything.
Yeah, cause the fucking crocodiles, ate them all.
Well, it's everything. It says it's cause the pythons, but it could be. 99.. Look at that. A 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%.
In some cases, in areas where pythons and other large invasive, large non-native constrictor snakes are known to be lurking.
Wow.
So the people that I know that have been there say it's over the last few decades, it's drastic. Yeah. You don't see anything anymore. You just see the snakes and you see alligators.
Well, it's like Guam. Guam had that problem with the snakes. Yeah. On the island of Guam, they had a monstrous snake problem. But that's the funny thing with the jungle.
It's like everything is. so, there's so many predators. Everything is eating each other. So it's like you don't have any one thing.
The balance is incredible. In Amazon.
In the Amazon.
That's the thing about the invasive species. They get introduced to an ecosystem that nothing's there to eat them, which is crazy. These python hunters that are finding these massive pythons in the Everglades, it's so crazy to watch how many of them there are and how they keep finding them.
I see kids on social media going out and literally finding Burmese pythons. It's like everyone can do it.
They say there's a half a million of them, at least in the Everglades.
I mean, it's warm, it's wet, there's wildlife. It's perfect. It's just like, you've got to figure out something to do with that.
How do they do that now? It's like they're so invasive. They're so in the system. How could they possibly eradicate them?
There's, I mean, cane toads in Australia. I mean, there's so many examples of this where we've transported something, or I think it was, I think it was cats in New Zealand. Devastated. House. cats just devastated.
Yeah, Australia as well. They brought them in to kill off other things and they just devastated ground nesting birds and anything else.
Yeah. No, like tragic. Yeah. It's really sad.
But what can they do? At this point, the Everglades are so dense.
Hire Florida mans to go out.
I think they are doing that. They are doing that.
Just put a reward on them.
But how much of a dent can they even put in it one-on-one?
I don't think it's a problem that you can really solve, because you get those big ones, but then it's like they're so cryptic. Snakes are so cryptic. Again, what we've learned about anacondas is they can be around you and you don't know it. They'll go in the sand in a river and they'll stick their nose up and they'll just be resting. They'll be like, I ate last week.
I'm just going to chill here. We'll be walking up a stream and if that snake, once snakes have radio transmitters in them, we're like, oh my God. We have none of the equipment required to find them. The babies, they're in the leaf litter, they're in the swamps. They're like, we're never going to get them out.
That's just the way it is now.
I totally think that they should try as much as possible. Poor Florida wildlife.
Yeah.
But, realistically, what are you going to do?
They're eating alligators now. I'm sure you've seen that.
Yeah. There's a picture where it exploded out the side.
Yeah. They're trying to eat alligators that are too big. They're eating 12 foot alligators.
We need to find someone to explain to the pythons what size alligator is the proper size alligator.
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