主持人: This Burmese python wants to know what is inside the diary of a CEO.

主持人: Oh my god.

主持人: Beautiful. Now, what are you feeling right now?

保罗: Wondering why I do this for a living.

主持人: Have you ever done a podcast with a 10-ft snake across the table before?

保罗: No, this is my first.

主持人: Awesome. And then we'll bring out the next friend.

保罗: Don't bring it over here.

主持人: Just don't move.

主持人: Paul, what have you spent the last 20 years of your life doing? living out of a backpack in the Amazon rainforest barefoot with a machete to help the indigenous people save the Amazon whatever it takes which means crocodile bites snake very rare diseases hunted by the narot traffickers with a picture of that guy that scar is because he was shot in the head by a 7ft arrow while he was trying to make peaceful contact with the unconted tribes and this is actually a very important story I think I have a video of this

保罗: yeah this is world first footage so tribe isolated so deep in the jungle that they've never heard of a spoon or the wheel or Jesus was coming out to make contact. So, we do a 2-day boat journey in one night through the worst thunderstorm I've ever seen. They were scared. We were scared because these tribes kill people all the time. And they had one question. How do we tell the bad guys from the good guys? You see, these people are being hunted by traffickers and gold miners and loggers and boxed in by deforestation. But if our oceans of rainforests are vanishing, life on Earth is not possible. Now, it's not too late, but we're the last generation that can save it. Paul, young kids are growing up attached to screens and loneliness is at an all-time high. Is there anything that you learned in those 15 years that a westerner like me would find useful?

保罗: 100%. So, let's start with purpose.

主持人: Listen, my team gave me a script that they asked me to read, but I'm just going to ask you in the nicest way I possibly can. Thank you first and foremost for choosing to subscribe to this channel. It is, it's been one of the most incredible crazy years of my life. I never could have imagined. I had so many dreams in my life, but this was not one of them. And the very fact that these conversations have resonated with you and you've given me so much feedback is something I will always be appreciative of. And I almost carry away a sort of burden of responsibility to pay you back. And the favor I would like to ask from you today is to subscribe to the channel if you would be so obliged. It's completely free to do that. Roughly about 47% of you that listen to this channel frequently currently don't subscribe to the channel. So if you're one of those people, please come and join us. Hit the subscribe button. It's the single free thing you can do to make this channel better. And every subscriber sort of pays into this show and allows us to do things bigger and better and to push ourselves even more. And I will not let you down if you hit the subscribe button. I promise you. And if I do, please do unsubscribe, but I promise I won't. Thank you.

主持人: Paul, you live an extraordinary life. A very atypical extraordinary life. What have you spent the last 20 years of your life doing? trying to find a way to explore the wildest parts of the Amazon and figure out a way to save them.

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

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

主持人: And you live in the Amazon.

保罗: For the last 20 years, I've lived mostly in the Amazon. I've slept more nights outdoors than I have in my adult life because I befriended the indigenous people of the upper Amazon rainforest. And that's what the book is about. It's I went down there at 18 years old because I needed adventure. And then the quest for adventure led for this call to meaning. And then that led to the discovery that we were the only ones who could do anything to stop the bulldozers and the chainsaws from destroying the thing that we loved.

主持人: A lot of people have clicked on this conversation for whatever reason. What are we going to talk about today that you think might be interesting to them in their lives and what is the wide variety of things from the conversations you have every single day that compels people cuz I want to give them a bit of a tlddr before we get into the detail.

保罗: I think that what people are going to find and this is what I tried to write about was that I didn't know where I was going at first. I just knew what I loved. And so over the last 20 years, it's been following a dream in a direction. And that dream was finding a way to relieve the incredible stress that I felt over the the state of the environment. We live in these times where people feel like the world is ending. There's nothing we can do. Our oceans are collapsing. The rainforests are vanishing. Elephants are being hunted to extinction. And I wanted to know, are there solutions to these problems? Is there a way to change the narrative of conservation and come up with an alternative reality where everything's okay? And do you think your message is more timely now than ever with everything that's going on with technology and AI and this sort of great transition we're in?

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

主持人: And as it relates to mental health, young kids are growing up attached to physical to screens and to technology and all these things. You've lived almost the opposite life. It appears for the last 20 years. I'm wondering if there's anything, you know, cuz you said today on your way here that you like didn't know how to get out of the Uber and

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

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

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

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

主持人: but in the same way that people might look at the way you choose to live your life and say, "This is very, very strange." Do you look at people that, you know, like me that work seven days a week behind a screen and think that's a very strange life?

保罗: I just know that I couldn't do it. I I I depend almost almost I'm so reliant on nature. I have to be around trees. I fall asleep to frogs. I I mean even even being in a city, I go seek out a place where there's a lot of trees. I am like a forest creature. If you take me out of my environment, I start to stress and die. And there's a part of me that yes, that starts to die if you keep me locked in concrete or if you were to if you were to relegate me to a a I was just in a hotel last week on the book tour and I realized nothing in the room with me was natural. The carpet, the table, the windows, the television, everything that was in this room with me was composite materials. And I couldn't even open the window to get to the outside air. And I it did occur to me. I said, I wonder if other people feel this type of of of societal claustrophobia where to me it's I have to have my feet in a river at some point. I have to I have to every night before I fall asleep, I have to look up. It's a ritual. I have to look up and and look at the stars. How else can you pray?

保罗: And so for me, being in a city has become a very different reality to what I'm used I mean, just taking a shower. I mean, trust me, it's not as much fun standing in a cold tile box and spraying water on yourself as it is running through the jungle, diving into the river and swimming and the whole river rushing around you. It's a whole different experience. And so, when I come back, I get a little bit, you know, I miss my I miss the frogs and the birds and and sort of my neighbors of of of the jungle.

主持人: Do you think there's like a collective delusion in terms of the way we live our lives? Do do you think we're we've gone a bit crazy? Kind of like the frog in the frying pan. It's happened so gradually, the sort of technological

主持人: creep of our lives that, you know, and we're looking at young kids that are more anxious and depressed than ever before. Loneliness is at an all-time high.

主持人: More people are taking anti-depressant medications than ever before.

保罗: I think that yes is the simple answer to your question. That that that sort of we're a species perpet we're a fish perpetually out of water. that as humans because we've taken ourselves away from forests and away from deserts and away from mountains and the ocean. I mean, we used to be fishermen and we used to be farmers and and now the life that we live is so incredibly different than that. If you ask kids where does their meat come from, there are kids that will say the grocery store. You know, they don't know that chickens exist before it's in the package. And and so, you know, for for there was that generation, which I think that you and I are both a part of, where it was like we were the bicycle generation. We might be the last one where it was like you went out in the morning and you were on your bicycle or you were running around with your friends and you would come home for dinner and I was incredibly lucky to have, you know, on the weekends I would go to the woods. I would take a steak and I would take one match and I'd take my golden retriever and we would go get lost up the side of a mountain and uh we' just go camping. My rule was no shelter, one match, one stake dog. So you couldn't mess up the match.

主持人: At what age?

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

主持人: Not typical for a 12-year-old,

保罗: but I needed it.

主持人: Why?

保罗: I don't know. I needed adventure. I think because being being stuck in a desk and being told you can't get up and you can't even go to the bathroom, and you you look down, do what we say, just being controlled was so counterintuitive to my essence. And so, I grew up with this need for adventure. And then somewhere along the way, the fact that I couldn't drink the streams that I was exploring or the fact that even when I was deep, deep, deep in the forest, I knew that if I really hiked for another 4 hours, I'll come out the other side. I wanted to experience wilderness. I wanted to experience wilderness where it never ended. I wanted to see the really wild places on the planet. And for some reason, that was inside me since I was very young.

主持人: So, how did you go from there? from being that 13 year old to setting off at what 17 years old with your Amazon research in Peru.

主持人: You you did go to university. You

主持人: you were actually really really smart. I I hear

保罗: I was smart enough that they had me both suspended and in in detention and in American Mensa. I was I was I was really all over the place. And and the thing is they make you feel stupid when you can't do the assignments. So I'd say, 'Why are you failing math and why can't you read this book and you didn't do your homework? But I was like, I know I'm smart and in the forest I was good at tracking and I could survive and I could make it through a weekend and I could build shelter. And so I always just gravitated towards that. And so I spoke to my parents. I dropped out of high school. You can take your GED and get out two years early with a with a with a with a one-day test. And I did that. The rule was I did have to go to university. So, I had to start taking semesters, but in between semesters, I was free to go to the Amazon rainforest. And so, I booked the most remote position that I could at a place where it took 2 days by boat from the nearest city to get to this tiny little research station. And it was run by this Peruvian guy and his partner. And his name was JJ. And that's the guy that opened the Amazon for me.

主持人: He opened the Amazon for you?

保罗: Well, JJ grew up in the Amazon as an indigenous person. And so what he was learning, he the the first chapter in this book is called the rarest of species because he's the only unicorn in the Amazon rainforest. He's an indigenous person. So he's been learning from his grandfathers, grandfathers, grandfathers, grandfathers all the way back.

主持人: And indigenous means

保罗: indigenous means his family is from the jungle. Their heritage, their lineage going back, they are jungle people. They're from the Seaha tribe. And so his father, Don Santiago, there they knew the medicinal plants. They knew how to fish for piranha. Then he can cut a piece of callus off of his foot and put it on a hook using himself as bait to catch a bait fish. He can mash up a barbasco route and put it in a stream and then all the fish float to the surface. He can track a deer. He could track a jaguar. He could track a person. So these people know everything about the forest and they're the people that I came in with. And because I knew about snakes, he knew every He knew everything about the forest, the medicines, the habits of the animals, the systems. The only thing I knew was I said, "I know how to handle snakes." And he said, "I'm scared of snakes." And I said, "I could teach you snakes." I said, "You teach me everything else." And he goes, "You like snakes?" He goes, "Come with us." He said, "We go on a family hunting trip once a year where we go on this expedition 10 days into the jungle where no one's allowed to go, only people with indigenous status." He said, "You're our guest. You come with us." And so there I was going up the river into parts of the world that have yet to be named into the wildest places in the Amazon rainforest and learning from these guys through experience how to catch fish out of the river, how to navigate through difficult parts of the of the stream when the storms are coming, how to survive them. And then we found anacondas. And so it was like this I had this very very in unorthodox training and introduction into the jungle. How big is the Amazon rainforest? Trying to get my head around the scale of it.

保罗: I'm bad with numbers. What I do know is that it's larger than the lower 48 states.

主持人: Wow.

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

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

保罗: 100%. There are still parts of the Amazon rainforest that are unexplored. There's parts of the Amazon rainforest that no one's ever been to. And if you really want to blow your own mind, the canopy of the Amazon rainforest is about 150 160 ft up above our heads, which is far.

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

主持人: And in terms of human life,

保罗: Mhm.

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

保罗: There are various tribes living through the Western Amazon. And you have the Seaha and the Machenga and you have the Yin and and then further out beyond all of these there were always rumors that there were uncontacted tribes and and for the first many years that I was there, it was always someone's uncle, someone's brother, someone's cousin would would come back with these crazy stories that someone had seen the tribes and that they were that they were tall and naked and they still hunted with bows and arrows and they would and then every now and And somebody would come back with a 7ft arrow, a spear tipped with bamboo, huge bamboo tip this big, razor sharp, like a machete. And that was the only proof we had that they existed until the day we met them.

主持人: When did you meet them for the first time?

保罗: So, in order to explain how we met them, we should probably explain why what where we got to in how the how the 18-year-old researcher became the director of of of a major organization. But,

主持人: please

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

主持人: Who burned it down?

保罗: The loggers.

保罗: And so the first time I saw ancient forest, a place that I love with trees significantly bigger than this room, vanished. There's this cacophony of life, this orchestra, this symphonic roar of life that you get in the mo, especially in the morning in the Amazon. And then at night, there's the night chorus. And when you hear that silenced, it's one of the most horrific things that you can experience because places that we loved, trees that had been standing for a thousand years, species that had never been described by science were all incinerated.

保罗: And I said to JJ, I said, "How do we this this this can't be allowed? This can't this can't possibly be something that's permitted." And I said, "Isn't there somebody that we can call?" We were standing on the side of the river, and he he leaned forward. And he looked this way and he looked that way and he goes, "Do you see anybody?" He goes, "Cuz I don't see anybody." He goes, "You have to do something." I said, "I have to do something." I said, "I'm 19, 20 years old." I said, "What am I going to do?" I said, "I don't have a PhD. I don't have a trust fund. I don't have a media presence. I don't have anything." I had a machete and I had bare feet. We both had machetes and bare feet. And so that was the start of the journey where we said, "The thing we love is being destroyed." We could see the smoke on the horizon. The trees that we had explored and become to love were laying smoldering on the ground in front of us. And we said, "Okay, now we have to figure out a way to change the narrative. The wildest place on earth is about to be destroyed, bulldozed, and burned. How do we save it?" And so that's where when you ask the question of how does life in the jungle sort of translate to what your listeners are going to find interesting, it's taking on a task that's so gigantic that at the start of it, we couldn't even come up with we couldn't even conceptualize how it could be possible even with the right tools

主持人: to save the Amazon

保罗: to save the Amazon rainforest, let alone for two guys with zero qualifications, bare feet and machetes. And so we started behind zero and today we're at the point where we've turned loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers. We're protecting 130,000 acres of the river. We're on the cusp of creating a national park. Me and JJ are the directors of Jungle Keepers and we're about to make history because we're going to save the entire watershed and all the trees and animals and heartbeats that are left. And that's the story that I'm trying to tell. That's the whole reason for my existence. That's why I that's what I wake up and do every day.

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

保罗: Yeah. Yeah. There's a there's a point where, you know, I remember cuz you grow up I was born in Brooklyn and then we you know, I grew up in Jersey for a while and then we moved to the Hudson Valley. But when you start you start going to the Amazon for months and months and months out of the year and you come back with scars and stories where a jaguar is breathing on your neck and you you go out on a solo and you come back and then suddenly standing and making conversation at a barbecue feels different.

保罗: It's it's almost like I imagine I have a lot of veteran friends and sort of you you almost get addicted to the action and then you also get addicted to the the the the team, you know. Uh Sebastian Younger writes about this about the the addict the the the the need for community the tribe and sort of the the mission and I think that that's one thing that people are missing today where they they they don't know you know we've been disassociated from religion and community and and and immediate sort of connection with other humans. And so then well then what else is there? How do how do you where where to what do you more your existence? What do you what's your what's your purpose? What do you wake up and do every day? And so I think, you know, in the old days it was like, you know, we have to we have to defend ourselves from the outside world, from waring communities, you know, or even just providing for your family. We have to bring water every day. We have to chop wood every day. We have to figure out how to survive. And like today, I mean, when I'm here, I wake up and I go, "Well, there's there's water in the fridge, so I don't have to do that." And I'm like, "The air conditioner is on and the I'm like, I guess I'll check my phone, you know."

保罗: And so I, you know, I think we have, like you said, become somehow we've gone really far away from what we are built for. And one of the beautiful things that happens when you go into the wild, and this can be any wild, is that it starts to change you. And so you go into the wild and you start picking up logs and throwing them. You start splitting firewood, and the first day you're going to have calluses on your hands, but then after a few weeks, you're going to have tough hands. You start walking barefoot, same thing. The sun starts to make your skin thicker and tanner and more resilient and then the rain will hammer that home and you start to get your eyes start to get sharper and you start to pay more attention to what you're hearing. And so you start going through this whole transformation where you start to be almost become a different animal. You become the jungle version of yourself. You become the mountain version of yourself. Your legs start to get strong again. And so so the wild puts you through this gauntlet of transformation and you become connected to your environment. And then that feeling of disassociation tends to alleviate a little bit.

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

保罗: Yeah.

主持人: Um they discovered something not so many years ago called the anterior midsulate cortex.

保罗: Mhm.

主持人: Andrew Hubman and I heard him say that he thinks it was one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience of the last century.

主持人: The anterior mid-s singular cortex is a part of the brain sitting between your emotional brain and your executive control center that essentially grows when you do hard things.

主持人: Not when you do things that um specifically when you do things that you don't want to do but you do them anyway. So not running a marathon because you enjoy it. Things you don't want to do and you do it anyway. And it went through some of the studies I saw said that younger people that have been brought into this sort of doom scrolling generation have smaller ones. If you are um obese, it's smaller. Um athletes have bigger ones and people who live longer have even bigger ones. And it's they kind of call it like the muscle of the brain of doing hard things. And so when you were talking about that physical transformation, I weirdly thought about I think it was Roosevelt who

主持人: after losing his mom and his wife on the same day.

保罗: Yes.

主持人: After his baby girl was born, he went out to the Badlands and spent two years doing pretty much what you said,

主持人: putting himself in intentional discomfort.

保罗: Yeah. and he came back and all of his friends described him as being transformed. He went on to become the youngest president in American history. He got shot and carried on doing the speech. He led the charge um uh I think it was the Spanish crusades or something like the Spanish war.

主持人: And the Rough Riders.

保罗: Yeah, the Rough Riders. And they all pointed at the moment when he went out to the Badlands. They said it shaped him into becoming a completely different man. That that discomfort.

保罗: Yeah, 100%. And and that's that's why Native American cultures for the initiation of their young men would have vision quests where they would send them out into the wilderness. And there's still different there's all different types. Aboriginal cultures have similar things. And I wanted to put myself through that. And so I went out on that's what I described in my first book is going out on that's where JJ taught me enough to survive in the jungle. And then I started going out on 10day solos into place. I'd have people bring me to the last place that had a name. Like I'm talking about poachers. And then I would start hiking and I would go so deep in the Amazon rainforest that I was just off the map and I would try and survive out there. And so I had a lot of adventures that I should not have survived. But it was very important to me to put myself through that because I grew up with that discomfort. I grew up with the overwhelming crushing stress of being told that we're at the end of days. We are losing I mean I saw it at the Bronx Zoo. They said, you know, we're losing our rainforests. And they had the sound of the chainsaws and you see the trees going over and they said we're losing elephants. You'd see somebody shoot and the elephant goes over and they just said everything that you for me everything you love is being destroyed and pretty soon we're not going to be able to drink and everything's going to be polluted and our fisheries are being destroyed. And I said wait so wait a second. I said I have to know if it's really that bad. So when I got old enough don't it's not just that I was inspired to go out on a mission. And it was that I wanted to find out for myself cuz I'm I don't like finding out through a screen. I don't I don't want other people filtering my information. I wanted to find out for myself. Is it really that bad? And so I was going out on a quest to understand what the reality was.

主持人: If I sat 18-year-old you at this table, he sat there and you know this version of you at what 37 38 38 you were sat there. So 20 years difference.

主持人: What would the notable differences be between these two men?

保罗: Um, well, he didn't know how to fish with his feet. Um, that's for sure. His machete skills would be terrible. But the the noticeable difference would be that that 18-year-old, his greatest dream was to alleviate the environmental stress that he grew up with, escape the world of rules, find purpose in life, and to just have adventures. My my greatest dream was to see the Amazon rainforest. I looked at people like Teddy Roosevelt and Jane Goodall and I said, "Man, they had such incredibly like extraordinary lives." And I said, "How come my life can't be like that? I'm over here in detention." You know, I'm over here being told I didn't do my homework. And I'm like, "I want to chop wood and carry water. I want to go to war. I want to be scared. I want to be challenged." And so for me it was I I was that would be the difference is that I would be hungry for all of that.

保罗: Whereas the person sitting across from you today, my body is a Jackson Pollock painting of scars, crocodile bites, tiger bites, infections, times that I've been almost crushed to death by elephants. I've been hunted by the narot terrorists. And at this point, the responsibility at that kid got to see all the things he wanted to see. We found the biggest anacondas. I lived through the amazing adventures and that's great.

保罗: The person sitting across from you today is responsible for protecting millions of animal lives. And my job is to explain to people that we that everyone reading this message or listening to this message has the chance to help the indigenous people save the Amazon before we lose it forever. And so that's the main difference is that at that age I was just I just wanted some swashbuckling adventure. And now I found that adventure became meaning. I found it along the way. And then now I'm on a whole other journey. Now it's now it's can we bring it home? Now it's can we achieve something that we thought was impossible and change the narrative of how it's done.

主持人: And I guess this kind of brings us back to this question about the unconted tribes. You said you and JJ were talking about how you might go about saving the Amazon. Was highlighting the unconted tribes in the Amazon part of the mission there?

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

主持人: to the almost the back end of the Amazon.

保罗: I've been there.

主持人: And and it's beautiful.

保罗: We are at the southern edge in the tributaries down there. There's one tributary.

主持人: What's a tributary?

保罗: A tributary is is an offshoot from a larger river.

主持人: So a stream is a tributary of a larger stream which goes into, you know, then eventually you reach the Hudson River.

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

主持人: I think that's an important distinction.

保罗: Yes.

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

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

主持人: how can we get their trees, their fish, they'll go and take those things from them or they'll or they'll sell them something that's not worth what what they think it is. And so we've been working with these indigenous communities to say, "Do you want the loggers to come in and cut down all of your trees?" And they go, "No." And they go, "But at the same time, we need a little bit of gasoline because what if we're having a baby and we have to get our daughter to a hospital in town?" And so we've been working with them to provide sustainable jobs as rangers protecting their own land. And it's such a simple solution whereas otherwise they would go and be loggers to get that cash. And so we were working with these communities and now they're rangers and boat drivers and guides and handymen. And they called us about a year ago and they said something incredible is happening and it's going to be dangerous, but you are the directors and you're part of this family and you're part of this story and we need you here for this, but the tribes are about to come out of the forest.

保罗: And we were in town and where what you know what we do now is you know we and we can explain this later but we raise money and we bring it to the Amazon where we the local people have the opportunity to set aside huge acreage of of the Amazon to protect it. We're we're changing the narrative of destruction where we just protect it before they get to it. And so we were in town with JJ who's now the director of this major organization and we're talking to our lawyers and we're in the office and we get this call that the tribe is out.

主持人: The tribe is out.

保罗: The tribe is out.

主持人: What does that mean?

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

主持人: Could we not have flown a plane over there or something? Is that you know, this sounds like a dumb question, but presumably we have satellites and we can zoom in.

保罗: The BBC did do a piece where they were flying a plane and they were looking at an unconted tribe from miles away and they said, "We're being very careful not to disturb them, but there is a tribe in the rainforest that has no contact with the outside world." And you could see these people bending and they're looking at the plane, but the plane's not close enough to really scare them or to cause them any distress. And so, we have done that. But then on our river out in the middle of nowhere where no one's heard of the BBC,

保罗: you just hear stories from loggers who've come down river from three weeks up river. You can go for three weeks up the river and hit nothing. There's nothing human. It's like the last endless forest. And so when the community called and they said there's arrows on the beach, the tribe is coming out. It's the first time in 10 years that the tribe seems to be coming out of the jungle to make contact. And so they got they got the directors of Jungle Keepers up there. We had to we had to rush to be there. They begged us to be there so that we could see it because they were worried that we wouldn't believe them.

保罗: And so we got there and we went all night. And when you go up a river at night, we do a two-day boat journey in one night.

保罗: And so the guy right there, the picture with the guy who has the scar on his forehead, that's Ignasio. He that scar is because he was shot in the head by a 7-ft arrow while he was trying to make peaceful contact with the unconted tribes. He was trying to give them a gift and they got spooked and they scared and they shot him in the head and he almost died from that when we heard that this was happening and he's now one of our best jungle keepers rangers. We said, "Can you do a two-day boat journey in one night?" And he went, "Yes, sir." and he put on a headlamp and he got in the back of the boat and we took an open top canoe and we drove from 6:00 p.m. until 9:00 a.m. the next day through the worst thunderstorm I've ever seen. I was on the front of the boat with a flashlight using the crocodile eyes, the Cayman eyes on the side of the river to navigate cuz they shine. The eyes shine comes back. The the the storm was so bad that I we couldn't see anything. We couldn't see the side of the river and because of the light igniting the raindrops, you can't you can't even see what's in front of you. So we were using the the croc eyes to to navigate where the edges of the river was. So I was spotting and telling him which way to go and he drove and we did that all night long. Got to the indigenous community and said, "Okay, so what's going on?" And they said, "Oh yeah, they left. Tribe's gone."

保罗: The only thing that they had was that one guy the previous day had been shot by an arrow and he had been fishing and he had seen the tribes. So he said, "And they had shot an arrow at him." The first thing they had done was shot one of these 7-ft arrows at him and the way it had hit the boat ricocheted and then hit his thick leather belt and blunted the tip of the arrow and he had the arrow.

保罗: And so he says, "So there are there are people here." And then a native anthropologist from another region showed up and he said, "I they know me as the grandfather. I can speak to these people. I speak a little bit of their language." And so we stayed another night, two days deep in the jungle. And the following morning we said, "Okay, we're getting out of here. There's obviously nothing here but, you know, stories and footprints and arrows and we have important work to do back in town."

主持人: And did you believe them?

保罗: I've learned one thing working in the Amazon. Always believe the locals. Always. There's there's if they say it's there, they're not wrong. And that's part of the reason that I've gotten to go on these adventures. You know, when JJ Tell told me there's places you can go that are so wild that it's like the Galopagos. the animals don't know a human, but you have to go for days on foot to the topmost reaches of the rivers to find this. Well, that's why I went on these these solos. And so I write that's what that's as a writer that's what I do is try and take people on these adventures through the Amazon. And so when they said the tribe is coming, Ignasio, the guy who'd been shot in the head, he said, "Listen to me." He said, "You're" He said, "You're my boss, right?" I said, "Yeah." He goes, "I need to speak to you like a friend." I said, "Speak, speak, speak." And he said, "They're coming. You'd be an idiot to leave." And so we posted up, we waited.

主持人: How he knew?

保罗: Yeah, I'm wondering how he knew.

保罗: He just knew, man. They just know. It's like they can they can tell. And then, you know, I mean, these are guys who know when there's a jaguar close by the sound of the birds. They know when a storm's coming before the storm is audible. You know, they they have higher tuned senses than we do. And and so he said, "Look, the tribe is coming. There's the arrow. They're in the region." And he goes, "And when they come this close, they generally they want to talk." And I said, "But this is" and sure enough, you hear Mosk go and everyone starts screaming. And it was just this moment of absolute panic where women were lifting babies and chickens are flying around and dogs and we're in this tiny little indigenous community on the side of a river with hundreds and hundreds of miles of jungle around. And we run to the edge of this, you know, the edge of the river where this cliff is. And across the river, we see them coming towards us. and they're walking out of the jungle and they're naked from head to toe. They just have some string tied around their waists, penises tied up to their bellies. They all have seven foot long bows and arrows and they're crouched over and they're looking at us and we're standing there and you go you sort of like you go I I just I I wanted I wanted to see this and now I'm not so sure I want to be here cuz there are warriors coming out of the jungle and they're from a thousand years ago. So I asked the anthropologist, I said, "They're like stone age people." And he goes, "They don't have stones." He said, "They're still in the bamboo age." He said, "These people are living such a primitive lifestyle. They're hunter gatherers.

保罗: And they've been isolated so deep in the jungle for so many centuries that it's like a time capsule. So there was a thousand years between us. We're standing on either side of the river with a thousand years between us. And this aperture into the history of what humankind used to look like. And these people came out holding their bows and arrows that they had made out of the jungle and they held up their hands and they were talking to us across a river. And it was sort of shirts versus skins. We were just two tribes separated by a little bit of water and they wanted to communicate.

主持人: With what language?

保罗: With their language. They I mean it's we don't even know really what to call them. For a while they were calling them the Mashkapiro, which means the wild piro people. And then um more more recently and partly because of our encounter they held up their hands and the first thing they said was no mole. We are the brothers. Brothers and so then our side said the same thing. The anthropologist said no mole brothers. And then this this this exchange began and it's like you know I as a Spanish speaker when I've been in Italy I can use my Spanish to kind of get through in in Italian. And I feel like it's like that the Yin people can speak to the Mashkapiro and it is an approximate translation.

保罗: And the first thing that they said after coming out of the jungle a thousand years late to civilization was send us bananas. They said send us food. And they demanded that we send them plantains as an offering. And our side said you put down your weapons. We will talk to you but we do not want this to end violently. We want this to be peaceful. If you want to talk to us, put down your bow and arrows because a shotgun, a shotgun only goes how many meters? You know, it's not even going to go 100 meters, 50 m, maybe buckshot. A longbowow arrow is going to go 300 m. It's going to go far

主持人: and they're needless to say, they're very good with those arrows.

保罗: They are very good with those arrows. These things will fly. Um, and so even standing on the other side of the river, we were not safe. And so we were all standing behind trees. We were watching. Ignasio, who'd been shot before, was watching with the binoculars. And he's going, "Whenever you see them walking," he said, "they let you see them, and then they clever girl you in the forest where there's one watching you from the shadows." And he he would grab me by the shoulder and go, "Look, there's one." And you would just see this, you know, red face paint in the shadows of the forest. And he'd have the bow trained on us. And so while some of them in the front were putting the bows down, there was others of them in the shadows that were making sure that they still had support. But we asked the guys in the front to put down their arrows. The anthropologists got in the river and gave them an offering of bananas.

主持人: I think I have a video here of this.

保罗: Yeah, this is world first footage.

主持人: I'll let you um You know how to use an iPad, right?

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

主持人: What's he doing with his finger there? He's doing

保罗: this.

主持人: Yeah.

保罗: I don't know. This is the moment that we gave them the bananas. And what's haunting about this is the desperation that you see on them where they're all rushing to get the bananas and they're not necessarily taking them like they're going to share later. They're taking them like I get my bananas, you get your bananas. You see this? They're all rushing to get this little boatload. And these are people that don't have boats. And as they're doing this, they're all talking at the same time. It was like a flock of parrots. It was just a cacophony of of sound.

保罗: And they're all fighting over these plantains. And and then once they get them, each person held their own. They have rope and plantains. And this interaction went on for several hours. And we negotiated with them. And this is just the footage. This is the footage that we're allowed to release right now. And this is them moving back off into the jungle. There's a lot more that happened. And again, that's where that's why that's why we're releasing this now. I should say that that's why we waited a while to release this footage because footage like this is incredibly sensitive for a number of reasons. A, you don't want people to think that we went out and contacted these people that want to be left alone. You also don't want to encourage other people to indulge their misconceptions. People go, "Oh, these are the last free people on earth. They live perfectly in balance with nature." No, people will go looking for them. Whereas, for hundreds of years, these people have asked for one thing and one thing only, to be left alone. And they've enforced that kind of like the Comanches with arrows. And on this day, they said, "Please give us food. Please give us us rope." And they had one other question.

保罗: They said, "How do we tell the bad guys from the good guys?" And we said, "What do you mean? Who are the bad guys?" And they said, "Some of you shooted us with the jiu-jitsu, with the fire sticks, the guns." And we were going, "Who who does that?" We said, "We are not the bad guys." And they said, "No, you also," they said, "We know you cut down our trees." They were speaking to all of us. It was not there's no like, you know, white guy, brown guy, Peruvian, foreigners, none of that. It was just all of you outsiders, stop cutting down our trees. Our trees are our gods. It was sort of like, you don't do that.

保罗: And then when they left just a few weeks ago, we learned that the narcot traffickers view them as a threat. And there was actually a mass grave found of a similar clan. And so these people are being boxed in by deforestation and hunted by narot traffickers and gold miners and loggers. And so I think that them coming out of the forest was their way of saying, "Hey, we're trying to get a read on what's going on in the outside world. Who is it? Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? They don't know that Jungle Keepers is protecting the land that they live on.

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

主持人: Do you know why some of them seem to be touching their nose?

保罗: It's funny. I didn't notice that. I think this is this is this is this is going to be your discovery to anthropology. I did not notice that, but it does. You see this a lot of them are doing this.

主持人: Yeah.

保罗: And the the outfit um

主持人: the outfit

主持人: What is this outfit? This it looks like there's kind of rope tied around their midrift with their penises out.

保罗: Mhm. Yeah. The the the head of the penis is covered by rope.

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

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

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

主持人: They They don't eat humans, do they?

保罗: They do not eat humans. They are not cannibal tribes.

主持人: That's a rumor people have talked about before. People have said,

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

主持人: And their haircuts, they all seem to be have the sort of mullet style haircut from

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

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

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

主持人: Yeah.

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

主持人: Raiding

保罗: raiding the farm.

主持人: Your farm?

保罗: The indigenous people's farm. Our community's farm.

主持人: So the women went to steal while they were distracting you.

保罗: That's right.

主持人: And did you catch the women on tape?

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

主持人: And how do you know the women were stealing from your farm?

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

主持人: How'd you know it was the women?

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

主持人: Yeah.

保罗: But they just they just grow.

主持人: Yeah.

主持人: They're all young as well.

主持人: Where's Where are the older people?

保罗: We'd love to know. We don't know. There's some tribes in the Amazon where the elderly people have more permanent settlements. There's been rumors of some extreme tribes where the elderly people if they can't keep up are just left to perish. Uh but we saw people between the ages of probably 12 and 45. I don't think anybody looks like they're in their 50s.

保罗: So we left with more questions than answers. They on that day they did get a pot that they they stole from a from you know the community you know they have their their farm and so there there was also a machete at the farm. Somebody just whacked it into a log. And so as they were leaving, one of the best things that we caught on video that we have we're not able to share yet is that one of these guys, and this was at the end after while everybody was going home, the anthropologist held up his hands and he said, you know, no mole brothers, go in peace. And these guys actually asked about me. I was the only person there with a big beard. And they said,

保罗: they said that one. They said, show us that one. And so I came forward. I stood at the edge of the river, which my heart was pounding. And the anthropologist said, he said, hold up your hands. Show them that you don't mean any harm. I held hel held up my hands like this and they held up their hands and they sang. They said no more. They knew that I wasn't from the indigenous community. And that was an incredible moment of we couldn't communicate but it was just sort of that basic I acknowledge you and they said I acknowledge you and we just had this thing across the river in about a thousand years and just and then that was it. And as they left, you know, one of the guys had a machete and he was he showed it to us over his shoulder like this. And one of my friends was going, "Oh," you know, in the local language he was saying, "Put down the machete. Leave the machete." And the guy just smiled and looked at us like, "Yeah, come and get it. Come and get it." And then at just as they left, one of the warriors walked out to the beach, put an arrow on the string, smiled at us, and just shot it. Was like, "Ha!"

主持人: Up into the air,

保罗: just at us in general, just to spook us. And then they all turned left and left, you know. So they have a sense of humor. We saw them smile, you know. We exchanged a little bit of that with them as well.

主持人: They look cold.

保罗: They are cold. I mean, it's it's it's 95° on that day. The other thing is it was cool as they're coming. If you go to the part where they're coming across the beach, there was millions of butterflies. That beach was covered in just millions of butterflies. And so as these people are walking out, the butterflies are just swarming around them. Go back to the beginning. The that right there. If you just notice, we don't notice it at first, but as they're moving, look at that. The world is swirling with leapid lepodopter in colors. Just just absolute

主持人: insanity how how beautiful this scene was. And I mean, when you see this, you know, if a if a Tyrannosaurus Rex walked out behind them, I wouldn't have been surprised. It was such a strange literally unbelievable thing to see because you know these these literally are the last people on Earth that are still living in this way where society we have planes, trains, automobiles, iPhones, all of this technology. We're talking about going to other planets.

保罗: They don't have metal, even a knife, unless they get it from someone else. And so it's just it's just an incredible, you know, the other thing is they do have medicinal technologies. They're able to stay infection-free living in the tropical wet jungle. That's pretty incredible

主持人: cuz they're they're virtually naked.

保罗: I mean, essentially naked. I think that's that's how they carry their rope. I don't think that's so much of clothing as we need rope and that's how we carry it. It's very it's very very complicated because the loggers shoot at them, the narcos shoot at them. People shouldn't be getting into the places that they live. And if you think about in the last few centuries, how many indigenous cultures have been annihilated by the outside world coming in these there's no shortage of these stories. And in this particular case, in 2026, when we have the communication and people are able to hear this story, this is why we're releasing this footage because the only hope these people have is if we protect them. They can't come on a podcast. They can't address the United Nations. They can't write a pet petition. The only hope they have is if we are able to protect the forest that they live in. That's it. And that's why we released this footage now. Cuz for a long time we said we can't release it. We said, "What if what if crazy hippie people go down there thinking that these are the last free people and they want to go live with them? That will kill them. The outside pathogens that you and I carry on us every day, the common cold that we have immunity to, could wipe out an entire tribe." And how many tribes like this do we believe are in the Amazon rainforest?

保罗: Several thousand little tribes, little clans that move nomatically through the Amazon.

主持人: Were they tall?

保罗: They looked like they were at least, you know, 5'9, 510. They were pretty tall, especially because the the Peruvians and the indigenous communities that we work with tend to be on the smaller side.

主持人: They they they are taller than the average uh some of the other tribes. There's another tribe that we ran into down there called the Nawa. And those people were were absolutely tiny. They were s like below five feet. All of them. Um

保罗: these guys were tall. Yeah.

主持人: And is there a leader here? Is someone in charge?

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

主持人: This one?

保罗: Yeah, I think so. And And he was the one that would walk the furthest out into the river.

保罗: Yeah. And he seems well muscled, healthy.

主持人: He's the biggest as well in size by the looks of it.

保罗: Yeah.

主持人: Okay.

主持人: These tribes have been known to kill people.

保罗: These tribes kill people all the time. The the day after this happened, we went down river and one of the people who had been maintaining the peace during this negotiation across the river was my friend George. And George kept saying, "Don't worry, it's going to be okay. Don't worry, no mole." And he would say, "Let's get them more bananas." And he said, "You stay behind the tree. Say, hey, please put down your camera. They don't understand that it's not a gun." He was making sure that everyone was calm. Well, George was driving the day after this in the river as he does every day and he rounded one riverbend and the tribe was out again. They were further up river and usually when they leave they go deep into the jungle but on this day they had been walking up the river which nobody expected and so when his boat came around the river they hadn't expected it and they open fired. Everybody else on the boat was able to get down under the the benches which is made out of heavy thick wood. As he was driving, he caught an arrow over the scapula, came out by his belly button.

保罗: So, it collapsed his right lung and cut through his whole body and he had to be helicopter evacuated out of the indigenous community. And somehow he lived. But he's never going to be the same. And there's there's a hundred stories I could tell you of people that have been killed by them.

保罗: But now and more and more there's stories of that they are also being exterminated. So their violence is in response to the fact that the outside world has been cruel to them. And the only way that they can ensure that they survive is by keeping the outside world out.

主持人: This is a might be a bit of a dumb question, but there's no consequence to that is there from the Peruvian government or anything. the proving government aren't trying to um you know if they if this uncontacted tribe kills somebody they're not necessarily going to go there and try and enforce any kind of like law.

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

主持人: Mhm.

保罗: Right.

保罗: How are you going to get to the other side of it in the jungle? It takes you about about an hour to cover half a mile through through dense jungle. If me and you were going with machetes right now through dense dense jungle, about an hour for every half mile. That's with no trail. With trail, you can go a little faster. With a boat, you can go a little faster. But the police have no jurisdiction outside of the city. The only reason the police have power is because everyone has agreed that there's a government and that they have power and that there's a but it's all made up. And when you go out in the jungle, you realize that there is no law in the wild. It's just whatever happens. It's who has a bigger stick.

保罗: And so they're still playing by that game. They've never heard of a law. And so they they've been known to find something interesting just the way and you know today if we're interested in a bird, we take a picture of it and then we study it or we can capture it. We can study it. You know, sometimes people will criticize Teddy Roosevelt for being a hunter, but a lot of the species, if he saw a new species, he would shoot it so that he could study it. That was what they did back then. But they do this with humans. They'll be like, "That's an interesting pair of pants."

保罗: They seem to think about life and death very differently.

主持人: And I was watching something um a podcast that you did where you said that they also speak the same language. some of these unconted tribes is the monkeys.

保罗: Yes. Um so what they do is they will emulate capacin calls, bird calls, the unrelated tinn tinimu goes.

保罗: Um the capachens I can't do their call but these guys have it down perfectly.

主持人: Capagins being

保罗: capagin monkeys

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

主持人: The tribes have.

保罗: Yeah. And so they'll go and you'll go and he'll go and you go, "Wait, wait a sec." You don't hear three tinus in a row. That's not how it works. That one tineu talks to the other tineu and all of a sudden I got five tinus around me. Uh-uh. And then you know you got the tribe around you. And so this is where the local people know how this stuff works. And to anyone from the outside that goes, there's no such thing as unconted tribes and they don't communicate. Yeah, they do. And one of my friends was in that exact situation where they were communicating with animal calls in a circle while he was in a stream with his father

保罗: and unfortunately they shot his father in the stomach and his father died. And then he ran for it and he lived to tell the tale. And the next day the his community, our friends came back and they found

保罗: this guy who had just bled out through his stomach. And why they killed him, we do not know.

主持人: So they pretend they're animals. Um but well, they they use animal sounds to communicate with each other.

保罗: Yes.

主持人: Because then the prey, which in this case might be a human,

保罗: Yeah.

主持人: won't know that it's

保罗: exactly.

主持人: Okay. So, if I'm going if we go, okay, let's split up and surround. We're we're we're unconted tribes now. And we go, okay, there's loggers over there. Let's split up, surround them. We'll see how many of them there are.

主持人: And use the monkeys language to

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

保罗: I was I was going to ask about happiness, but I don't even know the context in which to ask the question about their happiness.

保罗: No, I think I think that there's some some Coror Mc McCarthy quotes that would probably do better justice to their reality than the idea of happiness. I think that they are living in a world where they're more concerned with calories. They're more concerned with how much blood does it cost to walk a mile. They're more concerned with stealing the women from other tribes. They're not concerned with happiness. It's more apocalyptto than uh Downtown Abbey. You know, it's it's they're they're in a state of desperation. You could see it in their face.

保罗: And that's where there's a further anthropological question of what happens in the future for these people. But one thing that we know for certain is that rapid contact destroys them. It's happened before. All of this has happened before. You know, when the outside world reaches an unconted tribe, the pathogens kill them. When the outside world reaches even an indigenous community, alcohol, outside pathogens, money can destroy an indigenous culture and take away their language in a single generation. So, so these types of of severely isolated cultures, if they want to come out and make contact with the indigenous communities that are their neighbors, that has to happen over time. And and they have to have the agency to do it, which means their forest needs to be protected.

保罗: And so that's that's and that's all we know. You know, we don't know what their birth rates are, what their infant mortality rates are, where their old people are, what what what what are their creation myths, what are their beliefs? We have no idea.

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

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

保罗: which if I handed you a lighter and a full cup of gasoline and said, "Have all the sticks you want in the jungle," you still couldn't make me a fire right now.

主持人: How do you know they can make fire?

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

保罗: But it's also conceivable because they don't have pots.

保罗: It's conceivable that that that they some of these people haven't seen water boil, right? They just drink water and it falls on them from the sky. They certainly don't know that water freezes. On this point of happiness, you said you saw desperation in their faces, but does that mean that you think they're not happy,

主持人: or do you just think that

主持人: that isn't even a sort of a paradigm that they even consider? It's all about survival.

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

主持人: you know? And I was like, oh, okay. Yeah. None of us want to do that.

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

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

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

保罗: It's haunting.

主持人: What do you mean by that?

保罗: I mean that a child washed down river on a log to one of the very very remote communities in the Amazon rainforest and was adopted by an indigenous community, people that speak an indigenous language as well as Spanish. And when he was old enough to be asked questions, someone said, "Hey, by the way, when you were living with Los Kalatos with the with the naked people, that's what they call them. Um, what was it like?" and he just went, "I don't remember." And walked away. But I mean, when he came down, he was 8 years old.

保罗: You can't tell me you don't remember anything. And but it was a it was a it was a it was a guarded I don't remember. It was a I don't remember. No. Access denied.

保罗: It doesn't I mean, you got you know, and that's what people get wrong where they go, "Oh, these people still live, you know, in communion with nature." And it's like, yeah, and there's a lot of rape and murder and warfare and probably needless death from infections and disease and and and they're living a very different lifestyle, but it certainly is fascinating that they're out there. And I think that it only goes to illustrate that we what we're protecting here is truly that wild. Because a lot of people will say to me, well, how come you guys are so focused on protecting this river? There's thousands of tributaries in the Amazon. Why protect this 300,000 acres right there? It's like, well, this is the wildest part. John Mirror took Teddy Roosevelt on a camping trip when he wanted him to protect the Yusede Valley and the Sequoia trees. And he said, you have to see this. And so, he took Roosevelt and showed him how amazing it was. I mean, sequoia trees like that exist nowhere else on Earth. They're the biggest trees on the planet. If he if they hadn't protected them, they'd be gone.

保罗: And so them having the foresight to protect those trees, then we still have sequoia trees. And so that's what we're doing on this river. It's like by protecting 300,000 acres of forest, we ensure that those millennium trees, those skyscrapers of life continue to have monkeys, reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, that these tribes continue to live out in the far reaches. And then again to use the football field analogy in this vast expanse of wilderness, we found a way to use just like a little pin prick to actually bring people and let them see this amazing place. And so we, you know, the whole 99.99% of the thing is wild. And we that's why we built that treehouse to let you know some of our donors, some of our people, cuz now people from all over the world are helping us save this river. and the treehouse. That was a dream.

保罗: You know, there's a there's a mist river that flows above the Amazon that's invisible and it's larger than the Amazon River itself.

保罗: There's an invisible mist river above the Amazon that's larger than the river.

主持人: Mist.

保罗: Mist.

主持人: Okay.

保罗: And so the first time I saw it, I had climbed the tallest tree in the jungle, which took hours, and I was standing on a branch at dawn, and I saw the sun illuminate the mist river going across the canopy.

保罗: And I went, I have to share this with people.

保罗: And so we built that treehouse on a promontory at the edge of the terrairma looking out over the jungle so that people can see the reserve, see all the forest that they're protecting. Because at this point, the way we've see this and see that picture below it, that's the wasteland. That's what happens when you don't protect the Amazon.

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

保罗: No.

主持人: No,

保罗: no. I really enjoy hanging out with my native friends like when spending a day piranha fishing. Um, but I also really love my camera roll and doing photography and having modern medicine and being able to FaceTime my mom when I'm in the jungle. Like, you know, I I don't I don't I don't I no romanticism about their state. That that seems like stress and destiny. I don't I don't need to I don't want I certainly don't want to do that now. Is there anything that you learned or gleaned from them that I know a westerner like me who's spending a lot of time on I know screens and stuff and the way we live our lives might find useful.

保罗: I don't think that that we're at the point where they're imparting lessons. I think we're we're at the point where we're learning which questions we want to ask. That was first contact.

保罗: And so at this point our job is to figure out how do we how do we move forward? What do we what do they need? How do we ethically proceed in protecting this forest?

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主持人: What do you got?

保罗: I mean, in so many of these photos, you're holding massive snakes. And when I say massive snakes, I don't mean the snakes you guys listening are thinking about. I mean, anaconda sized snakes like, oh yeah, this was this was me and JJ's first first big anaconda that we big anaconda we caught. It was only about 12 feet. And uh yeah, that one that one this was a great snake because I'd never caught a big snake before. I'd always been, you know, you catch a small snake and I'd learned from Steve Irwin, you know, you catch a catch a snake by the tail and it's it might try to bite you. If you don't get it by the tail, snake's going to run away every time. Snakes are not never going to attack you, period. So, I learned you catch a snake by the tail and then it's once you get it by the tail, it's going to come back at you and try and stop you from grabbing its tail. Great. And if you need to, you can get it by the head and you got control of the snake. But if you have the head, you have the snake. So that first snake, I mean, I'm talking about a 12ft snake that's, you know, that's at least as thick as my leg. And I ran in there and I dove and I grabbed the snake by the head. Big mistake. Wraps around my arms. And the first thing that I realized was I had an anaconda handcuffs. Now I couldn't I couldn't release the snake if I wanted to because it was around my wrists. And then the second coil came around my shoulders. And now I'm feeling the I can actually hear my collar bone start to flex the way a stick sounds right before it snaps. And JJ grabbed the snake by the tail and pulled the tail off. And then his other brother, they got to me right as I was about to I mean literally the eyes were going to come out of my head. It was going to crush you. That's what happens.

保罗: And so he pulled that right off at the last second. So that was about as close as I came to knowing what it feels like. But that's not even a big one.

主持人: I think you came a little bit closer.

保罗: Yeah. No, that's that that's a

主持人: Explain this to me. So, for anyone that can't can't see, I would highly recommend you look at the screen now.

保罗: Um,

主持人: please look away. Look away. Don't listen to him.

主持人: This is a an absolutely crazy story. What What's going on in this photo? And why did you do that?

保罗: Sure. This is actually a very important story. You know, you hear these people talk about how if you're going to succeed at anything, you have to become very familiar with losing. You almost got to learn to love it.

保罗: And and so as we set out on this journey to explore the Amazon and to build relationships with the indigenous people and to study anacondas and to find a way to protect this place, at around 24 years old, I got approached by Discovery Channel. And they said, "Kid, we've never seen one like you. Let's do a show where we take people into the Amazon rainforest and show them anacondas." And I said, "That'd be amazing." I said, "I would love to do that. I could teach people about the forest. Let's let's go." They said, 'Great. The only thing is they said, you know, it's not a good enough show if we just show them the science that you're going to do. Because we wanted to use as the apex predators of the ecosystem, they're, you know, if there's mercury in the system, they're bioaccumulating there. Any toxins that are in the Amazon, they're going to absorb. It's going to get into the fish and then into the cayman, into the birds, into the anacondas. They're the apex predator. We were doing groundbreaking research on anacondas.

保罗: They said that wasn't good enough. They said, imagine if they said no one's, you know, reticulated pythons have eaten people. They said, "No one's ever had on record an anaconda eating a human." And I said, "It happens. It happens. I know a few people whose grandmother or uncle was eaten by an anaconda. It happens, but it doesn't happen where people no one's taking a picture of it." And so they said, "Well, if we make you a really expensive suit, will you get eaten by an anaconda?" I said, "I'll try." I said, "It's not going to eat. Snakes are sweethearts. It's not going to try to eat me." And they said, "But look, we we'll call the show Expedition Amazon. Send you out there with a team of scientists. We'll film the whole thing." Long story short, I agreed to it because what I thought at the time was, I keep seeing forest getting burned. I keep seeing my millennium trees go down, all of those monkeys and birds and snakes and beautiful animals that are getting incinerated. And they're telling me all I got to do to get a TV show that'll reach millions of people and let me get that message out there. All I got to do is at the end do this silly stunt to show people that snakes aren't that bad. And so we filmed this show for 6 weeks.

主持人: You agreed to what?

保罗: I agreed to potentially be eaten by an anaconda.

主持人: Okay.

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

主持人: And you volunteered.

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

主持人: For anyone that doesn't know who Jane Goodall is,

保罗: Jane Goodall, the famous pimeatlogist, the earthshattering scientist who redefined humans from men, the toolmaker to what we are now, the one who did more for conservation, wildlife, women's science than just about anybody else.

主持人: And she's also the um person that quoted on the front of your book saying, "On behalf of the forests that I love, thank you, Paul, for writing this book."

主持人: Clearly from reading through your story, she's um she's quite a hero of yours and has been for a long long time.

保罗: Yeah. I mean, and going from when my parents were reading us, me and my sister, they'd be reading us stories at night, you know, Jane Goodall and Gome with the chimps and how she she didn't listen to the rules, she named them. Even though her her colleagues said, "You never name your study subjects." And she said, "They have names. They're they have personalities. They have names." She broke all the rules. And and so I grew up with Jane as sort of this historical figure, but she was still like a living historical figure. And so then when I when I when I actually met her, it was so incredible because I I met her at a talk that she had given. And this this informed the rest of my life. The the the grace and wisdom that she showed changed me as a person because I met her at a talk that she was giving in New York City. And I had printed out a couple of chapters. I'd printed out one of the chapters that became my first book where I'm taking care of a baby giant anteater.

保罗: And I had printed out a chapter where me and JJ were looking for our first anaconda, this story. And I put those together with a little covered letter that's just said, "Hey, I love wildlife. I've been working in the Amazon for like 5 years and you've always been an inspiration to me. If I write a book, would you endorse it?" And so I gave this to her in the manila envelope while there was a line of 500 people and you know we you take the picture and she said thank you very much. She puts it aside and I said all right you know I tried my best and 48 hours later her her team reached out and said Jane read the material. She read the chapters and she thinks that they're wonderful and if you find a publisher let them know that Jane will endorse your book. And so then I went to the publishers and I said I have the endorsement of Jane Goodall and they said well that's basically Mother Earth herself. Mhm.

保罗: And they said, "So, so that's what got me in the door to become an author with my first book was Jane. You know, she's she was this titan of conservation, this legendary figure. And her just first of all, for someone that was on the road 300 days a year, that's an icon of science and conservation and hope. For her to have the presence of mind and the patience and the sense of responsibility to actually read something that some kid handed her, that's incredible. That's magic to me even to this day. And it and it matters to me and it informs how I act even to this day.

保罗: But without Jane sort of waving her wand in my direction, I would have no career. There would be no Paul, no Jungle Keepers, no book. We wouldn't be sitting at this desk today. Jane Goodall saved my life.

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

保罗: Oh, yeah. That was a tangent. Yes.

主持人: So, is this a wild anaconda or is this an anaconda held in captivity?

主持人: How did you get the anaconda to eat you?

保罗: So, let me see that next one on the picture.

主持人: This one?

保罗: Yeah. This is a snake called Eleanor. And we we named her this after my dear grandmother, who was an incredible woman and uh and uh the matriarch of our family. Now, Eleanor is the largest snake ever measured at the time, verifiably, scientifically measured. She was 18' 6 in and over over 100 kilos. And she was skinny. She hadn't eaten in a while. But imagine if she'd eaten a Cappy bar, she would have been, you know, 200 kilos. But um my team caught her while we were filming this show. And again, we were told the show would be called Expedition Amazon. The call sheet said expedition EA.

保罗: Then when we were done doing our research in the Amazon, they said, "Look, fly to I forget if it was like Kentucky or Louisiana." They said, "L fly to some state. There's a guy with a snake. No one will know the difference. We'll blur it out." And they said, "Do this little stunt." I said, "We'll put it the last five minutes of the show just to show people and then we'll, you know, we'll hype it up in the news." They're like, "We got you." A lot of handshakes, right? And the day before I was supposed to go on the Good Morning America show with uh Mr. Matt Lowauour, who got mad at me for doing push-ups on the set. Um, the the day before I was supposed to go on the show, I'm here again. I'm a kid and I'm going, I I think I think we got it. I think we did it. We caught the biggest snake ever. The footage of us catching that snake is insane. We're all jumping in the river and wrestling this kraken and we catch this snake and we learned from her. We did, we were, it sounds crazy, but we were developing field methodology for studying the species and we learned all kinds of things about anacondas because we fed her a transmitter. learned how she moves through the environment. This is research that had never been done before.

主持人: For context, feeding her a transmitter is putting a trans an electrical device

保罗: basically in her throat that she eats, she consumes, and it stays with her till she dies. So, you can see what she's doing.

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

主持人: Okay?

保罗: And so, we're doing this groundbreaking research. We caught this tremendous snake. We' survived a six week expedition in the Amazon. We had all this incredible footage.

保罗: And the night before I'm supposed to go out on the morning shows, they showed me the film. It had none of the science.

保罗: It had none of the conservation message that I was promised would be in the show. And instead, they focused on the stunt at the end. And they changed the name of the show to eaten alive. And then they sent me out the door to do the shows.

保罗: And the public was mad because I didn't actually get eaten and they felt like they were lied to. PETA was mad because they felt like I had put a a snake's life in danger somehow. Somehow somehow the animal rights people were furious. And then the scientists were mad because they said, "Okay, you're just a you know a a shock person. You're just in in this for the thrill and you're not really a conservationist." So it put me out of work for years.

主持人: Really?

保罗: Yes. It set me back about 10 years.

主持人: Really?

保罗: I tried I took a big swing because I thought it would help my forest and I hit my head on the ceiling and fell down hard. The next day the news I mean you know all of the late night shows were making fun of it. Jimmy Kimmel was like you for your next stunt you should try having sex with a hippo. I mean people the comments were just I went to India and lived with the herd of elephants for a while. I mean I had to get out. I couldn't I literally couldn't. I said my dream of being a conservationist is over. I was told by one prominent conservationist not even to come to South America.

保罗: And and again, the thing you have to remember through all of this is through the barefoot machete days, through going to the Amazon, the first 15 years of my 20-year journey, I had no support.

保罗: So, I was living out of a backpack, living out of a boat in the Amazon barefoot with no paycheck, no health insurance, no security, no pathway forward. Um, so it it was it was very uncertain times. You know that you actually I think it may have been on your show. There's this great quote where I think it was Alex Hormosi was saying that confidence comes from giving people irrefutable proof that you are who you say you are. And when I heard that quote I thought that's great. And then the next thing I thought was well but you have to start building that proof in a direction. And for a lot of people, I think they find themselves standing on a high hill looking at a set of mountains and you have to choose which direction you're going in. And for me, I was a high school dropout who was never going to be a conservation biologist.

保罗: And I was trained by the local people and sort of adopted by their tribe. And so I knew how to survive in the jungle and work with snakes and do all these crazy things. And I tried I tried to to take that message to television and I got Hollywood hard. I got lied to and I got taken for a ride. But that failure ended up being the best thing that ever happened because what it did was it sent me right back to the drawing board. Said you're not ready yet. And so sometimes the things that you want are not the things that you need. And it's this beautiful thing where life sort of moves aside I know I know I know you want that but I'm I'm going to give you what you need, not what you want. And so this was a case where I really I took it hard. I mean, at the time it was a devastating loss

保罗: and it was the best thing that ever happened because it it was the slap on the head that sent me back out into the jungle for years and years and years of of more experience. Double down. What do you really care about saving the forest? Well, if you care about saving the forest, how the hell are you going to do that? And we had to develop a system to do that. We had to develop a new technology as a way to save the forest.

主持人: What actually happened here?

保罗: So, we didn't I know you don't want to It sounds like you don't you don't don't want to talk about it.

保罗: It's just wasted air time to talk about it because we we rolled around on in the mud with a 16 ft anaconda and nothing happened.

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

保罗: No, the reason nothing happened is because they had snake handlers wrapping the snake around me while I was in this ridiculous suit. Um, I mean, the things I will do, the things I will do to protect this forest, that snake, if it was left on its own, would crawl off. Any snake would would, if there was, if I had a black mamba in my hands right now and I put it on this table, it would slide off the table and find the darkest spot in the room and it would go hide. If I had a spitting cobra, same thing. No snake wants to deal with you. They just want to go hide. They want to go back to sleep.

主持人: Most people are terrified of snakes.

保罗: Most people are terrified of snakes. And that's why I think you're going to like what I have for you.

主持人: What do you mean?

保罗: I brought a friend today.

主持人: You brought a friend?

保罗: I did bring a friend and I want you to meet him.

保罗: Now, this is a very, very small ball python. This is a baby. And one of the first things I try to impress upon people when they meet a baby snake is remembering that even if you're scared of snakes, you're the large apex predator. And this is just a tiny little reptile that is all alone in the world. They're born and they have to fend for themselves.

保罗: And for some reason, ever since I was a little kid, I was fascinated with snakes. I thought they were beautiful. I love the way they moved. I thought the way they can hold up their bodies and flick their tongues. I find snakes calming and beautiful and fascinating.

主持人: Is that snake dangerous?

保罗: You could hand this snake to a baby. This snake is so harmless. I mean, the worst thing that this snake could do if I was to, let's just say, pinch her and hurt her. She could bite me, but even that would barely break my skin.

保罗: This is a snake that's going to look for baby mice, little birds, maybe a frog, and try and grow to a larger size. Now, have you ever held a snake before?

主持人: No.

保罗: You've never held a snake?

主持人: I don't think so. No.

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

主持人: My hands are sweating over.

保罗: So, a few things is that even a baby baby snake is going to interpret your inner state a little bit. if you're very nervous and jittery and the snake is gonna pick up on that. But you see how she's sort of just fitting to my hand. Yeah, she's done a few things here. She's got her anchor. She's got her tail around these two fingers. And the next thing is she's flicking her tongue to sense what's going on. She's she's looking around, but she's also she's not excited.

主持人: She doesn't mind sweat.

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

主持人: I feel a little bit tense.

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

主持人: I think she's right.

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

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

主持人: Such a beautiful animal, I do have to say.

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

主持人: It's Can I Can I touch it with my thumb?

保罗: You can. They don't love being pet. That's one thing about snakes. They don't A lot of people when they come around to suddenly loving snakes, they go, "Well, I want to pet it the way I want to pet a dog." And snakes will retract from that. So if you do it, touch her with your with your thumb. See how she moves away?

主持人: She moved away. Yeah,

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

主持人: Okay. And is she a baby?

保罗: Absolutely. These are these this is quite small. And so in the jungle on cold days, I'll find snakes like this and literally warm them up in my hands. I'll put them in here. And just if you can just look at that. Just look at how sweet she is. She'll just stay like that.

主持人: She likes that.

保罗: She likes that. She likes that. She likes the warmth there. We are endtherms. They are ectotherms. Like all reptiles, they depend on their environment for their body temperature. And so on the cold days, see that? See that? I move my hand closer.

主持人: She got a little spooked. She went back into the Again, this is just a tiny baby. There's another one that is a similarly awesome example.

保罗: This is her larger relative. Same species, right? So, this is a small ball python and this is a larger ball python. And notice that both of these, there's no risk, right? There's no there's no danger here. It's not like I can't put these near my face. Again, both of these are sort of the golden retrievers of snakes. These are these are snakes that have been handled by responsible snake owners. So, will that small one grow into the big one or you saying they're the same sort of cousins?

保罗: Yeah, this is a larger ball python. This is a smaller ball python.

主持人: So, this one will eventually be the size.

保罗: Absolutely. And this one could could grow to be double that size. Really? I've seen ball pythons be double that size.

保罗: Now, this one

保罗: slightly different game for holding. But see, like that. Look who's scared here. Me. Well, and and him.

保罗: And so, look at that. He's beautiful. So, look, I'll just give you a sense of look at the power in a python.

保罗: You think pull-ups are hard. He's holding on with no no legs, no claws, just strength.

保罗: And he's just going to climb back up on onto my arm.

保罗: So, what I'd like you to do is hold out your wrist.

保罗: Yeah, you got this.

保罗: Just straight across the table. Hold that. Right like that.

主持人: Now, remember, if he does bite,

保罗: you mean if he doesn't

主持人: I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Just hold him up high enough that he's not touching the table. Yeah. And then I'm just going to coax him up. He's okay. You're okay. You're okay. You're all right. You're all right. There we go. There we go. So, he's just gonna just just feel that power as he moves, which he will eventually.

保罗: But, see, you can feel the power on this snake. It's a little bit more of a

主持人: a little bit more musculature.

主持人: They are stunning.

保罗: You see that? That's it. He's like, "Okay, cool. You're holding me here." They're pretty relaxed animals. So, he'll go and eat a small prey item, go back into his burrow, and then digest for a week before going back out. And now you Now, if you want, you can take your other hand and put it under him to support him. And then he'll start to move over both of your hands. Why don't you try that? Put your other hand very gently right under his coil right there. He got scared of that. That's okay.

保罗: Or you could put a thumb through the through the loop.

主持人: Could do, couldn't I?

保罗: Yeah, you could do that. You're loving all these suggestions.

保罗: All right, now watch. Let's see what happens when you put him on the table. Cuz I bet you anything he doesn't enjoy. You feel that power? You feel that little bit of power there?

主持人: Yeah.

保罗: Now, that's a snake this big. Wait till you see like with an anaconda or something.

保罗: Now, a table's sort of unfair. There's nothing for him to see this. He's going to he's going to flop a little bit. There's they're not supposed to be on a table. So, this is what I'll do. I'll be the

保罗: I'll be the ground cuz then see look now he's pushing with all those little belly scales. See how he can cruise that incredible snake locomotion. Now watch if I take away his look. He's holds on. They don't want to. Now he's got nothing to push off of. So he's gonna he's going to do the inchworm thing.

保罗: But you get a sense of how snakes move. They need that. They need the ground. They need pebbles. They need rocks. Now you Now catch them.

保罗: Oh, come on, Mike. Catch him now. No, seriously. Not by the head. Start by the tail. Just right here. Just pick him up. And then once you pick him up, you can give him to me and then we can be done. But but Stephen, you have to catch the snake.

主持人: Pick pick him up here.

保罗: Just pick him up.

主持人: He's not going to do anything

保罗: now. Nice and slowly, too, cuz he's a friendly snake. You don't want to offend him.

主持人: He seems to be tense.

保罗: I mean, he is side eyeing you right now.

主持人: That's what I mean. He seems like I'm side eyeing him. He's side eyeing me. But I'm telling you that the snake, all you got to do is just pick them up.

主持人: And then when I pick him up, what do I do?

保罗: Just pick them up and hand them to me. That's all you got to do. And then this is all over.

主持人: Oh my god. I can't believe this.

保罗: Oh my god.

主持人: Beautiful. Right up up up up. Amazing. Wonderful. Now I'm going to take him.

保罗: All right. And then I have one more snake that I really need you to meet. Come here. You can't hold on to that. This

保罗: This is a different story. And this is sort of the closest thing that we're going to get to an anaconda.

保罗: I think the easiest thing I could do here is just let her get around my neck.

主持人: What the [ __ ] is my life?

保罗: So now what you don't want snakes to do is to close that gap, right? You don't want them to wrap around your neck.

主持人: Could she kill you? She could.

主持人: Then don't bring it over here.

保罗: Well, I thought I thought you wanted to meet her, too.

主持人: But what what if she does something to me?

保罗: No, no. So, this is a different type of snake. This is a Burmese python. And when you talk about large constrictors, those are small constrictors, the the ball pythons. This is a larger constriction constrictor. And Burmese pythons get to be big. These can go up to 18 ft long. And now what I think you're going to really appreciate is the power that these things have when you feel that power. And now just don't move. Yeah. Now give her your hand. Take her take her with your hand. Good. Very good. Now hold this hand out. Good. Just like that. Now be the tree. Just be the tree. That's great. Yep. You want to come this way, girl? Come here. Her tail is hot.

主持人: Yeah.

主持人: Why? Why is the tip hot?

保罗: Maybe she likes you.

保罗: Okay, now she's just going to move behind your head. And I just want you to feel the muscles of that snake.

主持人: What was that?

保罗: Oh, yeah. That's great.

主持人: Is she hissing?

保罗: She's breathing. That's just her breathing cuz she's holding on. She's a ground snake. She's not really a tree snake.

保罗: Now, Burmese pythons, they grow to be 18t long. They can take down deer. And so what you have right now is this beautiful granite Burmese python crawling on your shoulders. And you're doing great, by the way. You look very calm. Breathe. Don't forget to breathe.

主持人: And she can kill a deer.

保罗: No, no, she'll grow. She's still a baby. She's still small. She'll eventually be able to kill a deer. Now I just I don't want her to. Now, here's the thing. I think she likes you.

保罗: And so when I try to take her,

主持人: the strength.

保罗: The strength. Yeah.

主持人: She could like break my pinky finger off.

保罗: Yeah. So, let's just see what we do. So, we know a few things. We know that she's not going to hurt us. We know that she's not going to eat that banana. I know she'd like to probably Come on. You want to come up, girl? Yeah. See, I think they come to me. I think they know. You hear that? You hear that breathing? Have you ever done a podcast with a with a 10-ft snake across the table before?

主持人: No, this is my first.

保罗: This is amazing. It's such a It's such a joy to be here with a Burmese python there.

保罗: So, I really This is the closest I can get you to an anaconda. I wouldn't bring an anaconda here. Their personality is a little different.

主持人: Their personality is different.

保罗: Oh, yeah. Different snake species just like you'd be a little bit more careful around certain dog species than you would others. Certain snakes. Now, notice, look, now I'm I'm I'm pulling a good deal here and she's not budging. So, now what you're going to do is just just massage the tail.

主持人: What you mean massage?

保罗: I would like you to massage the tail.

保罗: Just just maybe rub back and forth on her tail and there's going to be an instant reaction. Yep. Just keep doing that. She's not going to love that. Oh, she's hissing

主持人: because there might be something back here that she can't see.

保罗: Well, exactly. She doesn't want something interacting with her tail.

主持人: She seems to be stuck to my the the diary.

保罗: The diary itself.

保罗: Okay, girl. Okay, girl. Okay, girl.

主持人: She doesn't like that.

保罗: Well, actually, why don't you just lift her lift that coil over up onto the table? You got this. Just like you lifted the other snake. You're going to have to do this to get through this.

主持人: Just lift.

保罗: No. See the part that's hanging over? Just lift it up onto the table.

主持人: Oh my gosh.

保罗: Yeah.

主持人: Oh my gosh. It's so

保罗: How would you describe it?

主持人: It's like really soft, but then like you feels like pure muscle.

保罗: Pure muscle. Yeah. She's very She's This is a very very strong snake.

主持人: It's so heavy. I can't even pull it up.

保罗: I I need I need you to try.

主持人: I think she's resisting.

保罗: Come on. You're not going to hurt her. Just right around the edge of the table. Just up onto the table.

主持人: I can't. It's too

保罗: Come on. You got this. You got yourself. Pretend we're in the Amazon. And this snake is strangling me to death. And the only way to save my life is to take that snake's tail up.

主持人: But David,

保罗: she's gripping to just take

主持人: MY EYES ARE POPPING OUT OF MY HEAD.

保罗: NO, I'M BEING SERIOUS. SHE'S LIKE, SHE I can't I can't move her off. She's like,

主持人: "Yes, you can." Come on. Pull her out. Bring her around. You got this. Look at your arms.

主持人: I know. I know. I'm scared.

保罗: You got this. You got this. Believe in yourself. Come on. Get her up.