Lex Fridman

It just has to be that way.

Speaking of which, another complexity in all of this, you write about in the afterword of the book.

about the narco traffickers that have moved into the river basin.

They're not the loggers that we've spoken about anymore.

They're growing cocoa for cocaine and they're building airstrips.

So tell me how this came to be.

They're the same.

Yeah.

So they really don't care about the others.

This is the understand.

I, are you afraid?

And in some sense, it's a twist that you didn't ask for, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the fight you're fighting, which is protecting the rainforest.

But because of it being pristine and quiet and away from civilization, it also becomes a place where you can have airstrips.

It becomes lawless in a certain way because it's so far away from civilization.

So these narcos, there's a kind of distributed network where a bunch of them are pretending to be farmers.

So they're holding onto the land, and then maybe they start planting cocaine on the land slowly, and then they build airstrips.

Are they trying to stay under the canopy with the airstrip?

You understand, have you researched into this whole other world of drug trafficking, cocaine trafficking?

How big is the operation here looking at perplexity, multi-thousand ton, multi-billion dollar global industry?

I mean, globally, it's a monster.