Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
The following is a conversation with Paul Rosalie, his third time on the podcast. Paul is a naturalist, explorer, writer, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest and celebrating the beauty of the natural world. He has a new book coming out in a few days titled Jungle Keeper. They should definitely go pre-order now.
It tells some intense stories about his time in the jungle over the past several years, building up to a few epic recent events, including a new full-on extended encounter with an uncontacted tribe that we discuss in this podcast. Both the book and audiobook are great. I highly recommend it.
If you would like to support Paul and his incredible team in their mission to protect the jungle, go to junglekeepers.org. You can help with donations or by spreading the word or checking out the gala that Paul is hosting in New York on January 22nd in a few days. They are doing all they can to help raise funds for the mission of safeguarding as much of the rainforest as possible.
And I think it's a mission worth fighting for. The Amazon jungle is one of the most special and beautiful places on earth. As an aside, allow me to look back briefly and mention something that I've been struggling with a bit. For context, I traveled to the Amazon rainforest with Paul a while back. It was an adventure of a lifetime with lots of crazy twists and turns.
We did record a podcast out there, literally in the jungle. Episode 429, if you want to go check it out. It was awesome. And we also recorded a bunch of disparate footage of the journey, just for fun. And I would still love to somehow put all that together into a cohesive video, in case it's interesting to someone.
But I've learned just how difficult it is to organize and edit a pile of chaotically recorded footage like that. So, let's see if I can pull it off. But in any case, this kind of raw vlog-style video is something that I would love to be able to do more of as a way to celebrate amazing human beings like Paul and others, including everyday people who I meet on my travels.
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Chapter 2: What intense stories does Paul Rosolie share about uncontacted tribes?
So, I'll keep trying, tinkering, learning, and I ask for your patience and support along the way. Now back to our regular scheduled programming. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or at lexfriedman.com slash sponsors. It is in fact the best way to support this podcast.
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And I should say that a lot of folks said they still listen to these sponsors because of the personal touch, because of the human stories that I put in there, because of the random, disparate, chaotic thoughts that I throw in there. So for those folks, thank you. But if you skip, please, please still support the sponsors. I really wouldn't be able to do it without them.
To get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfriedman.com contact. All right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under 48 hours.
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Chapter 3: What are the dangers faced by Paul and his team in the Amazon?
This episode is also brought to you by Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. 65 average resolution rate, trusted by over 6,000 customer service leaders and top companies, including Shutterstock, Synthasia, Clay, Vanta, Lovable, Monday.com, and more. A lot of companies.
And they use it for customer service, and they use the incredible, specialized, niche, do-one-thing-right AI agent that is provided by Finn to do the customer service. And clearly, AI has a big role in...
Chapter 4: How does Paul describe the significance of the Amazon rainforest?
automating certain aspects of that. But it's not easy to do that well. So I'm really glad there's a company like Finn that's focused on just this and making sure it's done extremely well. It's built to handle complex multi-step queries like returns, exchanges, and disputes, delivering high-quality personalized answers just like your best human agent.
Go to fin.ai.com to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team. That's fin.ai.com. This episode is also brought to you by Miro, an online collaborative platform. Its innovation workspace blends AI and human creativity to turn ideas into results.
I'm really a big fan of the cutting edge of using online tooling for the brainstorming process, especially when it's collaborative. It's kind of interesting to see how different folks approach ideation or brainstorming or thinking through stuff. You know, me and Paul talked a lot about his journaling process. He writes a lot of stuff in the notebook, but
At a certain point, you have to convert that for archiving purposes, for sharing purposes, for collaborative purposes. You have to convert that to the digital form. You can't just have a hard notebook. I mean, the collaboration is really essential. And the internet and the internet connectivity and services like Miro allow that collaboration to take place.
It's really when ideas spring to life is in the collaborative aspect, especially when they're ideas that have a chance to have impact. Help your teams develop great ideas into results with Miro. Go to Miro.com to find out how. That's M-I-R-O dot com. And finally, this episode is brought to you by Masterclass.
where you can watch over 200 classes from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. Every time I talk about Scorsese, every time I talk about Terence Tao, because those are singular figures in human history.
By the way, Terence Tao, very good masterclass on mathematical thinking, but he's been pushing on all fronts, exploring all the different ways AI can be leveraged and utilized, to do exceptional research level mathematics. He's made some recent announcements. I probably want to talk to him again at some point.
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Chapter 5: What tragic event impacted Paul Rosolie's mission in the Amazon?
I'm in the middle of a conversation. He goes, pick up the phone. And my friend, who I had just shook his hand a few hours ago, they went back upriver, and as they were unloading their boat and washing off in the stream, the narcos did a drive-by and shotgun straight to the chest, shot him in the chest.
And so all of that enthusiasm, and we're protecting the biodiversity, and this is so great, there's people from around the world. It's like that scene in the movie where there's just a montage of success and hope and acres and winning, gunshot. And I could still feel his hand in my hand. I just shook his hand. I said, no, you can't. You're not. I said, is he okay? He said, is he okay?
He said he took a shotgun straight to the chest.
Chapter 6: How do narco-traffickers affect the Amazon rainforest?
And they're like, he's dead. I said, okay. And so I had to go out to dinner and not show the guests anything and just smile and laugh and talk to them about whatever and keep that in, which felt very, very difficult to do. And so what happened, as you said, the threat level escalated and we didn't know it.
The narcos had come in and started realizing that there's so much wilderness here that they can operate and there's no police. And then when we flew the drone, they got mad. So we realized this, we communicated with the police and they said, oh yeah, these are narcos. Now we realize this is part of the serious drug mafia.
And then I had gone back with the incident that you're referring to at the end of the book, I had gone back to New York, again, to speak to donors, to try and get this work to continue. And you know how it works. We're at the station and then you go to that little logging town and then there's a road.
And so our pickup truck had come in on the road and JJ was supposed to come down, get in the truck and drive back to the city. J.J. was on the river and went, I forgot I was supposed to get more stuff at the sea. He goes, you know, I'll go tomorrow. He went back up and he sent the boat driver down and told our driver, Percy, who was waiting with the pickup truck, he said, J.J.
's not coming today. Go back. and come back tomorrow. Percy starts driving down the road and he sees a tree across the road. And this is a single lane road through the jungle. There's nowhere else you can go. And men with guns come and stick the pistols in through the open windows. Gun against his head, they pull him out and they go, where's JJ and the mierda gringo boladron?
They said, where's that shithead gringo that flew the drone? And if either of us had been in the car that day, they would have killed us. And we know that because they took his wallet, they took his phone, our driver, Percy. They thank God they didn't hurt him, but they sent a message to us. They said, let him know. They said, we missed you this time, but we'll get you next time.
They said, we're going to get you. And so when JJ called me, he called me and he was howling. He just had the, you know, that...
adrenaline and that emotion of that it almost happened and so that was that that changed everything and so since then we've been you know it's not counting butterflies and taking ecological surveys it's it's that there's a drug war being fought on our river and now when these roads come in we can't just go out and meet these people anymore and go talk to them because they are actively looking to shoot us they know our names and
And then, as if all these other things weren't enough indication, the police intercepted a phone from someone they arrested. And on the phone, in the WhatsApp chat, it said, if you see JJ or the gringo, anyone in our network, please kill them. You'll be rewarded. So we both have a hit out on us. And life on the river has changed at the moment. We don't.
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Chapter 7: What are the challenges of protecting the Amazon rainforest?
of protecting the ecosystem and the animals and the race to, to tell people about it and do all this. It's like, now we're actively being hunted when we're there. So, and this is very directed at you and JJ.
Yeah. So they really don't care about the others. This is the understand. I, are you afraid?
What's it been like living with us? Well, the real fear of being murdered at any moment
I wish I could say I handled it better than I've been handling it. Like, I wonder how people in war zones do it. I wonder how some of my soldier friends that I have immense respect for have did it when they were deployed.
Cause for me, once this happened, it was, you know, every phone call now, I think did something happen to JJ, you know, every time I go to sleep, my dreams are that I'm being shot and it, I just, it just, it just, it, it really threw me. It really, really affected me when JJ called me the, the, the way he was just, he was just shouting. I don't even remember what he was saying.
He was just, he's, he was just shouting. They almost got us. They almost got us. He was so, you know, terrified and angry. And, and, and so, yeah, it's, it's, I, there was a day not that long ago that I was swimming in the river and I was just in the river, you know, right in front of the stairs at the station and a boat came around the bend and, And I remember thinking, do I run?
Do I go underwater? Do I hide? What the hell do I do? I didn't have a gun near me. I didn't have the security people were up the stairs. It's like, you go, holy shit. And it's not the danger of, you know, if I jump on an anaconda, it might kill me. Or if I climb this, I might fall. These are people who want to kill you. And on top of it, you have the... You know, when you see your...
When you see what your friend looks like after three days of floating in a river, what a body looks like of a person you used to know, that's very viscerally terrifying because there's the tragedy of that person lost his life who was younger than I was. He was a kid. He was in his 20s. And then, yeah, it's very hard to do anything. I mean, like right now, my hands are sweating. It affects me.
And even in the daylight, if I can go, you know, it's fine. This is part of the thing. This is the adventure. People deal with this all over the world. You can talk yourself tough, and then in those quiet moments, you know, that 4 a.m. thing, you wake up and you go, fuck. You know, why am I sweating? Why did I just have those dreams? Why is my heart racing? It's like you just have...
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Chapter 8: What is Paul Rosolie's vision for the future of conservation?
And how do they get prostitutes? They go steal girls from indigenous communities that don't know any better. And then there's reports that the narcos have made contact with the uncontacted tribes. And of course, they're going to shoot machine guns at them. They're not going to have a little shotgun where it's a fair fight. They're going to mow them down.
And the uncontacted tribes are going to have no idea. That's why I posted a video of me in the rain saying this is end game. Because there was a new road that was coming off the north of our territory above the ancient forest. They had jumped over because we stopped it at the ancient forest. They've gone above the ancient forest. Now they're trying to cut down to a new area.
And so it looks like this.
that yeah so there's the trans amazon stefan made this map of course um but you see the area that we're trying to protect loosely so that we don't give away anything the loosely the area that we are protecting so the light green is the 130 000 acres and then this metastasizing network of roads just reaching out and trying to get in and so they're trying to come in from the north where that arrow is they're trying to come down
And so the police are fighting them along this and it's a full on drug war right now. And, and so, so stopping that, securing this Northern boundary. And so when I, I mean, again, just the power of what we have, when I posted this, I asked Stefan to make, show people the road and where it's going to go. We posted this video and said, we have to protect this hundred thousand acres right now.
And all up here is uncontacted tribe territory. And just from that one post, um, We got $150,000 in like 48 hours and we bought this concession. We stopped that road, but now they're up here and they're trying to come down. So it's like, and this is the thing again, you said, you know, it's, it's great. Yes. You get to be an adventurer and you get to live in the jungle. Sure.
But it's like, there's this, this mission impossible thing where it's like, you might get lucky enough to pull off your psychotic mission, you know, jump your motorcycle off the train and parachute down and stop the bomb before it goes off. Great. How many of those do you get? And we're having to do it every month.
And if we, that's the thing, these amazing people that are supporting the Rangers allow us to patrol and protect us. Because once we have this land protected, the interesting thing is that the police can go into any of the light green areas. If anybody's there, just arrest them. They're on Jungle Keeper's land. They're out. And eventually that land will become National Park if we're successful.
The problem with the land that's not is it's a gray area. It's the middle of the Amazon. Are they allowed to be here? Do they really have cocaine? Because they'll plant papaya for acres and a little bit of cocaine behind it. They'll put the sacks. They're sneaky. And so they have to build a case and it takes time.
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