Joe Rogan Podcast: #2441 with Paul Rosolie (Transcript)

I mean, the jungle is filled with life, but it’s still got to be difficult to source. And you got to do it every single day.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Every single day.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no refrigeration, there’s no preservation.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No. So everything is instantaneous. You shoot a monkey, you got to cook it and eat it. You know, you get a turtle, you got to eat it. You got to open it and eat it. And so there’s… I mean, you can see there’s that questioning look on their face. They don’t understand who we are.

And really the only communications that we got was we need more food and stop cutting down our trees. They said, “Who are the bad ones?” They said of you, “Who are the bad ones? Why are you cutting down our biggest trees?”

The Threat of Deforestation

JOE ROGAN: Well, not just cutting down the trees, but also killing the indigenous people that protest it, that get in the way of it. If their tribe is centrally located in an area where they’re chopping down the trees, they kill those people.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, yeah. And so right now what we have is we have the loggers and the gold miners coming in. And so since the last time I saw you, we were nailing all these successes, adding acres to the reserve. Because what we’re doing is trying to create this corridor which is going to become a national park. We’re trying to save this one river in the headwaters of the Amazon.

And we had been on this success run, you know, from people hearing the stories from things like this, people coming in and helping us do that. And then it started to change where we realized, okay, we’re protecting so much land that the logging mafias and the narco traffickers started pushing back.

And so now it’s getting more serious as we’re getting closer to the finish line. It’s getting harder because they’re going, we want this to remain wild. And we’re going, we’re trying to protect this. And the local communities are going, this is our forest. And the loggers and the narcos and the miners are coming from other places and they’re cutting down this forest.

And so it’s just, you know, I mean, everyone knows the Amazon is the lungs of the Earth. Everyone knows it produces a fifth of our oxygen on our planet. It contains a fifth of the fresh water on our planet. So it’s vital to global planetary stability. But we’ve already destroyed 20% of it. And so we’re seeing the moisture cycle get broken. 20% of the whole Amazon rainforest.

JOE ROGAN: That’s insane.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And that thing is so big. 2.7 million square miles. And I think the lower 48 is 3 point something million square miles.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

PAUL ROSOLIE: It’s gigantic.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. And they’ve already killed off 20% of it.

PAUL ROSOLIE: 20% of it’s already gone.

JOE ROGAN: Is it mostly cattle ranching? Like, what are they doing it for?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Cattle ranching accounts for 60% of Amazon deforestation. And then it’s just development roads. China has a new shipping port in Peru that they want to, you know, create, I think a railroad over the Andes mountains or through the Andes mountains so they can start getting access to the Amazon for Asian markets.

The Climate Summit Irony

JOE ROGAN: Is it true they carved out a giant pathway through the Amazon for a climate change conference?

PAUL ROSOLIE: You know, I’ve been trying to figure out if that’s true. I saw that go all over the Internet.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s one of those things like, who knows if that’s real.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And then the other one is they’re like, you know, Swedish billionaire bought this much of the Amazon. And it’s like, but what’s his name saying that? And I’m like, I don’t…

JOE ROGAN: Well, let’s put it into Perplexity and find out if that’s true, whether or not they carved out a pathway through the Amazon for a climate change summit. Because that sounds like horseshit.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That just sounds too ridiculous.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no way they would do something that stupid.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I don’t know, but I did see…

JOE ROGAN: Also, why would they have a climate change summit in the Amazon? You going to do it in a tent?

PAUL ROSOLIE: No, I think they did it in Manaus. I mean, there are cities in the Amazon. There’s Iquitos, there’s Manaus.

JOE ROGAN: So, but you can fly into those cities. You don’t need to carve out a f*ing pathway.

PAUL ROSOLIE: But I remember seeing a video of this guy and he was saying like, this is where the jungle used to be and now it’s just this big road. And I was like, but again, who in charge of the climate… unless they were going to have a climate conference and just local administrators and politicians said, “Well, we better get ready and clear this area.” And like, maybe it wasn’t intentional, I don’t know. I mean, if they have pictures of it…

JOE ROGAN: Whoa, it’s on the BBC. “Amazon Forest Felled to Build Road for Climate Summit.”

PAUL ROSOLIE: There you go.

JOE ROGAN: Oh my God, it’s real. Oh my God. “A new four-lane highway cutting through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest is being built for the COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian city of Belem.” Oh my God. That is so crazy. “It aims to ease traffic to the city, which will help climate…”

PAUL ROSOLIE: It’s easier to drive when there’s no trees.

JOE ROGAN: “More than 50,000 people, including world leaders, at the conference in November, the state government touts the highway sustainable.” I love how they use that term. Sustainable is one of those wonderful terms. You can just throw on things. “Sustainable credentials but lacks local and conservation. But some local and locals and conservationists are outraged at the environmental impact.” Yeah, duh. That’s crazy.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Look at that.

JOE ROGAN: You’re chopping down trees to protest chopping down trees. That’s f*ing insane.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Sounds amazing.

JOE ROGAN: I just, you know, at what point in time are people going to wake up?

The Tipping Point

PAUL ROSOLIE: At one point in time people are going to wake up. And I think that that’s, you know, that’s sort of as I’ve been… I’ve just started this book tour and everything else and it’s the thing I’m trying to impress. I was just talking about this the other night is like we’ve had world wars, we’ve had great famines, we had the dust bowls.

There’s never been a time in history though before where we’re looking at is there going to be ecological collapse. The thing that I’m talking about with where they’ve cut 20% of the Amazon, scientists are warning that if we cut too much of the Amazon, that moisture cycle…

I think the thing was that 20 trillion liters of water every day are pumped into the air from the Amazon and that becomes the cloud system that rains back down and creates the Amazon rainforest. If you cut too much of that, you break the cycle.

And that forest has been growing for something like 55 million years. I believe it formed in the Eocene. And so we are the generation that’s going to decide: do we find a sustainable way to keep the Amazon rainforest functioning or are we going to break that cycle? And once we lose it, it’s not going to come back.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so crazy. It’s so crazy that people are so short-sighted. We want to have cattle ranches.

Conservation Through Economic Opportunity

PAUL ROSOLIE: It is disorganization and apathy. It’s like we have the ability to organize. I mean, if you can organize an airport, you can figure out a way to protect a forest. But the fact that it’s in numerous Latin American countries, Brazil wants to develop in Peru, you have the illegal gold miners coming in and now you have the pressure from the Asian markets.

And you know, we found that if you just, I mean that’s what we’ve been doing over the last 20 years is going to these gold miners and loggers and going, “How much do you make?” And they go, “$20 a day.” You go, “Do you want to make 60? And you get a cool shirt and you get health benefits and you get to ride a boat and you get a team.” And they’re like, “Yeah, that sounds so much better.” And they’re happy to come over but they need the opportunity.

JOE ROGAN: We talked about you doing that and I think that is really amazing. It’s just crazy that it takes a person like you and your organization to, like, put some sort of a dent in this. This isn’t some sort of a gigantic global effort, that there’s not a lot of people that are recognizing this issue and saying, “Hey, this is a huge problem if this goes away.”

Global Conservation Efforts and Local Heroes

PAUL ROSOLIE: I think, though, that there, I see in the world that I exist in, I see that all over the world there’s people doing conservation projects and that we are at this point where there’s enough happening, where, I mean, you had E.O. Wilson advocating for the half Earth policy where it’s, you know, at least half of the Earth has to remain ecosystems.

If you break too much down, if you ruin our ocean fisheries, if you cut the rainforests in the forest, you’re going to ruin the weather. The stuff that comes standard with life on Earth is going to be depleted. And so I think, you know, you see tiger numbers going up in India, you see that there’s actually been an increase in forest cover globally. But in some of the most important areas, like the Amazon, it’s just wild.

And I mean, that’s what we’re doing is, you know, the guy JJ that I work with, who’s local, he’s been trying to, he’s been saying this for years. I mean, since we saw each other, he got, which, I don’t know how this happened. I don’t know how some of this stuff happens, but we got an email one day from Time, and they were like, “We’re selecting our hundred climate leaders of 2024.” And they’re like, “JJ’s one of them.”

And I have no idea how the people at Time select this, but they chose this. I mean, JJ grew up in an indigenous community barefoot. He didn’t have shoes until he was 13. And it was because he saw his forest get destroyed and because he saw the fish vanish from the rivers as nets came in, and then as chainsaws came to the region, he saw the trees go down. He went, “We got to protect the next river.”

And so he’s the one that, you know, when I went down there at 18 years old, he’s the one that was like, “Look, you got to help me protect this.” And of course, at 18 years old, I was like, “How? How do I do that? How on earth is that possible?” And then when we started seeing the smoke on the horizon and we started hearing the chainsaws and it got more urgent, I started telling these stories and the anaconda stories and everything else. The first book that I wrote, and little by little, Jane Goodall, people helped along the way, Joe Rogan helped along the way.

The Amazon’s Hidden History

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’m happy to get the word out because, I mean, it’s kind of insane that it’s happening, but it’s also that place is such a magical place and it has such an insane history that we’re just starting to understand the history of the people that live there. I mean, through the use of LiDAR, they’re just starting to understand that the entire place was massively populated and that a lot of the plants that exist in the Amazon are actually agriculture plants that went, you know, went rogue when the people were depopulated because people brought in smallpox.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I got to push back on that. I feel like that’s a theory that’s been becoming prevalent as a theory.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’m sure there was a jungle before, because even in the Lost City of Z, I mean, even the talk, what is it? Percy Fawcett, the people that went there, they talked about the Amazon being a lush rainforest and these enormous cities that were incredibly complex before the jungle swallowed them up. So it’s clear that there was some form of jungle there already, 100%, but that these plants that they grew for agriculture were the ones that had, you know, once people stopped tending them and taking care of them, they overwhelmed the rest of the forest.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, a friend sent me a clip. And you, I think you were talking to Tom Segura and you went, “You know, and the crazy thing about the Amazon,” and you went, “It’s largely man made.” And I was like, threw something.

JOE ROGAN: No, let’s find out why we said that. Let’s pull that up, run that into Perplexity and see what articles we get. Because what they’re saying is that these plants that the number, if I believe, if I’m not mistaking the numbers that they exist in are not natural.

PAUL ROSOLIE: But that’s only around these ancient sites. And so I went and did a deep dive into this. And the sites that they’ve studied are along the watersheds. And so in the Amazon, you have terra firma, which is sort of dry forest, and then it dips into the river basin and you have flood plain. Most of these cities existed on floodplains.

And so where the scientists are able to go is up the rivers and they go to the edges of these flood plains where they find ancient human settlements. And that’s where you find terra preta soil, which is human engineered. And that’s where you find there’ll be like a higher incidence of certain trees or certain plants. What are these trees? And so like bananas for example, or sometimes they’ll plant a higher amount of Brazil nut trees.

JOE ROGAN: So here it is, our sponsor Perplexity, which is always accurate. Estimates suggest that roughly 10 to 15% of the Amazon standing forest shows clear signs of being man made or strongly shaped by long term indigenous management. Not planted as uniform tree farms, but modified over thousands of years.

Much of the Amazon that looks wild has been influenced by pre-Columbian indigenous agroforestry, soil enrichment, Amazon dark earths, that’s terra preta, and species selection. Rather than being a purely untouched wilderness, these systems differ from modern plantations. They are diverse semi-natural forests enriched with useful trees and crops rather than rows of single commercial species.

So the idea of the terra preta was that a lot of the Amazon soil is not good for agriculture. Is that correct?

PAUL ROSOLIE: It’s barren.

The Amazon’s Ancient Origins

JOE ROGAN: It used to be a vast inland sea.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. When it separated from Africa, the Congo and the Amazon used to be joined in some sort of proto-Congo system. And then when they separated, the Amazon, South America hit up against the Nazca plate, the Andes Mountains shot up and then the salinated water drained out. And that’s why we still have inland freshwater stingrays, manatees, pink river dolphins.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Oh, that makes sense.

JOE ROGAN: And so that happened over millions of years.

PAUL ROSOLIE: As those salinated water, the saltwater dolphins, adapted to fresh water.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Is that why they became pink?

JOE ROGAN: They became pink I think because they’ve lost their pigmentation. They have terrible eyesight. They almost don’t need to see because you don’t in that sediment rich water. They’re using sonar.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Wow. So they become almost blind.

JOE ROGAN: All the fish you pull out, these giant catfish, they hardly have eyes. They have like light sensing organs. You can’t see. I mean, there are clear rivers in the Amazon, which I would love to go, I’ve never been to one. And like the streams are clear, but the Amazon river itself is nothing. Everyone’s like, “Oh, you should bring a GoPro in the river with you.” And I’m like, “For what? You’re not going to see anything.”

PAUL ROSOLIE: It’s just sediment.

Debunking the “Man-Made Amazon” Theory

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but the thing that this theory about the Amazon is, even human engineered is wrong. Because when you look at the size of the Amazon, you look at that 2.7 million miles, it’s that they’ve said that what they’re not getting is that in the areas that these people have been studying with LiDAR and through this anthropological digging, they’re saying it’s more than we thought.

There’s certainly more human settlements than we previously thought. There maybe were a few million people there before Pizarro and the explorers came. But what you don’t realize is that between the rivers, between each river, which is the majority of the Amazon, is this terra firma, giant jungle with hundreds of miles between the rivers. Nobody’s been there.

And so I just was reading a scientific paper, it was saying they went out and sampled those areas and it showed absolutely no sign of human engineering. And so most of the forest in…

PAUL ROSOLIE: Terms of the growth of the plants. But did they do LiDAR to see if there’s previous structures?

JOE ROGAN: Well, the good thing with the LiDAR is that they fly over. And so LiDAR confirmed that over those human areas, like you get like a river confluence where two rivers are coming together, there’ll be a human settlement there. And in those areas they find that the terra preta, they’ll find that the plants occur in different abundance and diversity than in the other places.

But that the, this message that the Amazon itself was engineered by ancient humans or prehistoric humans is not actually accurate. It was a wild jumble.

PAUL ROSOLIE: They’re saying clickbait.

JOE ROGAN: Did they think it. Because people build their careers on, you know, if you come out and say I have a new theory about how this formed, it gets attention. There’s even a, and nothing against, what’s his name? Graham Hancock. For a while, everyone’s like, “Oh, Paul Rosolie used to debate Graham.” I got nothing against Graham Hancock, he’s great.

But it’s just the messaging is becoming that the Amazon was kind of man made. And so what happens is you get leaders like in Brazil going, “Well, if the Amazon was really man made, then we can manage it now.” And it’s just not accurate.

If you look at the, and even Smithsonian did an article where they said, “These are the current things that are coming out. These are the theories.” And then it went, “Yeah, but these theories discount the fact that 95% of the Amazon rainforest has not been surveyed in this way.” And most of it shows that these are just wild ecosystems that have been growing since the dawn of time for the last 55, 30 million years.

And it’s just been speciating and growing and evolving on its own. And it’s only in these tiny areas that humans have done this sort of engineering. Where there were tribes, the first one to come down the Amazon, he mentioned that there were tribes that had sectioned off parts of the river and they were growing the giant river turtles. And that was their prime source of protein. So they figured out how to get…

PAUL ROSOLIE: A giant river turtle.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, tremendous. They’re like three or four feet across from carapace.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Show me a giant river turtle, Jamie.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, they’re huge. They’re monstrous. Absolutely. We don’t have them anymore.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Bigger than sea turtles. Like those sea turtles. Sea turtle, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Sea turtle size. They’re huge. They’re absolutely monstrous. And then we found fossils. We were on a beach, we found fossils of an eight foot river turtle. Yeah, but see, like that.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Okay, so just like the ones you find in Hawaii, those sea turtles are like, if you go to the big island, you could swim with them. It’s pretty dope.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. These guys don’t have flippers, though. They still have claws.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Those are monster turtles.

JOE ROGAN: Massive. And so they were growing them, farming them.

PAUL ROSOLIE: They were farming them. And so in areas like that, you’re going to see agriculture, you’re going to see pot, you’re going to see terra preta. You’re going to see things where there was a small civilization by the edge of the river. And then in the other 98% of the Amazon, no one’s ever been there.

JOE ROGAN: Have you had sea turtle before? This kind of turtle, whatever it is, have you eaten it yet?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Oh, sea turtle. No. This turtle? Yeah, absolutely. What is it like? It’s kind of slimy. It’s not like anything. It’s very strange because they cook it and just, you know, everyone always goes.

JOE ROGAN: How could you be a conservationist and eat the animal?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Because when you go to someone’s house and they live on the side of a river and they go, “we’re having dinner,” that’s what they’re serving.

JOE ROGAN: You got to eat with them. Yeah, I wouldn’t do that, man.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You’re ruining me.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: How could you? Let me throw paint on it.

JOE ROGAN: Let me glue myself to this shell.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yes, that’s what I’m going to do next time. And I showed you that video where I’m sharing the monkey head with the girl.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Like, I was babysitting a six year old and she was like, “it’s lunchtime.” And I was like, “well, what did your parents leave you for lunch?” And she opens this pot and pulls out a monkey head. And she was like this. So we put it on the fire, warmed it up, and then we both sat there, just like, rip it.

I would rip off a piece for her because I was stronger and give it to her. And then she was like, “no, no, I want the ear.” And she would rip off the ear. Like we just sat there eating a monkey face.

And so the turtle, they cook it in the shell. They’ll just slit his throat, throw it on the fire. And so it cooks in the shell, then they part the shell. And then you kind of just like, it’s like a slow cooked, like when the meat falls off the bone.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You just throw a little salt on there and it’s kind of—

JOE ROGAN: How do they get their salt? Is that something they trade?

Indigenous Communities and Modern Challenges

PAUL ROSOLIE: They trade for it. They trade for it. I mean, the people I’m dealing with have access to the outside. Even the really remote communities that are two days upriver, they trade with the outside world. They have some interaction with money.

And so that’s one of the things that we’re doing as an organization is saying, “okay, what do you want your future to look like?” Because right now you have a couple shotguns, you got a couple chainsaws, you got a couple boats. And those things make you want money, but you also want to eat fish out of the river every day. You also want to eat monkeys every day. And these are your staples.

And they’re like, you know, if you cut down more of these trees, there will be less monkeys. If you shoot too many, like, it’s not like they have deer tags where it’s like a monitored thing. They just, they’re not understanding. You know, when it was a bow and arrow, it was kind of a fair game. Now the shotgun, it’s like you can go shoot whatever you want.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, every time you point at a monkey, it’s dead. Yes. It’s not a tricky hunt.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And so we’re working. These guys are working with us as rangers, and we’re building this, developing this relationship with the local communities of saying, “how do you—do you want to continue living this way? Do you want your kids to live this way?” And the answer usually is yes, but with better health and education. So we want to—

JOE ROGAN: Yes, but that’s interesting. So they like that way of life. They want to continue that way of life because it’s the only thing they’ve known. I mean, have any of these people ever gone to any of these other cities that are fairly close or that they could reach and see what that life is like?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, we brought one of the communities. They were having trouble with the Peruvian government getting recognized as an indigenous community. And they were having this trouble for 15 years. And we used, you know, now we have lawyers and people and we have an office and all this stuff in Peru.

And so we went and sat down with them. We said, “okay, why are you having this trouble? I mean, you clearly are an indigenous community. What’s the holdup?” And the holdup was that it takes two days for them to get to the nearest town. When they get to the nearest town, they’re scared of the traffic. They have no idea what to do with paperwork. They have to sit in an office.

I mean, these are people that are putting their bows and arrows and guns down and walking into an office and sitting there in the air conditioning. And they’re like, “next.” And they’re like, “sit.” And they’re like, “do you have form like I227B?” And they’re like, “I2 what?” And they’re like, “what’s your Social Security number?” And they’re like, you know, they got some fish shells in there.

And so what we realized was that they were just having trouble with the administrative part. And so we put our lawyers on it and we got them their indigenous titled land. And so now no one can take that away from them. And so for that, we brought them all to the city. We had a big conference and we had a big celebration about it. And they all had the feathers on their head and they were all celebrating. And now they’re safe.

JOE ROGAN: Is there any pushback? Like, is there any political influence by whatever it is, miners, ranchers, anyone who tries to stop that from happening? Bribe people to try to take over the land of these people?

The War Zone of Influence

PAUL ROSOLIE: Absolutely. I mean, the Amazon is a war zone of influence. And so you have, I mean, the miners. If anybody tries to protest the gold mining, they kill you.

So one of the lawyers that I was working with, his father had come out and said, “look, as a local Peruvian person in the jungle, I want this to stop. They can’t. They’re destroying—” There’s a, Jamie, there’s a photo in the folder that says, I think it says sandstorm or something, but it’s just, it’s not even, again, deserts are actually ecosystems. This is a wasteland.

They’ve destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres in the Peruvian Amazon. You can see it from space. It’s this horrible scar. And they’ve cut the trees, burned the forest, and then they’ve sucked the land up. And then they take the bottom of the sediment and they use mercury to bind the gold out of the sediment, and then they burn the mercury off the gold, releasing it into the air.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, great.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Oh, yeah. So that then in the rain, it comes down as mercury rain, which gets into the fish, which gets into the people.

JOE ROGAN: And then also the miners must be getting mercury poisoning.

PAUL ROSOLIE: The miners all have mercury poisoning. Birth defects, health problems, respiratory issues. I mean, it’s some of the fires. That is me. That is me running out there with you right there. Yeah. I mean, as soon as we see forest burning, we run towards it.

JOE ROGAN: And it rains there a lot. Right. So, like, how long does this forest fire last?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Well, they do it in September when the, like, it’s like July through September when the forest is at its driest. They come in and they cut the forest and they leave it down.

JOE ROGAN: What was that picture you showed me, Jamie?

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s a horrible picture.

JOE ROGAN: Was that animals burned alive on a tree?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Two baby jaguars that were burned alive.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, God.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. And so people—

JOE ROGAN: And they just stuck on the tree, burned alive. That’s crazy.

PAUL ROSOLIE: People talk about, you know, we’re losing ecosystems, and it’s like, it’s not just about us. These animals live there. They have nowhere else to go. And so there’s massive individual suffering for animals. Millions of animals on a single tree.

And so then when you have these fires where they cut the forest and just burn everything, this, I mean, those trees would have been filled with monkeys and birds and the snakes, you know, they get scared. They burrow deeper into their hole. And then it burns.

JOE ROGAN: And so this is all for gold mining.

PAUL ROSOLIE: This was for cattle ranching, this one. This was invaders on our river that come in from other places. They set up cows, they set up papaya. I mean, this is what it’s supposed to look like. It’s supposed to be this lush, verdant, ancient rainforest filled with wildlife.

I mean, the cacophony of sound when you’re going to sleep in your tent at night and you’re out in a place like that, it’s just this throbbing, pulsing symphony. It’s incredible, the magic of that place. A real wilderness is wild.

I mean, this is, that particular shot was, it’s, we had to go for days to reach that spot. You know, all day on the river camp, all day on the river camp. You know, you’re going up rapids, you’re going up the waterfalls to get to these places that nobody can go. And there’s an example of, it’s, that was specifically a location where they’ve studied and they’ve found that there’s never been a human settlement there. It’s just a corner of the Amazon.

Unexplored Wilderness

JOE ROGAN: Ever have they done lidar in these areas where they say that people have never been?

PAUL ROSOLIE: I don’t know for sure.

JOE ROGAN: That’s where it gets weird, right? Because, like, they’ve done lidar on some of these places that were very lush and tropical, and then they find these structures underneath it. They find these areas that clearly had some sort of pathways and geometric patterns that indicate foundations of buildings.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, those are there. I just think that right now the problem is that it’s getting grossly overstated how much of the Amazon, if you take it as a football field and you go, “man, I thought it was only in this much of the football field,” you know, in a few inches of it. And then you find out there’s actually 10 feet of the football field that was still. The rest of the football field is still wild.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And so what I think that’s the message that’s getting lost is they’re going, “there’s a lot more here than we thought.” That doesn’t mean the whole thing.

JOE ROGAN: I watched a documentary once on this guy was losing his mind. He was a scientist who was a biologist who’s convinced that the giant sloth still existed in the Amazon and they couldn’t find it and that these people who lived there were telling him, “we see them, we know what they are, we have a name for them.”

And this guy had been there for years, and he was losing his mind because he couldn’t find it. And he sort of staked his academic reputation on the idea that this sloth existed. Couldn’t find anything. But it doesn’t mean it’s not there.

PAUL ROSOLIE: It doesn’t mean it’s not there.

JOE ROGAN: There’s so much.

PAUL ROSOLIE: There’s so much. And the locals are never wrong.

JOE ROGAN: Like, imagine if you were looking for a coyote and you had to look through the entire, like, there was a thousand coyotes in the center of the United States, and you started in Pennsylvania and you were hiking your way. Like, “I don’t see any f*ing coyotes,” but there’s a thousand of them that are in North Dakota, and you’ve got to find, like, that’s essentially—

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s a great way of thinking of it. It’s the same thing with rattlesnakes. When I was a teenager, I was exploring the mountains of New York, and I was going, “it says there’s rattlesnakes here.” So I was just walking around, finding every kind of snake. I’d be like, “well, where are the rattlesnakes?”

And you don’t realize that wildlife occurs in populations. And so the rattlesnakes were all near rattlesnake dens. And so then I started making friends with other guys that were into snakes, and they were like, “yeah, we know where they are. It’s only, you see that mountain right there? It’s like, it’s on the side of that. Go to that in the morning when there’s sun, and you’ll see them basking.” It’s like, you got to go to where they live, right?

JOE ROGAN: And you have to talk to the people that actually know. Well, this guy was trying to do that. But there was this one scene of exasperation where he was sitting down saying, “Did I stake my entire reputation on horseshit?”

PAUL ROSOLIE: You know, did he?

JOE ROGAN: But he. Do you have to pee? He keeps getting up, which is unusual for him. Can you tell Jeff to come and get him? See if he can. He might have to pee. He’s generally happy to chill.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, I’ll just lay down.

JOE ROGAN: He keeps getting up and he’s huffing, which is like he communicates that way. When he wants to eat, he comes up to me and he huffs. You know, my buddy’s the best.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No, but I think that’s the truth, is that people think you can just go find this stuff and the secrets in this world are hidden for a reason. And even if there is a tribe that knows about the giant ground sloths, they’re not going to tell us, right? They’re not going to tell us from the outside. So it might be like one valley between two mountains where there’s still a population.

JOE ROGAN: Bathroom. Bring them back in here. I’m pretty sure he has to go. Thanks, Jeff.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I wouldn’t, you know, I mean, there’s…

JOE ROGAN: Got to be a bunch. Well, there’s so many plants that they find there. This is an interesting statistic. Find out what percentage of pharmaceutical drugs the compounds emanate from the Amazon. It’s an enormous percentage.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. A lot of the base drugs, quinine, came from the Amazon. The first cure for malaria. I know Captopril, which was a blood pressure medication, came from Bushmaster Venom. That was in the 90s. There’s so much. I mean, I just got whacked by a stingray. Hard.

JOE ROGAN: I saw that. It got your foot right. What was that? What happened?

PAUL ROSOLIE: That was brutal. I mean, you’ve been hit by everything. Dude, my body is a Jackson Pollock painting of scars.

JOE ROGAN: Do you ever get checked for parasites? Because you must have all of them.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I do.

Pharmaceutical Discoveries from the Amazon

JOE ROGAN: Estimates typically say that about 25% of modern pharmaceutical drugs are derived from rainforest plants. And many of those known examples come from the Amazon. But there’s no precise peer reviewed percentage just for the Amazon alone. Most popular figures you see, like 25% of medicines come from the Amazon, actually refer to all tropical rainforests, not specifically the Amazon.

But the thing is, how much of the Amazon has not been explored and how many potential pharmaceutical drugs, or you know, here’s, that’s the term, right, pharmaceutical drugs. What about natural remedies exist in the Amazon that aren’t, you don’t need to patent them and sell them at a f*ing pharmacy.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And yeah, I mean, look, so we have Neosporin. You get a cut, it looks a little infected. You put Neosporin on it, it might work. Down there we have a tree that you get. We tested this and it murders bacteria. It’s like a hundred times more potent than Neosporin.

JOE ROGAN: What’s it called?

PAUL ROSOLIE: The Sangre de Drago. It’s not even a big secret. People know about this. Every time I post about it, everyone’s like, “Yeah, we know about that. We use it.” But no one’s ever turned it into a cream.

JOE ROGAN: Can it grow in Austin?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Probably.

JOE ROGAN: Can I get some Sandra, how do you say it?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Sangre de drago. The dragon.

JOE ROGAN: Sandra de Drago.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Sangre de drago.

JOE ROGAN: Sangre de drago, yes.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Dragon.

JOE ROGAN: I’m watching Game of Thrones again. That sounds like something Khaleesi would say.

PAUL ROSOLIE: The mother of dragons.

JOE ROGAN: And by the way, Khal Drogo could have used that.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I mean, right, the thing that took him down.

JOE ROGAN: That didn’t make any sense to me. I thought that was a plot hole.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No, serious.

JOE ROGAN: There it is. Dragon’s blood. Sangre de drago.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, but is it good?

JOE ROGAN: Is it sourced well, right. It’s probably made by some ahole. It’s probably like one. The rest of it’s corn syrup.

PAUL ROSOLIE: We just hit the tree with the machete and then you have a spoon and then you put it on your thing. And actually, exactly that. When I saw that, I thought the opposite. I was like, “Oh, this great warrior.” I was like, that’s such a great plot twist that just a nick killed him. I mean, I just had a staph infection in my leg from one mosquito bite that just got itchy. And then it spread and it spread and it spread until I had to be on double antibiotics. They cultured it and it was MRSA.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s like I would have died in the Amazon.

MRSA and Jungle Infections

PAUL ROSOLIE: Well, I got MRSA years ago. I had dengue and I had gone to a clinic in the city, which MRSA usually lives in hospitals in the human areas.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Because it’s a medication resistant staph infection. That’s what MRSA stands for, right?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yep. And so I had gotten it, and so I have a tendency now. I’ve been a little bit compromised in terms of infections because living twenty years in the jungle. And so I had already gotten it, so chances are that’s where it doesn’t exist.

And that’s the thing you see, in the wild jungle, you don’t have malaria, you don’t have rabies, you don’t have dengue. Because the human population is so low that it doesn’t spread. A mosquito bites you here, the next person it’s going to bite is me or Jamie. Mosquito bites me in the city and then I go out into the rainforest, there’s no one else for it to bite. It’s going to bite an anteater. And so it’s not going to spread like that.

Whereas if we have a town of loggers, that’s why when you go to these logging and mining camps, the diseases, they’re just, I mean, there’s this thing called this type of flea called a piki that burrows into your feet and lays eggs. There’s leishmaniasis, there’s malaria, dengue, Zika virus. There’s all these crazy things, but we don’t have that out in the jungle because the ecosystem, the frogs eat most of the mosquito larva.

The mosquito larva like bromeliad cups or puddles. Well, bromeliad cups and puddles are filled with tadpoles. And then, of course, there’s turtles in the puddles eating the tadpoles. And then there’s other things eating the turtles. Everything’s eating everything. Ecosystem regulates it when you ruin that.

So then you cut down the forest. Now you have puddles sitting in the sun, and they’re all twitching with mosquito larva, so you have tons of mosquitoes. And so that’s how nature, they say mangrove forests will stop tsunamis from destroying a town because they’ll stop the rush of the water. Well, forests will keep you safe by not only producing rainfall that will come down on your crops, but also making sure that the ecosystem is not out of balance so you’re not covered in mosquitoes and parasites.

JOE ROGAN: When I lived in LA, I moved into a house in Encino that I was renting, and no one had lived there in quite a while, and they had left the water in the pool. And when I was going out to look at the pool, the pool was completely green, and there was things swimming in it. I mean, like, school swimming. And I go, “What is that?” The guy goes, “That’s mosquito larva.” Like, no way. And he’s like, “Yeah, we have to kill them. We have to drain the pool.”

I was just thinking about how many times I was going to get bit once these things hatched. It was crazy. It was like watching little fish swim around. Little hatchlings.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And then thank God for dragonflies, because they’ll lay their young in the same thing, and dragonfly larva will go murk those things. They’re savage. And then you get tadpoles.

JOE ROGAN: Wild kingdom right in your pool.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Right in your pool, right in your little cup. But when I got stung by the stingray, it was crazy because I had been walking with shoes in this stream. I took my shoes off because it’s like, “Oh, I’m at a waterfall. I know this waterfall. I love this waterfall.” Playing in the waterfall. And man, it’s the one thing. Bullet ants, caiman bites, snake bites. I’ve had it all. The stingray bite was the one thing.

JOE ROGAN: Worse than bullet ants.

PAUL ROSOLIE: A hundred thousand times worse.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

The Stingray Attack

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yes. And I’d seen one guy get stung by a stingray, and he had nerve damage, a systemic infection up his leg and his whole body, and he didn’t walk for months. So when I got hit, I felt this is what I felt. I felt, in the flash of a second, I felt the stingray barb go into my foot, and it wagged its tail under my skin. So it flayed the skin off the arch of my foot and came out.

JOE ROGAN: And it has venom.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. So there, all the skin is…

JOE ROGAN: Man, that is nasty. Did you put the skin of the dragon or whatever the hell it is?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Better. So I sat, and of course, my first thing was, I was like, “Okay, I got to document this.” Oh, man, I’m unconscious. I’m unconscious.

JOE ROGAN: At this point, you’re in that much pain?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yes. I was blacking out. Yeah. I mean, I was literally, I knew people were filming, and I was like, I didn’t, you know, you want to be tough. You want to be like, “All right, I just got bit by a stingray. It’s going to be fine.” I was not tough.

JOE ROGAN: It says, “I don’t remember any of this.”

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. So that first thing right there, I started taking a video. My friend comes up to me and he was like, “Hey, man.” He’s like, “We got to, you got to stop.” He’s like, “Because in a minute, you’re going to go under.” I was like, “What do you mean I’m going to go under?” And he’s like, “Once the venom hits your system,” he goes, “You’re not going to be able to walk. And we’re still a few miles from the river.” He’s like, “We got to get you to the boat, and we can’t carry you.”

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And so they got me back to the station. I don’t remember any of it. They had me laying on my back, and I was in so much pain, I couldn’t put my foot down. I mean, I was making deals with God. I was going, “If you just make the pain go away.” I was like, “I’ll go to church every day.” I was like, “I’ll never smoke a cigarette again.” So that’s the plant medicine. That’s where I’m going with this.

JOE ROGAN: I’ll smoke a cigarette every day. That’s funny.

Indigenous Plant Medicine

PAUL ROSOLIE: That pack there. They went to two different trees and they removed compounds from the tree. One was the bark and one was the fiber. And they put it into a leaf pack, and they cook it on a pan and they heat it and it makes this plant poultice. And they put this boiling hot piece of plant material. It’s like a fish cake. And they put it against the wound, and even that burned, but it felt better than the venom. And it starts to suck out the venom.

And so when they took it off my foot after, this is them getting the plant material. They know the medicines, and that’s been handed down through the generations.

JOE ROGAN: So they’re just shaving it off with a knife?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yes. You see, there’s a few different colors. And then they heat that up until it’s scalding, press it against your foot.

JOE ROGAN: And you’ve been in the Amazon for a long time. This is the first time it’s ever happened to you. You’ve been stung by a stingray.

PAUL ROSOLIE: This is the first time.

JOE ROGAN: Now, how does it happen? You just step in the wrong place.

PAUL ROSOLIE: JJ’s nephew, so he knows, he’s got the indigenous training. He knew exactly what to do.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

Indigenous Medicine and Stingray Venom

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. So that’s all the venom. So now all that black stuff is all the denatured blood that came out of my foot. And so for about four hours, I was in this state of just level 10 pain, just white hot pain. I couldn’t talk to anybody. I couldn’t do anything.

People were coming to me and they were like, what can we do? And I was like, just leave me alone. I was like, I don’t want you to look at my face. You know, I was coming in and out. And then by nighttime, it had gotten… This was at night where I was like, okay, the pain had subsided, but I didn’t get nerve damage and I didn’t get a huge infection because they had this indigenous plant medicine to save me.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

PAUL ROSOLIE: The last guy that I knew that got it, he went straight to the hospital. And they had no idea how to deal with it. The locals know how to deal with this stuff. Wow, look at that.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s tree medicine.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. So what happens? You just stepped in the wrong spot. That’s all it is.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I mean, I’ve stepped on stingrays before, and you feel them flutter. And I… One time I even felt the barb go, like, past my foot, but it didn’t penetrate. I do not know how. I mean, it must have been a small one or something, but it just right up through the arch of my foot. And what’s funny is that just…

JOE ROGAN: I would never walk barefoot ever.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I walk barefoot all the time. But just days before, not days before that, about a month before that, I’d fallen off of something like a 50 or 60 foot cliff and just rolled down and bruised ribs and gotten all banged up. I’d climbed up this cliff thinking I could… I was like, I see this root up there. I can get up to the top.

And at the top, my strength just ran out and my feet were pedaling and I had no footholds and I just went tumbling down this thing and I just went, you know what I said? I’ve had infections, I’ve had crocodile bites, I’ve had dengue. I got a week left in the Amazon. I’d been in the Amazon for six months and I was like, I’m doing nothing dangerous. No tree climbing, no anaconda hunting, no croc diving, none of that stuff.

And I was just swimming in a waterfall. Bam. How long ago put me out of the game? That was actually in April. I waited to post it until now, but everyone’s messaging me going, how’s your foot? And I’m like, it was months ago. But I was like, it is better.

JOE ROGAN: How long did it take before it was better?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Honestly, two days. I was on my feet in two days. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And if you went to the hospital…

PAUL ROSOLIE: I did not go to the hospital.

JOE ROGAN: But if you did go to the…

PAUL ROSOLIE: I mean, the guy that… The guy that went to the hospital didn’t walk for two months, had the necrosis and had a huge infection that he had to go get treatments for. I mean, he went back to his home country and had to continue being treated for months.

I felt terrible. And him too. Watching someone roll back and forth in that type of agonizing pain, like Braveheart pain, like when they’re just like opening him up. I mean, I just didn’t know there was pain like that, you know, I mean, I’ve ripped open every part of my body and I just… This was… It’s from the inside and it’s pulsating.

And you just go… The other thing is, you go, how much of my year did I just miss? You know, am I going to… It’s like the one time I almost chopped my knee. I almost cut the tendon that holds your kneecap on. And I was just like, man, did I just take myself out of the game for a year? You know, just like, come on. And so when that happened, I was like, this is going to be so bad.

JOE ROGAN: And meanwhile, a couple days later, you walk around because you understood the medicine.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Local guys know. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That was awesome.

JOE ROGAN: Did you ask them how they know this stuff?

Indigenous Knowledge and Ayahuasca

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, their father taught them and their mother taught them, and their grandparents know. And so that’s the thing with knowledge, Indigenous knowledge all over the world. If you listen to authors like Wade Davis, who writes a lot about indigenous wisdom, you know, this is stuff that’s been one at a time gleaned from nature.

And, you know, you know better than most, you know, you’re living out there. Who’s the first person that figured out ayahuasca? You know, if we take this and this, we take this vine and then we take this and we boil them together. How many trials and errors, how many dead guys were there before one worked?

JOE ROGAN: Right. And what was the motivation?

PAUL ROSOLIE: And what was the motivation?

JOE ROGAN: They said the jungle taught them how to do it. They did.

PAUL ROSOLIE: The prevailing thing is that science and sort of like the statistics of trial and error are incomprehensible given 40,000 plant species and all the different flowering and orchids and trees. And so it would take millennia if you did trial and error. And the cost of human life to any civilization would make it too high.

And so when they say that the gods gave us ayahuasca, that’s the prevailing, best thing we got is that it’s a link between our world and the spirit world that the jungle gave us.

JOE ROGAN: Right. And the other thing is how much of our senses have atrophied by modern civilization? Like, what kind of communication do you actually get from the forest? Is it instincts, intuition? Are there senses? Is there a feeling that you get where you get an understanding of combining two things? Because the jungle is actually got a way of communicating with you that’s a non verbal way.

The Sentience of the Jungle

PAUL ROSOLIE: I think the jungle, I mean, I view it as almost, you know, it’s like, it’s godlike. It’s almost like a giant, complex sentient being. And so if you listen to, if you watch, you know, if you walk the jungle with JJ, an indigenous tracker, he’ll tell you, you listen to the birds, they’ll tell you how fast you’re allowed to walk.

JOE ROGAN: What?

PAUL ROSOLIE: And what he means is you’re walking through the forest on a sunny day, it’s the afternoon, and everybody’s chirping and making tons of noise, and all of a sudden everything goes quiet. And then you got to figure out, is that because there’s a weather system coming in and we’re about to be in a thunderstorm, or is there a jaguar right over there?

And everything around me knows, and it’s like the birds are the messengers of the forest. And so even that you start to become attuned to the frequency of the forest. And I notice when I bring people in that have never been in the wild before, they walk loud. They’re talking the whole time. They’re not paying attention to that sort of…

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You know, holistic view of where you are.

JOE ROGAN: You know, modern civilized life has made us so clunky when it comes to the woods.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, just when I take people in the woods of people have never hunted before. Yeah. They’re stepping on branches, snap, snap, rocks over, like, talking loud.

PAUL ROSOLIE: My favorite is walking in front of you and then when the stick snaps back, like, having the sensitivity to, like…

JOE ROGAN: They don’t catch it.

PAUL ROSOLIE: They don’t catch it. Like…

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Just get smacked in the face. Thanks.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s just a lack of awareness. It’s like, if you’ve never been, you don’t understand. But, I mean, I would imagine it’s that times a million in the Amazon and then all the different things that are communicating. One of the things that they found out with monkeys is that monkeys have some sort of a language where they can say a sound that means an eagle is there.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: And that they will play tricks on other monkeys so that they can get to fruit. So they will say that an eagle is there when an eagle’s not there, and then they’ll go and steal the fruit. So they will lie about an eagle being there and get access to fruit.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Lying monkeys does not surprise me. It’s African vervet monkeys that I’ve read about that they have different calls, different words for land, predator, lion, eagle. And they can communicate these things. They’re speaking. Yeah, they’re speaking.

JOE ROGAN: That’s our crows, I’m sure.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Oh, God, yes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Oh, yes.

JOE ROGAN: They’re super intelligent.

Saving a Spider Monkey

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. Oh, I don’t know how we pull this up. I have it on YouTube. But there is this thing where we were coming down river, it was like seven in the morning. We’ve been up at our… This communication with monkeys theme as… as we’re coming down river. It’s like seven in the morning, and I’m always cold. So I’m sitting on the boat and I’m cold. I’m just, like, listening to music or something.

And JJ’s like, look, look, look. He’s like, there’s a spider monkey in the river. I was like, there’s always, you know, spider monkeys cross rivers. That’s okay. And he’s like, no, no, no. The river’s high right now. And there’s all these whirlpools and currents, and so, yeah, I jump into the…

JOE ROGAN: River to save the monkey.

PAUL ROSOLIE: To save the monkey. She couldn’t get to the side, so I give her my paddle, and she looks at me and she goes, no. She’s like, I’m scared of you. And then I spoke to her in spider monkey.

JOE ROGAN: What did you say? Like that she thinks you’re going to eat her.

PAUL ROSOLIE: She thinks I’m going to eat her. But as soon as I started going, look, look, she’s looking at me because I’m making the sound. And all of a sudden she goes, wait, wait, wait. You speak me language.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And then just do it like you would do it. See, I’m making it right there.

JOE ROGAN: And she’s looking at me, talking right to her.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No, no, no, no, no. And then I’m like, look, it’s okay. And they like their tail to be supported.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. That’s crazy. Dude. She let you hold on to her.

PAUL ROSOLIE: So now she’s relaxed.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. Dude, you saved a monkey.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Only because I spoke her language, and I learned her language from some of the orphans that I’ve rescued.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And then she was like, well, if you let… Because I could have grabbed her, like, you know, like animal control that grabbed her by the neck. And I was like, you know what? Look, she’s looking at me because I keep talking to her.

JOE ROGAN: And then you got her over to the shore?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, got her over to the side, and she kept looking at me like, what is… What…

JOE ROGAN: What happened when you put her down?

PAUL ROSOLIE: I didn’t put her down. She ran away.

JOE ROGAN: She just ran away? Yeah, but not fast. She didn’t run away. Like she was in terror. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That…

PAUL ROSOLIE: When I… When I first did, I went… And she looked at me and she went… She looked at me and she, like, responded. She was like, what?

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. You speak easy.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You know that’s crazy. It was wild. And that’s one of those stories where if it wasn’t on video, and I said, I spoke to a spider monkey. And she responded, people… Yeah, bullsh*t, right?

JOE ROGAN: I saved a spider monkey. Like, b*tch, that was your pet?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That looked like a pet. It looked like you had a relationship with it. Like, as you’re holding onto the tail, like it knew you.

When she was looking back, I mean, she was like, hey, thanks for the branch. You know, because she was drowning, we saw her head go under a few times. She was really struggling. She was exhausted.

And I know that the spider monkey, their tail is their fifth limb. They have this incredible finger pad that’s like 12 inches long, and so it just wraps. They always had their tail anchored on a branch. And so I held her tail, and I was like, I got you. Now hold on to the stick. I was, like, explaining it to her, and she’s looking at me going, how the hell are you?

JOE ROGAN: That is so wild.

PAUL ROSOLIE: It was. It was really cool. That was originally, I was like, JJ, I was like, I don’t want to get wet. She’ll be fine. He was like, go get it. Go catch it. I was like, okay.

JOE ROGAN: Wow, you’ve eaten spider monkey, haven’t you?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Well, sure. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to save him, right?

JOE ROGAN: I would save a deer. There you go. But does it feel, it must feel really weird eating a primate.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I wish I could say it did. I don’t care. Really. No. I mean, we’ve become very callous to certain things, but, I mean, when people serve turtle now, I’m like, well, which one is it? You know, it’s like, I don’t really, you know, it’s like rib eye or T bone? Like, what are we eating?

JOE ROGAN: Is turtle good? Like, would you, like, order it at a restaurant?

PAUL ROSOLIE: All right, so the problem is that the way they cook it down there, these are people that live hand to mouth, right? And so when they cook a turtle, if you get salt, you’re lucky. It’s not like they’re sprinkling some cilantro on it and, like, marinating it. It’s, you know, so if you just, like, took a chicken and threw it on a fire and then, like, ate a piece of it, it’s not great.

And so a lot of times that you eat this food way out there in the bush. I mean, I’ve been there where they’ve shot a spider monkey, grilled it up, and I’ve been like, you know, I’ll just eat rice. And then I’m like, I’m going to be tired tomorrow. There’s no protein. I haven’t had protein in a week. And I’m like, give me an arm. You know, you just, like, eat the hand. All right. And it just tastes awful.

JOE ROGAN: My friend Steve Rinella, he was in the Amazon with the Yanomami, and he said that that’s their preferred food, that they like that above everything.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, yeah. And I see no conflict between, you know, we’re trying to protect the ecosystem and save the monkeys. And I love the monkeys, and I’ve rescued a lot of them personally. But again, when you’re in Rome, right, you know, if you don’t eat with them, they go, that gringo, you know, they think that they’re. Yeah. Whereas they’re like, oh, you’re one of us.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You have to, you know, show them, you know, how, you know, little things.

JOE ROGAN: Must be chewy as f*, right.

PAUL ROSOLIE: It’s kind of smooth. It’s kind of like if it’s well cooked, it’s kind of like mutton.

JOE ROGAN: So you have to slow cook it, long cook it. Is that what it is?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Ideally, yes, but a lot of times it’s just, they tie it to a cross like it’s little monkey Jesus, and they throw it on the fire.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. When I saw them cook it, they singed the outside. They singed all the hair off. And then they cooked it. I think they cooked it inside bananas. See if you can find Steve Rinella eats a monkey. I think they, and then they boiled some of it in, like, a soup.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I don’t enjoy boiled meat. I’m never excited by boiled meat.

JOE ROGAN: But stew, right? Isn’t stew good?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Beef barley stew is good.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I mean, if you sear it first and then you, I mean, it’s kind of.

PAUL ROSOLIE: If you sear it first because, like, boiled chicken, to me just, like, think of white, like.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So here he’s just eating chicken.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. See, like, they’re, like, having a really good time.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Initially he was like, I’m not doing that. And then once they started doing it, he was like, okay. He said it tasted like smoked turkey.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: My boy Giannis. Yeah. It’s interesting because if you live there, like, my friend David Choir, he was in Africa and he hunted with the Hadza and they eat baboons. And he said one of the craziest things is when you hit the baboon with an arrow, they grab it. Like a person. Yeah, like if a person gets shot with an arrow and he’s like, dude, it’s f*ed.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yikes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but that’s what they eat. They don’t have a lot of food. And, you know, it’s like you were saying, also they don’t have a sense of wildlife conservation. It’s not like, hey, we have an accurate assessment of how many baboons are here or how many deer are here or duikers or whatever the animal is that they’re hunting.

They just eat whatever they can. And sometimes they eat them almost to extinction, and then they have to move on to baboons. And baboons were like, the only thing that was left. And there’s also like, other people have encroached in settlements and, you know, that’s.

The Challenge of Wildlife Conservation in Remote Communities

PAUL ROSOLIE: The way my guys, because we have a lot of wildlife in our region and people from other regions will come as loggers and they’ll go, oh, God, my God. My dad told me that it used to be like this where we were, and now we have people from other watersheds in the Amazon, like, you know, 150 miles away coming to us.

And they’re going, can you guys bring Jungle Keepers over? And they don’t understand, you know, we’re killing ourselves just to protect this river. And they’re going, can you do this where we are? They’re like, we have no more food because they don’t have any regulation on this.

And so what we’re doing with the tribes in our area is just teaching this basic thing of like, you know, don’t hunt at these times of year when they’re having their babies.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Don’t over hunt, monitor how many monkeys you’re bringing into the village. And so we’re trying to develop this with them where if you’re going to keep eating monkeys, do it in a way that they keep being monkeys.

JOE ROGAN: Especially once they’ve gotten firearms.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Especially once they’ve gotten firearms. One of the older guys said to me, he goes, man, it’s so sad. He goes, we grew up. He goes, you could just pull fish out of the river. And there was monkeys in the trees and there was turtles. He goes, you could eat whatever you wanted out of the forest. He goes, now he goes, we’re eating sparrows.

And he was like, we’ve just, we’ve eaten everything down to the smallest birds. He was like, it’s just destroyed. And it was where he is is like something was like, Cormac McCarthy’s nightmare.

Encountering a Recently Contacted Tribe

If Cormac McCarthy was still alive, I would show him the, I went to a part of the Amazon that really no one goes to, up this horrible river, and they were recently contacted, uncontacted people. Just this tribe that had just come out of the forest, and they still had their bows, and they had no idea.

Me and JJ went for, like a three week expedition, plane to plane to plane to three days on a boat, to two days on a boat, to finally reaching this last settlement. And the missionaries had pulled this tribe out of the forest. They’d tricked them. They said, just come with us for a ride. Pulled them out. But then they said, well, if you want to go back, you got to pay for your gasoline.

And the tribe was like, how do we pay? With what? And they were like, money. And the tribe was like, what’s that? And where do we get it? And so these little people were standing. These were not tall people, like the Mashco Piro. These were little tiny people, and they were standing there with their bows.

And so we showed up with our tents and our gear, and we were trying to go up this river in our boat, and these little people came up to us, and they were like, they were making the gesture for food. And so there’s some loggers over there. And so JJ just didn’t think. And he was like, you want some food, you got to go pay for it. He was like, money.

And, you know, he’s through a guy, he was translating, and these people are going, but we don’t have any money. And JJ took some coins out of his pocket and was like, just go buy some bread. And he gave him some coins. And they went and they tried it and they got some bread.

And then all of a sudden, there was 50 of them coming at us, and they were surrounding JJ and they were grabbing at him, and they were like, he’s the guy with these tokens that allow us to eat. And we had to get out of there because it was causing a problem.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow.

PAUL ROSOLIE: But I mean, these people think with their bows and arrows and there’s no more animals to hunt, and no one’s going to give them money. And they live at the edge of the world.

JOE ROGAN: And they’re probably tiny because they don’t have any protein.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. Wow. It was horrifying. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever, I’ve seen poverty all over the world. This was.

JOE ROGAN: Again, a hunter gatherer tribe with no food.

PAUL ROSOLIE: With no food and no way of getting back to forest where they could be a hunter gatherer tribe. Now they were in this wasteland where the loggers and the gold miners and the oil companies. There was even a barge with oil. And it was like, this is where the Amazon is being eaten.

And it was out of sight. You have to go for days just to get there. There’s no foreigners there. Actually, they did say, we were talking to one logger, and he said a few years ago, he goes, there was a, we saw some rafts coming down river, and then they stopped at this beach upriver and they made camp.

And he’s like, so we all talked about it and we said, well, we have a feeling they’re organ harvesters. And they thought they were scared of these incomers. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Did organ harvesters visit the Amazon?

PAUL ROSOLIE: No. And so, but that’s what they were. They’re sitting around the campfire, and someone was like, what if they’re organ harvesters?

JOE ROGAN: Why would they think that?

PAUL ROSOLIE: I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: That must be a thing that gets.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I don’t know. But the dude I was sitting with told me, he goes, you know, we got real scared sitting around the campfire. Everyone was telling these stories, and he’s like, so we figured the safest thing would be to go kill them. So they went and they killed them.

And they were a couple of European, like, hikers on a mega expedition in the Amazon. I just got murdered by the locals preemptively in case they were dangerous. And this dude was like, yeah, we f*ed up. And I’m talking to him. I was like, so who did the killing? Was it, you know, I was like, shit, man.

But I mean, this place was dark. Yeah. You know, the next book I write, I’m going to have to do a deep dive into this one because it was just, it was heavy. And we also, we knew, we, for the first time, you know, when you’re in the jungle, we’re like, we’re safe.

This place, it was like, people are looking at you, and they’re like, that’s a jacket and a watch, you know, like a camera and a tent and a pack raft. They’re like, if we killed him, we get all kinds of stuff. They’re looking at you like, man, that’s a, that’s a lot of opportunity. You could just see them being like, well, let’s separate him from the herd.

Yeah, it was rough. It’s like, you think like, the cowboy days, like, when it was really wild. Blood Meridian.

The Harsh Reality of Amazon Outposts

JOE ROGAN: Well, not only that, but there’s probably a ton of stories about people that have come down and done horrible things. So it’s not like you’re thinking, like, these are wonderful people that come to give us plantains. No, no, you’re thinking, these are the type of people that would do horrible things to us so we have an opportunity to get something from them. And pure desperation.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Pure desperation. And so, like, the communities that I’ve worked with in my region of the Amazon, they’re all, you know, I’ve showed up on a pack raft and been like, hey. And they’re like, where’d you come from? And I’m like, I’m just this foreigner who does work here. And I talk to them and they’re like, oh, camp here. You’ll be safe. They’re really nice. They’re caring. They’re families.

This place that we were at was this outpost, and it was all extractors. It was all gold miners, petroleum people, loggers. And it was like all the men who were in the dark, the black market people were all in the same place. So there was like a brothel. There was these displaced natives, and then there was like this one really scary missionary.

This man looked insane. He had crazy eyes. And he wouldn’t come anywhere near us.

JOE ROGAN: From where? Where’s he from?

PAUL ROSOLIE: I couldn’t tell where he was from, but he was dressed in the robes. It was like the mission, except he was evil. Like, you could tell. He. You could tell. He looked at us and just vanished. And he had this little settlement that he had cleared, and he was bringing his children in and pulling them out of the forest.

JOE ROGAN: Was he a white guy?

PAUL ROSOLIE: He looked like a white guy, but it was hard to tell. He had, you know, he looked like Rasputin.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And these poor people are sitting there and you could see them, like they were all, like, breastfeeding their babies and like, like trying to eat rats. And like, it was just, we stayed there for one night and we all, we didn’t sleep. We slept back to back. We were just in our tent, just awake all night.

And then the next day, we got in the boat and we kept going further up river. We finally made it into the, into past the edge of human civilization into just uncharted jungle. But it was really, and so, at least where we are, it’s like we’re working with these tribes to make their lives better, to educate them. And there’s this feeling. There’s this good feeling.

Fighting Gold Miners and Protecting the Forest

We have Jungle Keeper shirts. I mean, now we’re on the river and we see jungle keepers, boats going by. We had gold miners, just a few, just a few weeks ago, we had gold miners. Everyone, the whole team was calling each other. We sent our ranger team out there. We brought the police. They arrested the gold miners. They brought them to town. They offered them jobs, and they said, you just can’t be doing that here.

And so they only cleared, like, half an acre of forest. And then we got them. So they didn’t destroy anything. And so that’s how we’re keeping them.

JOE ROGAN: But someone hired them to mine gold, right?

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s the thing. No one hires them. They get it in their head. They go, you know, hey, to their cousin, you know, they’ll go, why don’t we go make some money? Let’s go up there and see if there’s gold. And they’ll launch a little expedition. They’ll bring, like, a 16 horsepower motor and go for three days, and they’ll sneak past us.

I mean, now the government’s getting involved because we’ve been having this success. We’re going to get a park guard station on our river. So we’re not going to have this problem. But they’ll go up the river and they’ll just set up, and they’ll start panning, and they’ll go, I see this little flake here. And they’re like, cool, let’s burn some forest. And then we’ll start sucking it up. We’ll run it through the big motor, and they’ll bring their wives and their kids, and it’s artisanal.

And so what they do is they get the gold, and then they have to take it in their little boat back to the town. And then here’s the problem. There’s one store where you go to sell the gold. And guess who’s waiting outside that store? The people that rob you at gunpoint and take your gold and then give it to the actual people. And so it’s really sad, artisanal gold mining. They’re not organized.

The Narco Threat

And it’s the same with the narcos. We’ve been having problem with narcos. And everyone’s like, dude, you can’t mess with the narcos. Like, you’re going to lose the fight. And it’s like, yeah, but these are, these are people that are like, we’re just going to grow a little bit, and they’re just going to sell it. Coca.

I mean, we busted, we helped the police bust a, we saw a clearing on deep, deep, deep, deep, way up river days upriver. There’s a clearing out in the jungle. And so we sent our rangers. The rangers came back and were like, we can’t deal with this. Something scary going on up there. And so we told the police, and the police were like, yeah, we’ll try and get up there.

Now, at the same time, I’m with JJ one day. And we always do the same thing. When there was a bad patch of deforestation along the river, we said, how the hell did this happen? They did it so quick. And so I put up the drone and I flew it over. And I’m going, who are these people? Are they loggers? We’re just trying to get a sense of what’s going on, fly the drone down.

And usually when we see loggers, they’ll run into these little palm thatched huts. They’ll run into them to hide from the drone. That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: They know what a drone is.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Well, these people came running out, and they had guns. And we had already on the river. We had passed their settlement and flown the drone back. Their boat came out after us, and we started going. And I was like, JJ, you could just talk to them like normal. And he looked at me, and he went, not this time.

And we had a, we had a 60 horsepower, and they had a 40. And we were just blazing ahead of them. And I had the drone in the air, and so, you know, $5,000 drone. And so I’m driving the drone. And I was like, can we, can we, like, I got to get this drone. And they were like, JJ looked at me. He’s like, we’re not stopping. And it dawned on me, that was like, if we get caught, we’re getting killed.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, man.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And we arrived at our, at this point, nobody on the boat had a gun. And so we arrived at a place where the police were camped out, where the guard, they had been dispatched to go check out that other site. And so we arrived, and the police force that we work with was there. And we pulled up, and we’re like, yo, we got bad guys coming in.

And they masked up, loaded up. They got on our boat. We turned around, and as soon as they saw us coming back at them, they left. And then days later, they went to that same police force and assassinated one of the guys.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, man.

PAUL ROSOLIE: So the narcos are different. The narcos are scary. And that clearing that we originally found, they were actually Pridea’s sacks of white powder. The Peruvian military went in and actually raided that camp, arrested everybody. It was so big that the American DEA knew about it. They were notified.

And so this is now what’s happening on this river where it’s, because it’s the last wilderness. They’re coming. And so we’re trying to, you know, we’re relying on the Peruvian authorities to stop this from happening to, so that we can create this park before it’s too late. Because they’re also blazing roads. They’re bringing in loggers. They’re smart. They bring people, and they’ll send the loggers ahead of them, and then when the loggers clear the land, they’ll just start growing coca.

And so it’s gotten scary. I texted you when it was at its, when I first started having to travel with security. I remember texting you because I was like, this is a different game. It used to be like, we’re counting the butterflies and we’re…

JOE ROGAN: You wanted to learn where to train.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Because it’s scary walking around. Well, the thing is, the police intercept off to one of the people that they arrested on the phone. It said, if you see JJ or that sh*thead gringo that flies the drone, they said, if you kill them, we’ll reward you.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, man.

Death Threats and Close Calls

PAUL ROSOLIE: So they found this message on WhatsApp. They showed it to us, and they were like, you guys have a hit on you? And then a few days later, they, JJ was supposed to get in the car at the side. You know, you take the boat down river to the car. And he was supposed to get in the car and go back to the town.

He actually came downriver in the boat and then went, I forgot that I wanted to finish up something at the station. Take me back. He went back to the station. So our driver, Percy, started driving back along this little dirt logging road by himself. And they had trees across the road, masked guys with guns. They put the guns in the windows. They pulled him out, and our windows are tinted, and they said, take JJ and Paul out.

They were going to do it. And so it just so happened that JJ wasn’t in the car. Just by pure luck, he was not in the car that day. And they roughed up our driver. They took his driver’s license. They took his cell phone, and they just said, just let them know we missed him today, but we’ll get him soon.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, man.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And so we went, of course, we went to the police. And we’re like, look, we’re going to need a lot more protection. They’re like, it’s getting, I mean, we’re just trying to save the rainforest, man. Like, we’re not trying to, and these people are going, well, we’re just trying to grow drugs, and we want to do that where there’s no police.

And the wilderness is only, the wilderness is becoming a finite thing now. So it’s becoming this battle, battleground. Jamie, on there is a map. I’m wondering if you could pull up the map because I could explain to you…

JOE ROGAN: What’s the status of this right now. Are they still after you guys?

PAUL ROSOLIE: They are still after us, but it’s been for about eight months. It was really bad. It was really scary. It was horrible. Like, every day, anytime JJ called me, I’d have a panic attack. But you see the yellow on the right is the trans Amazon highway.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the big…

The Race to Protect the Land

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s the big artery. That’s what the Chinese in Brazil built. But then that smaller thing going up, that’s the roads that the loggers and the narcos are making. So that big red arrow, they’re trying to make a road that goes in through there. And so the white line outlines what we’re trying to protect. And that light greenish blue is the area that we have protected. That’s that 130,000 acres that we have protected.

And so that’s what we’re doing right now. It’s a race against time. If we can fill in that area, if we can fill that whole thing in, we save the land. And once it’s ours, once it’s under jungle keepers protection, it’s indigenous protected, the, all right, we’re back.

JOE ROGAN: So where are they growing the drugs in this map?

PAUL ROSOLIE: So right at the upper tip of that arrow, sort of the outside, they had cut a little, a little road filament into there. And again, these little tiny trail roads, they go under the forest. The forest is 160 feet tall.

JOE ROGAN: Is there a way you can communicate with these guys saying you’re not trying to stop this?

PAUL ROSOLIE: I mean, right now what we’re doing is putting signs on all of these little tiny, I mean, these are jungle roads where just to go on the road you’re going out to, where you know, if anybody finds you out there, they’ll just kill you. And your body will be decomposed and recycled within 48 hours by the jungle. So you’re past where there’s police. This is just earth. It’s the wild west more than the wild west.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Because the wild west was never this dense.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Well, it’s the wild west. And you can’t see 10 feet in front of you.

JOE ROGAN: Right. That’s what I’m talking about. This is more wild than the wild West, I guess.

The Narco Threat and Conservation Efforts

PAUL ROSOLIE: So, yeah, you have Indians with arrows and now you have these narcos that are straight up evil that are coming. I mean, they’re taking girls from indigenous communities to work in their brothels. They’re growing cocaine brothels up there. You got men working out in the jungle. And so they go to the communities and they tell them, “Hey, your daughter is very pretty. She’d be a great waitress. You know, we can educate her while she trains and helps people.” And then they never see them again.

And so it’s all that darkness. And at the same time, what we’re doing is bettering the lives of the community, making friends with these people. We have these amazing rangers and I mean, we have different ranger stations along the river. And if we make this into a park, like Teddy Roosevelt. No, John Muir took Teddy Roosevelt on a three day camping trip and showed him Yosemite and like Sequoia and all this stuff. And he was like, “We got to protect this. Like, it’s special here. Look at the size of these trees. Look at the beauty of this valley.” And then they protected it.

There’s nothing as wild as this river on earth today. And so if we protect this now, the 200 indigenous people that live on this river get protected from the narcos. They continue having abundant fish and resources. And then they’ll work as park guards and educators and chefs and boat drivers to maintain this gigantic protected area. And then Peru will have this crown jewel of the Amazon. So they love it.

JOE ROGAN: But how can you protect them from the narcos? I mean, the amount of money that’s involved in trafficking cocaine would make it a real problem.

PAUL ROSOLIE: But the good thing is that these are the little artisanal ones. These are the guys that go, these are not like mafia bosses. This isn’t like the Mexican cartel. These are like these little clans of people that go, “You know what, we could just grow some cocaine and then we’ll sell it to the big guys.” And so they’re just, they’re like mom and pop cocaine growers, but they’re also murderers.

JOE ROGAN: Well, of course.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And so when the cops go out there, the cops just arrest them and take them straight to jail. And so the cops have been. Everyone assumes that Latin American police, no matter what, are going to be corrupt. And like the police force we’ve been working with has been keeping us alive. And they want this park protected as much as the indigenous people do. It’s amazing how many good people are out there. They’re actually helping.

JOE ROGAN: And how many narco organizations, artisanal narco organizations are out there?

Peru’s Cocaine Crisis

PAUL ROSOLIE: Peru has become, it’s not great. Peru, I think, has become, if not on the same level as Colombia, I think they might have surpassed Colombia in terms of cocaine production. They’re not doing great with that right now. And so we’re at this very, very crucial juncture there.

But, you know, it’s funny because in doing all this, you know, with even with the book coming out, and I’ve been talking to people and people go, “Well, you have narcos now.” They’re like, “So you’re going to fail?” And it’s like, man, you’re not even the one on the ground. Like, I’m the one on the ground. I’m telling you, we’re not going to fail. And the police have been successful at clearing them out. And it’s getting better.

Just like the whole thing with, yeah, the Amazon’s disappearing, but we can still stop it. It’s like, you got to. You think, like before D Day, if Churchill was like, “I will probably lose.” Like, you can’t have that mentality. And so it’s very, very encouraging seeing the local people stand up for what they believe in.

And the job is dangerous. There’s a video on there that I think it says, Sandra, tree crush. But we, I got woke up a few weeks ago and one of my managers came running at like 3 a.m. I see a flashlight coming through the jungle. And so I’m thinking the worst. And then he comes, he’s going, “Paul.” He goes, “A tree.” And I told you the last time I was on here, I said the most dangerous thing in the rainforest is the trees falling. He said, “A tree fell on the ranger station and it’s raining.”

And I’m talking about rain. You know when you’re at the airport and you hear that sound where it’s like, there’s no sound louder. Your ears can’t handle it. It was raining so loud. And he’s screaming into my ear, “This tree fell on the ranger station.” He goes, “And one of the rangers was crushed.” And I’m going, “But dead or alive?” And he goes, “We don’t know yet.”

And so it’s 3 a.m. and we get in this boat and we’re going upriver. And there’s lightning flashing and there’s rain falling. And I’m looking with the flashlight and I’m navigating by the crocodile eyes because we don’t know where the edges of the river are because the eye shine. And so we have footage of this, and we arrive at the ranger station and sure enough, this tree had fallen, crushed the roof, all the beams and all the scaffolding under the roof, and fallen on this woman’s face while she was in bed.

And so she was crushed under this. And she couldn’t even scream because it was raining so loud. And so we get there and I stick my hand into the rubble and I hold her hand, and I’m like, “Are you okay?” And she was like, “Hey, Paul.” She’s like, “I have no idea.” And she was amazingly like, like buoyant. She was like, “I have no idea if I’m okay.” She’s like, “But I’m alive.” I was like, “We’re going to get you out of here.”

We started chainsawing, I mean, like, 16 feet of tree debris over her and all this gnarled roof material. And we had to pull her out of there. And she had a scratch on her ankle. Wow. Got this great video of her sitting in the hammock at like 6 a.m. and she’s smoking a cigarette. And she’s like, “I’m alive.” She’s going, “I’m alive.” And she didn’t quit. She’s still a ranger. And it’s like she’s out there right now driving up and down because she wants that forest protected for her kids. And it’s like, these people care.

The Addiction to Adventure

JOE ROGAN: It sounds like the adventure of this is very addictive to you. This is what I’m getting. I think you love it. I think you love the forest. I think you love protecting it. But I think there’s something about the danger of it and the chaos and the wildness of it all that seems to me, I’m looking in your eyes, you’re smiling, because you know I’m right.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I know. Yeah. I’m not going to deny that. When I was a kid, I remember sitting in school and being like, why did, like, you read about, like, Roosevelt and Jane Goodall and like, these people had these amazingly adventurous lives. And I was sitting in school, getting detention after detention and getting yelled at and being like, “Can I go to the bathroom?” And I was like, why do they get to do that? And I have to do this.

And then, like, you know, everyone around me was like, you know, “When you get a job, then you’re really going to love your desk.” One of my friend’s mom said that to me. She goes, “You think you hate your school desk?” She goes, “Wait till you get your real desk.” And I was like, “Oh, man.” And so, yeah, riding on the boat at 4 a.m. with the lightning is incredible. Showering in the river.

JOE ROGAN: You see my crocodile eyes?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, man. I mean, with the wind in your hair and the feet, I mean, you know the magic of the mountains and the jungle has its own vibe. You watch that mist snarling up off the canopy and it’s like, it’s so wild that you just, you feel better, you feel healthier.

And again, you know, that whole thing of what’s that thing? They say like a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace. And it’s like the beauty of that, you know, you drink from the river and then you sweat it out. And you watch your sweat join the steam and rain back down onto the jungle. You are connected to your environment and every single day you don’t know what’s going to happen.

You know, I opened. There was one day where I was like, “Okay, I’m going to stay on the station. I’m not going to do anything. I’ve been hammering myself in the swamps for a week.” And I was like, “I’m just going to drink coffee and do office work on my computer.” So I was at the station and my team comes running. They’re like, “Anaconda.” And I was like, “Where?” I was actually annoyed. I was like, “How big of an anaconda?” And they’re like, “No, it’s a pretty big anaconda.”

As we go down to the thing and sure enough, this big a anaconda on a log, we’re like 11 feet, you know, not a monster. But then I started doing this thing where I was like, because they were all like, “Be careful.” And I was like, “Of what?” And they’re like, “It could bite you.” And I was like, “It’s asleep.”

JOE ROGAN: I was like, she’s just trying to get the sun.

PAUL ROSOLIE: So I started, I took out my phone, I started doing this thing. I was like, “People are scared of snakes.” And I was like, I was like, “If you’re scared of snakes.” I was like, “There’s an 11 foot anaconda. Do I appear to be in danger yet?” And then I kept getting closer and I was like, “How about now? How about now?” And then I was like, she’s not waking up. So I get on the log with her and the anaconda still doesn’t get up. And so I turned around and her coil is here and her head’s like, you know, 10 feet over there.

And I just put my head on her. Now I’m laying on the snake and I’m still taking a video and I’m going, “See this snake doesn’t care that I’m here. And even if she wakes up, you know what she’s going to do? She’s going to jump in the water. She’s not going to bite me.” And she never woke up. And I figured, you know what? Why bother her?

JOE ROGAN: She never woke up when you rested, she woke up.

PAUL ROSOLIE: She moved her tongue, but she never freaked out.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’re the king. It sounds like they don’t really have any natural predators. Right? Do they?

PAUL ROSOLIE: When they’re small? When they’re small, crocodiles, right? The crocodiles, the herons, the piranha. You forget that, like pelicans and herons can eat like a baby alligator. They’ll just throw it back, just take it down their throat. And the herons are crazy. Herons are amazing hunters. Pelicans are disgusting. The way they’ll take like a whole bullfrog and just glut it down. So you know that thing’s like alive in their chest.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve seen videos of them doing it to pigeons or seagulls.

PAUL ROSOLIE: The one where he swallows a seagull whole. The seagull’s like getting smaller as it goes down.

Pelicans: Nature’s Monsters

JOE ROGAN: And you realize like, that crazy mouth that they have is just so they can swallow things alive. Yeah. I mean, this weird looking funky thing like, oh, that’s a monster. That’s a monster that just swallows things alive.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. You don’t think of birds as savage as they are.

JOE ROGAN: What are you laughing at, Jamie? Pictures of pelicans trying to eat s* on the screen.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I’m trying to eat a dog.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, oh, oh. Come on. Marshall. Marshall. Trying to get a. He’s trying to get a. Oh, my God. Yeah. They basically can eat almost anything that’s near their size. Good Lord. That one just fly out. Wow. It’s too late.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Oh, man. Yeah, they’re monsters trying to eat another. God, that’s, that’s, I call bullshit on that one. There’s no way his pelican was trying to eat a bear. I believe that, though. I’ve seen that video.

JOE ROGAN: What are those things?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Those are baby capybaras.

JOE ROGAN: Capybaras, right. Those are, they’ve, are those the things that have made their way into. No, it’s a different animal that’s made their way into, like, Louisiana and they have to go out and shoot them.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Javelinas.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, no, no, no, no. It’s a type of large rodent because David Tell used to have a TV show called Insomniac and he went out at night one time with them. In Louisiana. And they’re hunting these things that, they’re an invasive rodent, a giant rodent. And it was like Dave would do his shows and then it was a Comedy Central show. It was a really good show. And then he would find things to do in the town because he can’t sleep because he’s up all night. And so he went out with these people that were. God, I can’t remember what the animal was, but it’s a large invasive rodent that exists in the South.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Nutria.

JOE ROGAN: That’s right. Yeah. And people eat them.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, yeah. I mean, the rodent.

JOE ROGAN: Let me find that video because it’s kind of crazy. They’re out there hunting them with 22s.

PAUL ROSOLIE: With 22s?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I mean, they have to. They’re completely invasive species and they’re huge. They’re like a small dog.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s something I left off the list. We eat those all the time. We actually call it a paca. It’s like a small capybara with spots. I mean, you know, it’s like squirrels, but they’re big. They’re like cat sized and fat. People eat them all the time. Those are delicious.

JOE ROGAN: What’s your favorite thing to eat in the jungle?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Piranha.

JOE ROGAN: Piranha?

PAUL ROSOLIE: F* yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Oh, my God. They’re delicious. And when you fry a piranha, you know, you slit, make the slits along it. You just fry the whole thing. You just pull it right off of its skeleton and the fins become like chips, like little salty chips. So good.

JOE ROGAN: You just put salt on it?

PAUL ROSOLIE: A little bit of salt and then fry it up. And then better than the piranha is the pacu, the big vegetarian.

JOE ROGAN: And the piranha species. Yeah, those are invasive species in America as well. People catch them all the time. They catch them and they’re like 40 pounds.

PAUL ROSOLIE: They’re huge.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Someone caught a world record pacu.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Powerful, really powerful.

JOE ROGAN: Pacu. P, A, C, U. Right?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I want to say in Georgia. Georgia or Florida, somewhere around there. And f*ing huge.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. No, they’re powerful. We fish for them. You have a 10 foot pole with a rope on it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s a pacu.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Look at the size of that thing, man. That’s crazy. 50 pounds. World record size pacu caught in Florida. There it is. 50 pounds. That’s nuts, dude.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Those are so nutritious. When you eat them, you feel like you’re just gaining muscle.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. You still eat a lot of elk?

JOE ROGAN: Oh yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Don’t you feel like it’s a superfood?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: This is how I feel. I live on these things. I feel like I just…

JOE ROGAN: You live on piranha? Yeah, piranha and pacu.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. How do you catch the pacu?

Fishing for Pacu in the Amazon

PAUL ROSOLIE: 10 foot pole. You have a piece of rope and you put a piece of last night’s dinner. You tie a bunch of rancid chicken, you leave it out in the sun, make it smell bad. You go out at 6 in the morning.

JOE ROGAN: So they’re not vegetarians.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Well, they’ll eat anything. They specialize on the nuts. That’s why they have the human teeth. Those are the ones that have the human teeth. When you open their mouth, they have molars and then a few front teeth.

And so we go with this 10 foot pole, nobody can make a sound on the boat. You’re just floating with the river. You’re invisible. And you wait for a feature in the river, like a rock or a place where the water’s rushing and you smack it against. Because they like that falling fruit or falling seeds.

And when they hit, I’m talking about a 4 inch hook. When they hit that hook, this is the thing, because you’re doing this for an hour and you’re like, “All right, there’s no pacu in here.” Well, guess what? When they do hit it, they’ll pull you right out of the boat.

I’ve been dragged straight across the boat where you got to use one hand to stop yourself and the other hand’s holding this pole. And then your friend’s got to pull you back. You get this fish on the thing and it’s going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

JOE ROGAN: You’re catching them that big?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, they’re huge. And then you got to have a hammer because you got to shut them off somehow. You got to crack them right between the eyes because otherwise they’ll just either jump out of the boat or injure, destroy everything.

That was the other thing. We were going up river a few months ago at night. We’re all just quiet in the boat and we’re going to go up to this tributary to explore it. And I had a group of tourists with me and this girl was sitting on the front.

And all of a sudden I feel something go past me. There’s something. And all of a sudden I got wet. And all of a sudden I hear, ba bang, ba bang, ba bang, ba bang. In the boat I’m going, “What the f* is going on?” Turn on my headlamp. And there’s a pacu in the boat. And the girl that was sitting on the front, her head is bleeding.

One of those huge pacos jumped out of the river in the night, hit this girl in the head and then fell into the boat.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And so we just grabbed… Yeah, we just ate it. But I mean, that pacu was in the middle of the Amazon at night, just jumping around, enjoying itself and it just jumped in the wrong…

JOE ROGAN: Wow. Wow.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Two foot fish flying through the air.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s your favorite thing to eat?

Amazonian Cuisine

PAUL ROSOLIE: Absolutely. What else is really good to eat? There’s these little cup mushrooms that are really good. You fry them up with garlic. You do that and pacu, now you’re talking good.

My friend Roy is a chef. He’s really… He’s one of the jungle. He’s the president of Jungle Keepers right now. He’s a local guy and he focuses on Amazonian cuisine. And so he goes and he picks all the right flowers and funguses and he’ll take pacu and he’ll flavor it with a type of orchid thing.

And all of a sudden you have this amazing food. Lima, they have, you know, Peru’s become this amazing place for food. Peru is great food.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

PAUL ROSOLIE: He does the jungle version.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

PAUL ROSOLIE: So it’s not nasty monkey soup.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not turtle.

PAUL ROSOLIE: It’s the curated, you know, five star version of jungle cuisine.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s number one.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Pacu’s number one, 100%. I mean, even great crocodile. I think I tried alligator once, but it didn’t leave an impression on me. I haven’t really… Also, I feel like they’re my friends.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: How’s that?

PAUL ROSOLIE: I like them just because they’re cool. I mean, I work with them a lot. I’m always catching caiman. I always see them on the side of the river. You know, nobody’s serving me… If they were serving me caiman, then it would be just like the monkey where it’s like, “All right, I got to eat it.” But nobody’s serving me caiman.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s not a staple of their diet.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No. In the north and Iquitos, they eat a lot more caiman. So you don’t see caiman on our river. There’s still… There’s a caiman on every beach. There’s jabiru storks, there’s cocoi herons, there’s just macaws everywhere. There’s just so much life. It’s Avatar. It’s just pulsing life. It’s incredible.

JOE ROGAN: Did you find that video of David Tell? No. It weirdly is not online.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I found a picture of the episode, but not a video of it.

JOE ROGAN: And they’re just shooting nutria.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I think they eat them too, but I can’t find it.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And he was actually on the episode.

JOE ROGAN: This is a long time ago. This is back when Dave was drinking. So this is… Dave’s been sober for, I want to say, 15 years at least, somewhere in that range. And this is back when he would just drink at the comedy club and then stay up all night, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Never end.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I mean, he’s the most unhealthy and also the most hilarious guy alive.

Drinking and Moderation

PAUL ROSOLIE: You’ve stopped drinking, right?

JOE ROGAN: I drink a little every now and then. Now I went eight months with no drinking, and I started having a glass of wine with dinner and a cocktail or two. But I have not had more than two drinks in a night.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Feels good.

JOE ROGAN: It was a good break. The eight months. I felt really good, and I was convinced I was never going to drink again. And then I drank a glass of wine. I was like, “Ooh, I like this. I miss this.”

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s the one thing. The wine is good.

JOE ROGAN: Wine with a steak. Yeah. I think it was important to just recognize that I was doing it and it wasn’t an alcoholic. I was just… Have a club.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I’m there all the time. And, you know, you’re out with friends. You want to drink? Yeah, sure. Let’s have a drink.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Go to dinner, have a drink, have another drink. It just got to a point where I was feeling… And I’m too healthy. I work out all the time. And I was like, “Why am I doing this to myself?”

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, but now I realize, you know, little moderation, it’s not bad. But drinking is essentially fun poison.

Ayahuasca Experience

PAUL ROSOLIE: Fun poison. It’s weird. After Lex ruined drinking for me, Lex gets saucy. Well, this is the thing. When he came to the Amazon, he goes, “I want to do ayahuasca.” And so we called… You know, JJ’s oldest brother is 70 something. We called this shaman in, and he’s like, you know, with the Lex voice, he’s like, “Brother, you have to do this with me.”

And I was like, “I am not drinking ayahuasca.” There’s a chapter in the book about when I did it with the old master and he over boiled it and we all saw God in the unit. We were there for the big bang. It was awful. It was hard. No, no, no. It’s like taking a mega dose. It was awful. It was traumatic.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t like to get scared.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I was terrified, man.

JOE ROGAN: No.

The Ayahuasca Experience with Lex Fridman

PAUL ROSOLIE: So I was like, I have retired. I was like, I’m not doing it. And Lex was walking around in circles for two hours. And he comes up to me and he puts his hand on my shoulder and he goes, “I came all the way here for you.” He goes, “Now you do this for me.” He goes, “Don’t leave me alone in the dark.”

And I went, God, I said, all right, I’ll do it. And we drank right next to each other and the guy’s smoking his pipe and, you know, he’s the feathers on and he’s singing to us. And you’re drinking and you’re going deeper and deeper into the hole and God, it was interesting though.

We both, the shaman said that, you know, he was talking about what Lex was going afterwards. He was talking about what Lex was going through on his journey. And he goes in and does this deep work of the things he sees coming off of you. And this is a guy, the shaman I’ve known for 20 years. He’s like my uncle.

And so he would come up to me and he’d go, I’d be laying down, you can’t get up. And he’d come up to me and he’d go, “One more cup.” And I’d be like, sure, like, why not? And he’d like, give me a kiss on the forehead and throw it down my throat. And then he’d go to Lex and go, “One more cup.” And Lex would be like, “Yes.” And then, you know, give it to Lex.

And he said that, he said that he wasn’t worried about my spirit. He said I was there to protect Lex. And he said Lex was there to do some real work. And so what’s interesting is that we both reached this sort of, we both reached the pinnacle of what was happening at the same time where I felt myself about, I felt it coming. I was like, oh, no, I’m going to throw up. I’m going to throw up.

And all of a sudden my consciousness lifted six feet above my body and I was looking down at me and Lex and I got this overwhelmingly calm sensation. And without speaking, the shaman said to me, he said, “You’re not going to feel this. I know you don’t like it.” He said, “You’re just here to support him so you can vomit now.”

And so Lex started vomiting and I started vomiting, but I was watching myself and I was watching him and I was just like, this is fine. It doesn’t hurt a bit. And it was very, very comforting. And then he came and he started with the, you know, shaking the leaves and singing louder and really cultivating, making sure we gave everything that we purged, all of it.

And then he brought the crescendo down and then he calmed and then he began singing. And then we settled back into the symphonic throb of the night. And then the trip went on for some time. But it was interesting that things heightened at that moment and that we went through it together. Wow.

JOE ROGAN: So why did he think that you were there to protect Lex? It was just like something he said.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s what he said. That’s what he said to me, you know, and then, and then, and then, you know, it was very interesting watching Lex go through his journey because he, by the end of it, he just got happier and happier. He just liked it more and more.

And around, around, I think cup six, I tapped. After the, after the vomiting, after that thing, it was sort of, again, there’s, there’s energies floating around. And he’s singing. It’s great, you know, understanding a little bit of the language because, you know, he’s singing to his grandfather. He’s singing to the spirit of Santiago and the spirit of the anaconda and using the old words for them, you know, not even saying anaconda.

He’s, he’s saying the other things, amaru mayo. And, you know, he’s saying shiwa wako and he’s talking about the, so he’s doing this and shaking his thing and you hear the frogs throbbing and it’s all moving through your skin. And so I, yeah, I tapped out after a while and Lex kept going. He’s got an amazing constitution. I think that’s the Russian thing.

But since then, I can’t drink. Really, I can’t drink. I could have a cup of wine maybe, if I have more than that. I feel sick, like I feel damaged. I have not been able to drink. I haven’t had a beer since two years ago.

JOE ROGAN: So what do you think it is? It just like, let you know what it’s doing to you?

PAUL ROSOLIE: I have no idea. It’s just a weird side effect. I keep trying it. I like, I used to love whiskey. I’ll smell some whiskey and I’m like, really?

JOE ROGAN: So we cracked a bottle right now, turned off.

PAUL ROSOLIE: It would make sense. I mean, I could take a sip of it but my body would be like no, red light. Red light. No.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, well, your body’s correct.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, but it made me hypersensitive. I noticed from that moment onwards.

Lex Fridman’s Vegas Adventures

JOE ROGAN: Did it have the effect with Lex? I don’t think so. He still boozes it up? I’m sure he goes hard. We went to Andrew Schultz’s wedding with Lex.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then we had a float. We flew with Whitney Cummings. She was doing a gig in Vegas and we said, we’ll go with you. So it was me, my wife and Whitney and Lex. We flew to Vegas. And we hung out with David Goggins. I called him up, come meet us at the hotel.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Does he party?

JOE ROGAN: No, no, no, no. Him and Lex were doing push ups. They were doing, drunk. Lex was drunk and David wasn’t. And Lex wanted to have a push up competition with Goggins.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s amazing. I mean, but that’s why he’s Lex, right? Because he’s willing to try everything.

JOE ROGAN: He’s an animal.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I mean the fact, push up competition with David Goggins, he’s just silly. That’s hysterical.

JOE ROGAN: He’s quite a character, that Lex. He told me he’s going to Dagestan to train. He’s going to go to Dagestan and train with like Khabib’s team.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Good lord. You’re like 42. How old is he? He’s got to be in his 40s.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Early 40s, I think he’s still very young.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, but like you’re going to go there and train with savages.

PAUL ROSOLIE: How old is Khabib?

JOE ROGAN: Well, Khabib’s retired, but he’s probably 35 if I had a guess, you know, somewhere around there, you know, but it’s a different thing.

PAUL ROSOLIE: He’s the one. Let’s talk now.

The Greatest Fighters of All Time

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, let’s talk now. Well, he’s training those guys now. He’s training, you know, Islam Makhachev and Umar Nurmagomedov, his cousin. He’s training some of the best guys alive. So he’s running a camp down Dagestan.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Because he’s kind of like, so did he, it seemed like at least I don’t, like I wasn’t really following his career, but it seemed like he came in like an assassin and did some big stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Well, his dad died. His dad died during COVID and after his dad died, he promised his mother that he was going to stop fighting. Got it. Yeah. His dad was his trainer. His dad was legendary. Legendary trainer and trained Islam, trained Khabib. And when he died, Khabib made a promise to his mother. He fought Justin Gaethje, beat him, defended his title, and that was it done.

PAUL ROSOLIE: But I mean, he’s, he’s very well regarded now for his accomplishments in fighting. Right?

JOE ROGAN: One of the greatest of all time.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, there’s an argument of who the greatest of all time is. It’s very subjective.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: But he’s certainly in the conversation. You know, of, he’s one of, I don’t think there is a, maybe Jon Jones is the greatest of all time. Just based on his accomplishments and also undefeated, but also the time that he’s been, I mean, John won a world title at 23 and is still like, up until he, he relinquished his heavyweight title recently. He’s 36, 37 now.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No one’s beaten him.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy. No one’s had a run like that. No one’s had a run like that.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s insane. How big is he?

JOE ROGAN: John’s a heavyweight. John, I think is 6’3″ or 6’4″, you know, and now he’s about 240ish. But he used to fight at 205. That was his main weight class.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s some crazy.

JOE ROGAN: And so, you know, the conversation of who is the greatest of all time in my book? Mighty Mouse is in that conversation too.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Mighty Mouse.

JOE ROGAN: Mighty Mouse is Demetrius Johnson. He’s a flyweight. The problem is he was a very small guy. And so a lot of people disregard the smaller guys in that conversation. But skill wise, the expression of mixed martial arts excellence, I put Mighty Mouse in his prime, right up there with everybody.

Training Philosophy and Body Types

PAUL ROSOLIE: Do you think that now, your arms are significantly bigger than mine? And I feel like the guys who are good at striking have smaller arms.

JOE ROGAN: Mike Tyson, giant arms.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Giant arms. There you go.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I feel like you’re swinging around some weight like you are, but you also have a lot more power behind it.

JOE ROGAN: That’s true. It’s conditioning, you know, like the whole thing of swing. It’s like, did you develop those arms just doing bicep curls? Or did you develop those arms doing functional things, constant training that gives you muscle, endurance, you know, it all depends. But if you see like a big, bulky bodybuilder guy, that’s not good.

PAUL ROSOLIE: For like our level where we’re still athletic and stuff. I’m going, man, I don’t want, I don’t want to put on more. I want to get stronger, but I don’t want to put on.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I don’t do really anything to try to put weight on. Yeah, I don’t lift anything heavier than 70 pounds.

PAUL ROSOLIE: So many dudes just want to.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they just want to look big. Yeah, I don’t do anything like that. Like I said, the heaviest thing I lift is my body weight. You know, I do a lot of body weight stuff. I do a lot of chin ups and dips and sometimes I do it with a vest, you know, and I do, you know, but with kettlebells, like the heavy, occasionally I’ll throw around a 90 pound kettlebell.

But the heaviest I really trained with is 70. Yeah, but that’s plenty. But I don’t, like I said, I don’t train for size. I just train for function.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Strength and function.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. To me, it’s silly if I don’t have range of motion, function. Like, what am I doing? I don’t, I’m a martial artist. Like, my whole thing is to be able to use my body. It’s not to make it look like I can use it. I’d rather be something smaller and more functional than bigger and just look like a big goofy toad.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, I bulk too easily. I actually try to put on, I only do, we’re Italian, Irish.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, come on, you get thick.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, you get thick quick.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you got to watch a long line of people. Long line of thick people.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Can I take a quick beep?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: We’ll be right back.

JOE ROGAN: Ladies and gentlemen.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You’ve been, you’ve been murdering it. Like you’ve been having just tons and tons. You just, you do them every day. I just keep.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it’s not any different pace than before.

PAUL ROSOLIE: It’s usually four a week, it seems. It’s just, I feel like maybe it’s because I’m in the jungle for a few weeks and then I’ll like come back and look and I’m like, whoa, Johnny Knoxville, Matt Damon and like, bang, bang, bang, bang.

JOE ROGAN: The key is just keep going, you know, like you’ve run a thousand miles, right? But you didn’t run a thousand miles in a day. You run 10 a day, and then days go on.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Incredible, though. You get to meet everybody.

JOE ROGAN: You meet a lot of people. Yeah, you definitely develop a better understanding of human beings because, you know, you’re limited by the amount of human beings you interact with. Your scope, your understanding of people.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: The more you can talk to the more different people, the more you get a different sense.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, well, you’re in a very unique. I mean, again, I always go back to the bee lady. Remember that? The one who locates the bees.

JOE ROGAN: She’s cool. Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And then you have people like Knoxville on. And you guys are talking. I just heard you guys talking about, you know, when he got hit by the bull. I was always wondering if that was real. And then I remember the first time I came in here, I was asking you and Jamie, I was going the one question with the David Blaine thing, because he had you shove that thing through.

JOE ROGAN: I subbed it through. Yeah, that was real.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I was going, come on, they got it. That can’t be.

JOE ROGAN: Nope, that was real. I mean, because I did it once. I hit a nerve, and he had to restart it, right?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Maybe back out and shove it right through. But it’s not a trick, you know, it’s just pain. Like, I could do that. If I wanted to do that, I could do that. I could shove a needle through my arm.

PAUL ROSOLIE: How bad do you want it?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t want to do that.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t understand why I would do that.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And I feel like that’s a little bit of what Knoxville was saying, where he was like, look, he’s like, I got a response. And he’s like, this is what I started doing. And it’s like, one way or the other, how are you going to get the attention?

The Dangers of Head Injuries

JOE ROGAN: That’s what brought him to the dance, is just getting hurt all the time. But when he told me he had been knocked unconscious 16 times, and then the last one, that’s really bad. And then the last one was the bull one that landed on his head, and he was depressed for months and had to get on medication.

I’m very averse to head injuries, which is kind of hypocritical because I’m a combat sports commentator, you know, weird. And I’ve also been hit in the head a bunch of times, but I just think it’s really f*ing bad for you overall. I stopped sparring when I was in my late 20s. Really? Kickboxing, sparring.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then I did it a little bit when I was supposed to fight Wesley Snipes. I went back, started sparring again.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Did you fight?

The Wesley Snipes Fight That Never Happened

JOE ROGAN: No. Wesley Snipes was hysterical. It was in. I was in my mid-30s. I was like, this is the last chance I get to do something like this. And then I got contacted by Campbell McLaren, who was one of the producers of the early UFC. He’s like, this is going to sound crazy, but Wesley, he was in tax problems. He wound up going to jail for tax evasion. Apparently he had some crazy guy who was telling him, you know, you don’t have to pay taxes. You know, there’s those guys that are like, what do they call them? Sovereign citizens.

So what they call them, there’s a lot of people that give really bad advice.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You know, he got in with someone like Wesley Snipes.

JOE ROGAN: Uh huh. And you know, they tell you, like, they can’t prosecute you. It’s not in the context.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And he believed it because he didn’t have.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know. I never talked to Wesley. I don’t know. I don’t have anything against him.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You sure he just wasn’t scared of fighting you, so he made up this whole story?

JOE ROGAN: No. I think Wesley also might have been embarking on a journey of cocaine.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Oh.

JOE ROGAN: Which gives you a very distorted idea of what you can and can’t do.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Everything.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You think you can do everything?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know if that’s the case. I think it might have been just. Well, he’s a very legitimate martial artist. I mean, Wesley, if you look at his skills, like from the movie Blade, and like, he’s a really good martial artist. He knows how to fight. Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You kind of have to be to do those movies. Yeah. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But my thought was just, I’m going to grab him and choke the life out of him. Like, how’s he going to stop me? Yeah. Like, also, I know how to stand up. Like, I was awesome as a kickboxer.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That would have been awesome if you could fight one person, dead or alive, full fight.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t want to do that. I wouldn’t eat. No. The problem with it, it really, nobody.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Theoretically, not you as Joe Rogan, the dad, and like, just Joe Rogan.

JOE ROGAN: It would not be a one person. What it would be is start fighting again. It would be fighting whoever. The whole thing would be competing. But obviously I’m 58. That’s never.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I’m saying, like, but like Wesley Snipes, it’s like, you know, you say, like, oh, I’d want to fight.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I just thought it would be an adventure.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And I trained for like, six months. I was training with Rob Kamen, who’s like, a legendary kickboxing, a Dutch kickboxing champion. So he was my kickboxing coach. And so I was training with him in the mornings, and I was training Jiu Jitsu at night. It was hard. It was really hard. I was doing it for six months. I was training twice a day for six months. It was really brutal. And I was so tired. I was tired all the time.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And that’s where you got those leg kicks that you were teaching George St. Pierre?

JOE ROGAN: Nah, I learned how to do that when I was a kid.

Taekwondo Champion Turned Comedian

PAUL ROSOLIE: Now my question is, now he’s such a legendary MMA guy, like, he was. Did he not have.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I was a Taekwondo specialist, you know, and I was multiple time state champion in taekwondo, and I won a bunch of national tournaments. And I was really good. I was really good at Taekwondo. Like, I fought at a very high level, and I have a lot of really good instruction that I got from. I got very lucky, and I stumbled upon a school in Boston called the Jaehun Kim Taekwondo Institute. Just randomly walked in the door one day, and it turned out to be one of the biggest, best taekwondo schools in the world.

And so I had trained with some of the very best people in the world, just by fortune. And I was physically gifted. I was very lucky in a lot of ways. A lot of natural power. And I learned technique, which is the most important thing, like, perfect technique.

And so when it was funny, because it came about because of John Donaher, I had a conversation with John Donaher, who’s George’s jiu jitsu coach, who’s maybe the greatest martial arts coach in the world, maybe of all time. Really legitimately, like a brilliant man. He was a philosophy major from Columbia who got. I think he was a professor for a bit, but then he got obsessed with Jiu Jitsu and was just teaching jiu jitsu and training jiu jitsu and sleeping on the mats. Like, literally, literally, literally teaching all day, training all day and sleeping on the mat.

But a brilliant man. And we were having dinner one night, and he’s like, George needs some help with the finer points of the spinning back kick. Do you know anyone who can help him? And I said, this is going to sound crazy. Yeah. I go, but I have, like, the best spinning back kick you’re ever going to see in your f*ing life. I go, I know it sounds crazy because I’m a comedian. I go find a bag. I could show you. Yeah, I can show you what I do. And then I brought. There’s a video of me.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Oh, I saw it.

JOE ROGAN: Okay.

PAUL ROSOLIE: The sound is imprinted in my mind, George.

JOE ROGAN: This is when we’re at Legends, Legends MMA in LA, which is where I trained. It was where Eddie Bravo had 10th Planet Jiu Jitsu. And, you know, I go, okay, let’s go downstairs to the Muay Thai part and I’ll show you. And then I kick the bag, and he’s like, man, what the f*? Can I film this? He’s filming with a flip phone, which is crazy. Like, that’s how long ago this was. I don’t know. It was probably 2005 or something like that. I had hair, and it was funny because it was like this thing, because I don’t do it even back then. It wasn’t like I was training in kickboxing. I wasn’t training in Taekwondo. It was just. I just still had it in me.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Do you keep it?

JOE ROGAN: Did it today.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You did it today?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Nice.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: It was an impressive video. And you just go, Jesus, if he’s showing this to Georges St. Pierre, how good is he at this thing?

JOE ROGAN: I used to be really good.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, I believe you.

A Knockout That Changed Everything

JOE ROGAN: But I realized when I was, like, 21. Well, I realized when I was 19 that I was going to have to stop because I fought in California. I was living in Boston at the time. I was traveling all over the country and fighting, and I fought in the nationals in California against this guy who was the Illinois state champion. And I knocked him out really bad. It was really bad. I hit him with a wheel kick in the head, and my heel was sore for days afterwards. Like, I had a hard time walking from his f*ing head.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And he never got up. He went down face first, was snoring. And back then, my thing was, if I knocked anybody out, I would just act like it was no big deal. Just turn around and walk away. No celebration. I just walk away like that. I’m going to do that to all you guys.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And so I walked away. And then I turned to my friend Jung Sik, who was my corner guy. I said, is he getting up? He was like, he’s not getting up. He’s not going to get up. He’s out. And then they took him, and they put him in a stretcher. And then they were taking care of him, and for like a half hour, he was still unconscious. And then they took him to the hospital. I have no idea what happened to him, but I realized it was so bad, it was because he came forward.

So what happened was he did. Do you know what a switch kick is?

PAUL ROSOLIE: No.

JOE ROGAN: Switch kick is you’re standing with your left leg forward, and you switch legs and you come, like, with the left kick.

PAUL ROSOLIE: So you think he’s repositioning, and then he’s moving forward.

JOE ROGAN: He telegraphed it, and it’s his left leg. So I saw that his left leg was coming this way. So I spun with my right heel, and I hit him in the head as he was running forward. So it’s like multiple. The force itself of a wheel kick is so powerful. Yeah. And then when you’re running into a wheel kick, it’s crazy.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Like, two cars driving it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like getting hit with a baseball bat that fing, you know, Mark McGuire swinging. It’s crazy how much power there is in it, because it’s your legs. Your legs carry you around all day, and the torque of your whole body, you’re whipping around and you’re hitting with the heel, and you know, there’s no padding on your heel, and it’s not right. Hit him right on the fing cheek, like, right on the side of his head. He went out.

And then I came back to my instructor, and he wasn’t there at the tournament. I went back to Boston. He’s like. He goes, I heard you had a really good knockout. And I said, yeah. I said, I was. It was scary. I go, I thought he was dead. He goes.

JOE ROGAN: Sometimes they die. And then he walked away from me, and I was like, f*, man. Sometimes they die. I’m like, that’s me. I’m like. And I had no health insurance. I was 19. I was broke. I was training for the. I wanted to be on the Olympic team. That was two years from there. And I lost a lot of my steam at that moment because I was like, what am I doing? I’m fighting for free. I don’t have any money. I have no insurance, and I’m doing this thing. And I knew back then I was getting some brain damage. For sure.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then I started kickboxing, like, right after that. And then I really kind of lost my feeling for Taekwondo because I realized it was so limited, you know, that, like, when I was sparring with kickboxers, I was really. My hands are so limited. So then I started working with this guy, Joe Lake, who was a box coach. And that’s when I was doing a lot of boxing and a lot of kickboxing. And I was like, man, I’m getting my brains beat in, and I don’t know why I’m doing this. And I’m like, there’s no professional. It wasn’t like the UFC existed at the time.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I got offered a kickboxing fight for 500 bucks. And I was like, 500 bucks. So for 500 bucks, I lose my amateur status. I can never fight in the Olympics, and there’s no money in it. As a person, professional, I’m like, what is my future? Am I going to be one of the. And then I’m new guys in the gym that I used to train with, like when I was 19. And then by the time I was like, 21, I was seeing brain damage in these guys.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I was seeing them slurring their words, forgetting what they were saying, repeating themselves. The weird thing is they’ll tell you a story.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And then they tell you the same story. Yeah. Like two minutes later. And like, you just told me that story. Like, they don’t remember. They don’t remember anything.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And now. But now, now George St. Pierre is a good example of someone. I feel like he made it out of fighting before.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Like, he looks very healthy. He’s fine. He looks like he’s fine.

JOE ROGAN: He’s fine. But he’s, you know, he’s a very intelligent guy. He does also does a lot of things to keep his mind very active. He plays chess.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, and he’s very, like, proactive.

PAUL ROSOLIE: But he seems like, even, like I’ve just seen him on social media where he’s like, hey, guys, this is how I do. Like, he’s just like a very.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Seems like a very positive, fun.

JOE ROGAN: You know, he’s the best case scenario for both. Another guy in the argument for the all time great. For an all time great MMA champion who has a successful and happy life outside of it.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Didn’t end up with the shakes.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, he’s fine. I mean, I’ve hung out with him a bunch. I’ve hung out with him recently. Yeah, he was great. We came to the comedy club. He’s actually playing my friend James McCann. They were playing chess in the green room at the comedy mothership. It was so cool.

PAUL ROSOLIE: We were filming it the last time I came. I think he had been in there the night before, and I was like, that would have been a trip to meet him.

JOE ROGAN: He’s amazing, but he’s such a sweetheart of a guy. You would never imagine that he’s this f*ing killer inside the octagon.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He’s such a sweet guy, but it’s just like, for him, it was just this incredible challenge, and he was really good at it, and he just figured out a way to express himself that way. And, you know, is a legend.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Like, I don’t imagine that he was, like, big on, like, the trash talk before fights and everything, right. He was probably just like, look, we’re just going to.

JOE ROGAN: No, there was no trash talk. He was very respectful unless someone was disrespectful to him and, you know, and even then, he wasn’t trash talking.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No, he always seemed like he was cool. Yeah, he was just doing his thing.

JOE ROGAN: No, he was one of the best representatives of the sport of all time, if not the best.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No, I like that.

JOE ROGAN: Never got into trouble outside the octagon. Yeah, never, you know, was never drunk driving or beating people up and, you know, just a great guy. And if I would have to tell people who he is, like, he would. He’s like, who’s your friend? I was like, what do you think he does? Yeah, what do you think my friend does? And, like, I don’t know. He seems cool.

PAUL ROSOLIE: How big is he?

JOE ROGAN: He’s one of the. He’s about 5’9″, 5’10”, maybe. And now he probably weighs 180 pounds. 185 pounds, maybe fought at 170.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: You know, he’s not, like a scary looking person. I’m like, that’s one of the greatest fighters that’s ever walked the face of the earth. Like, no way. I’m like, yeah. I mean, he’s like, hey, how you doing, man? What’s going on?

PAUL ROSOLIE: He doesn’t seem like he’s, like, jovial.

JOE ROGAN: No, he’s a sweetheart.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No, he’s not trying to intimidate. Like, you know, Khabib looks like he’s.

JOE ROGAN: You know, he’s really smart. I mean, he’s really. He’s always, like, watching documentaries and reading books.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: He’s fascinated by ancient history and dinosaurs and really into aliens.

Jane Goodall and Bigfoot

PAUL ROSOLIE: Dinosaurs. No, it’s just crazy, man. You’ve gotten to this. You’ve met everyone. Did you ever have Jane Goodall on here?

JOE ROGAN: No, I did not, unfortunately.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I wanted to make that happen.

JOE ROGAN: She’s gone, right?

PAUL ROSOLIE: She just died.

JOE ROGAN: I wanted to talk to her about Bigfoot because she was convinced that Bigfoot was real.

PAUL ROSOLIE: What?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: She was convinced that Bigfoot was real.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. She did this interview. She said she’s certain of it. Yeah, yeah, we’ll find it.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Jamie, I. Not that I don’t believe you, but I just don’t find Jane Goodall.

JOE ROGAN: I know, I know, I know. I was stunned. I was like, what? And this is. By the time I had been convinced that Bigfoot was fake.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. I’m in that camp.

JOE ROGAN: There’s camera traps, but this is the camp. There was an animal that coexisted with human beings for sure. That was called Gigantopithecus.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: You know the whole story.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So Gigantopithecus, they found bones in an apothecary shop in China in the 1920s or 30s. And an anthropologist found these molars and said, where did you get this? These are primate molars and they’re f*ing enormous.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like whatever this thing was was absolutely huge. So they went to the site where they got it. They found mandible bones that indicated it was bipedal. So it was an upright walking chimp, walking primate that was 8 to 10 feet tall. Like, what the f* is this?

And so I’m sure you’ve seen the images of what a Gigantopithecus looked like in comparison to a human being. It’s in the orangutan family. So that thing existed and also existed in Asia. Right. So you look at the Bering Strait and you look at the Bering Land bridge that we know existed during the Ice Age. And so we know that humans migrated from Siberia into North America. We know that for a fact.

You know one of the reasons we know that for a fact, because Mormons were convinced that Native Americans were part of the Lost Tribe of Israel. Yeah. So some rich Mormon guy did a DNA test on Native Americans and found out that they emanated from Siberia. Yeah. And so it was incorrect.

So we know humans came down from there. Why wouldn’t other animals. Sure, we know they did. We know Short faced bear, a bunch of different animals. They find their bones in Alaska and they know that they probably made their way down through North America. It just stands. It just makes logical sense that if you have a variety of different megafauna that probably one of those primates or a bunch of those primates lived in the Pacific Northwest, which is the area where they would be. Right. And then you have incredibly dense forest. Right.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So Jane Goodall won’t rule out the existence, but no, no, find the video where she says, I’m convinced.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I’m convinced.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, because she was talking. Oh, no, no. Okay, just find it because it exists.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I can’t cancel the videos.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, go. Go to video.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Dude, she would have been awesome. You should. I’m.

JOE ROGAN: How Bigfoot might be real. That’s it right there. Put the headphones on.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Headphones. Here we go.

JOE ROGAN: I climbed into the hills.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Oh, there’s Jane.

JOE ROGAN: This was where I was meant to be. I wanted to talk to you about something. That some would say is fictional, but you would say, hold up, we don’t know for certain. And that’s big. Everybody talks to me about, I’m romantic. I would like Bigfoot to exist. I’ve met people who swear they’ve seen Bigfoot. And I think the interesting thing is every single continent there is an equivalent of Bigfoot or Sasquatch.

PAUL ROSOLIE: There’s the yeti, there’s the yari in.

JOE ROGAN: Australia, there’s the Chinese wild man, and.

PAUL ROSOLIE: On and on and on.

JOE ROGAN: And you know, I’ve had stories from people who, you have to believe them. So there’s something, I don’t know what it is. I’m always open minded.

PAUL ROSOLIE: What about other mythological creatures?

JOE ROGAN: Pause for a second. So they’re saying that to her. He’s saying that to her. And she said that in reaction to a previous interview that she did. The previous interview that she did. She said, I’m convinced that it exists.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you know, you got to realize this is a lady that lived with primates in an inaccessible area where there’s very few human beings. And she had these interactions with them. I don’t agree with her, but I think that it existed at one point in time.

One of the other reasons why I think it exists is that different Native American tribes put this into perplexity. How many different Native American terms were there for a hairy wild man or Bigfoot? And I believe there’s more than 80 that’s wild. Now, they don’t have a lot of mythological creatures in Native American culture. Right. And so in different tribes. Right. But they have a name for this hairy wild giant man that lives in the woods.

PAUL ROSOLIE: A Wookiee.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They also have. The other thing that’s really fascinating is giants. There is a lot of ancient cultures have stories about giants and Native American tribes have ancient stories of giant red haired men, which, you know, God, it’s in the Bible. It’s in a bunch of, okay, 40 or 50 separate terms across different languages and regions. Hairy. Wild giant man. No single agreed upon count, but dozens of distinct Native American names for hairy wild giant man banks easily over 40 to 50 separate terms across different languages and regions. Interesting.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I still, I would love to see the clip eventually of Jane Goodall saying I believe in Bigfoot. Because she’s saying that she’s like, I’m open to the idea of it.

JOE ROGAN: She’s saying that. And as the reason why he’s asking is because he had. Exactly. He had seen the previous interview. See if we can find another interview with her talking about Bigfoot.

Jane Goodall’s Impact on Conservation

PAUL ROSOLIE: She was awesome. You know, she was awesome. She’s the reason I have a career, really, her being awesome. There’s two stories I tell people. First of all, because everyone goes, what’s Joe Rogan like? No, it’s true. Because everyone wants to know. And you’re controversial. And so I’m always the nicest f*ing guy in the world. I said the first time I came, you sent me a message and you said something about like, hey, don’t worry about a thing. Like, I’m even going to bring my dad. Like, it was very nice. A little pat on the back because you go, Jane Goodall.

I went to a talk when I was like 22 something, and I was just writing chapters of my first book, Mother of God, which didn’t even have a name yet. And I had chapters in a manila envelope. And I went to a talk that Goodall was giving. And I mean, I’d been read stories and seen the black and white pictures. So this is like, you know, like Einstein, Abe Lincoln. Jane Goodall’s like a living historical figure.

And so now she’s talking in front of me, and I had brought these chapters and I wanted to ask her because I’d already sent the chapters to publishers and they’d all been like, kid, none of this is true. You know, no way did you jump on a giant anaconda. No way did you raise an anteater. They just didn’t believe me.

And then when it was my turn, after hundreds of people, I get to her and, you know, she goes, “Hello.” She goes, just takes a little picture with you. And I said, “Would you read these chapters?” I said, “I would love it because I loved your stories as a kid.” And she goes, “Thank you.” And she puts it to the side.

48 hours later, her staff gets in touch and they go, Jane actually read what you gave her. Loved it, and said, finish the book, get a publisher, and I will write you an endorsement. Whoa. She waved her magical wand in my direction and gave me a career.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so cool.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And what’s really great is that earlier this year, I emailed her and it was because this book was coming out. And I said it would be amazing to have, I mean, I said, at this point, no one’s, you know, the conservation, the voice of Mother Earth. And she just, you know, she was just, she just said, you know, “Just keep protecting the Amazon. That’s your mission.” She was always very, it was like, you know, Luke, believe in yourself. It was like, you know, she was just like, “Your job is to protect this forest.” And it was incredible.

JOE ROGAN: That’s amazing.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And so, yeah, right. You know, about six months ago, I got to tell her. I was like, look, because the last time I’d spoken to her, we were protecting, I think it was like 100,000 acres. And then in the last year, we added 30,000 acres to the reserve. And so I said, you know, we’re making strides forward. And she just, it was good that I got to tell her that. And then, and then, you know, recently we found out that she died. But what a legacy.

JOE ROGAN: What a legacy.

PAUL ROSOLIE: What a legacy.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I mean, we know so much about primate behavior because of that woman.

PAUL ROSOLIE: We still know so much about, I mean, man, the toolmaker. Before her, we said there was humans that use tools. And now we know that, you know, capuchin monkeys use rocks. We know that otters use rocks. I mean, I’ve seen elephants use a stick to scratch. I’ve seen camera trap footage of an elephant using a stick tree to knock over an electrical fence. Animals use tools.

Oh, yeah, she was the first one. I mean, she went out there when she was, what, 20 something years old, Middle Africa, blonde girl, crazy, and then spent the whole rest of her life. But the lesson that I take away from that is that even as famous as she was, that she was traveling 300 days a year. I mean, she’d been, you know, an icon for decades, and that she still took the time to actually read something that some kid handed to her.

That’s unfathomable grace to do that. And then, literally, if that didn’t happen, I never would have published Mother of God. I never would have started Jungle Keepers. I never would have been protecting the rainforest. She empowered that. She did that with her magic. And I think that that’s incredible.

JOE ROGAN: That’s so cool.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Absolutely incredible.

The Possibility of Undiscovered Primates

JOE ROGAN: Did you find any other? No. I guarantee it exists. But it’s okay. You have to trust me. I don’t think she’s correct, but I do think, not Bigfoot, but I do think that it’s entirely possible that there is a small hairy primate, like human-like primate, that exists still. That’s like the Hobbit people from the island of Flores.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You know, there’s the thing called the Orang Pendek. Have you heard of that?

PAUL ROSOLIE: No.

JOE ROGAN: The Orang Pendek, I think Indonesia, perhaps Vietnam. There’s a bunch of places that have this creature that gets sighted on multiple occasions. And they used to think of it as just silly legend. But now because of the discovery, which was, was it in the 90s that they discovered the hobbit people on the island of Flores? You know about that, right?

PAUL ROSOLIE: I’ve heard of them, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Homo.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Those are real. We have their bones.

JOE ROGAN: Very real. Very real. It was a very small, like, hobbit-like creature that was a type of primate that was bipedal, that was like a little tiny hairy human being that lived at least on the island of Flores, but most likely lived in many other places as well. And there’s a possibility that it still exists. And it’s not me saying this, it’s like some actual anthropologists that believe that this thing might still be alive because you’re dealing with incredibly small populations.

PAUL ROSOLIE: But are those, I mean, are those islands so small that, no, like, unlike the Amazon, it’s gigantic. But like, how could there be population?

JOE ROGAN: Incredibly dense. Incredibly dense forest. And no one’s going down in the bushes. Right. It’s like the Tasmanian tiger.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I was just going to say, like the thylacine, where it’s like they’re just hidden.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly, exactly. Small population. Like, there’s a lot of sightings of the thylacine, you know?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. But somehow all these sightings, it’s never on a, it’s never clear.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, that was, it’s also, there’s no one there.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Here’s the thing. I mean, let’s pretend that you saw wolverine in the Montana woods. Like dense Montana woods. And it’s a hundred yards away. You see it briefly for a second. Get your phone. You’re not going to, you might have seen it. You might have seen it trapped in trees. But, like, how are you going to get it off your phone? You’re going to have to, unless you have a Samsung, where you have a really good zoom, you’re not going to be able to zoom in enough. Yeah, you know, like, you have to have, like, there’s only a few phones that are, yeah, you’re not going to get good footage, but we know that wolverines are real.

But finding a wolverine in the woods, I’ve talked to God, I’ve talked to hundreds of men who spend a giant portion of their life in the woods, and only a few have seen wolverines.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I would love to see a wolverine.

JOE ROGAN: How about mountain lions? They’re everywhere. I’ve only seen three of them in my entire life.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s wild.

JOE ROGAN: But I’ve probably been around a hundred of them and not known it.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s the reaction we got with the tribes, was that if you look at uncontacted tribe, my whole life, you look at photos of uncontacted tribes, it was like blurry, crafty. Because who was out there? Like a logger. Right. Or it was somebody running.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And even when I saw them the first time, when I was out on a solo 10 days deep in the jungle, I saw them and I ran for my life. And everyone went, you didn’t see him. I mean, I’m a, I don’t mind that if I have Pixar. It didn’t happen. Right. And so with this, when we started actually showing people what we had, it was like, this has never been. It’s like, it’s like a vision into the Stone Age.

JOE ROGAN: Right. I mean, really, not even the Stone Age.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Like, they’re the stone tools.

JOE ROGAN: They’re using sharpened sticks.

A Window Into Ancient Human History

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. I showed it to an anthropologist, and he was saying, you know, Stone Age isn’t necessarily accurate here. He said, because they’re not using stone. They don’t have clay pots. He goes, this is something. This is, but I mean, then think about it. It’s actually like a time machine because you’re, you’re, I mean, we were standing across the river, talking to these people, and it’s like, you guys are a couple thousand years back. And so it’s like, this is such a strange aperture into history.

JOE ROGAN: It’s not even a couple. Maybe like 30, 40, maybe.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I feel like, I feel like, I feel like somehow to me, the number seems like two, but it’s like, you know, we were like little tribes.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. But 2,000 years ago, the Egyptian pyramids were already 2,500 years old.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s true. But I mean, again, the civilization isn’t homogenous. Right. Like, different.

JOE ROGAN: Of course, you know. Well, obviously, there’s uncontacted tribes still right now.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what’s crazy.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like a man with a cell phone from the future filmed people.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s what I’m saying. It felt like that. It felt like this was like a Back to the Future moment where it’s like, you know, this is, they have no idea. And my people, thinking of everyone else back home, I was like, don’t realize that these people are still out there in the jungle living like this. Right.

JOE ROGAN: And probably in the dense, dense, dense forest, there’s probably many more of them.

PAUL ROSOLIE: There are many more of them. In fact, while we were watching them out front, there was this terrifying moment where the, we heard something behind us and it was, which we never saw them. But the women came light foot in behind, and they pulled up all the yuca and the bananas, and they were raiding. And so for a second, we were like, there’s an ambush.

JOE ROGAN: And.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And everyone was, like, turning the shotguns away from the river, and they were like, we thought there was going to be arrows flying. So, like, my guy Ignacio grabs me and, like, put me down. And we were hiding behind trees waiting for it. And it was like, no, no, no. They’re just stealing all of the fruit and all of the crops. And they just raided our whole village.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

PAUL ROSOLIE: But I really, I really did feel like, you know, you go, imagine what it would be like to go back and see the Comanches, watch them riding across the plains after the buffalo. And it’s like, we can’t. But in this case, they were right there. Right.

JOE ROGAN: And now.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And now, now that these videos are going out across the world, it’s like, look, we’re trying to explain to people, you know, first of all, there’s a lot of those, you know, you know, exactly what kind of people they’re like, leave them alone. It’s like, literally, we’re the people trying to make sure that they get left alone. Like, that’s our job.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, you got to ignore those folks. Yeah. Especially you. You’re not the type of person that’s interfering with their life at all.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No.

JOE ROGAN: By giving them the bananas, you’re literally helping them.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Well, and again, I was a witness. That was happening between the tribes and the tribes. But for all the indigenous cultures that have been destroyed in the last few centuries, we can do it right. For once, we can actually respect these people. If they want to come out, they can come out. If they want to adapt, they can. But they need to have forests to live in in order to make that decision.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And so that’s where it’s like, how.

JOE ROGAN: Can they make an informed decision? How could they, how can they adapt? I mean.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Well, I think it would be very slow.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so crazy.

The Path to Contact

PAUL ROSOLIE: I think it’d be slow. I think it’d be a few more banana exchanges, maybe without the arrow shot afterwards. And then maybe it starts to be like, okay, you guys can come here. Maybe. Maybe the communities teach them how to grow bananas. Maybe they don’t want to come, but they want a few things, you know, maybe they want a couple of machetes because it’ll just help, you know, and they want to keep to themselves. Maybe.

JOE ROGAN: But, I mean, other than them, the thought of the most uncontacted people is North Sentinel Island. And North Sentinel Island, the interesting part of that is one of the reasons why they’re so distrustful of people is because they had been contacted in the 1800s by a f*ing pervert.

There was a guy named Commander Maurice Vidal Portman, who was a, like, explorer pervert. And the reason why I say that is, like, this guy had, like, weird journal logs where he was like, “this one has testicles the size of a sparrow’s egg.” Like, he would dress them up like Roman soldiers and take pictures of them. They kidnapped a few of them, and then they gave a bunch of people the flu and a bunch of people died.

And so they had this immense distrust for people because of this guy and his explorations onto that island, that island and other islands like it. So they don’t have a written language. Right. These people, there’s no evidence they have fire. So there’s this story of these, because, you know, it’s incredibly wet environment. So they have these stories that they probably have these oral traditions of these white people that come and f* up everything.

So when someone shows up on a boat, like, there’s been a few instances where people were killed a few years back, but not just him, there’s a boat that sank there. So it washed ashore and sank. And they were headed to go kill those people when they were rescued. And now we’ve spotted them. We, people have spotted them with metal. And they believe the metal they got was salvaged from the boat.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So they got pieces of metal. Yeah. So this is the boat that shipwrecked. In 1981, a cargo ship named the Primrose ran aground on the coral reefs surrounding North Sentinel. The crew radioed for assistance and settled for a long wait. But in the morning, they saw 50 men with bows on the beach building makeshift boats to swim out to them and f* them up. Yeah, I mean, they have a severe distrust, obviously, of people.

PAUL ROSOLIE: So I was on the Andaman Islands, which is right next to these.

JOE ROGAN: That guy, respectable lawyer on Twitter. He’s the one I got the information from. He documented the whole story of, if you scroll all the way up, he’ll talk about that guy, Maurice Vidal. See, look at he dressed. That’s the guy.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So that f*ing creep.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Look at him.

JOE ROGAN: He looks like a pervert. So he’s hanging out with…

PAUL ROSOLIE: He should have known he was a pervert. Look at him.

JOE ROGAN: Look at him. Wonderful testicles.

PAUL ROSOLIE: They probably didn’t want to profile.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. So that’s the dude. Yeah, he’s from the English Royal Navy. Yeah. Portman. Maurice Vidal Portman. Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Dude, those guys.

JOE ROGAN: Look at these guys. F*ing thrown.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Those guys be doing some sit ups.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’re out there hustling.

The Andaman Islands

PAUL ROSOLIE: You know, I went to the Andaman Islands, which is right out there.

JOE ROGAN: That’s where he originally landed.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. And if you want to feel like you fell off the face of the earth, you go to the Andaman Islands. First of all, beautiful. You can only, I think if you still like this, you can only get there from the Indian city of Chennai or Calcutta because it’s an Indian territory that they don’t, they limit who can travel there.

And there’s, I mean, there’s, they’ve brought elephants there because they didn’t used to have bulldozers and stuff. So the British brought elephants by boat. And there’s these old archival footage photos of them lifting off of like pirate ships, listing elephants on the rigging and then putting them and the island. Now the Andaman Islands have elephants.

JOE ROGAN: Whoa.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And there’s still people riding around on the elephants, you know, like moving trees off the road and doing things. But when you go from one place to the other place, exactly what you said, because they don’t want human safaris because they want to protect these indigenous people, you have to go with a police escort to cross the island because you have to go through.

And the police watch you like a hawk. And I, you know, I take a picture of everything. I take 300 pictures a day on my phone. And look at that. No, see, if you can see elephants being lifted off of ships. There’s a bunch of pictures here that are crazy.

JOE ROGAN: They’re pulling logs.

PAUL ROSOLIE: But this is, this is, you know, elephants moving logs. Happens all the time. But there’s literally a picture of the elephants up on the riggings.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And, but man, you drive through areas where there’s just these tiny little people with bows and arrows and they’re still out there. I got to go swimming with an elephant there. Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow, that’s so dope. Look at the elephant swimming. How cool is that?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow. That’s f*ing awesome.

PAUL ROSOLIE: There you go. Look at that. That’s them nuts. Lifting the elephant.

JOE ROGAN: Like, what the f* am I doing in the air?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. Look at that.

JOE ROGAN: You have to blindfold him. No, he’s not blindfolded. He’s painted.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You know, they probably should have, but…

JOE ROGAN: Then maybe the elephant would freak out. Elephants. It takes so much for an elephant to freak out and f*ing kill people. There’s a horrible video of this guy’s abusing an elephant. Like, he’s a trainer and he’s like, keeps whacking the elephant. And the elephant goes, that’s enough. And just stomps him into a pancake.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yep. Or that video I sent you with the tiger.

JOE ROGAN: Which one?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Where the tiger mauls the guy and you’re like, that’s terrible. He kills him. And then the second shot is they show the guy and he’s still alive, but he’s got slashes down to his skull. Like, just don’t just, I mean, these animals are…

JOE ROGAN: You just don’t push them down.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Especially not an elephant.

Human Expansion and Environmental Impact

JOE ROGAN: Well, as human beings just want to f with everything. That’s part of why we’re on every fing square inch of the Earth, practically. We want to f with everything. You know, it’s, we’re the weirdest animal ever because we’re on every fing continent. We’re everywhere. There’s not another animal like us.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No.

JOE ROGAN: And, you know, all of us came from Africa, which is even nuttier, right? So we emanated from Africa and just spread out all over the world. As soon as we figured out how to float, as soon as we figured out how to hike and how to wear warm clothes, we just kept moving.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And now are we going to figure out how to not destroy the systems that keep us alive? Right.

JOE ROGAN: And now we’re talking about doing the same thing on other planets.

PAUL ROSOLIE: We’re talking about it, but way before we start worrying about other planets, I want to make sure that this planet works. I mean, I’m just, I’m so, I’m just, it drives me crazy how quickly everyone’s going to, I just, when I come back to society so quickly, we’re like, it’s on people’s minds. They’re talking about this stuff.

And I’m going, guys, the ocean is filled with trash. Like, the Amazon is burning. I’m like, can we just fix this? And there’s areas where we have, I mean, you know this. Like, they brought wolves back to Yellowstone. Like, New York’s waters are getting cleaner. The humpbacks are coming back.

But everyone’s so, I mean, but we haven’t actually, when we get to Mars, talk about it all day. But it’s like, until then, I just feel like we are so overwhelmed with serious problems here and the last chance in history to fix those problems. So there’s an amazing opportunity.

And I feel like people are so, like this, this modern nothingness that people feel where it’s like, oh, it’s the end of times. And it’s like, dude, this is the most exciting time. You can fly everywhere, you got information at your fingertips. There’s more people than ever before working to make good in the world, to help people, to save animals, to restore ecosystems.

And it’s like, so I get confused when I come back from what I feel is like battle. And I’m on this mission for 20 years to do this one thing, and people are like, I’m just scrambled and delirious. And I’m like, go outside.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, get off your phone, put your…

PAUL ROSOLIE: Phone down, go to the mountains. That John Muir thing. I’m, you know, to the mountains. The mountains are calling. And I must go like, go close your phone, go touch grass for a while.

Actually, that was one of the favorite, I forget what I, I posted a video of me with this huge anaconda around me and holding her head is a 20 foot anaconda. One of the comments was this guy, he was like, “dude, you’ve touched enough grass. Go back inside, go watch Netflix.” Yeah. He’s like, that’s enough.

JOE ROGAN: You’re the opposite. You’ve gone too far.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You’ve gone too far. Interesting use of free will.

The Solar Farm Disaster

JOE ROGAN: What was fascinating to me, when people were trying to save things and by saving things, they don’t realize that they’re actually f*ing things out far worse than finding them. Well, there’s a good example. I think it’s the Mojave Desert, where they just now, California and all their infinite wisdom decided to build this immense solar farm out in the desert. I saved it. I’ll send it to you, Jamie.

It is so crazy. So they decided to build this immense solar farm. It turns out this solar farm because it’s got mirrors that like point towards these solar panels, it’s incinerating 6,000 birds a year. Incinerating 6,000 birds a f*ing year. Which is like, what does that even mean? Like, how is that even so?

PAUL ROSOLIE: It’s a death ray.

JOE ROGAN: A fing death ray. God. I know I saved it. Where did I save it? Oh, you got it. I mean, I don’t know which article you have. It’s okay, pull up any of the articles. But I mean, when you look at it, it heats up to a thousand fing degrees. The Mojave Desert? Yeah, they just shut it down so it’s concentrated sunlight.

Solar power towers use mirrors to focus sunlight onto a receiver, creating extremely high temperature. The problem is they’re fing killing birds like a motherfer. Just like those ugly windmill farms. Those things are a blight on the face of the Earth. When you drive to South Texas.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: A buddy of mine has a ranch down there. Solar, look at that. Mojave Desert solar plant kills 6,000 birds a year. I think that’s in 2016. They just recently shut it down. They’ve spent billions on this fing thing, and it’s not generating nearly the amount of solar power they were hoping. It turns birds into fing fireballs instantly.

But when you drive down to South Texas, they have these, that’s what it looks like. Isn’t that crazy? Look at that. Isn’t that nuts?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. We got to stop spreading out.

JOE ROGAN: We’re so stupid.

PAUL ROSOLIE: We got to stop.

JOE ROGAN: That’s like, who said that’s a good idea? And counterintuitively, nuclear power is, like, the best for the environment.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Which is, people think, no, Three Mile Island.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No, they got it. You know what? They just call it something else. If you just, if you just rebrand it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they just have to realize that the old, like the Fukushima plants and they f*ed the whole area up forever. Those are old. That’s a plant that I think went live in the 1970s. Like you, the new technology. You can have solar power and it’s, or, excuse me, nuclear power. And it’s clean.

PAUL ROSOLIE: But I think people are scared of the word nuclear. I’m saying if you came out and you called it like a something, something plant, we got to get over it.

JOE ROGAN: We got to get over that hump, you know? But that’s, it’s just human beings. But there’s this constant battle, right? There’s a battle of good and evil.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yes, there is.

The Battle Against Ignorance and Cultural Narratives

JOE ROGAN: And there’s also a battle of ignorance and information, and it goes back and forth. And the only way to educate people is sometimes you have these brave people that are responding to this intense amount of ignorance, and they have to go out there and say, no, that’s not it. It’s this. And this is huge societal narrative, this huge cultural narrative that they have to fight against, which is almost impossible to undo.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I mean, when you realize there’s something that everybody has wrong, or you realize that there’s something. The amount. Because then you got to get the message to everybody. Right? How do you do that? Right. Then you got to make them care about it. Right. I mean, it’s just wild, too.

JOE ROGAN: But that’s us. That’s the battle. There’s always this. I think you need those things in order for us to push progress. You need something to fight against. Like, think about where you would be if you didn’t have this thing to push against. It’s not that the thing is good, but it is bad. But it creates good people that push against it.

And this is the constant battle of the human spirit. We’re always engaged in this battle to right wrongs and to figure things out and to make things better that are bad. And then to realize that, oh, we’re making it way worse. Someone has to come along and course correct, and then it’s usually a few brave people that are pushing back against this tidal wave of negativity and ignorance.

PAUL ROSOLIE: The tidal wave of negativity is wild. The grief is just like a poison peddled by the darkness. They want you sad and disoriented. I just feel like so many people now when I come back, they’re downtrodden by just the buzz of the news and everything. And I’m like, listen. Choose something that you care about and work on it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Or just pick that one.

JOE ROGAN: Be the good you want to see in the world.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Be the good you want to see in the world. And it’s like, I’m in this unique position because I’m contacted now all day long by people that want to help us protect the rainforest, people who want to use that blueprint to do it somewhere else. And we’re on the cusp of doing this.

So I’m surrounded by. I get a lot of positive people with innovations, people with ideas, people. I mean, even, you know, everyone says, oh, why can’t the billionaires? And it’s like, we get people who have money and they come in and they’re like, I’ll help you get that piece of land that’ll be protected. I get reinforced, right? All the time. People go, the world’s going to shit. And I’m like, the world’s amazing people are helping.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: You know, and it’s like, I’ve seen so much good done.

JOE ROGAN: It really is all what you’re focusing on. If you’re focusing on. That’s the very thing. Unique thing about today is that you’re inundated with so much information. And we generally tend to gravitate towards the things that are terrifying and the things that are dangerous that scare us. And so you’re paying attention to the news of literally 8 billion people, which is not natural, it’s not normal.

PAUL ROSOLIE: We’re supposed to know about our village and maybe the next village, right? And so, like, that’s one thing, you know, I had a friend, you know, did you hear about the flood that happened in Bangladesh? I was like, what do you, you know, my sympathy. But, like, there’s. There’s always a flood happened. The world is gigantic. There’s 8 billion people.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And so, like, you know, there’s only.

JOE ROGAN: So much you can pay attention to.

PAUL ROSOLIE: So much you can pay attention to.

JOE ROGAN: But if you have a phone, all the bad stuff is coming into your pocket all day.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And I think a lot of the. It’s funny because a lot of the people, like the adults are. People are worried about the kids. I think the adults are worse.

Finding Meaning in Modern Life

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, a lot of them. Yeah. And a lot of them, they’re searching for meaning. And so they find meaning in activism or in pseudo activism and yelling about things online and then maybe going out into the street and screaming at people and they think that that gives meaning to their life.

You know, there’s a lot of people that just feel like, really lost. And this strange concrete culture, concrete and electronic culture that we’ve created, it doesn’t give you the fulfillment that the natural world does. I mean, I’m sure it’s one of the draws that you have to the jungle is that living out there in nature is wildly fulfilling because it’s normal.

It’s like it fills in all the slots that you have evolved to have. Like, as a human being, we have always lived in coordination with nature up until fairly recently. You know, if human beings have been alive in this form for half a million years, how long have we been in cities? In cities? How long have we been in even agriculture? A few thousand years. Temperature controlled rooms, crazy.

PAUL ROSOLIE: With a little noise box constantly stressing us out.

EMF Signals and the 49ers Injury Mystery

JOE ROGAN: Also, Wi-Fi and EMF signals. I was just reading this fing crazy thing. Have you paid attention to this, Jamie, about the 49ers, about San Francisco? Isn’t that fing nuts? They think it’s real. So there’s a disproportionate amount of severe catastrophic injuries that come out of San Francisco. And their training facility is right outside this power station.

Oh, yeah. I mean, way more Achilles tendon blown out, way more knees blown out. Way more like catastrophic ligament and tendon ruptures, like. And they’ve been talking about it since, like, the players started talking about it, like 2012, I believe. And people like, oh, that’s nonsense. And now the stats are in and you’re looking at the amount of injuries that come from this area. It’s like, it’s not normal.

PAUL ROSOLIE: No. And so you think, what if they’re getting weakened by the water, by the electricity?

JOE ROGAN: Electricity, yeah, by the EMF signal. I mean, it’s Look, EMF signals we know disrupt human beings. But to what extent, like to what extent does LED lights and to what extent is it minimal? Do you feel it? Is it not? Does it have a long term effect? Does it take forever until it actually compounds?

But they’re looking at the data from this one training facility so you can find something on it. There’s a lot of stories have come out this week about it where people are starting to gather up all the data and like, hey, this is not normal. This is like a much higher percentage of severe injuries from this one camp, which doesn’t make any sense.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Well, it’s like that Erin Brockovich thing where it’s like you find a place where a lot of people are getting the same kind of cancer and it’s like there’s a reason.

JOE ROGAN: So what does it say here at the top of the article? What’s the article say?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Just about it. Just about the whole thing explains.

JOE ROGAN: So is it true? What is this from? How long ago is this? Two weeks? Yes, two days ago. Okay, the injury conspiracy theory. And is it true? So what is this? This is USA Today, which is like just skipped ahead to the so called mechanisms have not been established. Many of the experiments are contradictory. Many of the experiments have exposures either don’t relate specifically to 50-60 Hz magnetic fields.

It’s a topic that will likely resurface or any major injuries during the Super Bowl at Levi’s Stadium February 8th in Santa Clara. Is Santa Clara near there?

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s where they play the game.

JOE ROGAN: That’s where they play the game. But is that the training facility? The idea is that it’s near the training facility. Right, and I don’t. That’s again, that’s.

PAUL ROSOLIE: This is.

JOE ROGAN: So that’s where the electrical substation is and there’s the field. I mean, cut the shit.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s.

JOE ROGAN: That can’t be good.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Literally radiating onto them, that can’t be good.

JOE ROGAN: But I don’t think it’s going to affect the game. You know I’m saying I think it’s like being there all the time. Practicing there all the time is what’s going to weaken their body without checking?

PAUL ROSOLIE: I don’t know, I don’t.

JOE ROGAN: Unless that’s where they practice. I don’t see a large practice facility. Well, look at the f*ing multi use field. I know they don’t practice on those fields generally. Right, but they use the fields. I mean they must practice there.

PAUL ROSOLIE: It could be.

JOE ROGAN: This could just be a park. That’s why I got to look up where they practice.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Right, right, right. LA Rams don’t practice next to SoFi Stadium.

Power Lines and Health Risks

JOE ROGAN: I can’t imagine it’s good for you. I mean, there’s also. Okay, we’ll find this out. Is there any truth to power lines and people living under power lines having increased rates of cancer? Because I’ve heard that that’s true.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. I mean in environmental college that was. There’s numerous giant class action lawsuits for people that were living under high tension power lines. And I mean, I actually, I knew someone who. I mean, I’ve been to the places where I did. For my senior project I was doing where we went to the areas where they were fracking. Remember that? Remember that documentary where they were lighting the wildfire?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah, yeah. Gas Land. Great documentary.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. And those people were screaming, they’re trying to get the attention to say, this is not good. And of course the companies come in and they go, we’ll give you $2 million if we yield us drill on your land. And these are people that could need the money. Right. And then a few years later, all of their kids have cancer.

JOE ROGAN: Pull that back up again, please. So we put it into our sponsor, Perplexity. There’s some limited evidence, a small increase in childhood leukemia risk. Very close high voltage power lines. But overall the lick is weak, not clearly causal. And typically residential exposures are considered within safety guidelines.

See, the thing is like who is. One of the things about Perplexity or any large language model is you’ve got to get the information from online and who’s publishing this information. So it’s like there’s only so much of it that’s available. But possibly carcinogenic is a weak category, so it says.

International Agency for Research in Cancer classifies extremely low frequency magnetic fields like those from power lines as possibly carcinogenic to humans, mainly because of the childhood leukemia data. F* that, dude.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s wild.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, just f* that. I would never buy a house that’s near them. What are you looking for?

Woolly Mammoth Artifacts

PAUL ROSOLIE: I just realized it’s a molar. Yep.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, this is from my buddy John Reese from Alaska.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s that guy?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s incredible.

JOE ROGAN: Actually, no, this one is from Colossal.

PAUL ROSOLIE: So that’s a.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a company that’s bringing the woolly mammoth back.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, yeah, yeah, those guys.

JOE ROGAN: This piece is from my buddy John Reese. That’s a molar.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s cool.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s a tooth. That’s how many of them they have that they could.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That they’re just starting to make it into art.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I have a pool cue that has woolly mammoth ivory in it.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Dude, look at that. Look at that.

JOE ROGAN: I know.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Isn’t that nuts?

JOE ROGAN: And that is so beautiful. Something 10,000 years ago used that to mash down vegetables.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Wow. That. That is gorgeous.

JOE ROGAN: People, you know about the boneyard, right?

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, no, you were the first time you told me all about it. Incredible place.

JOE ROGAN: Shout out to my boy John Reeves.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, that. I would love to go there.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, you should, dude.

PAUL ROSOLIE: I would love to. That’s pretty incredible. So fascinating.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, the Colossal guys have been up there. Quite a few people have been up there to explore. I think either. Grant. No. Randall. Did Randall Carlson go up there? I think he’s either gone there or is going there.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, you got to make the intro for me 100% to go see.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, I’ll set that up. He’s always trying to get me to go out there too. I just don’t have the time. But what a phenomenal place. By the way, he’s found a new site. He’s found a new site up there that has more bones. Yeah, I mean it’s. You’re talking about an area that’s only about four to six acres.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That he’s been exploring.

PAUL ROSOLIE: And he’s got other deposits. Right.

JOE ROGAN: It’s like massive deposits. Thousands of animals, including animals that weren’t even supposed to be there.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah. That’s so cool.

JOE ROGAN: Crazy. And a thick layer of carbon that indicates that f*ing place was on fire.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Yeah, yeah. I mean that when you find fossils in the wild, there’s nothing like finding fossils. I remember the first time I found like a little shell. And then like I said, we, not that long ago, we found like a seven foot turtle shell. Thick, thick, thick, like black. Fossilized in the river basin in the Amazon.

The river was especially low and it was just, you know, it was half out, like a crashed alien spaceship. Like it was just this huge thing and it was like you get this sense, you get that, that tactile, visceral sense of like, whoa. These used to be here.

JOE ROGAN: You know what they found in China recently?

PAUL ROSOLIE: What’d they find?

JOE ROGAN: They found dinosaur eggs that the inside of them is all crystals now.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Oh, it’s crystallized through the crystallized baby Velociraptor.

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s just basically all crystal. Just crystal. Like a geode. Yeah, but it’s a dinosaur egg. It’s just over millions and millions of years.

PAUL ROSOLIE: They’re probably making art out of that right now.

Dinosaur Eggs Turned to Crystal

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know what they’re doing with it. Yeah, I think it’s fairly recent that this discovery, at least the article that I read was fairly recent about it. But it’s just crazy. Oh, so much cool shit in the world.

PAUL ROSOLIE: We’re on such a cool planet.

JOE ROGAN: So here it is. “70 million year old dinosaur egg contains surprising a sparkling crystal surprise.” Isn’t that nuts? Turned into crystals.

PAUL ROSOLIE: How? That was a dinosaur egg.

JOE ROGAN: Grapefruit sized dinosaur egg from a fossil bed in China gave paleontologists huge spread. Rather than a dinosaur embryo or sediment, it was filled with sparkling crystals of calcite lining the inner shell. A natural dinosaur geode, a rare occurrence provides researchers with unique information on the structure of the shell.

In this case, a never before seen OO species. OOs species species of egg named. Oh boy.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Good luck.

JOE ROGAN: Pronouncing that identified in 2022 paper led by paleontologist Qinghe of Anhui University in China. Not only that, it’s among the first dinosaur eggs, or evidence of any dinosaurs for that matter, found in the roughly 70 million year old Upper Cretaceous Christian formation of the Quishan basin. Wow.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s insane.

JOE ROGAN: F*ing A man. Dinosaur eggs that are filled with. Look at that. Crystals.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Beautiful. It looks like a geode.

JOE ROGAN: Mm.

PAUL ROSOLIE: It’s a dinosaur egg. Nuts. That’s insane.

JOE ROGAN: Nuts.

PAUL ROSOLIE: That’s wild.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, the world’s a wild place, my brother.

PAUL ROSOLIE: The world’s a really wild place.

JOE ROGAN: You know more than anybody.

Twenty Years of Conservation Work

PAUL ROSOLIE: Well, that’s what I’ve been. I’ve been trying to see as much of it as I can and save as much of it as I can.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’m glad you’re out there and I’m glad you’re still alive because you freak me out every now and then when you send me messages. “Don’t worry about your safety.” And “I need someone to train me to use a gun.” I’m like, oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, we’re dealing with the narco people. Oh, Jesus Christ.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Well, we’re closer than we ever have been. Thank you for how much you’ve been able to help us get that message out. This book is 20 years of the wildest shit. It’s the story of Jane and how we.

JOE ROGAN: I went.

PAUL ROSOLIE: How I met JJ, how we found the anacondas, all the. All the. Everything that led to this. I mean, how, how. I mean, you talked about when you started out. I mean, just being a kid and you have a dream and. I mean, I went to the Amazon. I just wanted to see the Amazon. That was. That was the dream.

I never in a million years imagined that I’d get to go on these adventures. See these animals. And then now that we’re on the cusp of protecting an entire river, I mean, the wildest dreams that me as a kid had couldn’t even touch this. And so it’s a fun book to be sharing with you.

JOE ROGAN: F*ing dope. My brother. And the book is “Jungle Keeper: What it Takes to Change the World.” Paul Rosolie. Available now.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Thank you. My brother in there. Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Always great to see you.

PAUL ROSOLIE: The best.

JOE ROGAN: Do it again. Thank you, brother.

PAUL ROSOLIE: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: All right, bye everybody.

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