Taken from JRE #2013 w/Paul Rosolie:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5NM14BIsV9yVzq7keqHijN?si=52004796ee244734

The Jerogan Experience I was very lost and very alone and I was like on like day 6 or something of being lost I don't remember No it wasn't that long I was solo But I was lost and I was scared and I was in a hammock How did you get lost?

Well as soon as you leave the river Like you could literally walk 15 feet and then be like, I'm just gonna come right back.

And the jungle will like, blare with you.

So you just like, think you know what you're doing.

Just last week I took people, I wanted to cross from 1 trail to another trail and I was like, I'm a guide, I can do this.

And I came back out on the same trail like a half hour later and I was like, yep, that's what I meant to do, let's go.

Because actually, apparently some of the iron content in some of the saps in the trees pulls the needle.

You know, it's like you really just, you have to learn your bushcraft.

You have to learn how to navigate in the jungle.

And it's like, which is pretty much, you have to get just amazing at dead reckoning and remembering your course.

Because it's so dense that like, we play with people.

We go, see if you can go from here to there.

So I had gone out on this solo, gotten lost, gotten scared, and then been like, oh shit, what if I just into the wilded myself?

What if now I'm gonna be the next kid that went and died in the Amazon.

I slept in the hammock, but this is as I was learning, so I didn't realize that the hammock that I had bought had a mosquito net on top, but the back was not mosquito-proof, so they could stick through.

So my back was being destroyed by mosquitoes as I'm trying to sleep, and a couple of nights of that and so I finally fall asleep and I wake up in the middle of the night and I hear breathing right next to my face, and I like wanted to turn my headlamp on, and I just hear like, Rrrrr, right here.

I was like 6 inches away from a jaguar's face.

And she just came in, she wanted to see what that was.

She was like, you're not gonna move That's what you're not gonna do.

She growled like right into my ear and then That one's cute that's a cute picture That's a cute Jack

Wow, and they vary in in colors and the the spots and everything right Like some of them are much darker.

Yeah, well I mean, yeah, actually somebody recently was like, where do you see panthers?

And I went on this whole thing of like, you know, a leopard or a jaguar, just like you can have albinos, you have a melanistic 1.

So like people would call that a panther, but a panther's not a real, there's no animal that's a panther.

It's like it's a, it's just another name for it.

Yeah, in South India they have the black leopards, which are stunning.

And so, Humans don't get taken out by them

I can only really speak for our region of the Amazon, but there's I haven't even heard a story about it Really?

No 1 like no 1 our Jags are just we have like record numbers of Jags Like I think they're listed as near threatened and we have like some of the strongest remaining jaguar populations in the world.

And some people go their whole lives without seeing them.

Well, because people walk off into the jungle and they don't realize people People it's so funny living in the wild and seeing people show up there and it's like people come and they're like they smell like shampoo and cologne and Bugspray and deodorant and they're just like if to an animal that has such better senses than we do, they might as well just have like sirens on them.

And like you are this shiny, glittering fog horn of attention in the jungle, and like every animal's going to run away from you.

And so people are always like, how come you go out and you see so much stuff?

And it's like, I only shower in the river.

Like, I'm out there for weeks and it's like I'm not going and shampooing my hair.

It's like, and so to these animals, they know when you're coming.

Like a jag is just gonna be like, oh, there's a human there.

Do you wash with soap when you wash in the river?

You have to keep your skin clean or else you'll just get infections.

But for the most part, my clothing, everything, I don't use anything that's scented because of that, because I wanna be out there and just blend in.

And that's whether I'm out in the field with elephants or whether you're out in Africa or India or whether you're in the Amazon.

And so like not that long ago, I was checking a camera trap and I heard, I thought it was a, we had students at our research station at the time and I heard like the leaves going like ch-ch-ch and it was like September so the jungle was dry and I turned around and I was gonna scare this person because I was gonna be like, who walks that loud in the jungle?

Like have you never, You have no respect and I turned around with my finger up and this jag walked right by me on the trail and just went, what's up?

And just kept walking and I was like, a finger up and I was like, okay.

But I took that as good because at least I was, my scent trail was so that he didn't know I was there.

I could see it on his face, he didn't care.

He was like, but I mean, he was 6 feet away.

He just walked by me and was like, yo, what's up?

They don't think of you as food, so they just keep moving.

No, and I think they're, you know, with big cats, the mothers teach the young how to hunt.

And I think they're so oriented, like with tigers, they're so oriented on horizontal.

And it's like, when they see a vertical animal walking by, I think they're like, first of all, I don't know what this is.

You've got to be desperate to take that risk.

I don't think that I don't think that they lions are a different story But but with Jags with Tigers with leopards I don't I've never ever felt any fear being around a jaguar, like any fear.

I don't even take pictures of them, I just enjoy it.

If I'm with people, I let them take pictures, but I will not lift my camera for a jag.

I don't want to sit there finally seeing 1 and then put another screen in front of my face.

You shine your headlamp into the night, and then when things look back at you, you got to wonder what it is.

Well, when there's 2 eyes in the front, you know, it's better.

But sometimes the deer, but then the jags do this thing where they move their head like this.

They'll do this little side to side thing.

The deer, they'll just blink at you, they'll just blink.

And so you start learning the eye shines, you start learning the, you know, because then you can be out there at night and you look at something and people are like, oh shit, dude, it's a jag, and it's like, no, it's a deer.

saying that the uncontacted tribe were speaking in monkey calls, what

So JJ's dad used to tell us, he said, if you're ever out in the forest and something doesn't sound right, he was like, get out of there.

And he was like, because they will use the Tindamoo calls, like the undulated Tindamoo is like, But like, we know what that sounds like, but we also know what it doesn't sound like.

And so like every now and then you'll hear 1 that's, you know, different.

And like we all get freaked out, because we're like, that's how we do it.

Like if there was a bunch of tourists right there and JJ wanted me to come over and like chill with him and we wanted to go hang, he would just do that and get my attention.

And like I know that it's not a tenement, I know it's JJ.

And so it's like they've taken that to a whole nother level where they can communicate.

And so there was a group of guys who was upriver, and they got surrounded.

They heard monkey calls coming from different directions.

And they realized that they were completely surrounded.

At least 1 of the guys who was telling it to me, he got in the water and crawled like a turtle and escaped.

And then the tribe showed up and then there was this whole showdown where they actually shot 1 of the community members.

And then 1 of the guys who knows some of their language was saying that they, It looked like they were mad with the guy that shot the guy they were mad with him Like they're like, why did you do that now?

There's gonna be retaliation like why did you shoot him?

And like there was like a whole discussion happening while these people were like huddled in the stream waiting to see if they got killed too So it's like I don't really on you know, so you get these loggers going in there, it's like, yeah, we'll pay you to protect the rainforest.

You don't have to be going into these areas that are that dangerous.

So yeah, so at this point now though, through all of this though, we've established jungle keepers.

And if we can do that, we'll basically be helping to establish 1 of the largest protected areas in the Amazon rain forest, which will encompass these uncontacted people.

And they can stay uncontacted and they can stay safe and do whatever they want to do in the jungle, guarding the secret pyramids and the giant ground sloths or whatever the hell it is that they do.

Now, how many uncontacted tribes are they aware of?

I think there's like over 100 different groups across the Amazon.

There's also varying degrees of, and the other thing is the conversation so often gets turned to like they're, you know, violent and that they're people to live out in the jungle.

And I have no idea how they do it either because you know at night we need headlamps.

They're able to make fire in the jungle at night, every day.

If I gave you an entire book of matches, me and you, we sat down right now in the jungle, I was like, okay cool, you got a machete and a book of matches, first 1 to make fire wins.

So how are they, what's their, are they doing bow drill?

We don't know how they do that, we don't know how they stay infection free, we don't know what they do with their old people, we never see old people, We never really see children.

And so like they move around and they, we see like groups of men on beaches.

We see like that picture, that aerial picture where you see like a family group out that's in turtle season where you have turtles laying their eggs on the beaches and the tribes will come out because that's easy food.

You just pick up turtle eggs and eat them.

But there's so much that we don't know about their lifestyle.

Just, you know, if you leave them alone, then they won't kill you.

If you, you know, then people go, oh, they're Stone Age tribes.

And it's like, well, they're not stony tribes because they're alive right now.

And you couldn't live out in the jungle, but they can.

So it's like there's elements of their botanical knowledge, their medicinal knowledge, their creation myths, their view of history.

I mean, they're coming at reality from a whole different perspective than we are.

And there's really no way to get, does anyone speak their language?

It's not universal, and there was someone in our region who like captured a child from the uncontacted, raised him in a very remote community, and people have tried, anthropologists have tried, they've been like, hey, so what was it like when you grew up?

Like no one's been able to get any information out of him

Does he not remember does he just not want to talk about it?

I don't know That's that's that's the these are there's all there's all these underlying stories Oh, man, yeah, that's just there's just then last year at some loggers went to a place they shouldn't have gone and they got whacked.

And sort of like the WhatsApp underground in Peru, like everyone was sending each other pictures because 1 of the cops sent to his family a picture of what the bodies looked like on day 6, laying on the beach with arrows in them and shit.

It was like, it makes you stay in bed at night.

yeah, it's just, it's a complicated topic because there's people that want to contact them.

There's people that want to leave them alone.

And then of course, there's missionaries that are like, they need the Bible.

yeah, there's only so much time and yeah Hollywood fuckery

The book was fantastic and that guy was out of his mind out of his mind out of his mind.

Yeah Percy Fawcett, yeah, Percy Fawcett, But like the fact that he could go on those expeditions and not get infected.

I've been brutally like, let me show you, I'll show you this picture.

I don't think there's any way of pulling this up, but like, oh my God.

Like The jungle just gets into your skin.

It started mosquito bites and then I would scratch and you don't realize you're spreading it with your fingernails.

You Go like this and shit and son I mean I almost died from that like that was but I was staying in the jungle to like take care of an anteater But it's like

Like if you're in the jungle to use antibiotics go home You just go home.

I have to go home at that point I got to I remember I got to JFK and the the guy, you know, like look down my passport he goes, yeah, what were you doing in Peru?

And then he looked up at me and he goes, buddy, what the fuck?

And I was like, I'm just trying to get, he like stamped it, he was like, go, go, go, go, go.

you could have been infected with some crazy plague.

Could have had like monkey Ebola, like It looked bad.

But for Percy Fawcett to not, they would say other people would be dying.

There was somebody, I think the guy's name was Murray.

He'd already been out with Shackleton, so he was like, I'm a real explorer.

And he lasted, he didn't last any time with Fawcett.

Because Percy Fawcett was just like, you can't keep up, go die.

So my question is, did he go out and eventually get killed?

Or did he eventually go out and find the tribe that made him their king?

Yeah, no 1 really knows what happened to him.

And they said in that book that over a hundred people have died looking for him since he left.

Because then the other expeditions that have gone out, all of those have died too.


Speaker 0: The Jerogan Experience I was very lost and very alone and I was like on like day 6 or something of being lost I don't remember No it wasn't that long I was solo But I was lost and I was scared and I was in a hammock How did you get lost? Well as soon as you leave the river Like you could literally walk 15 feet and then be like, I'm just gonna come right back. And the jungle will like, blare with you. You will, because it's all green. So you just like, think you know what you're doing.

Just last week I took people, I wanted to cross from 1 trail to another trail and I was like, I'm a guide, I can do this. And I came back out on the same trail like a half hour later and I was like, yep, that's what I meant to do, let's go. Like, happens to JJ all the time. Really? You cannot find your way in the jungle.

Do you

Speaker 1: use a compass?

Speaker 0: Don't use a compass. Why not? Because actually, apparently some of the iron content in some of the saps in the trees pulls the needle. It doesn't work really well.

Speaker 1: Even the trees are trying

Speaker 0: to trick you. Oh my God. GPSes run out of batteries. You know, it's like you really just, you have to learn your bushcraft. You have to learn how to navigate in the jungle.

And it's like, which is pretty much, you have to get just amazing at dead reckoning and remembering your course. Because it's so dense that like, we play with people. We go, see if you can go from here to there. It's like, they can't. They can't go there.

They can't do that. As soon as you leave the river. So I had gone out on this solo, gotten lost, gotten scared, and then been like, oh shit, what if I just into the wilded myself? What if now I'm gonna be the next kid that went and died in the Amazon. I slept in the hammock, but this is as I was learning, so I didn't realize that the hammock that I had bought had a mosquito net on top, but the back was not mosquito-proof, so they could stick through.

So my back was being destroyed by mosquitoes as I'm trying to sleep, and a couple of nights of that and so I finally fall asleep and I wake up in the middle of the night and I hear breathing right next to my face, and I like wanted to turn my headlamp on, and I just hear like, Rrrrr, right here. Like I could feel her breath. I was like 6 inches away from a jaguar's face. And she just like, Whooo, whooo, whooo. And then left.

And she just came in, she wanted to see what that was. She was like, you're not gonna move That's what you're not gonna do. She growled like right into my ear and then That one's cute that's a cute picture That's a cute Jack

Speaker 1: Wow, and they vary in in colors and the the spots and everything right Like some of them are much darker.

Speaker 0: Yeah, well I mean, yeah, actually somebody recently was like, where do you see panthers? And I went on this whole thing of like, you know, a leopard or a jaguar, just like you can have albinos, you have a melanistic 1. Yeah. Wow. So like people would call that a panther, but a panther's not a real, there's no animal that's a panther.

It's like a Kleenex. It's like it's a, it's just another name for it.

Speaker 1: That is so beautiful.

Speaker 0: Black jag.

Speaker 1: Look at that thing. Yeah. Oh my God, that's beautiful.

Speaker 0: Yeah, in South India they have the black leopards, which are stunning.

Speaker 1: What an amazing looking animal.

Speaker 0: Look at the muscles.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an amazing killing machine. And so, Humans don't get taken out by them

Speaker 0: I can only really speak for our region of the Amazon, but there's I haven't even heard a story about it Really? No 1 like no 1 our Jags are just we have like record numbers of Jags Like I think they're listed as near threatened and we have like some of the strongest remaining jaguar populations in the world. It's incredible.

Speaker 1: And you barely see them.

Speaker 0: We barely see them. The last 1 I saw was 2 years ago. And some people go their whole lives without seeing them.

Speaker 1: Really? Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 0: yeah, yeah. Well, because people walk off into the jungle and they don't realize people People it's so funny living in the wild and seeing people show up there and it's like people come and they're like they smell like shampoo and cologne and Bugspray and deodorant and they're just like if to an animal that has such better senses than we do, they might as well just have like sirens on them. And like you are this shiny, glittering fog horn of attention in the jungle, and like every animal's going to run away from you. And so people are always like, how come you go out and you see so much stuff? And it's like, I only shower in the river.

I live out in the jungle. I smell like they do. Like, I'm out there for weeks and it's like I'm not going and shampooing my hair. It's like, and so to these animals, they know when you're coming. Like a jag is just gonna be like, oh, there's a human there.

Speaker 1: Do you wash with soap when you wash in the river?

Speaker 0: I do, I do use a biodegradable soap. You have to keep your skin clean or else you'll just get infections. But for the most part, my clothing, everything, I don't use anything that's scented because of that, because I wanna be out there and just blend in. And that's whether I'm out in the field with elephants or whether you're out in Africa or India or whether you're in the Amazon. I want to be sort of like included.

I want to blend in. And so like not that long ago, I was checking a camera trap and I heard, I thought it was a, we had students at our research station at the time and I heard like the leaves going like ch-ch-ch and it was like September so the jungle was dry and I turned around and I was gonna scare this person because I was gonna be like, who walks that loud in the jungle? Like have you never, You have no respect and I turned around with my finger up and this jag walked right by me on the trail and just went, what's up? And just kept walking and I was like, a finger up and I was like, okay. Oh Lord.

But I took that as good because at least I was, my scent trail was so that he didn't know I was there. I could see it on his face, he didn't care. He was like, but I mean, he was 6 feet away. He didn't even break a stride. He just walked by me and was like, yo, what's up?

Speaker 1: They don't think of you as food, so they just keep moving.

Speaker 0: No, and I think they're, you know, with big cats, the mothers teach the young how to hunt. And I think they're so oriented, like with tigers, they're so oriented on horizontal. Get the neck from underneath. Break the neck from up top. And it's like, when they see a vertical animal walking by, I think they're like, first of all, I don't know what this is.

Second of all, it smells weird. Third of all, where do I even? You've got to be desperate to take that risk. Mmm. I don't think that I don't think that they lions are a different story But but with Jags with Tigers with leopards I don't I've never ever felt any fear being around a jaguar, like any fear.

I don't even take pictures of them, I just enjoy it. Wow. I let other people take pictures. If I'm with people, I let them take pictures, but I will not lift my camera for a jag. I'll just stand there

Speaker 1: and just. Just take it in? Yeah.

Speaker 0: You get to see them so rarely. I don't want to sit there finally seeing 1 and then put another screen in front of my face.

Speaker 1: Right.

Speaker 0: Look through it through some glass. Whoa. Yeah, that's our camera

Speaker 1: traps. That's from yours? Wow, look at that thing. That is so majestic. What an amazing animal.

Oh, yeah. Those glowing eyes.

Speaker 0: Well, that's the crazy thing. You shine your headlamp into the night, and then when things look back at you, you got to wonder what it is. It's like...

Speaker 1: Well, when there's 2 eyes in the front, you know, it's better. There's 2 eyes in

Speaker 0: the front, yeah. But sometimes the deer, but then the jags do this thing where they move their head like this. They try and see around your headlamp. They'll do this little side to side thing. The deer, they'll just blink at you, they'll just blink.

And so you start learning the eye shines, you start learning the, you know, because then you can be out there at night and you look at something and people are like, oh shit, dude, it's a jag, and it's like, no, it's a deer. When you were

Speaker 1: saying that the uncontacted tribe were speaking in monkey calls, what

Speaker 0: are they doing? So JJ's dad used to tell us, he said, if you're ever out in the forest and something doesn't sound right, he was like, get out of there. And he was like, because they will use the Tindamoo calls, like the undulated Tindamoo is like, But like, we know what that sounds like, but we also know what it doesn't sound like. And so like every now and then you'll hear 1 that's, you know, different. And like we all get freaked out, because we're like, that's how we do it.

That's how JJ taught me to do it. Like if there was a bunch of tourists right there and JJ wanted me to come over and like chill with him and we wanted to go hang, he would just do that and get my attention. And like I know that it's not a tenement, I know it's JJ. And so it's like they've taken that to a whole nother level where they can communicate. And so there was a group of guys who was upriver, and they got surrounded.

They heard monkey calls coming from different directions. And they realized that they were completely surrounded. At least 1 of the guys who was telling it to me, he got in the water and crawled like a turtle and escaped. And then the tribe showed up and then there was this whole showdown where they actually shot 1 of the community members. And then 1 of the guys who knows some of their language was saying that they, It looked like they were mad with the guy that shot the guy they were mad with him Like they're like, why did you do that now?

There's gonna be retaliation like why did you shoot him? And like there was like a whole discussion happening while these people were like huddled in the stream waiting to see if they got killed too So it's like I don't really on you know, so you get these loggers going in there, it's like, yeah, we'll pay you to protect the rainforest. I'm like, you don't have to do this. You don't have to be going into these areas that are that dangerous. So yeah, so at this point now though, through all of this though, we've established jungle keepers.

We have 50,000 acres. We're trying to do 300,000 acres. And if we can do that, we'll basically be helping to establish 1 of the largest protected areas in the Amazon rain forest, which will encompass these uncontacted people. And they can stay uncontacted and they can stay safe and do whatever they want to do in the jungle, guarding the secret pyramids and the giant ground sloths or whatever the hell it is that they do. But we're close.

Speaker 1: Now, how many uncontacted tribes are they aware of?

Speaker 0: I think there's like over 100 different groups across the Amazon. There's also varying degrees of, and the other thing is the conversation so often gets turned to like they're, you know, violent and that they're people to live out in the jungle. And I have no idea how they do it either because you know at night we need headlamps. We don't have night vision. All the animals have night vision.

So it's like what do they do that night? They're able to make fire in the jungle at night, every day. If I gave you an entire book of matches, me and you, we sat down right now in the jungle, I was like, okay cool, you got a machete and a book of matches, first 1 to make fire wins. We couldn't do it. It's wet, everything is wet.

So how are they, what's their, are they doing bow drill? Are they doing, what are they doing? So like, we don't really know, no. We don't know how they do that, we don't know how they stay infection free, we don't know what they do with their old people, we never see old people, We never really see children. And so like they move around and they, we see like groups of men on beaches.

We see like that picture, that aerial picture where you see like a family group out that's in turtle season where you have turtles laying their eggs on the beaches and the tribes will come out because that's easy food. You just pick up turtle eggs and eat them. But there's so much that we don't know about their lifestyle. And people get so many things wrong. Just, you know, if you leave them alone, then they won't kill you.

If you, you know, then people go, oh, they're Stone Age tribes. And it's like, well, they're not stony tribes because they're alive right now. And you couldn't live out in the jungle, but they can. So it's like there's elements of their botanical knowledge, their medicinal knowledge, their creation myths, their view of history. I mean, they're coming at reality from a whole different perspective than we are.

Wow.

Speaker 1: And there's really no way to get, does anyone speak their language? Do we know what language they all speak? Is it universal? Do they have different languages?

Speaker 0: It's not universal, and there was someone in our region who like captured a child from the uncontacted, raised him in a very remote community, and people have tried, anthropologists have tried, they've been like, hey, so what was it like when you grew up? And it's like, it's dark. He's just like, I don't remember. Like no one's been able to get any information out of him

Speaker 1: How old was he when they captured

Speaker 0: I think like 6 like under 10 for sure

Speaker 1: Does he not remember does he just not want to talk about it?

Speaker 0: I don't know That's that's that's the these are there's all there's all these underlying stories Oh, man, yeah, that's just there's just then last year at some loggers went to a place they shouldn't have gone and they got whacked. And sort of like the WhatsApp underground in Peru, like everyone was sending each other pictures because 1 of the cops sent to his family a picture of what the bodies looked like on day 6, laying on the beach with arrows in them and shit. And it was like, oh my God. It was like, it makes you stay in bed at night. You're just like, I am not going out.

Speaker 1: Jesus. But I mean,

Speaker 0: yeah, it's just, it's a complicated topic because there's people that want to contact them. There's people that want to leave them alone. And then of course, there's missionaries that are like, they need the Bible.

Speaker 1: What did you think about Lost City of Z?

Speaker 0: I loved the book. I wanted more from the movie Course,

Speaker 1: yeah, there's only so much time and yeah Hollywood fuckery

Speaker 0: The book was fantastic and that guy was out of his mind out of his mind out of his mind. Yeah Percy Fawcett, yeah, Percy Fawcett, But like the fact that he could go on those expeditions and not get infected. I've been brutally like, let me show you, I'll show you this picture. I don't think there's any way of pulling this up, but like, oh my God. Like The jungle just gets into your skin.

Speaker 1: What is that on your face?

Speaker 0: MRSA infection. It started mosquito bites and then I would scratch and you don't realize you're spreading it with your fingernails. You Go like this and shit and son I mean I almost died from that like that was but I was staying in the jungle to like take care of an anteater But it's like

Speaker 1: how did you get free of that? Like if you're in the jungle to use antibiotics go home You just go home.

Speaker 0: I have to go home at that point I got to I remember I got to JFK and the the guy, you know, like look down my passport he goes, yeah, what were you doing in Peru? And then he looked up at me and he goes, buddy, what the fuck? And I was like, I'm just trying to get, he like stamped it, he was like, go, go, go, go, go. He's like, go, go to the doctor. I can't believe they let me through.

Right,

Speaker 1: you could have been infected with some crazy plague.

Speaker 0: Could have had like monkey Ebola, like It looked bad. And I spent days in the hospital. It was really, really bad. But for Percy Fawcett to not, they would say other people would be dying. There was somebody, I think the guy's name was Murray.

He came from the Shackleton expedition. He'd already been out with Shackleton, so he was like, I'm a real explorer. And he lasted, he didn't last any time with Fawcett. Because Percy Fawcett was just like, you can't keep up, go die. You can go die with the mules.

Like he just wouldn't stop. So my question is, did he go out and eventually get killed? Or did he eventually go out and find the tribe that made him their king? There's no knowledge. There's no knowledge of it.

Speaker 1: Yeah, no 1 really knows what happened to him.

Speaker 0: And they said in that book that over a hundred people have died looking for him since he left. Because then the other expeditions that have gone out, all of those have died too.

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Dangers of the Amazon and Uncontacted Tribes