An 18-year-old bought a one-way ticket to the Amazon

Lex Fridman introduces Paul Rosolie as a conservationist, explorer, author, filmmaker, and "real life Tarzan," the founder of Junglekeepers, which protects more than 50,000 acres of threatened Amazon habitat. Fridman calls him one of the most incredible people he has met and hopes to walk the jungle with him one day. The conversation starts in 2006, when Rosolie was 18, fled New York, and flew to Peru. That leap, Fridman notes, has not really ended.

The pull started at three: dinosaurs, wildlife documentaries, Steve Irwin. Rosolie's parents used to joke about nature versus nurture; their move was to nurture the nature. He was the kid who followed creeks to see where they went, who wanted turtles and snakes, and who hated school. He is dyslexic, undiagnosed at the time, and did not read until he was about 10. In first grade a multiplication sheet broke him. He ran out of the classroom and into the nearest woods, because that was the place that felt safe.

By high school the academic path was clearly not working. His parents gave him a rare answer: take the GED, leave after tenth grade, you will go to college, but first go do something you love. He saved for a ticket to the Amazon and met indigenous men who opened the forest. Walking in, he says, was the first scene of *Jurassic Park*: giant trees, leafcutter ants in real life, the feeling that the movie had just started. That, he tells Fridman, was when he "came online."

Asked to name what felt like home, Rosolie will not isolate streams or animals. Any forest draws him, whether upstate New York, India, or Borneo. The Amazon is all of that turned up until everything is superlative. There are more plants and animals there than anywhere else on Earth, he says, not only now but in the entire fossil record. The meeting of the Andes and the Amazon lowlands is, terrestrially, "the greatest library of life that has ever existed."

Half of that life lives in the canopy, a hundred feet up, on branches humans barely reach. Things without names walk around up there. Color, diversity, thousand-year-old trees, and a sense of natural majesty overwhelm the visitor. The men who first took him in opened a door and asked how far he wanted to go down the rabbit hole.

When he is unsure of a decision he still asks WWSD: What Would Steve Do. Fridman wants to know why that is a good heuristic for a life. Rosolie's answer is that almost everything the public saw from Steve Irwin was positive. Bitten by a reticulated python, he smiled. Destroyed in the press for feeding a crocodile with his son nearby, he tried to explain why people had to love the animal. The core was love, protection, and what Rosolie calls an insatiable madness for wildlife. An abstract moral rule is hard to run in a split second. A specific person's reaction is not.

Fridman reads the opening of Rosolie's book *Mother of God*. Late at night in a palm-thatched hut on the Tambopata River, two wild-boar heads sizzle in embers, monkey skulls hang in a basket, termites have almost eaten the table, and "the song of a million insects and frogs filled the night." Before he died, Santiago Durand told Rosolie a secret about a hidden place in the jungle. That line about a million songs is what hit Fridman. What is it like, he asks, to sit talking while so many living things press in from the dark?

Every night in the jungle, Rosolie says, you live with the knowledge that millions of heartbeats are out there. Past roads, telephone poles, and hospitals, there is no park fence and no rescue helicopter. Snakes, jaguars, frogs, and insects move through swamps and branches. He and his team put on headlamps and fall to their knees at what they see. Insects, frogs, and some night birds make noise. A great deal of the rest evolved to be silent and invisible. The racket you hear is only a fraction of the scene.

Another line from the book: life is a temporary moment of stasis in the churning, recycling death march that is the Amazon, sometimes called the greatest natural battlefield on Earth. In any acre, more things are eating other things than anywhere else. Walk a swamp and you get tarantulas on the water, frogs in the trees, tadpoles waiting to drop, fish waiting to eat them, birds above. The brain cannot process it. Fridman presses on the scale: we write libraries about the millions dead in World War II, yet billions of organisms are being killed around you. Does that change how you see life?

A wildebeest eaten alive by lions makes people question God. In the Amazon those processes become almost a religion for him, a reminder of how temporary a person is. Sweat leaves the skin, rises into the canopy, joins cloud, falls as afternoon rain, and you drink the river. Werner Herzog called it overwhelming and collective murder. Rosolie treats it as part of the freak show of the Amazonian night. Bullet ants are fair play: you get nailed, you say well done, you go to bed with a pile of Tylenol. Out there, he says, you really are part of nature, which is what makes it refreshing.

A family from the Ese-Eja community of Infierno took him in. They invited him on the annual hunting trip: four men in boxers in a motor canoe, going past the places that have names. When the motor breaks, argument dies with it. Religion, politics, and opinion are all debatable in a human world. On that river the sentence is simple: if we do not figure something out, the water will rise and take the boat. Nobody argues. Everyone is suddenly united against a natural fact. That, he says, is a state where he feels very at home. The Amazon is also more efficient than most places at swallowing you.

Fridman brings up Francisco de Orellana, who in 1541 and 1542 led an expedition the length of the Amazon after coming down the Andes and building craft in the headwaters. When the boat failed they rebuilt it. At the mouth, navigating by the stars, they made something seaworthy enough to reach Spain. Orellana's reports of tribes of women, large settlements, and farms of corralled river turtles are why the basin has the name it has. Fridman calls the man a gangster. Rosolie agrees there are good books on him. The lesson he takes is the default setting of every expedition since: nobody is coming to rescue you. If the boat dies, you rebuild it.

Stories like Orellana's and Shackleton's are the inner game when a river rises 20 feet, washes the tent away, and you crawl out with a machete and a headlamp, no bag, no food. The next six days to town will be hell: ants, mosquitoes, sleeping on the ground. The question becomes whether you are even a percentage as tough as the people you have read about. At 14 or 15 there was ego in it, a hunting knife and a dog in the Catskills, one match, a steak. In the Amazon you get stripped so completely that, as he puts it, you watch the atheism leave everyone's body when they think they are about to die. Lost in a swamp for days, sure this was it, there was no ego, only hope, prayer, and whatever survival knowledge he could summon. Walk the line between adventure and tragedy without going over, and it can feel almost blissful.

He does not want to die. He loves the people in his life and has a lot left to do. Every time he has been certain death was coming, though, he has been very calm: if this is how the movie goes, this is how it goes. The acceptance reassures him.

Fridman asks what lessons sit in *Grizzly Man* and *Into the Wild*. Was Rosolie ever afraid he would become one of those stories? Yes. In *Mother of God* he wrote that he almost *Into the Wild*-ed himself: so lost, so destroyed, that he thought this would be the next tale of an idiot kid from New York who went to the Amazon thinking he was Percy Fawcett and vanished. Vanish out there and the body is gone in a couple of days. A dead animal on a trail is a pecking order of black vultures, yellow-headed vultures, king vultures, dung beetles, and maggots. You cannot even leave chicken out until morning.

He loves Herzog, especially *Burden of Dreams*, shot in the Amazon not far from where he works. The extras hired as natives look like the men he hangs out with. Herzog trying to haul a steamboat over a mountain is pure madness, and you can watch the jungle grind him down. During COVID, living in the forest with no support, Rosolie tied up a boat in rain that felt as if the universe were trying to rip the Earth in half. He woke every two hours, barefoot in golf-ball rain, to check it. In the morning he went to make coffee; 15 minutes of heavy rain filled the boat and sank it. He was stuck upriver with no boat. No matter how hard you try, he says, the jungle's message is: listen, you are nothing. Herzog threw himself into that, which is why the film is brilliant. The line about a land God, if he exists, created in anger is, for Rosolie, Herzog embracing a darkness that ayahuasca also opens, because the brew takes you into the heart of the jungle.

Then the penguin. In an Antarctic film Herzog narrates that a bird marching inland, away from the ocean, is deranged, that it has lost its mind. Rosolie takes offense. How do you know it is not a brave explorer? Penguins attach hard. Maybe the mate went that way. We assume every animal we meet is the average of the bell curve, but there are special animals the way there are special humans. Fridman found Herzog's monologue brilliantly dark and comic, and probably irrelevant to penguin biology. Rosolie's larger frustration is people who have never left pavement asking whether animals can show compassion, then gasping when one animal helps another. Go ask Jane Goodall. Go ask anyone who works with animals daily. The uncomfortable part is that people are still surprised animals are not programmed automatons.

Goodall spoke highly of his book and is one of the mentors he lists. Her field work, done young, broke the rules: she named her subjects, which everyone said you should not do, and she refused the charge of anthropomorphism. They show love, compassion, hate, and fear, she said, and she smashed through that wall. Rosolie wonders the same thing with a praying mantis on his hand or a spider choosing a web site: that is a calculation. Walking in the jungle not long ago, a dove landed inches from his face, panting. An ornate hawk-eagle came in ten feet away, scowled, raised its head feathers, and left. The dove, he felt, said thanks and flew the other way. It had used him as a shield. Fridman offers a frame Rosolie likes: among animals there is a Mike Tyson and an Albert Einstein, a New Yorker and a Midwesterner. An angry bear might just be the asshole New Yorker. You cannot project a species average onto the individual in front of you.

JJ, he says, is the most skilled jungle man he has ever seen, and he knows a lot of hard men in the region. Libraries of information sit in that skull. Rosolie has watched him cure with medicinal plants what Western doctors could not, and navigate without stars or any marker a visitor can see. It is like watching elephants decide, with no audible sound, that the herd is going this way. JJ will stop and say a herd of peccary is coming. Based on what? Just wait. The gift on top of a barefoot Amazon childhood is fluent English, so tourists, scientists, and reporters can hear him. He is good on camera because he does not care about cameras.

A few months before the taping they were walking up a stream. Rosolie spotted jaguar tracks. JJ told him to look harder: the toes were deeper than the back of the print, the prints were by the water, so the cat had been leaning to drink. Then look behind you. Fresh scat, butterflies on it, an older pile beside it. Look up: three vultures. The kill is nearby; the jaguar has been returning to drink while it feeds; it is within 30 feet. Rosolie had seen impressions in the sand. JJ had drawn what felt like nineteen conclusions. It was Sherlock Holmes reconstructing a crime scene. When JJ talks about animals he talks about each species as a person: this jaguar never likes to let you see her; she was watching monkeys, did not notice him, then felt embarrassed and left. He will tell you a harpy eagle never does that. Once JJ caught a beautiful tiger catfish and the boat was excited to eat it. Rosolie felt bad watching it gasp, threw it back, and raked sand to fake an escape trail. JJ looked and said he hated him. That is not how a fish leaves. He knew the track of a fleeing fish. Rosolie had to promise another one.

Santiago Durand was JJ's father. He had been a policeman and, as a teenager, worked the boats that supplied Puerto Maldonado before the gold-mining town grew, pulling canoes up the Tambopata toward Puno, where mules came down from the mountains, because there were no motors yet. That labor made him physically terrifying. Rosolie met him in his eighties, still living in the jungle alone. He had seen an anaconda eat a tapir, a cow-sized mammal. He had met uncontacted people face to face. He killed an 11-foot electric eel, took a nerve from the back of its neck, cut his own forearm, buried the nerve there, wrapped the wound with a dead toad, and claimed it would give him strength for life. He stayed a jungle badass until he quietly leaned back at a barbecue and ceased to be alive. The whole region showed up. Knowing him, Rosolie says, still gives street credit.

The secret Durand told them was where to find the big ones, the Yacumama: go to the *boayo*, the place of boas, which they came to call the floating forest. Amazon creation myths have the anaconda coming down from the heavens and carving the rivers; look at a map and it looks like that, even the right color. The basin is feminine in its imagery, from the tribes of women to the kapok, Madre de la selva, the mother of the forest. Durand had helped unite scattered Ese-Eja groups and win government recognition; Infierno got its name because missionaries took so many arrows they called it hell. He had 19 children and adopted a twentieth, a Shining Path refugee who floated down the river. For Rosolie the secret was the hinge from weekend adventure to identity. Working those giant snakes brought attention, and the work stopped feeling like a retreat. It felt like something he was born to do.

Anacondas are the largest snakes on Earth by bulk. Reticulated pythons in Southeast Asia can be longer; anacondas are massive boas that give live birth. A baby is two feet long and thinner than a finger, food for toads, herons, and crocodiles. If she survives she eats her way up the food chain, fish then crocs then capybara, until a female at the end of life is 25 or 30 feet, 300 or 400 pounds, head bigger than a football, an apex predator of the rivers. Rosolie showed up asking where the anacondas were. Locals told him it is not like that: they are subterranean, in special swamps, and people kill them. After a hunting trip they brought Santiago a 12-foot snake, now a classic photo of Rosolie and JJ with it over their shoulders. Durand called it the smallest anaconda he had ever seen and sent them to the floating forest.

They reached it at night. One of JJ's brothers took a look and walked back. The ground shook; stars reflected underfoot. It was a lake with floating grass islands, treetops coming through the surface, very *Life of Pi*. Two-foot-wide smooth paths ran through the grass. JJ said the snakes were listening. Around 1:00 a.m. they saw it at the same time: a snake Rosolie figures was 25 feet, dead asleep, a 16-foot anaconda sprawled across her, both in starlight, the men standing on a lake in the middle of the Amazon. He felt the blood drain from JJ's face. At maybe 20 years old he thought if they could show people this they would be on the cover of *National Geographic* and could protect all the jungle they wanted. He jumped on her. Arms around the body, he could not touch his fingers. She did not turn and eat him. She reached the edge of the grass and plunged into the dark. He watched the stars vibrate, chose not to go headfirst into the black, and kept a hand on her as muscle and scale raced by until the tail slipped away. He lay panting, then turned to find JJ white, circuits blown. After that, he says, the parameters of reality they had assumed were a tiny fraction of what was out there.

How dangerous to humans? Not at all, he says, then adds that their cook's father-in-law was eaten by one. It happens, the way a bee sting sometimes kills; you need a very big, very hungry snake. The man who got eaten went for a midnight swim drunk, alone, in an Amazonian lake. Rosolie has handled or caught more than 80 anacondas in the field and not one has bitten him. They choose flight. No snake is "aggressive" in the chest-beating sense: a cobra standing up is saying do not make me do this. He started catching garter snakes and black rat snakes as a kid after watching Irwin, with a rule of a hundred non-venomous snakes before any venomous one. In Harriman State Park at 16 he shouldered aside a man about to beat a copperhead with a stick. In India, where he has lived on and off for five years, an 11-foot king cobra in a kitchen drank a bottle of water poured on her nose, then crawled off. Snakes, unlike birds, can be lifted, shown, and put back. For people carrying a symbolic hatred of them, that moment of calm contact is a teaching tool.

Catching them is another education. Early on, shirtless and barefoot, he grabbed a 16-footer behind the head; a coil pinned his wrists, another his neck, and he was 15 seconds from a collapsed ribcage when JJ unwrapped the tail. He is usually point man now. The tail man gets projectile musk and smells like anaconda for a week. The scientific stake is uglier: anacondas eat across a riparian food web that is absorbing mercury from artisanal gold mining. Miners cut and burn forest, wash sand, bind microscopic gold with mercury, and burn the mercury off. Vapor goes to cloud and rains into rivers. People in the region have birth defects. Rosolie went into the Pampas, a machine-gun-guarded mining frontier that looks like Mars, with ABC's Matt Gutman, via two Russian concession holders. A lawyer's father had been assassinated for standing up to miners. Someone warned him on Instagram; in June a motorcycle pulled up with a sterner warning. He does not treat conversion as a joke. Up the Malinowski in 2018, staying with miners everyone said would kill him, he watched the Peruvian navy dynamite a barge. He asked the miner what now. Get a new motor. Why not do something else? He showed photos of tourists, tarantulas, macaws. A year later the man had cut 17 palms with a chainsaw and built a lodge. Junglekeepers makes the same offer to loggers: $15 a day destroying ancient hardwoods that hold about 60% of the forest's carbon, or $35 a day, a uniform, insurance, and the job of protecting what they already know how to move through. Many of them love the jungle. They are not cartoon villains. They need a paycheck.

Fridman asks about Discovery's *Eaten Alive*, the stunt in which Rosolie would wear a suit and let an anaconda swallow him. In hindsight it was what happened after years of watching places crucial to his soul burned to ash, looking left and right in the middle of the Amazon, and finding no one. Rainforest destruction since the 1970s is a cliché. At 23, home no longer foreign, he was firing shots in the dark to get attention. In LA an executive spun a pen and said giant anacondas and mercury were not good enough. Someone asked what if they showed that anacondas can eat humans. He joked that the only feasible version was a suit with a breathing apparatus, the snake unhurt. They said kid, you're on.

They paid more than he had ever made; nobody pays you to be a conservationist. They changed voices, lines, and the message. He kissed a 19-foot snake, called her the queen of the Amazon, talked about her scars and her babies; the cut they used was him answering what would happen if she bit you. He did not see the film until the night before *Today*. The call sheet had said Expedition Amazon; it became *Eaten Alive*. A threatening call told him he was going on live television. Scientists wrote him off. PETA attacked. The American public was angry he did not actually get eaten. Jimmy Kimmel told him to have sex with a hippo next. Death threats filled his messages. He exiled himself to India for six months. He does not resent Discovery in a personal way; they also made a documentary claiming mermaids were real. He cites the scorpion and the frog. He was young, Hollywood spit him out, and that is on him. He would only go back with right of refusal. A committee, he says, never helped real art. Authenticity is the currency, which is why he thinks Joe Rogan and Fridman matter: the filter is off.

What actually changed the game was 2019. A month after filming a small documentary they drove past 70-foot flames. His phone overheated in two minutes, but he stood in the fire pulling animals out, screaming that this happened every day, crying on camera for the first time. He had usually refused to document in those moments. A month later, in New York, headlines said the Amazon was burning worse. He threw the video on Instagram at 8 p.m., phone at 100%, never having cursed on the account, and went to bed. In the morning the phone was on the floor at 2%, ringing. He became a talking head for three weeks. JJ told him to go get the support. Then Joe Rogan shared it. Even then, after 13 years in the game, the wave of "we care so much" produced nothing he could use. At the start of COVID he was going through a divorce, broke, ready to get a regular job. Dax Dasilva, who had started Lightspeed, called and said he was in. If Rosolie and JJ had been trying to hold a boulder off the forest, Dasilva put an arm out. Funding for rangers, converted loggers, 50,000 acres, with more coming. Social media, not a network, built that.

Jaguars, he says, are not the danger. Falling trees are. JJ and Santiago started sending him on solos: hammock, headlamp, three days of food, hooks, machete. One night a jaguar came up while he slept, panting, smelling him. He reached for the headlamp; the sound of his arm on fabric made her growl. He could feel her breath. He was not scared. If she had been hunting he would already be dead; she was curious. He had been lost, tired, devastated. After that he felt she had breathed fire into him. If you can be six inches from a jaguar's face, you can navigate out of a three-day swamp.

Survival manuals tell you not to try a fire in the Amazon; failure will break your spirit. You still want one, because wet and exposed you can get hypothermia. Nuts travel; ramen is nutritionally irrelevant; fish forces you to get good. JJ has cheat codes: pound certain roots into a stream and fish float up. He will slice a slug of callus off his own heel for bait, catch a six-inch fish, and in 15 minutes have a four-foot catfish. Locals start a reluctant fire with diesel in a tuna can. You are wet all the time. At 19, raising an orphaned giant anteater named Lulu, he picked up dengue, probably MRSA in a hospital, and went back upriver. Vision went black and white. He passed out. Pus glued his eyes and pillow together. He sat by a psychotic rainy-season river praying for a boat, wrote a goodbye letter to his parents, and finally caught a "death boat" of loggers: baby monkeys, toucan cages, crocodile pieces, anaconda and jaguar skins, flies on his face. A passenger on the plane got up and never came back. Immigration in New York looked at the passport, looked at his face, and told him to go. Five days of IV antibiotics. Doctors said he had gone very close. He did not know the trees then. Sangre de grado and ojé, *Ficus insipida*, murder infections the way crocodile blood is said to. If JJ had been there he would have been fine.

Lulu rode his back for weeks while he taught her to find ants. Her tongue was 11 inches long; she would fire it up his nose to wake him and hook claws into his clothes if he tried to get her off. Without all-day physical contact she threw tantrums and shredded things. On the scale from cockroach to elephant, he had not known giant anteaters had that kind of emotional need. Caring for her forced him to move through the jungle as an animal, the way living with a semi-wild elephant herd in India later did. A matriarch walked up to a woman none of them knew was pregnant, trunk to her stomach, and called the others over. Dharma, a tuskless male who belonged with neither cows nor bulls, threw tantrums at 2 a.m. when a tiger called, put a jeep on two wheels for bananas, and would play with Rosolie's hair while he journaled. Scientists measuring elephant intelligence with buckets and keys, he says, should try walking with them for three weeks. African elephant numbers are at about 2% of a few centuries ago; some calves are now born tuskless because poaching made tusks a death sentence. Humans, uniquely, have made a geological layer of themselves, the Anthropocene. He has seen the burning Amazon and still loves sharing ideas, travel, FaceTime. He celebrates what makes people human. Flying, not fire, is the invention that still stuns him when he looks down on clouds.

Asked for the most dangerous Amazon mammal on a solo, he disappoints: humans. Jaguars will not even let you see them. In India an old leopard or a musth elephant might take you; in the Amazon, almost nothing attacks. Uncontacted tribes are the exception people do not understand. They are modern people living naked in the forest now, not paleolithic leftovers. One camp says the rubber boom drove them deep and made them hyper-violent. Victor, who works with Junglekeepers, was coming downriver in 2004 with mahogany. He sent a husband and wife ahead to cook breakfast. A tribe came out screaming, arrows flying, no warning. An arrow pinned the man's leg. He told his wife to run. She looked back from the water and saw them begin to rip him apart. Victor found his friend disemboweled on a red beach. In August, on the underground WhatsApp chain of the Amazon, loggers who tried to steal trees were photographed porcupined with arrows, white puffy bodies, skulls showing.

The rubber barons, at the start of the industrial revolution, could not plantation-grow rubber because of leaf blight. Henry Ford tried. Gangs went into the forest, whipped, burned, enslaved, raped. A missionary said they killed locals the way you or I would kill a mosquito. The rubber went to hoses, gaskets, and tires. Some groups said not us, and stayed out with six-foot bows and seven-foot bamboo-tipped arrows honed like razor blades. A Junglekeepers ranger, Ignacio, tried to send bananas across a river; an arrow sliced him from temple toward the ear, opening him to the skull. He keeps that side of his hair short. They are the *hermanos*, the brothers, and the rule is you do not camp certain beaches at certain times of year.

Rosolie's own contact came on a three-week solo, dropped by poachers on a tributary so unnamed the boatmen asked if he was committing suicide. After a week alone, reality warped. You are not born alone, he realized; you are born into a room of people. By day six it got weird: looking back downriver as if that life had already ended, panic that World War III had started in New York. Santiago had warned that capuchins sounding not quite like capuchins meant the tribe. Ignacio had videos of them using monkey calls as code. Sleep became hard. He left a fish skeleton outside the tent, woke, unzipped, and found something like 27 black caiman staring, some heads enormous, wanting the fish. He scooted the tent back. They did not eat him. He had gotten cocky with crocodiles before: a six-foot spectacled caiman he could not tuck under his arm tagged him, a tooth in one side of the hand and out the other. The watch saved him. Black caimans were critically endangered for fashion skins and are bouncing back. Leave habitat, he says, and most animals are fine. Tigers went from 100,000 in 1900 to about 4,000. Humpbacks went from 130,000 to about 8,000 in the whaling years and back over 100,000. Rainforests are 3% of land. It is not that much to ask.

He kept going upriver toward the Andes, pictures from home in the pack, until the stream was a trickle and he saw smoke around the next bend. Loggers could not be there; a boat would have grounded miles back. He is the kid who touches wet paint. Around the bend, naked people on the far beach, bows in hand, conferring. He thought this was the part of the story where they dissect him to see what he eats. He ran for about three hours, swam, soaked all the food, inflated a packraft in six inches of water, and floated into the night until the headlamp died. Sleeping was worse: dreams of voices outside the tent. A 16-foot black caiman motored beside him on the way down; he was not scared of the croc. He was scared of them. It took about a week to reach town. Close to death, from MRSA or from tribes, he says, you get a new joy for life. They are not fundamentally different people. They are tall, extraordinary hunters who can put a bamboo arrow into a spider monkey in a 160-foot tree, and they live naked with botflies. Fifty percent of Amazon life is still in the canopy. He trad-climbs into it, JJ belaying, onto branches as thick as a table, Avatar islands of bromeliads, orchids, and sun-exposed cactus. Species estimates swing from 10 to 30 million. Bullet ants, seven or eight times: not a local sting but a full-body alarm, lymph nodes, headache, sweat, cold, blurry vision. Steve-O putting a hand in a glove of 70 of them he cannot understand.

Fridman asks him to steelman Graham Hancock on advanced ancient civilizations in the Amazon. Orellana reported great settlements; a few hundred years later they were gone, likely disease. There is clearly a long history of complex societies, and lidar keeps finding more. What Rosolie reacts to are headlines that the Amazon is a man-made garden. That, he says, is not true, and it is a slippery slope: a Brazilian president can hear "man-made" and keep engineering it. Uncontacted groups have stolen banana plants you can see from the air. Slash-and-burn happened. None of that makes the basin an artifact. If he had billions, first arrest deforestation, then play: fly a Cessna and you see lakes and shapes that do not make sense. Most scientists cluster at a few stations on the same trails. Fly hours off that grid and you cross 40 minutes of unbroken green between tiny tributaries. On solos you never leave the river. In those 70 miles, maybe someone was there 10,000 years ago. We do not know. Boots on the ground still decide, and curiosity about rocks does not justify endangering people who are not bothering anyone.

Fridman turns the uncontacted problem into an alien one: if you were the visiting civilization, how would you contact Earth? Send a boat of bananas, get shot. Aliens landing in New York would be shot in minutes. Lex believes the galaxy is full of life and that contact, if it comes, may be a higher-dimensional message we are too dumb to read, possibly what AI is for. Rosolie is earth-centric. A universe of diverse life is more beautiful than humans alone, but the alien worlds he actually knows are here: walrus islands, salmon, frogs, elephants who would tell visiting aliens to get these primates off them. He has a meteorite at home that blows his mind because everything else he has touched is from this planet. The next ten years, he thinks, we decide whether ocean ecosystems collapse and whether we log out the last 3% of rainforest. If aliens asked the elephants how they were feeling, the answer would not be kind. Fridman suspects a swing back toward physical connection as online life proves shallow. Rosolie finds talk of immortality from the tech sector a way of not looking at something too bright. He is uneasy about robots faking consciousness; Fridman pushes it to toasters you love more than partners. They let it sit.

On climate change he draws a hard line. Anyone who denies change has not been outside, has not talked to old farmers, has not heard Santiago say the seasons moved, has not noticed New York losing white Christmases. He is not a climate scientist. Anecdotes about depleted fisheries, Borneo's shrinking forest line, and Amazon killing fields he can offer. He picked one thing: protect as many wild heartbeats as he can. Fridman restates a Jordan Peterson and Björn Lomborg critique: climate is too complex for confident 50-year predictions, so fear-driven rebuilds of energy and infrastructure may not be justified; local, fundable fights are. Rosolie is a Peterson fan and thinks the man is heroic with language and theology. He cringes when Peterson seems to dismiss an ecological emergency, or when "the environment" is used to mean everything, which would halt global progress. He also sees kids in his inbox who have become vegan, given up TV, and absorbed a doomsday anti-human religion. At Thanksgiving he is not even in that argument. His career is Amazon, India, Africa, and also salmon runs and backyard butterflies. To the terrified kids: calm down, go outside, get laid, pick one thing you can affect, even if it is an elderly neighbor. The number he will defend is this: we have lost about 70% of wildlife in 50 years. Wildlife maintain ecosystems. Do not cut down the 3% of the world that holds about 50% of the biodiversity. Keep some wild tigers because they have a right to exist. Telling him to go vegan when a village offers spider monkey is a non-starter. Peterson telling people to make their beds and asking whether we are being alarmist is, to him, reasonable. He would like Peterson to sit with animal intelligence longer. More than half of humans live in cities, ecological orphans. Take the fear of snakes and mosquitoes away, get someone to a peaceful moment fly fishing in upstate New York, and they talk about it for the rest of their life.

If they travel together, Rosolie wants to take Fridman to church: giant trees, old gods, converted loggers, the floating forest, piranha fishing, five days of airplane mode, comfortable, not torture. A few days at a research station, camp on the edge of uncontacted country, the Junglekeepers station, sacred places the way you would walk the treasures of Italy. He keeps cameras in a zipped backpack, not in silica, because temperature swings put moisture inside the lens. New iPhones are a weapon if they are tethered; he drops them constantly. A pan across 3,000 black, red, and blue butterflies on a beach went berserk on Instagram. In the dry season thousands settle on a salt seep, wings flat; disturb them and you get a rainbow vortex. He wants a slow-motion shot from below. Gear that is babied dies; cameras that get slid through mud, paint worn to metal, last, "David Goggins cameras."

Poachers, to him, are people who machine-gun an elephant for tusks or cut a rhino's horn before it is dead, calf beside it. He is a hunter. So is JJ. Through VETPAW he has watched post-9/11 U.S. veterans protect black and white rhinos and elephants on Buffalo Kloof, a South African hunting reserve. Elephants and rhinos are never hunted there. Impala, wildebeest, zebra, buffalo are, because there are no longer enough predators to take the old and sick, and nobody pays $30,000 to photograph a buffalo. They will pay that to hunt one on foot, ethically, and the money runs the reserve. Factory farming bothers both men. Catching a fish or killing a deer you will eat for a year is, in Rosolie's word, almost a sacrament. Teach a child to grow a carrot. Feel a fish tug. If livelihoods depend on salmon and elk, people fight for them. If everyone is at Burger King, a dam goes in and a few people with signs look silly.

Ayahuasca, he says, opens the heart of darkness right up. Friends in Brooklyn who think they did it last week make his native friends howl; it can only be done in the jungle. He had done mushrooms, brought a notebook, and was unprepared. An old shaman with a face like a map of the world blew smoke over the cup. As soon as it went down, he knew he was gone. Sitting in the dark on a palm-thatched platform, tens of millions of frogs and insects around him, he could not light a cigarette. Someone unzipped the universe. He spent what felt like years in unconstructed dream space, floating between nebulas, without a physical shape, without a name, like his meteorite, a piece of something detached from Earth. The shaman had forgotten and overboiled the brew; the vine was as thick as a garbage can, not an arm. At 4 a.m. he had hands again and wept with gratitude that he would see his parents. He crawled to his friend Chris, a New York firefighter, and they held each other. They found the shaman in the morning lying naked in a stream, like E.T., and the man retired after that. Usually it is not that intense. The point, as he reads it, was to be shown the basement of the universe, cold dark nothing, and then returned to life, light, and love. Like almost dying, except fully dying. He has retired from ayahuasca. Fridman's curiosity would take him to Mars; Rosolie needs a hill he believes in before he dies on it. Space is not that hill.

Meaning is a daily question that pulls him a little apart from the human world. Other people do mushrooms and notice how amazing this is. He lives in that noticing: how food tastes, FaceTiming his mother from the Amazon when people were recently rubbing sticks against saber-toothed tigers. He hopes this is a testing ground, aliens or God, something crucially important, because it feels as if it is. It is impossible to him that it means nothing. He is open to meanings we have no idea about. The few things he knows are the things he loves, and some of those are being pushed to extinction, so he tries to protect them. That is the mission. Fridman closes with Jane Goodall: if we kill off the wild, we are killing off a part of our souls.