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Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the

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Speaker 1: Thing from My Heart Radio. One of the ways people

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Speaker 1: learn to care about our planet is by seeing the

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Speaker 1: natural world up close. My guests today have dedicated their

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Speaker 1: lives to taking their audiences to remote areas and telling

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Speaker 1: the stories of the people and the animals who lived there.

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Speaker 1: The animal Kingdom couldn't ask for a better ambassador than

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Speaker 1: Philippe Deondrade. The award winning filmmaker is the host of

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Speaker 1: the series Untamed on nat Geo Wilde. His boundless enthusiasm

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Speaker 1: for all animals and the lengths he's willing to go

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Speaker 1: to to capture their everyday majesty have made Philippe Deondrode

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Speaker 1: a rising star in the world of wildlife filmmaking. But first,

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Speaker 1: I'm talking to Glenn Shephard, an ethnobotanist and medical anthropologist

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Speaker 1: who spent decades studying indigenous people in the Amazon. He

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Speaker 1: holds a doctorate in medical anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley,

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Speaker 1: and his work has been featured in National Geographic and

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Speaker 1: The New Yorker. Glenn speaks eleven languages, and his ease

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Speaker 1: at learning them played a big role in deciding his career.

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Speaker 1: My dad's a doctor, and I was supposed to follow

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Speaker 1: the family tradition to become a doctor, obviously, and so

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Speaker 1: I was all trained, you know, premy I was going

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Speaker 1: to do premed at Princeton, and you know, straight a

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Speaker 1: student and all that. But almost by accident, I just

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Speaker 1: discovered that I was really good at languages. I mean

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Speaker 1: there's nothing in the families. I just sort of I

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Speaker 1: did French in high school. I spent like a summer

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Speaker 1: exchange program friends, and like in three weeks I was

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Speaker 1: speaking French like perfectly, I mean not perfectly, but very well.

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Speaker 1: And I just sort of had this I wish I

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Speaker 1: had that knack for like electric guitar or something, but

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Speaker 1: I just have this inborn talent. I don't know where

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Speaker 1: it came from. I'm just very good at learning, picking

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Speaker 1: up and speaking them more more spoken than written. And

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Speaker 1: so I get to I get to college, and I

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Speaker 1: just started learning all the languages I could. I took

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Speaker 1: I took Arabic, I took German. I tried out Chinese

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Speaker 1: for a bit, but I ended up sticking with Arabic

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Speaker 1: and German. And I love traveling, and so I was thinking,

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Speaker 1: how can I, you know, medicine languages, where do they meet?

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Speaker 1: And I discovered, sort of by accident, the field of ethnobotany,

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Speaker 1: which is the traditional uses of plants by different peoples

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Speaker 1: around the world, indigenous people's, ancient people's as well. And

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Speaker 1: so I remember in an undergraduate class, I took some

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Speaker 1: archaeology classes and one of the student papers I had

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Speaker 1: to write was about trepid nation. Trepid nation is this

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Speaker 1: ancient practice in Peru in other places where they would

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Speaker 1: do surgery on the skull, they would literally cut open

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Speaker 1: the skull. They find these skulls in the Peruvian desert,

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Speaker 1: asked us with holes open in them, and they can

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Speaker 1: tell by the growth of the bone that the person

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Speaker 1: survived the treatment, and they weren't. Most of the yeah,

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Speaker 1: it was. It doesn't seem to have been to treat

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Speaker 1: like a brain injury. They seem to be healthy people.

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Speaker 1: And they think that they opened up to open channels

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Speaker 1: of communication with the spirits. That's one of the theories.

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Speaker 1: And you know, they used coca leaf as an an aesthetic.

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Speaker 1: They use these obsidian knives, so they performed brain surgery

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Speaker 1: in ancient Peru, and that sort of fascinatility, brain surgery,

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Speaker 1: coca anesthetics, and so I sort of got interested in

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Speaker 1: this interface between archaeology, anthropology, medicine, languages and discovered this

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Speaker 1: field of ethnobotany and started reading up on it. Ethnobotany

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Speaker 1: isn't really taught as a discipline often in anthropology. You

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Speaker 1: sort of have to find your way, and I actually

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Speaker 1: wound up. I was taking Arabic, and my Arabic teaching

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Speaker 1: assistant he was doing his PhD on the poetry of

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Speaker 1: Jordanian Bedouins, like these these ancient medieval poems that were

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Speaker 1: recited by heart by these ancient medieval these ancient poems

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Speaker 1: that are survived today. He was doing his PhD on that,

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Speaker 1: and I said, well, that sounds really fascinating. Do they

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Speaker 1: use plants? Oh? Yeah, they use these different medicinal plants.

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Speaker 1: And so I went around the university and I got

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Speaker 1: money to spend the summer after my sophomore year summer,

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Speaker 1: and so I'm gonna go to Jordan's and live with

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Speaker 1: these better when learn their medicinal plants. And so I

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Speaker 1: showed up on the border of it's literally the border,

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Speaker 1: it's called H four Province. So I show up on

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Speaker 1: the border of Iraq. It's like it's this panhandle of Jordan.

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Speaker 1: It goes, it goes between Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabian.

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Speaker 1: There's this little panhandle out there where these Bedouin live.

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Speaker 1: And you don't think there'd be any medicinal plants in

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Speaker 1: the desert, but there are it rains and these things grow,

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Speaker 1: and they had all these interesting plants. They had this

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Speaker 1: one plant. It's called handle. There's an Arabic expression moral handel.

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Speaker 1: It means as bitter as this bitter goard. And the

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Speaker 1: someone who's really nasty, like a nasty person you called mound,

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Speaker 1: is a bitter person. And it's this little it's like

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Speaker 1: a watermelon, same family's watermelon, this size, and you cut

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Speaker 1: it in half. It's very bitter. And to treat diabetes,

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Speaker 1: you sit in a hot house like sweathouse. You cut

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Speaker 1: it in half and you put it on your heel

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Speaker 1: of your foot and you just sit there in the

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Speaker 1: sweat house until you taste the bitterness on your tongue.

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Speaker 1: That's how it's absorbed by your feet. And when you

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Speaker 1: can taste the bitters on tongue, you stop because it's toxic.

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Speaker 1: And they treat in the Arabic. It's incredible. So I

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Speaker 1: was fascinated by this. You know, this medicinal plant, this knowledge,

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Speaker 1: all these medicinal plants in the desert. And so this

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Speaker 1: friend of mine Yon spent the fall semester of his

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Speaker 1: senior year in Peru and wrote me these amazing letters.

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Speaker 1: Were going down the Andes mountains, the cloud force, the

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Speaker 1: howler monkeys are singing, and there's these Indians who come

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Speaker 1: every couple of weeks to bring bananas. They're called the

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Speaker 1: Macha Indians. I was like, m So I looked them up,

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Speaker 1: went to the library, found a little vocabulary book written

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Speaker 1: in four read everything that was written about them. And

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Speaker 1: when they get back, I go to Turborg, John Turborg,

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Speaker 1: and I say, hey, I just got back from Jordan.

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Speaker 1: I'm good at languages, I'm interested in the botany. If

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Speaker 1: I can find the money, will you take me to

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Speaker 1: Peru to do my seniors? And said sure. Once I

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Speaker 1: set foot in those pruning villages, it felt like I

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Speaker 1: was coming home. I mean, I really Jordan was amazing,

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Speaker 1: but it was very far and very strange. It was

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Speaker 1: a very strange, exotic experience. And and when I stepped

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Speaker 1: foot and Prue was like it was like being in Virginia.

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Speaker 1: We grew up on the chest Peak Bay, hunting, fishing, crabbing, boating.

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Speaker 1: I feel like I was reliving my child just and

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Speaker 1: so I just you know, I just felt at home

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Speaker 1: and I said, this is it, this is what I'm

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Speaker 1: gonna do. I felt like I was at home in

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Speaker 1: your lifetime, in the time that you went to Princeton,

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Speaker 1: and there was no place that necessarily was studying on

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Speaker 1: the deeper level ethnobotany. Whereas ethnobotany being studied now. Do

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Speaker 1: they have programs now or it still remains, It still

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Speaker 1: remains sort of like me, It's sort of doesn't really

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Speaker 1: fit in any existing container, so it always falls between

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Speaker 1: the crack. So the you know, the great ethnobotanist of

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Speaker 1: the Amazon, Richard Schulte, is that the wonderful film Embrace

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Speaker 1: of the Serpent, the Columbian film that won the Oscar

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Speaker 1: a couple of years back, was sort of loosely based

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Speaker 1: on his life. Richard Schults was an ethnobotanist at Harvard

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Speaker 1: and he was the greatest ethnobotanist of all time. Really,

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Speaker 1: certainly the twentieth century we spent I think twelve years

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Speaker 1: living in the Amazon searching the origins of the cure

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Speaker 1: are poison that they use for surgery muscle, you know,

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Speaker 1: heart surgery. Ayahuasca this mysterious plant. Back then, it was

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Speaker 1: a mysterious plant. Looking at the botanical identification of ahuasca.

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Speaker 1: He helped identify the magic mushroom in Mexico. He was

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Speaker 1: this peyote. He was involved in all these ethno botanical discoveries.

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Speaker 1: And yet when he retired, Harvard simply never replaced his

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Speaker 1: position as ethnobotanist, because it's not it's not real botany.

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Speaker 1: It's sort of this ethnobotany. It's this thing that's sort

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Speaker 1: of between it. The anthropologists don't consider it to be anthropology.

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Speaker 1: Botanists don't consider it to be botany, and it falls

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Speaker 1: prey to these these sort of rigid disciplinary boundaries and

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Speaker 1: reneg Yeah, it's renegade botany and renegade anthropology, and it

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Speaker 1: doesn't fit into the mold. And so so you have

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Speaker 1: people like me, or you know, people who are interested

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Speaker 1: in this, who create a program here, create a program there.

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Speaker 1: University of Georgia had an important ethnobotany program for all

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Speaker 1: My professor Berlin was there, but then he retired in Athens, Georgia.

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Speaker 1: He was at Berkeley when I was at Berkeley, and

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Speaker 1: then he moved to Georgia, and then and then when

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Speaker 1: he retired, it wasn't really no one really kept it going.

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Speaker 1: And so it's an unfortunate result of the disciplinary boundaries

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Speaker 1: that these very fascinating and important fields. I mean, all

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Speaker 1: of this work on malaria that's been coming out using

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Speaker 1: these Chinese medicines treat malaria, so ethnobotany still produces results.

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Speaker 1: My son, my youngest son, Glen Gabriel, when he was

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Speaker 1: a year and a half old, he was diagnosed with

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Speaker 1: this extremely rare it's not exactly a cancer. It's an

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Speaker 1: immune system disease that used to be considered a kind

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Speaker 1: of limp foam. It's called histocytosis, and it basically causes

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Speaker 1: the white blood cells to attack the body. And he

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Speaker 1: had these huge holes in his skull, He lost one

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Speaker 1: of his vertebra from this immune system just attacks the

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Speaker 1: bones and and he was treated this wonderful clinic and

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Speaker 1: we thought he had brain cancer and was gonna be

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Speaker 1: dead in six months, but it turned out to be

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Speaker 1: this other very rare disease like one in a million histocytosis.

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Speaker 1: And among the treatments that he was given is a

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Speaker 1: drug called in blasting, which is used treating cancer and

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Speaker 1: it comes from the rosy periwinkle originally from Madagascar, which

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Speaker 1: was a traditional medicine by African people's in the Caribbean

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Speaker 1: brought it and it sort of went wild in the Caribbean.

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Speaker 1: It's used an Afro Caribbean traditional medicine and it turns

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Speaker 1: out to be very effective against cancer and other kinds

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Speaker 1: of tumors. So he had his first shot and he

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Speaker 1: had to slump the size of an olive besides behind

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Speaker 1: his right ears. Here was it. Now, that's when we

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Speaker 1: first noticed it. And after one shot that lump just vanished.

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Speaker 1: And so there is this tremendous potential for ethnobotany to

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Speaker 1: contribute to human welfare and it could also contribute to

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Speaker 1: sustainable livelihoods for indigenous peoples. But it just the discipline

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Speaker 1: doesn't have a home because it's it's interdisciplinary. Everyone talks

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Speaker 1: about interdisciplinary at universities. When it comes down to like

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Speaker 1: who we're gonna hire, where's the funding going, It falls

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Speaker 1: between the cracks for someone on the ground and someone

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Speaker 1: doing the work you're doing. When people in this country

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Speaker 1: who are and I don't judge them because it's it's

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Speaker 1: it's just the state of things in America, and they're

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Speaker 1: completely ignorant about the condition of the rainforest in South

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Speaker 1: America and particularly in Brazil, with the preponderance of it

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Speaker 1: is in Brazil because of the size of Brazil. What's

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Speaker 1: you live in the United States and all you hear

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Speaker 1: all the time is like they're losing you know whatever,

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Speaker 1: whatever it is, five thousand acres an hour or whatever

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Speaker 1: the eth it is that's coming on down there. What's

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Speaker 1: going on? Is it really that threatened or is that

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Speaker 1: is that exaggerated? Well, you know, I've worked in the

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Speaker 1: Amazon for thirty five years and I've lived in Brazil,

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Speaker 1: in the Brazilian Amazon for twenty years, and the Amazon

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Speaker 1: has always been under threat. Indigenous people have always been

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Speaker 1: under threat. Gold rushes in different times, the Bell of

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Speaker 1: Manchy Damn that was that was being proposed in the

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Speaker 1: ninety nineties, which was blocked initially, deforestation, drug trafficking, These

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Speaker 1: things were always there. Beef cattle, beef cattle, cattle, ranching,

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Speaker 1: palm oil plantations, industrial agriculture, mine traction, mining, mining, oil drilling,

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Speaker 1: oil contamination, gas wells. Can we say a gas pipeline

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Speaker 1: and run in Ecuador, mobile in Peru. So these threats

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Speaker 1: have always been there, but these past two years in Brazil,

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Speaker 1: what we've seen under the Mostonato administration, I've seen nothing

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Speaker 1: like this in my twenty years, where in a sense,

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Speaker 1: you know, there's Brazil has a constitution, there's there's a

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Speaker 1: whole article about indigenous people's rights, much better rights than

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Speaker 1: in the American case, you know, with what they have,

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Speaker 1: like rights to their traditional lands, height land titling the

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Speaker 1: ninth because it was under a military dictatorship from nineteen

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Speaker 1: sixty four, and the nineteen constitution includes all these provisions

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Speaker 1: for indigenous people's rights. And so people like me and

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Speaker 1: you know, perhaps others, I guess we were sort of

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Speaker 1: lulled into complacency. And then suddenly Bosonato gets elected and

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Speaker 1: all of these you know, constitutionally enshrined rights and protections

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Speaker 1: just went down the drain. And you know, those forces

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Speaker 1: were there, the miners were there, the agrab business was there,

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Speaker 1: the cattle ranchers were there. But there was a pretense,

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Speaker 1: at least on behalf of the Brazilian government debate these laws,

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Speaker 1: we have these norms, you know, suddenly Bosonata comes in

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Speaker 1: and gives people just a blank check, like we don't

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Speaker 1: have to obey these laws. He's the son his father

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Speaker 1: was a wildcat miner at happy at Halata. Was this

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Speaker 1: mine that sebast Salgado, those wonderful photographs of this it

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Speaker 1: looks like hell, it's just this looks like something out

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Speaker 1: of Dante, this pit with people carrying pit. Yeah, with

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Speaker 1: people carrying all these this mud and landslides. And Bostanta's

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Speaker 1: father was there. So people talk about the Amazon. They're

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Speaker 1: not interested in the Indians or the fin trees. They

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Speaker 1: want the minerals. And so he's been very pro mining

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Speaker 1: and basically said, you guys got a blank check. And

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Speaker 1: so there was illegal mining before, but nothing like I

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Speaker 1: mean basically they're like, well, the president's behind us, we're

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Speaker 1: going in and so how much would you say it's

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Speaker 1: a taking and people are just going in the government's

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Speaker 1: just going in and saying get out and we're gonna

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Speaker 1: take it. Or how much are they going to these

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Speaker 1: people and exploiting their needs and offering them money? Oh yeah,

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Speaker 1: the latter for sure. I mean both things but I

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Speaker 1: mean mostly it's saying, you want some money that, get

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Speaker 1: the hell out of here. We're gonna we're gonna raise

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Speaker 1: cattle here. Yeah, And you know, he may even think

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Speaker 1: of himself. He certainly portrays himself as being a friend

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Speaker 1: of indigenous people's Like, they're living on all these minerals,

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Speaker 1: why can't they exploit them, you know, to a certain

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Speaker 1: category pres inside that makes sense. Well, they you know

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Speaker 1: this idea, they're very poor, they live on this land

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Speaker 1: with all this gold. Why can't they exploit it? Why not?

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Speaker 1: The Brazilian constitution doesn't prohibit mining on indigenous lands. It

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Speaker 1: says that there needs to be specific laws that regulate

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Speaker 1: that so that indigenous peoples can benefit from it. And

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Speaker 1: those laws haven't been passed yet, and and he's desperately

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Speaker 1: trying to pass them. But the problem is mining creates

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Speaker 1: this fever that can't be controlled. And you can see

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Speaker 1: it going on now with the Yo, mommy, with cool,

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Speaker 1: with the Cayapo. These miners just come in and the

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Speaker 1: level of devastation mining is just the worst possible kind

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Speaker 1: of devastation. There was a there's a village that I

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Speaker 1: worked in, you know, five years ago, and when you

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Speaker 1: fly over it, you just you fly for like forty

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Speaker 1: five minutes and you just see this this river that's

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Speaker 1: just been completely devastated. It's not even in its course anymore,

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Speaker 1: has been totally turned over, you know, hundreds of square

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Speaker 1: kilometers of devastation. And because gold mining is completely out

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Speaker 1: of control, illegal mining, and they just theysical gold, gold

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Speaker 1: diamonds as well, but mostly gold, but not resources for

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Speaker 1: these technological things like chips and so forth. There. I mean,

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Speaker 1: there's this amazing place in Brazil and the upper to

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Speaker 1: your Negro. It's this meteor that landed on Earth and

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Speaker 1: it's got the largest reserves of I think niobium, were

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Speaker 1: these rare metals for cell phones anywhere in South America.

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Speaker 1: It's in a protected area. It can't be exploited right now,

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Speaker 1: but you could imagine ways in which these medals could

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Speaker 1: be exploited sustainably and ways that would benefit local people.

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Speaker 1: But right now it's just the worst possile. It's like

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Speaker 1: the Yukon Valley, just the worst possible gold rush. And

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Speaker 1: but you know, there's all of these misconceptions about Amazonian

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Speaker 1: indigenous peoples and and the Amazon rainforest. There's this idea

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Speaker 1: that the Amazon is being destroyed by this clash between

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Speaker 1: civilization and nature. But it's not really a clash between

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Speaker 1: civilization nature. It's it's a clash between two different kinds

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Speaker 1: of civilization. The indigenous peoples of Amazon have a civilization,

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Speaker 1: and they have lived in the Amazon for thousand years

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Speaker 1: and before the conquest, before they were wiped out by diseases,

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Speaker 1: there were these large cities in the Amazon, on the

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Speaker 1: scale of the city states in ancient Egypt. There were

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Speaker 1: large cities with that large populations. There were sort of

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Speaker 1: these garden cities where I wouldn't say people lived in

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Speaker 1: harmony with nature, but they discovered ways of harnessing natural

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Speaker 1: processes for producing food without cutting it down and just

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Speaker 1: planting monocrop you know, planting barley or rice or or

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Speaker 1: or wheat or or cattle or something like that, like

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Speaker 1: the Americans. And this is even even scientists, even archaeologists

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Speaker 1: through the twentieth century assumed that indigenous peoples in the

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Speaker 1: ancient Amazon were much like the indigenous people that they

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Speaker 1: were seeing the nineteen fifties, these very small groups, nomadic people,

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Speaker 1: you know, sort of primitive people's and then you know,

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Speaker 1: in the two thousands, we started having these major archaeological

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Speaker 1: discovers like Michael Heckenberger at University of Florida discovered garden

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Speaker 1: cities in the Shingle with these huge earthworks with dikes

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Speaker 1: and roads connecting, like there was major indianerit that requires

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Speaker 1: thousands of people to create these causeways and roads and

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Speaker 1: fish ponds, and so there were these civilizations in the

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Speaker 1: Amazon that rather than everywhere else in the world, you

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Speaker 1: had about eleven thousand years ago, you had people discover

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Speaker 1: domestication of plants and animals everywhere in the world happened

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Speaker 1: about the same time. Eleven tho years ago. In Egypt

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Speaker 1: it was barley, and China was rice. In Anatolia it

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Speaker 1: was horses and and you know, wheat and so on.

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Speaker 1: Eleven thou years ago, the people in Egypt were hunting

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Speaker 1: their hunter gathers, hunting gazelles. They started domesticating barley. Three

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Speaker 1: four thousand years later you have pyramids and dynasties. It

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Speaker 1: was the same thing all over the world, and the

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Speaker 1: archaeologists and culture historians have just assumed this is a

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Speaker 1: universal process in human history. You you get crops, you

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Speaker 1: domesticate animals, and five thousands and in the Amazon. It

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Speaker 1: doesn't fit the mold because people in Amazon domesticated crops

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Speaker 1: eleven thousand years ago, but they didn't take crop domestication

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Speaker 1: to agricultural fields and monocultures the way every whelse and

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Speaker 1: what they planted crops. They continued to hunt and fish,

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Speaker 1: and they discovered ways of domesticating the forests without having

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Speaker 1: to cut it all down. And so brazil nuts. I

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Speaker 1: remember when I was a kid, you'd only get brazil

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Speaker 1: nuts at Christmas time and your Christmas stocking. You couldn't

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Speaker 1: get it any other time year. So these wonderful, amazing

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Speaker 1: brazil nuts, these delicious nuts, they come from this huge tree,

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Speaker 1: fifty feet tall tree from the Amazon lives five hundred years.

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Speaker 1: The assumption was who in the world would plant a

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Speaker 1: tree that takes eight hundred years to grow. It's a

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Speaker 1: natural tree. But research that I did with some geneticists

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Speaker 1: in the early two thousands, we discovered that the Brazilian

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Speaker 1: Amazon and Bolivia are filled with these groves that have

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Speaker 1: fifteen twenty fifty d Brasilia trees. And then you go

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Speaker 1: for hundreds of kilometers there's no brasionas and there's another

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Speaker 1: little grove of Brasilas, and so we were able to

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Speaker 1: show using genetics that there is very strong genetic evidence

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Speaker 1: and historical evidence that these are actually there aren't exactly plantations,

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Speaker 1: but they're often associate with archaeological site. It was a system.

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Speaker 1: It was a system for producing food using the forest

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Speaker 1: without having to cut it down. And Brazila is one example.

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Speaker 1: We have Assai palm, which is a big thing. Now

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Speaker 1: you have all these palm trees. There's a whole system

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Speaker 1: of what's called agro forestry. Agra forestry means you you

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Speaker 1: use the forest like a garden. You don't cut it down,

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Speaker 1: You introduce things, protect things, you take away weeds and montvines,

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Speaker 1: and you turn the forest into this productive system. And

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Speaker 1: so that induce amazons. People's perfected this way of harvesting

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Speaker 1: the force without having to cut it all down. And

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Speaker 1: so when Europeans are especially after you know, there was

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Speaker 1: a huge population in the Amazon before four two and

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Speaker 1: was wiped out by smallpox, measles, warfare, diseases, and so

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Speaker 1: there was this idea that all that the indigenous people's

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Speaker 1: Amazon of today, of the nineteen fifties, or the way

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Speaker 1: they always have been, No, these are the refugees from

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Speaker 1: this genocide. If you look at the ancient pottery from

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Speaker 1: the Amazon, you have in in the Tapajos River in Brazil,

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Speaker 1: there's a pottery tradition called Sothday. I would say it's

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Speaker 1: as sophisticated as my empoties. These incredibly elaborate basis, with

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Speaker 1: these figures of humans transforming into jaguars and snakes. It's

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Speaker 1: this beautiful ceramic pottery. And in the archaeologists up until

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Speaker 1: mid nineties they said, oh, that that came down from

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Speaker 1: the Andes. There's no way that these primitive people could

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Speaker 1: have had such sophisticated ceramic trigians. They must have learned

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Speaker 1: it from the Andes. And so there's this idea that

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Speaker 1: the Amazon is this primitive place. The indigenous people's lives

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Speaker 1: sort of on the verge of starvation, and they have

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Speaker 1: they have a very low level of culture, not like

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Speaker 1: the Incas and the Aztecs Mayas a very low level

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Speaker 1: of culture, and the Amazon is this big, wild, pristine place.

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Speaker 1: What we're discovering recently in the past twenty years is

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Speaker 1: that the Amazon has been farmed in garden by indigenous

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Speaker 1: peoples for thousands of years in ways that don't destroy it.

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Speaker 1: And this is what we need to learn from Ravan.

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Speaker 1: Cutting down all the trees for planting soybeans or bringing

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Speaker 1: cattle are destroying it with gold mines. We need to

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Speaker 1: learn from these people how to make it productive for

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Speaker 1: food crops and Assai palm and medicinal plants, and it

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Speaker 1: can be done ethnobotanist Glenn Shepherd. If you like conversations

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Speaker 1: with passionate conservationists, check out my interview with biologists Charles Mutton.

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Speaker 1: It was his love of birds that originally drew him

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Speaker 1: to the Amazon. If you're interested in birds and working

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Speaker 1: in the Amazon is the one of the most amazing

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Speaker 1: things you can do if you're a bird scientist, because

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Speaker 1: the bird diversity there is much higher than than anywhere else.

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Speaker 1: In the wor role. You'll have five species of birds

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Speaker 1: in just a few square miles. So there's one park

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Speaker 1: about the size of Massachusetts has has ten percent of

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Speaker 1: all the bird species in the world. So once you're

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Speaker 1: working there, you become spoiled. If you're an ornithologist or

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Speaker 1: bird scientists, you really want to continue working in such

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Speaker 1: a station of birds. Pretty much. Here more of my

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Speaker 1: conversation with Charles Mutton that Here's the Thing dot Org.

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Speaker 1: After the break, Glenn Shepherd talks about his work with

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Speaker 1: the Cayepo people of northern Brazil to update a thirty

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Speaker 1: year old exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.

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Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing.

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Speaker 1: In his decades in the Amazon, Glenn Shepherd has worked

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Speaker 1: closely with indigenous people, particularly the much A Gengga of

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Speaker 1: Manu in southeastern Peru where the Amazon begins, and the

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Speaker 1: coy Epo near the mouth of the Amazon in northern Brazil.

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Speaker 1: Glenn Shepherd is a researcher at the Emilio Gueldy Museum

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Speaker 1: in Bellum, Brazil, one of the oldest and most important

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Speaker 1: research institutes in the Amazon. He's lived in northern Brazil

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Speaker 1: for two decades. But that wasn't always the plan. My

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Speaker 1: plan was sort of the more the traditional, you know,

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Speaker 1: do a PhD, get a university job in the States,

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Speaker 1: god teach, do teach, do summers. But I married a

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Speaker 1: Brazilian and moved to Brazil. Met her at Berkeley. She's

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Speaker 1: a biologist at Berkeley, and she was returning home to Brazil,

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Speaker 1: and so I got married and we had three kids,

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Speaker 1: and I just sort of stayed. It was it wasn't

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Speaker 1: the plan to stay, but you know, it opens doors

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Speaker 1: when you're there, like not not just in Brazil, but

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Speaker 1: I'm in the Brazilian Amazon, so people coming through and

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Speaker 1: you just you just have these opportunities. I mean, for example,

424
00:21:51,359 --> 00:21:55,119
Speaker 1: I worked with the Cayapo and I just got a

425
00:21:55,200 --> 00:21:56,760
Speaker 1: job in the Gueldy Museum. It's sort of like the

426
00:21:56,760 --> 00:21:59,800
Speaker 1: Smithsony of the Amazon Sis. It's this second oldest museum

427
00:21:59,840 --> 00:22:03,480
Speaker 1: in Brazil in Malaying on the Brazilian Amazon where you

428
00:22:03,480 --> 00:22:05,159
Speaker 1: are nor northern region, and it's sort of like a

429
00:22:05,240 --> 00:22:10,439
Speaker 1: natural history museum, you know, with them anthropology, archaeology, animals, baleontology.

430
00:22:10,600 --> 00:22:13,199
Speaker 1: And I just moved there. They didn't stay. To me

431
00:22:13,200 --> 00:22:17,040
Speaker 1: as a curator of the ethnographic collections, and these Cayapo

432
00:22:17,080 --> 00:22:19,960
Speaker 1: Indians come to town and they were they were visiting

433
00:22:19,960 --> 00:22:23,400
Speaker 1: the collections and they were looking at collections of objects

434
00:22:23,440 --> 00:22:25,960
Speaker 1: from their culture, war clubs and feather crowns from the

435
00:22:26,000 --> 00:22:28,479
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds, and they say, we really like this.

436
00:22:29,160 --> 00:22:30,600
Speaker 1: We want to come back and do more of this.

437
00:22:31,119 --> 00:22:33,240
Speaker 1: Can you find us some money to bring us back

438
00:22:33,280 --> 00:22:36,080
Speaker 1: to do this I said, sure, I'll try, And then

439
00:22:36,119 --> 00:22:38,320
Speaker 1: he said, and but make sure you buy cameras because

440
00:22:38,320 --> 00:22:40,520
Speaker 1: we want to learn how to make films so we

441
00:22:40,520 --> 00:22:42,479
Speaker 1: can film these objects in the museum and show them

442
00:22:42,480 --> 00:22:45,080
Speaker 1: back home. But we make these things still. We don't

443
00:22:45,080 --> 00:22:47,119
Speaker 1: want you to think that we we've forgotten all this

444
00:22:47,160 --> 00:22:48,639
Speaker 1: stuff here. We know how to make all this stuff.

445
00:22:48,760 --> 00:22:50,159
Speaker 1: So we want to make films in the village to

446
00:22:50,160 --> 00:22:52,480
Speaker 1: show you the rituals and how we make these things.

447
00:22:52,680 --> 00:22:54,800
Speaker 1: Oh you know, by the way, we're we're going to

448
00:22:54,920 --> 00:22:56,720
Speaker 1: do an initiation ritual in a month and a half.

449
00:22:56,720 --> 00:22:57,840
Speaker 1: You want to come and film it? And I was

450
00:22:57,880 --> 00:23:02,160
Speaker 1: like yeah, So they just came. Normally the anthropologist shows

451
00:23:02,240 --> 00:23:04,600
Speaker 1: up in the village with the strange idea. I want

452
00:23:04,640 --> 00:23:07,400
Speaker 1: to say, this is the Cayapo, the anthropos thea where

453
00:23:07,440 --> 00:23:09,280
Speaker 1: are they in relation to where you were in there

454
00:23:09,359 --> 00:23:11,199
Speaker 1: there in the north as well, they're in They're in

455
00:23:11,320 --> 00:23:14,080
Speaker 1: southern Parta, so I'm in I'm in the northern part

456
00:23:14,080 --> 00:23:16,600
Speaker 1: of Pata on the Amazon River. They're in the headwaters

457
00:23:16,600 --> 00:23:18,280
Speaker 1: of the Shingu River. That's the name that you hear

458
00:23:18,280 --> 00:23:21,520
Speaker 1: a lot, so they're impacted by it's sill northern Brazil.

459
00:23:21,520 --> 00:23:25,280
Speaker 1: But it's the southern part. And these are states or provinces,

460
00:23:25,280 --> 00:23:28,800
Speaker 1: what are they call another I mean, Amazon is really huge.

461
00:23:28,800 --> 00:23:30,959
Speaker 1: If it weren't for its vastness, it would have been

462
00:23:30,960 --> 00:23:33,119
Speaker 1: gone long ago. It's huge. I mean, if you the

463
00:23:33,160 --> 00:23:37,159
Speaker 1: Amazon basin itself is bigger than all of Europe. The

464
00:23:37,160 --> 00:23:40,200
Speaker 1: country of Brazil is bigger than the United States without Alaska.

465
00:23:40,200 --> 00:23:42,840
Speaker 1: People don't the way the maps are done, countries around

466
00:23:42,840 --> 00:23:45,440
Speaker 1: the equator looks smaller, and Brazil is bigger than the

467
00:23:45,480 --> 00:23:48,560
Speaker 1: United States without Alaska. And the Amazon is bigger than

468
00:23:48,640 --> 00:23:52,199
Speaker 1: all of Europe. Amazon is huge, and and it is

469
00:23:52,240 --> 00:23:54,240
Speaker 1: being cut down at a tremendous rate. But because there's

470
00:23:54,280 --> 00:23:56,880
Speaker 1: just so much of it, there is still some left.

471
00:23:56,920 --> 00:23:58,360
Speaker 1: If it were anywhere else, it would have been gone

472
00:23:58,359 --> 00:24:02,000
Speaker 1: long ago. Now, you had an exhibit planned last year

473
00:24:02,119 --> 00:24:06,000
Speaker 1: the American Museum of Natural History about the Kayapo. Yeah,

474
00:24:06,040 --> 00:24:09,000
Speaker 1: thirty years ago. Robert Carnaro, who was the curator of

475
00:24:09,000 --> 00:24:12,280
Speaker 1: South American Mythology from almost fifty years. He recently passed away.

476
00:24:12,280 --> 00:24:15,520
Speaker 1: He passed away just early last year. He put up

477
00:24:15,520 --> 00:24:18,159
Speaker 1: an exhibit at the American Museum in the late nineteen eighties.

478
00:24:18,280 --> 00:24:21,000
Speaker 1: It's a beautiful exhibit. You've probably seen it. It shows

479
00:24:21,080 --> 00:24:24,840
Speaker 1: indigenous peoples as they were at the moment of contact.

480
00:24:25,200 --> 00:24:30,359
Speaker 1: So it shows these wonderful mannequins, lifelike mannequins, indigenous peoples

481
00:24:30,359 --> 00:24:34,600
Speaker 1: of different Amazonian cultures, wearing their traditional clothes and performing

482
00:24:34,640 --> 00:24:38,000
Speaker 1: different traditional activities. He's sort of conceived of the exhibit

483
00:24:38,080 --> 00:24:41,040
Speaker 1: is like themes and variations. So there's shamanism, what are

484
00:24:41,040 --> 00:24:44,080
Speaker 1: the different kinds of shamanism? Houses, what are the different

485
00:24:44,119 --> 00:24:46,800
Speaker 1: kinds of houses that Amazon and people build? How's warfare

486
00:24:46,840 --> 00:24:50,080
Speaker 1: work in the Amazon agriculture, hunting, and so it's it's

487
00:24:50,080 --> 00:24:53,280
Speaker 1: an exhibit that shows people as they were at the time,

488
00:24:53,359 --> 00:24:57,320
Speaker 1: like in the nineteen fifties. And among those exhibits there

489
00:24:57,400 --> 00:25:00,400
Speaker 1: is an image it's probably the most powerful figure in exhibit.

490
00:25:00,480 --> 00:25:03,480
Speaker 1: It's a Kayapo warrior all covered in face paint, body paint,

491
00:25:03,520 --> 00:25:05,679
Speaker 1: with this feather crown and this huge war club and

492
00:25:05,680 --> 00:25:08,600
Speaker 1: this big lip plug like Rowney the leader with his

493
00:25:08,640 --> 00:25:11,320
Speaker 1: big lip plug. And it's just and it's in the

494
00:25:11,359 --> 00:25:13,680
Speaker 1: section on war fan. It's just a very impressive object.

495
00:25:13,680 --> 00:25:17,720
Speaker 1: And it just so happened that in the Kayapo leaders

496
00:25:18,200 --> 00:25:22,600
Speaker 1: were in New York with Terence Turner. Famous are anthropologists

497
00:25:22,640 --> 00:25:25,760
Speaker 1: from Chicago who passed away also recently, and he brought

498
00:25:25,760 --> 00:25:27,359
Speaker 1: these Kayapo activists. They were they were going to the

499
00:25:27,400 --> 00:25:29,840
Speaker 1: World Bank and visiting New York and he's thought by

500
00:25:29,840 --> 00:25:31,760
Speaker 1: the museum and visited and so they looked at this

501
00:25:31,800 --> 00:25:34,600
Speaker 1: kayapol warrior and Robert Cornero said, what do you think

502
00:25:34,680 --> 00:25:36,719
Speaker 1: is it? He was afraid that they would they wouldn't

503
00:25:36,760 --> 00:25:38,919
Speaker 1: like the sabbathe, you know, presentation as a savage with oh,

504
00:25:38,960 --> 00:25:40,239
Speaker 1: this is great, we love it. This is the way

505
00:25:40,280 --> 00:25:43,400
Speaker 1: where we're very warlike. We love this thing. But you're

506
00:25:43,440 --> 00:25:46,440
Speaker 1: missing a head dress, and he needs body paint and

507
00:25:46,440 --> 00:25:48,000
Speaker 1: you should put on a necklace. And so they took

508
00:25:48,119 --> 00:25:51,800
Speaker 1: their own body adornants and put them onto this mannequin,

509
00:25:51,920 --> 00:25:55,840
Speaker 1: a head dress, a necklace, I think, arm bands, and

510
00:25:55,880 --> 00:25:58,720
Speaker 1: they painted it. So the paint that's on that mannequin,

511
00:25:58,760 --> 00:26:02,560
Speaker 1: the Kaiapo actually put on it. And so then I

512
00:26:02,560 --> 00:26:06,159
Speaker 1: came up to the American Museum last year January, and

513
00:26:06,200 --> 00:26:08,760
Speaker 1: the idea was to do an exhibit, a new exhibit

514
00:26:08,800 --> 00:26:11,879
Speaker 1: about the Yapo that reflected on this visit of the

515
00:26:11,960 --> 00:26:16,040
Speaker 1: Kayapo thirty years ago to the museum and how they've

516
00:26:16,119 --> 00:26:18,640
Speaker 1: changed in the meantime. The idea was to create that

517
00:26:18,720 --> 00:26:21,400
Speaker 1: shows the Kaipo warrior holding this war club. What we did,

518
00:26:21,480 --> 00:26:24,239
Speaker 1: there's a big photograph of a Kayapo warrior holding rather

519
00:26:24,280 --> 00:26:26,359
Speaker 1: than a war club, he's holding a camera, video camera,

520
00:26:26,400 --> 00:26:30,520
Speaker 1: looking at us. Because the Kayapo, they see the camera

521
00:26:30,600 --> 00:26:33,080
Speaker 1: as a kind of weapon. In the old days of warfare,

522
00:26:33,440 --> 00:26:35,640
Speaker 1: the Cayapo, when they would raid each other, they had

523
00:26:35,680 --> 00:26:38,480
Speaker 1: like these the war raids, and they were interested in

524
00:26:38,520 --> 00:26:44,000
Speaker 1: capturing trophies. They would capture weapons, war clubs, songs, body ornaments.

525
00:26:44,800 --> 00:26:47,600
Speaker 1: They would capture guns from their enemies. So the idea

526
00:26:47,680 --> 00:26:51,000
Speaker 1: isn't so that the warfare isn't about conquering your your

527
00:26:51,080 --> 00:26:53,520
Speaker 1: enemies land and taking over the land. It's about conquering

528
00:26:53,560 --> 00:26:56,960
Speaker 1: the trappings of their civilization and incorporating them into your civilization.

529
00:26:57,119 --> 00:26:59,440
Speaker 1: And so for them, they think of the video camera

530
00:26:59,480 --> 00:27:01,800
Speaker 1: and they say this literally, the video camera is a weapon.

531
00:27:01,800 --> 00:27:04,560
Speaker 1: It's like bowl and arrows. We capture the weapon, this

532
00:27:04,760 --> 00:27:07,720
Speaker 1: camera from the white people. They call them coubing white people,

533
00:27:08,160 --> 00:27:10,960
Speaker 1: non indigenous people's and then we use that as a

534
00:27:11,000 --> 00:27:14,240
Speaker 1: weapon to defend our culture. And so the exhibit is

535
00:27:14,280 --> 00:27:17,000
Speaker 1: all about how they use cameras. They want to give

536
00:27:17,040 --> 00:27:19,399
Speaker 1: their own narrative about what's going on rather than the

537
00:27:19,440 --> 00:27:21,919
Speaker 1: official Brazilian areta. There's two things I want to finish

538
00:27:21,920 --> 00:27:25,199
Speaker 1: with one thing, I believe that the pandemic was the

539
00:27:25,680 --> 00:27:28,520
Speaker 1: dress rehearsal for what's going to happen in terms of

540
00:27:28,520 --> 00:27:32,440
Speaker 1: global warming. In this society, people have been asked to

541
00:27:32,480 --> 00:27:36,560
Speaker 1: make sacrifices and to understand certain limitations and to understand

542
00:27:36,600 --> 00:27:39,960
Speaker 1: their own personal responsibility and participating in a program is

543
00:27:40,000 --> 00:27:42,159
Speaker 1: going to help us to manage some of these problems.

544
00:27:42,480 --> 00:27:45,960
Speaker 1: And we've come out with a very poor score, and

545
00:27:46,000 --> 00:27:48,320
Speaker 1: that the global warming is going to come and going

546
00:27:48,359 --> 00:27:51,320
Speaker 1: to create a whole other menu of edicts we have

547
00:27:51,400 --> 00:27:55,119
Speaker 1: to live by, uh, in terms of sacrifices and and

548
00:27:54,960 --> 00:27:56,639
Speaker 1: and a big part of that that has to do with food.

549
00:27:57,080 --> 00:27:58,800
Speaker 1: You're not gonna be able to eat whatever you want

550
00:27:58,840 --> 00:28:00,560
Speaker 1: whenever you're You're gonna have to eat less speef because

551
00:28:00,560 --> 00:28:03,320
Speaker 1: the production is very toxifying and so forth. What is

552
00:28:03,359 --> 00:28:05,480
Speaker 1: your opinion about that? Are you seeing any signs of

553
00:28:05,480 --> 00:28:09,720
Speaker 1: global warming down where you are? Absolutely the rainfall patterns

554
00:28:09,720 --> 00:28:12,800
Speaker 1: are completely different. Now. Indigenous people talk about this, they say,

555
00:28:12,800 --> 00:28:14,199
Speaker 1: you know it used to it used to be you

556
00:28:14,200 --> 00:28:15,879
Speaker 1: could count on it raining in such and such a

557
00:28:15,880 --> 00:28:17,560
Speaker 1: time and not raining, so you could plant your crops

558
00:28:17,720 --> 00:28:19,520
Speaker 1: and now it will be a drought and then the

559
00:28:19,600 --> 00:28:22,040
Speaker 1: rains come and you know, villages have been washed away

560
00:28:22,119 --> 00:28:25,840
Speaker 1: and other places you know they plant. The climate has

561
00:28:25,840 --> 00:28:29,439
Speaker 1: gone completely crazy. And the Amazon is this huge pump.

562
00:28:30,080 --> 00:28:33,160
Speaker 1: It pumps water from northern Brazil to southern Brazil. It's

563
00:28:33,160 --> 00:28:36,800
Speaker 1: this gigantic like suction pump that sends water to the

564
00:28:37,320 --> 00:28:41,560
Speaker 1: farmers in southern Brazil who are funding Bolsonado and the destruction.

565
00:28:41,760 --> 00:28:43,200
Speaker 1: And it's going to come back, and it could turn

566
00:28:43,240 --> 00:28:45,320
Speaker 1: southern Brazilian too. If you look all around the globe

567
00:28:46,040 --> 00:28:49,320
Speaker 1: at the latitude of where southern Brasili is, it's the

568
00:28:49,360 --> 00:28:52,440
Speaker 1: Gobi Desert, it's the it's the Kalahari, It's that same

569
00:28:52,520 --> 00:28:55,640
Speaker 1: latitude these productive farmlands in Brazil. Everywhere else in the

570
00:28:55,640 --> 00:28:57,640
Speaker 1: world is a desert. And the only reason it's not

571
00:28:57,680 --> 00:28:59,920
Speaker 1: a desert and Brazil is because of the Amazon. You know,

572
00:29:00,040 --> 00:29:02,000
Speaker 1: one of the things you see in the work you do,

573
00:29:02,120 --> 00:29:05,560
Speaker 1: the unifying idea behind all this kind of work is

574
00:29:05,600 --> 00:29:08,520
Speaker 1: that we've lived in a country that has gone around

575
00:29:08,520 --> 00:29:11,680
Speaker 1: the world and told everybody what we can teach them,

576
00:29:11,800 --> 00:29:13,840
Speaker 1: and global warming is going to teach us what those

577
00:29:13,840 --> 00:29:17,000
Speaker 1: people can teach us, what can the indigenous people's and

578
00:29:17,280 --> 00:29:20,400
Speaker 1: even historically, what can they teach us. It's gonna help

579
00:29:20,480 --> 00:29:24,600
Speaker 1: us to at least address not solved, but at least

580
00:29:24,640 --> 00:29:27,840
Speaker 1: address the climate change problem that's going to come pouring

581
00:29:27,880 --> 00:29:29,920
Speaker 1: down on top of us in some horrible way. Well,

582
00:29:29,920 --> 00:29:33,640
Speaker 1: there's an interesting statistic. If you take all of the

583
00:29:33,680 --> 00:29:36,440
Speaker 1: fruits of these edible fruits that indigenous people's manage in

584
00:29:36,440 --> 00:29:39,920
Speaker 1: the Amazon rap Ice Brazilias i e. Dozens and dozens

585
00:29:39,960 --> 00:29:44,920
Speaker 1: of fruits, they produce something like forty times the protein

586
00:29:46,000 --> 00:29:48,880
Speaker 1: of all the cattle that's produced in the Amazon. So

587
00:29:49,080 --> 00:29:51,320
Speaker 1: it's there's no lack of food in the Amazon. It's

588
00:29:51,360 --> 00:29:55,080
Speaker 1: the model. We're not getting it wrong across the board,

589
00:29:55,200 --> 00:30:04,720
Speaker 1: but pretty close, pretty close. Ethnobotanist Glenn Shepherd. Philippe Deondrade

590
00:30:04,880 --> 00:30:09,560
Speaker 1: has a singular mission to help everyone care about wild animals,

591
00:30:09,880 --> 00:30:12,600
Speaker 1: and he'll go to any lengths to do it. De

592
00:30:12,760 --> 00:30:16,200
Speaker 1: Andrade envisioned his career from the time he got his

593
00:30:16,320 --> 00:30:19,720
Speaker 1: first camera. His big break came in two thousand fifteen,

594
00:30:20,120 --> 00:30:23,760
Speaker 1: when he won a national geographic film competition. He made

595
00:30:23,760 --> 00:30:27,160
Speaker 1: a short film called adapt It's an apt title for

596
00:30:27,280 --> 00:30:32,040
Speaker 1: both nature and Philippe's own story. De Andrade grew up

597
00:30:32,120 --> 00:30:36,320
Speaker 1: extremely poor, first in Brazil and then as an undocumented

598
00:30:36,360 --> 00:30:40,840
Speaker 1: immigrant in Cleveland. I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

599
00:30:41,560 --> 00:30:44,040
Speaker 1: And what that allowed me to have at such an

600
00:30:44,120 --> 00:30:48,080
Speaker 1: early age, which was an injection of wild life into

601
00:30:48,160 --> 00:30:50,600
Speaker 1: the system. And what I mean by that is my

602
00:30:50,720 --> 00:30:53,000
Speaker 1: mom would take me to the Amazon, she would take

603
00:30:53,040 --> 00:30:55,680
Speaker 1: me floating down rivers. We would go camping for months

604
00:30:55,720 --> 00:30:57,480
Speaker 1: at a time. I would go swimming in the ocean,

605
00:30:57,840 --> 00:31:01,160
Speaker 1: I would go tree climbing. This was my introduction to

606
00:31:01,320 --> 00:31:04,440
Speaker 1: life and it wasn't until about six when we moved

607
00:31:04,480 --> 00:31:08,240
Speaker 1: to Cleveland, and so I had that kind of taken

608
00:31:08,320 --> 00:31:12,440
Speaker 1: away from me, that zestin and surrounding of nature, and

609
00:31:13,880 --> 00:31:17,440
Speaker 1: it never truly left the system. If anything, it just

610
00:31:17,560 --> 00:31:21,320
Speaker 1: kind of made me hungry for more wildlife, for more adventure.

611
00:31:21,720 --> 00:31:24,440
Speaker 1: That's basically what set me on this path to doing

612
00:31:24,520 --> 00:31:27,960
Speaker 1: what I do today, which is trying to reintegrate myself

613
00:31:28,040 --> 00:31:31,040
Speaker 1: into nature as as often as I can in my

614
00:31:31,200 --> 00:31:34,400
Speaker 1: line of work as a National Geographic explorer. But at

615
00:31:34,440 --> 00:31:37,520
Speaker 1: an early age I had an interesting relationship with my

616
00:31:37,600 --> 00:31:40,680
Speaker 1: biological father he was a very abusive person. He was

617
00:31:41,080 --> 00:31:44,320
Speaker 1: on drugs, and he was uh not the nicest person

618
00:31:44,400 --> 00:31:48,240
Speaker 1: to my mom. So family life wasn't necessarily the best

619
00:31:48,320 --> 00:31:53,000
Speaker 1: as I was growing up, and that simultaneously with that

620
00:31:53,280 --> 00:31:57,760
Speaker 1: passion for nature also created an escape for me. It

621
00:31:57,880 --> 00:32:01,720
Speaker 1: allowed me to connect with nature, sure into wild animals

622
00:32:02,000 --> 00:32:04,600
Speaker 1: because a lot of people say animals don't have a voice,

623
00:32:05,120 --> 00:32:08,280
Speaker 1: and I believe it's rather that people aren't listening. You know,

624
00:32:08,400 --> 00:32:12,320
Speaker 1: communication is a is a major element across every single species,

625
00:32:12,400 --> 00:32:15,160
Speaker 1: not just the human. So animals are talking to us,

626
00:32:15,280 --> 00:32:18,440
Speaker 1: it's just that we're not necessarily listening. And as an

627
00:32:18,520 --> 00:32:22,880
Speaker 1: immigrant raised by a single mother in poverty and illegal immigrant,

628
00:32:22,920 --> 00:32:25,040
Speaker 1: at that I felt like I had a voice in

629
00:32:25,160 --> 00:32:30,960
Speaker 1: people weren't listening. So it was this affinity passion. Animals

630
00:32:31,080 --> 00:32:34,600
Speaker 1: make my heart sing and then you a company that

631
00:32:35,240 --> 00:32:38,680
Speaker 1: with this escapism that I found at an early age,

632
00:32:39,120 --> 00:32:42,680
Speaker 1: and because animals in a way saved me, it became

633
00:32:42,800 --> 00:32:46,120
Speaker 1: my life's mission to save them. So you're in Rio,

634
00:32:46,200 --> 00:32:47,640
Speaker 1: but your mother would take you to the countryside, you

635
00:32:47,680 --> 00:32:50,479
Speaker 1: go out to the country absolutely. So we actually got

636
00:32:50,600 --> 00:32:53,040
Speaker 1: displaced because of a flood, and that's what took us

637
00:32:53,040 --> 00:32:54,720
Speaker 1: to real I was born in the real hospital, but

638
00:32:54,800 --> 00:32:58,959
Speaker 1: then was raised on the countryside. But because of a flood,

639
00:32:59,280 --> 00:33:02,880
Speaker 1: we went back to Rio DIGIONEI on the favelas. Uh So, yeah,

640
00:33:02,960 --> 00:33:05,520
Speaker 1: it was always about getting back to the roots, getting

641
00:33:05,560 --> 00:33:08,560
Speaker 1: back to home. I mean, my mom had not pet monkeys,

642
00:33:08,600 --> 00:33:10,680
Speaker 1: but she had monkeys at the house. Growing up. She

643
00:33:10,760 --> 00:33:14,160
Speaker 1: had anacondas. You know, they saw jaguars on the red

644
00:33:14,560 --> 00:33:16,400
Speaker 1: So this was something that she grew up with and

645
00:33:16,640 --> 00:33:19,000
Speaker 1: kind of try to instill in us well as for

646
00:33:19,080 --> 00:33:22,360
Speaker 1: people who don't know about what a favela is. And

647
00:33:22,440 --> 00:33:26,240
Speaker 1: some of the cities of of Brazil and beyond the

648
00:33:26,360 --> 00:33:29,840
Speaker 1: favelas that I saw were people picking through garbage dumps

649
00:33:30,560 --> 00:33:34,040
Speaker 1: and um, you know, like some of the fiercest poverty

650
00:33:34,080 --> 00:33:35,680
Speaker 1: I've ever seen in my life. Is that was that

651
00:33:35,760 --> 00:33:38,920
Speaker 1: how you grew up. That's actually exactly how we grew up.

652
00:33:39,040 --> 00:33:42,520
Speaker 1: As you could imagine whenever we we think about like

653
00:33:42,720 --> 00:33:46,440
Speaker 1: immigrating in the sense of moving from one country to another,

654
00:33:46,560 --> 00:33:49,560
Speaker 1: but when you're raised in a developing nation, you can

655
00:33:49,640 --> 00:33:52,880
Speaker 1: immigrate even within your own country and find that it's

656
00:33:52,880 --> 00:33:57,200
Speaker 1: a complete culture shock. Right. So, growing up in the countryside,

657
00:33:57,280 --> 00:33:59,120
Speaker 1: we were poor, but we didn't know, we were poor.

658
00:33:59,440 --> 00:34:01,240
Speaker 1: We had every thing that we needed. You know, we

659
00:34:01,320 --> 00:34:04,000
Speaker 1: were poor financially, but we had food every day, we

660
00:34:04,080 --> 00:34:07,040
Speaker 1: had experiences, we had clean water, there was no violence,

661
00:34:07,280 --> 00:34:08,719
Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden we go to Rio

662
00:34:08,800 --> 00:34:11,759
Speaker 1: de Janeiro and we're like, we're poor. You know, it

663
00:34:11,880 --> 00:34:15,439
Speaker 1: was it was weird that somebody you knew didn't die

664
00:34:15,800 --> 00:34:20,200
Speaker 1: that week. Um, and that's what I think led my

665
00:34:20,760 --> 00:34:24,239
Speaker 1: father down this path of just violence and rage and

666
00:34:24,360 --> 00:34:27,840
Speaker 1: drugs and ultimately the reason why my mom wanted to

667
00:34:27,880 --> 00:34:30,879
Speaker 1: get us out of there. You know. So yeah, when

668
00:34:30,920 --> 00:34:34,719
Speaker 1: you picture like flavellas or slums or you know, the

669
00:34:35,080 --> 00:34:37,600
Speaker 1: kind of bottom of the barrel um in terms of

670
00:34:38,360 --> 00:34:40,880
Speaker 1: quality of life, that's what we were. That's what we

671
00:34:40,960 --> 00:34:45,440
Speaker 1: had in Reo Dejaneiro. So anything was better. Now when

672
00:34:45,480 --> 00:34:50,880
Speaker 1: you go from Brazil to Cleveland, Ohio, was there a

673
00:34:51,040 --> 00:34:53,800
Speaker 1: job waiting for your father or your mother there? So

674
00:34:54,080 --> 00:34:57,040
Speaker 1: it was interesting. We we came to the States, my mom,

675
00:34:57,120 --> 00:35:00,200
Speaker 1: my sister, and I because my dad had worked here.

676
00:35:00,280 --> 00:35:02,560
Speaker 1: But then when we came here, he was just kind

677
00:35:02,600 --> 00:35:05,640
Speaker 1: of out of control and he went back to Brazil

678
00:35:05,800 --> 00:35:08,520
Speaker 1: and he took all of our documents. So this is

679
00:35:08,600 --> 00:35:10,840
Speaker 1: something that a lot of people think with immigrants is like,

680
00:35:10,920 --> 00:35:12,480
Speaker 1: you know, they're always looking for a way out. That

681
00:35:12,520 --> 00:35:14,880
Speaker 1: couldn't be further from the truth. We were actually pretty

682
00:35:14,960 --> 00:35:17,680
Speaker 1: much stranded in the States because we had no way

683
00:35:17,719 --> 00:35:21,040
Speaker 1: of going back. We didn't have passports, any documentation, anything

684
00:35:21,120 --> 00:35:24,520
Speaker 1: like that. So I think my mom just looked up,

685
00:35:24,719 --> 00:35:27,080
Speaker 1: you know, cost of living and was like, Oh, this

686
00:35:27,200 --> 00:35:29,640
Speaker 1: place is cheap enough, it's developing enough. It looks like

687
00:35:29,680 --> 00:35:33,040
Speaker 1: there's a small Brazilian population. You know why we didn't

688
00:35:33,080 --> 00:35:35,080
Speaker 1: go to Boston and said, I don't know where there's

689
00:35:35,080 --> 00:35:39,640
Speaker 1: a healthier and bigger Brazilian population, but we chose Cleveland. Interesting,

690
00:35:40,040 --> 00:35:43,360
Speaker 1: so the boy from the favela who goes to Cleveland

691
00:35:43,480 --> 00:35:45,279
Speaker 1: ends up at the University of Florida. Where were you

692
00:35:45,360 --> 00:35:47,759
Speaker 1: in Gainesville or where I was in Gainesville, Florida. How

693
00:35:47,800 --> 00:35:50,879
Speaker 1: did you pay for it? Well? I worked my ass off.

694
00:35:51,080 --> 00:35:56,160
Speaker 1: I literally worked three jobs full time, and I did everything.

695
00:35:56,280 --> 00:36:00,400
Speaker 1: I washed dishes, I photographed Bob mitzvuzz I worked at

696
00:36:00,440 --> 00:36:03,399
Speaker 1: the TV and radio station. And I don't even want

697
00:36:03,440 --> 00:36:07,040
Speaker 1: to say it was like a difficulty because there was

698
00:36:07,160 --> 00:36:10,280
Speaker 1: no other option. I just watched my mom do whatever

699
00:36:10,440 --> 00:36:13,160
Speaker 1: she had to do to make it, no questions asked,

700
00:36:13,239 --> 00:36:15,520
Speaker 1: just work her ass off and get it done. And

701
00:36:15,719 --> 00:36:19,320
Speaker 1: so I went into university with that same mindset. I

702
00:36:19,480 --> 00:36:22,160
Speaker 1: realized that I was lucky to have a higher education.

703
00:36:22,840 --> 00:36:25,600
Speaker 1: I was going to make something of it. And so

704
00:36:25,840 --> 00:36:29,120
Speaker 1: college for me probably looked a lot different than most people,

705
00:36:29,480 --> 00:36:31,880
Speaker 1: because I never thought I was going to go to college.

706
00:36:32,120 --> 00:36:35,040
Speaker 1: You know, I was illegal for almost fifteen years, so

707
00:36:35,520 --> 00:36:39,360
Speaker 1: university was very, very very far off in the distance.

708
00:36:39,600 --> 00:36:42,120
Speaker 1: So when I actually had the opportunity, I was like,

709
00:36:42,160 --> 00:36:45,040
Speaker 1: I'm gonna pick my dream school. I'm gonna do whatever

710
00:36:45,280 --> 00:36:48,120
Speaker 1: I have to to make it happen. I'm gonna double major,

711
00:36:48,480 --> 00:36:51,080
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna work my ass off and absolutely make

712
00:36:51,160 --> 00:36:56,000
Speaker 1: something of myself. And so I worked throughout university, like

713
00:36:56,160 --> 00:36:59,480
Speaker 1: I said, double major, and I was as active as

714
00:36:59,480 --> 00:37:02,279
Speaker 1: a college student could possibly be, every single week and

715
00:37:02,400 --> 00:37:06,600
Speaker 1: making films every single weekend, you know, volunteering doing internships,

716
00:37:06,960 --> 00:37:11,880
Speaker 1: catching alligators, catching snakes, tagging sharks. I was involved in

717
00:37:12,040 --> 00:37:15,799
Speaker 1: biology and in film, and I also saw an opportunity

718
00:37:15,880 --> 00:37:19,680
Speaker 1: alec because there was no track for wildlife filmmakers or

719
00:37:19,719 --> 00:37:24,080
Speaker 1: for you know, budding national geographic photographers are explorers, so

720
00:37:24,600 --> 00:37:27,279
Speaker 1: I had to go and do that myself. If I

721
00:37:27,360 --> 00:37:29,319
Speaker 1: were going to make it happen, this is the thing

722
00:37:29,400 --> 00:37:31,239
Speaker 1: you had your site some from the beginning, you were

723
00:37:31,280 --> 00:37:36,399
Speaker 1: going to become a wildlife documentary filmmaker. For me, it's

724
00:37:36,520 --> 00:37:39,560
Speaker 1: kind of always been a plan A type of thing,

725
00:37:39,760 --> 00:37:42,200
Speaker 1: and when you come out of the background that you

726
00:37:42,280 --> 00:37:46,360
Speaker 1: know I talked about earlier, there's only an upside. So

727
00:37:46,600 --> 00:37:49,279
Speaker 1: I've always had it wedged in my mentality that if

728
00:37:49,320 --> 00:37:51,239
Speaker 1: I got the opportunity, or if I was going to

729
00:37:51,320 --> 00:37:53,600
Speaker 1: become legal in this country, there is no plan B.

730
00:37:54,160 --> 00:37:57,560
Speaker 1: Plan A for me has always been to work for

731
00:37:57,719 --> 00:38:01,040
Speaker 1: National Geographic to become an explorer, to make wildlife films,

732
00:38:01,080 --> 00:38:04,920
Speaker 1: to tell conservation stories, and to spend a wildlife to

733
00:38:05,000 --> 00:38:09,279
Speaker 1: spend cent of my time in nature, infused in a

734
00:38:09,480 --> 00:38:13,279
Speaker 1: setting surrounded by wild characters. So I would say the

735
00:38:13,440 --> 00:38:16,480
Speaker 1: first decision I made that set me up for for

736
00:38:16,600 --> 00:38:19,319
Speaker 1: my career was going to the University of Florida, paying

737
00:38:19,360 --> 00:38:22,319
Speaker 1: out of state tuition, you know, truly living on my own.

738
00:38:22,640 --> 00:38:26,920
Speaker 1: And the second decision was before I even graduated, I

739
00:38:27,080 --> 00:38:30,359
Speaker 1: decided to hike the Appleasian Trail. So I spent six

740
00:38:30,480 --> 00:38:34,320
Speaker 1: months living in the woods, going from Georgia to Maine,

741
00:38:34,800 --> 00:38:38,400
Speaker 1: and I mean, you know, when you make a decision

742
00:38:38,520 --> 00:38:41,680
Speaker 1: like that, you're all in. And I'll never forget this

743
00:38:41,880 --> 00:38:44,560
Speaker 1: instance that I had on the app Latian Trail. The

744
00:38:44,640 --> 00:38:48,680
Speaker 1: most critical conversation I've ever had with a human being

745
00:38:49,160 --> 00:38:51,400
Speaker 1: was an eighties something, your old man at a Dollar

746
00:38:51,480 --> 00:38:54,839
Speaker 1: General in Franklin, North Carolina. And when you look at

747
00:38:54,880 --> 00:38:57,319
Speaker 1: the map on the app Lastian Trail, you know, if

748
00:38:57,400 --> 00:38:59,759
Speaker 1: it's like this, like if it's a foot. I was

749
00:39:00,440 --> 00:39:04,520
Speaker 1: not even an inch, like I barely started with this thing.

750
00:39:05,080 --> 00:39:07,279
Speaker 1: And there was this eighties something year old guy at

751
00:39:07,320 --> 00:39:09,000
Speaker 1: the dollar General and he looks at me up and

752
00:39:09,040 --> 00:39:11,880
Speaker 1: down because I smell like bigfootstoe jam and regret, you know,

753
00:39:12,080 --> 00:39:14,360
Speaker 1: just had gotten off the woods and just buying a

754
00:39:14,440 --> 00:39:17,440
Speaker 1: pack of Rama noodles. And he's like, are you homeless

755
00:39:17,560 --> 00:39:20,200
Speaker 1: or what's going on here? And I was like, I'm

756
00:39:20,280 --> 00:39:23,120
Speaker 1: hiking the apples and Trail and he's like, wow, you're

757
00:39:23,239 --> 00:39:25,359
Speaker 1: you're actually doing it. And I was like, yeah, it's

758
00:39:25,480 --> 00:39:27,800
Speaker 1: something that I convinced myself I was gonna do. And

759
00:39:28,200 --> 00:39:30,759
Speaker 1: you know, I I started in Georgia about a month ago.

760
00:39:31,640 --> 00:39:35,080
Speaker 1: And he's like, I've always wanted to do something like that.

761
00:39:35,320 --> 00:39:38,279
Speaker 1: I've always wanted to take a big adventure in my life.

762
00:39:38,880 --> 00:39:41,680
Speaker 1: But what about the odds of failing, what about getting

763
00:39:41,760 --> 00:39:45,000
Speaker 1: hungry or hypothermia, or you know, just simply not reaching

764
00:39:45,080 --> 00:39:49,560
Speaker 1: your end mark. Aren't you worried about failing? And I

765
00:39:49,719 --> 00:39:52,600
Speaker 1: told him, I said, out of all the people that

766
00:39:52,880 --> 00:39:56,360
Speaker 1: wish they had taken one step on the Applachian Trail

767
00:39:56,640 --> 00:39:59,959
Speaker 1: and hadn't, and about two thousand people a year hyped

768
00:40:00,040 --> 00:40:04,480
Speaker 1: this thing, the single fact that I had started already

769
00:40:04,600 --> 00:40:08,600
Speaker 1: makes me a success. When I finished this, I would

770
00:40:08,640 --> 00:40:11,680
Speaker 1: have been a success six months ago, not because of

771
00:40:11,719 --> 00:40:15,239
Speaker 1: the destination, but because of the mentality that pushed me

772
00:40:15,360 --> 00:40:17,919
Speaker 1: onto the mountain in the first place. And I could

773
00:40:17,960 --> 00:40:20,440
Speaker 1: see this guy breaking down in front of me, this

774
00:40:20,600 --> 00:40:23,759
Speaker 1: eighties something year old, you know, gentleman, speaking to me

775
00:40:23,840 --> 00:40:27,160
Speaker 1: about this, and he just told me, never ever ever

776
00:40:27,320 --> 00:40:31,720
Speaker 1: live with regret, keep that mentality and don't allow failing

777
00:40:31,880 --> 00:40:34,239
Speaker 1: something to keep you from doing it, because that's what

778
00:40:34,360 --> 00:40:37,160
Speaker 1: kept me from going after my dreams. And it was

779
00:40:37,239 --> 00:40:39,799
Speaker 1: at a Dollar General and Fink Glenn, North Carolina, where

780
00:40:39,840 --> 00:40:42,680
Speaker 1: I was like, Okay, I'm not just literally on the

781
00:40:42,800 --> 00:40:46,160
Speaker 1: right path with this hiking thing. I'm metaphorically on the

782
00:40:46,280 --> 00:40:51,200
Speaker 1: right path with this mentality of just go after it start. Now.

783
00:40:51,680 --> 00:40:56,000
Speaker 1: Some people have suggested that you're the next Steve Irwin

784
00:40:56,160 --> 00:40:58,719
Speaker 1: in some case, but we all know how he ended up.

785
00:40:59,120 --> 00:41:03,359
Speaker 1: Describe a couple occasions where you bit off more than

786
00:41:03,440 --> 00:41:05,760
Speaker 1: you could chew. Where you thought you were in trouble,

787
00:41:05,960 --> 00:41:09,359
Speaker 1: you thought you were in danger. Well, my first night

788
00:41:09,719 --> 00:41:12,520
Speaker 1: in New York City after having never been there before.

789
00:41:12,960 --> 00:41:18,880
Speaker 1: You're on the subway. Humans scared the ship out of me. Significt.

790
00:41:18,920 --> 00:41:20,839
Speaker 1: I will take a jaguar, I will take a shark.

791
00:41:20,920 --> 00:41:23,439
Speaker 1: I will take a snake any day over a human being.

792
00:41:23,800 --> 00:41:28,120
Speaker 1: I got bit by an individual my first train ride

793
00:41:28,239 --> 00:41:30,680
Speaker 1: in New York City, and I had just got done

794
00:41:30,680 --> 00:41:34,120
Speaker 1: on the App York. Yeah, I had seventeen cents to

795
00:41:34,200 --> 00:41:39,080
Speaker 1: my name, and I was so exhausted that I put

796
00:41:39,200 --> 00:41:42,239
Speaker 1: my giant backpack next to me fell asleep on the train,

797
00:41:42,600 --> 00:41:44,360
Speaker 1: and I guess this gentleman next to me was like

798
00:41:44,440 --> 00:41:46,799
Speaker 1: shaking me to get off of him, and I wasn't

799
00:41:46,920 --> 00:41:50,560
Speaker 1: quite responding, and so I just literally had something bit

800
00:41:50,719 --> 00:41:52,680
Speaker 1: me and woke up to this guy on a train

801
00:41:52,800 --> 00:41:55,160
Speaker 1: yelling at me, like, get the f off me. Man, like,

802
00:41:55,239 --> 00:41:56,880
Speaker 1: where do you think you're at? And I was just

803
00:41:57,040 --> 00:42:00,680
Speaker 1: like wow. So the scaredest I've ever been when it

804
00:42:00,719 --> 00:42:03,920
Speaker 1: comes to a wild animal is getting bit by somebody

805
00:42:03,960 --> 00:42:06,319
Speaker 1: I didn't know on the New York City. So other

806
00:42:06,400 --> 00:42:10,080
Speaker 1: than you're the subway in New York, where in the

807
00:42:10,200 --> 00:42:13,920
Speaker 1: wild encountering an animal, have you ever been really in danger?

808
00:42:14,600 --> 00:42:18,480
Speaker 1: I've never been in danger from an animal. The one

809
00:42:18,640 --> 00:42:21,319
Speaker 1: instance where I will say I truly had my heart

810
00:42:21,400 --> 00:42:24,719
Speaker 1: jump out of my chest is my first documentary for

811
00:42:24,840 --> 00:42:28,880
Speaker 1: National Geographic was Jaguar Beach, where we were documenting jaguars

812
00:42:28,920 --> 00:42:32,280
Speaker 1: eating sea turtles in Costa Rica. And I waited twenty

813
00:42:32,320 --> 00:42:35,120
Speaker 1: one days inside of a camera hide. Twenty one days

814
00:42:35,520 --> 00:42:38,560
Speaker 1: inside of a hide in the dry forest feels like

815
00:42:39,400 --> 00:42:42,200
Speaker 1: you're inside of a dragon's womb. I mean, there's no

816
00:42:42,320 --> 00:42:45,560
Speaker 1: other way around it. It's so many mosquitoes that you

817
00:42:45,600 --> 00:42:47,759
Speaker 1: think you're gonna get lifted off the ground. You've got

818
00:42:47,880 --> 00:42:50,080
Speaker 1: one bucket for your water, you've got another bucket to

819
00:42:50,120 --> 00:42:52,239
Speaker 1: go to the bathroom in and you can't confuse the two.

820
00:42:52,800 --> 00:42:56,759
Speaker 1: And it's it's miserable, to say the least. And I

821
00:42:56,920 --> 00:42:59,839
Speaker 1: had this jaguar out of twenty one days I had

822
00:42:59,840 --> 00:43:03,560
Speaker 1: a ten minute experience with the jaguar, and she was pregnant,

823
00:43:04,160 --> 00:43:07,560
Speaker 1: and she got a bit curious. We were filming with

824
00:43:07,680 --> 00:43:10,919
Speaker 1: infrared lights, which means that she couldn't they weren't white lights,

825
00:43:11,000 --> 00:43:13,960
Speaker 1: so she couldn't see the light emitting from our lights

826
00:43:14,000 --> 00:43:16,560
Speaker 1: because they were red, and their eyes don't pick up

827
00:43:16,600 --> 00:43:21,000
Speaker 1: on that sensor. And so she just kept coming closer, closer, closer,

828
00:43:21,160 --> 00:43:23,759
Speaker 1: and closer. And I was in the middle of the

829
00:43:23,880 --> 00:43:27,880
Speaker 1: dry forest by myself. You know, I didn't know how

830
00:43:27,960 --> 00:43:30,120
Speaker 1: far away I was from the next human being, with

831
00:43:30,239 --> 00:43:35,360
Speaker 1: a wild, hungry jaguar literally breathing down my neck on

832
00:43:35,440 --> 00:43:38,839
Speaker 1: the other side of this camera hide, which was made

833
00:43:38,880 --> 00:43:43,160
Speaker 1: out of you know, nylon tent material. And in that moment,

834
00:43:43,560 --> 00:43:46,560
Speaker 1: I was like, what the hell did I get myself into?

835
00:43:47,320 --> 00:43:52,520
Speaker 1: But I kept my composure. I just stayed there. I

836
00:43:52,600 --> 00:43:55,440
Speaker 1: didn't make a single noise, and I knew that she

837
00:43:55,560 --> 00:43:58,640
Speaker 1: could feel me because the whiskers of a cat work

838
00:43:58,760 --> 00:44:01,680
Speaker 1: similarly to the set three organs of a shark, where

839
00:44:01,719 --> 00:44:05,120
Speaker 1: they can just pick up on environmental changes, you know,

840
00:44:05,560 --> 00:44:10,600
Speaker 1: things like change in wind direction, smell density. Jaguars just

841
00:44:10,719 --> 00:44:13,920
Speaker 1: have a knack of picking up like something's different without

842
00:44:14,000 --> 00:44:16,680
Speaker 1: even seeing it, and so she knew that I was

843
00:44:16,800 --> 00:44:20,240
Speaker 1: there even though she couldn't see me. And in that moment,

844
00:44:20,400 --> 00:44:24,279
Speaker 1: I literally had the most powerful presence I've ever been

845
00:44:24,360 --> 00:44:27,440
Speaker 1: presented with right in front of me. And the crazy

846
00:44:27,560 --> 00:44:30,919
Speaker 1: thing about that jaguar is two months after we left,

847
00:44:32,560 --> 00:44:35,960
Speaker 1: she had those cubs and the scientists let me name them,

848
00:44:36,800 --> 00:44:41,040
Speaker 1: and so I named one Jane, after my idol, Jane Goodall,

849
00:44:41,280 --> 00:44:43,400
Speaker 1: and I said, you guys get to name the next one,

850
00:44:43,760 --> 00:44:46,000
Speaker 1: and they said, we're gonna name it Philippe. So now

851
00:44:46,400 --> 00:44:49,480
Speaker 1: there's a Jane Goodall and there's a Philip jaguar cub

852
00:44:49,840 --> 00:44:53,600
Speaker 1: running around the beaches of Costa Rica causing terror. And

853
00:44:54,560 --> 00:44:57,959
Speaker 1: even though nothing happened, and I can't say that something

854
00:44:58,000 --> 00:45:01,000
Speaker 1: would have happened if I behave differently, just being presented

855
00:45:01,080 --> 00:45:04,040
Speaker 1: in that kind of situation was enough to make you

856
00:45:04,560 --> 00:45:07,520
Speaker 1: realize how small you are in nature. When you go

857
00:45:07,680 --> 00:45:11,400
Speaker 1: on these trips and you're going to be shooting, how

858
00:45:11,480 --> 00:45:14,239
Speaker 1: many people do you bring with you? So in in

859
00:45:14,400 --> 00:45:20,239
Speaker 1: this line of work, less is more. Typically, anytime I'm scouting, researching,

860
00:45:20,400 --> 00:45:22,680
Speaker 1: like you know, trying to figure something out, it's me

861
00:45:22,880 --> 00:45:25,200
Speaker 1: and a biologist or me and a ranger, or me

862
00:45:25,320 --> 00:45:28,520
Speaker 1: and a poacher or somebody that understands the animal in

863
00:45:28,640 --> 00:45:31,680
Speaker 1: the area. That's typically it. So two people I like

864
00:45:31,800 --> 00:45:34,280
Speaker 1: to keep it to when I'm working and we're filming,

865
00:45:34,560 --> 00:45:38,399
Speaker 1: a team of three or four is absolutely perfect. Are

866
00:45:38,440 --> 00:45:42,800
Speaker 1: you ever armed? Never armed? Is anybody armed? Absolutely not?

867
00:45:43,120 --> 00:45:45,600
Speaker 1: And I will say that's not to say that in

868
00:45:45,719 --> 00:45:49,320
Speaker 1: certain situations you shouldn't. But for anybody listening to this,

869
00:45:49,600 --> 00:45:51,520
Speaker 1: you know, and and this is a critical element of

870
00:45:51,800 --> 00:45:53,440
Speaker 1: what I do. If you're kind of looking to get

871
00:45:53,520 --> 00:45:58,800
Speaker 1: into this, you know, preparation is absolutely key. Preparation is

872
00:45:59,200 --> 00:46:02,719
Speaker 1: absolutely name of the game. And so the only instance,

873
00:46:02,760 --> 00:46:05,560
Speaker 1: which is kind of funny, where I've ever been armed

874
00:46:06,040 --> 00:46:09,040
Speaker 1: was my first assignment with National Geographic was in Botswana,

875
00:46:09,120 --> 00:46:12,000
Speaker 1: which is Jurassic Park, the oka Ana Delta. It's just

876
00:46:12,360 --> 00:46:15,520
Speaker 1: everything you could ever hope for. Everybody should visit there

877
00:46:15,520 --> 00:46:17,960
Speaker 1: and they would lock onto why we need to save

878
00:46:18,040 --> 00:46:22,880
Speaker 1: this planet. But we were documenting lions eating elephants, and

879
00:46:23,239 --> 00:46:28,320
Speaker 1: so we spent twenty four hours a day for the

880
00:46:28,640 --> 00:46:30,800
Speaker 1: first month and a half that I was there, side

881
00:46:30,840 --> 00:46:32,759
Speaker 1: by side with the elephants. But this is what I

882
00:46:32,800 --> 00:46:35,319
Speaker 1: mean when it comes to preparation. You hear of all

883
00:46:35,360 --> 00:46:39,920
Speaker 1: these accidents lions ripping tourists out of vehicles, or you know,

884
00:46:40,080 --> 00:46:42,800
Speaker 1: person sticking out their hand and getting their hand bitten

885
00:46:42,840 --> 00:46:44,600
Speaker 1: off by a line when they're trying to take a photo.

886
00:46:45,120 --> 00:46:49,120
Speaker 1: That's because either a they're not understanding the animal, or

887
00:46:49,200 --> 00:46:51,960
Speaker 1: be they're not listening to what the guide is telling them.

888
00:46:52,600 --> 00:46:55,960
Speaker 1: When we film lions in Africa, we keep all of

889
00:46:56,040 --> 00:46:59,640
Speaker 1: our body parts inside the vehicle. We don't have windshields,

890
00:46:59,840 --> 00:47:02,959
Speaker 1: we don't have doors, we don't have windows. It's three

891
00:47:03,120 --> 00:47:06,520
Speaker 1: sixty degree view and the car is entirely open. I've

892
00:47:06,560 --> 00:47:10,560
Speaker 1: had leopards, lions, hyenas stick their heads inside of a vehicle.

893
00:47:10,880 --> 00:47:14,200
Speaker 1: I've woken up to a snouted cobra on the steering wheel,

894
00:47:14,360 --> 00:47:17,640
Speaker 1: which is infamously the snake that killed Cleopatra. You know,

895
00:47:17,760 --> 00:47:20,280
Speaker 1: I was truly excited about that, my first snouted cobra,

896
00:47:20,520 --> 00:47:22,160
Speaker 1: something I've always wanted to see because I had an

897
00:47:22,160 --> 00:47:25,040
Speaker 1: obsession with Cleopatra when I was younger. So anyways, what

898
00:47:25,160 --> 00:47:28,720
Speaker 1: I mean by that is the animals sees the vehicle

899
00:47:28,840 --> 00:47:31,480
Speaker 1: as a single unit, as long as you don't break

900
00:47:31,680 --> 00:47:33,920
Speaker 1: the unit by sticking your arm out, sticking your head

901
00:47:33,960 --> 00:47:36,759
Speaker 1: out getting out of the vehicle. They don't distinguish you

902
00:47:37,360 --> 00:47:41,760
Speaker 1: from that unit. So it's just about knowing the situation

903
00:47:41,840 --> 00:47:44,760
Speaker 1: that you're getting yourself into and abiding by the rules

904
00:47:45,000 --> 00:47:47,880
Speaker 1: because in nature, animals make the rules. So when you

905
00:47:48,000 --> 00:47:50,920
Speaker 1: break those rules, that's when you have accidents. It's no

906
00:47:51,040 --> 00:47:53,120
Speaker 1: different than when it's you know, diving with the shark.

907
00:47:53,640 --> 00:47:56,200
Speaker 1: Sharks will speak to you when she doesn't want you

908
00:47:56,320 --> 00:47:59,880
Speaker 1: in the area anymore. She'll lower her pectoral fins and

909
00:48:00,080 --> 00:48:04,239
Speaker 1: show arch her back and just kind of change the

910
00:48:04,360 --> 00:48:07,280
Speaker 1: body language that she's giving you. And when that happens,

911
00:48:07,520 --> 00:48:09,600
Speaker 1: trust me, you want to listen to her. So it's

912
00:48:09,640 --> 00:48:13,959
Speaker 1: about reading the situation, understanding what you're getting yourself into,

913
00:48:14,360 --> 00:48:18,000
Speaker 1: and being able to speak animal. And I guarantee you

914
00:48:18,320 --> 00:48:21,480
Speaker 1: if you can do that, accidents are very, very very

915
00:48:21,640 --> 00:48:26,080
Speaker 1: very minimal in my line of work. The host of

916
00:48:26,239 --> 00:48:31,760
Speaker 1: nat Geo Wilde's Untamed series, Philippe Deondrode, if you're enjoying

917
00:48:31,840 --> 00:48:35,000
Speaker 1: this conversation, don't keep it to yourself, Tell a friend

918
00:48:35,239 --> 00:48:38,719
Speaker 1: and follow here's the thing on the I Heart radio app,

919
00:48:38,800 --> 00:48:43,640
Speaker 1: Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,

920
00:48:43,760 --> 00:48:48,879
Speaker 1: Philippe Deondrode talks about his introduction to wildlife killing contests.

921
00:49:01,600 --> 00:49:04,840
Speaker 1: I'm Alec Baldwin and this is here's the thing. Earlier

922
00:49:04,920 --> 00:49:08,040
Speaker 1: this year, Philippe de Andrade released a film in collaboration

923
00:49:08,120 --> 00:49:12,920
Speaker 1: with Project Coyote to bring awareness to wildlife killing contests.

924
00:49:13,760 --> 00:49:16,200
Speaker 1: It's basically a hunting tournament where the goal is to

925
00:49:16,320 --> 00:49:20,280
Speaker 1: kill as many animals as possible, and they target important

926
00:49:20,280 --> 00:49:24,680
Speaker 1: and critical predators like foxes, wolves, bobcats, pumas in coyotes.

927
00:49:25,120 --> 00:49:29,200
Speaker 1: And to give you an idea of what this looks

928
00:49:29,239 --> 00:49:32,160
Speaker 1: like is it's purely animal genocide. I went to one

929
00:49:32,239 --> 00:49:36,400
Speaker 1: tournament in Texas in two thousand and twenty called the

930
00:49:36,440 --> 00:49:40,800
Speaker 1: West Texas Big Bobcat Tournament. In one tournament in one state,

931
00:49:41,160 --> 00:49:44,719
Speaker 1: in one weekend, seven hundred and eighteen teams signed up

932
00:49:45,080 --> 00:49:49,680
Speaker 1: and one team killed a hundred in sixteen animals. And

933
00:49:49,800 --> 00:49:53,680
Speaker 1: it's happening in over forty states. Where did you first

934
00:49:53,840 --> 00:49:57,000
Speaker 1: encounter this? Okay, so I'm about to tell this for

935
00:49:57,080 --> 00:50:02,320
Speaker 1: the first time publicly. I found out about these killing

936
00:50:02,400 --> 00:50:06,279
Speaker 1: contests because I was doing a documentary with my great

937
00:50:06,320 --> 00:50:11,840
Speaker 1: friend Ben Masters about Trump's physical law as it relates

938
00:50:11,920 --> 00:50:15,040
Speaker 1: to wildlife. Because it was something that nobody was talking about.

939
00:50:15,320 --> 00:50:20,239
Speaker 1: So we said, what if we do the entire Rio

940
00:50:20,360 --> 00:50:24,680
Speaker 1: grand along the border between Texas and Mexico by horse

941
00:50:24,880 --> 00:50:28,840
Speaker 1: back riding, mountain biking, and canoeing as to do in

942
00:50:28,960 --> 00:50:35,200
Speaker 1: ecological survey of how a physical barrier would obstruct nature.

943
00:50:35,800 --> 00:50:38,760
Speaker 1: And one day we ended up on this guy's property

944
00:50:38,920 --> 00:50:42,600
Speaker 1: that he was managing on the Texas side and we

945
00:50:42,840 --> 00:50:45,280
Speaker 1: got held up. And so the next day at breakfast,

946
00:50:45,600 --> 00:50:48,839
Speaker 1: we were a day late, and he goes, hey, you're

947
00:50:48,920 --> 00:50:53,160
Speaker 1: the cat guy, right, And that week I was National

948
00:50:53,200 --> 00:50:56,440
Speaker 1: and Geographics two thousand eighteen Big Cat Ambassador, so I

949
00:50:56,560 --> 00:50:59,360
Speaker 1: was doing all these commercials and social media campaign to

950
00:50:59,560 --> 00:51:03,319
Speaker 1: cause uproar, you know, a donation based incentive to keep

951
00:51:03,400 --> 00:51:06,279
Speaker 1: cats around on our planet. So this guy recognized me

952
00:51:06,400 --> 00:51:09,360
Speaker 1: from that and was like, I got you guys, beers.

953
00:51:09,400 --> 00:51:11,759
Speaker 1: I got you guys breakfast, Come and sit down, enjoy

954
00:51:11,800 --> 00:51:14,440
Speaker 1: a warm hot meal. So we're sitting there eating a

955
00:51:14,520 --> 00:51:17,400
Speaker 1: breakfast burrito and he goes, hey, cat guy, how do

956
00:51:17,440 --> 00:51:19,080
Speaker 1: you like your breakfast? And I was like, man, it's

957
00:51:19,080 --> 00:51:20,719
Speaker 1: the first warm thing we've had in a week, Like,

958
00:51:20,840 --> 00:51:24,120
Speaker 1: thank you so much. He goes into his truck and

959
00:51:24,239 --> 00:51:27,839
Speaker 1: he comes back with a dead bobcat, just the head

960
00:51:28,480 --> 00:51:31,960
Speaker 1: and the skin just hanging there, lifeless, and he walks

961
00:51:32,040 --> 00:51:34,640
Speaker 1: over to me and he says, if you're gonna stand

962
00:51:34,719 --> 00:51:37,080
Speaker 1: me up for breakfast, then I'm gonna feed you cat,

963
00:51:37,280 --> 00:51:41,560
Speaker 1: and he just throws the bobcat at me. And I

964
00:51:41,719 --> 00:51:46,799
Speaker 1: just tried to break this down psychologically, and I was mad.

965
00:51:46,880 --> 00:51:48,600
Speaker 1: I was hurt, I was sad. I was all these

966
00:51:48,760 --> 00:51:51,480
Speaker 1: crop pots of human emotion, but more than anything, I

967
00:51:51,600 --> 00:51:54,800
Speaker 1: was confused. And I was like, you just shot a

968
00:51:54,880 --> 00:51:56,920
Speaker 1: bobcat and fed it to us as a prank, Like

969
00:51:57,120 --> 00:52:00,239
Speaker 1: is that your version of funny? And he goes, oh, well,

970
00:52:00,280 --> 00:52:02,080
Speaker 1: it's fine. I call him in every weekend. And I

971
00:52:02,160 --> 00:52:03,560
Speaker 1: was like, what do you mean call him in? And

972
00:52:03,680 --> 00:52:05,719
Speaker 1: he's like, I do these predator killing contests and I

973
00:52:05,880 --> 00:52:07,839
Speaker 1: was like, what are those? And he starts to show

974
00:52:07,920 --> 00:52:12,000
Speaker 1: me photos and he is a competitor in these wildlife

975
00:52:12,080 --> 00:52:15,800
Speaker 1: killing contests. So the way I got exposed to this

976
00:52:16,040 --> 00:52:21,040
Speaker 1: niche community that is growing was by being fed one

977
00:52:21,120 --> 00:52:24,400
Speaker 1: of my favorite animals the same week that I was

978
00:52:24,480 --> 00:52:28,840
Speaker 1: running a campaign with National Geographic to protect wild cats.

979
00:52:29,440 --> 00:52:33,239
Speaker 1: So that was the universe giving me a call, and

980
00:52:33,400 --> 00:52:36,520
Speaker 1: I was just lucky enough to answer the call and

981
00:52:36,680 --> 00:52:39,480
Speaker 1: to say, Okay, I have to learn more about this,

982
00:52:39,680 --> 00:52:42,080
Speaker 1: I have to investigate this, and I have to see

983
00:52:42,120 --> 00:52:44,160
Speaker 1: what's going on here. And when I did, and I

984
00:52:44,239 --> 00:52:47,040
Speaker 1: started to pull back that band aid, it was the

985
00:52:47,280 --> 00:52:51,160
Speaker 1: ugliest cut that I had seen in American culture when

986
00:52:51,239 --> 00:52:54,440
Speaker 1: it comes to our relationship with wildlife, because it's not

987
00:52:54,719 --> 00:52:58,160
Speaker 1: people killing to survive, it's not people killing to feed

988
00:52:58,200 --> 00:53:01,880
Speaker 1: their family. It's people killing for sport. It's people killing

989
00:53:02,239 --> 00:53:06,880
Speaker 1: because it shows how far we've lost ourselves as a culture,

990
00:53:07,000 --> 00:53:10,319
Speaker 1: as a species, as as a race when it comes

991
00:53:10,400 --> 00:53:14,080
Speaker 1: to our relationship with nature, and that we think that,

992
00:53:14,520 --> 00:53:16,520
Speaker 1: you know, for a belt buckle or for a couple

993
00:53:16,520 --> 00:53:19,880
Speaker 1: of hundred bucks, that validates calling in a wild animal,

994
00:53:20,280 --> 00:53:23,120
Speaker 1: shooting it, showing up to a way in and then

995
00:53:23,280 --> 00:53:26,520
Speaker 1: throwing in a pit as if it were garbage, or

996
00:53:26,640 --> 00:53:29,160
Speaker 1: throwing it in a pit with other animals and setting

997
00:53:29,200 --> 00:53:32,000
Speaker 1: that on fire. Because that is literally what's happening at

998
00:53:32,040 --> 00:53:37,439
Speaker 1: these tournaments. It's not for wildlife management because indiscriminate killing

999
00:53:37,600 --> 00:53:43,080
Speaker 1: doesn't work. It's not helping farmers. It's just simply to kill.

1000
00:53:43,480 --> 00:53:47,000
Speaker 1: It's sport killing. And that to me is the indifference

1001
00:53:47,400 --> 00:53:51,080
Speaker 1: of good men. It's killing to kill What was what

1002
00:53:51,239 --> 00:53:54,200
Speaker 1: was something you said that was glorious? So I'll give

1003
00:53:54,239 --> 00:53:57,160
Speaker 1: you as a quick story right now of the positive note.

1004
00:53:57,600 --> 00:54:00,680
Speaker 1: And when I was in the Osa Peninsula, which is

1005
00:54:00,760 --> 00:54:04,160
Speaker 1: two point five percent of the Earth's biodiversity. It's the

1006
00:54:04,280 --> 00:54:07,479
Speaker 1: most ecologically intense hotspot in the world according to National

1007
00:54:07,560 --> 00:54:10,240
Speaker 1: Geographic and Osa Peninsula is on the border of Costa

1008
00:54:10,320 --> 00:54:13,799
Speaker 1: Rica in Panama. I went down there. We took out

1009
00:54:13,960 --> 00:54:16,800
Speaker 1: thirty school kids on a boat and took them to

1010
00:54:16,920 --> 00:54:20,000
Speaker 1: Kanye Island, which is the only place, one of the

1011
00:54:20,080 --> 00:54:22,120
Speaker 1: only one of few places in the world where the

1012
00:54:22,200 --> 00:54:25,560
Speaker 1: northern and Southern humpback whales aggregate to give birth. And

1013
00:54:25,719 --> 00:54:28,120
Speaker 1: we showed them whales and dolphins for the first time,

1014
00:54:28,520 --> 00:54:34,440
Speaker 1: and they absolutely like their minds exploded. They saw dolphins

1015
00:54:34,520 --> 00:54:37,000
Speaker 1: bow riding in front of and behind the boat, jumping

1016
00:54:37,040 --> 00:54:40,680
Speaker 1: around the boat. They saw whales breaching, they saw whale babies.

1017
00:54:41,160 --> 00:54:43,799
Speaker 1: And then we made them pick pieces of plastic out

1018
00:54:43,880 --> 00:54:47,400
Speaker 1: of the ocean because we said here's these animals. We

1019
00:54:47,440 --> 00:54:49,759
Speaker 1: could see them falling in love with it immediately. And

1020
00:54:49,880 --> 00:54:52,440
Speaker 1: then we wanted to educate them about the destruction that

1021
00:54:52,600 --> 00:54:55,879
Speaker 1: human beings are having on their habitat the next time

1022
00:54:55,920 --> 00:54:57,600
Speaker 1: I went down to the Osa, I was at a

1023
00:54:57,640 --> 00:55:00,840
Speaker 1: wedding and a mom came up to me super upset

1024
00:55:01,160 --> 00:55:04,120
Speaker 1: and was like, because of you, I can't buy Natella

1025
00:55:04,200 --> 00:55:06,879
Speaker 1: because it has palm oil in it, and my daughter

1026
00:55:06,960 --> 00:55:09,800
Speaker 1: tells me that it's cutting down the rainforest of the jaguar.

1027
00:55:10,120 --> 00:55:13,399
Speaker 1: And we can't buy plastic because it's my daughter told

1028
00:55:13,400 --> 00:55:15,920
Speaker 1: me that it ends up inside of the whale. And

1029
00:55:16,120 --> 00:55:19,239
Speaker 1: just this lightbulb went off and I was like, wow, Like,

1030
00:55:20,120 --> 00:55:22,560
Speaker 1: this is how you influence parents. This is how you

1031
00:55:23,080 --> 00:55:26,280
Speaker 1: influence you know, the generation of voters and of people

1032
00:55:26,640 --> 00:55:29,880
Speaker 1: with money as you reach their kids. And so I

1033
00:55:30,080 --> 00:55:34,680
Speaker 1: wrote an environmental education curriculum through National Geographic We got

1034
00:55:34,800 --> 00:55:38,360
Speaker 1: it funded working with the Ministry of of Education, Environment

1035
00:55:38,400 --> 00:55:42,160
Speaker 1: and Tourism down in Costa Rica, and we're implementing environmental

1036
00:55:42,360 --> 00:55:46,040
Speaker 1: education into the entire public school system of Costa Rica,

1037
00:55:46,520 --> 00:55:48,399
Speaker 1: making it the first country in the world where kids

1038
00:55:48,400 --> 00:55:51,400
Speaker 1: are going to be learning about conservation. And why I

1039
00:55:51,560 --> 00:55:56,719
Speaker 1: deemed this a major upside is because kids have this

1040
00:55:57,040 --> 00:56:01,480
Speaker 1: unspoiled interpretation of truth and so when you give them

1041
00:56:01,520 --> 00:56:03,440
Speaker 1: the truth and they can see it making sense in

1042
00:56:03,520 --> 00:56:07,719
Speaker 1: front of them. They make responsible decisions and they can

1043
00:56:07,800 --> 00:56:12,319
Speaker 1: also influence their parents to make responsible decisions. So when

1044
00:56:12,360 --> 00:56:14,960
Speaker 1: everybody says kids are the future, I don't believe that

1045
00:56:15,160 --> 00:56:18,320
Speaker 1: kids are the absolute right now, someone that wants to

1046
00:56:18,360 --> 00:56:21,520
Speaker 1: follow in your footsteps, what is your recommendation to them

1047
00:56:21,520 --> 00:56:25,560
Speaker 1: as should they start? Well, it's it's funny because Darwin

1048
00:56:25,640 --> 00:56:27,880
Speaker 1: said it wasn't the smartest, it wasn't the strongest, It

1049
00:56:28,000 --> 00:56:32,080
Speaker 1: wasn't the fastest species. It was the species most adaptable.

1050
00:56:32,080 --> 00:56:35,239
Speaker 1: Which is why I name my my film adapt Um

1051
00:56:35,400 --> 00:56:38,360
Speaker 1: to somebody that wants to get involved, whatever age, and

1052
00:56:38,440 --> 00:56:40,640
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to be somebody young, because I believe

1053
00:56:40,680 --> 00:56:43,960
Speaker 1: it or not. I get more of this question from

1054
00:56:44,160 --> 00:56:47,279
Speaker 1: people looking for a second or third career change or

1055
00:56:47,360 --> 00:56:49,840
Speaker 1: a parent than anything, you know, because they see the

1056
00:56:49,920 --> 00:56:52,120
Speaker 1: signs all around them, and they love their kids and

1057
00:56:52,200 --> 00:56:53,920
Speaker 1: they don't want their kids to grow up in a

1058
00:56:53,960 --> 00:56:56,480
Speaker 1: world that's burning down around them, so they I get

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Speaker 1: questions from parents all the time, what can I do?

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00:56:58,600 --> 00:57:02,480
Speaker 1: How can I get involved? And what I always am

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00:57:02,520 --> 00:57:07,440
Speaker 1: a big preacher of is honesty. Be honest with yourself.

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00:57:07,640 --> 00:57:11,440
Speaker 1: What type of person are you? What makes your heart sing?

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00:57:11,920 --> 00:57:15,799
Speaker 1: What is the least friction that you could introduce into

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00:57:15,880 --> 00:57:19,480
Speaker 1: your life where you will translate the message that you

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Speaker 1: have in your heart about wild life, about conservation, about

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00:57:22,600 --> 00:57:27,520
Speaker 1: the planet streamlined. If you're somebody that's a photographer, use

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00:57:27,640 --> 00:57:30,840
Speaker 1: your camera as an excuse, as a vessel to share

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Speaker 1: your stories. So find out who you are, find what

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00:57:35,120 --> 00:57:37,800
Speaker 1: makes your heart sing, and get into it in a

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Speaker 1: way that invigorates your passion and add your voice to conservation. Listen,

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Speaker 1: my thanks to be safe and we'll see you down

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Speaker 1: the road. Okay, stay wild, alec my thanks to Glenn

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Speaker 1: Shephard and Philippe de Andrade. We're produced by Kathleen Russo,

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00:57:56,280 --> 00:58:00,240
Speaker 1: carried Donna Hu and Zach McNeice. Our engineers Frank impureal

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Speaker 1: hi'm at like Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to

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Speaker 1: you by iHeart Radio.