Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2013 - Paul Rosolie
Uploaded: 2023-07-27T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2013 - Paul Rosolie' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-07-27. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2013 - Paul Rosolie' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-07-27. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2013 - Paul Rosolie

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Hey Marshall, come here, buddy.
This is one of the rare times that Marshall's been in the studio during a show.
Come here, Bubba. Say hi to everybody.
He's the best.
He is the best.
They're the best dogs. They're like universally sweet dogs.
They're such sweethearts.
I love that my dogs, I can literally take a piece of meat out of their mouth
and they'll be like, is something better coming?
They're so friendly.
There's no worry about protecting themselves or survival.
My friend calls them love sponges.
That's the best way to describe them.
They're perfect creations.
Hang out with us. We're going to be in here.
Dude, first of all, I'm in your book right now.
I just started it.
It's insane.
How the fuck did you even get the idea to do what you did?
How does this take me through the first seeds of the thoughts that had you go
to the Amazon?
When I was a kid, I remember very far back.
I remember being a kid and going to the Bronx Zoo and looking.
They had an exhibit.
I think it was in the House of Reptiles where there's all these scientists and
they're holding a giant snake
and they're doing research and they're protecting these places.
So I always had it in my head that I want to see these places before they're
gone.
I grew up with a lot of environmental stress.
I really felt like this message of we're losing the rainforest, we're losing
elephants.
How did you develop that feeling?
I don't know.
I mean, my parents would read me Jane Goodall's books as a kid and, again,
things like the
Bronx Zoo, Steve Irwin.
You know, and I loved, I grew up, you know, and having access to, like, New
York and New Jersey.
I mean, there's such incredible forests there.
It's really, the New York, New Jersey forest thing.
Like, people, for whatever reason, that don't live around there, they think New
Jersey is, like, some vast wasteland.
Like, New Jersey is, like, more bears per capita than anywhere else in the
country.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's wild out there.
Amazing forests there.
I grew up, like, you know, and then, like, by, like, 13 years old, I was, like,
you know,
I had, like, a hunting knife and I would do one match and I'd bring my golden
retriever into the woods.
And we'd do, like, a mini solo, two nights, you know, and I have to make a fire
with that one match.
And it's, like, I was always doing shit like this, like.
So you always had, like, a call to that kind of life.
I always just rivers, streams, forests, tracking bears, trying to figure out
where the fox's hole is.
Like, I liked spending time with animals in nature and then, like, it just
drove me crazy that no matter how deep I would go, you know, in eastern forests,
you always, like, come out the other side.
And I always was just, like, I want to find somewhere where it's, like, truly
wild.
Like, where there's no limit to it.
Like, what's the max?
What's the highest you can turn this thing?
And I was terrible in school, failed all my classes, severely dyslexic, all
that.
And so I tried.
Actually, my wonderful parents were, like, you do know that you can take a GED,
skip the last two years of high school, and go straight to college.
And I was, like, I did not know that.
So I did that.
And then as I was doing that, I just said, you know what?
I was, like, I'm going to go to the Amazon rainforest.
I had a professor that showed me a piece of wood, and he made a joke, like, oh,
this is probably, like, teak from the Amazon.
And, like, I was, like, oh, yeah.
I was, like, I got to get down there before it's too late.
That's what it was.
That is what it was.
I got to get down there before it's too late.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, like, they're telling you that there's Jurassic Park.
There's literally anaconda dragons in these monster swamps, and there's harpy eagles
taking howler monkeys, and there's all this incredible bustling life, and it's
all vanishing.
And I was, like, well, I want to see it before it's gone.
The greatest show on Earth.
And so how much of an understanding did you have about the Amazon, about how to
get around?
It seems like you just kind of just dove in.
I did dive in.
I found the most remote research station I could find, and, of course, nobody
wants to take it like a 17-year-old kid from Brooklyn, from New Jersey, and put
them in the rainforest.
I had no qualifications.
But I went with people that were doing research on macaws, and I was out there
for weeks at a time.
But the luck was that I met this guy named J.J. Juan Julio Duran, local S.A.
Indian, grew up in the forest barefoot, and the dude has libraries of
information in his brain.
Medicinal plants, how to track animals, places in the forest that nobody knows
about.
And then he just started, he was just like, you're funny.
You really love this shit.
He's like, let's go out all night.
We don't come back until we find three snakes.
He was terrified of snakes.
He's like, let's go find three snakes, because he was like, why does this gringo
keep catching snakes?
He's like, what the hell is the matter with you?
And so he was teaching me everything, and then I was just like, look, dude,
this is how you do snakes.
This is how you figure out if they're venomous.
This is how you handle a snake.
I could teach him one thing.
He taught me the entire Amazon rainforest.
So he didn't know, I mean, he must have known what venomous snakes there were,
right?
No, because what they'll do is they'll be like, oh, that red one, it's venomous.
They chop it in half.
That's not how you identify a snake.
That's like saying like every, you know, it's like identifying cars by color.
Like it doesn't make any sense.
Okay, right.
It's with snakes.
You can have like, for example, like an Amazon tree boa.
You can have one mother giving birth to like a rainbow of babies.
There'll be like gray ones, green ones, yellow ones, like all these different
morphs.
And so people will be like, oh, those are those red ones.
They'll get you.
Those are coral snakes.
It's like, no, you know, I just, it's, it's a constant battle with, you know,
with the locals.
I'm always like, do you think this is venomous or not?
And they're like, hmm.
And I'm like, would I be holding it if it was venomous?
And they're like, oh yeah.
That's crazy that they don't know.
But I guess it's like safer to assume that they're all venomous or anything
bright colored is venomous.
Yeah.
And again, the jungle is a place where there's a lot of stories.
And so like you always hear stories about like who got bitten by a snake and
this happened, who got, you know,
and so like they have the snake Loro Machaco, which is, they know it's a green
snake.
That's all that like the average logger or the average gold miner knows.
I was just like literally two weeks ago, I was out in the jungle and I was out
and it was raining
and there was a Loro Machaco next to my head with flicking its tongue next to
my head.
And I was like, oh, cool.
I got to bring this back and show them.
So I very carefully caught this viper and brought it back.
And they were like, that's not it.
That's the boa.
And I was like, oh God.
I was like, I can't help you people.
I was like, I'm literally showing it to you.
But the rule is just kill every snake.
And so I've always been like this, like ambassador for snakes, trying to get
people to be like, you know,
you have black snakes and gopher snakes and garter snakes and you show them to
kids.
Snakes are wonderful.
Like I love snakes.
They're a part of the whole ecosystem, especially in something as complex as
the Amazon.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, when I lived in the Hollywood Hills, people would always
complain about coyotes.
Yeah.
I'd say, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But how many rats do you see?
Yeah.
You don't see a lot of rats.
There's a reason for that.
The coyotes are the cleanup system.
Yeah.
Later, I got to show you the video I took yesterday, the day before yesterday,
a coyote walking through
my front yard in New York.
In the middle of the day.
Yeah, they're everywhere now.
They're everywhere.
It's wild.
Big one.
Have you ever read Coyote America?
No.
It's a really good book by this guy, Dan Flores.
He's been on the podcast a couple of times.
He was my friend, Steve's professor in college and he stayed in touch with this
guy and he's
a wildlife historian and he wrote a book about coyotes and it's the story is
insane.
Like coyotes, they're originally persecuted by the gray wolves.
The gray wolves were extirpated and killed off by the people that settled.
And then coyotes, when they were prosecuted, when they were persecuted, what
they would do is
expand their range.
Yeah.
So they're in every single city in every state now.
And that's only over the last few decades.
I mean, the fact, I mean, I think in a lot of places you can hunt a coyote like
daytime,
nighttime, anything, anytime with like any message.
It does the opposite of what it's intended to do because when you kill a coyote,
then the
females, when they do roll call, they realize a coyote is missing and they have
more pups.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a wild animal.
No, it's a really, it's a really amazing animal.
They're so clever too.
No, they're crazy.
This one comes trotting across my front yard every day.
And it's like, I went, I opened my front door and I went, woo.
I just stopped and looked at me and I just like took a picture on my phone.
Wow.
Yeah.
It was crazy.
New York city.
Coyotes.
It's an amazing animal.
But so, so when you went down there, what kind of gear did you bring?
Like how, how prepared were you for this?
Uh, completely.
Shoestring budget.
Shoestring budget.
Yeah.
A student dropped out of high school, saved up money from working at like the YMCA.
Like I went down there wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
Like, did you plan on trying to find some sort of a job?
Like what were you going to do for food?
No.
So this was the thing.
I went down there as a, as a, as a volunteer just to experience it, you know,
like, and then,
and then basically as I became friends with JJ, it was like, he was like, could
you, could
you come back?
He's like, you have access to like gringos and people that travel.
He's like, bring us tourists.
He's like, we're trying to protect this river.
Like now while it's still completely pristine.
And at the time I was like, well, that's, that's, that sounds great.
So I started bringing people.
We started Tam and do expeditions.
And so it was like small time, just bringing some tourists to the jungle,
showing them around
and taking them on night walks, doing stuff like that.
Um, but it, it, it, it was a very much like, there wasn't a plan.
I knew what I loved.
I didn't have a plan.
I wasn't like, I'm going to be a jungle keeper.
Like I just went down there and was like, this is amazing.
And I want more of it.
And then, you know, at that age, people are like, you know, what are you going
to do for
a job?
And I was like, I don't know, but I'm going back to the jungle.
Like, and then it was as, you know, then as we saw more of the forest getting
destroyed
as we were, we're the trans Amazon highway cuts straight across the Amazon
rainforest.
You can drive from like Rio all the way to Lima.
And so for the first time in history, they opened up a land trade route through
the heart
of the Amazon rainforest.
And the final segment of the trans Amazon highway was over the mother de Dios
river,
which is right where we work.
And so we saw the amount of cars in our region go from like 400 a day to like
800 a day to
2000 a day.
And all of a sudden these offshoot roads and all of a sudden the burning and
all of a
sudden places that used to be pristine and wild.
All of a sudden we're seeing this horrific burning, ancient trees cut down,
entire ecosystems wiped
out.
And so then at that point I'm going, okay, it's not a joke anymore.
We, someone's got to do something about this.
And then, you know, you look and you realize you're in the middle of the Amazon
rainforest.
Ther