Your Bones Break First: The Man Who Survived Being Eaten Alive!

This Burmese python seems eager to peek inside the diary of a seeker. Oh wow—tell me how you feel right now.

Why is it by me—should I stay still. Okay, what have you actually been doing for the last twenty years?

I’ve lived mostly in the Amazon, learning from Indigenous friends and finding real ways to protect what we love. People miss the scale: it holds roughly a fifth of Earth’s freshwater and produces a similar share of oxygen, so losing it breaks life’s support systems. I chased adventure at eighteen and found purpose, and now I work to stop the chainsaws and bulldozers.

What are we going to cover that lands for people right now, with tech and AI changing everything?

I followed a feeling, not a plan, and turned eco dread into action and proof that solutions exist. We’re the generation that can still repair our ecosystems or lose the chance for good.

Kids live on screens while you’ve lived the opposite; you even said you struggled to open a car door today. What did that life teach you that might help the rest of us?

My early teachers were Indigenous experts like JJ, who grew up fishing and hunting instead of shopping, and they grounded me in what’s real. Mountains, rivers, storms and hunger set hard limits, and those boundaries snap you out of the confusion that screens amplify.

Do you look at desk-and-screen life as odd?

I’m a forest creature; without trees, frogs, stars, and river water, I wither. Cities feel like sealed boxes of composites, while a cold river swim at dusk is my version of a shower.

Have we drifted into a slow-boil delusion as anxiety and loneliness soar?

Yes; we pulled ourselves out of habitat. As a kid I took one-match campouts and went looking for endless forest after seeing favorite streams turn undrinkable.

So how did the thirteen-year-old camper become the seventeen-year-old in Peru, and were you academically gifted?

I was the kid in detention and Mensa, so I left high school early, did university terms, then disappeared upriver to a remote research post. JJ welcomed me into an Indigenous family expedition where I learned to navigate, read weather, find food, and eventually track anacondas. That world is vast and still unexplored, with half its life in a canopy taller than buildings.

Help us separate Indigenous communities from the truly uncontacted groups, and why your river stayed wild.

That tributary stayed untouched because a feared nomadic clan, often called Moshko-Piro, patrolled it for centuries, and by the time I arrived they were a rumor. We partner with nearby Indigenous villages as paid rangers, and when they called saying arrows were on the beach, Ignacio drove us through a night storm to witness what became first contact.

Men appeared across the river, naked except for rope, bows in hand, said brothers in their tongue, and asked for plantains and rope while hidden archers covered them; we asked them to lower weapons and offered food. They were wary of cameras as guns, and the mood was equal parts awe and fear on both sides.

They wanted to know how to tell good from bad outsiders, said some shoot them and cut their gods, the trees. They’ve never heard of the wheel or Peru, and while the men faced us, the women raided the community plot, then the group smiled, fired a show arrow skyward, and slipped back into the forest.

These groups kill people; does the state respond, and how dangerous are they really?

The next day my friend George took a seven-foot arrow through his chest and survived only by helicopter; there’s no real law out there, only whoever holds the bigger stick. They coordinate with monkey and bird calls to surround intruders and have killed many, while traffickers and illegal loggers are killing them too, and weeks later a mass grave of a similar clan turned up.

Neuroscience backs your transformation idea: the anterior mid-cingulate cortex grows when we do hard things we don’t want to do, which is why Roosevelt’s Badlands reset him.

That’s why I did long solos, put myself through a real gauntlet, and tested the apocalypse narrative with my own eyes. The eighteen-year-old wanted swashbuckling adventure; the man here now carries scars and responsibility and wakes up to protect millions of animal lives with Junglekeepers.

Given the desperation you saw, do they seem happy, and do they live in huts?

They live by calories, risk, and raids, yet still share brief smiles and play; sudden contact ruins isolated peoples, so the only ethical path is protecting their forest and letting them choose the pace. We find fire pits and camps, not villages, and we know little about elders, births, or beliefs.

You mentioned a child taken in by neighbors who remembered nothing; what does that tell you?

He refused to talk about the naked people, which hints at trauma and the hard edges of that world where beauty mixes with violence and disease. It’s one more reason to shield the watershed we’re safeguarding, share the mist river from our canopy treehouse, and lock up approximately three hundred thousand acres before it’s gone.

Do you envy their life, and is there anything a screen-bound Westerner should take from them?

I love fishing with my friends in the forest and I also love medicine, cameras, and calling my mom, so I don’t romanticize their hardship. We’re still at questions, not lessons.

You’re always holding giant snakes; what’s the story with that wild suit, and how did the TV project unfold?

Discovery pitched science plus a stunt they imagined ended with me inside an anaconda suit, and I said yes to reach people about the forest even after Jane Goodall warned it could go sideways. We caught and studied a record anaconda we called Eleanor with a swallowed transmitter, but the edit cut the science, retitled it Eaten Alive, and the backlash froze my career and sent me back to the jungle to build the proof that now exists.

People still ask why you weren’t eaten.

Snakes avoid us unless forced, and on that set handlers had to coil one around me in a silly suit; left alone, any snake crawls for cover. I’d rather teach, so I brought gentle ball pythons for you to hold and a young Burmese python so you could feel the power of a big constrictor.

My hands are sweating but I’m trying; this is heavy, alive power, and I can barely lift her tail off my book.

I’m letting her rest near my neck and asking the obvious: could she kill you; you say she could at size, but not like this.

Be the tree, breathe, and ease her tail free; now you know why I never bring an anaconda into a studio.

People fear snakes from movies, but even a big Burmese python mostly wants to find a dark place to rest; they start on rats and birds, grow into powerful, generally calm giants, and while they can draw blood, the real issue is how invasive they’ve become in Florida.

It’s stunning and a bit unnerving, which probably comes from those Anaconda films; shifting gears, what carry-over lessons would you give someone chasing a totally different dream?

You earn mastery by being a beginner for a long time; the master has failed more than the novice has tried. Stop asking for permission, show up where the work happens, make yourself useful, and eventually you’re on the boat.

Did you carry a plan B, or is that overrated?

I burned the boats and nearly broke myself doing it, especially around COVID when I secretly decided to quit; a week later a major funder called, momentum hit, Jane Goodall’s blessing amplified it, and everything turned.

How should someone decide to keep going or stop, given survivorship bias—the jets that didn’t come back?

Rationally, I should’ve stopped years earlier, but sometimes winning needs an all-in bet; still, there’s a thin line between devotion and self-destruction, so for many a quiet option B might be wise.

Remember, Everest is littered with once-hyper-motivated climbers; my path isn’t a template, and like a tiger’s hunt, some days you push all your chips in knowing the kick could end you.

I see a shared pattern in the greats I meet: unusual behavior sustained for unusually long, especially at the point most people quit.

Relentlessness matters most, powered by obsession; meaning grows with responsibility, and my faith now comes from the raw truth of rain, rock, and river.

I wondered if science and evolution would push you toward atheism.

To me, science is God’s language and the wild is a church; every creature plays a role, and our unique minds make us stewards with a one-way door in front of us.

If you feel stuck, lace up and help; better yet, apprentice with someone you admire for five years and learn the craft before trying to save the world.

On the other end of the spectrum, humanoid robots and fast-rising AI—do you see a looming risk?

I love modern tools, but the AI panic feels like false-idol hysteria; we built these systems and, used well, they’ll augment us while we focus on fixing the one planet we actually live on.

I think tech ironically increases our hunger for nature and community, so people may drift out of cities into the trees.

Even chip CEOs say AI improves experts rather than replaces them; I avoid the outrage feed, curate what I see, and save my attention for real fires in the forest.

You’ve tried ayahuasca—what happened, and did it change you?

My first ceremony was mild, but a second, overboiled brew hurled me through a cosmic storm so intense the shaman later retired for a week; I came back grateful for having a body and wouldn’t recommend that ride to anyone.

How do local people interpret it?

They see it as a divine gift that opens a bridge between worlds.

What is Jungle Keepers, and how can people support it?

It’s our system for protecting the Amazon by hiring former loggers and miners as rangers, funded directly by people through JungleKeepers.org. Monthly giving turns into protected acres, real jobs, and saved heartbeats.

I’m signing up monthly and urge anyone who can to do the same, because the Amazon underpins air, water, and medicine in ways most never see.

Thank you—if we all push the cart, it rolls; if no one does, it doesn’t.

Share a forest medicine story that stayed with you.

Tularemia beat hospital antibiotics for months until JJ sealed it with tree sap and a plant tonic overnight; a stingray sting eased when family boiled bark into a poultice and pulled the venom.

Beyond species, we’re losing languages and lifeways as roads and the internet flatten culture; each tongue is a different blossom on the human vine.

How did love find you with a life lived upriver?

I’d given up, then met my wife after a talk, took her upriver to catch a caiman, and proposed in a canopy treehouse; she’s now deeply in the mission and keeps me organized in the human world.

That leaf-cutter ant video made me hesitate about jungle life.

Picture millions of ants cutting tent-sized confetti, opening fist-wide holes for everything else to crawl in while you wait out a wet, bug-slammed night.

The rainforest runs on energy—everything eats and is eaten—and yet I’m optimistic because tigers, humpbacks, bald eagles, and even the ozone hole prove we can turn the graph around.

Your book is a vivid call to say yes to a hard calling, and I’ll link it below.

I learned to tell stories from the voices my parents read—Tolkien, Conan Doyle, and Jane Goodall.

Our closing question: if you had three years left, what would you regret not doing?

Not finishing the mission would break me; we’re still in the barrel of the wave and countless heartbeats are counting on us.

Thank you for the work—if you’re moved, support Jungle Keepers, because small monthly gifts compound into saved lives; we’re done, thank you.