Uncontacted Tribes, Jungle Warfare & Being Eaten Alive - Paul Rosolie - #1052

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
People of Australia and New Zealand and Bali, I'm coming to you live this March and April. Imagine that, me on stage in your city. It's a night of big ideas, unfiltered stories, and the kind of conversations I don't get to have on the podcast live in a room together. Perth and Brisbane are already completely sold out, but there are still tickets available for Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Christchurch, Auckland and Bali. And you can get yours right now by going to the link in the description below or heading to chriswilliamson.live. See you there. How was getting stung by a stingray?

**Paul Rosolie** (0:35)
That was wonderful. I loved every second of it because people pursue ice plunges and ayahuasca journeys and people are constantly looking for the edge. And I found the edge, right? I thought I was tough. I thought I'd been through pain.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:51)
I didn't know anything.

**Paul Rosolie** (0:53)
I was making deals with God.
I was in so much pain and you don't think like your chest cavity or your head, you don't think that your foot could throw you into agony. So it stung me in the foot and what happened was-

**Chris Williamson** (1:07)
Tell me this, where were you?

**Paul Rosolie** (1:08)
So I'm in a stream in the Amazon rainforest and I had my shoes on just because I'd been hiking and I reached this waterfall and I said, I'm going to take my shoes off to enjoy the waterfall and swim around. And as I'm playing in the waterfall, I just instantly know it. It's like you got shot in the foot and this stingray, I stepped on the stingray and it stuck its barb and it's, you know, it's the size of a steak knife. It sticks its barb in through the skin. And the thing is, it wagged its tail under the skin. So it flayed the skin off of the meat of the foot and then swam out.

**Chris Williamson** (1:39)
So just what does a-

**Paul Rosolie** (1:41)
In a split second.

**Chris Williamson** (1:41)
What does a stingray, because it's flat and it's just the tail. So if you stood on the tail or has it been looking for you?

**Paul Rosolie** (1:51)
No, no, no, it's flat, flat. The whole thing is flat. And then if it gets scared, it stings to make you go away. Oh. They're not trying to attack you. They want to be left alone. I stepped on him. It's my fault. I couldn't see him.

**Chris Williamson** (2:01)
And then the tail came up.

**Paul Rosolie** (2:02)
Tail went straight up in the arch of your foot is sensitive. And so steak knife to the arch of the foot injected a ton of venom as it flayed the skin off, pulls out. And so I'm like, I'm like, look, this hurts but the flesh wounds don't hurt that much. And I'm like, that hurt getting stabbed hurt. And so I'm over there. I'm about to film and I'm like, I'm in the Amazon rainforest and I just got hit by a stingray. My friend comes up to me and he goes, we don't have time for this. He's like, you're going to pass out soon. And when you pass out, we can't carry you to the river. And I said, how do you know I'm going to pass out? He goes, it happens to everybody. And sure enough, the next thing I know, I'm on a cart getting wheeled through the jungle. I don't remember the boat ride at all. And then they got me to the research station and I was in so much pain. I was making every deal with the universe. If you just make this stop, I promise I'll do whatever, you know, just everything. And they, luckily as with the local guys, so they were scraping the trees, gathering medicinal barks that they baked in a pan. They wrapped it in leaves and they baked it into a poultice. And they put that on the wound, boiling hot poultice, which actually weirdly enough felt good, boiling hot, but the skin was already off. They put that on and then they wrap it to your foot and they leave that there for a few hours. And that sucks out the venom. But for about four or five hours, it was the worst, most blinding pain, like level 10 The doctor goes, you know, what are you feeling, at a two or an eight? And I was like, this was a 10 I can't imagine more pain than that. It's like being just the venom. It's like having an electrical wire shoved into your veins. But the last guy I know that got stung by a stingray, he went to a hospital and he had permanent nerve damage, didn't walk for two months, had a systemic infection because he went with the Western medicine way. The local guys are like, dude, we know how to deal with this. We have trees for that. There's a sap for that. They have it. They know, they've learned from their grandfathers and grandmothers.