Adventure Keynote Speaker

In 1981, four travelers walked into the Bolivian Amazon looking for adventure. Only two came out. Yossi was 22 when the group split and a raft accident left him alone in uncharted rainforest, no food, no knife, no way to call for help. For 20 days the adventure he had dreamed of became something else: a test with no audience and no second place.

That is what makes his keynote different from an expedition story. Expeditions are planned. Adventure, real adventure, is what happens when the plan dies and you are still there. Yossi came out of the jungle with a story that became a book read by millions and the film Jungle, starring Daniel Radcliffe. He also came out with something more useful: a working knowledge of what people are capable of when everything is stripped away.

He went back, years later. Not to conquer the jungle but to work with it, co-founding Chalalan, an eco-lodge owned and run by the Indigenous community of the village that saved his life. The adventure that nearly killed him became a livelihood for the people who ended it. Audiences hear both halves: the surviving, and the building that came after.