Yossi Ghinsberg

Ghinsberg’s survival story was enacted in the 2017 psychological thriller Jungle, starring Daniel Radcliffe as Yossi Ghinsberg. Ghinsberg's story was also featured in the documentary series I Shouldn't Be Alive on Discovery Channel.

In 2014, Arclight Films announced that they would be adapting Ghinsberg's novel Jungle: A Harrowing True Story of Survival. The movie, renamed Jungle, was released on October 17, 2017 after being filmed for six weeks in April and May 2016, in the Colombian sites of Tobia, Guaduas, and Honda. It qualified for a 20-40% cash rebate from the Colombian Film Commission.

Ghinsberg is a co-founder and currently the CEO at Blinq.me, a Silicon Valley-based tech-startup financed by 500 Startups's acceleration program. In 2015, Ghinsberg launched the mobile application Blinq, which adds a layer of contextual information to mobile messaging applications and is derived from Headbox. Once installed, Blinq appears as a small white dot that pops up inside mobile messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and SMS, alerting the user to new information about the person they are communicating with. This additional information is pulled from a variety of other networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

21-year-old Ghinsberg and his two friends followed Ruprechter by plane to Apolo, La Paz, and from there traveled down to the Tuichi River and to a local village called Asariamas, at the confluence of rivers Tuichi–Asariamas. There, they restocked food and supplies. Then, according to Karl's stories about having visited an ancient indigenous village hidden deep within the rainforest – inhabited by primitives who had seen very few white men in their lifetime – the group began traveling up the Asariamas River and across the mountains on their way there. Eventually, low on supplies, they had to eat monkeys. Stamm refused to eat monkeys and inevitably grew physically weaker. Under these conditions, they decided to abandon their journey and return to Asariamas.

With the villagers' help, they built the raft, pursued their new route downriver, and arrived at the confluence of rivers Tuichi–Ipurama. There, Ruprechter suddenly told them about San Pedro Canyon – a dangerous series of rapids, waterfalls, and boulders unsuitable for boating – and the fact that he could not swim, and thus refused to continue on the trip. His deceit and betrayal led to distrust within the group and ended with the group's splitting up: Gale and Ghinsberg decided to continue rafting downriver to Rurrenabaque, while Ruprechter and Stamm decided to walk up the Ipurama River to Ipurama village, near the river's source, and return from there to Apolo. The four men resolved to reconvene before Christmas, in La Paz.

He co-founded Headbox, a startup that has built an application to integrate social media activity and communication networks into one feed. In 2013. Headbox appears as a little white dot that provides a summary of all social network activity into a meta social graph.

After returning from the Amazon, Ghinsberg graduated from Tel Aviv University in Israel with degrees in Jewish Philosophy and Business Administration. Ghinsberg also studied the Kabbalah traditions in authentic environments and continues to study religions of the past and the present, including the Ancients, the Classics, Eastern, Contemporary, and the Shamanic Path. Ghinsberg lived and worked in the Amazon from 1992 to 1995. In 1997, Ghinsberg moved to Australia to help establish clinics that offer drug and alcohol detoxification recovery and treatment programs. He has married three times and has four children: Mia, Cayam, Nissim, and Shalem. In 2009, Ghinsberg returned to Israel with his wife and his children. Ghinsberg married Belinda on March 7, 2010. Ghinsberg and his family have lived in Israel, Australia, and the United States.

In 2009, Ghinsberg returned to Israel and established Collecteco, a design label for interior and landscape designs displaying a gallery of furniture made from recycled materials. His development team is based in Ramallah.

Ghinsberg has been covered on Fox News Latino, CNN, TEDx, BBC America, BBC World Service, LA Times, and LinkedIn. He was ranked one of the Top 20 Most Inspiring People on Twitter in 2012. Ghinsberg was featured on Larry King Live! in the "I Shouldn't Be Alive" Discovery Channel documentary and channel series, which aired April 27, 2006 on CNN. He spoke at TEDxBratislava in 2010, his talk entitled "On Thinking Outside of the Box" about his struggle for survival in the Amazon and the insights he took away from the experience. Ghinsberg featured in the 2013 travel documentary Gringo Trails (film) by documentary filmmaker, Pegi Vail. In the film, Ghinsberg returns to the Bolivian jungle and the community who assisted in his rescue, and discusses how they have adapted to the influx of tourists in the wake of his survival story. Ghinsberg was covered on the front page of The Jerusalem Post' s April 22, 2016 edition. In September 2016, Ghinsberg returned to Bolivia to speak at the Solon Foundation and El Bala about his Amazon survival experiences.

Ghinsberg has been a motivational speaker since 2001 and has related his experiences and hardships during his three weeks stranded in the Amazon jungle. He has spoken on topics revolving around his experiences in The Power to Survive, Sailing the Seas of Change, and WEvolution, applying his survival story into motivational speaking. He currently speaks on The Power to Survive - Bringing Amazon Survival Skills to Business.

Ghinsberg was recruited in 1995 by The Center for Investigation & Treatment of Addiction (CITA) International to serve as Vice President for Development. In this capacity, Ghinsberg has founded 12 centers for the treatment and research of opiate addiction in different parts of the world from Mexico to China. In 1999, Ghinsberg left CITA International and moved to Australia to open his own treatment center. In Australia, Ghinsberg founded The Alma Libre Foundation dedicated to assisting opiate addicts and providing rehabilitation options for re-integration into society. In 2001, at the height of the Intifada, he organized a music festival in Israel to promote Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.

Ghinsberg wrote his first book, titled Back from Tuichi, in 1993. The book became popular in Israel and sold millions of copies, and it has been translated into 15 languages and published in several countries under different names, including Heart of the Amazon (Macmillen) Back from Tuichi (Random House), and Lost in the Jungle (Summersdale). In 2008, he wrote his second book, titled Laws of the Jungle: Jaguars Don't Need Self-Help Books. In concurrence with the movie, Summersdale will re-release its book Lost in the Jungle as Jungle in 2017.

Ten years after almost losing his life in the Amazon, he went back to the Bolivian jungle. Ghinsberg put the Tacana-Quechua people of the village of San José de Uchupiamonas in touch with the Inter-American Development Bank, which gave a $1.25 million grant to build a solar-powered ecolodge in the jungle, and to train the local people how to manage it. He stayed there from 1992 to 1995 with the natives and helped them build and operate Chalalan, an ecolodge in Bolivia's Madidi National Park. He also put the people of San Jose in touch with Conservation International, a Washington environmental group that has pioneered much of the ecotourism field and was instrumental in getting 4.5 million acres around San Jose declared as the Madidi National Park. Ghinsberg also worked on protecting intellectual properties of indigenous people of that region. Ghinsberg co-founded EthnoBios, a biodiversity prospecting company local to the Amazon basin, and taught the indigenous people how to protect their intellectual properties.

Yosseph "Yossi" Ghinsberg (Hebrew: יוסי גינסברג ‎) is an Israeli adventurer, author, entrepreneur, humanitarian, and motivational speaker based in Australia. Ghinsberg is most known for his survival story when he was stranded in an uncharted part of the Bolivian Amazon jungle for three weeks in 1981. Ghinsberg is a tech-entrepreneur and the founder of the mobile applications Headbox, designed to integrate all social media activity into one feed, and Blinq, which provides social media and activity live updates.