Paul Rosolie: Uncontacted Tribes in the Amazon Jungle | Lex Fridman Podcast #489

- ... were standing there. Everyone is waiting, 'cause at any moment an arrow could just fly through your neck, and there's people holding shotguns. And the anthropologist, this little guy, is standing there in the front, and he's going, "Enimole." He's going, "Brothers." And then it happened. Then you start hearing people screaming, "Mashco! Mashco!" And people are screaming and women are lifting children and running into the huts and the dogs and chickens are going nuts and— - So fear, fear. - Fear. He's going, "Look there. He has a bow. He has a bow." And we're looking up the beach and there's just this clan walking down the beach with these seven-foot bows and they're hunched over and they're pointing at us. They're going, "Look at that one. Look, there's a gun there." And you can see them communicating to each other and the butterflies are swirling off the beach and they can hit a spider monkey out of the treetops at 40 meters. They can sneak up and you will never know they're there. And so when that arrow passes through your body, you'll only have a moment to realize it before you fall over. In order for any of this to make sense, I have to show you this footage. - And this has not been shown ever before. - This is a world first. - The following is a conversation with Paul Rosolie, his third time on the podcast. Paul is a naturalist, explorer, writer and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest and celebrating the beauty of the natural world. He has a new book coming out in a few days titled Jungle Keeper that you should definitely go pre-order now. It tells some intense stories about his time in the jungle over the past several years, building up to a few epic recent events, including a new extended encounter with a non-contacted tribe that we discuss in this podcast. Both the book and audiobook are great. I highly recommend it. If you would like to support Paul and his team in their mission to protect the jungle, go to junglekeepers.org. You can help with donations or by spreading the word or checking out the gala that Paul is hosting in New York on January 22nd in a few days. They are doing all they can to help raise funds for the mission of safeguarding as much of the rainforest as possible, and I think it's a mission worth fighting for. The Amazon jungle is one of the most special and beautiful places on Earth. As an aside, allow me to look back briefly and mention something that I've been struggling with a bit. For context, I traveled to the Amazon rainforest with Paul a while back. It was an adventure of a lifetime, with lots of crazy twists and turns. We did record a podcast out there, literally in the jungle. Episode 429, if you want to go check it out. It was awesome. And we also recorded a bunch of disparate footage of the journey just for fun. And I would still love to somehow put all that together into a cohesive video in case it's interesting to someone. But I've learned just how difficult it is to organize and edit a pile of chaotically recorded footage like that. So, let's see if I can pull it off. But in any case, this kind of raw vlog-style video is something that I would love to be able to do more of as a way to celebrate amazing human beings like Paul and others, including everyday people who I meet on my travels. So, I'll keep trying, tinkering, learning, and I ask for your patience and support along the way. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Paul Rosolie. We've survived a challenging time out in the jungle about a year and a half ago, and since then, your life has increasingly gotten more intense. So, you've achieved the incredible feat of saving now more than 130,000 acres of rainforest. And the goal that you're working towards is protecting 200,000 acres more. And doing so while facing extreme danger from narcos, narco-traffickers, so-called Cocaine Mafia in an escalating drug war. This is insane. These are new developments. Illegal loggers, as we've talked about before. Gold miners, and the incredible recent encounter with an uncontacted tribe. And we'll talk about all of this. So your new book, Jungle Keeper, opens with the killing of two loggers by the warriors of an uncontacted tribe, the Mashco Piro, in August 2024. And then you reveal that you had your own dramatic encounter with the tribe two months later in October 2024. So if I may, let me read the opening of the book. "Far out on the western edge of the Amazon rainforest, deep in the Peruvian jungle, a pair of loggers plunged their chainsaws into the buttressed roots of an ancient ironwood. An ironwood, or shihuahuaco, of this size is a giant among giants, an emergent sentinel that reaches heights of 160 feet, towering over the rest of the canopy." I've read that many are over 1,000 years old, by the way, as an aside. And you've found ones that are 1,200 years old. - Incredibly old. - Anyway, you continue. "This particular tree had started its life as a tiny sapling in the great jungle, a story that began before the Spanish reached Peru, long before the United States was even a dream. At a time when Leonardo da Vinci was still honing his talents in a far away part of the world, through the Renaissance, the First and Second World Wars, and the birth of our grandparents." This tree was out there slowly charging upward, anonymous, just one pillar among the billions of others. But on this day, in August 2024, when the two loggers worked, this witness of the centuries came crashing down to the canopy with such cataclysmic power that it shook the earth. And then you go on to talk about how the shaking of the earth was felt and heard by the uncontacted tribe. You go on to describe how these particular loggers were killed by the uncontacted tribe of Mashco Piro. What do we know about these warriors of the uncontacted tribe? - We know that across the Amazon basin there's still perhaps thousands of clans of uncontacted peoples, people that are living in nomadic isolation in what remains of the intact Amazon basin and want to remain that way. And so, what happened with these loggers was that local people told them, "Don't go out there. Don't go into these territories." And what happens is that people that aren't from... There's this thing with the jungle, people don't believe that it's as wild as the legends say. And so when they say there's calatos out there, there's wild people out there, these loggers from another region go, "Yeah, that's just some story. We're fine. We'll go. We have shotguns." They don't realize you're dealing with a civilization of people that is still nomadic, still uses bamboo-tipped arrows, still lives naked in the Amazon rainforest, has knowledge of medicines that we've yet to encounter or may never discover, and that they can hit a spider monkey out of the treetops at 40 meters. And so while you're using a chainsaw, they can sneak up and you will never know they're there. And so when that arrow passes through your body, you'll only have a moment to - And we're looking at something you posted on your Instagram- ... which are the arrows that they use, which are bigger than you. So they're like six or seven feet. - Six, seven feet. More like seven feet. And that's- - Look how sharp that is. - ... incredibly sharp. They cure it over the fire and they have a way of sharpening it. That edge of bamboo becomes incredibly knife-sharp. You can cut meat with it easily; I've done it. These arrows... Look at that. I mean, I'm 5'9". That's easily a seven-foot arrow. - Yeah, so for people who are just listening, this "arrow" is really a spear. Some people would think it was a spear, but they're shooting this thing with a gigantic bow. That's crazy. - Yeah, and so to be holding that... Look at that, they even twist the fletching so the arrow spins in the air. They have incredible craftsmanship, and then you see all the little string on there is plant fibers they've woven, and then this is them. - Yeah, the warriors of the tribe. - The warriors of the tribe. And so the fact that we're sitting here talking on microphones, and that we have airplanes and cell phones and all the things we have in the modern world, and there's still... We still live in this age where there's, right now at this moment, people living out in the jungle who have been there since before history, is an incredible thing. - Let me look this up on Perplexity: what are the technologies we modern humans have that the Mashco Piro do not? It's just interesting to think about the kind of technologies we take for granted. Energy and power, obviously all the electricity generation, grids, batteries, solar panels, and electric motors, metals and materials, mass-produced steel, aluminum, advanced alloys, plastics, composites, glass, concrete, all of those things. - All of those things. - Tools, of course, and machinery. The infrastructure of roads and bridges and buildings, and the weapons of war—everything but the spears and arrows that they have—and the medicine and biology. Of course they probably have complicated medicines that they've developed for their own— ...that are available within the jungle. - I mean, that entire list is no. - No. - I mean, metal, I think you have to be able to excavate into the earth and forge metal. These people don't even... As one of the local anthropologists said to me, a Peruvian anthropologist, he said, "You know, people think of them as Stone Age tribes." And he was like, "They don't have stones." He's like, "They don't..." So they don't know that water... They see water that they drink. They don't know that water freezes, because they've never seen it. They don't know that water boils, because they don't even make clay pots. They just have their bamboo and their string. And so they're living an incredibly simple life. So all of that, I mean, even a camera is a miracle to them. You have to bend your mind to even understand how far back they are. It's like looking into thousands of years ago, like the Stone Age. - When they hear the sounds of the chainsaws, the sounds of machinery in the distance- ...I wonder how they can possibly comprehend what that is. - I think they view it as a demonic destructive force. And when I show you the encounter that we had, we got a few takeaways. We left with more questions than answers, but one of the things they were able to communicate across the language barrier was, "Why are you cutting down the trees?" They don't like it. - Yeah. That represents to them the danger and destruction that the outside world brings. - They see us as the destroyers of worlds. - So tell me about this encounter in October of 2024. - So, in order to tell you about that encounter I think we need to orient people into where we're talking about. We're talking about this river that runs through the western edge of the Amazon rainforest that you know well now, after spending time there with me. It's a high tributary of the Amazon where you have the main river channel and then smaller and smaller and smaller tributaries. And the smaller you get, the less trafficked they are. And so this river has remained wild through the centuries. And even during the '90s when there was a mahogany boom where people went out for it, trees, there were very few people going up this river. 20 years ago when I first got to the region and people told me there were uncontacted tribes out there, it was always in the realm of something... You know, it's like people say, "There's Bigfoot," or, "Don't go there, it's haunted." It was like a tall tale almost. And even the Peruvian government at the time I first went to Peru, which was 2006, their official position was that the tribes are a myth. There's no such thing as the tribes. That was the official position. And you just... You would hear these stories of people that got shot. You'd meet someone high up a river, four days upriver, deep in the Amazon, that had an arrow. And you'd look at this thing and it had this, you know, mega gravity. And so as we've created Jungle Keepers and now we're protecting 130,000 acres of this river, we're protecting the plants and the animals and the ancient trees, and trying to preserve the ecosystem, and counting the butterflies and conducting ecological surveys, and what we've inadvertently found ourselves the caretakers of, is the fact that these people, in order to continue living, have to remain isolated, want to remain isolated. That's their one mandate as a civilization: the tribes of the Mashco Piro. And so, in October, as Jungle Keepers now, we're working with the indigenous people. What we do is we take loggers and gold miners and make them into rangers and give them better jobs, and we try to protect the forest. And those people who live up in the remote indigenous community, they called us on a satellite phone and they said, "Directors, you've been working with us and telling us you wanna help us. The tribes are coming out. What do we do?" - So, even they don't really know, when the tribes emerge from the deep jungle- ... what to do? - They were terrified. - What was your thinking when you got the phone call? - When we got the phone call, it was a mix of... because we're over here trying to get land concessions and doing all this important work, and part of me was like, "That can't be real, so we're gonna keep our heads down." - Bigfoot is emerging- ... from the forest. - Like, yeah, sure. And then we hung up and we said, "Okay, maybe tomorrow if they're still there or something." And then it was crazy because it was probably about noon and we had an important day of meetings. We had a meeting with the police, we had a meeting with the landowner, we were trying to do all this stuff for the conservation work. And then I got together with the core team of directors, JJ, Mohsin, Stéphane, and we said, "Wait, if this is real, we have to get there now. Like now, now." And so we dropped what we were doing, canceled the meetings, and put other people on them. We got a boat and we called Ignacio, our most hardcore ranger. - Who has been shot. - Who in 2019 was shot in the head by an arrow and still bears the scar, and he barely survived. And we said, "Look, this is going down." He said, "I already know because the whole river knows." We said, "Can you get us there by tomorrow morning?" And he said, "Look, it's a two-day journey by boat. So, no." And we said, "Is there any way you can you get us there?" And he went, "I'll get you there." And so we got a couple of sacks of rice, a couple of cans of tuna, our dry bags, our tents. We got on a boat by 6:00 PM and we started riding up the river - Through the night? - ...through the night. And so a two-day boat journey that we're trying to flex into one night. And so I was at the front with the headlamp— ...with the torch. And so the first few hours it was clear, and that comet... Remember that comet— ...that was going? There was that comet in the sky. I remember looking at it and going, "This is it." I knew this was it. And the first few hours were clear and the stars were out and it was beautiful, and then it clouded over and the lightning started, and then it just apocalypse downpoured. And from midnight until 8:00 AM it was just the front of the boat with the light, and it was just a Star Wars vision of raindrops and galaxies and moths flying in my eye. People don't realize you can get hypothermia in the tropics, but as you're going at night, even if it's 80 degrees outside, in the rain, in the wind at night, in a lightning storm, you're freezing. And so by 2:00 AM I'm convulsively shivering, and we're using the caiman eyes on the side of the river because it was so dark we couldn't see where we were going, so those shine back at you. So I'm finding the caiman eyes and then motioning with the light to Ignacio where to go, and he knew how to find the channel and we had to jump the waterfalls. We did the two-day boat ride in one night. And we arrive at this community where... And it's morning now and the howler monkeys are calling over the jungle, and the little naked children are all by the side and everyone's scared. And we get a hug from this guy, Bacho, who we know, and they're like, "Come in, come in, come in." And they're like, "The tribe came out yesterday. We saw a few of them on the beach and they're gone now." And so we collapsed, we fell asleep. Rained the whole day. That night we went out and we looked for them and there was this crazy moment where we're standing on this beach and their footprints were there. And the local indigenous anthropologist was standing there, looking out into the Amazon beyond, and there's just all this wreckage. It looked like something very Cormac McCarthy: just dark sky, iron clouds, and we're standing there. Everyone is waiting, 'cause at any moment an arrow could just fly through your neck. And there's people holding shotguns, and the there in the front and he's going, "No mole." He's going, "Brothers." There's only a few words that intersect between the languages and he's going, "Brothers, we're here. We don't want to hurt you." He's speaking in the Yine language. And he's saying, "Come out." And you can tell by their footprints—the trackers explained this—that you could see... it was just the balls of their feet. So right as we pulled up to the beach, they ran. So they were there listening to us, and he's going, "Nomole, come out. It's okay. Lay down your arms. We'll lay down ours. Nomole." He just kept saying, "Nomole." And nothing happened. And we went back to the village and went to sleep. We wake up the next morning, and it's 5:00 AM. And again, we're trying to save the jungle. We're in a race against time to get these land concessions. And so my team, like Mohsin and JJ—Stefan couldn't come because he was in town signing paperwork and interviewing loggers and landowners. And also, he didn't think there was any chance this was gonna be real because in his entire 50-something years in the Amazon, he's never seen them. And so we're getting ready to leave in the morning. We had tents on the boat, and Ignacio comes up to me and he goes, "You're my director, right? You're my boss?" And I went, "Yeah." He goes, "I need to talk to you like a friend." I was like, "Yeah, shoot. Go." And he goes, "You'd be an idiot to leave right now." He goes, "They're coming." And so he convinced us to stay. We pull our tents off the boat. Stefan and Mohsin go off with their cameras. They start shooting, you know, people. These are monkey eaters and fishermen—the community that we're in. And everything's quiet. And I opened my laptop, and I was working, just writing my book. And then it happened. Then you start hearing people screaming, "Mashco, Mashco!" And people huts, and the dogs and chickens are going nuts. And I mean— - So fear. Fear. - Fear. - Because we should say, the obvious thing is, as far as anyone remembers, any minimal, small encounters with these tribes— ... have been violent. - Extremely violent. These tribes have remained alive because of their violence. Like the Spartans or the Comanches, they seem to have adopted violence as a first response to contact. - Maybe you can correct me on this, but I read that in the late 19th century, early 20th century, there was documentation of encounters with these tribes by the private armies of the rubber barons. And those encounters were, from the rubber barons' armies' perspective, violent. And so maybe the lesson the uncontacted tribes learned is that any interaction with the outside world is gonna have to be violent because they have to defend themselves. - Yeah. You had colonial missionaries in the 1600s and 1700s. Then you had the rubber barons, late 1800s into the 1900s, just periods of extraction and domination and cruelty. And these tribes—their grandparents must have told them, "When the outside world comes, you shoot first. That's the only thing that's gonna keep you alive." - Do you think the memory of those violent encounters is defining to how they think about the world? - Yeah. Because even in my lifetime there, in the 20 years I've spent in the Amazon, Ignacio was shot in the head. My friend Victor survived a violent encounter where they murdered somebody on a beach. They've shot numerous people. They've even shot people who were trying to help them, people who were trying to give them clothing and bananas. They call it porcupining them, where they find a body on the beach with so many arrows that when they fall over, all the arrows are sticking up. And they'll do it out of curiosity too. It's like, "Hey, you're wearing a suit. That's weird. We've never seen anybody in a black and white suit." The way Teddy Roosevelt would shoot a bird for science. They just want to look at you. And so they're operating on a different... They don't have the moral system that we have or understand. They're truly wild. - How does Ignacio think about them? Because they almost killed him. - Yes. It depends on the mood you get him in, because if you ask him... One day I asked him, "If you could see the people who shot you in the head, what would you say to them?" And he looked at me with that Ignacio look and said, "I wouldn't say anything. I would kill as many of them as I could." He also had a time where he was in a really remote guard station working for the Ministry of Culture, and they showed up and he knew that they were going to kill him. So he climbed into the peak of the little structure there. And just like a dog in a car, that greenhouse effect in the top at midday with the sun beating down, he was huddled over a mattress while they were walking on the deck— ...moving pots and pans and looking at our items and artifacts. And he knew that if he was found, they'd kill him. But if he stayed up there, he was literally frying. He said he was soaking the mattress. He could feel himself dying. For two hours he had to stay there. And he was constantly making this decision: "If I come out, I die. If I stay, I probably die." He's like, "Probably die is better than definitely die." So he was terrified. And as they're screaming, "Mashko," everybody's running, Ignacio comes and finds me. You can see in his eyes, you can see when somebody has that PTSD response, he's breathing heavy. He's moving behind trees. He's keeping me close to him and going, "Look there. He has a bow." "He has a bow." And we're looking up the beach, and there's just this clan of naked men walking down the beach with these seven-foot bows, and they're hunched over, pointing at us. They're going, "Look at that one." "Look, there's a gun there." You can see them communicating to each other. The butterflies are swirling off the beach. In these moments you go, "Am I entering a moment that is— is this a one-way door?" "Is this an irreversible situation?" Because there's an unfolding situation where they're coming towards us. Are they going to attack? What do they want? Is there going to be a... I mean, I am soaked in chills right now talking about it, because I remember standing there, going, "There's no way this is real life." It's burned into my memory, them walking down the beach with the bows. And of course, you know, Stefan is up there firing off pictures and Mohsin is down getting video. And the community that we're with, people had... You hear shotgun shells loading home. They're getting ready. And there's this one guy, this anthropologist named Romel, who has been the only person who has communicated with them peacefully. He did it in 2013, where he stood on the beach and spoke to them. He knows enough of the local dialect that overlaps with theirs that he can speak to them. And as they're coming down the beach, the butterflies are flying up, and we're all waiting. And again, shotgun, you're talking, you know, how many meters? 30, 40 meters? I don't know accurate. For an arrow, you loose a seven-foot arrow that weighs nothing, you're talking about 300 meters easy. They can shoot you from across the river. So Ignacio was pulling me and he was like, "Down. You go down." "You stay behind this tree. Watch them from there. Watch out, he has an arrow." He was watching everyone because you could see, he's like, "This is how it happens." - Did you think this might be the last day you have on this earth? Were you afraid? - I was, yeah, of course I was afraid. You're with- I'm with my two best friends and people that I work very closely with. You're in the middle of nowhere, there's no help coming, and you're with- ...26 people and there's 50 of the tribe that you can see, and you know they're surrounding us. There are men on the other side of the river. And then we had guns looking back towards the jungle because we knew we were being surrounded. And so, again, this is always the story of someone's uncle, brother, or cousin telling a story that happened, and now it's happening. Not in the shadows, not in the middle of the night. It's happening in broad daylight. They're walking out onto the beach. It's like the first time they saw the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. You're going, "There's no way." - And you are walking on the knife's edge. And it's funny you say this, about taking pictures. Because there's two ways to think of this situation. This is fascinating, or this is extremely dangerous. It's both. It's a knife's edge. So you could approach it one of two ways. "If I die, I die. I'm going to take some good pictures." - But that was also our mission. As the directors of Jungle Keepers, we work with this community to ensure their lifestyle can continue, and they're saying, "Hey, that's great, but as an indigenous community, we're dealing with people that raid our stuff, try and steal our women, and kill our hunters. Now they're coming out. We want you to see it." Documenting it is part of our job. We have to show what happened that day. And so those guys were shooting. And very seriously, it's actually... Mohsin's wife and I always joked, "If the tribe ever comes out, you stand in front of him, you take the arrow. He has kids." And that day, we were strategically positioning ourselves, being like, "You, down. You cannot get killed." In those moments, you start to go, "Okay, where will I be safe from arrows? Where can I run to the river if they come over?" And you start planning, "Okay, if I jump into the river..." I was going, "Okay, I got my bag. I have a can of tuna. I have a flashlight." I was like, "If I jump into the river and float down and I live, I'm still days upriver." And so you start going through all these things. - And of course, the Mashco Piro people are thinking exactly the same thing, probably. - Well, the interesting thing is that they're initiating the contact, right? They are the ones coming out of the jungle and confronting us. - And fundamentally, that contact is- they're at least giving peace a chance. They're trying the peaceful contact first, correct? Or was there a violent element? Like, what did you sense in the caution of them emerging to the beach? - Fear. As they came out, you could see fear on them because the way they were hunched over, the way they had their bows ready, they were worried. And so they came and Romel is standing there closer than any of us at the edge, on one side of the river. And it was like shirts versus skins. It was two tribes looking at each other with a thousand years of civilization between them. And Romel's going, "Put down your bows. Put down your bows and we can talk." And he's saying, "Namole, Namole." He kept saying, "Brothers, brothers, please put down your..." - So Namole means brother in a language that they might be able to understand? - Namole means brother in a language that they do understand, and it seems like they refer to themselves as the Namoles. The brothers. - So potentially, that's what they call themselves as a tribe, Namoles? - Exactly. And actually, the anthropologists that we've been speaking to post-event have been explaining to us that- you know, Piro is the group that they're from, these various nomadic tribes. And Mashco basically means "wild Piros." One thing we know they call themselves is Namoles. - So we might converge towards the name of this tribe being Namole versus Mashco Piro? - The Namoles, yeah. It seems like the most current self-appointed identity is the brothers, Namole. - Anyway, there's these shredded warriors on the beach. They're gigantic. - With seven-foot arrows, and we're all standing there. And so the first thing, again, you just think of like the peace pipe in the old stories. And the first thing is, "Let's make them an offering of peace." So they got a canoe with no motor, and we piled it with plantains, just full of plantains, 16 feet of endless green bananas. And then, I mean, the balls on this guy, the anthropologist- he gets into the river, takes the canoe, and it's the dry season, so the river's only about three or four feet deep at the channel. And so he walks this thing out, this one man walking in the face of all these warriors. He takes the boat and he pushes it towards them. And they rush out, and they start grabbing the bananas, and they're not going, "Okay, we will unload these bananas and use them later." They're my bananas. And they're fighting, yelling, and they're all grabbing 'em, and then they push the boat back and he talks to them a little bit. It's not a perfect translation, so he's saying, "Where have you come from? What do you want? Who's your leader?" And he's trying to establish these things, and they all sort of talk at the same time, like a flock of birds. It wasn't like one man speaks. And there were no women. The women were nowhere to be seen. And actually, at one point as we were preparing, I think it was while we were preparing the second canoe of bananas, there was a moment of absolute panic. It happened when there was a noise behind us and you just hear shotguns swing behind us. And, you know, Mohsin goes down. I go running away from the river because I want to see if there's an attack coming. And I'm standing, me and this guy were sharing a tree as cover, and he's got a shotgun and he's looking back into the forest. And what was happening was the women of the tribe had come silently, and they were just pulling yucca out of the ground and taking the banana plants and ruining the farm completely. They were raiding the farm behind us while the men were talking up here. So again, were they peacefully contacting us or were they like, "Hey, go make a diversion and take the food out the back"? - So I mean, you really were surrounded. - We were completely surrounded. - So they could have murdered all of you, probably. - Easily. We were outnumbered five to one at the least. - Yeah. And maybe they wanted peace, but part of the reason is they didn't know how deep this goes. They didn't know if you had backup. - They don't know if we have backup. They also had questions. Some of their questions were incredible: "How do we tell the difference between, how do we know who the good guys and the bad guys are?" Because to them, all you outsiders are the same. So why, who were the ones cutting down the trees? - And those are the ones they know are the bad guys. - Well, the big trees seemed to have incredible significance to them. They're significant to us in a different way, but to them, it's offensive on an almost religious level to cut a big tree, as if you're killing their gods. - So there's a spirituality to the trees to them. - It seems like that. - And so whoever's cutting them down is a source of destruction on a spiritual, existential level. - spiritual, existential level. They ask, "Why would you destroy our home?" - In a deep sense, the uncontacted tribes represent the deep jungle. And so if they're threatened, that means the jungle, the deep jungle is threatened. - They are the human voice of the jungle and they're asking questions and they're also demanding. You know, they're clapping at us and they're waving and they're saying, "Send more bananas." And so they loaded up another boat and they pushed another boat out, and this time they gave them some rope. They all had rope tied around their waists, penises tied up. But they love rope and some of them were wearing rope that they had made, which is brown or reddish. And then some of them were wearing rope that they had clearly pillaged from logging camps or the communities because it was modern nylon paracord. And they had this wound around their waists like a thick belt. And they took the second boat and they had some rope and they had some plantains on there. - So, some of these guys might have been the ones that murdered the loggers. - Could be. - From a couple of months before that. - Absolutely, could be. But what Ramal said as he was talking to them, he turned to us and he said, "The other groups call me the Grandfather." He said, "This group, I don't know any of these." He said, "This is first contact." He said, "This is the first time this group is talking to us." And you saw people from maybe 12 years old to what looks like 40-something, like a banged-up 40. And no really old people and no women. - So this is a particular clan of the uncontacted- - It's a particular clan, - a tribe who they've never contacted. Is there, just from your memory, interesting aspects about the way they were trying to communicate? Like you said, clapping. I think it's, from an anthropology perspective, from a human perspective, fascinating. How do you talk to people from an uncontacted tribe like this? So clapping, yelling. It's interesting to know that there's not a hierarchy where there's a leader that represents. Or is that something we know for sure? - Before even coming to talk to you about this, we passed this through anthropologists and ethicists and we said, "Look, is it even okay? Can we talk about this?" Because if you talk about this, and you tell people there's these uncontacted tribes, people have misconceptions. They go, "They're the last free people on Earth. We need to go join them. We want to see them." There's all this bad stuff that happens, and all these people want to be left alone. So the last thing we want to do is kill the thing we're trying to protect and tell the world. But at the same time, they're speaking out. They're saying, "Stop cutting our trees. Leave us alone." And so if we're not successful in the greater Jungle Keepers' mission of protecting this river, they cease to exist. And so advocating for these people requires us to have this conversation. It requires us to have this footage and to show the world, and then leave them alone. - This is a world first. I mean, up until now... You know, we're sitting there this day and- the only thing you've ever seen are these blurry images of them from someone's cellphone from 100 meters away of the uncontacted tribes. And we're sitting there with 800 millimeters with a 2X teleconverter and, you know, R5s. And so, this is as we're looking through the vines, anticipating the tribe coming. I'll put a little bit of volume so you can hear it. And then you can see, this is the moment. This is us running when they're like, "They're out. They're coming down the beach." - Oh, wow. Oh, wow. - You see how many thousands of butterflies? But look at the way they move. Look at the way they point. Look at him with his bow. - Wow. - There it is. - They're trying to figure out what they're looking at. - And they didn't know the cameras were there. So this was the guys looking out the back. So he's going, "There's something back here." He could- hear the women in the farm. And I'm looking in every direction because I'm going, "Which way is the arrow coming from?" But see, he has his shotgun. This is just like a farm shotgun. Even if he shot it, you have to use a stick to bang out the shell. But see, as they come closer, they start laying down their... See, he's laying down his bow and arrow. They understand. - So these are warriors, and the way they were at first moving, it really looked like they're ready for violence. And now they're all standing in a relaxed- And they're smiling? Are they smiling? - Smiles come at some point. I would say that one of these guys seemed like he was in a leadership position. He did most of the talking. - What's with the different hand gestures? This, the holding your hand up to the face. All of this means something. - All of this means something. Some had red smeared on their faces. Some had yellow. - Did you have a sense of hierarchy at all, like the boss? - Again, there were just these two dominant guys. And, like, this guy and one other guy who looked almost like him, like his brother. A lot of gesturing. - Wow. This is incredible, Paul. - Yeah. You see the rope? Some of that rope is... - Yeah, I can kind of tell who the bosses are. - Right? All right, so a few of But see, even that, as he's pointing- what are you pointing at? - You guys are nuts. You guys are nuts. - You see, though, they're rushing in. There's this desperation. They're hungry. They also— - Is that in the water, or is that Ramo in the water in that case? - The, in this particular video, it's a guy named Liner. But see these guys? They're fighting over it. It's not that we're all going to share it later. It's, "I get mine, you get yours." And so what does that mean? - Yeah. But here, they're in peaceful mode, for sure. - Now, after we'd given them, after we'd given them several boatloads of bananas, things did calm down. Ramo said to them, "Look, we've given you what we can give you. We gave you sugarcane. We gave you boatloads of plantains." And so then there came a time where things were a little more relaxed. They were walking around. We had a great moment where we'd given them the plantains. We'd given them the bananas. And he'd said, "Look, that's it." He said, "We've given you what you asked for. You asked for bananas. We don't— we don't cut the trees here. All of us here are not tree-cutters. We're indigenous people." And he couldn't explain who the hell we were, but they were like, "We don't cut the trees. We're not the loggers." And they're like, "Okay." So then at some point, Ignacio went out and sort of like started, you know, he'd go like this and they'd go like this. And he'd dance a little bit, they'd dance a little bit. And then there was this human moment of just joking. - So even Ignacio warmed up. - Even Ignacio warmed up. Once he realized no one was going to die that day, things did calm down. It was a false sense of security. Here, I'll show you. There's a couple more things that are relevant here, though. Yeah, this is just them interacting with the boat. - This is truly incredible, man. - But then they don't have boats. They don't have stone tools. They don't... Imagine if you showed them ice. You know, they wouldn't... - This is historic. - I mean, it's the... you hear of Percy Fawcett encountering the tribes. We've heard of anecdotal accounts. This is the first time that the tribes have been filmed, that we can hear their voices— ...that there's a documented interaction happening. I mean, look how comfortable he's getting. He's so close. They asked him for his shirt. He gave his shirt. - This is incredible. - They asked him for his pants. He gave his pants. He was in his underwear. You see this? The shirt that's over his shoulder? Ignacio took off his JungleKeeper shirt and threw it to the anthropologist, and then the anthropologist walked off and threw it to them. So over the shoulder of that uncontacted naked warrior is a JungleKeeper shirt with the logo showing. - That's great. - So their, like, their second shirt and they're... - You just upgraded that guy's status in the tribe. He's going to be the new boss with that shirt. - He's got a dope polo. And he didn't even have to order it. But yeah, this is in the aftermath when things were calm. And then my moment with this that really stuck with me was when Ramo said to me, "You know, they're asking about you." And I said, "What are they asking?" He goes, "Yeah, they're asking about you." And again, I'm not tall but compared to the people in the village, I was a little bit taller and had big shoulders. And he said, "They said you look like a warrior. Could you come forward? Show them that you don't mean any harm. Show them your palms." And so he pulled me up onto the beach, right before they left. I hold up my hands. Listen. And they sang back. They're singing. They raised their hands. I raised my hands. - And then we were left watching them walk off the beach into the jungle with everything that we'd given them, and they were gone. And so we went downriver the next day and the community said to us, "Okay, now you understand this is real. This is terrifying. You felt that fear. You have a duty, if you're gonna protect this river, to protect us from them and to help us figure out what future they want. If they want to come to us, if they want to learn farming, if they... whatever it is, that's fine." But they were like, "We need protection from you guys." And then in this video in the beginning, I'm narrating to the camera and walking around right as they're coming up the beach. But you see this guy, right there in the blue shirt? That's George. And he was very friendly, very confident with this. He said, "Don't be scared. They're not going to hurt us." And the next day, we went back to town—long journey back to town. We go to sleep, we wake up in the morning, and we find out that the following early morning, our friends in the community had said, "Okay, the tribe is gone. We gave them sugarcane, bananas, and said, 'Please come back, you're welcome here anytime.'" And George was driving a boat with people on board, and as they were going upriver, 200 of the tribe ran out, surrounded the boat, and they started firing arrows. Everybody else hit the deck and got under the benches and hid behind bags of rice. George was driving as fast as he could, leaning back while driving. And one arrow came in just above his scapula and came out by his belly button. And so he had that seven-foot arrow tip through him. They pulled him out, and I saw the boat afterward, and there's just horrific amounts of blood all over the boat. He had to be medevacked out, and somehow he lived. And we were able to help getting him a helicopter, getting him evaced, all this. But again, you just go, "What..." you know, these people came out of the jungle and they asked for bananas. We gave them bananas and we, in every way possible said, "We mean peace. We want friendship with you." And then the next day, they attacked. - What do you think happened? Why do you think their mind turned? Or maybe this has to do with the role of violence in their society. Maybe it's so integrated into how they interact with the world that they don't even see that as a fundamental shift in the interaction. - I don't know. I don't know what to make of it. And the only thing I can think is that the way they hid the women from us, you don't know for them, maybe we're not allowed to see their women, you know? Because the one thing that we got was that as George— George's boat and this other boat were going upriver, which is how they live—it's not like they were doing anything wrong. These people live in a community days into the Amazon, they were going fishing. And so they came around a bend and I think they spooked the tribe. The tribe might have just acted defensively and said, "We don't know who this is." The motors could have set them off, we don't know. But they shot him. And then the other thing is the thing with the necklace. I've asked anthropologists about this, and their answer was that at this point they said, "You know more than we do." Because two of them had the exact same item around their necks, and it seems to be a Brazil nut and then some sort of casing around the side, and it looked like animal teeth positioned in there. And it's like, what are you carrying? Are you carrying medicine? Are you carrying some sort of a totem? But both of them... and it's not a comfortable thing to wear around your neck— you know, grapefruit-sized or bigger. - Do you have a sense if that's a container or is it just like a totem? - It seems like a container. If they didn't let it get wet, they cared for it. The guy in this picture, he's got this... this is a piece of tree fiber that he has it on him, and then he's gotten his hands on Brazil nut sacks, plastic sacks from one of the farms across the river. And so they just take, they take. And one of them got a machete and he was walking. As they were leaving, again, during that period where they got friendly, he was leaving and he had the machete, playing with it and swinging it at butterflies. And one of my friends, this guy Bacho, he goes, "Oye, deja mi machete." He's like, "Drop the machete." And the guy just looked at him and was like, "Yeah, come and get it." You know, it's like, "Yeah, you cross the river and see what happens." - Do you think he figured out, or they later figured out, how to use a machete? - Oh, they know the machete. - They understand the machete? - Yeah, they do raids for machetes. - They understand the power of sharpened metal. - It's an Excalibur sword to them. But yeah, that one has stuck with me because I wonder, what were they carrying in there? - So what are some of the questions? Like if you could know everything you'd want to know about them— Maybe in the space of communication and language, that's really interesting. You mentioned that there's all kinds of calls, animal calls. So they obviously know how to fake animal calls. - Yeah, they can use animal calls with enough complexity that they can do basic commands. They can speak in Capuchin; they use Tinamou calls. Some of our rangers were upriver a few months ago. This is recently, they were upriver and they found a Nomole trail, a Mashco-Piro trail, and it was Ignacio, of course. He made a secret whistle out into the jungle and he's listening, and they whistle back. So he and everybody on the team just ran back to the boat and got out of there. But at least they answered. They didn't just shoot. He whistled, they whistled, and they said, "Out," and he got out. But we don't know, where are the old people? Do they not survive? What are the marriage rituals? How is reproduction handled? There are one or two children in the Amazon that I know of who have washed downriver on a log and been rescued by communities and raised. They either learn the native dialect or Spanish, and then, at some point, somebody will go and ask, "What was it like when you lived with them?" The answer is always the same: "I forget." They don't talk about it. - So maybe we know that they value secrecy. I mean, when you're afraid of the outside world, part of that is confidentiality. They all sign NDAs. - Yeah, there are some really good NDAs. - It's an understood NDA. There are no lawyers. There's only one way to execute the law. - Yeah. It's either a really strong NDA or that it is savage living out there in the jungle, where you're eating monkeys and turtles and you're hungry for days on end. Your wife might get stolen by another tribe. Your baby might get stolen—imagine the botflies and the things that they must put up with. It's just... I mean, what we experienced in three days of living with modern camping gear, headlamps, and a sense of direction—they're doing none of that. Put us out there naked, a very different story. - Yeah, the brutality of nature— Werner Herzog comes to mind. They have to live in that. But then there's something about the jungle that serves as a catalyst for spirituality, so they must also have a religious component, a spiritual component that probably unifies them. There must be an ideology they operate under. - Oh, there must be. There's many things they must have. They must have a belief system. They probably have amazing origin stories. It would be amazing to know what things they have accurately and inaccurately guessed about us, about the outside world. I mean, they've never heard of the country they live in or of World War II or any of it. And so seeing them come across the beach was surreal because it's like this aperture into history. - By the way, you do have a certain look, so you realize like— as I'm speaking to you, your face is carved in some wood somewhere, And there's a few of them gathering around and like still singing about the great gringo with the— - The full beard and the big nose. They probably drew this like, "He's got hair all over his face and a huge nose, and they tell their children. - Yeah. And it could be anything. They— To the children, they say, "This is the monster you should be afraid of," or this could be the most beautiful encapsulation of the outside world. It could be everything in between. You don't get to control the myths. - You don't get to control the myths. Yeah, God only knows, but - That's so interesting. - So now, in that 130,000 acres that we have, we know—and this is what we sort of have to come out with— we are now protecting these people. And the only way to do that is to make sure that they're not contacted, let alone that they don't get machine guns shot at them by the narcos, or that crazy hippie gringos don't go down there thinking they're going to join the coolest commune on Earth. - So how much of the land that they move about is within the 130,000 acres of rainforest you've been able to save? And how much of it is not? How much of it is in the extra 200,000 acres that you're trying to save? - Most of the rest, most of that 200,000 that we're still trying to protect is territory that is theirs. And in order- People always ask me this. They're like, "How could you buy the Amazon?" They're like, "That doesn't make sense." And it's like, well, I have bad news for you. Somebody already owns it and we have to buy it from them so that they don't log it. And so these landowners are going to sell their forest to the logging companies because owning 10,000 acres of the Amazon doesn't help you if you're a third-generation jungle man. And now it's just something that's up there and you live in the city, and so they're going to contract either the narcos, the loggers, or the miners to go out there and use it, and they'll get a little money. And when those people see these people, they will kill them. That's for sure. And shotguns and machine guns in the end will win, not to mention the germs. - So all the money you're trying to raise and all the land that you're trying to save, it's all towards that: protecting the deep jungle. So when you buy up the jungle, you just want to let it be, let the natural ecosystem come back to life in the cases when it was logged or just flourish- ...if it hasn't? - Again, we're talking about the last great jungle. I always called it the last endless forest because this place is so incredibly remote. And then the other question I always get is, "Well, why is this river so, so important?" And for my whole career, 20 years in the Amazon, it's been that it's massively intact forest. Places like the ancient forest where the trees have never been cut, growing since the dawn of time. Thousands of species can be on a single shihuahuaco tree, and it's Avatar on Earth. You can see the sweat come off your skin and rain down and then drink it out of the river, and you're part of the chemical physical reality there. It's one of the last places that's untouched. This changed everything because we realized that along with the butterflies and the monkeys and the jaguars and the trees and the ecosystem—there's also a human culture that will, in the next few years, cease to exist, that will be exterminated if we don't protect them. And when you look back at what happened to indigenous cultures all over the world over the past few centuries, that they've been wiped out, we collectively now, because we know this, have a chance to undo all the injustices of the past by at least doing one right, by saying these people want one thing: to just be left alone. Imagine if we just protected the river. And then it's not that they're this thing that's vanishing from reality, but they get to continue living that way. And if they want to come out and contact us, great, and if they want to continue living like this for 10,000 years, they can. And that's what we're working with now. It's become so much more important than just, you know, trying to protect the environment. It's like, no, we're trying to protect things like Yellowstone and Yosemite and the sequoias that occur nowhere else on Earth. You protect the things that are unique and special, the crown jewels, and in both a biological way and an anthropocentric way, this has now become a river with global historic significance because this story is going to play out in the next 18 months. - You're trying to save more and more rainforest. And the mission is clear because there's just this deep jungle... ...that's full of this incredible life. And now we know with uncontacted tribes, there's a lot of interests that don't care about the jungle they're pushing into... ...and want to cut it down, want to destroy it. And the mission is pretty clear. You just want this whole territory to be preserved. - Yeah. And that's what makes it so beautiful is that this is one of those crown jewels. This is one of those special places on earth where it's like a time capsule for nature, for human culture, for biodiversity, for climate services, for everything. I think people get overwhelmed when you say, "We have to save the environment. We have to save the ocean." This is one watershed. It's 300,000 acres, and we're already at 130,000. We've shown we can do it. The loggers are happy to turn into rangers. People all over the world have become Junglekeeper supporters. We have several thousand people that every month give us between five and a thousand dollars, and that keeps the rangers going, that employs the local people. So it's not just drawing a line and making a park and saying, "Everybody stay out." It's like, no, you have the Nomoles, you have the indigenous people, you have a future for the indigenous people where their kids don't have to worry about eating monkeys. They can be park rangers. I get blowback when I say, "People can even come see it through the treehouse." People go, "Oh, are you going to bring tourists into the wildest place on earth?" And it's like, look at that jungle. In those 300,000 acres, if you're talking about a football field, we're talking about two blades of grass that we access so people can see it, which makes a huge difference. The fact that we can share it with people... I mean, the amount of people that listen, look, since the first time I came here and spoke to you, the amount to which you've made it possible for us to protect this place, the amount of spider monkeys, jaguars, and giant anteaters, and those ancient millennium trees that you've made it possible to protect is monstrous. - Thank you, brother. - No, thank you. - It's been an honor of a lifetime to be able to watch you. I tell this to people, there's certain people I'm glad exist in this world, because you've educated me and millions of people about the beauty of the jungle, and how important the fight to save the jungle is. So if you're listening to this, you absolutely must go. Please donate, post about it, and share it with friends: Junglekeepers.org. You're also doing a gala in New York at the end of January. So if you can, please go and donate to help save the jungle. - Yes, please do. And because our first conversation led to the first surge where people realized what Junglekeepers was— and because we got this surge of support, we were able to expand our work, protect more acres, a lot of our major donors, a lot of our small scale donors came in because of that. So these are people that went, "Wait, if Lex thinks it's a good idea, then we'll do it." I think based on your trust they came in. And so... - I guess also I should say it's not enough to speak and communicate the importance of saving the rainforest. You actually have to have incredible people there making it happen. And we have talked and we'll talk more about the dangers and the complexities involved on how to navigate everything. And one of the things, and the reason I'm really excited about what you're doing is I just got to meet the team, and it brings a smile to my face— several of the people I know who are extremely competent. Stefan, somebody we've talked about— Yes, he likes to take pictures of stuff but primarily, the thing he does incredibly well is run everything, organize everything to make sure that stuff happens and happens quickly and efficiently, all the kind of things that are required to make stuff like this happen in the complex environment that the jungle operates in, the sometimes lawless environment— that the jungle operates in. So the team is incredible, which is why when you sort of connect the money, how does the money lead to the solution of the problem? It's the team and the team makes it happen. - I didn't know that people like Stefan existed. - Yeah, me neither. - You know, because I— - When I met him— He was a beautiful, wonderful human being. - I just... I'm, you know, again, I can use a machete to catch a fish. But his systems knowledge and his ability... I mean, his bandwidth is the size of a country. It has its own area code. It's... He's... You know, just like JJ opened the door of the Amazon and gave us that local indigenous perspective. I mean, yeah, okay, I told some stories about it, but Stefan came in and went, "Okay, you guys have good ideas, but you're both jungle guys." "You're not helping each other." And running those systems and making the website and making it possible to connect the people that care with the indigenous ranger program and make sure the rangers have shirts and cans of tuna and that there's a person running the ranger team— I mean, these are things I couldn't dream of organizing. I can't even organize my... I can't even make my bed. I can't even get that far. - Caveman want fish. - Watching you hunt for fish with a machete is one of the most awesome things I've seen. You were literally able to catch a fish with a machete. That's what you're good at. And Stefan is good at everything else. - Everything else. You remember the meme of the most interesting man in the world? Where they say, "He once had an awkward moment just to see how it felt." It's like Stefan's to-do list doesn't exist because it's already done. It's just incredible. - Quick pause. Bathroom break. - Oh, 100%. Yes, sir. - And we're back. One thing I forgot to ask you is about the diet of the uncontacted tribes. You mentioned potentially monkeys and turtles, maybe eggs? So, what do we know about what they eat? What's the source of protein? Do they eat monkeys? - Their primary sources of food would be monkeys, turtles, turtle eggs, and small game like paca, the large rodent that's the size of a beagle. Capybaras. Stuff they can shoot. They don't really fish. And we know these things because our indigenous trackers and rangers find their camps. They'll find some of those little thatch structures they make on the beaches, and we see the bones. There'll be tapir bones, there'll be turtle shells, which seem like their closest thing to a bowl. The day that we interacted with them, they did find a bowl. We saw them walking away with it in one of the farms, and then days later we found it destroyed. So they didn't seem like they saw much utility in the bowl. - A temporary container. - It's temporary. They make a fire. They must be amazing at making fire. I don't know how they do it out there. - It's very difficult because everything is wet. - I don't know how they do it. And I'm a really good firestarter. - And it's tough in the jungle. - It's almost impossible most of the year because everything is wet to its core. - So you think they cook the meat? - They have to be cooking their meat from a parasite standpoint, ...everything. We know that— ...they're cooking their meat. We see it. You know, there's not a lot of excess berries. Things like berries and nuts and fruits, that the monkeys and the birds are— ...and the bats are getting to those first. I mean, that's what fruit does, right? A tomato is green until its seeds are mature, then it turns red to advertise, "Eat me," so that you eat it and your gut transports that somewhere else. It gets free transportation. In the jungle, that happens so quick that we're never getting produce. - In the book, you have a picture of a native girl on the Los Piedras... ...having monkey for lunch. - Yes. - It looks really strange when you have— The monkey kind of looks— It looks a little bit like cannibalism because it looks like a small human. I don't know what it is about monkeys. There's a human— ...element to them. In their eyes, in their form factor, but even in the warmth they bring to the interaction. - Yeah, I was babysitting her. She was six at the time, Dira, and her parents went out and we were left at camp. They said, "Keep an eye on her. Make sure nothing eats her." She was like, "Hey, I want lunch." I said, "Great, what is there?" And she pulls out this monkey head. She was like, "It's ready," and she starts pulling at the ear. She's like, "Can you help me?" So I pulled off the ear with my teeth— ...and then I gave it to her. We just shared this monkey head back and forth. We're sitting there and I took a few pictures of her as she's eating. I have this video where I go, "What's your favorite food?" She said, "Monkey." I said, "Not cake?" And she was like, "Monkey." She was pulling its lips off and, like you said— ...you see the teeth and the eyes. It's sort of grilled in static agony. It looks like a tortured human, and she was just enjoying it. - Let me look it up on Perplexity. How many people in the world eat— monkey? Does it taste good? - If it were prepared right, it would taste good, but they just throw it over the fire. And even if you took a perfectly good chicken and did that, it wouldn't taste great. - There's no reliable global count of how many people eat monkey meat, but available data suggests many millions regularly or occasionally consume primate bushmeat— ...especially in parts of Africa, Latin America and Asia. I mean, she looks like that is her favorite meal— is monkey. - Yeah, we had a great time. - Who are we to judge? - Who are we to judge? I mean, have a tuna sandwich or a monkey face, whatever. - She's loving it. That's awesome. That's a good picture there. - And she's adorable. - Yeah. Now that some time has passed, when you look back at that encounter, which I really do think is historic, with the uncontacted tribe, what do you think about? What lingers with you? - Honestly, I'm still processing it. I'll still find myself just staring off, sort of remembering it or looking at the footage. But it felt like the voice of the jungle was speaking. You know, these people are... there's that separation between humans and nature where we go, "We have to protect nature." You know? It's like explaining what water is to a fish. We're part of it. We depend on it. And these are people that depend on it 100%. And as we sit here surrounded by technology, concrete and civilization, they're still out there right now. And the fact that we've been trying to protect their home without even really knowing that they were in it because they're so elusive, it gives you perspective on where we came from and how far we've come. You know, I look at simple things. You board an airplane or you take a picture and you go, "This is a miracle." And I think having that perspective of having interacted with them where you go, "How much work does it take to make this?" If you and I were standing in the jungle and somebody said, "You have to make this," how many years before we came up with this? How many rubber trees, and where would we get the metal, and what would we use as dye? How do we make the spring mechanism and figure out how to make it rotate? I don't know. And it's like they are working with the bare essentials. And so it's an interesting reference point to start at in terms of how incredibly at in terms of how incredibly privileged we are. You know, the other thing is we have written text—so many different types of text. We have code, and we have language, and we have music, and we can communicate in all these different ways. And they have spoken word. They have oral tradition, and that's it. And so they're operating the way our ancestors did through the power of what operated and is persisting in modern And so I think, for me, I come back to the world and it moves very fast when I see it because I'm still stuck on, you know, whether or not me and you can drink out of that puddle. Thinking about that. - The big questions of life. - Yeah. I mean, you're right from the perspective of the uncontacted tribe. Going from the technological world to the jungle, you realize the majesty, the magic of the biological system that is the jungle, that is nature. But from their perspective, also there is a majesty and magic to the technological world. The human-created technological world of the pen and the computer, and the light bulb, that too is magical. So sometimes we - Absolutely - don't give enough credit to both: the magic of the technological world, all the incredible things humans have been able to build, and the magic of the natural world. - I mean, what we've been able to achieve, I think you and I and people that spend large amounts of time in the wilderness, especially somewhere as remote and fundamental as the Western Amazon, have a different perspective on it. Because I think that when you're born in it, you don't necessarily have the framework to appreciate how far we've come. You go, "Yeah, I got on the train today. I checked my phone. I FaceTimed my mom," and you're like, "This is all normal." And it's like we found a way to take things out of the ground and mix them together into magic devices that can do anything. And it's mind-blowing. - There's a deep optimism to that. You write in the book, which I really like, I think somewhere in the beginning, quote, "Given all the death and destruction I've witnessed, it would be easy to slip into the popular anti-human narrative that we are a plague on the planet and there's nothing that can be done, but my career in conservation has given me a glimpse into an alternate narrative. I've met people who are proving more and more that something can be done. I'm talking about real heroes, people who have dedicated their lives to redeeming the evil that is capable of being waged by the human soul, people who are guarding the flame amidst the storm, proving every day what so many have forgotten. There is still hope." And that speaks against the cynicism and apathy, and the view that humans are a destructive force in the world. That speaks to the fact that humans, with all the technological elements that we have created, can actually do a lot of good. I wrote in my notes here a quote from the great Jane Goodall: "The greatest danger to our future is apathy." So caring about the world, having optimism for the world, having a hope for the world is the way to help have an impact, help save it. But on that, I have to ask you about Jane. She passed away on October 1st. Some humans in this human civilization of ours can open our eyes to the beauty of the world, and she is one of the best of them. And she's had an impact on your life. Maybe can you speak to the impact that she's had? - I mean, when I grew up, you know, my parents... Being dyslexic, I couldn't read for a very long time. And so my parents read to us every night, which was amazing considering how hard they were working. But they'd find the time to give us an hour of reading every night, whether it was Lord of the Rings or Sherlock Holmes or Jane Goodall. And so I grew up with Jane being this figurehead of conservation and of adventure and sort of a living historical figure, this legendary person. And so then one time, right around the time that I'd been going to the jungle for a few years, I got to go see Jane speak, I think it was at NYU. And, you know, sitting in the crowd, watched her, completely amazed. And I had, at the time, my cousins had been telling me that I should write down my stories, the stories of taking care of an anteater and stories of catching anacondas. And they're like, "Write, you know? These are such good stories." And so I'd been writing them down and I just remember after the talk, she did at least an hour on stage and then hundreds of people lined up, and she sat there and each of those people wants a moment with this legend. And so she has to take a picture, shake their hand, they say, "You mean so much to me." She says, "Thank you." And then they move on and they say, "We'll send you the picture." "Okay, great." So then I got my moment and we waited in line and I gave her this manila envelope with two chapters in it. And one chapter was "Lulu the Giant Anteater" for Mother of God, and the other chapter was me, JJ and Pico out on the river catching anacondas, and just talking about how amazing the jungle was. And I said, "I'd love it if you could endorse my book that doesn't exist yet." And I felt like such a loser doing that. And I felt so stupid because I feel like everyone was probably asking something of her, and I, you know, it's incredibly draining to talk to that many people, even if it is for a good reason. And 48 hours later, she got back and she said, "You know, this is incredible. I would love to write a recommendation for your book as soon as you find a publisher." And what happened with that is that Jane—the way I think of it is, you know, she waved her very powerful magical wand in my direction, and she had the incredible compassion and presence to actually—I mean, after talking to that many people and being on the road 300 days a year and being Jane Goodall, this living legend scientist, to actually do something so mundane as look at some kid's writing. And of course, when I went to publishers, they said, "Jane who? Who said that they would endorse your book?" Because everyone had said no. Every publisher in New York had already said no. And then after that, HarperCollins took me on and they said, "Well, if Jane Goodall thinks it's a good idea, then we think it's a good idea." And it became Mother of God and then because of that, Jungle Keepers, Dax, everything else stemmed from that. So had Jane not been the legend that she is truly in every moment, my whole career would never have happened, which also means that those thousands of heartbeats and thousands of acres in the Amazon wouldn't be protected because we never would've started Jungle Keepers. - And she did that not because you're special; she did that to everybody. And now just imagine the scale, the impact she's had because of that. And guess what? You have a bit of that responsibility now as well. There's young people that walk up to you in that way, and you have that responsibility of seeing them, of giving them a chance, of seeing the potential in every single human being that walks up to you. - It definitely... I would say that with Jane, we could do four hours on just Jane: what she did for humanity, for science, for women, for wildlife, the amount of other people that she inspired and gave careers to, everything she did for me. But to me, that presence of mind when you reach that level, to not be worried about your own travel and your own schedule and busy with getting some rest—and that she actually looked at it—has informed how I operate. And indeed like you say, at this point, as strange as it is, people will stop me on the street and say, "Hey, I watch your videos every night with my kids." Or someone will say, "How do I get your job? I've been watching you for years and I'd love to help conservation." So it's made it so that I follow her example where it's like you stop what you're doing and you pay attention. Because you don't know, that might be the next kid that's out there saving a river, or the next person that makes an innovation that makes it possible to clean rivers, or whatever it is, whatever their dream is. Jane was in the hope business. She always said it: you know, that not losing hope was key to staying in the fight. And that we live at a time when, apathy is a poison peddled by the darkness. It's— they're trying to make you feel disoriented, apathetic, and scared. And fighting back against that and having conviction and passion and fire and hope are the only way that we're gonna fight that. She understood that and spent her whole life spreading it, guarding the flame against the storm, and tipping her candle to others to light them. I mean, that was her whole thing. - What advice would you give to young people on how to do that? Those young Pauls sitting there—and your life story is just incredible in that way. You've taken a leap into adventure, into the unknown. What would you recommend they do? - I think the thing that I try to communicate to them— and again, my inbox is filled with people. "I'm from Finland. I'm from Spain. I'm from Georgia." People saying, "How do I get your job? How do I get out there and do it?" And it really is just that: you throw yourself headfirst into adventure. You just do it. I remember hearing people say, "You know, if I can do it, you can do it." And I remember how hollow that sounds 'cause I'm like, "Yeah, you're on a talk show or you just wrote a book..." You know, these titans of their industries and innovators saying, "Oh, if I can do it, anybody can do it." But now that we're protecting all this rainforest, and that I've lived with the animals and met the tribes, and it's becoming this global movement. You know, I didn't have a PhD. There's that quote that someone less qualified than you is living your dream life and has your dream job right now, and I am the poster child for that because I went there when I failed out of high school and started taking unmatriculated college classes and going to the jungle with my friend JJ and just doing it for the sheer love of it for years, almost a decade before anything surfaced. And the other thing is there's not even a path. There was no path ahead of us. There was no, "Okay, you go to school. You get trained in this, and you're gonna become a this." I went there and it was like, "You're never gonna be a conservation biologist 'cause you don't have the grades. You don't have a PhD. You don't have family money. You're not gonna be able to protect rainforests." So I said, "All right, well then, selfishly, I just wanna see it." And then I ended up getting trained by the indigenous people, and like what happens so many times—you could use a restaurant example as the best one, where you might start washing dishes, but at least you're in the restaurant, you know? And then at some point, the manager's gonna need you to help with restocking and so on. And after a few years, you're gonna be helping the new guy, and after a few years you might end up being the manager, and at some point you might end up starting your own restaurant. That's the only way to do that. You can't just search it on a computer. You have to go sweat and bleed and do it. - And that said, especially if you fall in love with the journey, the path you take is full of difficult periods. I think you said somewhere this just seems to be the nature of it. That there's going to be pain and suffering along the way. You have a really nice post... ...that I recommend people watch about just this. When people ask for advice: that the hardship, the suffering— —and I've seen how much you care. When I've seen you, just in your face, when you see a tree being cut down or you see the fires, there's real pain there in your heart and you have to carry that. And so the post is, "How honest can I be? What do I tell these kids who message me asking how they can do what I do? It's not David versus Goliath. There's no sword or sling that can hold back a dragon this big. You're going against the current of global economic entropy and human apathy. Swimming against the current is tiring, a great way to drown. Every day we don't win, we lose, and when we do, worlds burn. The more you know, the more it bleeds. The heartbeats all stop when the flames come through. Constellations of species turn to ghosts, and we're the only ones saving them. Cupped our hands around a candle in the howling darkness." And people want to be inspired. Keep that social media going, keep it up. You're doing great. They want to know we're winning, and we've done a lot of winning, but not right now. We're getting slaughtered. We're at that part of the story. We're almost at the end game. We can think positively, as positively as we want. Thoughts and prayers won't stop a chainsaw, and the motor that's carrying us against the current towards the miraculous goal only works when there's gasoline in it. As soon as that stops, we drown. We drown. We can take the warm light from all of those who help and not let it bother us that there are people who could buy a planet, claiming to care. At some point you realize what's really happening." "As a kid you'd rather be Aragorn. You don't want to actually carry the ring, not when you learn what it's going to cost, even if you make it. How can you explain to Sam why you can't get on the boats? Whatever it takes, whatever it takes. It's that time of year again. Here come the flames. Whatever it takes, it's coming." And people should watch the video that goes along with this. But that speaks to the pain, the difficulty, the challenge, the suffering involved— when you're faced with the possibility of destruction. And that's the other side of the sword of caring for something deeply. - Yeah, we've watched a lot of forest burn. We've pulled a lot of animals out of the flames. Yeah, I wrote that at a time where we were just getting hammered. Funding wasn't coming in. There were miners. It was just months and months out in the jungle alone, and yeah, that— it's a Thom Yorke track that I'd just been listening to again and again, and it was so low. There was then a huge new invasion where they just— burned the whole side of the river. And you know, it's never going to come back. And it's part of the forest that I loved, and I knew the animals there and it's, it's gone. And so we have to live through that on a weekly basis, at least a day-to-day basis. And when you take on responsibility for something like this, you— you go to sleep thinking, "If we don't do it then worlds burn. If we don't save it, then..." Every time you said the sadness that surrounds a happy moment— well, it's like, how am I supposed to go to a party and talk with people about anything, or how am I supposed to go to sleep when if we don't succeed at what we're trying to do, if we don't outrace the chainsaws and the roads, then those trees die, those millennium trees, and we're the only ones out there protecting them. When you see that black scorched earth with nothing left, it's just ashes on the ground and the cacophony of life is silenced, and it's just this horrible, violent silence. It makes you sick. And so, yeah, there's a lot of weight that comes with that where we're not theoretically doing something. We're black and white, practically doing it. - So that's the other side of the advice to young people. - Oh, yeah. - It's not gonna be easy. - No. When they say, "How do I get your job?" it's like, "Well, you don't want my job. You don't want the botflies, and you don't want the dengue, and you don't want—don't even inquire what a normal life looks like." I lived out of a backpack for 20 years. You know how many monkey faces I had to eat because there was no other food? Like, seriously. Just that shot, being alone on the boat in the river and how many days the motor didn't work. And you sleep out there, and you get rained on because you don't have any protection, and you have some leaves over your face. And then you go home, and everyone's got a job, and everyone's got kids, and everyone's happy. And they're like, "What are you doing down there?" "I'm trying to save the rainforest." They're like, "Sure." And now we're at this point where, I've cared a whole lot for a long time. We've had rises, and then we've had falls, and we've had wins, and then we've had failures. And…

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