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

We're standing there. Everyone is waiting because 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, "No mole." He's going, "Brothers."

Then it happened. Then you start hearing people screaming, "Mos, Mosko." And people are screaming and women are lifting children and running into the huts and the dogs and chickens are going nuts. And I mean, fear, fear, fear. He's going, "Look there. He has a bow. He has a bow."

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." They're going, "Look, there's a gun there." And you can see them communicating to each other. The butterflies are swirling off the beach and they can hit a spider monkey out of the treetops at 40 m. They can sneak up and you will never know they're there. 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. 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 full-on extended encounter with an uncontacted tribe that we discuss in this podcast. Both the book and audio book are great. I highly recommend it.

If you would like to support Paul and his incredible 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. We also recorded a bunch of disparate footage of the journey just for fun. 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.

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 regular scheduled programming. This is the Lex Freedman 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 Rosley.

We've survived a challenging time out in the jungle about a year and a half ago. 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. The goal is that you're working towards is protecting 200,000 acres more. And doing so while facing extreme danger from narcos, narcot 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 a non-contacted tribe, and we'll talk about all of this.

Your new book, Jungle Keeper, opens with the killing of two loggers by the warriors of a non-contacted tribe, the Mashkapiro, in August 2024. And then you reveal that you had your own dramatic encounter with the tribe 2 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 shiua wako of this size is a giant among giants, an emergence sentinel that reaches heights of 160 ft towering over the rest of the canopy. I've read that many are over a thousand years old by the way as an aside. And you've found ones that are 1200 years old. Incredibly old.

Anyway, you continue. This particular tree has 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 through the canopy with such cataclysmic power that it shook the earth.

Then you go on to talk about how the shaking of the earth was felt and heard by the uncontacted tribe. So you go on to describe how these particular loggers were murdered by the uncontacted tribe of Mshapiro.

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 quote unquote uncontacted peoples, people that are living in nomadic isolation in what remains of the intact Amazon basin and want to remain that way. So what happened with these loggers was that local people told them, don't go out there. Don't go into these territories. 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. When they say there's kalattos out there, there's wild people out there, these loggers from another region go, "Yeah, that's 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 have yet to encounter or may never discover, and that they can hit a spider monkey out of the treetops at 40 m. So, while you're using a chainsaw, they can sneak up and you will never know they're there. When that arrow passes through your body, you'll only have a moment to realize it before you fall over.

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, seven feet.

Six, seven feet, more like 7 ft. That's incredibly sharp. They cure it over the fire and they have a way of sharpening it. That edge of bamboo becomes incredibly like knife sharp. You can cut meat with it easily. I've done it. These arrows, look, look at that. I'm 5'9. That's easily a 7 foot arrow.

So, for people who are just listening, this quotequote 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 they even twist the fletching so the arrow spins in the air. They have incredible craftsmanship. Then you see all the little string on there is plant fibers that they've woven. And then this is them. The warriors of the tribe.

The fact that we're sitting here talking on microphones and that we have airplanes and cell phones and all the things that 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 Mashkapira 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 and grids and batteries and solar panels and electric motors, metals and materials, mass-produced steel, aluminum, advanced alloys, plastics, composites, glass, concrete, all of those things, tools, of course, and the machinery, the infrastructure of roads and bridges and buildings and the weapons of war, everything but the spears and the 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.

That entire list is no.

I mean metal think you have to be able to excavate into the earth and and forge metal. These people don't even as a one of the anth local anthropologist 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 what that water boils because they don't have they don't even make clay pots. They just have their bamboo and their string. So, they're living an incredibly simple life. So, all of that, I mean, even, you know, a camera is a miracle to them.

It's like looking into thousands of years ago, like stone age.

Well, 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 like a demonic destructive force. 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 that they were able to communicate across the language barrier was, "Why are you cutting down the trees?" They don't like it. That represents to them the danger that the outside world brings, the destruction that the outside world brings. They see us as the destroyers of worlds.

Tell me about this encounter in October of 2024.

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 you know well now after spending time there with me. It's a high tributary of the Amazon rainforest where you know you have the main river channel and then smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller tributaries. The smaller you get, the less trafficked they are. This river has remained wild through the centuries. Even during the '9s when there was a mahogany boom where people went out for mahogany trees, there was very few people going up this river.

20 years ago when I first got to the region and people were telling me that there's uncontacted tribes out there. It was it was always in the realm of something um you know it's like people say there's there's there's Bigfoot or don't go there, it's haunted or something. It was like a tall tale almost. Even the Peruvian government at the time that I went to Peru first, 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. You just you would hear these stories of people that got shot. You'd meet someone high up a river 4 days up river deep in the Amazon that had an arrow and you'd look at this thing and it had this, you know, mega gravity.

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. 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 of these of the of the Mashkapiro.

In October, we were, you know, 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. 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 want to 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, you know, we should keep because we're over here like trying to get land concessions and doing all this important work. Part of me was like, that can't be real. So, we're going to keep keep our heads down. Bigfoot is emerging from the forest. Sure. Then because we got the call, we hung up and we said, "Okay, maybe tomorrow if they're like still there or something."

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 land owner. We were trying to do all this stuff for the conservation work. Then I got together with the core team of directors, JJ, Mos, and Stefan. We said, "Wait, if this is real, we have to get there like now, like now now." So we dropped what we were doing, canceled the meetings, we put other people on the meetings, we got a boat, we called Ignasio, we called 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. We said, "Look, this is going down." He said, "I already know because the whole river already knows." We said, "Can you get us there by tomorrow morning?" He said, "Look, it's a two-day journey by boat, so no." We said, "Is there any way you can get us there?" He went, "I'll get you there."

We got a couple sacks of rice, a couple cans of tuna, our dry bags, our tents. We got on a boat by 6:00 p.m. We started riding up the river through the night through the night. So two-day boat journey that we're trying to flex in one night. So I was at the front with the with the headlamp with the torch. The first few hours it was clear. That comet, remember that comet that was going? There was that comet in the sky. I remember looking at the comet and going somehow I was like, "This is it." I knew this was it. The first few hours was clear and the stars was out and it was beautiful. Then it clouded over and the lightning started and then it just apocalypse downpoured. From midnight until 8 am, it was just the front of the boat with the light. It was just Star Wars vision of just, you know, raindrops and galaxies and and and moths flying in my eye.

People don't realize you can get hypothermia in the tropics. But it's like as you're going at night, even if it's 80° outside in the rain, in the wind at night in a lightning storm, you're freezing. So by, you know, 2:00 a.m., I'm convulsively shivering. We're using the crocodile eyes, the Cayman eyes on the side of the river as because it was so dark we couldn't see where we were going. So those shine back at you. So I'm I was finding the Cayman eyes and then motioning with the light to Ignasio where to go and he knew how to find the channel. We had to jump the waterfalls. We did the two-day boat ride in one night.

Nice. We got there and we arrive at this community where and it's morning now and the howler monkeys are calling over the jungle and you know 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 that we saw a few of them on the beach and they're gone now. 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 there were their footprints were there and the the local indigenous anthropologists was standing there and we're standing at the edge of this beach looking out into the into the Amazon beyond and there's just all this wreckage. It looked like something very Cor McCarthy, just dark sky, iron clouds.

We're standing there, everyone is waiting because at any moment an arrow could just fly through your neck. There's people holding shotguns. The anthropologist, this little guy is standing 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." He's going, "Brothers, we're here. We don't want to hurt you." He's speaking in in the Yin language and he's saying, "Come out." You can tell by their footprints. The trackers explained this to us. You could see it was just the balls of their feet. So right as we pulled up to the beach, they had run. So they were there listening to us. He's going, "No mole, come out. It's okay. Lay down your arms. We'll lay down ours. No mole." Just keep kept saying, "No mole." Nothing happened. We went back to the village. We went to sleep.

We wake up the next morning and it's 5:00 a.m. Again, we're trying to save the jungle. We're in a race against time to get these land concessions. So my team like Mosen and Stfan, JJ couldn't come because he was in town actually signing paperwork and interviewing loggers and land owners. Also he didn't think that there was any chance this was going to be real because in his entire 50s something years in the Amazon, he's never seen them. So we're getting ready to leave in the morning. We had tents on the boat and Agnosio comes up to me and he goes, "You're my director, right? You're my boss." I went, "Yeah." He goes, "I need to talk to you like a friend." I said, "Yeah, shoot, shoot, go." He goes, "You'd be an idiot to leave right now." He goes, "They're coming."

So he convinced us to stay. We pull our tents off the boat. Stefan and Mosen go off with their cameras. They start shooting, you know, people. These are these are monkey eaters and fishermen, the the the community that we're in. Everything's quiet. I opened my laptop and I was working just writing writing my book. Then then it happened. Then you start hearing people screaming mash go mash go 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 because we should say kind of the obvious thing is as far as anyone remembers any encounters any minimal small encounters with these tribes have been violent extremely violent these tribes have remained alive because of their violence almost like the Spartans or the Comanches they've 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. Those encounters were from the rubber barons army's perspective violent.

Yeah. So maybe the lesson they learned the uncontacted tribes is that any interaction with the outside world is going to have to be violent because they have to defend themselves. You had colonial missionaries in the 16 1700s. Then you had the rubber barons late 1800s into the 1900s just periods of extraction and domination and cruelty. These tribes their grandparents must have told them when the outside world comes you shoot first. That's the only thing that's going to keep you alive.

Do you think the memory of that 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, Ignasio 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 are trying to give them clothing and bananas. they've just where they 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 so they think and they'll do it out of curiosity too where it's like hey you're wearing a suit that's weird we've never seen anybody in a black and white suit and then get a you know the way Teddy Roosevelt would shoot a bird for science they're like they'll just what they just want to look at you and so they they're operating on a different they don't have a moral system that we have or understand they're just they're truly wild.

How does Ignasio 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, I said, "If you could see the people that shot you in the head, what would you say to them?" He looked at me with that Agnosio look. He said, "I wouldn't say anything. I would kill as many of them as I could." I said, "Okay."

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 up into the the peak of the of the little structure there and just like, you know, 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. He knew that if he was found, they'd kill him. But if he stayed up there, he was literally frying to death. He said he was soaking the mattress. He was he could feel himself dying for 2 hours. He had to stay there. He is constantly making this decision of if I come out, I die. If I stay here, I probably die. He's like, "Probably die is better than definitely die." So he was terrified.

As they're screaming, "Mosh, go!" And everybody's running and women are lifting children. Ignasio comes and finds me. You can see in his eyes, you can see when somebody has that PTSD response where he's breathing heavy. He's he's he's moving behind trees. He's not He's keeping me close to him and he's going, "Look there. He has a bow. He has a bow." We're looking up the beach and there's just this clan of naked men walking down the beach with these 7ft bows and they're hunched over and they're pointing at us. They're going, "Look at that one." They're going, "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 am I entering a moment that I is this is this a one-way door? Is this is this not something that is this an irreversible situation? Because there's an unfolding situation where they're coming at towards us. Are they going to attack? What do they want? Is there going to be I mean, I'm I'm I am soaked in chills right now just talking about it because I remember standing there and going, there's no way this is real life. I it's burned into my memory them walking down the beach and seeing them with the bows and of course you know Stefan is up there just firing off pictures and and and Mosen is down getting video and the the community that we're with people had you know you hear shotgun shells loading home and them and them loading it but they're also they're getting ready and there's this one guy this anthropologist named Raml who has been the only person who has communicated with them peacefully he did it in 2013 where He stood on the beach and he spoke to them. He knows enough of the local dialect that overlaps with theirs that he can speak to them.

As they're coming down the beach, the butterflies are flying up and we're all waiting. Again, shotgun, you're talking, you know, how many meters? 30, 40 m, I don't know, accurate for an arrow. You loose a 7ft arrow that weighs nothing. You're talking about 300 m easy. They can shoot you from across the river. So Ignasio was like pulling me and he was like down. He's like, you go down. He was like, "You stay behind this tree." He's like, "You watch them from there." He's like, "Watch out. That guy has an arrow." He's like, "He's watching everyone cuz you could see." He's like, "This is how it happens."

Did you think you might This might be the last day you have on this earth. Were you afraid?

I was. Yeah. Of course I was afraid. Um, it's you're with you're with I'm with my two best friends and a bunch of people that I work very closely with and you're in the middle of nowhere and there's no help coming and you're with like, you know, 26 people and there's 50 of the tribe that you can see and you know that they're surrounding us. There's all men on the other side of the river and then we had we had guns looking back towards the jungle cuz we knew we were being surrounded. So again, this is always this is always the story of of of someone's uncle, brother, cousin tells a story that happened and now it's happening. It's not happening in the shadows. It's not happening in the middle of the night. It's happening in broad daylight. They're they're walking out onto the beach, you know? It's like it's like the first time they saw the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. You're going, "Uh-uh, there's no way."

You are kind of walking on the knife edge of uh and it's funny you say Stefan was taking pictures because there's two ways to think of the situation. This is fascinating or this is extremely dangerous and it's both. It is a nice edge. So you could approach it one of the two ways like if I die I die. I'm going to take some good pictures. But also we're there that was also our mission. You know as as the directors of Jungle Keepers we're working with this community to ensure that their lifestyle can continue. They're saying, "Hey, that's great, but as an indigenous community, we're dealing with these people that come out and raid our stuff, try and steal our women, that kill our hunters, and now they're coming out. We want you to see it." So documenting it is part of our job. We have to show what happened that day. So those guys were shooting.

Very seriously. It's actually so Mosen's wife and I, we we always joked about like, "Oh, if the tribe ever comes out, like you stand in front of him, like you take the arrow. He has kids." It was, you know, that day it was like we were strategically positioning ourselves being like, you know, you down. You cannot get killed. It was, you start in those moments to go, okay, where can where will I be safe from arrows? Where can I run to the river if they if they come over? 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 up river. So you start going through all these things. But of course the the Moska Piro people are thinking exactly the same thing probably.

Well the interesting thing is that they're initiating the contact, right? They're they are the ones coming out of the jungle and confronting us. Fundamentally that contact is they're at least giving peace a chance. Is this 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. So they came and you know, Raml is standing there as closer than any of us at the edge of on one side of the river. It was like, you know, shirts versus skins. It was two tribes looking at each other with a thousand years of civilization between them. Raml's going, "Put down your bows. Put down your bows and we can talk." He's nom. He kept saying no. He kept saying, "Brothers, brothers, please put down your So Noly means brother in a language that they might be able to understand."

Nomole means brother in a language that they do understand. It's and it seems like they refer to themselves as the Nomalies. the brothers. So potentially that's what they call themselves as the tribes in the moles. Exactly. The anthropologists that we've been speaking to post this event have been explaining to us that mashkopro, you know, piro is the is the the group that they're from these these various nomadic tribes and mashko basically means like wild piro. So the one thing we know they call themselves is nom. So at the end of this we might converge towards the name of this tribe being Namo versus Mashkapi. the Namo. Seems like the most current or at least their self-appointed identity is the brothers Namo. Anyway, there's these shredded warriors on the beach. With 7 foot arrows. We're all standing there.

The first thing again, you just think of like, you know, the peace pipe in the the old stories. 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, like just full of plantains, 16 ft of of endless green bananas. Then I mean the balls on this guy, the the anthropologist. He gets into the river, takes the canoe, and it's the dry season, so the river is only about 3 4 feet deep at it at the channel. So he walks this thing out. There's one man walking in the face of all these warriors and 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 you're grabbing your bananas and they're fighting and they're yelling and they're all grabbing and they're they're grabbing them and then they push the boat back and he talks to them a little bit and again it's not a perfect translation. So he's you know he's saying where have you come from? What do you want? Who's your leader? He's trying to establish these things and they're saying things and they all sort of talk at the same time like a flock of birds. They're not they don't have it wasn't like one man speaks and there was no women. The women were the women were nowhere to be seen.

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 and and it happened when there was a noise behind us and you just hear a bunch of shotguns swing behind us and you know Mosen goes down. I go running away from the river now cuz again I want to see it coming if there's an attack coming. 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 peering through. What was happening was the women of the tribe had come silent foot and they were just pulling the yuca 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, we need some food, so go make a diversion and and and take the take the food out back."

I mean, you really were surrounded.

We were completely surrounded. So they could have murdered all of you probably easily.

We were we were out numbered five to one at the least. It's probably fair to say that part of the reason they did maybe they wanted peace, but part of the reason is they didn't know how deep this goes. They didn't know if you have backup. They don't know if we have backup. They also they had questions. They were asking the 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? Cuz to them, all you outsiders are the same