Most Replayed Moment: I Met An Uncontacted Tribe! The Secret World Hidden In The Amazon Rainforest - Paul Rosolie

Paul Rosolie is a conservationist, author and founder of Jungle Keepers, who has spent years exploring and protecting some of the most remote areas of the Amazon rainforest. In this moment, Paul shares the unbelievable journey that led him deep into the Amazon, where rumours of an uncontacted tribe became something far more real. He shares the emotions when coming face to face with those living separate from the modern world… and what this encounter taught him. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/fk52Ml7u85b Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/heJRtQmv85b Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Paul Rosolie: https://www.paulrosolie.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  As a founder building a business when I was in my early twenties, I think I always had a deep sense of imposter syndrome because there was something that I wasn't good at, and that thing was finances. Finance and understanding your financial position as a small business is the great enabler of all of your dreams. I was running from it until I discovered a platform called Zero. Zero is an accounting and financial management platform specifically for small businesses, and it brings accounting, payments, payroll and analytics all into one place, even for people that don't love doing finances. Zero wants to do the financial work for you, but its core ambition is to go beyond keeping the financial record because Zero wants to help you understand what's happening in your business. And increasingly, and this is maybe the most important thing, is help you make decisions.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Finally, we have a partner who can enable us in a simple way for those people that are both left brain or right brain and enable our dreams. You can learn more about Zero by going to zero.com. Thank you to Zero. Thank you for sponsoring this podcast, but also thank you for helping me to scale my business as somebody that, quite frankly, has never loved finances that much.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  How big is the Amazon rainforest? Trying to get my head around the scale of it.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  I'm bad with numbers. What I do know is that it's larger than the lower 48 states. It's absolutely tremendous. It's the largest contiguous rainforest on earth.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  And are there parts of it that people have never been to?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. There are still parts of the Amazon rainforest that are unexplored. There's parts of the Amazon rainforest that no one's ever been to. And if you really want to blow your own mind, the canopy of the Amazon rainforest is about 150, 160 feet up above our heads, which is far. And half of the life in a rainforest exists in the canopy. So you're talking about the most mega biodiverse biome that has ever existed. There's never been more terrestrial wildlife anywhere on earth than in the Amazon rainforest and right now, in the entire fossil record. We were at the apex, the climax community of the Amazon rainforest. It's that brilliant. Where the Andes rainforest, cloud forests, meet the lowland tropical Amazon. There it is.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  That's the most life we know of in the entire universe.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  And in terms of human life, I hear there's lots of human life there that we've never contacted.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  There are various tribes living through the Western Amazon. And you have the Eseha and the Machigenga, and you have the Yne. And then further out beyond all of these, there were always rumors that there were uncontacted tribes. And for the first many years that I was there, it was always someone's uncle, someone's brother, someone's cousin would come back with these crazy stories that someone had seen the tribes and that they were that they were tall and naked, and they still hunted with bows and arrows. And they would, and then every now and then, somebody would come back with a seven-foot arrow, a spear tipped with bamboo, a huge bamboo tip this big, razor sharp, like a machete.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  And that was the only proof we had that they existed, until the day we met them.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  When did you meet them for the first time?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  So in order to explain how we met them, we should probably explain why, where we got to in how the 18-year-old researcher became the director of a major organization.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Please.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Okay, well, somewhere along the way, as we, as we did these expeditions through the Amazon and I became closer and closer with the indigenous people, you know, JJ, as a teacher, kept telling me, and that's what the first chapter of the book is about, is, you know, him just teaching me the incredible interconnectedness. There's this, there's this moment that I write about where he's going, "Look at this beach and tell me the news." And I said, "What?" And he said, "Yeah." He said, "Every day, the ground is like last night's newspaper. It tells you what happened." So I look at the beach and there's jaguar tracks. And it's like a mess of jaguar tracks and some jaguar scat. And I made no sense of it. And he was like, "This is where she came yesterday to drink. That's where she pooped. This is where she came today to drink.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  You can see the newer tracks." And then he's like, "And what you didn't notice? You didn't see the vultures above us?" And I look up and there's vultures above us. And he goes, "Notice they're not looking at us. They're looking at the jaguar." And so they're looking that way. Jaguar had a fresh deer kill and had continually been eating and then coming to the river to drink. And so he can decipher all of these incredible things. And so as he's taking me through these worlds of butterflies and interconnected species, where there's a mist river flowing over the rainforest, this avatar on earth. And then we, then they burned it down.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  Who burned it down?

• 4:52Speaker 01

  The loggers. And so the first time I saw ancient forest, a place that I love with trees significantly bigger than this room, vanished. There's this cacophony of life, this orchestra, this symphonic roar of life that you get in the morning, especially in the morning in the Amazon. And then at night, there's the night chorus. And when you hear that silenced, it's one of the most horrific things that you can experience because places that we loved, trees that had been standing for a thousand years, species that had never been described by science, were all incinerated. And I said to JJ, I said, "How do we? This can't be allowed.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  This can't, this can't possibly be something that's permitted." And I said, "Isn't there somebody that we can call?" We were standing on the side of the river. And he leaned forward, he looked this way, and he looked that way. And he goes, "Do you see anybody?" He goes, "'Cause I don't see anybody." He goes, "You have to do something." I said, "I have to do something." I said, "I'm 19, 20 years old." I said, "What am I gonna do?" I said, "I don't have a PhD. I don't have a trust fund. I don't have a media presence. I don't have anything." I had a machete and I had bare feet. We both had machetes and bare feet. And so that was the start of the journey where we said, "The thing we love is being destroyed. We could see the smoke on the horizon. The trees that we had explored and become to love were laying smoldering on the ground in front of us." And we said, "Okay, now we have to figure out a way to change the narrative.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  The wildest place on earth is about to be destroyed, bulldozed and burned. How do we save it?" And so that's where, when you ask the question of how does life in the jungle sort of translate to what your listeners are going to find interesting? It's taking on a task that's so gigantic that at the start of it, we couldn't even come up with, we couldn't even conceptualize how it could be possible, even with the right tools.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  To save the Amazon?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  To save the Amazon rainforest, let alone for two guys with zero qualifications, bare feet and machetes. And so we started behind Zero. And today, we're at the point where we've turned loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers. We're protecting 130,000 acres of the river. We're on the cusp of creating a national park. Me and JJ are the directors of Jungle Keepers. And we're about to make history because we're gonna save the entire watershed and all the trees and animals and heartbeats that are left. And that's the story that I'm trying to tell. That's the whole reason for my existence. That's why I, that's what I wake up and do every day.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  And you've really taken on that responsibility in a very personal way, I can tell.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, there's a, there's a point where, you know, I remember, because you grow up, I mean, I was born in Brooklyn. And then we, you know, I grew up in Jersey for a while, and then we moved to the Hudson Valley. But when you start, you start going to the Amazon for months and months and months out of the year, and you come back with scars and stories where a jaguar is breathing on your neck. And you go out on a solo and you come back. And then suddenly, standing and making conversation at a barbecue feels different. It's almost like, I imagine, I have a lot of veteran friends and sort of, you almost get addicted to the action. And then you also get addicted to the team.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  You know, Sebastian Younger writes about this, about the need for community, the tribe and sort of the mission. And I think that that's one thing that people are missing today where they don't know, you know, we've been disassociated from religion and community and immediate sort of connection with other humans. And so then, well, then what else is there? How do you, where, to what do you moor your existence? What do you, what's your, what's your purpose? What do you wake up and do every day? And so I think, you know, in the old days, it was like, you know, we have to, we have to defend ourselves from the outside world, from warring communities, you know, or even just providing for your family. We have to bring water every day. We have to chop wood every day. We have to figure out how to survive.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  And like today, I mean, when I'm here, I wake up and I go, "Well, there's, there's water in the fridge, so I don't have to do that." And I'm like, "The air conditioner is on and the..." I'm like, "I guess I'll check my phone."

• 9:00Speaker 01

  And so I, you know, I think we have, like you said, become, somehow we've gone really far away from what we are built for.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  And one of the beautiful things that happens when you go into the wild, and this can be any wild, is that it starts to change you. And so you go into the wild and you start picking up logs and throwing them. You start splitting firewood. The first day, you're gonna have calluses on your hands. But then after a few weeks, you're gonna have tough hands. You start walking barefoot, same thing. The sun starts to make your skin thicker and tanner and more resilient. And then the rain will hammer that home. And you start to get, your eyes start to get sharper. And you start to pay more attention to what you're hearing. And so you start going through this whole transformation. You start to be, almost become a different animal. You become the jungle version of yourself. You become the mountain version of yourself. Your legs start to get strong again. And so, so the wild puts you through this gauntlet of transformation. And you become connected to your environment.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  And then that feeling of disassociation tends to alleviate a little bit.

• 9:59Steven Bartlett?

  I heard about this particular part of the brain that changes as well. You talked about transformation.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:06Steven Bartlett?

  They discovered something not so many years ago called the anterior mid-singulate cortex. Andrew Huberman, I heard him say that he thinks it was one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience of the last century. The anterior mid-singulate cortex is a part of the brain, sitting between your emotional brain and your executive control center, that essentially grows when you do hard things. Not when you do things that, specifically when you do things that you don't want to do, but you do them anyway. So not running a marathon because you enjoy it. Things you don't wanna do, and you do it anyway. And it went through, some of the studies I saw said that younger people that have been brought into this sort of doom scrolling generation have smaller ones. If you are obese, it's smaller.

• 10:50Steven Bartlett?

  And athletes have bigger ones. And people who live longer have even bigger ones. And it's, they kinda call it like the muscle of the brain of doing hard things. And so when you were talking about that physical transformation, I weirdly thought about, I think it's Roosevelt, who, after losing his mom and his wife on the same day,

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:06Steven Bartlett?

  after his baby girl was born, he went out to the Badlands and spent two years doing pretty much what you said, putting himself in intentional discomfort.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:15Steven Bartlett?

  And he came back and all of his friends described him as being transformed. He went on to become the youngest president in American history. He got shot and carried on doing the speech. He led the charge, I think it was the Spanish Crusades or something, the Spanish War.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  And The Rough Riders.

• 11:29Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, the Rough Riders. And they all pointed at the moment when he went out to the Badlands. They said it shaped him into becoming a completely different man, that discomfort.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. A hundred percent. And, and that's, that's why Native American cultures, for the initiation of the young men, would have vision quests, where they would send them out into the wilderness. And there was still different, there was all different types. Aboriginal cultures have similar things. And I wanted to put myself through that. And so I went out on, that's what I described in my first book, is going out on, that's where JJ taught me enough to survive in the jungle. And then I started going out on 10-day solos into places. I'd have people bring me to the last place that had a name. Like, I'm talking about poachers. And then I would start hiking. And I would go so deep in the Amazon rainforest that I was just off the map. And I would try and survive out there. And so I had a lot of adventures that I should not have survived. But it was very important to me to put myself through that, because I grew up with that

• 12:22Speaker 01

  discomfort. I grew up with the overwhelming, crushing stress of being told that we're at the end of days. We are losing, I mean, I saw it at the Bronx Zoo. They said, you know, we're losing our rainforests. And they had the sound of the chainsaws and you see the trees going over. And they said, we're losing elephants. You'd see somebody shoot and the elephant goes over. And they just said, everything that you, for me, everything you love is being destroyed. And pretty soon, we're not gonna be able to drink. And everything's gonna be polluted and our fisheries are being destroyed. And I said, wait, so wait a second. I said, I have to know if it's really that bad. So when I got old enough, don't, it's not just that I was inspired to go out on a mission. It was that I wanted to find out for myself, because I'm, I don't like finding out through a screen.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't want other people filtering my information. I wanted to find out for myself. Is it really that bad? And so I was going out on a quest to understand what the reality was.

• 13:17Steven Bartlett?

  If I sat 18-year-old you at this table, he sat there. And, you know, this version of you at, what, 37?

• 13:24Speaker 01

  38.

• 13:25Steven Bartlett?

  38, you were sat there, so 20 years difference.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:27Steven Bartlett?

  What would the notable differences be between these two men?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Well, he didn't know how to fish with his feet. That's for sure. His machete skills would be terrible. But the noticeable difference would be that that 18-year-old, his greatest dream was to alleviate the environmental stress that he grew up with, escape the world of rules, find purpose in life, and to just have adventures. My, my greatest dream was to see the Amazon rainforest. I looked at people like Teddy Roosevelt and Jane Goodall, and I said, man, they had such incredibly, like, extraordinary lives. And I said, how come my life can't be like that? I'm over here in detention. You know, I'm over here being told I didn't do my homework. And I'm like, I wanna chop wood and carry water.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  I wanna go to war. I want to be scared. I wanna be challenged. And so for me, it was, I was, that would be the difference, is that I would be hungry for all of that. Whereas the person sitting across from you today, my body is a Jackson Pollock painting of scars. Crocodile bites, tiger bites, infections, times that I've been almost crushed to death by elephants. I've been hunted by the narco terrorists. And at this point, the responsibility, that kid got to see all the things he wanted to see. We found the biggest anacondas. I lived through the amazing adventures, and that's great. The person sitting across from you today is responsible for protecting millions of animal lives.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  And my job is to explain to people that we, that everyone reading this message or listening to this message, has the chance to help the indigenous people save the Amazon before we lose it forever. And so that's the main difference, is that at that age, I was just, I just wanted some swashbuckling adventure. And now I found, that adventure became meaning. I found it along the way. And then now I'm on a whole other journey. Now it's, now it's can we bring it home? Now it's can we achieve something that we thought was impossible and change the narrative of how it's done?

• 15:37Steven Bartlett?

  And I guess this kind of brings us back to this question about the uncontacted tribes. You said you and JJ were talking about how you might go about saving the Amazon. Was highlighting the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon part of the mission there?

• 15:54Speaker 01

  No, very much no. That's a great question, because what we started doing was we looked at this river basin and we said, okay, we, we love this, this one really wild river. And now we said, why, why has this river been so wild? You know, so you think of the Amazon as a tree of rivers. You have the main Amazon channel and then all these millions of branches. And so the upper Amazon, the uppermost branches of the Amazon rainforest, those tip, tip, tops, people are only just getting to them now. You know, the main Amazon channel is a shipping port. And then you have these huge tributaries going off of it. And you can get in as far as Iquitos with a steamship. Like, you can go all the way through Brazil, thousands of miles, and get all the way to Iquitos, Peru, to the, almost the back end of the Amazon.

• 16:37Steven Bartlett?

  I've been there.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  And, and it's beautiful. We are at the southern edge in the tributaries down there. There's one tributary.

• 16:44Steven Bartlett?

  What's a tributary?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  A tributary is, is an offshoot from a larger river. So a stream is a tributary of a larger stream, which goes into, you know, and then eventually you reach the Hudson River. And so this is a tiny little tributary. And the, we, what we discovered is that the reason people hadn't developed this tributary, the reason other indigenous communities hadn't formed, was that for hundreds and hundreds of years, this particular river had been protected by the violent, mysterious, macho Piro, nomadic, uncontacted tribes. And that had kept it wild. They were the original jungle keepers. But by the time I got there, they were sort of just a myth.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  And so they were something that, they said they lived really far upriver, past the last indigenous community. And when I say indigenous community, I mean, people that we can talk to, people that we can interface with, that I can speak a little Spanish to and they'll understand me.

• 17:39Steven Bartlett?

  I think that's an important distinction.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:40Steven Bartlett?

  Because can you make that distinction between indigenous and these tribes?

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Yes. So within Peru, you have Lima and, and, you know, Michelin-starred restaurants and all this amazing food. And then you travel down to Cusco, you have Machu Picchu, and you have the Andes and all of that incredible culture. And then you go down to the jungle. And that's a little bit like going to the back end of Alaska. It's where it's like, you are very far away from LA or New York, like, but it's the same country. And out there, you'll reach these communities where they are indigenous. And so in the reserve that we currently protect as jungle keepers, there's two indigenous communities there. And we work with them to sort of support them. Because as these loggers and narco traffickers and gold miners come in, they see them as, as a mark. They'll go in and say, oh, there's these helpless indigenous people.

• 18:30Speaker 01

  How can we exploit them? How can we get their trees, their fish? They'll go and take those things from them. Or they'll, or they'll sell them something that's not worth what, what they think it is. And so we've been working with these indigenous communities to say, do you want the loggers to come in and cut down all of your trees? And they go, no. And they go, but at the same time, we need a little bit of gasoline, because what if we're having a baby and we have to get our daughter to a hospital in town? And so we've been working with them to provide sustainable jobs as rangers, protecting their own land. It's such a simple solution. Whereas otherwise, they would go and be loggers to get that cash. And so we're working with these communities. And now they're rangers and boat drivers and guides and handyman.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  And they called us about a year ago and they said, something incredible is happening. And it's gonna be dangerous, but you are the directors and you're part of this family and you're part of this story and we need you here for this. But the tribes are about to come out of the forest.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  And we were in town and where, you know, what we do now is, you know, we, and we can explain this later, but we raise money and we bring it to the Amazon where we, the local people have the opportunity to set aside huge acreage of the Amazon to protect it. We're changing the narrative of destruction where we just protect it before they get to it. And so we were in town with JJ, who's now the director of this major organization. And we're talking to our lawyers and we're in the office and we get this call that the tribe is out.

• 19:53Steven Bartlett?

  The tribe is out?

• 19:55Speaker 01

  The tribe is out.

• 19:56Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 19:57Speaker 01

  It means the mythical, uncontacted tribe, that when I arrived in Peru, the president of Peru had been saying, these are a myth, they don't exist. And it's just, it's the boogeyman, it's been made up as a story to scare the loggers. So their existence was contested, they were almost on the fringes of imagination.

• 20:15Steven Bartlett?

  Could we not have flown a plane over there or something? Is that, you know, this sounds like a dumb question, but presumably we have satellites and we can zoom in.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  The BBC did do a piece where they were flying a plane and they were looking at an uncontacted tribe from miles away. And they said, we're being very careful not to disturb them. But there is a tribe in the rainforest that has no contact with the outside world. And you could see these people bending and they're looking at the plane, but the plane's not close enough to really scare them or to cause them any distress. And so we have done that. But then on our river, out in the middle of nowhere, where no one's heard of the BBC, you just hear stories from loggers who've come down river from three weeks upriver. You can go for three weeks up the river and hit nothing, there's nothing human. It's like the last endless forest.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  And so when the community called and they said, there's arrows on the beach, the tribe is coming out. It's the first time in 10 years that the tribe seems to be coming out of the jungle to make contact. And so they got, they got the directors of Jungle Keepers up there. We had to, we had to rush to be there. They begged us to be there so that we could see it because they were worried that we wouldn't believe them. And so we got there and we went all night. And when you go up a river at night, we'd do a two-day boat journey in one night. And so the guy right there, the picture with the guy who has the scar on his forehead, that's Ignacio, that scar is because he was shot in the head by a seven-foot arrow while he was trying to make peaceful contact with the uncontacted tribes.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  He was trying to give them a gift and they got spooked and they scared and they shot him in the head and he almost died from that. When we heard that this was happening and he's now one of our best Jungle Keepers Rangers, we said, can you do a two-day boat journey in one night? And he went, yes, sir. And he put on a headlamp and he got in the back of the boat and we took an open-top canoe and we drove from 6:00 PM until 9:00 AM the next day through the worst thunderstorm I've ever seen. I was on the front of the boat with a flashlight, using the crocodile eyes, the caiman eyes on the side of the river to navigate because they shine, the eye shine comes back. The, the, the storm was so bad that I, we couldn't see anything. We couldn't see the side of the river and because of the light igniting the raindrops, you can't, you can't even see what's in front of you.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  So we were using the, the croc eyes to navigate where the edges of the river was. So I was spotting and telling him which way to go and he drove and we did that all night long. Got to the indigenous community and said, okay, so what's going on? And they said, oh yeah, they left. Tribe's gone. The only thing that they had was that one guy the previous day had been shot by an arrow. And he had been fishing and he had seen the tribes, so he said, and they had shot an arrow at him. The first thing they had done was shot one of these seven-foot arrows at him. And the way it had hit the boat ricocheted and then hit his thick leather belt and blunted the tip of the arrow and he had the arrow.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  And so he says, so there are, there are people here. And then a native anthropologist from another region showed up and he said, they know me as the grandfather, I can speak to these people, I speak a little bit of their language. And so we stayed another night, two days deep in the jungle. And the following morning, we said, okay, we're getting out of here. There's obviously nothing here but, you know, stories and footprints and arrows and we have important work to do back in town.

• 23:37Steven Bartlett?

  And did you believe them?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  I've learned one thing, working in the Amazon, always believe the locals, always. There's, there's, if they say it's there, they're not wrong. And that's part of the reason that I've gotten to go on these adventures. You know, when JJ Tel told me, there's places you can go that are so wild that it's like the Galapagos, the animals don't know a human. But you have to go for days on foot to the topmost reaches of the rivers to find this. Well, that's why I went on these, these solos. And so I write, that's what, that's, as a writer, that's what I do is try and take people on these adventures through the Amazon. And so when they said the tribe is coming, Ignacio, the guy who'd been shot in the head, he said, listen to me, he said, you're, he said, you're my boss, right? I said, yeah. He goes, I need to speak to you like a friend. I said, speak, speak, speak.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  And he said, they're coming, you'd be an idiot to leave. And so we posted up, we waited, how he knew?

• 24:30Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I'm wondering how he knew.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  He just knew, man, they just know, it's like they can, they can tell. And then, you know, I mean, these are guys who know when there's a jaguar close by by the sound of the birds. They know when a storm's coming before the storm is audible. You know, they, they have higher tuned senses than we do. And, and so he said, look, the tribe is coming, there's the arrow, they're in the region. He goes, and when they come this close, they generally, they want to talk. I said, but this is. And sure enough, you hear "Mashko" and everyone starts screaming. And it was just this moment of absolute panic where women were lifting babies and chickens are flying around and dogs. And we're in this tiny little indigenous community on the side of a river with hundreds and hundreds of miles of jungle around. And we run to the edge of this, you know, the edge of the river where this cliff is.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  And across the river, we see them coming towards us. And they're walking out of the jungle and they're naked from head to toe. They just have some string tied around their waists, penises tied up to their bellies. They all have seven-foot-long bows and arrows and they're crouched over and they're looking at us. And we're standing there and you go, you sort of like, you go, I just, I wanted, I wanted to see this and now I'm not so sure I want to be here. Because there are warriors coming out of the jungle and they're from a thousand years ago. So I asked the anthropologist, I said, they're like Stone Age people. And he goes, they don't have stones. He said, they're still in the Bamboo Age. He said, these people are living such a primitive lifestyle, they're hunter-gatherers.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  And they've been isolated so deep in the jungle for so many centuries that it's like a time capsule. So there was a thousand years between us. We're standing on either side of the river with a thousand years between us and this aperture into the history of what humankind used to look like. And these people came out, holding their bows and arrows that they had made out of the jungle. And they held up their hands and they were talking to us across a river. And it was sort of shirts versus skins, we were just two tribes separated by a little bit of water and they wanted to communicate.

• 26:32Steven Bartlett?

  With what language?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  With their language. They, I mean, it's, we don't even know really what to call them. For a while, they were calling them the Mashco Piro, which means the Wild Piro people. And then more, more recently, and partly because of our encounter, they held up their hands and the first thing they said was, "No mole, we are the brothers, brothers." And so then our side said the same thing, the anthropologist said, "No mole, brothers." And then this, this, this exchange began and it's like, you know, I, as a Spanish speaker, when I've been in Italy, I can use my Spanish to kind of get through in Italian. And I feel like it's like that, the Yene people can speak to the Mashco Piro and there's an approximate translation.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  And the first thing that they said after coming out of the jungle a thousand years later, the civilization was, send us bananas. They said, send us food. And they demanded that we send them plantains as an offering. And our side said, you put down your weapons. We will talk to you, but we do not want this to end violently, we want this to be peaceful. If you want to talk to us, put down your bow and arrows. Because a shotgun, a shotgun only goes how many meters? You know, it's not even going to go 100 meters, 50 meters, maybe, buckshot. A longbow arrow is going to go 300 meters, it's going to go far.

• 27:56Steven Bartlett?

  And needless to say, they're very good with those arrows.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  They are very good with those arrows, these things will fly. And so even standing on the other side of the river, we were not safe. And so we were all standing behind trees, we were watching. Ignacio, who'd been shot before, was watching with the binoculars and he's going, whenever you see them walking, he said, they let you see them and then they clever girl you in the forest where there's one watching you from the shadows. And he, he would grab me by the shoulder and go, look, there's one. And you would just see this, you know, red face paint in the shadows of the forest and he'd have the bow trained on us. And so while some of them in the front were putting the bows down, there was others of them in the shadows that were making sure that they still had support. But we asked the guys in the front to put down their arrows.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  The anthropologist got in the river and gave them an offering of bananas.

• 28:45Steven Bartlett?

  I think I have a video here of this.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is world first footage.

• 28:51Steven Bartlett?

  I'll let you, um, you know how to use an iPad, right?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  There we go. Yeah. So this is, this was, this is just a random moment from the earlier days, but this is that moment where everyone starts screaming, "Mosh, go!" And we're all running. And this is what I was talking about, where they are moving across the beach and you can see the, sort of the posture they're using there. I mean, he's got, they have their bows and arrows in hand, and then they showed up and see they're pointing. They were worried that our cameras were guns, and so they were asking to put down the cameras. They were curious about various members of our tribe, and they were all talking at the same time. And so it was very difficult to understand what they wanted.

• 29:34Steven Bartlett?

  What's he doing with his finger there? He's doing...

• 29:36Speaker 01

  This?

• 29:36Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  I don't know. This is the moment that we gave them the bananas. And what's haunting about this is the desperation that you see on them, where they're all rushing to get the bananas, and they're not necessarily taking them like they're going to share later. They're taking them like, "I get my bananas, you get your bananas." You see this? They're all rushing to get this little boatload. And these are people that don't have boats. And as they're doing this, they're all talking at the same time. It was like a flock of parrots. It was just a cacophony of, of sound. And they're all fighting over these plantains. And, and then once they get them, each person held their own. They have rope and plantains. And this interaction went on for several hours, and we negotiated with them. And this is this,

• 30:22Speaker 01

  the footage. This is the footage that we're allowed to release right now. And this is them moving back off into the jungle. There's a lot more that happened. And again, that's where, that's why, that's why we're releasing this now, I should say that. That's why we waited a while to release this footage, because footage like this is incredibly sensitive for a number of reasons. A, you don't want people to think that we went out and contacted these people that want to be left alone. You also don't want to encourage other people to indulge their misconceptions. People go, "Oh, these are the last free people on earth. They live perfectly in balance with nature." No. People will go looking for them, whereas for hundreds of years, these people have asked for one thing and one thing only, to be left

• 31:05Speaker 01

  alone. And they've enforced that, kind of like the Comanches, with arrows. And on this day, they said, "Please give us food, please give us rope." And they had one other question. They said, "How do we tell the bad guys from the good guys?" And we said, "What do you mean? Who are the bad guys?" And they said, "Some of you shot at us with the jujitsu, with the fire sticks, the guns." And we were going, "Who, who does that?" We said, "We are not the bad guys." And they said, "No, you also..." They said, "We know you cut down our trees." They were speaking to all of us. There was nothing, there's no like, you know, white guy, brown guy, Peruvian foreigners, none of that. It was just, "All of you outsiders, stop cutting down our trees. Our trees are our gods." It was sort of like, "You don't

• 31:48Speaker 01

  do that." And then when they left, just a few weeks ago, we learned that the narco traffickers view them as a threat. And there was actually a mass grave found of a similar clan. And so these people are being boxed in by deforestation and hunted by narco traffickers and gold miners and loggers. And so I think that them coming out of the forest was their way of saying, "Hey, we're trying to get a read on who, what's going on in the outside world. Who is it? Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys?" They don't know that Jungle Keepers is protecting the land that they live on. They've never heard of a spoon, or the wheel, or Jesus, or World War II, or the country of Peru. And so, so they're coming out with

• 32:32Speaker 01

  so many questions. And the only way to care for these people and to give them the, the rights that they deserve is to protect the forest they live in.

• 32:42Steven Bartlett?

  Do you know why some of them seem to be touching their nose?

• 32:47Speaker 01

  It's funny, I didn't notice that. I think this is, this is, this is gonna be your discovery to anthropology. I did not notice that, but it does, you see this, a lot of them are doing this. Yeah.

• 32:57Steven Bartlett?

  And the, the outfit?

• 32:59Speaker 01

  The outfit.

• 33:00Steven Bartlett?

  What is this outfit? This, it looks like there's kind of rope tied around their midriff with their penises out?

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, the, the, the head of the penis is covered by rope.

• 33:09Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, they've got the penis up into the rope?

• 33:11Speaker 01

  No, the head of the penis is up and protected. And, and that makes sense, given the jungle where there's mosquitoes and botflies and sandflies. That, that's a smart move. And then rope seems to be, I mean, what is, it goes like fire, rope, ladders, like, I think it's like man's second invention. They are obsessed with rope. That's how they make their bowstrings, that's how they make their arrows, that's how they lash things together to make the, the limited structures that they make. And some of what we know about them is, you know, we find their camps after they leave. So we know what they eat. They primarily turtles and monkeys. They don't fish. They don't have fish hooks.

• 33:47Steven Bartlett?

  They, they don't eat humans, do they?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  They do not eat humans. They are not cannibal tribes.

• 33:51Steven Bartlett?

  That's a rumor people have talked about before, people have said.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's even a couple of versions of my voice in AI saying that on the internet, but it is not true.

• 34:00Steven Bartlett?

  And their haircuts? They all seem to be, have this sort of mullet style haircut from the seventies.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  It seems like they all grab the front and just find a way to cut it. There might be like one guy with a machete who just does the haircuts.

• 34:13Steven Bartlett?

  And for a lot of them, this is the first time they've seen a human?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  So actually, this was first contact. The anthropologist who came to the scene, who managed this interaction, he said he had met an uncontacted tribe before in the region. He said, "None of these were men that he'd met." And the other thing, notice they're all men.

• 34:33Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  The women were hitting, hidden in the forest. And while the men were making a distraction in front of us, the women were raiding the farm behind us.

• 34:41Steven Bartlett?

  Raiding?

• 34:42Speaker 01

  Raiding the farm.

• 34:43Steven Bartlett?

  Your farm?

• 34:44Speaker 01

  The indigenous people's farm, our community's farm.

• 34:47Steven Bartlett?

  So the women went to steal while they were distracting you?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 34:50Steven Bartlett?

  And did you catch the women on tape?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  No. No, no, no, no, no. Everyone was, we were all huddled up very, very close. I mean, this was an incredible encounter, but let me explain, the prevailing emotion during this entire thing was fear on both sides. They were scared, we were scared. The indigenous people naturally have shotguns anyway. Everyone had their shotguns out. They all had, some of them had put their bows on the beach, but they had other, they had archers waiting. And so everyone was sort of, you know, it was like, "Put down your guns and we can talk," but nobody really wanted to put down their guns.

• 35:25Steven Bartlett?

  And how'd you know the women were stealing from your farm?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Because after this was all over, and we went to the farm, everything had been pulled up. All the yucca, all the plantains, all the sugarcane, the entire farm was ruined.

• 35:42Steven Bartlett?

  How'd you know it was the women?

• 35:43Speaker 01

  The women in the village told me it was the women. They were, "Ah, that was the women." Also, you see the smaller footprints. These men have wide, big men. They're from walking barefoot their whole lives, their feet get ancho, they get really thick. And so, and I have jungle feet like that now, but these guys have almost duck feet at this point, like big, fat, calloused feet that get wider. You ever see a farmer's hands? But they just, they just grow.

• 36:09Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  Like that.

• 36:10Steven Bartlett?

  They're all young as well. Where's, where are the older people?

• 36:15Speaker 01

  We'd love to know. We don't know. There's some tribes in the Amazon where the elderly people have more permanent settlements. There's been rumors of some extreme tribes where the elderly people, if they can't keep up, are just left to perish. Uh, but we saw people between the ages of probably 12 and 45. I don't think anybody looks like they're in their 50s. So we left with more questions than answers. They, on that day, they did get a pot that they, they stole from, from, you know, the community, you know, they have their, their farm. And so there, there was also a machete at the farm. Somebody just whacked it into a log. And so as they were leaving, one of the best things that we caught on video that we have, we're not able to share yet, is that one of these guys, and

• 37:00Speaker 01

  this is at the end, after, while everybody was going home, the anthropologist held up his hands and he said, you know, "No mole, brothers, go in peace." And these guys actually asked about me. I was the only person there with a big beard. And they said, "That one." They said, "Show us that one." And so I came forward, I stood at the edge of the river, which my heart was pounding. And the anthropologist said, he said, "Hold up your hands, show them that you don't mean any harm." I held, I held up my hands like this. And they held up their hands. And they sang. They said, "No mole." They knew that I wasn't from the indigenous community. And that was an incredible moment of, we couldn't communicate, but it was just sort of that basic, "I acknowledge you." And they said, "I acknowledge you." And we just had this thing across the river in about a thousand years and just, and then

• 37:44Speaker 01

  that was it. And as they left, you know, one of the guys had a machete, and he was, he showed it to us over his shoulder like this. And one of my friends was going, "Oi", you know, in the local language, he was saying, "Put down the machete, leave the machete." And the guy just smiled and looked at us like, "Yeah, come and get it. Come and get it." And then just as they left, one of the warriors walked out to the beach, put an arrow on the string, smiled at us, and just shot it. I was like, "Ha."

• 38:10Steven Bartlett?

  Up into the air?

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Just at us, in general, just to spook us. And then they all turned and left. You know, so they have a sense of humor. We saw them smile. You know, we exchanged a little bit of that with them as well.

• 38:22Steven Bartlett?

  They look cold.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  They are cold. I mean, it's, it's, it's 95 degrees on that day. The other thing is, it was cool, as they're coming, if you go to the part where they're coming across the beach, there was millions of butterflies. That beach was covered in just millions of butterflies. And so as these people are walking out, the butterflies are just swarming around them. Go back to the beginning, the, that, right there. If you just notice, you don't notice it at first, but as they're moving, look at that, the world is swirling with Lepidopter in color. It's just, just absolute insanity how, how beautiful this scene was. And I mean, when you see this, you know, if a, if a Tyrannosaurus Rex walked out behind them, I wouldn't have been surprised. It was such a strange, literally unbelievable

• 39:06Speaker 01

  thing to see, because, you know, these, these literally are the last people on earth that are still living in this way, where our society, we have planes, trains, automobiles, iPhones, all of this technology. We're talking about going to other planets. They don't have metal.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Even a knife unless they get it from someone else. And so it's just, it's just an incredible. You know, the other thing is they do have medicinal technologies. They're able to stay infection free, living in the tropical wet jungle.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  That's pretty incredible.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Because they're, they're virtually naked.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  I mean, essentially naked. I think that's, that's how they carry their rope. I don't think that's so much of clothing as we need rope and that's how we carry it.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  It's very, it's very, very complicated because the loggers shoot at them, the narcos shoot at them.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  People shouldn't be getting into the places that they live. And if you think about in the last few centuries, how many indigenous cultures have been annihilated by the outside world coming in? These, there's no shortage of these stories. And in this particular case, in 2026, when we have the communication and people are able to hear this story. This is why we're releasing this footage because the only hope these people have is if we protect them. They can't come on a podcast, they can't address the United Nations, they can't write a petition. The only hope they have is if we are able to protect the forest that they live in. That's it. And that's why we've released this footage now, because for a long time we said, we can't release it.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  We said, what if, what if crazy hippie people go down there thinking that these are the last free people and they want to go live with them? That will kill them. The outside pathogens that you and I carry on us every day, the common cold that we have immunity to could wipe out an entire tribe.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  As a founder building a business when I was in my early twenties, I think I always had a deep sense of imposter syndrome because there was something that I wasn't good at. And that thing was finances. Finance and understanding your financial position as a small business is the great enabler of all of your dreams. I was running from it until I discovered a platform called Zero. Zero is an accounting and financial management platform specifically for small businesses. And it brings accounting, payments, payroll and analytics all into one place, even for people that don't love doing finances. Zero wants to do the financial work for you, but its core ambition is to go beyond keeping the financial record because Zero wants to help you understand what's happening in your business. And increasingly, and this is maybe the most important thing, is help you make decisions.

• 41:58Speaker 00

  Finally, we have a partner who can enable us in a simple way for those people that are both left brain or right brain and enable our dreams. You can learn more about Zero by going to zero.com. Thank you to Zero. Thank you for sponsoring this podcast, but also thank you for helping me to scale my business as somebody that, quite frankly, has never loved finances that much.