WEBVTT 1 00:00:04.118 --> 00:00:06.661 How big is the Amazon rainforest? 2 00:00:07.443 --> 00:00:09.025 Try to get my head around the scale of it. 3 00:00:10.587 --> 00:00:11.468 I'm bad with numbers. 4 00:00:11.708 --> 00:00:15.171 What I do know is that it's larger than the lower 48 states. 5 00:00:16.131 --> 00:00:17.452 It's absolutely tremendous. 6 00:00:17.492 --> 00:00:19.914 It's the largest contiguous rainforest on Earth. 7 00:00:20.234 --> 00:00:22.816 And are there parts of it that people have never been to? 8 00:00:22.836 --> 00:00:23.137 100%. 9 00:00:23.277 --> 00:00:25.739 There are still parts of the Amazon rainforest that are unexplored. 10 00:00:26.179 --> 00:00:28.641 There's parts of the Amazon rainforest that no one's ever been to. 11 00:00:29.081 --> 00:00:37.228 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. 12 00:00:38.410 --> 00:00:41.972 and half of the life in a rainforest exists in the canopy. 13 00:00:42.392 --> 00:00:46.914 So you're talking about the most mega biodiverse biome that has ever existed. 14 00:00:46.934 --> 00:00:53.236 There's never been more terrestrial wildlife anywhere on Earth than in the Amazon rainforest and right now. 15 00:00:53.336 --> 00:00:58.018 In the entire fossil record, we're at the apex, the climax community of the Amazon rainforest. 16 00:00:58.139 --> 00:00:58.579 It's that. 17 00:00:59.454 --> 00:00:59.854 Brilliant. 18 00:01:00.254 --> 00:01:05.317 Where the Andes rainforest cloud forests meet the lowland tropical Amazon, there it is. 19 00:01:05.637 --> 00:01:08.419 That's the most life we know of in the entire universe. 20 00:01:10.020 --> 00:01:16.303 And in terms of human life, I hear there's lots of human life there that we've never contacted. 21 00:01:17.493 --> 00:01:32.244 There are various tribes living through the Western Amazon, and you have the Eseha and the Machigenga, and you have the Yine, and then further out beyond all of these, there were always rumors that there were uncontacted tribes. 22 00:01:33.814 --> 00:01:49.705 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 tall and naked and they still hunted with bows and arrows. 23 00:01:49.725 --> 00:01:57.951 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. 24 00:01:58.928 --> 00:02:00.348 razor sharp, like a machete. 25 00:02:01.449 --> 00:02:06.330 And that was the only proof we had that they existed until the day we met them. 26 00:02:11.291 --> 00:02:12.851 When did you meet them for the first time? 27 00:02:15.512 --> 00:02:27.555 So in order to explain how we met them, we should probably explain why, what, where we got to in how the, how the 18 year old researcher became the director of a major organization, but. 28 00:02:27.755 --> 00:02:28.015 Please. 29 00:02:29.235 --> 00:02:29.475 Okay. 30 00:02:29.575 --> 00:02:47.739 Well, somewhere along the way, 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 him just teaching me the incredible interconnectedness. 31 00:02:48.100 --> 00:02:53.141 There's this moment that I write about where he's going, look at this beach and tell me the news. 32 00:02:53.161 --> 00:02:53.681 And I said, what? 33 00:02:54.350 --> 00:02:57.251 And he said, yeah, he said, every day the ground is like last night's newspaper. 34 00:02:57.271 --> 00:02:58.131 It tells you what happened. 35 00:02:58.691 --> 00:03:05.933 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. 36 00:03:06.033 --> 00:03:08.594 And he was like, this is where she came yesterday to drink. 37 00:03:10.295 --> 00:03:11.115 That's where she pooped. 38 00:03:11.655 --> 00:03:13.175 This is where she came today to drink. 39 00:03:13.335 --> 00:03:14.516 You can see the newer tracks. 40 00:03:14.956 --> 00:03:18.437 And then he's like, and what you didn't notice, you didn't see the vultures above us. 41 00:03:18.937 --> 00:03:21.978 I look up, and there's vultures above us, and he goes, notice they're not looking at us. 42 00:03:23.175 --> 00:03:24.255 They're looking at the jaguar. 43 00:03:24.335 --> 00:03:25.596 And so they're looking that way. 44 00:03:26.116 --> 00:03:31.138 Jaguar had a fresh deer kill and had continually been eating and then coming to the river to drink. 45 00:03:31.178 --> 00:03:33.739 And so he can decipher all of these incredible things. 46 00:03:34.159 --> 00:03:42.903 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. 47 00:03:44.724 --> 00:03:46.084 And then they burned it down. 48 00:03:46.805 --> 00:03:47.425 Who burned it down? 49 00:03:47.845 --> 00:03:48.365 The loggers. 50 00:03:53.627 --> 00:03:58.955 a place that I love with trees significantly bigger than this room, vanished. 51 00:03:59.897 --> 00:04:07.308 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 Amazons. 52 00:04:08.707 --> 00:04:10.288 And then at night, there's the night chorus. 53 00:04:11.109 --> 00:04:24.099 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. 54 00:04:25.240 --> 00:04:26.941 And I said to JJ, I said, how do we... 55 00:04:28.113 --> 00:04:29.814 This can't be allowed. 56 00:04:29.874 --> 00:04:32.796 This can't possibly be something that's permitted. 57 00:04:33.416 --> 00:04:35.037 And I said, isn't there somebody that we can call? 58 00:04:35.057 --> 00:04:37.639 We were standing on the side of the river, and he leaned forward. 59 00:04:37.679 --> 00:04:40.621 He looked this way, and he looked that way, and he goes, do you see anybody? 60 00:04:41.221 --> 00:04:42.422 He goes, because I don't see anybody. 61 00:04:43.166 --> 00:04:44.447 He goes, you have to do something. 62 00:04:45.007 --> 00:04:45.887 I said, I have to do something. 63 00:04:45.907 --> 00:04:47.828 I said, I'm 19, 20 years old. 64 00:04:47.849 --> 00:04:48.589 I said, what am I going to do? 65 00:04:48.629 --> 00:04:49.449 I said, I don't have a PhD. 66 00:04:49.469 --> 00:04:50.930 I don't have a trust fund. 67 00:04:50.970 --> 00:04:52.311 I don't have a media presence. 68 00:04:52.331 --> 00:04:53.171 I don't have anything. 69 00:04:53.752 --> 00:04:55.032 I had a machete and I had bare feet. 70 00:04:55.072 --> 00:04:56.613 We both had machetes and bare feet. 71 00:04:57.193 --> 00:05:00.515 And so that was the start of the journey where we said, the thing we love is being destroyed. 72 00:05:00.535 --> 00:05:02.076 We could see the smoke on the horizon. 73 00:05:02.096 --> 00:05:08.359 The trees that we had explored and become to love were laying, smoldering on the ground in front of us. 74 00:05:08.399 --> 00:05:10.801 And we said, okay, now we have to figure out a way to change the narrative. 75 00:05:11.441 --> 00:05:15.223 The wildest place on earth is about to be destroyed, bulldozed, and burned. 76 00:05:15.943 --> 00:05:16.583 How do we save it? 77 00:05:17.483 --> 00:05:34.030 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 conceptualize how it could be possible, even with the right tools. 78 00:05:34.630 --> 00:05:35.551 To save the Amazon. 79 00:05:35.711 --> 00:05:41.697 To save the Amazon rainforest, let alone for two guys with zero qualifications, bare feet and machetes. 80 00:05:42.557 --> 00:05:44.840 And so we started behind zero. 81 00:05:45.520 --> 00:05:50.825 And today we're at the point where we've turned loggers and gold miners into conservation rangers. 82 00:05:50.845 --> 00:05:52.667 We're protecting 130,000 acres of the river today. 83 00:05:54.408 --> 00:05:56.489 We're on the cusp of creating a national park. 84 00:05:57.050 --> 00:05:59.371 Me and JJ are the directors of Jungle Keepers. 85 00:05:59.891 --> 00:06:05.555 And we're about to make history because we're going to save the entire watershed and all the trees and animals and heartbeats that are left. 86 00:06:06.615 --> 00:06:08.136 And that's the story that I'm trying to tell. 87 00:06:08.156 --> 00:06:09.897 That's the whole reason for my existence. 88 00:06:09.937 --> 00:06:12.419 That's why I, that's what I wake up and do every day. 89 00:06:13.840 --> 00:06:16.821 And you've really taken on that responsibility in a very personal way, I can tell. 90 00:06:17.642 --> 00:06:17.982 Yeah. 91 00:06:18.499 --> 00:06:23.403 Yeah, there's a point where I remember, because you grow up. 92 00:06:23.664 --> 00:06:24.764 I mean, I was born in Brooklyn. 93 00:06:25.305 --> 00:06:27.026 And then I grew up in Jersey for a while. 94 00:06:27.046 --> 00:06:28.127 And then we moved to the Hudson Valley. 95 00:06:28.608 --> 00:06:40.838 But when 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. 96 00:06:40.878 --> 00:06:46.223 And then suddenly standing and making conversation at a barbecue feels different. 97 00:06:47.868 --> 00:06:54.052 It's almost like I imagine I have a lot of veteran friends and sort of you almost get addicted to the action. 98 00:06:54.792 --> 00:06:57.534 And then you also get addicted to the team. 99 00:06:57.734 --> 00:07:04.679 You know, Sebastian Younger writes about this, about the need for community, the tribe. 100 00:07:05.539 --> 00:07:06.759 and sort of the mission. 101 00:07:06.879 --> 00:07:17.122 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. 102 00:07:17.522 --> 00:07:18.942 And so then, well, then what else is there? 103 00:07:19.542 --> 00:07:22.743 How do you, where, to what do you more your existence? 104 00:07:22.983 --> 00:07:25.384 What do you, what's your purpose? 105 00:07:25.904 --> 00:07:27.104 What do you wake up and do every day? 106 00:07:27.724 --> 00:07:36.168 And so I think in the old days, it was like we have to defend ourselves from the outside world, from warring communities, or even just providing for your family. 107 00:07:36.208 --> 00:07:37.989 We have to bring water every day. 108 00:07:38.049 --> 00:07:40.210 We have to chop wood every day. 109 00:07:40.250 --> 00:07:41.450 We have to figure out how to survive. 110 00:07:41.470 --> 00:07:47.833 And today, I mean, when I'm here, I wake up and I go, well, there's water in the fridge, so I don't have to do that. 111 00:07:48.534 --> 00:07:50.575 And I'm like, the air conditioner is on and the— 112 00:07:51.536 --> 00:07:54.962 I'm like, I guess I'll check my phone, you know? 113 00:07:55.583 --> 00:08:02.956 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. 114 00:08:04.569 --> 00:08:09.490 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. 115 00:08:10.110 --> 00:08:12.971 And so you go into the wild and you start picking up logs and throwing them. 116 00:08:12.991 --> 00:08:14.131 You start splitting firewood. 117 00:08:14.151 --> 00:08:16.351 And the first day you're going to have calluses on your hands. 118 00:08:16.731 --> 00:08:19.052 But then after a few weeks, you're going to have tough hands. 119 00:08:19.512 --> 00:08:21.312 You start walking barefoot, same thing. 120 00:08:21.692 --> 00:08:25.253 The sun starts to make your skin thicker and tanner and more resilient. 121 00:08:25.553 --> 00:08:27.133 And then the rain will hammer that home. 122 00:08:27.173 --> 00:08:30.974 And your eyes start to get sharper and you start to pay more attention to what you're hearing. 123 00:08:31.714 --> 00:08:35.959 And so you start going through this whole transformation where you start to almost become a different animal. 124 00:08:36.519 --> 00:08:38.061 You become the jungle version of yourself. 125 00:08:38.081 --> 00:08:39.623 You become the mountain version of yourself. 126 00:08:39.643 --> 00:08:41.424 Your legs start to get strong again. 127 00:08:42.325 --> 00:08:49.052 And so the wild puts you through this gauntlet of transformation and you become connected to your environment. 128 00:08:49.693 --> 00:08:54.258 And then that feeling of disassociation tends to alleviate a little bit. 129 00:08:55.253 --> 00:08:59.176 I heard about this particular part of the brain that changes as well. 130 00:08:59.216 --> 00:09:00.396 You talked about transformation. 131 00:09:00.496 --> 00:09:01.517 Yeah. 132 00:09:02.278 --> 00:09:07.281 They discovered something not so many years ago called the anterior mid-singulate cortex. 133 00:09:08.141 --> 00:09:14.085 Andrew Huberman, I heard him say that he thinks it was one of the most important discoveries in neuroscience of the last decade. 134 00:09:14.725 --> 00:09:23.872 Sentry, the anterior mid-cingulate cortex is a part of the brain sitting between your emotional brain and your executive control centre that essentially grows when you do hard things. 135 00:09:24.632 --> 00:09:30.837 Not when you do things that, specifically when you do things that you don't want to do, but you do them anyway. 136 00:09:31.217 --> 00:09:33.278 So not running a marathon because you enjoy it. 137 00:09:33.639 --> 00:09:35.320 Things you don't want to do and you do it anyway. 138 00:09:35.340 --> 00:09:41.763 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. 139 00:09:42.264 --> 00:09:45.305 If you are obese, it's smaller. 140 00:09:46.066 --> 00:09:47.487 Athletes have bigger ones. 141 00:09:47.647 --> 00:09:50.108 And people who live longer have even bigger ones. 142 00:09:50.148 --> 00:09:53.210 And they kind of call it like the muscle of the brain of doing hard things. 143 00:09:53.230 --> 00:09:57.312 And so when you were talking about that physical transformation, I weirdly thought about, I think it was Roosevelt. 144 00:09:57.773 --> 00:09:57.913 Yeah. 145 00:09:57.933 --> 00:09:58.093 Yeah. 146 00:09:58.873 --> 00:10:09.659 After losing his mum and his wife on the same day, 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. 147 00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:10.160 Yeah. 148 00:10:10.480 --> 00:10:13.161 And he came back and all of his friends described him as being transformed. 149 00:10:13.642 --> 00:10:16.363 He went on to become the youngest president in American history. 150 00:10:16.463 --> 00:10:18.164 He got shot and carried on doing the speech. 151 00:10:18.544 --> 00:10:19.185 He led the charge. 152 00:10:20.245 --> 00:10:23.907 I think it was the Spanish Crusades or something, the Spanish War. 153 00:10:23.927 --> 00:10:24.668 The Rough Riders. 154 00:10:24.688 --> 00:10:24.828 Yeah. 155 00:10:24.848 --> 00:10:25.550 Yeah, the Rough Riders. 156 00:10:25.570 --> 00:10:28.117 And they all pointed at the moment when he went out to the Badlands. 157 00:10:28.157 --> 00:10:31.265 They said it shaped him into becoming a completely different man. 158 00:10:31.365 --> 00:10:32.468 That discomfort. 159 00:10:32.869 --> 00:10:33.070 Yeah. 160 00:10:34.250 --> 00:10:34.910 A hundred percent. 161 00:10:35.051 --> 00:10:42.335 And, and that's, that's why Native American cultures for the initiation of the young men would have vision quests where they'd send them out into the wilderness. 162 00:10:42.435 --> 00:10:44.256 And there was still different, there was all different types. 163 00:10:44.677 --> 00:10:48.179 Aboriginal cultures have similar things and I wanted to put myself through that. 164 00:10:48.619 --> 00:10:54.203 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. 165 00:10:54.583 --> 00:10:57.885 And then I started going out on 10 day solos into place. 166 00:10:57.905 --> 00:11:00.647 I'd have people bring me to the last place that had a name and, 167 00:11:01.787 --> 00:11:02.867 Like I'm talking about poachers. 168 00:11:03.828 --> 00:11:05.368 And then I would start hiking. 169 00:11:05.968 --> 00:11:09.049 And I would go so deep in the Amazon rainforest that I was just off the map. 170 00:11:09.750 --> 00:11:11.150 And I would try and survive out there. 171 00:11:11.170 --> 00:11:13.871 And so I had a lot of adventures that I should not have survived. 172 00:11:14.231 --> 00:11:18.672 But it was very important to me to put myself through that because I grew up with that discomfort. 173 00:11:19.273 --> 00:11:25.395 I grew up with the overwhelming crushing stress of being told that we're at the end of days. 174 00:11:26.555 --> 00:11:29.498 We are losing, I mean, I saw it at the Bronx Zoo. 175 00:11:29.518 --> 00:11:31.880 They said, you know, we're losing our rainforests. 176 00:11:31.920 --> 00:11:35.064 And they had the sound of the chainsaws and you see the trees going over. 177 00:11:35.084 --> 00:11:36.285 And they said, we're losing elephants. 178 00:11:36.325 --> 00:11:38.367 You'd see somebody shoot and the elephant goes over. 179 00:11:38.867 --> 00:11:43.572 And they just said, everything that you, for me, everything you love is being destroyed. 180 00:11:43.592 --> 00:11:45.254 And pretty soon we're not going to be able to drink. 181 00:11:45.714 --> 00:11:48.177 And everything's going to be polluted and our fisheries are being destroyed. 182 00:11:48.337 --> 00:11:49.578 And I said, wait a second. 183 00:11:50.755 --> 00:11:52.636 I said, I have to know if it's really that bad. 184 00:11:52.697 --> 00:11:56.620 So when I got old enough, it's not just that I was inspired to go out on a mission. 185 00:11:56.640 --> 00:12:01.283 It was that I wanted to find out for myself because I don't like finding out through a screen. 186 00:12:01.303 --> 00:12:04.205 I don't want other people filtering my information. 187 00:12:04.225 --> 00:12:05.426 I want to find out for myself. 188 00:12:06.007 --> 00:12:07.348 Is it really that bad? 189 00:12:07.808 --> 00:12:12.132 And so I was going out on a quest to understand what the reality was. 190 00:12:12.852 --> 00:12:19.974 If I sat 18-year-old you at this table, he sat there, and this version of you at, what, 37? 191 00:12:20.134 --> 00:12:20.375 38. 192 00:12:20.415 --> 00:12:22.415 38, you were sat there, so 20 years difference. 193 00:12:22.455 --> 00:12:22.615 Yeah. 194 00:12:23.015 --> 00:12:25.756 What would the notable differences be between these two men? 195 00:12:29.203 --> 00:12:30.824 Well, he didn't know how to fish with his feet. 196 00:12:31.545 --> 00:12:33.067 That's for sure. 197 00:12:33.807 --> 00:12:35.349 His machete skills would be terrible. 198 00:12:35.729 --> 00:12:48.622 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. 199 00:12:50.323 --> 00:12:52.284 and to just have adventures. 200 00:12:52.664 --> 00:12:56.425 My greatest dream was to see the Amazon rainforest. 201 00:12:56.965 --> 00:13:03.668 I looked at people like Teddy Roosevelt and Jane Goodall, and I said, man, they had such incredibly, like, extraordinary lives. 202 00:13:04.128 --> 00:13:06.048 And I said, how come my life can't be like that? 203 00:13:06.108 --> 00:13:07.249 I'm over here in detention. 204 00:13:08.129 --> 00:13:10.550 You know, I'm over here being told I didn't do my homework. 205 00:13:11.090 --> 00:13:13.250 And I'm like, I want to chop wood and carry water. 206 00:13:13.290 --> 00:13:14.231 I want to go to war. 207 00:13:14.931 --> 00:13:17.291 I want to be scared. 208 00:13:17.552 --> 00:13:18.472 I want to be challenged. 209 00:13:18.992 --> 00:13:23.793 And so for me, it was, I was, that would be the difference is that I would be hungry for all of that. 210 00:13:23.833 --> 00:13:25.974 Whereas the person sitting across from you today. 211 00:13:27.152 --> 00:13:36.618 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. 212 00:13:37.198 --> 00:13:39.439 I've been hunted by the narco terrorists. 213 00:13:39.680 --> 00:13:45.863 And at this point, the responsibility of that kid got to see all the things he wanted to see. 214 00:13:46.244 --> 00:13:47.765 We found the biggest anacondas. 215 00:13:47.805 --> 00:13:49.946 I lived through the amazing adventures, and that's great. 216 00:13:51.553 --> 00:13:57.134 The person sitting across from you today is responsible for protecting millions of animal lives. 217 00:13:57.794 --> 00:14:09.957 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. 218 00:14:10.997 --> 00:14:12.497 And so that's the main difference. 219 00:14:12.517 --> 00:14:15.458 At that age, I just wanted some swashbuckling adventure. 220 00:14:16.356 --> 00:14:19.217 And now I found that adventure became meaning. 221 00:14:20.077 --> 00:14:21.138 I found it along the way. 222 00:14:22.058 --> 00:14:23.839 And then now I'm on a whole other journey. 223 00:14:23.899 --> 00:14:25.540 Now it's, can we bring it home? 224 00:14:26.260 --> 00:14:30.661 Now it's, can we achieve something that we thought was impossible and change the narrative of how it's done? 225 00:14:32.442 --> 00:14:37.484 And I guess this kind of brings us back to this question about the uncontacted tribes. 226 00:14:37.924 --> 00:14:42.446 You said you and JJ were talking about how you might go about saving the Amazon. 227 00:14:43.868 --> 00:14:48.663 was highlighting the uncontacted tribes in the Amazon part of the mission there. 228 00:14:49.686 --> 00:14:51.047 No, very much no. 229 00:14:51.207 --> 00:14:58.792 That's a great question because what we started doing was we looked at this river basin and we said, okay, we love this one really wild river. 230 00:14:58.912 --> 00:15:02.814 And now we said, why has this river been so wild? 231 00:15:02.914 --> 00:15:06.036 So you think of the Amazon as a tree of rivers. 232 00:15:06.056 --> 00:15:09.358 You have the main Amazon channel and then all these millions of branches. 233 00:15:09.958 --> 00:15:16.883 And so the upper Amazon, the uppermost branches of the Amazon rainforest, those tip, tip, tops, people are only just getting to them now. 234 00:15:17.423 --> 00:15:19.484 You know, the main Amazon channel is a shipping port. 235 00:15:19.524 --> 00:15:22.166 And then you have these huge tributaries going off of it. 236 00:15:22.526 --> 00:15:24.887 And you can get in as far as Iquitos with a steamship. 237 00:15:24.907 --> 00:15:32.832 Like you can go all the way through Brazil thousands of miles and get all the way to Iquitos, Peru, to almost the back end of the Amazon. 238 00:15:32.952 --> 00:15:33.833 I've been there. 239 00:15:34.033 --> 00:15:34.853 And it's beautiful. 240 00:15:35.914 --> 00:15:38.716 We are at the southern edge in the tributaries down there. 241 00:15:38.736 --> 00:15:39.796 There's one tributary. 242 00:15:40.276 --> 00:15:41.037 What's a tributary? 243 00:15:41.357 --> 00:15:43.839 A tributary is an offshoot from a larger river. 244 00:15:44.360 --> 00:15:49.684 So a stream is a tributary of a larger stream, which goes into, you know, and then eventually you reach the Hudson River. 245 00:15:50.625 --> 00:15:52.327 And so this is a tiny little tributary. 246 00:15:53.187 --> 00:16:08.420 And 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... 247 00:16:09.357 --> 00:16:15.100 the violent, mysterious, Mashcopiro, nomadic, uncontacted tribes. 248 00:16:15.840 --> 00:16:17.041 And that had kept it wild. 249 00:16:17.081 --> 00:16:18.521 They were the original jungle keepers. 250 00:16:19.422 --> 00:16:21.763 But by the time I got there, they were sort of just a myth. 251 00:16:22.583 --> 00:16:27.666 And so they were something that they said they lived really far upriver, past the last indigenous community. 252 00:16:27.686 --> 00:16:34.289 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. 253 00:16:34.447 --> 00:16:35.788 I think that's an important distinction. 254 00:16:35.848 --> 00:16:36.048 Yes. 255 00:16:36.328 --> 00:16:40.652 Because can you make that distinction between indigenous and these tribes? 256 00:16:41.212 --> 00:16:41.472 Yes. 257 00:16:41.733 --> 00:16:48.978 So within Peru, you have Lima and Michelin star restaurants and all this amazing food. 258 00:16:48.998 --> 00:16:53.762 And then you travel down to Cusco, you have Machu Picchu and you have the Andes and all of that incredible culture. 259 00:16:53.782 --> 00:16:55.523 And then you go down to the jungle. 260 00:16:55.543 --> 00:16:58.225 And that's a little bit like going to the back end of Alaska. 261 00:16:58.285 --> 00:17:01.447 It's where it's like you are very far away from L.A. or New York. 262 00:17:01.467 --> 00:17:02.869 But it's the same country. 263 00:17:03.815 --> 00:17:07.556 And out there, you'll reach these communities where they are indigenous. 264 00:17:07.696 --> 00:17:14.118 And so in the reserve that we currently protect as jungle keepers, there's two indigenous communities there. 265 00:17:14.438 --> 00:17:17.019 And we work with them to sort of support them. 266 00:17:17.199 --> 00:17:23.261 Because as these loggers and narco traffickers and gold miners come in, they see them as a mark. 267 00:17:23.361 --> 00:17:25.762 They'll go in and say, oh, there's these helpless indigenous people. 268 00:17:25.782 --> 00:17:26.882 How can we exploit them? 269 00:17:27.602 --> 00:17:29.503 How can we get their trees, their fish? 270 00:17:30.343 --> 00:17:36.024 They'll go and take those things from them or they'll sell them something that's not worth what they think it is. 271 00:17:36.644 --> 00:17:41.306 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? 272 00:17:41.326 --> 00:17:42.126 And they go, no. 273 00:17:42.826 --> 00:17:48.567 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? 274 00:17:49.307 --> 00:17:55.409 And so we've been working with them to provide sustainable jobs as rangers, protecting their own land. 275 00:17:55.449 --> 00:18:00.090 It's such a simple solution, whereas otherwise they would go and be loggers to get that cash. 276 00:18:01.331 --> 00:18:03.232 And so we were working with these communities. 277 00:18:03.752 --> 00:18:06.914 And now they're rangers and boat drivers and guides and handymen. 278 00:18:08.775 --> 00:18:13.258 And they called us about a year ago and they said something incredible is happening. 279 00:18:13.878 --> 00:18:14.959 And it's going to be dangerous. 280 00:18:15.179 --> 00:18:18.441 But you are the directors and you're part of this family and you're part of this story. 281 00:18:18.461 --> 00:18:19.602 And we need you here for this. 282 00:18:20.162 --> 00:18:21.943 But the tribes are about to come out of the forest. 283 00:18:24.172 --> 00:18:36.557 And we were in town and what we do now is, and we can explain this later, but we raise money and we bring it to the Amazon where the local people have the opportunity to set aside huge acreage of the Amazon to protect it. 284 00:18:36.937 --> 00:18:40.539 We're changing the narrative of destruction where we just protect it before they get to it. 285 00:18:41.019 --> 00:18:44.660 And so we were in town with JJ, who's now the director of this major organization. 286 00:18:45.000 --> 00:18:48.722 And we're talking to our lawyers and we're in the office and we get this call that the tribe is out. 287 00:18:49.481 --> 00:18:50.441 The tribe is out. 288 00:18:50.561 --> 00:18:51.582 The tribe is out. 289 00:18:52.142 --> 00:18:52.782 What does that mean? 290 00:18:52.923 --> 00:18:59.365 It means the mythical uncontacted tribe that when I arrived in Peru, the president of Peru had been saying, these are a myth. 291 00:18:59.565 --> 00:19:00.346 They don't exist. 292 00:19:00.726 --> 00:19:02.047 And it's just, it's the boogeyman. 293 00:19:02.067 --> 00:19:05.108 It's been made up as a story to scare the loggers. 294 00:19:05.908 --> 00:19:08.049 So their existence was contested. 295 00:19:08.129 --> 00:19:10.110 They were almost on the fringes of imagination. 296 00:19:11.391 --> 00:19:14.352 Could we not have flown a plane over there or something? 297 00:19:14.392 --> 00:19:18.514 Is that, you know, this sounds like a dumb question, but presumably we have satellites and we can zoom in. 298 00:19:19.555 --> 00:19:26.938 The BBC did do a piece where they were flying a plane and they were looking at an uncontacted tribe from miles away. 299 00:19:27.018 --> 00:19:33.921 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. 300 00:19:34.261 --> 00:19:40.364 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. 301 00:19:41.164 --> 00:19:42.345 And so we have done that. 302 00:19:43.085 --> 00:19:47.747 But then on our river, out in the middle of nowhere, where no one's heard of the BBC, 303 00:19:49.168 --> 00:19:53.035 You just hear stories from loggers who've come downriver from three weeks upriver. 304 00:19:53.056 --> 00:19:56.582 You can go for three weeks up the river and hit nothing. 305 00:19:56.602 --> 00:19:57.324 There's nothing human. 306 00:19:57.384 --> 00:19:59.047 It's like the last endless forest. 307 00:19:59.728 --> 00:20:01.432 And so when the community called and they said, 308 00:20:02.884 --> 00:20:03.904 There's arrows on the beach. 309 00:20:04.165 --> 00:20:05.205 The tribe is coming out. 310 00:20:05.585 --> 00:20:09.987 It's the first time in 10 years that the tribe seems to be coming out of the jungle to make contact. 311 00:20:10.528 --> 00:20:13.449 And so they got the directors of jungle keepers up there. 312 00:20:13.589 --> 00:20:15.250 We had to rush to be there. 313 00:20:15.310 --> 00:20:20.192 They begged us to be there so that we could see it because they were worried that we wouldn't believe them. 314 00:20:22.293 --> 00:20:24.234 And so we got there and we went all night. 315 00:20:24.414 --> 00:20:28.736 And when you go up a river at night, we do a two-day boat journey in one night. 316 00:20:30.295 --> 00:20:35.622 And so the guy right there, the picture with the guy who has the scar on his forehead, that's Ignacio. 317 00:20:35.702 --> 00:20:42.010 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. 318 00:20:42.530 --> 00:20:48.618 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. 319 00:20:49.519 --> 00:20:56.342 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? 320 00:20:56.362 --> 00:20:57.182 And he went, yes, sir. 321 00:20:58.163 --> 00:21:07.427 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 p.m. until 9 a.m. the next day through the worst thunderstorm I've ever seen. 322 00:21:07.987 --> 00:21:14.649 I was on the front of the boat with a flashlight using the crocodile eyes, the Cayman eyes on the side of the river to navigate because they shine. 323 00:21:14.689 --> 00:21:16.470 The eye shine comes back. 324 00:21:17.010 --> 00:21:19.651 The storm was so bad that we couldn't see anything. 325 00:21:19.671 --> 00:21:20.831 We couldn't see the side of the river. 326 00:21:20.971 --> 00:21:25.333 And because of the light igniting the raindrops, you can't even see what's in front of you. 327 00:21:25.353 --> 00:21:29.174 So we were using the croc eyes to navigate where the edges of the river was. 328 00:21:29.194 --> 00:21:31.155 So I was spotting and telling him which way to go. 329 00:21:31.175 --> 00:21:31.755 And he drove. 330 00:21:31.795 --> 00:21:33.896 And we did that all night long. 331 00:21:34.637 --> 00:21:37.039 got to the indigenous community and said, okay, so what's going on? 332 00:21:37.840 --> 00:21:38.981 And they said, oh yeah, they left. 333 00:21:40.443 --> 00:21:40.923 Tribe's gone. 334 00:21:43.125 --> 00:21:47.309 The only thing that they had was that one guy the previous day had been shot by an arrow. 335 00:21:48.871 --> 00:21:49.692 And he had been fishing 336 00:21:50.958 --> 00:21:54.779 And he had seen the tribes, so he said, and they had shot an arrow at him. 337 00:21:54.839 --> 00:21:58.140 The first thing they had done was shot one of these seven-foot arrows at him. 338 00:21:58.760 --> 00:22:06.443 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. 339 00:22:08.778 --> 00:22:10.699 And so he said, so there are people here. 340 00:22:11.439 --> 00:22:16.161 And then a native anthropologist from another region showed up and he said, they know me as the grandfather. 341 00:22:16.241 --> 00:22:17.301 I can speak to these people. 342 00:22:17.321 --> 00:22:19.342 I speak a little bit of their language. 343 00:22:20.343 --> 00:22:23.224 And so we stayed another night, two days deep in the jungle. 344 00:22:24.184 --> 00:22:26.545 And the following morning we said, okay, we're getting out of here. 345 00:22:27.505 --> 00:22:33.088 There's obviously nothing here but, you know, stories and footprints and arrows, and we have important work to do back in town. 346 00:22:33.308 --> 00:22:34.088 And did you believe them? 347 00:22:35.322 --> 00:22:39.786 I've learned one thing working in the Amazon, always believe the locals, always. 348 00:22:40.707 --> 00:22:44.030 There's, if they say it's there, they're not wrong. 349 00:22:45.392 --> 00:22:47.674 And that's part of the reason that I've gotten to go on these adventures. 350 00:22:47.694 --> 00:22:59.265 You know, when JJ Tell 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. 351 00:22:59.765 --> 00:23:01.826 Well, that's why I went on these solos. 352 00:23:01.846 --> 00:23:06.989 And so as a writer, that's what I do is try and take people on these adventures through the Amazon. 353 00:23:07.969 --> 00:23:12.671 And so when they said the tribe is coming, Ignacio, the guy who'd been shot in the head, he said, listen to me. 354 00:23:12.691 --> 00:23:14.813 He said, you're my boss, right? 355 00:23:14.833 --> 00:23:15.313 I said, yeah. 356 00:23:15.373 --> 00:23:16.874 He goes, I need to speak to you like a friend. 357 00:23:17.594 --> 00:23:18.674 I said, speak, speak, speak. 358 00:23:19.155 --> 00:23:20.395 And he said, they're coming. 359 00:23:20.715 --> 00:23:21.996 You'd be an idiot to leave. 360 00:23:22.396 --> 00:23:23.397 And so we posted up. 361 00:23:23.917 --> 00:23:24.417 We waited. 362 00:23:24.877 --> 00:23:25.418 How he knew? 363 00:23:26.187 --> 00:23:27.888 Yeah, I'm wondering how he knew. 364 00:23:27.988 --> 00:23:29.248 He just knew, man. 365 00:23:29.268 --> 00:23:29.849 They just know. 366 00:23:29.889 --> 00:23:31.549 It's like they can tell. 367 00:23:31.609 --> 00:23:36.772 And then, you know, I mean, these are guys who know when there's a jaguar close by by the sound of the birds. 368 00:23:37.832 --> 00:23:40.634 They know when a storm's coming before the storm is audible. 369 00:23:41.014 --> 00:23:43.295 You know, they have higher tuned senses than we do. 370 00:23:44.539 --> 00:23:46.920 And so he said, look, the tribe is coming. 371 00:23:46.940 --> 00:23:48.360 There's the arrow, they're in the region. 372 00:23:48.380 --> 00:23:51.501 He goes, and when they come this close, they generally, they wanna talk. 373 00:23:51.921 --> 00:23:56.922 I said, but this is, and sure enough, you hear, Moshko, and everyone starts screaming. 374 00:23:57.422 --> 00:24:02.424 And it was just this moment of absolute panic where women were lifting babies and chickens are flying around and dogs. 375 00:24:02.444 --> 00:24:07.765 And we're in this tiny little indigenous community on the side of a river with hundreds and hundreds of miles of jungle around. 376 00:24:08.205 --> 00:24:11.466 And we run to the edge of this, you know, the edge of the river where this cliff is. 377 00:24:12.326 --> 00:24:14.327 And across the river, we see them coming towards us. 378 00:24:15.188 --> 00:24:17.989 And they're walking out of the jungle, and they're naked from head to toe. 379 00:24:18.029 --> 00:24:22.272 They just have some string tied around their waists, penises tied up to their bellies. 380 00:24:22.712 --> 00:24:26.434 They all have seven-foot-long bows and arrows, and they're crouched over, and they're looking at us. 381 00:24:27.035 --> 00:24:35.419 And we're standing there, and you go, you sort of like, you go, I wanted to see this, and now I'm not so sure I want to be here. 382 00:24:36.020 --> 00:24:41.483 Because there are warriors coming out of the jungle, and they're from 1,000 years ago. 383 00:24:43.002 --> 00:24:46.104 So I asked the anthropologist, I said, they're like stone age people. 384 00:24:46.124 --> 00:24:47.946 And he goes, they don't have stones. 385 00:24:48.406 --> 00:24:49.847 He said, they're still in the bamboo age. 386 00:24:50.568 --> 00:24:53.270 He said, these people are living such a primitive lifestyle. 387 00:24:53.350 --> 00:24:54.711 They're hunter gatherers. 388 00:24:55.731 --> 00:25:00.295 And they've been isolated so deep in the jungle for so many centuries that it's like a time capsule. 389 00:25:00.775 --> 00:25:02.937 So there was a thousand years between us. 390 00:25:03.037 --> 00:25:09.922 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. 391 00:25:10.542 --> 00:25:15.145 And these people came out holding their bows and arrows that they had made out of the jungle. 392 00:25:16.085 --> 00:25:19.587 And they held up their hands and they were talking to us across a river. 393 00:25:20.088 --> 00:25:21.869 And it was sort of shirts versus skins. 394 00:25:21.889 --> 00:25:25.351 We were just two tribes separated by a little bit of water. 395 00:25:26.271 --> 00:25:27.392 And they wanted to communicate. 396 00:25:28.305 --> 00:25:29.006 With what language? 397 00:25:30.226 --> 00:25:31.107 With their language. 398 00:25:31.928 --> 00:25:34.530 I mean, we don't even know really what to call them. 399 00:25:35.270 --> 00:25:38.693 For a while, they were calling them the Mashko Piro, which means the wild Piro people. 400 00:25:39.373 --> 00:25:47.399 And then more recently, and partly because of our encounter, they held up their hands, and the first thing they said was, No mole. 401 00:25:48.540 --> 00:25:49.321 We are the brothers. 402 00:25:50.261 --> 00:25:50.601 Brothers. 403 00:25:51.562 --> 00:25:53.863 And so then our side said the same thing the anthropologist said. 404 00:25:53.883 --> 00:25:54.443 No mole. 405 00:25:54.863 --> 00:25:55.223 Brothers. 406 00:25:55.944 --> 00:26:05.608 And then 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. 407 00:26:06.289 --> 00:26:07.629 And I feel like it's like that. 408 00:26:07.750 --> 00:26:12.512 The Yine people can speak to the Mashcopiro and there's an approximate translation. 409 00:26:13.867 --> 00:26:20.670 And the first thing that they said after coming out of the jungle a thousand years late to civilization was, send us bananas. 410 00:26:21.791 --> 00:26:22.771 They said, send us food. 411 00:26:23.652 --> 00:26:26.553 And they demanded that we send them plantains as an offering. 412 00:26:27.153 --> 00:26:29.815 And our side said, you put down your weapons. 413 00:26:30.515 --> 00:26:33.559 We will talk to you, but we do not want this to end violently. 414 00:26:33.579 --> 00:26:34.660 We want this to be peaceful. 415 00:26:34.800 --> 00:26:38.004 If you want to talk to us, put down your bow and arrows. 416 00:26:38.044 --> 00:26:41.207 Because a shotgun, a shotgun only goes how many meters? 417 00:26:41.307 --> 00:26:44.411 You know, it's not even going to go 100 meters, 50 meters, maybe. 418 00:26:44.831 --> 00:26:45.272 Buckshot. 419 00:26:47.156 --> 00:26:50.600 A longbow arrow is going to go 300 meters. 420 00:26:50.660 --> 00:26:51.821 It's going to go far. 421 00:26:52.242 --> 00:26:55.045 And needless to say, they're very good with those arrows. 422 00:26:55.065 --> 00:26:56.146 They are very good with those arrows. 423 00:26:56.166 --> 00:26:57.408 These things will fly. 424 00:26:58.449 --> 00:27:00.931 And so even standing on the other side of the river... 425 00:27:01.924 --> 00:27:02.604 We were not safe. 426 00:27:02.744 --> 00:27:04.365 And so we were all standing behind trees. 427 00:27:04.425 --> 00:27:08.728 We were watching Ignacio, who'd been shot before, was watching with the binoculars. 428 00:27:08.768 --> 00:27:12.510 And he's going, whenever you see them walking, he said, they let you see them. 429 00:27:12.610 --> 00:27:16.092 And then they clever girl you in the forest where there's one watching you from the shadows. 430 00:27:16.112 --> 00:27:18.494 And he would grab me by the shoulder and go, look, there's one. 431 00:27:18.574 --> 00:27:22.736 And you would just see this red face paint in the shadows of the forest. 432 00:27:22.776 --> 00:27:24.277 And he'd have the bow trained on us. 433 00:27:24.857 --> 00:27:29.340 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. 434 00:27:30.241 --> 00:27:31.402 that they still had support. 435 00:27:32.423 --> 00:27:34.565 But we asked the guys in the front to put down their arrows. 436 00:27:35.546 --> 00:27:39.170 The anthropologists got in the river and gave them an offering of bananas. 437 00:27:40.552 --> 00:27:42.093 I think I have a video here of this. 438 00:27:42.874 --> 00:27:44.636 Yeah, this is world first footage. 439 00:27:46.649 --> 00:27:53.974 I'll let you... You know how to use an iPad, right? 440 00:27:53.994 --> 00:27:55.735 There we go. 441 00:27:55.915 --> 00:27:59.017 Yeah, so this is just a random moment from the earlier days. 442 00:27:59.037 --> 00:28:01.879 But this is that moment where everyone starts screaming, Mosh, go! 443 00:28:01.899 --> 00:28:02.619 And we're all running. 444 00:28:03.259 --> 00:28:06.081 And this is what I was talking about, where they are moving across the beach. 445 00:28:06.101 --> 00:28:09.183 And you can see the posture they're using there. 446 00:28:09.203 --> 00:28:09.803 I mean, he's got... 447 00:28:11.344 --> 00:28:14.847 They have their bows and arrows in hand, and then they showed up and see they're pointing. 448 00:28:14.867 --> 00:28:15.367 Yeah. 449 00:28:15.745 --> 00:28:19.787 They were worried that our cameras were guns, and so they were asking to put down the cameras. 450 00:28:20.468 --> 00:28:25.751 They were curious about various members of our tribe, and they were all talking at the same time. 451 00:28:26.932 --> 00:28:28.893 So it was very difficult to understand what they wanted. 452 00:28:29.455 --> 00:28:30.936 What's he doing with his finger there? 453 00:28:30.956 --> 00:28:31.917 He's doing this. 454 00:28:32.178 --> 00:28:32.378 Yeah. 455 00:28:32.898 --> 00:28:33.299 I don't know. 456 00:28:33.919 --> 00:28:35.801 This is the moment that we gave them the bananas. 457 00:28:35.841 --> 00:28:42.547 And what's haunting about this is the desperation that you see on them, where they're all rushing to get the bananas. 458 00:28:42.567 --> 00:28:45.890 And they're not necessarily taking them like they're going to share later. 459 00:28:45.910 --> 00:28:48.853 They're taking them like, I get my bananas, you get your bananas. 460 00:28:48.873 --> 00:28:49.213 You see this? 461 00:28:49.233 --> 00:28:50.334 They're all rushing. 462 00:28:50.354 --> 00:28:50.775 They're rushing. 463 00:28:52.109 --> 00:28:54.530 to get this little boatload. 464 00:28:54.550 --> 00:28:56.111 And these are people that don't have boats. 465 00:28:56.711 --> 00:28:59.032 And as they're doing this, they're all talking at the same time. 466 00:28:59.072 --> 00:29:00.513 It was like a flock of parrots. 467 00:29:00.573 --> 00:29:02.954 It was just a cacophony of sound. 468 00:29:04.515 --> 00:29:06.315 And they're all fighting over these plantains. 469 00:29:06.455 --> 00:29:09.517 And then once they get them, each person held their own. 470 00:29:09.917 --> 00:29:11.958 They have rope and plantains. 471 00:29:11.998 --> 00:29:14.859 And this interaction went on for several hours. 472 00:29:14.959 --> 00:29:16.160 And we negotiated with them 473 00:29:17.285 --> 00:29:18.266 And this is just the footage. 474 00:29:18.286 --> 00:29:20.167 This is the footage that we're allowed to release right now. 475 00:29:20.787 --> 00:29:23.148 And this is them moving back off into the jungle. 476 00:29:23.168 --> 00:29:24.649 There's a lot more that happened. 477 00:29:25.370 --> 00:29:28.332 And again, that's why we're releasing this now. 478 00:29:28.352 --> 00:29:28.852 I should say that. 479 00:29:28.872 --> 00:29:35.196 That's why we waited a while to release this footage because footage like this is incredibly sensitive for a number of reasons. 480 00:29:36.957 --> 00:29:42.100 A, you don't want people to think that we went out and contacted these people that want to be left alone. 481 00:29:43.148 --> 00:29:46.951 You also don't want to encourage other people to indulge their misconceptions. 482 00:29:46.971 --> 00:29:49.573 People go, oh, these are the last free people on earth. 483 00:29:49.733 --> 00:29:52.636 They live perfectly in balance with nature. 484 00:29:52.656 --> 00:29:52.716 No. 485 00:29:54.637 --> 00:29:55.999 People will go looking for them. 486 00:29:56.039 --> 00:30:01.003 Whereas for hundreds of years, these people have asked for one thing and one thing only, to be left alone. 487 00:30:01.703 --> 00:30:05.006 And they've enforced that kind of like the Comanches with arrows. 488 00:30:05.847 --> 00:30:08.068 And on this day, they said, please give us food. 489 00:30:08.189 --> 00:30:09.069 Please give us rope. 490 00:30:09.690 --> 00:30:11.051 And they had one other question. 491 00:30:13.992 --> 00:30:16.154 They said, how do we tell the bad guys from the good guys? 492 00:30:16.214 --> 00:30:17.195 And we said, what do you mean? 493 00:30:17.635 --> 00:30:18.556 Who are the bad guys? 494 00:30:19.036 --> 00:30:24.621 And they said, some of you shoot at us with the jiu-jitsu, with the fire sticks, the guns. 495 00:30:25.021 --> 00:30:25.802 And we were going, who? 496 00:30:26.753 --> 00:30:27.233 Who does that? 497 00:30:27.253 --> 00:30:28.334 We said, we are not the bad guys. 498 00:30:28.354 --> 00:30:29.475 And they said, no, you also. 499 00:30:29.495 --> 00:30:31.416 They said, we know you cut down our trees. 500 00:30:31.436 --> 00:30:32.817 They're speaking to all of us. 501 00:30:33.137 --> 00:30:36.139 There's no like, you know, white guy, brown guy, Peruvian foreigners, none of that. 502 00:30:36.579 --> 00:30:38.320 It was just all of you outsiders. 503 00:30:39.361 --> 00:30:40.562 Stop cutting down our trees. 504 00:30:41.802 --> 00:30:42.883 Our trees are our gods. 505 00:30:42.923 --> 00:30:44.704 It was sort of like, you don't do that. 506 00:30:46.385 --> 00:30:51.969 And then when they left just a few weeks ago, we learned that the narco traffickers view them as a threat. 507 00:30:52.229 --> 00:30:55.551 And there was actually a mass grave found of a similar clan. 508 00:30:56.740 --> 00:31:03.586 And so these people are being boxed in by deforestation and hunted by narco traffickers and gold miners and loggers. 509 00:31:04.067 --> 00:31:10.833 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 what's going on in the outside world. 510 00:31:10.873 --> 00:31:11.313 Who is it? 511 00:31:11.754 --> 00:31:12.434 Who are the good guys? 512 00:31:12.454 --> 00:31:13.295 Who are the bad guys? 513 00:31:13.656 --> 00:31:17.159 They don't know that jungle keepers is protecting the land that they live on. 514 00:31:18.110 --> 00:31:25.237 They've never heard of a spoon or the wheel or Jesus or World War II or the country of Peru. 515 00:31:26.398 --> 00:31:28.900 And so they're coming out with so many questions. 516 00:31:29.100 --> 00:31:36.107 And the only way to care for these people and to give them the rights that they deserve is to protect the forest they live in. 517 00:31:37.614 --> 00:31:41.860 Do you know why some of them seem to be touching their nose? 518 00:31:42.540 --> 00:31:42.881 It's funny. 519 00:31:42.901 --> 00:31:43.982 I didn't notice that. 520 00:31:44.002 --> 00:31:47.026 I think this is going to be your discovery to anthropology. 521 00:31:47.507 --> 00:31:49.329 I did not notice that, but you see this. 522 00:31:49.369 --> 00:31:50.350 A lot of them are doing this. 523 00:31:50.370 --> 00:31:52.133 Yeah. 524 00:31:52.153 --> 00:31:52.293 Yeah. 525 00:31:52.747 --> 00:31:57.071 And the outfit, what is this outfit? 526 00:31:57.151 --> 00:32:00.814 It looks like there's kind of rope tied around their midriff with their penises out. 527 00:32:01.875 --> 00:32:04.497 Yeah, the head of the penis is covered by rope. 528 00:32:04.958 --> 00:32:06.739 Oh, they've got the penis up into the rope. 529 00:32:06.759 --> 00:32:08.661 No, the head of the penis is up and protected. 530 00:32:09.602 --> 00:32:14.166 And that makes sense, given the jungle where there's mosquitoes and bot flies and sand flies. 531 00:32:14.226 --> 00:32:15.347 That's a smart move. 532 00:32:16.264 --> 00:32:20.585 And then rope seems to be, I mean, it goes like fire, rope, ladders. 533 00:32:20.665 --> 00:32:22.285 I think it's like man's second invention. 534 00:32:22.825 --> 00:32:24.366 They are obsessed with rope. 535 00:32:24.426 --> 00:32:25.906 That's how they make their bow strings. 536 00:32:25.926 --> 00:32:27.386 That's how they make their arrows. 537 00:32:27.406 --> 00:32:32.287 That's how they lash things together to make the limited structures that they make. 538 00:32:32.347 --> 00:32:36.528 And some of what we know about them is, you know, we find their camps after they leave. 539 00:32:36.648 --> 00:32:37.348 So we know what they eat. 540 00:32:37.728 --> 00:32:39.308 They eat primarily turtles and monkeys. 541 00:32:39.328 --> 00:32:39.949 They don't fish. 542 00:32:40.929 --> 00:32:41.789 They don't have fish hooks. 543 00:32:42.715 --> 00:32:43.975 They don't eat humans, do they? 544 00:32:44.255 --> 00:32:45.356 They do not eat humans. 545 00:32:45.376 --> 00:32:46.596 They are not cannibal tribes. 546 00:32:47.256 --> 00:32:48.937 That's a rumor people have talked about before. 547 00:32:48.957 --> 00:32:54.639 People have said... Yeah, there's even a couple versions of my voice in AI saying that on the internet, but it is not true. 548 00:32:55.699 --> 00:32:56.499 And their haircuts? 549 00:32:57.500 --> 00:33:01.501 They all seem to have this sort of mullet-style haircut from the 70s. 550 00:33:01.521 --> 00:33:04.742 It seems like they all grab the front and just find a way to cut it. 551 00:33:04.882 --> 00:33:07.803 There might be one guy with a machete who just does the haircuts. 552 00:33:08.793 --> 00:33:10.837 And for a lot of them, this is the first time they've seen a human. 553 00:33:11.278 --> 00:33:12.920 So actually, this was first contact. 554 00:33:13.922 --> 00:33:19.232 The anthropologist who came to the scene, who managed this interaction... 555 00:33:20.855 --> 00:33:23.837 He said he had met an uncontacted tribe before in the region. 556 00:33:24.217 --> 00:33:26.719 He said none of these were men that he'd met. 557 00:33:27.160 --> 00:33:29.161 And the other thing, notice they're all men. 558 00:33:29.261 --> 00:33:29.481 Yeah. 559 00:33:30.182 --> 00:33:32.163 The women were hidden in the forest. 560 00:33:32.203 --> 00:33:36.827 And while the men were making a distraction in front of us, the women were raiding the farm behind us. 561 00:33:37.407 --> 00:33:37.727 Raiding? 562 00:33:38.048 --> 00:33:38.968 Raiding the farm. 563 00:33:39.168 --> 00:33:39.629 Your farm? 564 00:33:40.149 --> 00:33:41.530 The indigenous people's farm. 565 00:33:41.850 --> 00:33:42.851 Our community's farm. 566 00:33:43.031 --> 00:33:45.093 So the women went to steal while they were distracting you? 567 00:33:45.153 --> 00:33:45.513 That's right. 568 00:33:46.153 --> 00:33:47.614 And did you catch the women on tape? 569 00:33:48.055 --> 00:33:48.175 No. 570 00:33:48.195 --> 00:33:48.255 No. 571 00:33:48.978 --> 00:33:49.699 No, no, no, no, no. 572 00:33:49.799 --> 00:33:52.580 Everyone was—we were all huddled up very, very close. 573 00:33:52.620 --> 00:33:55.862 I mean, this was an incredible encounter, but let me explain. 574 00:33:55.903 --> 00:34:01.926 The prevailing emotion during this entire thing was fear on both sides. 575 00:34:02.527 --> 00:34:03.307 They were scared. 576 00:34:03.587 --> 00:34:04.268 We were scared. 577 00:34:04.608 --> 00:34:07.350 The indigenous people naturally have shotguns anyway. 578 00:34:07.450 --> 00:34:08.931 Everyone had their shotguns out. 579 00:34:09.351 --> 00:34:13.814 They all had—some of them had put their bows on the beach, but they had archers waiting. 580 00:34:15.592 --> 00:34:18.875 And so everyone was sort of, you know, it was like, put down your guns and we can talk. 581 00:34:18.895 --> 00:34:20.677 But nobody really wanted to put down their guns. 582 00:34:21.137 --> 00:34:24.880 And how do you know the women were stealing from your farm? 583 00:34:26.082 --> 00:34:30.606 Because after this was all over and we went to the farm, everything had been pulled up. 584 00:34:31.286 --> 00:34:35.971 All the yucca, all the plantains, all the sugar cane, the entire farm was ruined. 585 00:34:37.892 --> 00:34:38.653 How do you know it was the women? 586 00:34:39.307 --> 00:34:41.208 The women in the village told me it was the women. 587 00:34:41.228 --> 00:34:42.388 They went, ah, that was the women. 588 00:34:42.688 --> 00:34:44.028 Also, you see the smaller footprints. 589 00:34:44.329 --> 00:34:46.789 These men have wide, big men. 590 00:34:47.610 --> 00:34:49.550 They're from walking barefoot their whole lives. 591 00:34:49.590 --> 00:34:51.311 Their feet get ancho. 592 00:34:51.331 --> 00:34:52.231 They get really thick. 593 00:34:52.891 --> 00:34:54.852 And I have jungle feet like that now. 594 00:34:54.892 --> 00:34:57.693 But these guys have almost duck feet at this point. 595 00:34:57.713 --> 00:35:00.794 Like big, fat, calloused feet that get wider. 596 00:35:01.134 --> 00:35:02.334 You ever see a farmer's hands? 597 00:35:03.454 --> 00:35:03.694 Yeah. 598 00:35:03.714 --> 00:35:04.715 But they just grow. 599 00:35:04.895 --> 00:35:05.135 Yeah. 600 00:35:05.675 --> 00:35:06.015 Like that. 601 00:35:06.175 --> 00:35:08.997 They're all young as well. 602 00:35:09.097 --> 00:35:09.917 Where are the older people? 603 00:35:10.678 --> 00:35:11.318 We'd love to know. 604 00:35:12.779 --> 00:35:13.139 We don't know. 605 00:35:13.479 --> 00:35:18.963 There's some tribes in the Amazon where the elderly people have more permanent settlements. 606 00:35:19.603 --> 00:35:24.306 There's been rumors of some extreme tribes where the elderly people, if they can't keep up, are just left. 607 00:35:25.227 --> 00:35:25.707 to perish. 608 00:35:26.808 --> 00:35:30.530 But we saw people between the ages of probably 12 and 45. 609 00:35:30.830 --> 00:35:33.311 I don't think anybody looks like they're in their 50s. 610 00:35:35.632 --> 00:35:37.774 So we left with more questions than answers. 611 00:35:38.214 --> 00:35:42.816 On that day, they did get a pot that they stole from the community. 612 00:35:43.496 --> 00:35:47.238 They have their farm, and so there was also a machete at the farm. 613 00:35:47.258 --> 00:35:48.579 Somebody just whacked it into a log. 614 00:35:48.619 --> 00:35:49.600 And so as they were leaving... 615 00:35:50.440 --> 00:35:57.636 One of the best things that we caught on video that we're not able to share yet is that one of these guys, and this was at the end, while everybody was going home... 616 00:35:58.721 --> 00:36:02.363 The anthropologist held up his hands and he said, you know, no mole, brothers, go in peace. 617 00:36:02.923 --> 00:36:04.344 And these guys actually asked about me. 618 00:36:04.364 --> 00:36:05.904 I was the only person there with a big beard. 619 00:36:06.044 --> 00:36:08.806 And they said, they said, that one. 620 00:36:08.886 --> 00:36:09.926 They said, show us that one. 621 00:36:10.567 --> 00:36:11.407 And so I came forward. 622 00:36:11.427 --> 00:36:13.588 I stood at the edge of the river, which my heart was pounding. 623 00:36:14.248 --> 00:36:16.569 And the anthropologist said, he said, hold up your hands. 624 00:36:16.609 --> 00:36:17.910 Show them that you don't mean any harm. 625 00:36:17.950 --> 00:36:19.191 I held up my hands like this. 626 00:36:19.631 --> 00:36:21.932 And they held up their hands and they sang. 627 00:36:22.132 --> 00:36:23.633 They said, no mole. 628 00:36:23.993 --> 00:36:26.434 They knew that I wasn't from the indigenous community. 629 00:36:27.510 --> 00:36:33.493 And that was an incredible moment of, we couldn't communicate, but it was just sort of that basic, I acknowledge you. 630 00:36:34.293 --> 00:36:35.274 And they said, I acknowledge you. 631 00:36:36.174 --> 00:36:40.116 And we just had this thing across the river in about a thousand years and just, and then that was it. 632 00:36:40.857 --> 00:36:46.779 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. 633 00:36:46.859 --> 00:36:51.482 And one of my friends was going, oh, you know, in the local language, he was saying, put down the machete, leave the machete. 634 00:36:51.502 --> 00:36:53.903 And the guy just smiled and looked at us like, yeah, come and get it. 635 00:36:54.912 --> 00:36:55.593 Come and get it. 636 00:36:55.613 --> 00:37:03.999 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. 637 00:37:04.019 --> 00:37:04.719 It was like, ha. 638 00:37:05.920 --> 00:37:06.440 Up into the air. 639 00:37:06.520 --> 00:37:09.282 Just at us, in general, just to spook us. 640 00:37:09.843 --> 00:37:11.384 And then they all turned and left. 641 00:37:12.064 --> 00:37:13.085 So they have a sense of humor. 642 00:37:13.105 --> 00:37:13.986 We saw them smile. 643 00:37:14.686 --> 00:37:16.468 We exchanged a little bit of that with them as well. 644 00:37:18.369 --> 00:37:18.809 They look cold. 645 00:37:18.909 --> 00:37:19.250 Cold. 646 00:37:20.565 --> 00:37:21.546 They are cold. 647 00:37:21.926 --> 00:37:24.747 I mean, it's 95 degrees on that day. 648 00:37:25.107 --> 00:37:31.150 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. 649 00:37:31.431 --> 00:37:35.112 That beach was covered in just millions of butterflies. 650 00:37:35.132 --> 00:37:38.974 And so as these people are walking out, the butterflies are just swarming around them. 651 00:37:39.014 --> 00:37:41.135 Go back to the beginning, that right there. 652 00:37:41.175 --> 00:37:44.877 If you just notice, you don't notice it at first, but as they're moving, look at that. 653 00:37:44.957 --> 00:37:47.899 The world is swirling with Lepidopter in color. 654 00:37:47.919 --> 00:37:49.280 It's just absolute... 655 00:37:50.280 --> 00:37:52.561 insanity how beautiful this scene was. 656 00:37:52.601 --> 00:37:58.384 And I mean, when you see this, you know, if a Tyrannosaurus Rex walked out behind him, I wouldn't have been surprised. 657 00:37:58.424 --> 00:38:08.109 It was such a strange, literally unbelievable thing to see because, you know, these literally are the last people on Earth that are still living in this way. 658 00:38:08.189 --> 00:38:08.809 We're a society. 659 00:38:08.829 --> 00:38:13.611 We have planes, trains, automobiles, iPhones, all of this technology we're talking about going to other planets. 660 00:38:16.173 --> 00:38:16.793 They don't have metal. 661 00:38:20.275 --> 00:38:22.496 even a knife, unless they get it from someone else. 662 00:38:22.536 --> 00:38:27.677 And so it's just an incredible, you know, the other thing is they do have medicinal technologies. 663 00:38:27.697 --> 00:38:31.858 They're able to stay infection-free living in the tropical, wet jungle. 664 00:38:33.399 --> 00:38:34.399 That's pretty incredible. 665 00:38:34.439 --> 00:38:36.319 Because they're virtually naked. 666 00:38:36.940 --> 00:38:38.520 I mean, essentially naked. 667 00:38:39.180 --> 00:38:41.181 I think that's how they carry their rope. 668 00:38:41.241 --> 00:38:45.242 I don't think that's so much of clothing as we need rope, and that's how we carry it. 669 00:38:47.024 --> 00:38:51.154 It's very, very complicated because the loggers shoot at them. 670 00:38:51.535 --> 00:38:53.019 The narcos shoot at them. 671 00:38:54.818 --> 00:38:58.580 people shouldn't be getting into the places that they live. 672 00:38:59.000 --> 00:39:05.683 And if you think about in the last few centuries, how many indigenous cultures have been annihilated by the outside world coming in. 673 00:39:06.863 --> 00:39:08.924 There's no shortage of these stories. 674 00:39:09.364 --> 00:39:17.628 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. 675 00:39:18.048 --> 00:39:21.910 Because the only hope these people have is if we protect them. 676 00:39:22.625 --> 00:39:24.146 They can't come on a podcast. 677 00:39:24.166 --> 00:39:25.687 They can't address the United Nations. 678 00:39:25.727 --> 00:39:27.227 They can't write a petition. 679 00:39:28.248 --> 00:39:32.410 The only hope they have is if we are able to protect the forest that they live in. 680 00:39:32.990 --> 00:39:33.390 That's it. 681 00:39:34.091 --> 00:39:35.692 And that's why we've released this footage now. 682 00:39:35.712 --> 00:39:37.553 Because for a long time, we said we can't release it. 683 00:39:39.377 --> 00:39:45.362 We said, what if crazy hippie people go down there thinking that these are the last free people and they want to go live with them? 684 00:39:46.023 --> 00:39:46.783 That will kill them. 685 00:39:46.863 --> 00:39:53.749 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. 686 00:39:55.310 --> 00:39:59.714 What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. 687 00:39:59.854 --> 00:40:03.016 If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. 688 00:40:03.197 --> 00:40:04.017 Check the description. 689 00:40:04.317 --> 00:40:04.658 Thank you.