#489 – Paul Rosolie: Uncontacted Tribes in the Amazon Jungle
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with Paul Rosaly, his third time on the podcast. Paul is a naturalist, explorer, writer, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the Amazon Rainforest and celebrating the beauty of the natural world. He has a new book coming out in a few days titled Jungle Keeper. You should definitely go preorder now. It tells some intense stories about his time in the jungle over the past several years, building up to a few epic recent events, including a new full on extended encounter with an uncontacted tribe that we discuss in this podcast. Both the book and
Mhmm.
And then you reveal that you had your own dramatic encounter with the tribe two months later in October 2024. So if I may, let me read the opening of the book. Far out on the western edge of the Amazon rainforest, deep in the Peruvian jungle, a pair of loggers plunged their chainsaws into the buttressed roots of an ancient ironwood. An ironwood or chihuahuaco of this size is a giant among giants, an emergent sentinel that reaches heights of a 160 feet towering over the rest of the canopy. I've read that many over a thousand years old, by the way, an aside, and you've found ones that are 1,200
years old. Incredibly old.
Anyway, you continue. This particular tree has started its life as a tiny sapling in the great jungle, a story that began before the Spanish reached Peru, long before The United States was even a dream, at a time when Leonardo da Vinci was still honing his talents in a faraway part of the world through the Renaissance, the first and second world wars, and the birth of our grandparents. This tree was out there slowly charging upward, anonymous, just one pillar among the billions of others. But on this day, in August 2024, when the two loggers worked, this witness of the centuries came crashing
tribe? We know that across the Amazon Basin, there's still perhaps thousands of clans of, quote, unquote, uncontacted peoples, people that are living in nomadic isolation in what remains of the intact Amazon Basin and want to remain that way. And so what happened with these loggers was that local people told them, don't don't go out there. Don't don't go into these territories. And what happens is that people that aren't from there's this thing with the jungle. People don't believe that it's as wild as as the legends say. And so when they say there's there's calatos out there, there's there's
Yes. Which are the arrows that they use, which are bigger than you.
So they're like six, seven feet. Six, seven feet. More like seven feet. That's incredibly sharp. They cure it over the fire, and they have a way of sharpening it. That edge of bamboo becomes incredibly, like, knife sharp. You can cut meat with it easily. I've done it. These arrows look look at that. I mean, I'm five nine. That that that's easily a seven foot arrow.
Yeah. So for people who are just listening, this quote unquote arrow is really a spear. Some people would think of it as a spear, but they're shooting this thing with a gigantic bow. That's crazy.
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