Climbing the giant tree

... were standing there. Everyone is waiting, because at any moment an arrow could just fly through your neck, and there's people holding shotguns. And the anthropologist, this little guy, is standing there in the front, and he's going, "Wamole." He's going, "Brothers." And then it happened. Then you start hearing people screaming, "Mashco! Mashco!" And people are screaming and women are lifting children and running into the huts and the dogs and chickens are going nuts and— So fear.

The following is a conversation with Paul Rosolie, his third time on the podcast. Paul is a naturalist, explorer, writer, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the Amazon rainforest and celebrating the beauty of the natural world. He has a new book coming out in a few days titled Jungle Keeper that you should definitely go pre-order now. It tells some intense stories about his time in the jungle over the past several years, building up to a few epic recent events, including a new full-on extended encounter with an uncontacted tribe that we discuss in this podcast. Both the book and audiobook are great. I highly recommend it. If you would like to support Paul and his incredible team in their mission to protect the jungle, go to junglekeepers.org. You can help with donations or by spreading the word or checking out the gala that Paul is hosting in New York on January 22nd in a few days. They are doing all they can to help raise funds for the mission of safeguarding as much of the rainforest as possible, and I think it's a mission worth fighting for. The Amazon jungle is one of the most special and beautiful places on Earth. As an aside, allow me to look back briefly and mention something that I've been struggling with a bit. For context, I traveled to the Amazon rainforest with Paul a while back. It was an adventure of a lifetime, with lots of crazy twists and turns. We did record a podcast out there, literally in the jungle—Episode 429, if you want to go check it out. It was awesome.

We survived a challenging time out in the jungle about a year and a half ago, and since then, your life has increasingly gotten more intense. You've achieved the incredible feat of saving now more than 130,000 acres of rainforest. And the goal that you're working towards is protecting 200,000 acres more. And doing so while facing extreme danger from narcos, narco-traffickers, so-called Cocaine Mafia in an escalating drug war. This is insane. These are new developments. Illegal loggers, as we've talked about before, gold miners, and the incredible recent encounter with an uncontacted tribe. We'll talk about all of this. So your new book, Jungle Keeper, opens with the killing of two loggers— ... by the warriors of an uncontacted tribe, the Mashco Piro, in August 2024.

So tell me about this encounter in October of 2024. So, in order to tell you about that encounter, I think we need to orient people into where we're talking about. We're talking about this river that runs through the western edge of the Amazon rainforest that you know well now, after spending time there with me. It's a high tributary of the Amazon rainforest where you have the main river channel and then smaller and smaller tributaries. And the smaller you get, the less trafficked they are. And so this river has remained wild through the centuries. And even during the '90s when there was a mahogany boom where people went out for mahogany trees, there were very few people going up this river.

Before even coming to talk to you about this, we passed this through anthropologists and ethicists and people, and we said, "Look, is it even, can we talk about this?" Because if you talk about this and you tell people there are these uncontacted tribes, people have misconceptions. They go, "They're the last free people on Earth. They're living the real life. We need to go join them. We want to see them. We want to photograph them." There's all this bad stuff that happens and all these people want is to be left alone. So, the last thing we want to do is kill the thing we're trying to protect by telling the world. But at the same time, they're speaking out. They're saying, "Stop cutting our trees. Leave us alone." And so if we're not successful in the greater Jungle Keepers' mission of protecting this river, they cease to exist. And so advocating for these people requires us to have this conversation. It requires us to have this footage and to show the world, and then leave them alone. In order for any of this to make sense, I have to show you this footage.

So what are some of the questions? Like if you could know everything you'd want to know about them— Maybe in the space of communication and language, that's really interesting. You mentioned that there's all kinds of calls, animal calls. So they obviously know how to mimic animal calls. Yeah, they can use animal calls with enough complexity that they can do basic commands. They can speak in Capuchin; they use Tinamou calls. Some of our rangers were upriver recently, and they found a Nomole trail, a Mashco Piro trail. It was Ignacio, of course, and he made a secret whistle they do. He whistled out into the jungle and he's listening, and they whistle back. So him and everybody on the team just ran back to the boat and got out of there. But at least they answered. They didn't just shoot. He whistled, they whistled, they said "out," and he got out.

And we're back. One thing I forgot to ask you is about the diet of the uncontacted tribes. You mentioned— —potentially monkeys and turtle— —eggs? So, what do we know about what they eat? What's the source of protein? Do they eat monkeys? Oh, yeah. Their primary sources of food, I would say, would be monkeys, turtles, turtle eggs, and small game like paka, the large rodent that's like the size of a beagle. Capybaras. Stuff they can shoot. They don't really fish. And we know these things because our indigenous trackers and our rangers find their camps, and so they'll find some of those little thatch structures they make on the beaches and we see the bones. There'll be tapir bones. There'll be turtle shells, which seems like is their closest thing to a bowl. The day that we interacted with them, they did find a bowl. We saw them walking away with it in one of the farms, and then days later we found it destroyed. So, they didn't seem like they saw much utility in the bowl.

There is still hope." And that speaks against the cynicism and maybe apathy and the view that humans are a destructive force in the world. That speaks to the fact that humans, with all the technological elements that we have created, can actually do a lot of good. I wrote in my notes here a quote from the great Jane Goodall: "The greatest danger to our future is apathy." So caring about the world, having optimism for the world, having hope for the world is the way to help have an impact, help save it. But on that, I have to ask you about Jane. She passed away on October 1st. Some humans in this human civilization of ours can open our eyes to the beauty of the world, and she is one of the best of them. And she's had an impact on your life. Maybe can you speak to the impact that she's had? I mean, when I grew up, being dyslexic, I couldn't read for a very long time. And so my parents read to us every night, which was amazing considering how hard they were working. But they'd find the time to give us an hour of reading every night, whether it was Lord of the Rings or Sherlock Holmes or Jane Goodall. And so I grew up with Jane being this figurehead of conservation and of adventure and sort of a living historical figure, this legendary person. And so then one time, right around the time that I'd been going to the jungle for a few years, I got to go see Jane speak, I think it was at NYU. And sitting in the crowd, watched her, completely amazed.

What advice would you give to young people on how to do that? Those young Pauls sitting there, and your life story's just incredible in that way. You've taken a leap into adventure— ...into the unknown. What would you recommend they do? I think the thing that I try to communicate to them—and again, my inboxes are filled with people from Finland, Spain, Georgia, saying, "How do I get your job? How do I get out there and do it?"—and it really is just that: you throw yourself headfirst into adventure. You just do it. And I remember hearing people say that, like, "You know, if I can do it, you can do it." And I remember how hollow that sounds because I'm like, "Yeah, you're on a talk show or you just wrote a book." These titans of their industries and innovators saying, "Oh, if I can do it, anybody can do it." But now that we're protecting all this rainforest and that I've lived with the animals and met the tribes, and it's becoming this global movement—you know, I didn't have a PhD.

It just has to be that way. Speaking of which, another complexity in all of this—you write about in the afterward of the book about the narco-traffickers that have moved into the river basin. They are not the loggers that we've spoken about anymore. They're growing coca for cocaine, and they're building airstrips. So tell me how this came to be. Like you said, our whole life on this river, when loggers come in, JJ and I would walk up to them and say, "Hey, what's up?" and sit down with them and have a beer or share a meal and talk to them and ask who their father was and if we know them, and then hire them. And they're friendly.

You have this Instagram post with an anaconda around your neck. There's a million questions. Maybe you can talk about that experience, but also, how did you not die? So as you know, we've been studying the habits of Eunectes murinus for quite a while. The lowland green anaconda is the largest, heaviest snake on earth. And I've been practicing a lot for a long time, and this is the biggest one we've ever physically caught. This was just under 20 feet—it was 19 feet something. And you can see she's in the middle of shedding. And the other interesting thing with her is that she had blue eyes because her scales over her eyes turn blue right before it comes off of her head. And so I've never caught a blue-eyed anaconda before. But if you look at the size of my head and the size of my hands, you start to imagine that thing's head is bigger than a Great Dane's.

Speaking of somebody that does have camaraderie, there's this incredible video on your Instagram that people should go watch where this spider monkey was drowning and you jumped in to rescue her. Sure. So we're coming downriver. It's seven o'clock in the morning so I'm cold—I'm always cold. I'm sitting on the boat and JJ's like, "Look, spider monkey." And I go, "Great, spider monkey in the river," like that's normal. And JJ's like, "No, she's having trouble." And I was like, "Why is she having trouble? They swim all the time."

Yeah, I mean, you expect it from them. They're practically us. To me, it's when other animals show it. You know, the times that I've been on a trail and a jaguar has walked by and just been like, "Mm, 'sup?" Keep walking. And it's like, "Eh, it's kind of cool of you not to eat me. I appreciate it." Has that happened to you?

And hopefully, people get a chance to see that video. So I gotta ask you about the writing. I mentioned you're— —an incredible writer. What's your writing process like for this book, Jungle Keeper, for Mother of God, for future books you're writing? Are you like a Stephen King? Do you have a drinking thing where you go to some dark places in the basement? Do you write every single day? Do you take little notes here and there? Like, your notebook has a bunch of doodles— —a bunch of writing. What's your process like? I try to journal every day for a number of reasons. It's accountability. It helps me keep track of... It's fun to see your hopes and dreams. It's fun to record the mundane moments that we all forget about, and that might be, like, cooking in the kitchen with your mother. That might be a fun walk you had with your dog. Little things that you think you're going to remember everything, but you just don't. And so I have piles of notebooks in my room. When something happens, I write it down. If a cool story happens, I will write it down, or if I find a leaf from an extinct tree I will make an etching of it. But I just...