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

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Paul Rosolie recounts his evolution from an unqualified 18-year-old researcher into the co-director of Jungle Keepers, a mission sparked by witnessing ancient Amazonian forests being incinerated by

Key takeaways

• Paul Rosolie transitioned from a 19-year-old with bare feet and a machete to co-directing Jungle Keepers, now protecting 130,000 acres of Amazon rainforest.
• Indigenous guide JJ taught Rosolie deep ecological literacy, such as reading jaguar tracks on riverbanks to track animal behavior and forest health.

Main topics

• Amazon rainforest ecology and biodiversity
• First contact with uncontacted tribes

Notable quotes

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.

Conclusion

Rosolie's account underscores the urgent need for habitat preservation as the sole safeguard for isolated

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) you Speaker 2 (0:03) How big is the Amazon rainforest? Trying to get my head around the scale of it. Speaker 1 (0:10) 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. Speaker 2 (0:20) And are there parts of it that people have never been to? Speaker 1 (0:22) 100%. 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. Speaker 1 (0:39) 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're 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. That's the most life we know of in the entire universe. Speaker 2 (1:09) And in terms of human life, I hear there's lots of Speaker 1 (1:14) human life Speaker 2 (1:14) there that we've never contacted. Speaker 1 (1:17) 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. 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. 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. And that was the only proof we had that they existed. Speaker 1 (2:05) Until the day we met them. Speaker 2 (2:11) When did you meet them for the first time? Speaker 1 (2:15) 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, of, of a major organization. But Speaker 2 (2:27) please. Speaker 1 (2:28) Okay. Well, somewhere along the way, as we, 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 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. Speaker 1 (3:10) That's where she pooped. This is where she came today to drink. 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. 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. Speaker 1 (3:44) And then they burned it down. Speaker 2 (3:46) Who burned it down? Speaker 1 (3:47) The loggers. And so the first time I saw ancient forest, a place that I love with trees significantly bigger than this room. Speaker 1 (3:59) 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? Speaker 1 (4:28) This can't be allowed. 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, because 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 going to 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. 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 it. We couldn't even conceptualize how it could be possible, even with the right tools. To Speaker 2 (5:34) save the Amazon. Speaker 1 (5:35) 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 going to 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 what I wake up and do every day. Speaker 2 (6:13) And you've really taken on that responsibility in a very personal way, I can tell. Yeah. Speaker 1 (6:18) Yeah, there's a point where, you know, I remember because you grow up. I mean, I was born in Brooklyn, and then 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. 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 more 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. 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. And I'm like, the air conditioner is on. And I'm like, I guess I'll check my phone. And so I think we have, like you said, become somehow we've gone really far away from what we are built for. 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 going to have calluses on your hands. But then after a few weeks, you're going to 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 where you start to 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 the wild puts you through this gauntlet of transformation and you become connected to your environment. And then that feeling of disassociation tends to alleviate a little bit. Speaker 2 (8:55) heard about this particular part of the brain that changes as well. You talked about transformation. 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 want to 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. Athletes have bigger ones. And people who live longer have even bigger ones. They kind of 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 was Roosevelt, who 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. Speaker 1 (10:09) And Speaker 2 (10:10) he came back and all of his friends described him as being transformed. He went on to become the youngest president in