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

Steven Bartlett (0:04)

How big is the Amazon Rainforest? I'm trying to get my head around the scale of it.

Paul Rosolie (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.

Steven Bartlett (0:20)

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

Paul Rosolie (0:22)

100 percent. There are still parts of the Amazon Rainforest that are unexplored. There's parts of the Amazon Rainforest that no one's ever been to. And if you really want to blow your own mind, the canopy of the Amazon Rainforest is about 150, 160 feet up above our heads, which is far.

And half of the life in a rainforest exists in the canopy. So you're talking about the most mega biodiverse biome that has ever existed. There's never been more terrestrial wildlife anywhere on earth than in the Amazon Rainforest and right now. In the entire fossil record, we'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.

Steven Bartlett (1:09)

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

Paul Rosolie (1:17)

There are various tribes living through the Western Amazon and you have the Eseja 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 they would, and then every now and then, somebody would come back with a seven-foot arrow, a spear tipped with bamboo, a huge bamboo tip this big, razor sharp like a machete. And that was the only proof we had that they existed until the day we met them.

Steven Bartlett (2:11)

When did you meet them for the first time?

Paul Rosolie (2:15)

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

Steven Bartlett (2:27)

Please.

Paul Rosolie (2:29)

Okay. Well, somewhere along the way, as we did these expeditions through the Amazon and I became closer and closer with the indigenous people, 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. There's this moment that I read about where he's going, look at this beach and tell me the news. I said, what? 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. He was like, this is where she came yesterday to drink.

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.

And then they burned it down.

Steven Bartlett (3:46)

Who burned it down?

Paul Rosolie (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, 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 have been standing for a thousand years, species that had never been described by science, were all incinerated. And I said to JJ, I said, how do we...

This can't be allowed. 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. So 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.