They Call Themselves Brothers: First Contact in the Amazon

Lex Fridman opens *Jungle Keeper* the way the book does. In August 2024, two loggers in the far west of the Peruvian Amazon sank chainsaws into the buttressed roots of an ancient ironwood, a shihuahuaco that Rosolie describes as a giant among giants, an emergent sentinel some 160 feet tall. Trees of that size, Fridman notes, are often more than a thousand years old; Rosolie has found ones around 1,200. This particular tree had started life before the Spanish reached Peru, grown through the Renaissance and two world wars, and come down with a crash that shook the earth.

That shaking, Rosolie writes, was felt by an uncontacted people often called the Mashco Piro. Two months later, in October 2024, he had his own encounter with them. Fridman introduces him for a third time on the podcast: a naturalist, explorer, and writer who has spent his life protecting the Amazon. Junglekeepers now holds more than 130,000 acres on a high tributary, with a goal of 200,000 more, while facing narco-traffickers, illegal loggers, gold miners, and this clan of people who still live naked in the forest and still shoot bamboo-tipped arrows.

The episode begins with a clip Fridman says has never been shown. An anthropologist stands at the front of a beach, repeating a word that overlaps the languages: Nomole, brothers. Then villagers scream “Mashco,” women snatch children into huts, and dogs and chickens explode. Ignacio, breathing hard, pulls Rosolie behind a tree and points up the sand. A clan of men is walking down the beach with seven-foot bows, hunched, pointing at guns. Butterflies lift off the sand. Rosolie’s line is simple: this is a world first.

Across the Amazon basin, Rosolie says, there may still be thousands of clans living in nomadic isolation in what remains of intact forest, and they want to stay that way. Local people had told the loggers not to enter those territories. Outsiders often treat the warning as a tall tale, the jungle equivalent of Bigfoot, and go in with shotguns anyway. They are walking toward people who still use bamboo-tipped arrows, still live without clothes, and can take a spider monkey out of the treetops at 40 meters. You never hear them until the arrow is already through you.

Fridman holds up the arrows Rosolie posted on Instagram. They are six or seven feet long, more spear than the word “arrow” suggests, shot from a gigantic bow. The bamboo edge is cured over fire until it will cut meat; Rosolie has tried it. The makers twist the fletching so the shaft spins in flight, and the bindings are plant fiber they wove themselves. He is 5'9", and the thing in his hands is easily a seven-foot arrow. The craftsmanship, he says, is the reason this civilization is still alive.

Asked what modern tools these people lack, Rosolie’s answer is the entire list: metal, plastic, glass, pots, roads, anything that requires digging and forging. A Peruvian anthropologist put it more sharply. People think of them as Stone Age tribes. They do not have stones. They have never seen water freeze, and they do not boil it because they make no clay pots, only bamboo and string. Even a camera is a miracle. When they hear chainsaws, Rosolie thinks they hear a demonic force. In the encounter that followed, one of the few things they managed to communicate was a question: why are you cutting down the trees?

The river is a high tributary on the western edge of the Amazon, wild enough that even the 1990s mahogany boom barely reached it. When Rosolie first arrived in 2006, stories of uncontacted people sat in the same drawer as hauntings. Peru’s official position at the time, he says, was that the tribes were a myth. Then you would meet someone four days upriver with an arrow in a story, and the object had a gravity of its own. Junglekeepers set out to protect plants, animals, and ancient trees. What the team inadvertently became, he says, was caretaker of people whose one mandate as a civilization is to remain isolated.

In October the indigenous community upriver called on a satellite phone. The tribes were coming out. What should we do? Even they were terrified. Rosolie’s first instinct was disbelief, the Bigfoot reflex, and a full day of meetings with police and landowners. Then the core directors, JJ, Mohsin, and Stefan, looked at one another and decided that if it was real they had to go now. They canceled the meetings, grabbed rice and tuna, and called Ignacio, their hardest ranger, the man who in 2019 took an arrow in the head and still bears the scar. A two-day boat ride by morning? No. Any way at all? “I'll get you there.”

They shoved off at 6:00 p.m. Rosolie stood in the bow with a headlamp. For a few hours the sky was clear and a comet was up; he looked at it and thought, this is it. Then lightning and a downpour that lasted until 8:00 a.m. People forget you can get hypothermia in the tropics. By 2:00 a.m. he was convulsively shivering, steering by the shine of caiman eyes because the channel had vanished, signaling Ignacio with the lamp, jumping waterfalls. They arrived to howler monkeys and frightened children. The tribe had been on the beach the day before and was gone. That night the trackers read the prints: only the balls of the feet. The people had run at the moment the boat touched sand. Romel, a local anthropologist, stood on the wreckage of the beach in the Yine language and called Nomole into the trees. Nothing answered.

At 5:00 a.m. the team was ready to leave. Conservation work does not pause for ghosts. Ignacio asked to speak as a friend, not as an employee. You would be an idiot to leave, he said. They are coming. Tents came back off the boat. Stefan had stayed in town signing paperwork; in fifty-something years in the Amazon he had never seen them and did not believe this would be real. Rosolie opened a laptop and tried to write. Then the screaming started. Women ran with children. Ignacio found him with a PTSD look, moving tree to tree, pointing up the beach: he has a bow.

Every small encounter anyone could remember had been extremely violent. Fridman notes the rubber-baron armies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Rosolie adds colonial missionaries in the 1600s and 1700s, then extraction and cruelty. Their grandparents, he thinks, told them to shoot first. In his own twenty years, Ignacio was shot in the head; a friend named Victor survived a killing on a beach; people who tried to hand over clothes and bananas were shot anyway. Locals call it porcupining: so many arrows that when the body falls they all point up. Sometimes the motive is curiosity, the way Theodore Roosevelt shot a bird for science. You are wearing a suit they have never seen. They just want to look at you.

Asked what he would say to the people who shot him, Ignacio once answered that he would say nothing. He would kill as many as he could. Another time, working a remote Ministry of Culture station, he hid in the peak of a hut while they walked the deck, frying under the midday roof, choosing probable death over certain death. Now they were happening in daylight, not in someone’s uncle’s story. About 26 people on Rosolie’s side, 50 of the tribe in sight, men on the far bank, guns already facing back into the forest because everyone knew they were being surrounded. He thought of the first dinosaurs in *Jurassic Park*. He also thought about a can of tuna and a flashlight, and how many days of river he would still have to float if he jumped.

The only person who had spoken to them peacefully was Romel, who had stood on a beach in 2013 and knew enough overlapping dialect to talk. He kept saying Nomole, brothers, put down the bows. Anthropologists later told the team that Piro is the wider group, Mashco means wild Piro, and the name they use for themselves is Nomole. They came hunched, afraid, bows ready. The first offering was the old story’s peace pipe: a motorless canoe sixteen feet long, piled with green plantains. In the dry season the channel was only three or four feet deep. Romel walked it toward dozens of bows. They rushed the bananas, fighting, not storing, then pushed the boat back. He asked where they had come from, what they wanted, who led. Everyone talked at once, like a flock of birds. No women were in sight.

While a second canoe was being loaded, noise erupted behind the camp. Shotguns swung. Mohsin went down; Rosolie ran away from the river to see the attack. The women had come silently and were pulling yuca and banana plants, wrecking the farm while the men talked on the beach. The team was surrounded, outnumbered at least five to one, and could have been killed easily. Some of the questions that came across were sharp. How do we tell the good outsiders from the bad? Who is cutting the trees? Big trees, Rosolie says, seem almost religious to them, as if felling one were killing a god. They asked why you would destroy their home. He thinks they are right. Romel turned and said this group did not know him as Grandfather. This was first contact.

They had already run the footage past anthropologists and ethicists. Talking about uncontacted people can summon tourists, commune-seekers, and film crews; these people want to be left alone. Rosolie’s argument is that if Junglekeepers fails to protect the river, the Nomole cease to exist, so you show the world and then walk away. After several boatloads of bananas, Ignacio traded gestures and a little dance, and there was a human moment of joking. They asked Romel for his shirt and his pants and left him in underwear. Ignacio threw a Junglekeepers polo; it ended on a naked warrior’s shoulder, logo out. Then they asked about Rosolie. He looked like a warrior, they said. He walked onto the beach, showed his palms, and they sang. Then they took everything into the forest and were gone.

Two details would not leave him. Two dominant men wore the same grapefruit-sized object at the neck, a Brazil nut in some casing that seemed to hold animal teeth. They kept it dry. Anthropologists told him he now knew more than they did. Some waist ropes were plant fiber; some were nylon paracord looted from logging camps. One man left swinging a machete at butterflies. A villager named Bacho told him to drop it. The look back, Rosolie says, translated as come and get it. To them a machete is Excalibur. They raid for steel.

The community told the team it now understood the fear, and wanted protection. In the footage a man in a blue shirt named George says not to be scared: they are not going to hurt us. The next morning, after the village had given sugarcane and bananas and invited the clan back, George drove a boat upriver. Around a bend, about 200 people ran out, surrounded the boat, and started shooting. Everyone else hit the deck behind benches and rice sacks. George leaned back while he drove. One arrow entered just above his scapula and came out by his navel, a seven-foot shaft through his body. Rosolie later saw the boat, slick with blood. George was flown out and lived. They had asked for bananas, been given bananas, and been told in every way the visitors wanted peace. The next day they attacked.

Fridman wonders whether violence is so built into how they meet the world that they do not experience the shooting as a change of attitude. Rosolie does not know. Maybe outsiders are not allowed to see their women, and the boat rounded a bend onto them. Maybe the motors did it. Maybe it was simply defense. The hiding of women, the animal-call commands in capuchin and tinamou, the children who wash downriver on logs and later say only that they forget: all of it points to a logic that does not share a coordinate system with “contact.” Most of the remaining 200,000 acres the organization is trying to buy is territory they already use. People ask how you can buy the Amazon. Someone already owns it, Rosolie says. If you do not buy it from them, they sell it to loggers, miners, or narcos, and those men will kill what they meet. Shotguns and machine guns win. Germs win faster.

The river is no longer only butterflies and jaguars. In the next few years, he says, a human culture will be exterminated if the corridor is not closed. Protect it and they can stay isolated for ten thousand years, or come out on their own terms. Junglekeepers already has several thousand monthly donors giving between five and a thousand dollars, enough to turn loggers into rangers. The treehouse, he argues, is two blades of grass on a football field of 300,000 acres, a way for the rest of the world to see what is at stake. Their diet, as far as trackers can tell from camps, is monkeys, turtles, turtle eggs, paca, capybara, tapir: things you can shoot. They do not really fish. Turtle shells are the closest thing to a bowl; a metal bowl they carried off a farm was later found destroyed. Fire in a wet forest is a mystery even to Rosolie, who considers himself a good fire-starter. Looking back, he still stares at the footage. It felt, he says, like the voice of the jungle speaking.

Against the easy story that humans are only a plague, Rosolie writes that conservation has shown him people guarding a flame in the storm. Fridman quotes Jane Goodall: the greatest danger to our future is apathy. She died on October 1. Rosolie grew up dyslexic, unable to read for a long time, while his parents still gave an hour a night of *The Lord of the Rings*, Sherlock Holmes, and Jane Goodall. She was the living figurehead of conservation and adventure. Years into the jungle, he sat in an NYU audience, then waited in a line of hundreds, and handed her a manila envelope with two chapters of a book that did not exist: Lulu the giant anteater, and a river day with JJ and Pico catching anacondas. He asked her to endorse it. He felt like a loser. Forty-eight hours later she wrote that the pages were incredible, and that she would recommend the book as soon as he found a publisher.

Every house in New York had already said no. HarperCollins said that if Jane Goodall thought it was a good idea, they did too. The book became *Mother of God*. From that letter came Junglekeepers, Dax, and the acres now standing. She did it, Fridman notes, not because Rosolie was special; she did it for everyone. That presence, after 300 days a year on the road, is what he tries to copy when strangers stop him and ask how to get his job. Jane was in the hope business. She said that not losing hope was how you stayed in the fight, in a time when apathy is a poison peddled by the darkness. She spent a life tipping her candle toward other people.

His inbox is full of notes from Finland, Spain, Georgia: how do I do your job? You throw yourself headfirst into adventure, he says. The slogan “if I can do it, you can” always sounded hollow to him coming from talk-show titans. Now he is the poster child for another line: someone less qualified than you is already living your dream. He failed out of high school, took unmatriculated college classes, and went to the jungle with JJ for the sheer love of it, almost a decade before anything surfaced. There was no path. He was told he would never be a conservation biologist: no grades, no PhD, no family money. So he went to see the place selfishly, and the indigenous people trained him.

The restaurant is his metaphor. You start washing dishes, but at least you are in the building. Then restocking, then training the new hire, then maybe a restaurant of your own. You cannot search that on a computer. You sweat and bleed. The other half of the advice is the post he wrote when kids asked anyway. It is not David versus Goliath. There is no sling for a dragon this big. You swim against global economic entropy and human apathy, a tiring way to drown. Every day you do not win, you lose, and worlds burn. People want to be told we are winning. We have won a lot, he wrote, but not right now. We are getting slaughtered. Thoughts and prayers will not stop a chainsaw.

He wrote it in a low stretch, funding gone, miners on the river, months alone, a Thom Yorke track on repeat, then a burn that took a side of forest he knew by the animals in it. That land is not coming back. Happy moments arrive already salted with grief. How do you go to a party, or to sleep, when millennium trees fall if you lose the race? Black scorched earth, ashes, a violent silence where the cacophony of life used to be: it makes you sick. This is not theoretical. When people ask for his job, he says they do not want the botflies, the dengue, twenty years out of a backpack, monkey faces for dinner, motors that die, rain on a roof of leaves, and the look from people at home who say, sure you are. A friend told him recently that if the work had been any harder it would have killed him, and if it had been easier it would not have been so divine. That slapped him. They might actually pull this off.

Loggers, for twenty years, were neighbors. Rosolie and JJ would walk into a clearing, share a beer, ask who their father was, and often hire them. They are local people with a kid and a wife, working a chainsaw for about $30 a day because that is the tool they know. Narcos are a different species. In March, hours upriver from the station, he flew a drone over a new clearing, taking pictures, with potential donors on the boat. Men ran from the huts to their boats and gave chase: Junglekeepers at 60 horsepower, the other boat at 40. A father among the guests asked when he was going to land the drone. He crash-landed it by a tree and smiled: this happens, they get mad, no big deal. JJ’s smile fell off like a mask. This is not good.

They reached a police camp they knew. Rosolie shook a friend’s hand, pointed downriver, and watched the officers arm up, pull on ski masks, tell them to get down, and call for support on sat-link. The chasing boat saw guns and turned around. Hours later, at the station, Stefan rang and would not wait. The same officer had gone back upriver, unloaded, and been washing in a stream when the narcos did a drive-by. Shotgun to the chest. Dead. Rosolie could still feel the handshake. He had to go to dinner with the guests and show nothing. They had thought they were filming loggers. They were in a drug war.

The afterword of the book records what came next. Rosolie was in New York raising money. JJ was supposed to ride the pickup to the city, then sent the boatman down instead and told Percy, the driver, to come back tomorrow. On a single-lane jungle road Percy found a tree across the way. Men put pistols through the windows and asked where JJ was, and where was the gringo who flew the drone. If either director had been in that truck, Rosolie says, they would be dead. The men took the phone, spared Percy, and left a message: we missed you this time. Police later pulled a WhatsApp chat off an arrested phone. If you see JJ or the gringo, anyone in our network, kill them. You will be rewarded.

Fridman asks if he is afraid. Rosolie wishes he could say he handled it better. Every phone call might be JJ. Every night the dream is that he is being shot. Swimming in front of the station, a boat comes around the bend and the first thought is run, dive, hide; the gun is not nearby. This is not the risk of an anaconda. These are people who want you dead, and he has seen what a friend looks like after three days in the river. At 4:00 a.m. the heart is racing and the sheets are wet. They are not police or military. They wanted to protect a beautiful place. Two days before the taping, JJ rang at 9:00 p.m. and Rosolie had to pull the car over. Environmental defenders are murdered in the Amazon every year; he names Chico Mendes and Dorothy Stang. Cut the head off the snake, and the work usually dies with it.

The wilderness is the only place they can operate with impunity. With the narcos, Rosolie says, comes human trafficking: teams of men in the woods who steal girls from indigenous communities. There are reports they have already made contact with uncontacted people, and they will not offer a fair fight with a shotgun. They will use machine guns. A new road was coming off the north, above the ancient forest the team had already blocked. Stefan’s map shows 130,000 acres in light green and a metastasizing network of roads reaching in. One post, asking for 100,000 acres in uncontacted territory, raised $150,000 in 48 hours. They bought the concession and stopped that road. Now the traffickers are trying from another direction. It is *Mission: Impossible* every month: motorcycle, parachute, bomb. You might pull it off once. They have to pull it off on a calendar.

On Junglekeepers land, police can arrest anyone they find. Off it, the middle of the Amazon is a gray area: papaya out front, coca behind, a case that takes time, and in that time they knock off an officer. The organization needs about $20 million for the rest of the corridor. Several thousand donors will not get there overnight; 50,000 might, or one person who wants the park named after them. Right now, Rosolie says, they are begging on the side of the road for enough change to buy bullets and stay alive. The method on the ground is patient. Traffickers give the poorest people a few thousand dollars, gasoline, and a chainsaw, and tell them to turn left at a tree. A year later the illegal farm is a safe house. The bosses come to collect.

The airstrips are the clever part. Rainforest canopy runs 150 or 160 feet high. Clear the interior of a landing strip and the crowns still meet overhead. You will not see it from a satellite or a plane. Bush pilots duck under, load, and leave. That is also why the road toward the ancient forest stayed hidden: from above, the trees still touch. The other side of the arms race is a 16-foot solar glider that rides thermals, recharges itself, and can fly for two weeks, almost live disturbance data. An alert still means a two-day boat ride for police who are being asked to go get shot at in the jungle. Fridman cites a global cocaine market of some 25 million users. Where there is a market, Rosolie says, they will find a way.

Fridman, who is afraid of heights, asks about the giant ironwood Rosolie had walked past for 18 years. The base is the size of the studio. The trunk runs vertical for about 70 feet before the first branches, one great vine, a strength climb with no rest that does not hurt. He trained, went at 4:00 a.m. as the howlers started, no shirt, no shoes, JJ on belay. Every 30 feet a piece of webbing and a carabiner: trad climbing, so a fall just before the next piece is double the distance, head into the trunk, and you do not know whether the next hole is wasps or a snake. It took more than an hour to reach branches the size of mature oaks, thick as a minivan. He traversed on vines to about 120 feet in pre-dawn light.

When the first sun hit the canopy, moisture lifted. He sat on a branch above dark jungle and saw the thing he had always heard about: a river of vapor above the Amazon, said to carry more water than the river itself, in the same category as the Earth’s molten core until you are looking at it. Golden current over the canopy, blue in the troughs, macaws in the churn, monkeys below staring up as if to ask what he was. He writes “My God. My God.” He wanted JJ up, his mother, the world. He also felt guilty afterward. It felt like the gift of the tree. Those same ironwoods are macaw real estate. Nest hollows need trunks at least 500 years old, car-thick or thicker, so only about 17 to 20 percent of macaws breed in a given year. From a high branch they fly under you, wind in the feathers, and look back as if you were the strange animal.

The Instagram anaconda was the largest they have physically caught, just under 20 feet, a lowland green, *Eunectes murinus*, blue-eyed in shed. They named her Millie for the datasheet. When they tried to lift her, she flexed and ten people flew. At that size the head is bigger than a Great Dane’s; once the mouth gets purchase, Rosolie says, you are a bag of chips. He has caught 90-something anacondas, a handful in the 20-to-26-foot range, all of them choosing flight over fight. Alone, with her over his neck, it would be suicide. JJ is the reason he is alive. Indigenous stories of a horned anaconda used to sound like nonsense. After the Nomole walked out of the forest, he says, a Tyrannosaurus behind them would have made sense. A “spiked” water snake in a tank turned out to be algae on a *Helicops*. They are not wrong. You start to listen.

One morning at 7:00, JJ spotted a spider monkey in the river whose head kept going under. Rosolie jumped in with a paddle rather than grab her by the neck. He has raised orphans whose mothers were shot, and he tried broken spider-monkey sounds. She slapped the paddle away, then took it, looked at his face, and let go, preferring the current. On the third offer she wrapped her tail, took the handle, and made a sound he heard as “fine.” On shore she ran. Without a camera, he says, no one would believe the difference was language. A jaguar on a camera-trap trail walked past without breaking stride, mouth open, a “sup” look; the cat was making the decisions. A wild tiger in India never looked at him at all. That was worse: you matter as much as a stick. The animal that actually tried to kill him was a bull elephant in India, a real charge, trees coming apart, a stick thrown into the stream after he rolled off a ledge. He gave it the finger because he was alive. In his own jungle the little things are worse than the big ones: hornet nests, infection, mosquitoes. An 11-foot bushmaster he grabbed by the tail lifted up and, as he translates it, said don’t make me.

Rosolie journals every day, piles of notebooks, etchings of leaves, facts for a memory he already trusts. Amateur writers wait for inspiration, Stephen King said; professionals go to work. Rosolie writes when a scene arrives with its feeling attached, always paper between brain and laptop. He thinks of drafting as making clay and editing as sculpture, dozens of passes. *Jungle Keeper* was written in the jungle, ten-hour hikes and narcos by day, edits by night; he will not finish a book that way again. Chapters now get written when they happen, sent to his sister, and stacked for later. The next one is already titled *Endgame*. Just before Fridman’s visit, he and JJ went eight days up a more lawless river of oil camps, missionaries, and recently contacted Nahua people, a *Sicario* strip where everyone seemed to be pricing their backpacks. JJ said they were not safe.

Coming out of the forest, Rosolie found everyone talking about AI, as if people were walking into the Matrix and asking to be plugged in. He can tell, with what he calls stunning accuracy, when a message has been through ChatGPT, and he does not know what he is picking up. F. Scott Fitzgerald can describe a scream that wobbles and cracks at the top, and you know that sound; a model can write “the jungle was dark and stern” on command. Fridman says the question is worth staying with because it is a question about being human. As bots get better, he thinks in-person art and messy conversation will get more valuable, not less. Rosolie has almost stopped watching movies: too polished, not enough risk. They land on Robin Williams tearing the graph out of the poetry book, and on a friend who, at eleven, ran for a diner napkin while Williams waited on a New York sidewalk with an impatient manager. You can put a little magic on ordinary days, Rosolie says. Jane Goodall had a line about that too.

The money and the belief that made Junglekeepers a real organization came from Dax, who built Age of Union, went to the Amazon with Jane, and wrote *Echoes from Eden*. During COVID Rosolie quit. He was 32, in a divorce, JJ’s mother sick, a shaman with COVID, Pico’s leg coming off, loggers tearing the forest, four days in bed. Then Dax called, having looked at the budgets, and offered a ten-year commitment. Rosolie says you can get the bends from that kind of swing. Dax later visited, called them a messy startup, and came back to ranger teams, boats, and annual reports. Dan, a young filmmaker in Singapore, heard the first podcast, put himself on a Tamandua trip, and is now the person who can follow Rosolie into the dark with two giant cameras. The pattern is the same advice he gives kids: be standing there when the boat breaks down.

Fridman asks what he will do when this intensity is no longer livable. The river has to be protected in the next year and a half or the chance is gone. The first book was arriving in a wild Amazon. This one is building an organization and getting close. If they reach 300,000 acres, he thinks the story will tidal-wave into a documentary about saving the wildest place on earth. Then he would like children, a PhD, and a job teaching other people how to do this. The *Lord of the Rings* analogy is the ring: you can carry it only so long. He wants to know the monkey he pulled from the river, the toucan Lucas, and the giant anteater he saw with Dax still have a home. He would like to step out of *Blood Diamond* toward a professor’s role, Indiana Jones if the ending stays off the supernatural. Fridman asks him, please, not to die saving the rainforest. Rosolie thanks him: the first conversation changed the mission and pulled him out of a hole. Pre-order the book. Donate at junglekeepers.org. They still need the rest of the corridor.