Lex Fridman

So you've achieved the incredible feat of saving now more than 130,000 acres of rainforest.

And the goal is 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 a non-contacted tribe.

And we'll talk about all of this.

So your new book, Jungle Keeper, opens with the killing of two loggers by the warriors of a non-contacted tribe, the Mashkapiro, in August 2024.

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 shiwa wako, of this size is a giant among giants, an emergent sentinel that reaches heights of 160 feet, towering over the rest of the canopy.

I've read that many are over a thousand years old, by the way, as an aside, and you've

found ones that are 1,200 years old.

Yeah, 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 down through the canopy with such cataclysmic power that it shook the earth.

And then you go on to talk about how the shaking of the earth was felt and heard by the uncontacted tribe.

So you go on to describe how these particular loggers were murdered by the uncontacted tribe of Mashkopiro.