Stuff You Should Know - Who is The Man of the Hole?

Episode Date: August 16, 2018

In 2018, there's a man from a lost tribe still living deep in the jungles of Brazil who has been all alone since the mid 1990s. He's referred to as the Man of the Hole, and has had no face-to-face with modern humans. Who is he? We'll answer that question as best we can in today's episode.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry Jerome Rowland.

Boy, I'm not in a good way today, Chuck. You off your game? As if you can't tell. I think you're fine. Well, thanks, man, I feel a lot better. Sure. Yeah, no, I'm okay. I can tell you, I'm surrounded by friends, family.

Like, I'm on TV. I know your dad's in the corner, it's weird. I have, hey dad, I have TV. Oh man, I Instagrammed a photo of my mom and dad. Oh yeah? From the 70s, yeah. And I captioned it, they're like looking at each other kind of lovingly.

And I captioned it, the moment before I was conceived. You know what, Jerry showed me that today. Oh yeah? She did. I look a lot like my parents mixed together, huh? Well, the first thing I noticed was like, wow, that's what Josh would have looked like as a grown man in the 1970s.

Because that profile of your dad, I don't know, I'd never seen your dad young. So I was like, man, that's really, that's you. Yeah. But yeah, I totally saw it, I saw both. Yeah, yeah, because you look at my dad, you're like, oh, that's Josh, but then you look at my mom,

you're like, oh, there's Josh too, very bizarre. Yeah, I don't, I guess I definitely favor my father, for sure. Is that right? Yeah, so a lot of people just favor one or the other, but I'm 50-50. Yep. That's what we call your old 50-50. Yeah.

I think that's a new one. There's a T-shirt. Yeah, 50-50 Clark. So, oh, I know the point I was making. There's this How Stuff Works article that you sent called The Man and the Whole. And it talks about this guy who is the last of his kind. He's, as this article put it,

like the loneliest person on earth. And I was like, yeah, I mean, I'm sure this is a lot like being in solitary confinement or something like that. But no, this is way beyond that. In this How Stuff Works article by Jess Lynn Shields, like really drove it home. She wrote like, what if you were the last person

who could speak your language, the last person who remembered what Halloween was, or a Coca-Cola, or that a dog says, woof, like imagine that. And I'm like, yeah, that's way different from being in solitary. Solitary confinement would be bad enough. You know, you're physically restrained.

But at least you know out there that there are other people who know the same things you know, that speak the same language you speak, that your family's still out there, that kind of thing. This is utterly different. And this man, the last tribesman he's called, or The Man and the Whole,

is possibly not just the last of his kind. He might be the only person on the entire planet in the situation that he's in. Maybe. Isn't that bizarre to think? Yeah, I mean, we did another show on Are There Undiscovered People quite a few years back.

And I don't know how he didn't get to this guy, but I saw this article and it was striking, especially if you've seen the couple of videos. And I think there are only two pieces of video of this dude. One I saw where they were sort of shooting, they were zoomed in on a hut. And that's where he lives. There's a series of thatched huts in the Tanaru

Indigenous Reserve in the Rondonia State of Brazil. Yep. About 20,000 acres, big area of the forest and jungle. So he lives in these thatched huts that are scattered about in the middle of nowhere. And they were able to get them on film, kind of zoomed in between the cracks. And you see the guy kind of looking a little bit,

but you can't make out much. So I saw that video. And then I saw another one where it was a pretty good shot of him from a distance, making good work, trying to chop down a tree. That was the most recent video. Right, which, well, let's just go ahead and get into this. He was found or discovered in I think 1996

when some loggers from the state of Rondonia. Which from the impression I have, this is a very rough and tumble state populated by loggers and cattle ranchers. And there are very few laws from what I understand. And things are settled by the gun is the impression that I have of Rondonia. It's right smack dab in the middle of South America.

And it's extraordinarily densely jungled in the Amazon. Yeah, I mean, that one New York Times article, like the guy was talking that they were talking to, said, from a helicopter, you look down there, and you think there's just no one down there. It's just all jungle. He said, but when you get down there, he said, there's a lot of people and drug runners

and bad men everywhere. So this guy is definitely an anomaly because he is not hanging out with anybody. No, and the reason why they think he's alone, Chuck, is because back in 1995, 1996, when the rumors of like a wild man in the jungle started to circulate, they think that he had just recently survived a slaughter

that had killed off the rest of his tribe. Which was only like supposedly five or six people by that point because they think the rest had been slaughtered. And that's a common thing we're gonna come up on in a couple of these is these ranchers and loggers, they're like, we wanna go clear this land and there's a tribe, a native tribe there, an indigenous tribe, so let's just slaughter them.

Get them out of the way. It's really, really awful, awful thing. And it's been a very common thing apparently since the 70s and 80s when ranchers and loggers moved into Rondonia, just snatching up land. And this is, again, this is the Amazon. This is basically pristine rainforest that people who have never been contacted

by anyone from the outside world live still to this day. And this guy is one of them. So at first they thought maybe he was just a member of a tribe that we already know about. And then over time as they started to study this guy, it became quite clear that no, he's a member of a tribe that we didn't know about before. And we're pretty sure he's the last of his kind.

Yeah, so there's this organization called FUNAI, F-U-N-A-I, the National Indian Foundation of Brazil. And they have been tasked with, for the past 20 years, monitoring this dude. And before his companions were killed, monitoring his companions. And you sent a nice follow-up on FUNAI. They have a few departments and one is called

the General Coordination Unit of Uncontacted Indians. The CGII. And that was established in 1987. And they're the only department of government in the world which protects indigenous peoples who don't have contact with the outside world or nearby tribes. Yeah, because before in the like 19th century

and even through a lot of the 20th century, there was, it was just basically Christian missionaries who were making their way into the Amazon to contact tribes and bring them Jesus basically and also healthcare and food and all that stuff, tools, the implements of modern culture, but also to proselytize too. And there was a lot of,

it just wasn't very well thought out. And as a result, even from the best of intentions that a lot of these missionaries had, a lot of tribes died. So in 1910, Brazil came up with their, I think it was like the Indian Protection Services was the name of the department that they first came up with. And the Indian Protection Service,

they took over from the missionaries. And it was a step up in that sense because it was more coordinated. There was thought to it. There was some sort of study, but the point was to take uncontacted Amazonian tribes and bring them into the modern world

so that they could assimilate with the modern world. The point was to basically reduce cultural diversity in Brazil. And that kept going until the 60s when there was a huge expose about the Indian Protection Service that they had just fallen down so terribly in their mission that there was basically mass extermination, slavery,

rape, everything, every horrible thing that you can think of that could befall a human being happened to these tribes under the watch of the Indian Services Protection over 60 years. Yeah, so the department in 1987, the CGII was founded by a man named Sidney Pasuelo. I guess that's how you pronounce that. And this was a big sea change in policy,

which was like you were saying, the previous strategy, establish contact to try and get them integrated at some point to this new policy, which was don't even contact these people unless they're under serious threat because history has shown all manner of bad things can happen when you contact these people, one of which is certainly introducing them to new diseases

and things that will kill them that they've never seen or experienced. And there's a big debate still on what the best policies are here. Yeah, so these two American anthropologists, white American anthropologists men who I guess wrote an open letter in either science or nature, I think nature, basically saying Brazil and Peru

should reverse this longstanding policy of not contacting Indians in the Amazon and should actually plan a peaceful, well-organized contact so that they can be better protected. It's these anthropologists stance that if you don't protect them, they're going to die one way or another, that there's no way that they're going to remain isolated

on the longterm. Maybe you've got another generation possibly of some of these tribes that could live like this, but beyond that, it's just not going to happen. There's too many powerful interests banging on the doors of their preserved areas who are more than willing to hire people who will accept money to go kill these people

just to get this land. And by just leaving them alone, you're leaving them very vulnerable. Whereas if you plan out contact, then conceivably you can show them that there are things like medical treatment, there is better ways that you can protect them. You can kind of give them contact

and that even more so, interviews with groups that have become, have initiated contact or have had contact made with them said we would have made contact with you guys earlier, but we thought we were going to be enslaved or murdered or something. We had no idea that you wanted to actually help us. Had we known that, we would have contacted you guys

decades ago. So those two things put together, these American anthropologists have said, we endorse this. And FUNAI and a lot of other groups, including the UN and a human rights group in the UK called Survivors International have said, no, that is totally disrespectful,

that flies completely in the face of, of agreed upon procedure and protocol, just be quiet, you're being neocolonialists. Yeah, I think it's interesting though, because what they're trying to do is like you said, have very highly controlled contact and the assumption that they don't want to be contacted, at least through their eyes appears to be false.

Cause like you mentioned, they're afraid of being kidnapped or something or overtaken. And had they known like, oh, you just want to give us some nice tools and maybe inoculate us. And we'd actually be down with that as long as you leave afterward.

Right, and these two anthropologists said, like you've got to do this smartly, like you basically have to go in with cultural translators, usually tribes who have made contact with outsiders before already established contact that live in the same area, who might be able to translate between the outsiders and the actual uncontacted tribes. And you need healthcare providers

who are going to stay there for at least a year. You need at least a year of sustained care or else, yes, they're going to die from these diseases you're going to bring in inevitably. Yeah, I mean, they're good. They give good examples too in that article about how this is backfired with missionaries like the Yorah people, they were there for six months

and the missionary said, well, let's go on vacation. And then the Yorah died a few weeks later. And then in 1975, missionaries provided care to a community, an Ake community. They took a vacation and then they died as well. So they're saying like, you got to have a plan to go in and stay there. You can't just go in and bring them some food

and machetes and not give them. And they'll be like, spring break. And then get out of there. But I get the idea that this is still a pretty hot topic of debate. Oh yeah, those anthropologists, they set off a huge debate. And I think it was sparked by the video

that was released by Survivor International of the man and the hole chopping down a tree. And the video was taken in 2011, but they only just released it in July of 2018. And this is very much still going on, this big debate. And it's a huge issue and you can kind of see both sides. Like I had just read about Funai's counter to it that like, look, dudes, this is our thing.

We got this, you just mind your own business. We have our own policy, stay out, right? Stay out of this. But then if you read the anthropologists' letters, you're like, actually they have a couple of good points here. So it's not a clear cut picture one way or the other. It's definitely, there's a lot of nuance to it

on both sides. All right, let's take a respite. Let's take a furlough or a vacation. Yeah, and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the man and the hole. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? Also leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS,

because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast

or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so the reason they call him the man of the hole or the man in the hole is the odd thing of inside these thatched huts of which he has several around this area. Inside the huts are these, and all over the place, there are these holes with like spikes for like trapping animals. But he has these six foot deep holes inside of his own huts.

And apparently no other tribes around him have done this. And it's a very unusual thing. And the belief is that it's for his own protection, I guess, if he's being fired upon or something. By loggers, he can jump down on one of these holes. Yeah, that's the impression I have too, which is extraordinarily sad. It is.

So the reason why they think that he has these holes is because he's had terrible run-ins. I guess this seems to be evidence that he is the survivor of a slaughter or a massacre. Because this is not a normal technique that they've seen with other tribes. And they found it at every single one of the huts that they've come upon of his.

Yeah, they do know, though, from tailing him, or tailing him, monitoring him for the past couple of decades, though, that he hunts with a bow and arrow. He farms probably at night and stays out of the, you know, as much as he can, stays inside during the day out of fear, which is also awful. But he farms like papaya and corn and other fruits and vegetables.

He has all these traps set everywhere, like I mentioned. They have found hand-carved arrowheads, torches, made from branches and resin. And at one point, they actually tried to make contact. Yeah, several points. Well, at one point, when they tried to make contact, though, he fired upon them with his bow and arrow and actually hit someone in the chest.

One of the Funai agents. Yeah, and they were like, all right, we're out of here. Yeah, at that point, they stopped trying to initiate contact with this guy. And again, this is like peaceful contact they're trying to initiate, not like, hey, man, get off of this land. They're like saying, do you need anything?

Do you want some food? What do you want? And the first few attempts to contact him resulted in him just basically slipping into the shadows in the jungle and just disappearing. Then it progressed into standoffs. Then it progressed into a shooting. And so they stepped back, survivor international

in Funai and some other groups, stepped back and said, this guy is escalating in hostilities. He's showing us, he doesn't want anything to do with us. Like, it would be something if he'd shot the first time and then slipped away the second time and the hostilities were decreasing, but instead it's going the opposite way. The hostilities were increasing.

So he's getting that he has the opportunity to contact these people who are coming with their hands up and not trying to kill them. And he's still saying back off. So finally, the government said, we're just gonna back off. And they backed off. They, Funai established his policy of not contacting this guy,

not even attempting to contact this guy, but instead monitoring him, making sure that his preserve is protected and then leaving him things like the axe that he was seen using in that 2011 video or seeds for some of the plants that he grows. Yeah, which a lot of times he doesn't even accept or take these gifts.

Imagine he's not retrusting. And like you said, as far as protecting the area in 2007, Funai and the government eventually increased the area to 31 square miles around where he was is off limits to any trespassing or development. Later expanded to 3000 hectares. So I think they added another 3000 hectares. Oh, okay, to the already square mileage.

And this is really ticked off the ranchers and the loggers because they're like, our business is being held back by this one guy. Yeah. And they want to kill him. To kill him. As a matter of fact, when the government announced that it was not only keeping up the practice

of preserving this guy's land, 31 square miles, but adding an extra 3000 hectares, which brought the total to 42 and a half square miles or 110 square kilometers that this man has to himself. The five ranches that surround this preserve hired somebody to go try to kill him. Funai went and checked on him after a couple of weeks after that announcement was made public.

And they found that their outpost was ransacked and that they had found shotgun shells, spent shotgun shells in the forest floor. So there's clearly an attempt to made on the guy's life. And for a couple of years, they had no idea if he'd survived until that video was made in 2011 that showed this guy who was now 50.

They'd been tracking him since he was in his 30s. Yeah, he's in his 50s now. They think. Chopping down a tree, yeah. Chopping down a tree like it's nothing. So they knew that he was alive and in good health as of 2011. And they're assuming that he's still alive.

Man, how good would a movie be about this guy? I know. Just have a lot of it play out in silence, you know? Yeah, that would be amazing. That would be cool. I mean, it's crazy to see a video of this guy from seven years ago, like in the world we live in, to think about there's still places on earth

where this guy, it's almost like the Japanese straggler who had no idea that the war had been over for whatever, 30 years, living in the jungle. It's just amazing to think about the fact that this is the lone guy out there by himself and what his life must be like. But not only that, it's like when I, when we did the paramedics episode,

I think I said something like there's no greater symbol of humanity than paramedics, you know? I think this is another really great symbol of humanity. Paramedics in this guy. Well, no, the FUNAI, the Brazilian government's response to this, that this man has been part of a tribe. It's the last of his tribe.

And the Brazilian government has said, this man deserves to live his life out in peace in the way that he wants to in his traditional way to be left alone. And we're gonna designate 110 square kilometers that belong to no one but this man. Despite the fact that all around him is the outside world trying to press in,

we're gonna stand in the way of that so that this guy can live out his natural life. That just gets me, you know, right in the bread basket. Yeah, I think the Disney version of this movie is they would find a lone tribe's woman somewhere, drop her off and have them meet cute by the papaya tree. Yeah, and the ranchers wanna tickle him. But if it were live action, these days it would be,

they would hire either John Wayne or Fisher Stevens to play the last tribe. Fisher Stevens. Yeah, remember he played the Indian programmer in short circuit? Really? Oh, that's right. Yeah. Oh, geez. Yeah, that was as recently as the 80s.

Right, it's not like Mickey Rooney playing an Asian man in the 1960s. Not like that was any better. No. Boy, Hollywood. Yeah. Maybe getting it wrong for so long. They have, at least Mongol got it right though, right? Maybe. Yeah, we haven't seen him in history of reserve judgment.

Should we take another break? Yeah, we should. All right, we'll take another break and we'll talk a little bit more about some of these isolated tribes right after this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. OK, Chuck, so the last tribesman, the man in the hole, he's being left alone. And that's policy in Brazil and Peru from what I understand now.

There are some tribes that have actually accepted contact and have made peaceful contact and have become, um, uh, I guess a little more integrated. I think there's three degrees that FUNAI separates tribes into, indigenous tribes into. There's totally uncontacted, which is like, they are living off on their own. The outside world has nothing to do with them.

There's, um, partially contacted or partially assimilated. So they get emails. Right, like they're living in their hut in the jungle, but they still have an iPhone, right? And then there's fully assimilated, where they like live in a city now or something like that, or they have like a job in the city or something like that. Um, so it's not just in the Amazon,

it's not just in Brazil, where there are uncontacted tribes, although that is definitely the place where you're going to find the most. I think I saw somewhere between 50, 80, and 120, uh, uncontacted groups of indigenous people are presumed to be living in the Amazon still today. Yeah, I mean, just those, that random swath of numbers

shows you that they, they're still so much they don't know. For sure. But there's, there are other parts of the world where there are uncontacted tribes. Um, and you found an article that ran down a few of them. The one that surprised me was just, um, off the coast of India, on Sentinel Island in India, North Sentinel Island.

A good old cracked article, which may have been done under the watch of our now colleague, Mr. Jack O'Brien. Nice. Shout out to Jack and his daily Zeitgeist podcast. Yeah, which I was on. Have you been on yet? So I haven't been on.

You gotta be on. It's great, great fun. As a matter of fact, I'm going to lap you. I'm going to go on again. Yeah, well, please do. All right. Yeah, but the Sentinelese, uh, on North Sentinel Island, India,

and they don't even know if that's their real name. They just call them that because, uh, I guess we have called it North Sentinel Island. Not you and me, but other people who named it. Think the British. But apparently, yeah, probably. Uh, we don't know a lot about them, but in 2006, a couple of fishermen, uh,

drifted there in their boat, uh, near the island and were killed and buried in shallow graves. And helicopters came and they were like, we got to find this burial site and get these guys back at least. And they started firing arrows at the helicopter. And it was just out of there.

And the local cops were like, no, we're just going to leave those guys there. We're not, we're not going near it. They have actually for this is a, this has been going on for a very long time. Apparently Marco Polo, um, remarked on the road about them. He was traveling, I think the 12th or 13th century.

So they've been fierce for years now. And apparently survived the 2004 tsunami. Yeah. The Indonesia tsunami. That's crazy. Cause this is an island that the tsunami just swamped and they managed to hang on just fine. I think ancient people have survived

more than one tsunami, you know? I guess you're right. Back through the years. That was a pretty bad one though. Yeah. It was pretty amazing. This other one, the Korowai tribe of Papua, Indonesia. They were contacted in the seventies by of course missionaries and archeologists.

And they were using stone tools and living in tree huts and stuff like that. And their big belief as a tribe was that the world would be destroyed by an earthquake if they assimilated and changed their customs. So missionaries said, all right, you know what, we're just going to leave you alone. I think these people might have invented bungee jumping.

Do you remember that land diving episode? They sound really familiar. I think it might be. Maybe so, but they are in the middle of nowhere. So it's a long way from even like other remote villages. Which is a, I mean, that's a mark in your favor for now. But as the Amazon basin has been showing us since the seventies and eighties,

so much of it has disappeared due to clear cutting for ranching, logging. That you just have no idea how much longer that's going to hold up no matter where you are in the world. I mean, we're at seven and a half billion people now. And then I think the next 30 years we're expected to hit 10 billion.

That's a lot more people that not only need more land, but also are going to be using up those resources that are currently on that land right now, you know? Yeah, for sure. I mean, like if they discover oil where the Korawai tribe lives in Indonesia, there goes that isolation, you know? Yeah, probably so.

And I think that's a real danger for all tribes. I think that's probably what those two anthropologists were talking about. They're saying like long term, we need a plan here, everybody, we can't just be like, well, we just won't contact them because this is not viable. I think was their point.

Yeah. What about the, this one really was interesting to me, the old believers, have you ever heard of them? Yeah. There was like some GQ article in the last couple of years about them. Are they well-dressed? I think so, in burlap, apparently.

Yeah, these are Soviet, well, here's the deal. In 1978, there were these geologists in the Soviet Union that were looking for iron or they were in a helicopter. They saw a cabin way out in the remote areas of Siberia and they found a family there that actually spoke a language. I guess, I mean, what would that be?

What language? Old timey Russian? Old timey Russian. Uh-huh. And they were huddled in fear and they were yelling, this is for our sins. They were dressed in burlap and living off the land and apparently they were a group of people

called the old believers, which left the Russian church, the main Russian church in the 17th century and had been, I guess, looked at, they kind of went everywhere. It was sort of a diaspora for the old believers. Some of them just went to other countries and seeking asylum or whatever and apparently some of them just looked to Siberia

and were like, no one's there, so we'll go there. Nice. This sounds creepy though, the old believers. Oh yeah, that's a terrible name for them. You know, it seems like they could scan you or something to make your head explode. Or they worship Cthulhu or something. Yeah.

So I almost feel like, we should look into them a little more because I think they could probably hold up their own episode. I think you might be right. I also remember hearing about families that lived in the Ozark Mountains in the Midwest of the United States.

I think around Arkansas that had been out of contact. Didn't even know the Civil War had happened. What? They were just that isolated. Wow. So yeah, you tend to think of it as just strictly indigenous peoples and that it's just in the Amazon,

but like there's groups all over the world. It's fewer and further between outside of the Amazon because there's less unpopulated areas, but it happens. And one of the sad things about all of this is for one of these other tribes that, you know, you can go read this cracked article. What's it called?

I didn't see the title actually. It was just suddenly there were, oh, five isolated groups who had no idea that civilization existed. Cracked lists were always so great, are always so great. They've come in handy from time to time. But one of the sad things they point out

for one of these other tribes is that in Peru, and I imagine in some other South American countries, there are these awful things called human safaris where they will take tourists around to like, look at uncontacted tribes from afar and close up. They're like, here, drain some of this ayahuasca through your nose and we're gonna go check out some tribes hanging out on a river bank somewhere.

Man, so weird. Well, I wanna add one more thing. I came across an article that wasn't really apropos of what we were talking about, called The Right to Kill on Foreign Policy Magazine. And it's about like this other tangential issue that governments like Brazil have to deal with, which is like some of these isolated groups

practice things that the outside world finds abhorrent or is illegal in the outside world, specifically in this article in Phantasyde. If you're born with a disability and I think about 20 of Brazil's isolated tribes, there's a chance that the community will decide that you need to die. Again, it's the practice of Phantasyde.

And Brazil's like, we are not quite sure what to do about this because our constitution guarantees everyone in Brazil the right to live, but it also guarantees the indigenous groups the right to live according to their customs. So they have no idea what to do. And it's a big thing about moral relativism or moral absolutism and which one's correct.

And it's really interesting that they're having to think about this right now. Yeah, for sure. It's a really interesting article, definitely worth reading, okay? I will check it out. Are you talking to me? Yeah, I'm talking to everybody,

but specifically you, yeah. Well, if you want to know more about isolated tribes, you can look those words up anywhere on the internet and they're going to deliver you some amazing stuff. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Listener Mail. Since you said amazing stuff. Well, looky here, dude. I have a handwritten letter on construction paper.

Beautiful. Isn't that nice? Yes. I love it. Hey guys, I hope this finds you well. My name is Claire and I'm 21. In fact, for my 21st birthday, I came and saw you guys live in Cleveland. Awesome, that was a great show. It was.

I got to here in college and I'm studying mathematics with a license in education. So I'll be teaching high school math. Been a fan since 2015. Thank you for the many nights. You have calmed me and all the information I've learned. And I've been wanting to write for a while just to say thanks and send appreciation,

but also a request and a little something. Whenever you talk about math in any regard, please be more positive. Please stop getting it wrong. Please be more positive and encouraging. We're well known for pooping math and saying I hate it math. Well, it's so intimidating. It's just so stupid.

It is, but she says this. Math is hard and already has a stigma for people who hate it or too hate it. But as a future educator, since you too are sort of educators, require that reach a huge audience, your outlook and attitude about math is important. It's okay to not like math and think that it's hard,

but know that you and anyone can do math. I know it's a silly thing to ask and point out, but I think you could both have a positive impact on the math stigma. I wish you and your wives and Chuck, your daughter, all the best. Thank you for all of your hard work. And thank Jerry too.

Jerry has to put up with you too all the time. So she's definitely been working hard. And she writes sarcasm, smiley face. Have a fabulous day. And that is from Claire. And Claire, you're right. We just joke around, but we should take more care with our words about the maths.

You know what? Frankly, Chuck, I think Ms. Claire makes a great point that we should just basically take all the jokes out of our podcast entirely. No, no. Just so no one takes it the wrong way. No. Just make it nice and neutral.

No. She is right though. She is right. We should take it easy on math. She very nicely said, back off math. Yeah. Like, did she draw a little Yosemite Sam at the bottom there?

She did. Oh yeah, look at that. Nice. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Claire did, you can go to your local post office. We love that place. And you can also, instead, go to the internet, go to stuffyshino.com,

find all of our social media links there, or you can send us a new fangled electronic mail by addressing it to Stuff Podcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.