Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robé. And me, Simone Voce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. The big take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best-informed business reporters around the world. We cover the stories behind what's moving money in markets and help you understand what's happening, what it means, and why it matters every afternoon. I'm Sara Holder. I'm Salaya Mohsen. And I'm David Gurra. Listen to the Big Take and Big Take DC on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Chuck here with a Saturday Select, bringing you one all the way back from August 2018, a nice summer episode, Who is the Man of the Whole?

This is very interesting. The Man of the Whole was somebody who lived by himself as an uncontacted human. Well, pretty much uncontacted. A very interesting story. Sometimes I wish I was the Man of the Whole, but check it out right now. Who is the man of the hole? Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry Jerome, Roland. 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. I know you're TV.

My dad's in the corner. It's weird.

I have TV. Oh, man, I Instagrammed a photo of my mom and dad from the '70s. I captioned it. They're looking at each other lovingly, and I captioned it, The moment before I was conceived.

You know what? Gerri 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 you.

Yeah.

I think I'm actually- But I totally saw it. I I saw both.

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 guess I definitely favor my father.

Is that right? Yeah. So a lot of people just favor one or the other, but I'm 50/50.

Yeah. That's what we call you, old 50/50.

Yeah. I think that's a new one. There's a T-shirt.

Yeah, 50/50 Clark.

Oh, I know the point I was making. There's this House stuffWorks article that you sent called The Man in the Hole. And it talks about this guy who is the last of his kind. He's, as this article put it, the loneliest person on Earth. And I was like, yeah, 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 House stuffWorks article by Jesslyn Shields, really drove it home. She wrote, 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? Imagine that. And I'm like, yeah, that's way different from being in solitary. Solitary confinement would be bad enough. 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 is still out there, that thing. This is utterly different. And this man, the last tribesman he's called or the man in the hole, 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. We did another show on Are There Undiscovered People quite a few years back. And a 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. I think there are only two pieces of video of this dude. One, I saw where they were shooting They were zoomed in on a hut, and that's where he lives. There's a series of thatched huts in the Tinaru Indigenous reserve in the Rondonia State of Brazil. Yeah. About 20,000 acres, big area of the forest and jungle. He lives in these thatched huts that are scattered about in the middle of nowhere. They were able to get him on film, zoomed in between the cracks, and see the guy looking a little bit, but you can't make out much. 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. 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. Things are settled by the gun is the impression that I have of Rondoni. 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, the guy 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 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, supposedly, five or six people at that point, because they think the rest had been slaughtered. And It's a common thing we're going to come up in a couple of these is these ranchers and loggers. They're like, We want to 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 again, this is the Amazon. This is basically pristine forest, 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 was 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 19th century and even through a lot of the 20th century, it was just basically Christian missionaries who are making their way into the Amazon to contact tribes and bring them Jesus, basically, and also health care 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 still 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 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 exposé 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 happen 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 Sydney 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 white American anthropologist men who, I guess, wrote an open letter in either science or nature, I think nature, basically saying Brazil and Peru should reverse this long-standing policy of not contacting Indians in the Amazon and should actually plan peaceful, well-organized contact so that they can be better protected. It's these anthropologist 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 in the long term. 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 give them contact. And that even more so, interviews groups that 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. 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 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 because, like Like you mentioned, they're afraid of being kidnapped or something or overtaken. And had they known, 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, You got to do this smartly. You basically have to go in with cultural translators. Usually, tribes who have made contact with outsiders before already established contacts that live in the same area who might be able to translate between the outsiders and the actual uncontacted tribes. And you need health care 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.

They give good examples, too, in that article about how this has backfired with missionaries like the Yora people. They were there for six months, and the missionary said, Well, let's go on vacation. And then the Yora died a few weeks later. And then in 1975, missionaries provided care to a community on Akei community, an Akei community. They took a vacation, and then they died as well. So they're saying, You got to have a plan to go in and stay there. You can't just go in, bring them some food in machetes, inoculate them. And then 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 in the Hole, Chopping Down a tree. And the video was taken in 2011, but they only just released it in July of 2018. And Yeah, this is very much still going on, this big debate. It's a huge issue, and you can see both sides. I had just read about FUNAI's counter to it, that look, dude, 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 anthropologist's 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 in the hole. Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine. Hosted by me, Danielle Robé. And me, Simone Voice. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. The big take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best-informed business reporters around the world.

Western nations like the US and Europe. Mexico will likely have its first female President.

And then you have China. And help you understand what's happening, what it means, and why it matters. He got his yo-yos to Europe in time. But the longer this drags on, the more worry he's getting. They knew that they needed to do this as fast as they possibly could to get a drug on the market as fast as they could. I'm David Garra. I'm Sarah Holder. I'm Salaya Mohsen. We cover the stories behind what's moving money in markets. Basically, everyone was expecting, if not a calamity, certainly a recession.

But the problem is that that paperwork, as our reporting showed, is fake. As someone who's covering the market, I'm often very worried about an imminent collapse.

Listen to the Big Take and Big Take DC on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All that sitting and swiping, our backs hurt, our eyeballs sting. That's our bodies adapting to our technology, but we can do something about it.

We saw amazing effects. I really felt like the cloud in my brain dissipated.

There's no turning back from me. Make 2024 the year you put your health before your inbox and take the Body Electric challenge. Listen to Body Electric from NPR on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your 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 spikes for trapping animals. But he has these 6-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. 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 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... As as much as he can, stays inside during the day out of fear, which is also awful. But he farms papaya and corn and other fruits and vegetables. He has all these traps set everywhere, like I mentioned. They have found hand carved arrowheads heads, torches made from branches and resin. At one point, they actually tried to make contact.

They had several points.

Well, at one point when they tried to make contact, though, he fired upon them with his bow and arrow and actually He 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 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 and 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. 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 him. And he's still saying, Back off. So finally, the government said, We're just going to back off. And they backed off. Funai established this 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 ax 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. I imagine he's not very trusting. 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 3,000 hectares.

So I think they added another 3,000 hectares.

Okay, to the already square mileage. And this has really ticked off the ranchers and the loggers because they're like, Our business is being held back by this one guy, 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 3,000 2,000 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 them 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 on the forest floor. So there's clearly an attempt to mate on 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 is now 50. They've been tracking him since he was in his 30s.

Yeah, he's in his 50s now.

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.

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, 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 like.

But not only that, it's like... When we did the paramedics episode, I think I said something like, there's no greater symbol of humanity than paramedics. 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. This man has been part of a tribe. He'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 going to 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 going to stand in the way of that so that this guy can live out his natural life. That just gets me 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 want to 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 track.

Fisher Stevens.

Yeah. Remember, he played the Indian programmer in Short Circuit?

Really? Wow, that's right. Yeah. Oh, jeez.

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. They've been getting it wrong for so long.

They have. At least Mongol got it right, though, right?

Maybe.

Yeah, we haven't seen it yet. I'm not even sure. I'm not even sure. It's just your reserve judgment.

Should we take another break? Yeah, we should. All right, we'll take another break and talk a little bit more about some of these isolated tribes right after this.

Bring a little optimism into your life with The Bright Side, a new daily podcast from Hello Sunshine, hosted by me, Danielle Robé.

And me, Simone Voice. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. The big take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best-informed business reporters around the world.

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But the longer this drags on, the more worry he's getting.

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But the problem is that that paperwork, as our reporting showed, is fake. As someone who's covering the market, I'm often very worried about an imminent collapse.

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Okay, 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, 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 partially contacted or partially assimilated. So they get emails? Right. They're living in their hut in the jungle, but they still have an iPhone. And then there's fully assimilated, where they live in a city now or something like that, or they have a job in the city or something like that. 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 uncontacted groups of Indigenous people are presumed to be living in the Amazon still today.

Yeah. I mean, just that random swath of numbers shows you that there's still so much they don't know.

For sure. But there are other parts of the world where there are uncontacted tribes. And you found an article that ran down a few of them. One One that surprised me was just 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 in his Daily Zeitguys podcast.

Yeah, which I was on. Have you been on yet? I haven't been on. You got to be on. It's great fun. As a matter of fact, I'm going to lap you. I'm going to go on again.

Well, please do.

All right.

Yeah, But the Sentinelees on North Sentinele Island, India, and they don't even know if that's their real name. They just call them that because I guess we have called it North Sentinele Island. Not you and me, but other people who named it. I think the British. But apparently, yeah, probably. We don't know a lot about them. But in 2006, a couple of fishermen drifted there in their boat 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 going near it.

They have, actually. This has been going on for a very long time. Apparently, Marco Polo remarked on them, wrote 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, the Indonesia tsunami. That's crazy because 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.

I guess you're right. Back through the years. That was a pretty bad one, though.

Yeah, pretty amazing. This other one, the Koro'ai tribe of Papua Indonesia, they were contacted in the '70s by, of course, missionaries and archeologists, and they were using stone tools and living in tree huts and stuff like that. Their big belief as a tribe was that the world would be destroyed by an earthquake if they assimilated and changed their customs. 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? Is that them? 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 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 '70s and '80s, 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. Yeah, for sure. I mean, if they discover oil where the Korawhi tribe lives in Indonesia, Georgia, there goes that isolation.

Yeah, probably so.

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 long term, we need a plan here, everybody. We can't just be like, well, we just won't contact them because it's just not viable, I think was their point. Yeah.

What about this one really was interesting to me, the Old Believers. Have you ever heard of them?

Yeah. There's some GQ article in the last couple of years Are they well dressed? I don't 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 ore. They were in a helicopter, and they saw a cabin way out in the remote areas of Siberia. 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. They were huddled in fear, and they were yelling, This is for our sins. They were dressed in burlap and living off the land. 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 went everywhere. It was 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.

It sounds creepy, though, the Old Believers.

Oh, yeah. That's a terrible name for them. It seems like they could scan you or something, make your head explode, or they worship Cthulu 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 then it's just in the Amazon. But 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 this is for one of these other tribes, you can go read this cracked article. What's it called?

I didn't see the title, actually. It's It was suddenly there were 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'm I can imagine in some other South American countries, there are these awful things called human safaris, where they will take tourists around to look at uncontacted tribes from afar and close up.

They're like, here, drain some of this ayahuusca through your nose, and we're going to go check out some tribes hanging out on a riverbank somewhere.

Man, so weird.

Well, I want to 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, a foreign policy magazine. And it's about 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, Infanticide. 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 infanticide. And Brazil is 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 is correct. And which one's correct. 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. 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.

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 Hiram College, and I'm studying mathematics with a license in education. 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. 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 poopooing math and saying, I hated math.

Well, it's so intimidating. It's just so stupid.

It is, She says this, Math is hard and already has a stigma for people who hate it or to hate it. But as a future educator, since you two are 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 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 two 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. 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 our podcast entirely. 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. Did she draw little Yosimity 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. You can also instead go to the internet, go to stuffyeshouldknow. Com, find all of our social media links there, or you can send us a newfangled electronic mail by addressing it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks. Com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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And me, Simone Voce. Every weekday, we're bringing you conversations about culture, the latest trends, inspiration, and so much more. I am so excited about this podcast, The Bright Side. You guys are giving people a chance to shine a light on their lives, shine a light on a little advice that they want to share. Listen to The Bright Side on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search The Bright Side. The big take from Bloomberg News brings you what's shaping the world's economies with the smartest and best-informed business reporters around the world. We cover the stories behind what's moving money in markets and help you understand what's happening, what it means, and why it matters every afternoon. I'm Sara Holder. I'm Salaya Mohsen. And I'm David Gurra. Listen to the Big Take and Big Take DC on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All that sitting and swiping, our backs hurt, our eyeballs sting, that's our bodies adapting to our technology. But we can do something about it.

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