#369 – Paul Rosolie: Amazon Jungle, Uncontacted Tribes, Anacondas, and Ayahuasca

Paul Rosolie is a conservationist, explorer, author, filmmaker, real life Tarzan, and founder of Junglekeepers which today protects over 50,000 acres of threatened habitat. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings – BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off – Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex to get 1 month of fish oil EPISODE LINKS: Paul’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/paulrosolie Paul’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/PaulRosolie Junglekeepers: https://www.junglekeepers.com VETPAW: https://vetpaw.org PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (06:09) – Amazon rainforest (17:24) – Discovery of the Amazon (22:00) – Werner Herzog (28:06) – Jane Goodall (41:55) – Anacondas (1:05:44) – Eaten Alive (1:18:08) – Joe Rogan (1:26:28) – Surviving in the Amazon (1:53:39) – Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon (2:03:34) – Surrounded by black caiman crocodiles (2:21:11) – Graham Hancock and ancient civilizations (2:26:43) – Aliens (2:56:44) – Climate change (3:01:55) – Jordan Peterson (3:19:17) – Hunting (3:26:33) – Ayahuasca (3:35:00) – Meaning of life

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Paul Rosley, a conservationist, explorer, author, filmmaker, and real-life Tarzan, since for much of the past 17 years, Paul has lived deep in the Amazon rainforest, protecting endangered species and trees from poachers, loggers, and foreign nations funding them. He is the founder of Jungle Keepers, which today protects over 50,000 acres of threatened habitat. And Paul is one of the most incredible human beings I've ever met. I hope to travel with him in the Amazon jungle one day, because in his eyes, I saw a truth that can only be discovered directly by spending time among the immensity and power of nature at its purest.

• 0:47Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few-second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Eight Sleep for naps, BetterHelp for mental health, and Athletic Greens for a great nutritional basis for your health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfridman.com/hiring. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep and its new Pod 3 mattress.

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  There's few things I enjoy in life more than a great power nap. I take a sip of coffee. I get some caffeine in my body. And then when that feeling of just kind of jadedness, of tiredness, if you think of motivation as an ocean,

• 1:48Lex Fridman?

  the thing that covers that motivation are the surface waves. I think of the desire to nap as the surface waves. And the nap itself is a way to bring calm to the waters. It's a way to let the storm pass. I just took a nap before this, and you perhaps can tell in my voice the energy of a thousand butterflies. I don't know why I chose butterflies, but I did. I don't know why I chose a thousand, but it's a distributed system with emergent behavior, I'm sure. Although the flocking behavior I'm aware of is mostly for birds. I wonder if butterflies flock.

• 2:27Lex Fridman?

  They seem more independent. They seem too beautiful to flock. Does beauty prevent you from cooperating? Is there, is there a threshold beyond which you're too beautiful to cooperate with others? And the definition of beauty, of course, is species dependent, unless we're talking about butterflies, in which case they're just beautiful, beautiful to other species as well, at least to humans. Anyway, check out Aids Sleep and get special savings when you go to aidsleep.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H E L P, help. I've been going through some rough times mentally. I just took a nap, so I'm feeling pretty good. But

• 3:09Lex Fridman?

  this last year, and I just tweeted about this, has been really rough. I had some really low points. It's probably not the right place to talk about such low points here, as I sit alone in a dark hotel room, all the lights off, because you know how hotel rooms are. There's no overhead lights. It's just a lamp, and nobody knows how to turn that lamp on. So it's mostly darkness with little hints of light from a lamp that's just around the corner. And here I sit alone with a microphone, talking about things. What is this life

• 3:54Lex Fridman?

  exactly? Anyway, sometimes those little environments, those little moments can catch you off guard. And the darkness that's in our past comes to the surface, and it can break you. It's good to bring it to the surface often, so it doesn't break you. And that's where I think talking to others helps. I think talk therapy with a professional helps. If you want an accessible version of that, check out BetterHelp at betterhelp.com/lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by Athletic Greens and its AG1 Drink, which is an all-in-one

• 4:36Lex Fridman?

  daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Actually, I'm currently in Boston, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and tragically, I ran out of Athletic Greens.

• 4:48Lex Fridman?

  Athletic Greens is one of the things that makes me feel like I'm home. It is part of the daily ritual. I drink it twice a day and it kind of grounds me. It helps me make sure I'm getting all the nutrition I need. There's something about making sure your diet is not horrible and you're getting the nutrients in your body that you need and you're getting the sleep and the rest and the exercise you need. When all of that is in place, there's so much more that you can do with life. All the hardship, all the dark things, everything, you can take it on. And the easiest version of that is the vitamins. And the super awesome multivitamin I rely on is Athletic Greens. It's also delicious, I should say.

• 5:32Lex Fridman?

  They'll give you a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase when you go to athleticgreens.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Paul Rosley.

• 6:09Lex Fridman?

  In 2006, at 18 years old, you fled New York and traveled to the Amazon. This started a journey that I think lasts to this day. Tell me about this first leap. What in your heart pulled you towards the Amazon jungle?

• 6:23Paul Rosolie?

  From the time I was, you know, three years old, I'd say, you know, it was dinosaurs, wildlife documentaries, Steve Irwin, you name it. And like when my parents said, you know, nature versus nurture, they nurtured my nature. I was always just drawn to streams, forests. I wanted to go explore where the little creek led. I wanted to see the turtles and the snakes. And so I was a kid that hated school, did not get along with school. I was dyslexic and didn't know it, undiagnosed. I didn't read until I was like 10 years old, like way behind. And so for me, the forest was safety. Like I remember one time in first grade, they had you doing those, you know, those multiplication sheets. That was pure hell for me.

• 7:04Paul Rosolie?

  And so I actually got so upset that I couldn't do it that I ran out, the classroom, ran out the door and went to the nearest woods and I stayed there because that was safe. And so for me, like, once I got to the point where I was like, high school isn't working out, I had incredibly supportive parents that were like, look, just get out, take your GED, get out of high school after 10th grade, you gotta go to college, but like, start doing something you love. And so I saved up and bought a ticket to the Amazon and met some indigenous guys. And the second I walked in that forest, it was like, it's like the first scene in Jurassic Park when they see the dinosaurs and they go, this is it.

• 7:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Paul Rosolie?

  I walked in there and just, I looked at those giant trees. I saw leaf cutter ants in real life and I just went, oh, it was like the movie just started, you know, that was when, that was when like I came online.

• 7:51Lex Fridman?

  Can you put into words, what is it about that place that felt like home? What was it that drew you? What aspect of nature, the streams, the water, the, the forest, the jungle, the animals, what, what drew you?

• 8:05Paul Rosolie?

  Ah, it's just, it's always been in my blood. I mean, for any forest, I mean, whether it's, you know, upstate New York or, or India or Borneo, but the Amazon, it's, it's, it's all of that turned up to this level where everything is superlatively diverse. You know, you have more plants and animals than anywhere else on earth, not just now, but in the entire fossil record. It's the Andes Amazon interface. There's just, that's terrestrially, that's, that's where it is. That's the greatest library of life that has ever existed. And so you're just, you're so stimulated, you're so overwhelmed with color and diversity and beauty and this overwhelming sense of natural majesty of these, you know, thousand year old trees and half the life is up in the canopy of those trees. We don't even have access to it. There's stuff without names, walking around on those branches. And it's

• 8:50Paul Rosolie?

  like, it just takes you somewhere. And so going there, it was like, you know, the guys I met just opened the door and they were like, you know, how far do you want to go down the rabbit hole? How, how, how much of this do you want to see?

• 9:01Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned Steve Irvin. Uh, you list a bunch of heroes that you have, he's one of them. And you said that when you're unsure about a decision, you ask yourself, uh, WWSD, what would Steve do? Why is that such a good heuristic for life? What would Steve do?

• 9:18Paul Rosolie?

  He's a human being that like, everything we saw from Steve Irwin was positive. Everything was with a smile on his face. If he was getting bitten by a reticulated python, he was smiling. If he was, you know, getting destroyed in the news for feeding a crocodile with his son too close, he was trying to explain to people why it's okay and why we have to love these animals. And everything was about love. Everything was about, you know, wildlife and protecting. And to me, a person like that, that where you only see positive things, that's, that's a role model.

• 9:48Lex Fridman?

  And it's just like an endless curiosity and hunger to explore this, this world of nature.

• 9:53Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, and an insatiable madness for, for wildlife. I mean, the guy was just so much fun.

• 9:58Lex Fridman?

  I gotta, if it's okay, read to you a few of your own words. You open the book, Mother of God, with a passage that I think beautifully paints a scene. "Before he died, Santiago Duran told me a secret. It was late at night in a palm-thatched hut on the bank of the Tempeh Pata River, deep in the southwestern corner of the Amazon Basin. Besides a mud oven, two wild boar heads sizzling, sizzled in a cradle of embers. Their protruding tusks curling in static agony as they cooked. The smell of burning Sacropia wood and cinched flesh filled the air.

• 10:41Lex Fridman?

  Woven baskets containing monkey skulls hung from the rafters, where stars beaked through the gaps in the thatching. A pair of chickens huddled in the corner, conversing softly. We sat facing each other on sturdy benches, across a table hewn from a single cross-section of some massive tree, now nearly consumed by termites. The songs of a million insects and frogs filled the night. Santiago's cigarette trembled in the aged fingers as he leaned close over the candlelight to describe a place hidden in the jungle." That line, "The songs of a million insects and frogs filled the night," for some reason hit me.

• 11:23Lex Fridman?

  What's it like sitting there conversing among so many living creatures all around you?

• 11:28Paul Rosolie?

  Every night in the jungle, you live in constant awareness of that out there in the darkness are literally millions of heartbeats around you. And so like, We exist in this, in this, you know, domesticated paved world most of the time. But when you go out there past the roads and the telephone poles and the hospitals, and you make it out into earth, just wild earth. And there's no, there's no, it's not like this is a national park. There's no rescue helicopter waiting to come get you. You are out there and you're surrounded at night by, I mean, there are snakes and jaguars and frogs and insects and all this stuff just crawling through the swamps and through the trees and through the branches.

• 12:11Paul Rosolie?

  And we put on headlamps and go out into the night and just absolutely fall to our knees with wonder of the things that we see. It's absolutely incredible.

• 12:19Lex Fridman?

  And most of it doesn't make sounds like the insects do.

• 12:23Paul Rosolie?

  The insects do, the frogs do. You have some of the night birds making sounds, but a lot of it, everything has evolved to be silent, invisible. I mean, everything there is in the, on the list, like, like, there's another line in Mother of God where I said, like, you know, like, life is just like a temporary moment of stasis and like the churning recycling death march that is the Amazon. Like, it's, um, it's been called the greatest natural battlefield on earth. I mean, in any square acre, there's more stuff eating other things than anywhere else. And, and you go through a swamp in the Amazon and there's like, there's tarantulas floating on the water, there's frogs in the trees, there's, there's, there's tadpoles hanging from leaves waiting to drop into the water, there's fish waiting to eat them, there's

• 13:07Paul Rosolie?

  birds in the trees, you're sitting, you literally are surrounded by so many things that your brain can't process it. It's, it's just overwhelming life.

• 13:17Lex Fridman?

  Churning death march. Some of the creatures are waiting and some of them are being a bit more proactive about it. What do you make of that churning death march? That the amount of murder that's happening all around you at all scales? What is that? You know, we, uh, we dramatize wars and the millions of people that were lost in World War II. Some of them tortured, some of them dying with a gun in hand, some of them civilians. But it's just millions of people. What about the billions and billions and billions of organisms that are just being murdered all around you? Is that, um, do you? Does that change your view of nature of life here?

• 14:03Paul Rosolie?

  I've always kind of wondered like that, like when you see like a, you know, wildebeest taken down by lions and eaten from behind while it's alive and it makes you question God, you know, you go, how could, how could, how could they let this happen? In the Amazon, I find personally that these natural processes make up almost a religion, that it reminds you how temporary we are, that, you know, the, the, the botflies that are trying to get into your skin and the mosquitoes that are trying to suck your blood and the, you know, that when you sweat, you see, you see the, you literally can like hold out your arm and watch the condensation come off of your skin and rise up into the

• 14:45Paul Rosolie?

  canopy and join the clouds and rain back down in the afternoon and, and then you drink the river and start it all over again. And it's like, it's flowing through you. So the Amazon reminds me that, that there's a lot that we don't understand. And so when it comes to that overwhelming and collective murder, as Werner Herzog put it, it's just part of the show. It's part of the freak show of the Amazonian night.

• 15:11Lex Fridman?

  I see you, I, you, in, in certain moments, able to feel one with a mosquito that's trying to kill you slowly?

• 15:18Paul Rosolie?

  Hmm, one with the mosquito is a stretch.

• 15:23Lex Fridman?

  Is it always the enemy? What I mean is like, you're part of the machine there, right?

• 15:26Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. And it's like fair play. It's like fair play. So like we have bullet ants and like, you know, you get, you get nailed by a bullet ant and you just go, shit.

• 15:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Well, well done.

• 15:34Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. Today's, today's over. I'm going back to bed and I'm taking a pile of Tylenol and, you know.

• 15:38Lex Fridman?

  Do you think in that sense, when you're out there, are you a part of nature or you're separate from nature? Is man a part of nature or separate?

• 15:47Paul Rosolie?

  I think that's what's so refreshing about it is that out there you truly are. And so whether we're bringing researchers or film crews or, or whether we're just out there ourselves on an expedition, you truly are a part of nature. And so one of the things that, that my team and I started doing when I became friends with these guys, you know, this is a family of indigenous people from the community of Inferno and they took me in and.

• 16:13Paul Rosolie?

  As we got close, they started saying, you know, you can come with us on our like annual hunting trip. And I went, okay. And it's four guys in a boat. And you don't want to get your clothes wet. So we're all in like our boxers in a canoe with a motor going out past the places that have names. And you're out in the middle of the jungle. And the thing is, like, when you're, when your motor breaks, you are so quickly reminded of

• 16:40Paul Rosolie?

  the inherent truths, like the things that nobody can argue with. And we live in such a human world where everything is debatable, religion and politics and perspectives on everything. And then you get down to this point where it's like, if we don't figure something out, the river is going to rise and take the boat. That's the truth. And ain't nobody gonna like argue with that. And it's like, to me, there's a beauty in that truth. Because then all of us are united there in that, in that truth against like the natural facts around us. And so to me, I, that's, that's, that's a state where I feel very, very at home.

• 17:14Lex Fridman?

  And the Amazon is more efficient than most places on earth at swallowing you up.

• 17:19Paul Rosolie?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 17:21Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 17:23Lex Fridman?

  So just to linger on that, because you've spoken about Francisco de Aralana, who's this explorer in the, in 1541 and 42 that sailed the length of the Amazon.

• 17:35Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 17:35Lex Fridman?

  Probably one of the first. And there's just a few things I should probably read, I should probably find a good book on him because the guy seems like a gangster.

• 17:43Paul Rosolie?

  Yes, there's some great books on him.

• 17:45Lex Fridman?

  So he sailed, he led the expedition that sailed all the way from one end to the other. There's like a rebuilding of a ship.

• 17:54Paul Rosolie?

  Which is insanity.

• 17:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 17:56Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 17:56Lex Fridman?

  So because it speaks to the thing, it's like, nobody's gonna come and rescue you.

• 18:00Paul Rosolie?

  No.

• 18:00Lex Fridman?

  You have to, if your boat dies, you gotta have to rebuild it.

• 18:05Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. So they came down the Andes, entered in the headwaters of the Amazon, constructed some sort of raft, boat, craft, something, and made it down the entire Amazon basin. Of course, his stories are the ones that led to the Amazon being called the Amazon because he reported tribes of women. He reported these large cities, places where the tribes lived on farms of river turtles that they corralled and they lived off of that protein. And then when they came out to the mouth of the Amazon, if I remember it correctly, that just through navigation and the stars, they were able to calculate where the way was back to Spain and make a boat seaworthy enough to bring them home. Incredible, absolutely.

• 18:44Lex Fridman?

  Do people like that inspire you, your own journey? Like, what gives you kind of strength that in these harshest of times and harshest of conditions, you can persevere?

• 18:55Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, I mean, you look at the stories of people that are so, you know, these stories of people that have overcome incredible suffering like that, or like, you know, what Shackleton did, or something like that. And so like, when you're, you know, I've been, you know, your tent gets washed away, you go to sleep and the river rises 20 feet and washes away your tent and you crawl out and all you have is a machete and a headlamp, literally no bag, no food, no nothing, and you go, wow, the next six days before I reach back to a town is going to be just pure hell. I'm going to be sleeping on the ground, covered in ants, destroyed by mosquitoes. And then it becomes, you know, am I in any capacity, any percentage as tough and resilient as the people that I've read about that have made it through things far worse than this? And then that's the game you play.

• 19:39Lex Fridman?

  What goes through your head when all you got is the headlamp and the machete? So are you thinking at all? Like, I've gotten a chance to interact quite a lot with Elon Musk, and he constantly puts out fires, having to run several companies. There's never a kind of whiny deliberation about issues. You just always one step forward, how to solve, right? This is the situation, how do you solve it? Or do you also have a kind of self motivating, almost egotistical, like, I'm a bad motherfucker. I can handle anything, almost like trying to fake it till you make it kind of thing.

• 20:17Paul Rosolie?

  There was a little bit of that.

• 20:18Lex Fridman?

  With your machete and a headlamp?

• 20:19Paul Rosolie?

  I got a sword. There may have been a little bit of that when I was like, you know, like 14, 15 years old, I'd like, you know, have like a hunting knife and my dog, and I'd go out into the woods of like the Catskills and survive for a weekend with, my rule was one match. You know, you get one match and you got to make shelter. And then, you know, I'd bring like a steak and like make a fire and stuff. And like, at that point, there may be with some ego, but in the Amazon, you get stripped down so completely that you, it's like that thing, like, you know, watch the atheism leave everyone's body when they think they're about to die. It's like when you. Find yourself staring up at the Amazon at night and you go, there is no hope of getting out of here. I mean, I was once lost in a swamp where it took me days to get out of

• 21:04Paul Rosolie?

  there. And there was, there was moments where I just said, this is, you know, this is clearly it. There's no, there's no ego there. There's just hope. You, you start, you start realizing what you believe in and praying that you'll be okay. And, and then trying to, trying to summon whatever you know about how to survive. And, and that's it. And so it's, it's actually, again, it's kind of, it's kind of a blissful state. If you can walk that line between like adventure and tragedy and sort of keep yourself right at that very, very fine line without going over.

• 21:34Lex Fridman?

  Ever fear of death? Fear? Ever fear? Terror?

• 21:38Paul Rosolie?

  No, I don't want to die. I wanna, I wanna, you know, I, I love the people in my life and there's a lot of things I want to do. But every time I've been, every time I've been certain that I'm gonna die, it's been, I've been very, very calm. Very calm. And just sort of like, okay, well, if this is how the movie goes, then this is how it goes.

• 21:56Lex Fridman?

  Almost accepting.

• 21:57Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. Which is, which is reassuring.

• 22:00Lex Fridman?

  You've mentioned Herzog. Just to venture down this road of death and fear and so on. There's been a few madmen like you in this world. He's documented a couple of them. What lessons do you draw from Grizzly Man or Into the Wild, those kinds of stories? Were you ever afraid that you'd be one of those stories?

• 22:24Paul Rosolie?

  Oh, yeah. I actually think that that's in Mother of God where I said, I almost into the wilded myself. Like, I, I went out there and really, I got so lost and so destroyed that I said, this is, this is, this is gonna be the next one. You know, this is gonna be the next story of some idiot kid from New York who went to the Amazon thinking he was Percy Fawcett and then vanished. Because if you, if you do vanish out there, your body's gonna be consumed in a matter of days. Like, like two. You know, if we see, if we see an animal dead on the trail, it's, you got dung beetles and fly larvae and vultures and there's a whole pecking order. You know, you get the black vultures, the yellow vultures, the king vulture, they all come in. That thing is picked clean in a couple of days.

• 23:01Lex Fridman?

  What would be the creature that eats most of you in that situation?

• 23:05Paul Rosolie?

  Probably the vultures. Probably the vultures and the, and the maggots. It's, it's really quick. It's really, really quick. Like, like, like you, even as far as like, you can't leave food out. You know, like if you have like a piece of chicken, you say, oh, I'll eat it in the morning. You leave it out. You can't do that. It's not, it's not good by morning.

• 23:23Lex Fridman?

  Grisimatt, for example, like what, because that's a beautiful story. It's both comical and genius and especially the way Herzog tells it. Well, first of all, do you like the way he told the story? Do you like Herzog?

• 23:34Paul Rosolie?

  I do. I love Herzog and I love his documentary, The Burden of Dreams, which is in the Amazon, not very far from where I work. And the sheer madness that you see this man undergoing of just trying to recreate hauling a boat over a mountain is wild. And the extras that he hired to be, to play the natives are the, I think they're Machiganga tribesmen and they're just, they just look like all the guys that I hang out with. And it's like, you know, they're doing all this stuff in the jungle that, months and months and months, and you can just see him deteriorating with madness because the jungle, you know, your boat, you know how many times I've tied up a boat to the side of the river? This just happened like a year and a half ago.

• 24:17Paul Rosolie?

  I tied up, through COVID, I pretty much just lived in the jungle for a while. And there was nobody there and there was no support. And I tied up my boat and the rain is just hammering, like the universe is trying to rip the earth in half. The rain is just going and the river is rising. And I tied up the boat, but then you go to sleep and you gotta wake up every two hours to go check the boat. And the boat is thrashing back and forth. And so all night, every two hours, I'd wake up barefoot in driving rain, like, you know, golf ball raindrops and just go down, check the boat. And then by morning, I was like, I fell asleep, woke up, checked the boat. And then I was like, I'm just gonna go make coffee. I was so done. I was so like at the end of my rope, every time, bailing the boat out and stuff. And then we got 15 minutes of heavy rain that filled the boat, sank it.

• 25:01Paul Rosolie?

  And so now I'm stuck upriver with no boat. And it's like that type of thing where it's like, no matter how hard you try, the jungle's just like, listen, you ain't, you're nothing. You are nothing. And so it's that constant reminder. And so Herzog really threw himself into that, in that film. And it's brilliant to watch.

• 25:18Lex Fridman?

  What do you think he meant by the line that you include in your book? "It's a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger."

• 25:29Lex Fridman?

  Said in German accent.

• 25:30Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, overwhelming and collective murder.

• 25:36Lex Fridman?

  So that's, that's, so he didn't really appreciate the beauty of the, of, of the murder.

• 25:41Paul Rosolie?

  I think he appreciated it, but to him, it was very dark, you know? I think he saw the darkness in it and that's there. It sure is as soon as you do ayahuasca, you, that door opens and you see the darkness because it brings you right into the jungle, like the, the heart of it. But I think that for him, it, it is, I think that darkness is something that he embraces and that he loves. There's another film of his, and I don't know if this is accurate, but my memory has it, that there's a penguin, and I think it's in Antarctica, and the penguin's going in the wrong direction, away from the ocean. And I feel like he goes on this monologue about how like, he's just had enough.

• 26:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Paul Rosolie?

  This one penguin is just marching towards, you know?

• 26:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, well, he, his, because I remember that clip from that documentary. And what Werner says is that the penguin is deranged.

• 26:31Paul Rosolie?

  Yes.

• 26:32Lex Fridman?

  He's lost his mind. And I took offense to that.

• 26:36Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Lex Fridman?

  Because maybe that's a brave explorer. Like, how, how do you know there's not some, a lot more going on? Like, it could be a love story. Those penguins get super attached.

• 26:47Paul Rosolie?

  Maybe his mate was over there and he had to go find her, like.

• 26:50Lex Fridman?

  Or it's a lost mate and he, last time he saw her was going in that direction.

• 26:54Paul Rosolie?

  Exactly.

• 26:54Lex Fridman?

  So this is like the great explorer. They, we, we assume animals are like the average of the bell curve. Like every animal we interact with is just the average, but there's special ones, just like they're special humans.

• 27:05Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Lex Fridman?

  That could be a special penguin.

• 27:07Paul Rosolie?

  It could have been, and I, I had the same thought where I was like, I was like, he's, I, I found it beautiful how he interpreted it. What I took away from that was I found that Werner Herzog's monologue there was, was brilliantly dark and also comedic. But but maybe irrelevant biologically speaking towards penguins like, you know, which which happens a lot with animals. I find like there's so many times where I'll find people be like, do you think that animals can show compassion? And you hear like a bunch of people that have never left the pavement, talking about like, wow, this this one animal helped another. And it's like, it's like, go ask Jane Goodall if animals can show compassion. Go go talk to anybody that works on a daily basis with animals and they'll.

• 27:49Paul Rosolie?

  And so like, to me, there's a there's always a little bit of frustration in hearing people sort of like pleasantly surprised that animals aren't just, you know, that, you know, these automatons of, you know, just, just, what's the word like, like programmed, you know, nothingness.

• 28:06Lex Fridman?

  First of all, what have you learned about life from Jane Goodall? Because she spoke highly of your book and you list her as one of the mentors. But what what kind of wisdom about animals do you draw from her?

• 28:18Paul Rosolie?

  The wisdom from Jane is so diverse. It's, I mean, she, first of all, she's someone that, you know, the work that she did at the time she did it was so incredible because I mean, she she was out there at a very young age doing that field work. She was naming her subjects, which everyone said you shouldn't do. She broke every rule. She broke every rule. She was assigning and everyone said, you know, you're anthropomorphizing these animals by saying that they're doing this and that. And she she was like, no, they're they're they're interacting. They're showing love. They're showing compassion. They're showing hate. They're showing fear. And and she broke straight through all of those things. And and it paid off in dividends for her.

• 28:55Lex Fridman?

  Do you see the animals as having all those human like emotions of anger, of compassion, of longing, of loneliness, from what you've seen, especially with mammals, but with different species out there? Do they have all that?

• 29:10Paul Rosolie?

  It depends on the animal. You know, if you're talking, you know, on the on the scale of a cockroach to an elephant, you know, it's like a lot of these things. And I wonder about this stuff all the time, you know. I'll have a praying mantis on my hand and just go, what is going through your mind? You know? Or you'll see it, you'll see a spider make a complex decision and go, I'm gonna make my web there. You know, and you go, how how are you? How are you doing this? How are you? Because he he made a calculation there, you know, it's smart. I was in the jungle not that long ago and I'm I was walking and all of a sudden this dove comes flying through the jungle, right up to my face, lands on a branch like right here, right next to me. I look at the dove, dove looks at me and she's like, hey. And she's clearly like panting. And I'm like, I'm like, why? Why are you? Why are you so close to? This is weird. And she's like, I know.

• 29:52Paul Rosolie?

  And then, and then an ornate hawk eagle flies up 10 feet away, looks at both of us and just like scowls and like sticks up its head feathers and then just like flies off. And the dove was like, sweet, thanks. And then flew in the other direction. And I was like, dude, you just used me to save your life.

• 30:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Paul Rosolie?

  The dove knew.

• 30:08Lex Fridman?

  See, well, this is what, because there's, you know, there's Mike Tyson and there's Albert Einstein.

• 30:14Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 30:15Lex Fridman?

  And I, sometimes I wonder when I look at different creatures, even insects, like, is this Mike Tyson or is this Einstein?

• 30:20Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 30:21Lex Fridman?

  Like, cause one or other kinds of personnel, like, is this a New Yorker? Or is this a Midwesterner? Or is this like a San Francisco barista of the insects? Like, there's all kinds of personalities. You never know. So you can't like project, like, if you run into a bear and it's very angry, it could be just the asshole New Yorker.

• 30:43Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, sure, sure.

• 30:44Lex Fridman?

  As opposed to-

• 30:45Paul Rosolie?

  What are you saying about New Yorkers, man?

• 30:47Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. Point well made. So speaking about communicating with the dove, you first met the crew in the Amazon. You talk about JJ as somebody who can communicate with animals. What do you think JJ is able to see and hear and feel that others don't, that he's able to communicate with the animals?

• 31:08Paul Rosolie?

  When I say this is the most skilled jungle man I've ever seen, and I know so many guys in the region,

• 31:17Paul Rosolie?

  he has libraries of information in his cranium that we cannot fathom. It's just, it's just stunning. Like, you know, I have seen him use medicinal plants to cure things that Western doctors couldn't cure. I've seen him navigate in such a way that he's not using the stars. He's not using any, any discernible, you know, it's like, it's like when elephants, sometimes like you'll watch a herd of elephants and they'll be like, yo, let's go, we're going this way. And you'll see them sort of communicate, but there's no audible sound. They'll just decide that they're going that when they all do it. JJ has this way in the jungle of, you know, he'll stop and he'll go, wait. And you go, what is it? And he goes, There's a herd of peccary coming. And I'm like, where? Based on what?

• 32:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Paul Rosolie?

  You know, and he's like, just wait, you'll see. And he'll sit there.

• 32:06Lex Fridman?

  You think that's just experience?

• 32:07Paul Rosolie?

  It's incredible experience. It's, it's, it's growing up barefoot in the Amazon. And the gift is that he can speak fluent English. And so when I bring tourists and scientists or news reporters down there, he can communicate with them. He's actually good on camera because he doesn't care about cameras.

• 32:26Paul Rosolie?

  And like, you know, for instance, we were, we were, we were walking up a stream a few months ago. And I went, hey, look, jaguar tracks. And he went, oh. And I was like, what? Jaguar tracks? And he's like, no, look, look harder. And I was like, the, the toes are deeper than the back. And he was like, uh huh. And where are they? And I was like, by the water. And I was like, the jaguar's drinking. It was leaning to drink. And he was like, that's right. He's like, now look behind you. I look behind me. And there's scat. There's a big log of jaguar shit sitting there. It's got butterflies all over it.

• 32:56Lex Fridman?

  Fresh?

• 32:56Paul Rosolie?

  Pretty fresh. And then there's another one that's less fresh. And so he's, he's teaching me as he does, he's going, look at this, look at this. Is that one as fresh as this one? No. And then he goes, now look up, look up. There's three vultures above us.

• 33:10Paul Rosolie?

  The kill is near us. The jaguar has been coming multiple times to the river to drink as it's feasting on whatever it killed. And he's going, it's within 30 feet of us right now. And it's like, I'm like, oh, look, impressions in the sand. He's like, I just drew 19 conclusions from that. It's like watching Sherlock Holmes at work. It's just-

• 33:26Lex Fridman?

  Constructing the crime scene.

• 33:28Paul Rosolie?

  Incredible.

• 33:31Lex Fridman?

  Does that apply also to be able to communicate with the actual animals? Like, read into their body movements directly? Uh, into their, whatever that dove was saying to you, you'd be able to understand? Or is that all just kind of taking in the complex structure of the crime scene, of the interactions of the different animals, of the environment, so on? Like, what is that, that you're able to communicate with another creature? That he was able to communicate with another creature?

• 33:57Paul Rosolie?

  He knows the intention of pose. He knows the habits. He knows the perspective. When, when, when he talks about animals, he'll talk about each species as if it's a person. So he'll say, oh, oh, the, the jaguar, she never likes to let you see her. And so he'll come back from the jungle and he'll go, oh, I was watching monkeys and this, I, this jaguar was also watching the monkeys, but I was being so quiet. She didn't see me. And then when she see me, she feels so embarrassed and she go. And he'll tell you this story like as if he had this interaction with like his neighbor. And, you know, and he'll be like, oh, the pukakunga, it never does that. You won't see it do that. And so one, one time he caught a fish and I, I was such a big fish. It was this big, beautiful pseudo platistoma,

• 34:39Paul Rosolie?

  this tiger catfish, this amazing old fish, and they're all excited to eat it. And I felt so bad watching this thing gasp on the sand. And I went, you know what? We don't need this. This is for fun. Threw it back.

• 34:50Lex Fridman?

  Oh, no.

• 34:51Paul Rosolie?

  And then I took my hand and I went, and I made like drag marks, like, so I could say, oh, it, it, it snuck back in the water. And so he walks up, he looks at it and he was like, I hate you. And I went, what? No, I said, I must have, it must have just, he went, that's not what happens. He goes, it goes like this when it go, he knew the track of a fish. And I was like, oh, yeah. And I was like, all right, JJ, I'm sorry. I'll catch you another fish.

• 35:16Lex Fridman?

  Uh, so stepping back to that way you opened, Mother of God.

• 35:19Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 35:20Lex Fridman?

  Uh, who was Santiago Duran and what secret did he tell you?

• 35:23Paul Rosolie?

  JJ's father was, uh, at some point he was a policeman. At some point when he was a teenager, he was working on the boats that before this little gold mining city of Puerto Maldonado, uh, grew. The only way to get supplies in was to take canoes up the Tambopata River, up to the next state, which is Puno and, and where mules would come down from the mountains with supplies. And then he'd pilot the boats down, but they didn't have motors at that time. So he would be pulling the boat. So he was, he became this physically terrifying man.

• 35:57Paul Rosolie?

  And I met him when he was in his eighties and he was still living out in the jungle by himself. And I mean, he's seen an anaconda eat a tapir, which is the, you know, a cow sized mammal in the Amazon. He'd seen uncontacted tribes face to face. He once killed an 11 foot electric eel, opened the back of the thing's neck, removed the nerve that he says was the source of the electric. Then he cut his forearm, placed that nerve into his forearm, wrapped it with a dead toad and claimed that it would give him strength through the rest of his life and continued to be a jungle badass until the day he quietly leaned back at a barbecue and ceased to be alive.

• 36:38Paul Rosolie?

  The man was incredible, but the secret that he told us was that if you want to find big anacondas, you know, if you want to see the Yakumama, he was like, you have to go to the Buaio, the place of boas, the, the place that we came to call the floating forest. And so he sent us there and it became like this, this pilgrimage and, you know, in the Amazon, the, a lot of the creation myths are based around the anaconda coming down from the heavens and carving the rivers across the jungle. And if you look at the rivers, it looks like that. It looks like the path of an anaconda crawling through the jungle. It's even the right color. And so from the reference to the tribes of women, the Amazons, to the anaconda mother, everything in the Amazon is very feminine based, even the,

• 37:23Paul Rosolie?

  even the trees, the largest trees in the jungle, the mother of the forest, the madre de la selva is the capok tree and it's just this monster tree, these beautiful ancient trees. And that was the beginning of the transition that we made from me being like, I hate school. I want to go on adventures. You know, Jane Goodall got to do all this amazing stuff. I'm just a kid stuck here. To, to eventually becoming something that had to do with where my identity became the jungle, where my life became the jungle. The, the secret that he told us opened that door because when we started working with these giant snakes, it started getting attention. It started getting people to go, what are you doing?

• 38:07Paul Rosolie?

  And it started, it started allowing me to have experiences that, that solidified and nailed down the fact that this wasn't just like a weekend retreat. This was, this was something that, that I was born to do.

• 38:20Lex Fridman?

  And gave you more and more motivation to go into these uncharted territory of the Yakumama.

• 38:28Paul Rosolie?

  Yakumama.

• 38:29Lex Fridman?

  Which, just to step back, what nations are we talking about here? Is there some geography? What are we talking about? Where is this?

• 38:37Paul Rosolie?

  So I'm in Peru.

• 38:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Paul Rosolie?

  We're in Peru. And so Peru-

• 38:39Lex Fridman?

  Which is a South American nation.

• 38:41Paul Rosolie?

  Peru's a South American nation. Brazil has 60% of the Amazon, which is unfortunate, because anything that happens politically in Brazil has a massive impact, impact on the Amazon. Peru has the Western Amazon, and Ecuador has a little bit of the Western Amazon. And the Western Amazon is where the Andes Mountains, the cloud forests, which is a mega biodiverse biome, falls into the Western Amazon lowlands. And so you have these, the meeting of these two incredible biomes. And that's what makes this like superlative, incredible, you know, glowing moment of life on earth. So yeah, we're in Peru, in the Madre de Dios, which is the mother of God, which I always thought was

• 39:23Paul Rosolie?

  such a beautiful, you know, the jungle is the source of all life. And so we were with the Eseha people, and they belong to a community that's called Inferno, which was given by the missionaries who, when they tried to go bring these people, Jesus got so many arrows shot at them that they just called it hell. And so Santiago Duran helped unite these tribes that were, that were sort of scattered through the jungle and get them status, government recognized status as indigenous people. So he was sort of a hero. He was sort of a legend for a lot of the stuff he'd done out barefoot with just like a rifle and a machete in the jungle. He, he had, he had 19 children? And the last one, the,

• 40:04Paul Rosolie?

  the, I think the 20th child that he adopted was a refugee from the shining path that floated down the river. And he just took him in. And you know, this is, this is just a guy that was a, you know, everything he did, like when he died, the whole, the whole, the whole region showed up. It was, it was, he was somebody. So just the fact that I know him gives me street credit. Like the fact that I knew him, I can go like, oh, I knew Santiago. And people are like, no. I'm like, yeah.

• 40:28Lex Fridman?

  So you had to get integrated to the culture, to the place, that me, in every single way, which is, which is tough for you for the being- From from New York.

• 40:36Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. Yeah, it could have been tough, but it was I took to it, you know, the jungle. They they were very, you know, JJ is teaching me about medicines and we were doing bird surveys and, you know, taking data on macaw populations and JJ was just like, you really want to like, he goes, you got to sleep. And I was like, I only have a few weeks here. I don't know if I'm ever going to come back. I'm never going to sleep. So we'd be out every night looking for all the wildlife we could. I wanted to take photos. I wanted to see things and and then, you know, the the exchange came with that. He was like, you know, I'm terrified of snakes. And I said, well, I've always worked with snakes. I said, I'll teach you how to handle snakes. And then we just had this like little exchange. And when I left after my first time back in 2006, you know, I said, I said,

• 41:18Paul Rosolie?

  how can I help? And and they were like, look, you know, we're out here trying to protect this, this little island of forest that is going to be bulldozed. And and the more people that you can bring, the more knowledge and the more awareness that you can bring to this, it'll help. And so really, at that age, at 18 years old, I sort of started dabbling with the idea of that I could be part of helping these people to protect this place that I loved. And of course, at that time, that idea seemed like too large of a dream or too large of a of a of a challenge to that I could actually impact it.

• 41:56Lex Fridman?

  So what was the journey of looking for these giant snakes of looking for anacondas?

• 42:04Lex Fridman?

  And what are anacondas?

• 42:06Paul Rosolie?

  Anaconda is the largest snake on earth. So you have reticulated pythons in Southeast Asia. They're actually longer. But anacondas are these massive boas that give live birth. And unlike a lot of other species, an anaconda starts off, you know, a little two foot anaconda, just a little thicker than your finger, a little baby. And they're food for Cane toads, herons, crocodiles, you name it, they're, they're, they're pretty harmless, defenseless. But as they grow, they're eating the fish, they're eating the crocs, and then they grow a little more and they're eating things like capybara and they're eating larger prey. And then at the end of their life, a female anaconda, you're talking about

• 42:45Paul Rosolie?

  a 25, 30 foot, 300, 400 pound snake with a head bigger than a football. And these things, that means that they impact the entire ecosystem, which is very unique.

• 42:57Lex Fridman?

  Moves up the food chain to become basically.

• 43:00Paul Rosolie?

  An apex predator.

• 43:01Lex Fridman?

  Apex predator.

• 43:02Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. The, the apex predator of the rivers. And so.

• 43:05Lex Fridman?

  That's so interesting. It's just eating your way up the food chain.

• 43:08Paul Rosolie?

  Your way up the food chain, if you can survive. And like they, you know, they're constantly at, at war with everything else. But, you know, so I showed up in the Amazon. I was like, so where the anacondas at? And they were like, oh, no, no, it's not like that. They're like, it's, you, you have to find these things. They're, they're subterranean. They're living in the special swamps. They're, people kill them. And so, we went to the floating forest after we'd come back from an expedition. We'd caught like a 12 foot anaconda. And it's, now it's become like this, like classic photo of me and JJ with this anaconda over our shoulders. And we were like, we, you know, we 12 days out in the jungle on a hunting trip. And we, we came back and we showed his dad. And Santiago looked at us and he was like, that's the smallest anacondita I've ever seen. He's like, you guys are pathetic.

• 43:51Lex Fridman?

  Oh, man, 12 foot.

• 43:53Paul Rosolie?

  And he was like, look, you go to the, go. He was like, go. He's like, I'm giving you permission. Go to the boi, go to the floating forest. And so we went to this place and we reached there at night. And it was me, JJ, and one of his brothers. And his brother took one look at it and was like, I'm out. And he started walking back. And me and JJ get to the edge of this thing. And, and this is our friendship. It's both these two idiots pushing each other farther and farther. And like, I like put a foot on the, on the ground and it all shook. And the stars are reflecting on the ground. And what we realized is that it's a lake. With floating grass on top of it. Yeah. And there's islands of grass floating on this lake, very life of pie. And the tops of trees are coming out of the surface of the water.

• 44:36Paul Rosolie?

  And so we start walking across this and JJ's going, these are big anacondas. And I'm going, JJ, that's a two foot wide, smooth path, snaking through the grass. And there's no anaconda that big. Yeah. He was going, shh, they're listening. I said, they don't have ears. He goes, they're listening. And it's like, we're, we're walking and we're walking. And then it's like, maybe it's like 1 a.m. or something. And it was just like one of those moments where we saw it at the same time. And we're standing by the tail. And the snake was so big that, I mean, this must have been a 25 foot anaconda, dead asleep with a, with a probably a 16 foot anaconda like sprawled across her.

• 45:20Paul Rosolie?

  And they're laying in the starlight and we're floating on top of a lake, standing there in the middle of the Amazon. And JJ just, I just, I could feel the blood drain out of his face. And as like a, however old I was, you know, maybe 20 years old. I just said, if I, if we could somehow show people this, we'll be on the front cover of National Geographic and we can protect all the jungle that we want. And so I tried to catch it.

• 45:48Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. So I jumped on the snake. And the only measurement I have of this animal is that when I wrapped my arms around it, I couldn't touch my fingers. Yeah. And so I was, you know, my, my, my feet were dragging. And to her credit, this anaconda did not turn around and eat me because her head was, you know, this big. And, and she went and she reached the edge of the, the, the grass island. And she starts plunging into the dark. And so I'm watching the stars vibrate as this anaconda is going. And I had to make the choice of either going headfirst down into the black, which no, thank you, or stopping and just keeping my hand on this thing as it raced by me. And I just felt the scales and the muscle and the power go by. And then eventually taper down to the tail until it slipped away into the darkness.

• 46:32Paul Rosolie?

  And I was laying there just panting. And I turned around and went, JJ, what the fuck? Like, where were you, man? He was just like completely white, circuits blown. And I had to go then like, kind of like take care of him. I was like, you okay? And he was like, no. He, you know, he just couldn't. And so we came back with that. And then after that, we were like, okay, we have clearly, clearly the parameters of reality that we thought were possible are, are, are just a tiny fraction of what's out there. Like we, we now that that sort of recalibrated us. We were like, okay. We're, we're rubbing up against things that are bigger than we thought were ever possible. And so we were like, okay, now we need to, we need to concentrate on this.

• 47:10Lex Fridman?

  So how dangerous is that creature to you, to, to humans?

• 47:15Paul Rosolie?

  To humans, not at all. I mean, Mike, um, one, our, our cook's uh, father-in-law was, was eaten by an anaconda, but like, you know, then again, like

• 47:25Lex Fridman?

  The way you say that. Tell that story. Sometimes it happens.

• 47:28Paul Rosolie?

  It happens. I mean, come on, every now and then somebody gets stung by a bee and dies. Like, you know, it's, it once in a while it happens, but you gotta have a really big anaconda, really hungry. And like, anybody that works in the wild, I mean, just, you know, if you, you walk up to a crocodile, even a giant Nile crocodile, you walk up to them, most of the time they're gonna run into the water. They don't want confrontation. They hunt in their way, on their terms, sneaky. You're not gonna see him. And so with an anaconda, it's like, yeah, if you're, I mean, the guy who got eaten, like, if you're drunk and you go to the edge of the water and you go for a midnight swim by yourself in an Amazonian lake, I mean, whose fault is that?

• 48:04Lex Fridman?

  But if you jump in an anaconda and try to, uh,

• 48:06Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Lex Fridman?

  Try to hold on, then you're safe.

• 48:09Paul Rosolie?

  Apparently. I mean, I think I've, I think at this point, we've, you know, the research we've done, I think I've, I've handled or caught, you know, over 80 anacondas in the field and not one of them has bitten me. They always choose flight over fight. They're like, just let, leave me alone. Let me go. I'm just gonna crawl under this thing. They're not an aggressive animal. I mean, no snake, no, I actually like, I kind of like, the only time I get particular with like, you know, the words is like, people go, that's an aggressive, black mambas are aggressive. And I go, no, no snake is aggressive. A rattlesnake is gonna rattle to say, hey, back up. Cobra is gonna stand up and show you its hood. And people go, oh, look, he's being aggressive. No, he's not being aggressive. He's going, don't step on me. Don't make me do this. They're actually being very peaceful.

• 48:53Paul Rosolie?

  That's the way I look at it, because if there's a cobra in the corner of this room right now, he would crawl under the curtain and we'd never see him again.

• 48:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's like Genghis Khan, before conquering the villages, he always offered for them to join the army.

• 49:05Paul Rosolie?

  Doesn't need to be like this.

• 49:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, join us. Nobody gets destroyed. If you want to be proud and fight for your country, then uh.

• 49:14Paul Rosolie?

  Then.

• 49:15Lex Fridman?

  We're gonna.

• 49:15Paul Rosolie?

  Oblige him.

• 49:17Lex Fridman?

  Exactly. Okay. So how do you, how do you catch, uh, actually, let's step back because there is, in part, you are a bit of a snake whisperer. So what, what is it that,

• 49:30Lex Fridman?

  that others don't understand that you do about snakes? What's maybe a misconception? Or what, what is, uh, what have you learned from the language you speak that snakes understand?

• 49:42Paul Rosolie?

  I don't know. It's just, it's an animal that has, has many times in my life, I've been responsible for helping. You know, I started catching snakes when I was very young. I'd watch Steve Irwin and go out and catch a garter snake or a black rat snake in New York and,

• 49:58Paul Rosolie?

  and then I had a rule. I said, I have to catch a hundred non-venomous snakes before I'm allowed to handle a venomous snake, if I ever need to handle a venomous snake. And then, you know, I was on a trail one time, I think in Harriman State Park, and some guy, you know, like some big hero, he tells us, you know, he's like, back up. I'm gonna get this. And he like picks up a stick and he like goes to like assault this poor copperhead that's sitting on the trail. And so like at like 16 years old, I had to go and like shoulder this guy out of the way. And I like got the thing by the tail and used a stick to very gently just put it off the trail. Copperhead was not gonna do anything to him, but he wanted to, you know, beat his chest and show his wife that he was tough.

• 50:34Paul Rosolie?

  But then in India, you know, I've lived in India for five years at this point, in and out, you know, periodically. And, and snakes are always getting into people's kitchens. One time we had a king cobra get into someone's kitchen, an 11 foot snake, like a monster, like a god of a snake. This thing stood up, you know, would stand up, he'd be able to look at you over the table. And this terrifying monster thing, um, giant gorilla dog thing, like, we caught it with one of the local snake catchers and we brought it out and he goes. You know, I wonder why I was in the kitchen. Uh, yeah, looking for food and they go, no, they eat snakes. King Cobra, Ophiopagus Hannah, they eat snakes. And he goes, she's thirsty.

• 51:19Paul Rosolie?

  And so we got a bottle of water and we got footage of this and we, she's standing up. She's going, don't make me kill you. Don't make me kill you. You're scaring me right now. I don't want to kill you. We took the bottle of water and we poured it on her nose and she started, she started drinking. You could see, you could see her just drinking and the snake just took this long drink. She drank a whole water bottle. And then said, thank you so much and crawled off. And it's like, to me, the fact that people are scared of snakes, they have symbolic hatred of snakes. You know, you, you know, if someone's evil and sneaky, we call them a snake. And like, to me, it's like, when I take volunteers or researchers or students out into the jungle and we find an Emerald tree boa or an Amazon tree boa or, or a vine snake.

• 52:01Paul Rosolie?

  And it's like, there's this, it's one of the few animals, like you can't really catch a bird and show it to people. You're going to scare the bird, its feathers are going to come out. You might give it a heart attack. Snakes, you can lift up a snake. You know, if there's a snake in the room right now, I could lift it up and say, Lex, here, this is how you hold it. And we could interact calmly with this thing and then put it back on its branch and then it'll go. And I've seen what that does to people. I've seen how, the wonder in their eyes. And so to me, snakes have always been this incredible link to teach people about wildlife, about nature.

• 52:29Lex Fridman?

  Because they have naturally a lot of fear towards this.

• 52:32Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 52:32Lex Fridman?

  Creature and to realize that the fear is not justified, is not grounded, or is not as deeply grounded in reality. Of course, there's always New Yorker snakes, right? There's always going to be an asshole snake here and there.

• 52:45Paul Rosolie?

  Coming for me, man.

• 52:49Lex Fridman?

  Well, okay, so back to the anaconda. How do you catch an anaconda? Like what, uh, how do you handle, because it's such a 25 foot or even 12 foot.

• 52:57Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 52:58Lex Fridman?

  These giant snakes. How do you, how do you deal with this creature? How do you interact with them?

• 53:03Paul Rosolie?

  We had to learn how to do that because one of the first ones we caught that I would say maybe like a 16 footer, which is no joke of a snake, you know, girth of a basketball, let's say. Um, you know, we're on the canoe and this is, this is the early days. Like, you know, now we're at a whole different level, but this is back when we were barefoot and shirtless and just guys in the Amazon.

• 53:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 53:24Paul Rosolie?

  And JJ's like, you know, I just listened to him. He'd be like, get off the boat. You come from the top. We're gonna come from the bottom. So, okay. I just did as I was told. I came in, the snake is all curled up, dead asleep. She's got some butterflies on her eyes, trying to get salt and stuff. And all of a sudden, I see the tongue. So, so I'm like, she's awake. And I'm like, guys, guys, guys, she's... And they're, they're paying attention to not crashing the boat, to getting over there. And we're all trying to run. Snake starts going into the water. So I run ahead, grab this snake, get her by the head. So you got her by the head. You think, okay, can't, she can't get me. I got her right behind the head. And it's about this thick, the neck.

• 54:01Lex Fridman?

  What's that feel like? Sorry to interrupt. Like grabbing this thing with this giant head?

• 54:06Paul Rosolie?

  It's exciting. It's amazing. It's, it's scary.

• 54:09Lex Fridman?

  How, how hard is it to hold?

• 54:10Paul Rosolie?

  It's not that hard to hold. The scary part is the moment of, it's like, if you've ever done like a cliff dive or something, it's that moment where you go, do it, do it. The time, like, do it. And if your body's going, do not do that.

• 54:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Paul Rosolie?

  And then you're like, I gotta just do it. And you do it.

• 54:24Lex Fridman?

  Because you can't just gently like flirt with it. You have to grab.

• 54:27Paul Rosolie?

  No. And it's like, it's like crossing the street when there's a bus coming. It's like, if you hesitate, it's more dangerous. You know, so like, you just, you go for it. And I got her. And I was like, I got her. And then a coil goes over my wrists. And all of a sudden, my wrists slap together. And you feel this squeeze that can crush the bones out of an animal bigger than me. And the next coil comes very quickly over my neck. And now I'm on my knees with my arms tied. If I wanted to let go of the snake, I couldn't. And my shoulders are coming together. And my collarbone is about to break. And I tried to yell for JJ and all that came out was, there was nothing. And so that's what they do to their prey, you know? So I attacked, as far as the snake knows, I attacked. She doesn't know that. I just want to measure her.

• 55:06Lex Fridman?

  You, you started as the big spoon, but then the, the snake became the big spoon.

• 55:10Paul Rosolie?

  Very much became the big spoon. And I was, I would say I was 15 seconds away from having my entire rib cage collapsed. And then JJ showed up and grabbed the tail and just started unwrapping this thing. And then we got. But now we have a system. Now we know like, you know, I'm always, I've done, I've gotten more head catches than anybody. So I'm usually point guy. And you know,

• 55:30Lex Fridman?

  You're the, you're the, the first, the, the point guy.

• 55:34Paul Rosolie?

  I'm the point guy.

• 55:35Lex Fridman?

  The, the, the, taking the big risky.

• 55:37Paul Rosolie?

  Yes.

• 55:38Lex Fridman?

  First step.

• 55:38Paul Rosolie?

  Yes. Although the, it could be argued that there's a, a similarly large risk for the tail guy, because anaconda's defense is to take a giant projectile shit. And so the person that gets the tail is gonna smell like anaconda for like, at least a week.

• 55:52Lex Fridman?

  Yes, it's the least pleasant. You're taking, you're taking the, the most dangerous one there. They have the least pleasant job. This is fascinating.

• 55:59Paul Rosolie?

  But what's really fascinating though, is that because they're the apex predator, they're, they're eating the fish, they're eating the birds, they're eating everything. And everything in this riparian ecosystem is absorbing the mercury that's coming off the gold mining in the region. And so anacondas can be indicative for us of how is mercury moving through this ecosystem? And this is a region where we've lost hundreds of thousands of acres to artisanal gold mining, where they use mercury to bind the gold. They cut the forest, burn the forest. And then they run water through the sand and the sand particles have bits of gold in it, not chunks, but just little, almost microscopic flecks of gold. And then they use the mercury to bind that. And then they burn off the mercury and that vapor goes up into the clouds.

• 56:43Paul Rosolie?

  Just like everything else, it's all connected down there. And then rains down into the rivers. And so the people in the region are having birth defects from the amount of mercury that's in the water. And so we were starting at, at one point, when we were doing most of our anaconda research, we were learning things like these animals actually aren't just ambush predators, which is what most of the literature would tell you is that anacondas are ambush predators. No, they actually go hunting. They'll go find clay licks and salt deposits and they'll wait there. They'll actually pursue animals. And we were trying to find, take tissue samples to find out if anacondas could be used to study how mercury is moving through the ecosystem. And so that was really, it became, can we use these animals not only as ambassadors for wildlife? Because everybody wants to see the anacondas, but also.

• 57:28Paul Rosolie?

  You know, what can we learn from studying this very, very little understood apex predator?

• 57:32Lex Fridman?

  And one of the things you can learn is how mercury moves through through the ecosystem, which can damage the ecosystem in all kinds of different ways.

• 57:39Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, it's it's brutal, man. The the gold mining, what that's happening down there is is. It's funny because we've been hearing a lot recently about like the cobalt mines in Africa. And it's like where we are in the Amazon, um, we were down there with ABC News. I want to say like a year and a half ago, um, with my friend Matt Gutman, who's the chief correspondent for ABC and we, he wanted to see the Amazon fires. He wanted to see some wildlife. He wanted to see the areas that we're protecting. And then he goes, I want to see the gold mining areas. And and I'd never gotten in so deep, but we we met these Russian guy. You can't go with the Peruvian. They will kill you. Like our lawyer's father was was assassinated for standing up to the gold miners. There was two Russian guys, though, who had a legal mining concession somehow

• 58:24Paul Rosolie?

  way out past the machine gun guarded limit of the Pampas, which is where they do all this gold mining. And we got in there and took footage of the desert that is forming in what used to be the headwaters of the Amazon rainforest. And it's like, there is a massive global scale ecological crime happening down there that you can see from space from this unregulated gold mining. And the cops can't go there because they will be murdered. It's completely lawless.

• 58:52Lex Fridman?

  What's the machine gun limit exactly?

• 58:54Paul Rosolie?

  It's the border of this area that they call the Pampas, which is where the rainforest has been cut and completely destroyed. And it looks like Mars. It's just sand. And inside of this area are gold miners. And we, you know, we tried to get in there to film years ago. And there's just a lot of guys with machine guns who don't let that happen.

• 59:14Lex Fridman?

  And what the Russian guys have.

• 59:16Paul Rosolie?

  The Russian guys had access somehow. They'd come down with a bit of money and they had a new system. Yeah. And actually, what was interesting is while I was in there, they're very friendly and really, really too friendly, uh, gold miners. And they, uh, one of them, while I was there, he, uh, you know, he kind of tapped me on the shoulder. He was like, you know, look at those guys. He was like, those guys over there? He goes, I just heard them say your name. And he goes, that's not a good thing. He goes, they know exactly who you are. He goes, I wouldn't keep posting to Instagram about gold mining in the Amazon. And I was like, thanks for the warning. And then, you know, in June, somebody pulled up beside me on a motorcycle and I got a more stern warning, but.

• 59:55Lex Fridman?

  They pay attention to the flow of information because they don't want the world to find out.

• 1:00:00Paul Rosolie?

  Oh, the last thing they want is to be shut down, but the gold miners are notorious for, you know, just whacking people and throwing them in a, in a pile of, you know, gold mining leftovers. It's really like, like the Peruvian government has to get the military to go after them. Like the work we've done with gold miners, converting them into conservationists has all been like, I mean, I've seen the Peruvian Navy come down and literally blow up gold mining barges and, you know, it's, it's, it's a war. It's a war being fought in the Amazon.

• 1:00:31Lex Fridman?

  So it's, it's possible to convert them into conservationists? What's that process like? Or is that like, you say that in jest?

• 1:00:40Paul Rosolie?

  No, I say that in absolute sincerity. We, we went upriver, up the Malinowski River several years ago, and I think it was 2018, and everyone, everyone was like, you are going to die. Like you will be shot and killed. And the reason we were able to do it with relative safety was that the gold miner that we were going with was the brother-in-law of one of my closest friends down there, our expedition chef and one of the directors of Jungle Keepers. And they said, look, you can go, just keep a low profile. And so I went up with a photographer and we spent a week there and dead animals everywhere, deforestation everywhere. I mean, the things that we saw were so horrible. And we're living with these gold miners that are, you know, they're, they're, they're getting their gold, they're burning off the mercury.

• 1:01:25Paul Rosolie?

  I watched a guy smoking a cigarette, burning the mercury off of his gold with the, with the vapor going straight into his face with his child right there. I mean, unbelievable negligence of just sanity, just, and then, and then towards the end of the week, the Peruvian Navy comes down the river and everyone starts scrambling. And I was like, I'm just going to sit here with my hands up because, you know. And they didn't even stop. They they found the gold mining barge. You know, they have a floating thing in the river that just plums the bottom of the river, just sucks all the all the sediment up. And they stopped and they strapped a bunch of explosives to this motor. And good lord, the the the sound of this explosion and there was just hot metal raining down all over

• 1:02:08Paul Rosolie?

  the place. And then they just went, a bunch of guys in fatigues, and they just kind of like looked at us like peace. And I sat there with this gold miner and I went, now what? And he went, well, now I gotta go get a new motor. And I went, why don't you just do something else? And he goes, what else is there? And I went, look what we do. And I sat there with my phone and I was like, see this? These are pretty tourists and we feed them food and we show them tarantulas and macaws and things. And he looked at this and he went, wow. He goes, you, he goes, that looks like so much fun. And I went, it is so much fun. And so we show people, we bring students to the jungle. He goes, so you're saying if I build you a lodge, you'll bring people? I said, yeah. And I came back a year later and he sat there with a with a chainsaw, a hand saw and some nails.

• 1:02:51Paul Rosolie?

  And he cut down like 17 palm trees and he built an ecotourism lodge.

• 1:02:56Lex Fridman?

  So you give them another channel of survival, of making money?

• 1:03:00Paul Rosolie?

  And that's what we've been doing through Jungle Keepers for loggers and for all kinds of extractors is just saying, look, what do you make? You make $15 a day destroying the ancient trees of the jungle. What if we paid you $35 a day to have a uniform and a job and health insurance and security? And you just protect it and use all of the jungle knowledge you've gained as a logger to protect this place?

• 1:03:25Lex Fridman?

  Who are the loggers trying to to destroy the Amazon? Can you say a little bit more about it? Is that as a threat to the the Amazon rainforest?

• 1:03:36Paul Rosolie?

  A lot of them are really close friends of mine. They're they're they're people that need to make a living. And they're jungle people who, you know, the rainforest is a very challenging, especially the Amazon is a very challenging environment. So you have these people who they have a chainsaw, they have a job opportunity, they go out and they cut the trees. And a lot of these guys grew up fishing, they grew up in the jungle, they know how to do it. And so for them, it's a way to like, they also love it. So this is the thing, these are outdoorsmen, these are guys that love the jungle. And so they, you know, in the 90s, we had the mahogany boom, where they went out after the mahogany and you can almost can't find a mahogany tree in the jungle anymore. And and if you want to talk about like carbon sequestration in the rainforest,

• 1:04:19Paul Rosolie?

  the the ancient hardwoods hold like 60% of the carbon of the whole rainforest. They have an outsized disproportionate mass from from that ancient density of the wood. And so these these these loggers go out and they cut the wood that's most valuable. And then they bring it back to town and they sell it. And then people like us buy it and put it on our kitchen floors. And, you know, and so

• 1:04:43Paul Rosolie?

  the thing is, is I, you know, when I got to the Amazon, it was, you know, loggers are the bad guys.

• 1:04:49Paul Rosolie?

  And if you talk to, you know, a lot of like the PhDs that I worked with down there were, you know, always very at odds with the miners, at odds with the with the loggers. And then I'd be with JJ and JJ would sit down and he'd be like, hey, let's pour a drink. Oh, they have masato. Let's all sit down and like, we'd all be chilling and throwing them back with a bunch of loggers. And and then those, the opportunity through through not vilifying these people came to be like, oh, these are, these are, these guys are great, you know? And then, of course, out in the wild, every now and then something will happen. You'll see somebody's boat flipped over and you go, you go help them out. And then that that creates a certain type of kinship.

• 1:05:24Lex Fridman?

  So they're ultimately people who love, who love the same thing you love.

• 1:05:29Paul Rosolie?

  Often, yeah. Even if they don't love it, they're people that aren't necessarily looking to destroy it. I've met loggers who have looked at at trees they're about to cut and gone, ah, this is a shame. Start it up. You know, they're just like, this is where the paycheck comes from.

• 1:05:44Lex Fridman?

  Let's come back briefly to anacondas.

• 1:05:49Lex Fridman?

  Can you tell me, uh, this whole situation with discovery is eaten alive? There's some drama and controversy around that. Can you explain that whole saga with discovery with with your whole effort? Maybe outside of even the drama, the the initial thing,

• 1:06:07Lex Fridman?

  which I now feel you're sufficiently insane to actually do of being eaten by anacondas. Is that actually possible to survive something like that?

• 1:06:15Paul Rosolie?

  I mean, if it anaconda swallows you while you're wearing the suit that they made, maybe. But that was, in hindsight, whether that was the result of, look.

• 1:06:26Paul Rosolie?

  I go to the jungle and you start seeing these beautiful places, these incredible species. You start developing a relationship with these animals. And then you watch it get destroyed. Every year, we watch it burn. Every year, places that are crucial to my soul, I have seen leveled and turned to ash. And at some point, we started going, someone has to do something about this. And you look to your right and you look to your left and there is no one because it's the middle of the Amazon. And the rainforests have been being destroyed since the 70s. It's a cliche. And so we started trying to do something about it. And so I started

• 1:07:10Paul Rosolie?

  putting a little bit more emphasis on publicity, a little bit more emphasis on getting the message out there. And so I started trying to see how, what was going to work. You know, you start firing shots in the dark and seeing, and you know, JJ's going, you have to help us do something. And I'm going, okay. You know, and so from 18 years old, now, now I'm 23 years old. And all of a sudden, this place isn't, isn't foreign to me anymore. It's, it's home. And, and so

• 1:07:36Lex Fridman?

  You're trying to think of all the different ways you can bring attention to this place that you care about that's being destroyed.

• 1:07:41Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. You're standing next to a boulder of progress, of destruction. And it's about to roll onto the forest and just destroy it and snuff out all that life. And no one's there to do anything about it. And so you go, is there any way that I could put myself in front of this boulder and hold it back? And you're talking about, you know, the globe, the global economic reality. It's just, it's just such a massive, it's systemic.

• 1:08:09Lex Fridman?

  So what's the most dramatic possible thing I could do?

• 1:08:13Paul Rosolie?

  Exactly. So when you find yourself flown to LA as a 23 year old dude, and you're sitting there with some guy, you know, who's like spinning a pen and got his feet up on the desk and going, you know, what can you show us down there? And you go, I could show you the biggest anaconas in the world. And we could talk about mercury and bioaccumulation. And we could show people how these animals are misunderstood. And we go on a big expedition and we could be the coolest show ever. And he goes, yeah. Not good enough. Okay. And so those that that that that cycled through a bunch of times. Then someone at some point in one of those meetings said, you know, what if we show people that anacondas really can eat humans? And I went, how is that a good show? You want me to feed someone to an anaconda?

• 1:08:54Paul Rosolie?

  And I said, I said, I mean, I kind of joked like, what if, you know, I said, the only way that's feasible is if you like, make a suit with a breathing apparatus and let the snake eat you and then come back out safely and make sure you don't hurt the snake. And they were like, kid, you're on. And I was like, oh, shit.

• 1:09:11Lex Fridman?

  So I should mention as a small tangent, I think I mentioned to you offline, uh, due to travel troubles, where I traveled to the totally wrong part of the United States, um, on my way to Boston. And on my way to Boston, I did a conversation with, uh, Mr. Beast, Jimmy. And I got a chance to hang out with him for the day. And one of the things we did is have a lengthy brainstorm session with his team, or I was, I was observing it.

• 1:09:38Paul Rosolie?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:09:40Lex Fridman?

  But it was interesting because he's probably way better at that conversation that you had with the, with the guy in LA.

• 1:09:48Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Lex Fridman?

  Than the guy in LA. Obviously, because he's made, he's revolutionizing entertainment and he's also doing philanthropy.

• 1:09:56Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:57Lex Fridman?

  Which he's trying to figure out how to help the world with that kind of stuff. So I would love to actually, I'll send him a message to see what, what his thoughts, just brainstorm. He's so strong at this.

• 1:10:07Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Lex Fridman?

  Literally take the situation you're facing.

• 1:10:09Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:10Lex Fridman?

  Here's the place that I really care about is being burned down, is being destroyed.

• 1:10:16Lex Fridman?

  What's the sexy video?

• 1:10:18Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. Well, how do you get, how do you get people to watch something that's, you know, we all change the channel when they show us the kids in Africa with the swollen stomachs. Nobody wants to see it. And it's like, with the rainforest that like, we know, we know, we know. And I'm going, I could give data all day long. I could show photos of burning forest. And so I was looking for what would do it. And so the eating alive thing, without spending too much time on a, on a massive misstep was, I agreed to do it. They paid me at the time more money than I had made before, which I very much needed because nobody pays you to be a conservationist. So I was a very poor 23 year old that was like, yes, I would love that, please. And I thought, you know what? This is the start of a TV career.

• 1:10:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:01Paul Rosolie?

  We got, we got shafted so bad. I mean, they used, somehow they changed our voices. They changed the things we said. They changed the message of the film. There was one point where we had caught a 19 foot snake and I was holding her head and I said, this is such a beautiful animal, the queen of the Amazon. This is such a great moment for me. I kissed her on the head. I said, she's made so many babies. Look at the scars. I was talking about just the poetry of this incredible dragon. And then the producer goes, yeah, yeah, that's great. Listen, if that was to bite you, what would happen? And I was like, oh, well, if it bit you, you know, you'd bleed out because it would lacerate down to the, that's what they put in the film. And so day of, they didn't show me the film until the night before I went on Matt Lauer's

• 1:11:43Paul Rosolie?

  show and I said, I am not endorsing this film. And they had called it expedition on the call sheet. They'd called it expedition EA, expedition Amazon. All of a sudden they changed it to eaten alive. And I went, wait, guys, wait, wait, wait. I said, you're going to make people think that it actually happened, not that we're attempting it. And they, and I say, I'm not. And then they called me and they said, you better, you're going on live TV tomorrow. They said, you let us know what level of control we need to show for you, right? It was a very threatening phone call. And so I had to go out and smile for the cameras and endorse something that was a train wreck. And the, the scientific community was like, you're an idiot. We don't want to ever see you again. I lost a lot of opportunities. PETA came, which, you know, PETA, whatever, but PETA came out. People were like, you, you,

• 1:12:28Paul Rosolie?

  you were trying to hurt a snake, which I would never do. And then the American public was like, you know, you said you were going to get eaten by a snake and you didn't. And so everyone was pissed. I basically had to exile myself to India for like six months and just, I mean, I had death threats coming through all my messages. People were furious with me.

• 1:12:43Lex Fridman?

  What gave you strength to that? How difficult was that psychologically? Just everything you care about being completely kind of flipped upside down.

• 1:12:53Paul Rosolie?

  I've spent so much time on the ground with the local people, learning from the wildlife. It's such a devout and important thing to me. And it got turned into a sideshow. It got turned into a joke and then not just a joke, it got turned into that I'm somehow bad to animals. You know, I'm, I'm irresponsible scientifically. Jimmy Kimmel told me to have sex with a hippo as my next stunt. Like, it was like, it got really ugly and it misfired so bad. And when you hear these like motivational speakers talk about, you know, you've just got to keep trying and sometimes you're gonna fail hard. It was like, that one, I got hit in the head with a baseball bat. That one was tough. And at the time, I was like, I'm fine.

• 1:13:37Paul Rosolie?

  And I was like, I'm gonna go away for a while, you know? And, and I learned a lot, though. Like, at this point, I'm still glad I did it. Because, man, did I learn a lot about what a, what a roomful of people that you don't know, who could look you in the eye and shake your hand and say, trust us. Oh, boy.

• 1:13:54Lex Fridman?

  Do you, do you have, on a human level, resentment towards discovery, towards the people involved? Were you able to forgive them?

• 1:14:03Paul Rosolie?

  I don't care. It, it, it literally, that's what they do. You know, they literally put out a documentary saying that mermaids were real. You know, it's my-

• 1:14:10Lex Fridman?

  Wait a minute, wait a minute, they're not? Listen.

• 1:14:15Lex Fridman?

  I said, did- I'm not even touching that one.

• 1:14:18Paul Rosolie?

  It is true. It is true.

• 1:14:20Lex Fridman?

  The document, there is a-

• 1:14:21Paul Rosolie?

  There is a documentary where they duped a bunch of scientists who were like oceanographers and they like showed them ancient footage of, you know, mariners saying that seals were mermaids. Who cares? It's, it's, it's, it's, I was young. I got brought to Hollywood and I got spit out the other side. And that's on me. That's not their fault. You know, you, there's that, you know, you don't, the, the, there's that parable about the frog who gives the scorpion a ride across the water. And then at the end, he says, I'll give you a ride, just don't sting me. And they get to the other side and the scorpion stings him. And the frog goes, why did you do that? And the scorpion goes, I'm a scorpion. That's, it's not their fault.

• 1:14:55Lex Fridman?

  It's my nature. But now that you've become much more well-known and much more successful, what you do, you have a platform. Can you return to those people and use it, the machine, to get more and more attention? Is that something you work on? Or do you prefer to work completely outside?

• 1:15:15Paul Rosolie?

  I think that most of the success that we've had now in protecting the rainforest and it's the levels that we've reached are so far. I think back to those barefoot days of catching snakes with JJ in the boat and now the massive ecological reserve we have and the team of rangers and the converted loggers and all of that is because of the ability to communicate and to show people, but that's all been through social media. And so I'm open to the fact, you know, if, if, if somebody came and gave a sort of like Bordenian pass where they said, look, you can be yourself, you can swear, you can fart, you can smoke, you can do whatever you want to do, go out there and show us the real thing. I would love to, but now I know how those contracts need to be. I need to have

• 1:16:00Paul Rosolie?

  right to refusal and they can't change them. And so I'd almost rather just do it like the way I think like Mr. Beast does, does stuff where it's like you just, you get a crew of guys and some seed money and go film the episodes and put it out. Exactly. I mean, a committee never helped real art be better. It has to come from the, the, the source of inspiration. So you get, you get, I think, you know, you get JJ and a crew of people or the guys in Africa that I'm working with right now doing elephant conservation and like, but you gotta show real. I mean, look, that's why, that's why, I mean, look, that's why Joe Rogan isn't, is, is important right now. That's why you're important right now is because it's not being filtered through this ridiculous system of, of polishing it and dumbing it down.

• 1:16:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's why Joe has been an inspiration. You don't need a, a crew of a bunch of people. You don't need a crew, period. All you need is one or two other people and that's it. And in my case, you don't need anybody. I've been doing this. I, by requirement, I just need to be by myself. There, there's a few other folks now that help with the editing and so on, but it's just they make life more awesome as opposed to a boss that's, that tells, like a creative director.

• 1:17:09Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:10Lex Fridman?

  Somebody told me, actually, I was visiting. L A, I think it was in L A, that they were saying that now for all intimate scenes in Hollywood movies, there's an intimacy director. So when there's a two people having sex, there's a third person that ensures that on film, so it's not real, but there's still intimacy. There's a third person that ensures that like, everyone is comfortable and the actors say that this like always ruins the chemistry of the scene.

• 1:17:40Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Lex Fridman?

  And so it's a very Hollywood thing. I understand that it's creepy.

• 1:17:45Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, I understand. Thanks, Harvey Weinstein.

• 1:17:49Lex Fridman?

  And it's usually, I think, comes from the director pushing things too hard. If you just leave it to the actors, they know their boundaries, they can control their own boundaries. So the intimacy director is more for like the director pushing thing, you know, there's Werner Herzog.

• 1:18:02Paul Rosolie?

  I understand the, I understand the logic. Like, let's make sure that we don't have anything happen here that shouldn't be happening. I get it, but I, yeah. But, but no, I think that authenticity is, is, is the greatest currency. And I think that in order for me to tell the stories that I can tell, like, you know, what changed the game for me was, I want to tell you this story.

• 1:18:22Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 1:18:23Paul Rosolie?

  So in 2019,

• 1:18:27Paul Rosolie?

  the, the Amazon fires started popping off and we had just gone to, to film, like a month earlier, we'd filmed like a small documentary and they'd been following me as if I was on a, as if I was on a solo, which, you know, we did the best we could. I, I lived on my own. But we, as we were driving, we passed a spot where the flames were 70 feet tall. The forest was being destroyed and I went out there with my phone, which overheated in like two minutes and said, you can't use it. But I, for a second, I was out there in the flames, picking up animals and throwing them off to try and just get them cooled off. I was trying to get snakes out of there. Everything was, the birds are flying. And I fucking lost it. I, I was red eyed. I was crying and I was going, this is happening every fucking day. I was screaming and it's the first time.

• 1:19:13Paul Rosolie?

  That I'd done that because I've seen the burning so many times and I just lost it that day and I don't know what made me pull out my phone because usually in those intense moments, I I say, forget the documentation. This is real life. We got stuff to do and I'm doing, I'm not documenting. And then a month later, I'm home and I'm in New York and all of a sudden I see these articles like, you know, the Amazon's burning worse this year than it was last year and blah, blah, blah. And I was like this, you know, fucking and I threw it up on Instagram like eight o'clock at night. And I'd never like I'd never cursed on Instagram. I don't know, you know, why I just never did. And I my phone was on a hundred percent and I put it on top of the refrigerator and I went to bed. I woke up in the morning and my phone was on the floor on two percent and

• 1:19:55Paul Rosolie?

  it was ringing off the hook. And it was like the news and they're like, are you the guy that posted that viral video about the Amazon? And I was like, what?

• 1:20:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:04Paul Rosolie?

  And that was the start. That's where it broke. And that's where we went from barefoot in the Amazon to, you know, all of a sudden, you know, I was talking head for three weeks and going around on all these news stations and all of a sudden I was like spokesperson for the Amazon and JJ's calling me and he was like, go, go, go, go, go like get us, get us that support. And it was just, um, you know, so, so communicating with people and bringing them into that reality and whether it's, you know, rhino poaching and elephant poaching or the Amazon being destroyed. It's like, to me, it's like being able to, to, to take people into that is, is something that I would love to do.

• 1:20:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And you do it directly with authenticity on your Instagram. People should definitely follow your Instagram. I think, I think Rogan follows your Instagram too.

• 1:20:48Paul Rosolie?

  Well, the end of that story actually kind of involves him because yeah, because, because I went to all these news outlets and I was living in green rooms and traveling around and I was all strung out and I hadn't seen anybody I actually know in a few weeks, which was starting to get to me. And I finally got home and I went to like a family party and everyone's like, dude, you've been, it's been crazy. And I was like, yep. And then I left and my cousin Michael calls me and he's screaming and I'm going, what, what, what, what, what? And he goes, Joe Rogan just shared it. Joe Rogan, you shared it.

• 1:21:15Lex Fridman?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:21:16Paul Rosolie?

  And everyone was losing their shit and it was so amazing. And it was like,

• 1:21:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:20Paul Rosolie?

  That's when it really took off. And what happened as a result of all of this.

• 1:21:26Paul Rosolie?

  Is that a Canadian entrepreneur who started Lightspeed,

• 1:21:32Paul Rosolie?

  reached out and several months later, after COVID, after that boom, you know, I'd been in the game for maybe 13 years or something. Had no money, no savings, no job, no nothing. And after that great publicity thing, nothing happened. The waves came and everything got real exciting. Everybody reached out and they said, we care so much. Nothing happened though, you know, we can run into battle, but if we don't have our arrows in the quiver, what can we do? And I actually, I made a phone call to my friend Mosin, right at the start of COVID and I was going through divorce and I was broke. And I said,

• 1:22:08Paul Rosolie?

  I'm gonna get a job. I said, I give up. So this is stupid. I said, the ecotourism business is done. Jungle keepers has dried up. We're done. And then this guy Dax de Silva called me on the phone and said, listen, I'm in. What, what do we gotta do? And so if, if the analogy was me and JJ and a few other people trying to hold this boulder back from just destroying the rainforest, all of a sudden Dax comes in like a titan and just puts his arm out and just goes, I'm gonna help. And he gave us the funding to start actually developing a ranger program, to start actually bringing loggers to be protectors of the forest, to be supporting smaller conservation things. And now we're protecting 50,000 acres of rainforest. We're protecting entire streams and ecosystems that I love. And we're soon going to double that. And it's like this, this whole thing.

• 1:22:52Paul Rosolie?

  So, um, yeah, the, the, the, the communication of these things is crucial. And I actually think it's incredible that, that social media has played such a big role in it.

• 1:23:03Lex Fridman?

  Well, I mean, uh, just, just cause I, I know Joe well and I love him so much. I definitely think, uh, you should do his podcast, but also just be friends with him. I think you guys, um, he's one, you know, not the meme, but he's one with nature. And not much more with the, I'm one, while I do appreciate and love nature, I also love, um, technology and robots and so on. So we're in that meme type of way, we're very, very different, but.

• 1:23:35Paul Rosolie?

  Well, either way, at some point, make sure you tell the guy, thank you, because it definitely really helped push us over that, that limit where, you know, if enough people see it, you get someone like Dax who, who, who says, I can help and I have the resources to help. And that, that changed our whole lives.

• 1:23:52Lex Fridman?

  He's everything.

• 1:23:55Lex Fridman?

  Back to the jungle. Uh, you had a bunch of interactions with jaguars. How are you still alive?

• 1:24:01Paul Rosolie?

  Like what? Man, dude, Jags, Jags aren't the, Jags, I'll tell you this, Jags are not the danger. The falling trees are the danger. Uh, I'll tell you some elephant stories and then you'll, then you'll, then you'll wonder why I'm still alive. But, um, Jags, I've, I've one, you know, so JJ started and Santiago, his dad started challenging me to do solos. Go out alone into the wild style. You know, I'd have a hammock, a headlamp, three days worth of food, some fish hooks, a machete. And that's it. And so like one of the stories that, that happened early on was I was out there and it was raining and I was lost and this is how we test your jungle knowledge. Can you survive out there? Do you know how to find food? Have you listened to the things that we taught you?

• 1:24:45Paul Rosolie?

  And there was one night that I was in a hammock and a jaguar came up and I was asleep when it happened. And she came up right next to my head and she was, and I could hear her smelling me. And then my first instinct was to, to, to turn on my headlamp and just the sound of my arm moving against the, the, the material. And she just, like she just, right here, I could feel her breath. And I just laid there in the dark. And that's one of those moments where you go, you really learn a lot about yourself. Because I wasn't scared. I, I felt like I understood the intentions of the cat. If she was hunting, I'd already be dead.

• 1:25:27Paul Rosolie?

  She was curious and I was lost and I didn't know if I was ever going to get out of that jungle. But what she did was energize me because it was an experience like the giant anaconda where I said, this is so wild. That it's, that it's so almost cinematically outside the realm of what I thought my life could be like. That it made me like, wait. Cause the previous day I was lost, tired, confused, kind of devastated, tail between my legs. After that, I was like, man, you've been waiting for this your whole life. Go get it. And I like woke up and I was like, I am gonna navigate, even though I've been in this swamp for three days, I'm gonna find my way out of this swamp.

• 1:26:05Paul Rosolie?

  And like, she just like breathed fire into me where it was like, it was like, if that's possible, if I could be six inches away from a jaguar's face. Then I got, I got that energy from her.

• 1:26:16Lex Fridman?

  So you're able to start to really hear and feel the jungle around you?

• 1:26:23Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:23Lex Fridman?

  That was a, that was a sign. Do you know what you're doing?

• 1:26:26Paul Rosolie?

  It really felt like a sign. I really did.

• 1:26:28Lex Fridman?

  How do you survive on a solo, solo hike through the jungle? What, what are the different components? What are the different dangers? You said you had a hammock, you had some food. What, what kind of food, by the way, are we talking about?

• 1:26:39Paul Rosolie?

  Nuts, stuff that won't go bad. Yeah. Cause you can't, so you can't really start a fire in the Amazon. Like, I'm a good fire. I mean, I camp all over the place. I'm a wilderness guide. Starting a fire in the Amazon is futile. In fact, a lot of survival manuals will tell you, don't do it. Cause if you're really lost, it'll break your spirit. You're not gonna be able to do it.

• 1:26:59Lex Fridman?

  That's dark.

• 1:27:00Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. They're like, don't even try it.

• 1:27:03Paul Rosolie?

  But you can still get like hypothermia from, if you get wet and you lay out in the jungle, you could, you know, you could still, exposure can still get you. So you want fire. I even, in the beginning, I used to bring like ramen noodles, which is, which is nutritionally is irrelevant. And so I started bringing like nuts and then supplementing that with fish, which forced me to become a very good fisherman. And now of course, JJ knows that he can like, they can cut certain roots and they bash it up and they put it in the stream. And the, the fish just float to the top and they take with them. So like, he's got like, he's got all the cheat codes. Whereas like, I'm sitting there with a hook and then he's like, he'll go, now find bait. And I go, bait. In the most competitive ecosystem on earth, good luck finding a worm. You can't do it. What does JJ do?

• 1:27:47Paul Rosolie?

  He takes the machete, looks at his foot, cuts a slug of callous off of his heel. Cause he's got this thick rhino skin. Puts that on the hook, catches a six inch fish, chops it in half, puts it on a bigger hook. And in 15 minutes, he's got a four foot giant catfish that could feed a family of 16. And he's happy. I'm sitting there and I'm like, I'm gonna try to like stick a beetle on a, on a, on a fishing hook. And like, you know.

• 1:28:11Lex Fridman?

  Do you have just a line and a hook or is there a rod too?

• 1:28:13Paul Rosolie?

  Just a line and a hook. And then you, you, you just chop a, you just chop a rod and tie it to the, you know, you just chop a little sapling.

• 1:28:19Lex Fridman?

  So are you still able to start a fire or no?

• 1:28:22Paul Rosolie?

  I like for the food that I bring to not be fire dependent.

• 1:28:26Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 1:28:26Paul Rosolie?

  And so if I have some nuts, I can, I can shove in a few enough calories to get me through the night. Or like, and leave a fishing line out and there'll be something there in the morning.

• 1:28:36Paul Rosolie?

  But yes, I can start a fire, but a lot of times what I'll do is I'll bring a flask and not with like alcohol, but with diesel. And so you have a tuna can and you put the diesel in it. This is what the local guys do. Everything I do, you know, I'm sure there's gonna be someone listening to this and like, how could you do that? And it's like, yeah, this is what we do down there. Sorry. Uh, it's a, it's a tuna can. You pour a little bit of diesel in it. It burns slow. You light it and you put your sticks, you make your pyramid over that. And eventually that will burn through the moisture. And finally you'll get a very reluctant little fire enough to burn, you know, to make yourself like a cup of tea or to pour that into the noodles, something, something. Or you just eat a fish raw.

• 1:29:14Lex Fridman?

  How important is it to stay dry? Is it basically impossible?

• 1:29:16Paul Rosolie?

  It's impossible to stay dry. You're wet all the time. You're wet all the time.

• 1:29:20Lex Fridman?

  What does that mean? That means infections are more efficient?

• 1:29:23Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. So yeah, I don't know if you saw the picture in my book where I have the.

• 1:29:28Lex Fridman?

  The yellow spots?

• 1:29:29Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:30Lex Fridman?

  So yeah, there's a picture with your like entire face consumed with yellow spots is basically, I guess that's MRSA?

• 1:29:39Paul Rosolie?

  Yep.

• 1:29:40Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:29:41Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:42Lex Fridman?

  So how did that happen? What uh, what was the infection like? And um, yeah. And how crazy are you for letting that infection stay in you for a prolonged period of time without treating it? Or you had no choice?

• 1:29:56Paul Rosolie?

  No, I did have a choice. I was nineteen years old and I was taking care of a giant anteater that was orphaned. And this is like my dream animal.

• 1:30:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:02Paul Rosolie?

  And she was mine. And my job was to teach her the jungle. And so when I started like noticing that I had an infection and that I was, I had, I think I had dengue at the time too. I went back to town, probably picked up MRSA in the hospital where I got tested. Came back into the jungle and then got progressively sicker and sicker and weaker and weaker. As I was two weeks, three weeks in the jungle. And then it got to the point where my vision went black and white and I passed out one day. And, and I don't know why, but at the time I had shaved that day. And when I woke up the next morning, I couldn't open my eyes because the pus had come out of my eyes.

• 1:30:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:40Paul Rosolie?

  And out of my, the pores in my face, all those little micro cuts and the pillow was stuck to my face. And I was stuck upriver with no help at nineteen years old. And also when you, when you see that picture, you can imagine that I assumed that my life was over. Cause I didn't know what it was. And I also didn't assume that, or at the very least, I figured I'd be disfigured the rest of my life. I didn't think there was any getting better from that. And so I remember sitting by the side of the river praying that a boat would come by. But it was the rainy season and there aren't going to be any boats because the river is psychotic. Um, and so it was a long time before I got back to town. And I didn't want to leave the anteater, but it became like, I was like, I realized I was dying.

• 1:31:19Paul Rosolie?

  And then I finally got a boat with some loggers, a death boat, just loaded with, these guys were, had, had gone into the jungle and shot everything they could and taken all the babies and they were going to go sell them. And so it was like baby monkeys and toucans and birds in cages and pieces of crocodiles and anaconda skins. And jaguar skins rolled up. And it was just like, I was just laying there with all these dead animals in the boat with all the flies on my face and. Got back to the hotel, called my mother, said, please book me a flight out like today, like today. And then I sat on the plane and somebody, somebody sat next to me on the plane and I had a hood on. And I do, I do remember that in my, in the haze, at this point, I was having trouble staying conscious. But I do remember that she like, looked over like trying

• 1:32:04Paul Rosolie?

  to see what was sitting next to her and then she got up and never came back. And when I got to, to immigration in New York, you know, the cop, he like takes my passport and he goes, yeah, he goes, so what were you doing in Peru? He's looking down and he goes, yeah, and he like holds up the passport, looks at the passport, looks at my face, he goes, Bo, buddy. What the fuck? And I said, no, that's what he was like, I'm trying to get home to go to the hospital. He goes, he stamps it. He goes, go, go, go, go. God bless. God bless. He's like, oh shit. And then they put me in the room in the hospital with like the hazmat suits and they didn't know what it was. And I spent like five days on IV antibiotics with like four different things running through my veins. And the, the doctors were like, don't let it go that close. They're like, you went real close on that one.

• 1:32:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's what that picture, I mean, people should check out the book just to see the picture. Because I imagine you just laying there, unable to see, have a fever probably. So you're like half hallucinating.

• 1:32:58Paul Rosolie?

  Yep.

• 1:32:59Lex Fridman?

  And there's no, there's no boat, there's no, no way out.

• 1:33:02Paul Rosolie?

  There's no help coming.

• 1:33:04Lex Fridman?

  Plus, there's this creature who you've become a parent of.

• 1:33:09Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:09Lex Fridman?

  That you love.

• 1:33:10Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Lex Fridman?

  Boy, that's a dark place to be as a 19 year old. I mean, most people have never, will never be in a place like that. Like, where did you find strength in that, in those, in that place?

• 1:33:22Paul Rosolie?

  I don't know. I just remember writing like a goodbye letter to my parents because I said, if I die out here. It was really dark. Like, it was, it was, it was terrifying. It really felt like it was the end. And I was writing, you know, if you find me out here, I'm sorry. And all that, all that type of stuff. And it was, you know, I don't know about strength. There's no strength. It was just like move forward. And at some point, it was like, if you'll take me down river, take me down river, you know?

• 1:33:48Lex Fridman?

  You just got lucky with the loggers, with the deathboat?

• 1:33:51Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:51Lex Fridman?

  That they found you? Well, how did the infection start, by the way?

• 1:33:56Paul Rosolie?

  I don't know. I really don't know. I mean, we always have some sort of little shit. But the thing is now JJ taught me that there's like three different trees that can cure infections. I didn't know this at the time. I didn't know the cheat codes. Now, there's, there's, if you have a small infection, you can use Sangre de Drago and it'll, it'll cure it right away. Like, let's say you have a botfly and it gets a little pussy. There's a fly living in your skin. You put that on there, not only will it kill the fly, but it'll heal the infection. Now, if you have a worse infection, you can go to Ojai, which is Ficus insipida, and you can use that. And that will completely heal, that will murder. It's like crocodile blood. It will murder infections. So like, forget Neosporin, that's a joke. These are heavy chemical compounds running through these trees and they know all about them.

• 1:34:36Paul Rosolie?

  And so, whatever it is, so now, at this point, that's no longer an issue, like, because we know how to handle it. Which, at that time, if JJ had been there, I would have been fine.

• 1:34:45Lex Fridman?

  Well, learn the hard way. So, these are open wounds and then there's creatures that start living in them? Is basically, what is it?

• 1:34:52Paul Rosolie?

  Well, that's separate. That's botflies. Yeah, there's, there's a, there's a creature that unfortunately, very, very, very unfortunately, likes to make its home inside the flesh of mammals.

• 1:35:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Paul Rosolie?

  And so, the flies attach their eggs to mosquitoes. The mosquitoes go and seek out warm-blooded animals. The eggs, microscopic eggs, fall into your skin and then begin to grow and sooner or later, you feel a twitch. And it's a worm living inside of you that's like vertical down in you and it's, it's eating you. And at first, it's not a problem, but when they get to about as thick as that pen, it starts to hurt because you've got a hole in you and they have a little breathing tube that comes up. And they breathe and they go back in and then they eat and they come back up to breathe and you have a, you have a friend living in you.

• 1:35:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:38Paul Rosolie?

  And it's-

• 1:35:38Lex Fridman?

  You've had one of those?

• 1:35:39Paul Rosolie?

  I've had lots of those. It's tough to take them out. They have hooks.

• 1:35:46Lex Fridman?

  How do you, do you have to?

• 1:35:49Lex Fridman?

  You gotta love the jungle. So how do you take it out?

• 1:35:51Paul Rosolie?

  You have to come.

• 1:35:53Lex Fridman?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:35:54Paul Rosolie?

  Uh, you gotta, you gotta put an irritant. So like a lot of times what we'll do down there is some, someone will take a massive drag of a cigarette and then they'll spit the, they'll, they'll power like exhale and get some of the, some of the tar, which also shows you how much tar you get out of a cigarette. And then with a knife and you, you put that right over the hole. And then, uh, you put slap some Vaseline or something on top of that. So they can't breathe. And eventually over the course of a few hours, they'll come up enough looking for air. And then you gotta grab them with a tweezer and try not to rip them because then you're going to get an infection. And you gotta squeeze from the, but it's a whole ceremony when people have botflies. We're all like, oh, it's botfly time. Let's go. And then like JJ will squeeze. He's got like pliers for thumbs.

• 1:36:35Paul Rosolie?

  He can like take a piece of your neck and you think he's going to break your skin. He'll just squeeze until this thing comes out.

• 1:36:43Lex Fridman?

  And you don't wanna?

• 1:36:44Paul Rosolie?

  You don't wanna.

• 1:36:44Lex Fridman?

  There's an open wound right there and you have to.

• 1:36:46Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. You don't want to bathe for a day or two after, until that closes. Cause otherwise you're going to have like water sloshing around in like a little pocket of yours. This is kind of gross.

• 1:36:54Lex Fridman?

  And that water might have other organisms in it.

• 1:36:57Paul Rosolie?

  Water in your skin tends to, yeah. I mean, the jungle water is clean. We drink it like, I drink the water fresh out of the stream.

• 1:37:03Lex Fridman?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:37:04Paul Rosolie?

  Well, it's just a giant filtration system, all those roots, the whole jungle is constantly purifying everything.

• 1:37:10Lex Fridman?

  People might be thinking about that with the jungle. Yeah. There's insects probably all over you all the time.

• 1:37:16Paul Rosolie?

  It's not as bad as you think. Like I've been to, to, to Finland, Lapland in the summer and the mosquitoes are horrendous. Like devastating. The Amazon in, in, in our area, if you're sitting in a hammock, reading a book out, you know, our, our research stations don't have walls or anything. Um, you, you're good for about one, one mosquito every half hour, which really is not a lot. I mean, it's worse than New Jersey. Like it's really not that bad.

• 1:37:43Lex Fridman?

  Tell me a little more about the, the little baby anteater, Lulu.

• 1:37:47Paul Rosolie?

  Lulu.

• 1:37:48Lex Fridman?

  They, they you've, uh, who you've rescued and had to sadly leave behind.

• 1:37:52Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. I just was always fascinated with giant anteaters or this, you know, German shepherd sized thing with Wolverine claws and these giant Popeye forearms and they, they excavate.

• 1:38:03Paul Rosolie?

  And termite mounds and they have this long tongue and their baby's right on their back for the first six months of their lives. And so they actually have this incredibly intimate relationship with their young. And it just so happens that this animal that I was wildly fascinated with, there was an orphan on the river and JJ was like, you love these things. And I was like, yeah. And so he went and he was like, hey, my friend, you should, he got, he got me the, the baby and we were like, we're going to rewild her. And so I spent like weeks and weeks and weeks, just like with this thing on my back, crawling through the jungle, teaching her to find ants, giving her milk, falling asleep with her on my chest. And their, their tongue is like 11 inches long at that age. And so she, when she wanted me to wake up, she'd fire it up my nose and it would come out my mouth and she'd, and

• 1:38:47Paul Rosolie?

  then if I tried to get her off me quick, she'd stick the claws in and you know, all my clothes, I have like, I have old, like, you know, now they're like, you know, like museum pieces with rips in them from, from Lulu's claws. Just able to also communicate emotion and feeling and all that. She needed it. She needed it. So if this animal didn't have the physical touch, if we didn't, if I didn't hold her all day long, she'd throw tantrums. She'd go shred something. She'd go pull down the curtain. She'd go ruin the woods. She'd start literally having a traumatic response to not having intimacy, which was shocking because again, on the scale of a cockroach to an elephant, you go, I didn't know that giant anteaters had such intense emotions. Like, but she did. And we, we, you know, and also taking

• 1:39:32Paul Rosolie?

  care of her forced me to, to explore the jungle from the perspective of an animal. So I got to like be an animal. And so there's only a few times in your life, in my life, where I've gotten to do that. You know, one was with her. Another time was living with a herd of elephants where I had to walk with them through the forest and like, see how they interacted.

• 1:39:56Paul Rosolie?

  Completely natural. And it's, it's, it's different. It's very different. And you realize like, just like a person's public persona, when they're out on the street in Manhattan, is going to be very different than when you're on the couch with them on a Tuesday night. And, and, and with wild animals, it's very much like that. You know, like if we see, you see a bobcat on a trail and it's going to look at you and glare at you and then go off. And it's like, yeah, but what's it like when it's in the den? And it's playing with its cubs.

• 1:40:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So that when it's looking at you, that's like the Instagram post it's making. The actual.

• 1:40:28Paul Rosolie?

  Doing duck face. Yeah.

• 1:40:29Lex Fridman?

  So you've, besides Amazon, you spent a lot of time in India. Can you tell me what you learned hanging out with a herd of elephants?

• 1:40:39Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:40Lex Fridman?

  Well, what should, what do people not understand about elephants? That's, that's beautiful to you. That's interesting to you.

• 1:40:47Paul Rosolie?

  First of all, I think that elephants should have government representation as like a subset of society. Like actually, they.

• 1:40:54Lex Fridman?

  They have intelligence?

• 1:40:55Paul Rosolie?

  They are so intelligent. And, and when you look at an elephant, so there's this question that keeps coming up of, you know, are we, are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? Can, can we, can we interpret the intelligence that we're seeing? And I've, I've, I've, I lived with a semi-wild herd of elephants in India for a while. And some of the things that I saw like changed how I view reality, to be honest with you. Cause you know, you watch a matriarch of an elephant herd walk up to someone that none of us knew was pregnant. And her trunk goes to her stomach. And then she calls all the other ones over and they're interested in this little human that, that they know that there's something in there. And they're, and they're all conversing about it and you go, whoa.

• 1:41:39Paul Rosolie?

  Or that every morning we'd wake up and the elephants didn't want the stream water. They didn't want the lake water. They didn't want puddles. They wanted the water from our well. We had like a stone well, you know, like a traditional. And every morning it's like run out of bed because all the elephants were going to come and they were going to rip the bucket off and destroy everything. But they wanted that nice, cold, clean water. And so it was like caring for elephants that were wild, that were sometimes getting shot at by farmers because if they went to try and rob some bananas. So these are sort of like delinquent elephants that were half wild and the forest department was thinking about, you know, getting rid of them, which whatever that meant. And.

• 1:42:17Paul Rosolie?

  I made really good friends with this one elephant and his name was Dharma. And Dharma had the, had the, this stuff doesn't, this is, it's hard to write the book I'm writing right now because none of it sounds real. He grew up around people because he was a tuskless male. So he couldn't hang out with the females because he was a grown up male. And he couldn't hang out with the males, the bulls, because he couldn't defend himself when they rough housed and everything. So Dharma would be like wandering around the forest, not knowing who to hang out with. And so like, there was one night, there was a tiger calling and we just heard. You could hear it echoing over the hills. And what does Dharma do? 2am, we hear Dharma show up. And he's same thing. He starts throwing a tantrum. He starts pulling shit over.

• 1:42:59Paul Rosolie?

  He says, takes a chair, throws it. We had bananas in the truck. Dharma walks up to the truck. It's like a Jeep. He walks up to the Jeep, smells it. He looks at me and he's like, you're gonna get out of bed? I'm like, no, I'm not gonna get out of bed. I was like, Dharma, you're a grown ass elephant. The tiger does this thing again and he's like, I need bananas to feel better. Pushes the truck up on two, two wheels. Oh, wow. Looks at me. Is this how you want it to be? And so I'm up, I'm up and I go and I'm like, please, please, please, please, please, Dharma, I'm rubbing his face. And he's like, he puts it down. He's like, all right, well then, then hit me. I didn't do it. So he lifts it up again. And so in the end, there was no way for me to outsmart the elephant. He wins. There was nothing I could do.

• 1:43:43Paul Rosolie?

  And so a lot of my job was taking him out into the forest and, and, you know, spending a little bit of time with him. I have this beautiful, one time I set up the tripod and I went and I was just, I was just journaling. And he would come and he would just like play with my hair and be like, hey, what's up? You know, and he just, he wanted someone to, to interact with on an emotional level. And, you know, when you think about elephants in terms of the fact that, you know, people go, oh, you know, they, they use medication to induce labor. It's like, yeah, that's not that surprising. They, they, they hold the bones of the dead. It's like, yeah, they have the best smell of pretty much any animal. That's also not surprising. They probably know exactly who that was, that bone. But they can navigate to water holes and communicate in ways that we cannot really figure out.

• 1:44:28Paul Rosolie?

  And so when you hear about people measuring elephant intelligence, you'll hear about scientists being like, oh, well, we gave it a, you know, a bucket with a hole in it. And then it had like a key and there was a rope. And you're like, bro, this is all human stuff. Can you go walking with them for three weeks in the wild and watch how they deal with the problems that they encounter in the forest? And so elephants have become, especially recently with the work that's been going, that I've been doing in Africa with VetPaw. I've just become so fascinated with elephants and, you know, elephants, the elephant, the African elephant population right now is down at 2% of what it was a few hundred years ago. We're really, we're really putting them on the brink of, you know, there's, there's

• 1:45:12Paul Rosolie?

  some elephants that are being born tuskless because we've, poaching has taken down the great tuskers to the point where now it's, it's actually beneficial for some elephants to not have tusks because then they won't have humans. But that's, that's like we've created deformed elephants. And so like now I'm gotten very concerned with issues of elephants.

• 1:45:32Lex Fridman?

  And tusks are fundamental to the interaction between elephants?

• 1:45:35Paul Rosolie?

  Absolutely. I mean, when males compete with each other, but also elephants use their tusks, you know, like they'll, they'll break a branch and they'll be like, this is a good branch. I'm going to eat the hell out of this. And they'll like hang it on their tusk and they'll like grab a bunch of other stuff. They'll like hold it, you know, ripping a tree up out of the ground. I just watched it two weeks ago as, as, I was watching an elephant. He got down on his knees and stuck his, his tusk into the ground and like leveraged up. He like Archimedes'd this root out of the ground and then was like, that's a sweet root. And then when he left, I went and I tasted the root and it was like sweet ginger. And I was like, I have no idea what this is, but he knew it was good.

• 1:46:10Lex Fridman?

  Do they use tusks for sexual selection, like to impress the ladies or no?

• 1:46:14Paul Rosolie?

  It's certainly involved in how, who, who has mating rights.

• 1:46:18Lex Fridman?

  Oh, who wins in the competition?

• 1:46:19Paul Rosolie?

  Who wins. I mean, if you've got the big tusks, and there are elephants out there, like the mammoth big tuskers that have tusks down to the ground, like huge. And when you see them, it's like seeing something unique on earth, unique in history, because we're at a point where we might lose those. There are only a few of them left and then they're so prized by hunters.

• 1:46:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's interesting because I, I forget what the actual conclusion on that is because there's some studies of the use of, the value of beauty in evolution, like birds?

• 1:46:48Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:49Lex Fridman?

  And peacocks and so on, that there's no actual. Value to it, but it plays a role in in sexual selection, meaning value like it's much easier to understand competition, like a tusk helps you defeat.

• 1:47:03Paul Rosolie?

  Sure.

• 1:47:04Lex Fridman?

  The competitor.

• 1:47:04Paul Rosolie?

  It's a tool.

• 1:47:05Lex Fridman?

  But I bet you there's a component to the tusk where the ladies go, god damn, that's a nice.

• 1:47:11Lex Fridman?

  Like, there's a visual, beautiful component. Maybe not. I don't know.

• 1:47:14Paul Rosolie?

  But what if what if beauty, though, as we're defining it, though, is is is symmetry and the the absence of yellow spots on your face and and

• 1:47:24Paul Rosolie?

  healthy looking hair? And so like, I think to us, beauty is sexually appealing traits that look good to mate with. And so.

• 1:47:32Lex Fridman?

  So that that nineteen year old with Marissa, well, everybody in the world would swipe left on that.

• 1:47:37Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:38Lex Fridman?

  At least sexually desirable object in the universe. Okay. What you mean, speaking of elephant intelligence, it's something I I think and and work quite a bit on as with artificial intelligence is what the philosophical question that comes up is what is intelligence? What is intelligent?

• 1:47:58Lex Fridman?

  Humans, Homo sapiens, are often thought to be highly intelligent. That's the reason they stand out. In your understanding of different species like the elephant, what stands out to about humans? Or are they just another animal? With different kinds of intelligence?

• 1:48:23Paul Rosolie?

  Well, we're certainly unique because we have altered the entire planet.

• 1:48:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:28Paul Rosolie?

  You know, the term, the Anthropocene. I mean, it's like we've literally created a geological layer of us, whereas other animals don't. And going back to elephants, it's like they also engineer their environment. If you're in a forest, like if you drop me in a forest on Earth, I could tell you in two seconds if there's elephants there because this twisted branches and excavated earth and they they're constantly gardening.

• 1:48:53Paul Rosolie?

  But I mean, look, look at us. I mean, there's we're we're clearly unique in nature, which which makes me not understand the the the anti-human sentiment that that so much of environmentalism has about like, you know, like we're we're bad, we're damned, we ruin everything. And it's like, I've seen the worst. I've seen the burning Amazon. And I'm still like, I love being able to share ideas with you and travel to places and FaceTime my family when I'm not around them. And it's like, I I celebrate a lot of what makes us human. And I it's almost like reality is this crazy video game. And it's like, if we could just figure out the right keys, we can pretty much do anything we can think of. And it's like,

• 1:49:36Paul Rosolie?

  I mean, poetry, art, I mean, you know, I'm the biggest animal lover in the world, but we are, we are, we are different. We really are.

• 1:49:46Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the ability to puzzle solve, create tools. What do you think is the coolest invention humans have come up with? Is it fire? What's the most impactful?

• 1:49:59Paul Rosolie?

  I feel like fire is fire. I feel like fire is kind of a gimme. I feel like the

• 1:50:03Lex Fridman?

  They didn't really invent it. They probably

• 1:50:05Paul Rosolie?

  Like the wheel, flying. I mean, flying. I mean, think of, think if you could go back in time to someone that never flew.

• 1:50:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:13Paul Rosolie?

  You know, a Sultan, an Egyptian king, George Washington, you know, and be like, you can fly. I mean, this just just on my way here.

• 1:50:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:24Paul Rosolie?

  And I fly way too much, but I was looking out the window at the clouds and going, this is unbelievably spectacular. It's just stunning. You know, as a kid, you you look at a cloudy day, and you go, this is the world is like this today. And then you get in a plane and you fly above the clouds and it's sunny up there and you go, oh, it just, it changes your perspective. It's like when people go to the moon and they come back and they tell you the pale blue dot, you know, just, I say, I say flying, I think the ability to fly. I mean, the fact that I could, I could get on a plane and be in India in, you know, 20, 22 hours is shocking.

• 1:51:01Lex Fridman?

  In terms of its usefulness, I would argue that's not in the top five. But in terms of its ability to inspire, there's somebody I forgot who told me this idea that

• 1:51:14Lex Fridman?

  There's something about the atmosphere, Earth's atmosphere, that allows you to look up and see the stars. Like, if we didn't have that, human civilization would not have happened. Meaning, like, being able to look up and see something out there would fill our, like, there's something that allows you to look up versus just look down. To, like, first, looking at your local environment.

• 1:51:37Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:38Lex Fridman?

  Be able to, like, wander and see, holy shit, there's a big world out there. I don't know anything. If, if, if you're able to look up and see that.

• 1:51:49Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:49Lex Fridman?

  That, that kind of humility, combined with the ability to dream about exploring.

• 1:51:55Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:56Lex Fridman?

  Maybe it just inspires the exploration. It's, it's kind of an interesting thought, given how inspiring, for example, the, uh, the extra upgraded, super cool version of flying, which is flying to other planets. I mean, there's going to be, hopefully, it's possible, this century, a child born, no, not this century, maybe this century, a child born on another planet that looks up, that looks back at Earth. And, and has to be educated by his, her parents, that, like, there's another place. There's another place.

• 1:52:35Paul Rosolie?

  That creeps me out.

• 1:52:35Lex Fridman?

  Where life is way easier.

• 1:52:38Paul Rosolie?

  Oh, God, it's so easy. There's water everywhere.

• 1:52:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly. People complain about Earth, man, Earth is really, really nice.

• 1:52:45Paul Rosolie?

  Really, really good. It's really, really good here.

• 1:52:49Lex Fridman?

  Water everywhere, anything.

• 1:52:51Paul Rosolie?

  Oh, man, I wouldn't even leave, given, like, right now, like, if somebody said, like, oh, you could, like, you could go to the moon, I'd be like, no, I'm good. If I died in space, I'd be so pissed. I love it here.

• 1:53:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but you're still, there's a longing to explore for you.

• 1:53:05Paul Rosolie?

  There's a longing to explore, but I, I really think I'm, I'm such a, like, my longing to explore is like rivers, streams, oceans, jungles, like, to me.

• 1:53:15Lex Fridman?

  Life.

• 1:53:16Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, I would, I would watch the hell out of the, the livestream of, of Elon touching down on Mars. Like, I'd be like, this is incredible. It's amazing that I get to be around to see this. I'm staying where I'll be right here.

• 1:53:30Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, but it's good that the human spirit pushes us.

• 1:53:33Paul Rosolie?

  Oh, it's amazing.

• 1:53:34Lex Fridman?

  What's possible and it does that for you. What just a out there questions. What's what's the most dangerous animal in the Amazon? Would you say mammal? Let's go mammal.

• 1:53:47Paul Rosolie?

  Dangerous mammal.

• 1:53:49Lex Fridman?

  Like dangerous in terms of you walking around doing the solo hike.

• 1:53:53Paul Rosolie?

  I'm going to disappoint everybody with this, but it's it's it's humans. It's nothing. There's no. If I'm out in the Amazon, there's nothing that's going to attack me. You know, and in India, you might have, you might have an old leopard or a tiger that's missing a tooth that decides your prey, or you might have an angry elephant that's in must that just decides to just decides to flatten you in the Amazon. You're not this real Jaguars won't even let you see them.

• 1:54:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:20Paul Rosolie?

  And there's really nothing else. One of my friends, a brilliant scientist friend of mine, Pat, got attacked by a rabid oslo lot once, but that's like a diesel house cat just having a fit, you know, it's wasn't the worst thing in the world.

• 1:54:33Lex Fridman?

  Just the assholes kingdom. Okay, what in terms of humans, you've said

• 1:54:41Lex Fridman?

  that the tribes, some of them uncontacted.

• 1:54:44Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:44Lex Fridman?

  Can be exceptionally dangerous. What's your experience with them? What should people learn? Is it? It's such a fascinating part of life here on earth that there's tribes that don't have much or any contact with the quote unquote civilized world.

• 1:55:01Paul Rosolie?

  I most of the people that I meet don't actually really understand how how isolated these people are, or how weird it is that we're sitting here and that we have iPhones and airplanes and all this stuff. And these people are living naked in the forest at this moment. And so. The thing, though, you know, I also was recently, somebody, somebody said, oh, there's like Paleolithic tribes. And it's like, no, no, just by default, they're modern tribes living now. They just happen to be living out in the jungle. And there's a huge debate about, you know, do we try and contact them and bring them in? And there's two camps of people on this who they said that it was, it was, it was the trauma of the rubber boom

• 1:55:43Paul Rosolie?

  that sent them out that far into the forest and made them terrified of the outside world. And so that's also what made them so hyper violent. I mean, there, there, I, there's, one of the guys we work with on our team, Victor was, and I think it was 2004. He's coming down river and he had a load of mahogany wood and he's piloting this boat. And he sent two people, husband and wife, ahead to go start cooking breakfast on the beach. So they could put the little kitchenette thing down and pick, put the propane. He sent them ahead as the, he's going nice and slow with the barge coming down the river. They go ahead, reach the beach, they get out, he starts cutting some cane to start making a fire.

• 1:56:25Paul Rosolie?

  Tribe comes out, no warning, they just start screaming, they start shooting arrows. The man instantly gets an arrow through the leg and it pins his leg so he can't run. He tells his wife, go, save yourself. And she does, she jumps in the water, there's arrows falling around her too. And as she's floating down the river, she looks back and the last thing she sees is these guys getting to her husband and beginning to rip him apart. As Victor comes down the river, this is a guy we work with every day. He comes down the river and sees his friend disemboweled, opened up, dissected. His parts are all over the beach, the beach is red. And they only found out what happened because they found her later on, holding on to a stick in the river. And they were like, what happened?

• 1:57:10Paul Rosolie?

  And she was like, they just attacked, they don't want people on their land. On the, on the, on the, the sort of the underground WhatsApp chain of the Amazon, they, a few in August, like this was not internationally known. Some loggers went up and tried to steal a few trees from where the tribes were. And then everybody sent the pictures of what the loggers looked like after a few days because the tribes porcupined them with arrows. They were laying there on the ground with just arrows sticking out of their bodies. And then eventually the authorities came out and looked and there was just these white bodies. I'll show you the pictures later. There's just these white puffy bodies with like the skulls sticking out. And it was like, you don't mess with these tribes.

• 1:57:50Lex Fridman?

  I wonder what are the, what's the mythology around that they construct around who these outsiders are? Are they gods? Are they demons? Are they humans? What, who are they? Who are we to them?

• 1:58:04Paul Rosolie?

  Well, you, you gotta go back to the rubber boom. The, the rubber barons went down there and at the start of the industrial revolution, the only way to get rubber was to mine it from the trees that are out in the forest. And so the only way to do that, because you can't make a rubber plantation in the jungle. The, the rubber, when it's in plantation form, when it's a monoculture, it gets this leaf blight and it all dies. Henry Ford tried it, it didn't work. And so what they did was they sent these people down who just whipped, burned, enslaved, raped and pillaged the people. It's one of the worst periods in human suffering that I've ever read about. One missionary said they were killing the locals the way you or I would kill a mosquito. They just went nuts. And so they sent them out and they would come back with rubber. And this would

• 1:58:48Paul Rosolie?

  go to fuel the industrial revolution for hoses and gaskets and tires and all this stuff that suddenly we needed. And it was during that time that these, these, these, you know, gangs of foreigners would go into the jungle to enslave the natives, that these uncontacted tribes went back into the jungle and said, not us. And they have six foot bows and seven foot arrows with bamboo tips. They, they make the bamboo tips into razor blades. And so when those things fly, actually, one of my rangers, one of the jungle keepers team was present when the tribes had come out onto the river and he tried to help them

• 1:59:31Paul Rosolie?

  because they're nomadic and they live out there. And so there's an element of like, brother, like, you know, they're trying to be like, you don't need to be like this. Like, we're friendly. So they sent a canoe across the river with bananas. And so he's up to his waist in the river and the tribes are right across the river. And, and.

• 1:59:50Paul Rosolie?

  They shot and he sees the arrow coming right at his head. And as he moved to the side, it hit him at the temple and sliced him back towards the ear, opening him to the skull. He's fine. But let me tell you something, when he goes and gets a crew cut, it's most badass skull, the scar you've ever seen, man. And so he, he always keeps it real short on that side, but, but even if you try to help them, they're not necessarily friendly. That's a tough, that's a tough lesson. Yeah. I suppose they have a point. They have a point and, and protecting them is, is a default of, you know, now that we're protecting all this ecosystems and all these other indigenous communities, it's like, we all sort of live with this knowledge that they're the hermanos, the brothers are

• 2:00:33Paul Rosolie?

  out there and that's the way they want to keep it. And so we just have to be respectful of like, you don't camp on certain beaches at certain times of the year because we know that they might be there. You really have to be careful about that. Have you yourself interacted with any? My interaction with them came on a solo where I pushed it a little bit too far. And I, I was planning to do a three week, this was like the big one. And I, I got dropped off by poachers up a river and I, I went past the point where they were like names. They, I said, what, what, what tributary are we on? And they were like tributary. And I was like, okay. And I said, leave me here. And I remember the guy being like, are you committing suicide? And he, he didn't understand that. I was like, no, I have a backpack and I have like food and like, I'm going to like take videos and have a tripod.

• 2:01:18Paul Rosolie?

  And I was like, we're cool here. They looked at me like they were like, goodbye. And I was like, all right. And I went up this river and, and again, like you just, you learn these things like, you know, it was only when I'd been alone for a week that you realize you're, you know, that's saying that like, oh, you're, you're born alone and you die alone. It's like, no, you're not, you're born into a room full of people usually. At the very least, your mother's there for everybody. And, uh, and so you've been around people probably, if you're a normal person, every single day of your life. You've seen dozens, if not hundreds of people. And all of a sudden you realize what a social creature we are. Because on day six, it gets weird. For me, it got weird. I know there's people that can do it longer.

• 2:02:01Lex Fridman?

  So what does that, what does that mean? Like longing for contact? Like, are you lonely?

• 2:02:05Paul Rosolie?

  Longing for contact, the distortion of reality in the sense that like, you know, you wake up and there's no one there and you start to, you know, you're going up a river. So I would, I would keep, I kept, I kept looking back down river and almost thinking of my life as something. It was almost like I had already died and I had gone to somewhere else and I was looking back on that life as like something that I had experienced. And then there, there came this panic of what if it's gone? Or like, what if World War Three broke out and I just don't know about it? My family in New York is vaporized and something just, you just, you're, you're, you're.

• 2:02:40Lex Fridman?

  Actually, your ability to comprehend and interpret reality kind of requires other people. It's not just that you're lonely. You need that contact to actually just perceive the world, make sense of it. All of that. So you start basically hallucinating in a certain kind of way.

• 2:02:56Paul Rosolie?

  I started feeling very uncomfortable. And it doesn't help also that like Santiago told me these stories where he's like, if you hear capuchins sounding not quite monkeys, if you hear capuchin monkey sounding not quite like capuchins, he goes, it's the tribe and they're coming to get you. And then the guy who was shot, Ignacio, they showed me videos where we saw them on the beach and they're communicating in monkey calls. They're using it as codes that we don't understand them, even though we don't speak their language. But they're, they're using animal calls. And so every night you go to sleep and then you go, did that tinamo sound off? And you're like, shit. You know, and it's really hard to fall asleep. And then like one night I, I messed up and I, I left a fish.

• 2:03:39Paul Rosolie?

  I like cleaned this fish. I ate like this huge fish. I just ate it to my face. You're, you're putting out like marathon levels of, of energy every day. Like, you know, Goggins would love solos. He'd go, this is awesome.

• 2:03:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. You eat the fish raw?

• 2:03:52Paul Rosolie?

  Uh, this one, I actually cooked it, but you know, the skeleton was laying there, right? Right outside my tent. Stupid. And in the middle of the night I wake up and I, I just could tell there was something there, you know, and then like you almost don't want to look. It's like when you're a kid at the basement door and you're like, is there a ghost? It's like, I like unzip the tent and I like open it up. And there's like 27 black caiman outside of my tent all looking at me like this. And like some of their heads are this big and they're like, there's fish there. Can we have it? And I'm like, holy shit. And like, you know, I was like, do I, I kinda like, had to like scooch the tent back and like, move back and let them have their fish. And there was a host of crocodiles outside of my tent.

• 2:04:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:32Paul Rosolie?

  But no, so then there was.

• 2:04:33Lex Fridman?

  Wait, how many?

• 2:04:34Paul Rosolie?

  Like 27, maybe. There's a lot. Big ones, small ones, medium sized one, every type. They were all there and their eyes glow in the night. You know, you shine a light at animals and they have a tape in them lucidum. And so their, their eye shine comes back at you. If you shine a headlamp at a, at a jaguar or a frog or almost every animal has a tape in them.

• 2:04:52Lex Fridman?

  These are croc. There's a whole lot of them.

• 2:04:55Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:55Lex Fridman?

  I thought, can we go back to the part of the conversation where you said the jungle is not dangerous? The humans are the most dangerous?

• 2:05:01Paul Rosolie?

  Did they eat me? No.

• 2:05:02Lex Fridman?

  Why didn't they eat you?

• 2:05:03Paul Rosolie?

  They wanted the fish.

• 2:05:05Lex Fridman?

  Is there some way of you interacting with them that shows that you're not a source of harm?

• 2:05:10Paul Rosolie?

  I don't believe so. I'm sure there's someone out there that thinks they can talk to crocs, but.

• 2:05:14Lex Fridman?

  Cause there's a, there's a story of you grabbing a croc by the tail.

• 2:05:18Paul Rosolie?

  Yes.

• 2:05:18Lex Fridman?

  What did you learn from that?

• 2:05:19Paul Rosolie?

  Learned to not always listen to JJ.

• 2:05:21Lex Fridman?

  So JJ was testing you to, uh?

• 2:05:23Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, to see how stupid I was.

• 2:05:25Lex Fridman?

  How do you hold the crocodile exactly?

• 2:05:28Paul Rosolie?

  You have to get them by the head, like an anaconda like this. And so.

• 2:05:31Lex Fridman?

  So you're one of the world experts at grabbing creatures by the head?

• 2:05:35Paul Rosolie?

  I wouldn't say world expert, but I've done a lot of it. Um, I also have, you see how there's like kind of a ball there? That's where a crocodile tooth went in that side and like came out that side of my, that was a really good chomp. And the watch I was wearing at the time, saved me because that, like that.

• 2:05:51Lex Fridman?

  Real fast, just chomp.

• 2:05:52Paul Rosolie?

  Just whack. Like somebody took a sledgehammer, you put your hand on the table and I just went, bah, really hurt. Um, shouldn't have been doing that.

• 2:06:00Lex Fridman?

  What, how did that, how did that come up?

• 2:06:02Paul Rosolie?

  Cause I caught a croc that was too big. So usually when we catch little caiman in the streams and we measure them to monitor the populations,

• 2:06:09Paul Rosolie?

  you get it by the neck and then I tuck the tail under my arm and I hold it. And you're talking about a little, you know, four foot croc, nothing. And I, I, this one, I dove into a, into a swamp and I caught like a six foot, spectacled caiman and her head is big. And I had her by the neck and I realized I couldn't get her tail under my arm because her tail was all the way back there and she started thrashing. And it was like probably croc number 375 that I'd caught and I just got a little cocky and I said, ah, she's, you know, I just, I just like grabbed her by a leg. I was like, I got this. And she just came back and tagged me and I went, okay, gonna go back to being safe.

• 2:06:47Lex Fridman?

  Just to linger on it, what uh, is it one of the, one of the bigger predators in the Amazon? What, and it's, is it going, are they going extinct, black caymans?

• 2:06:58Paul Rosolie?

  Black cayman were, I believe they were critically endangered for a while because for a while the fashion industry loved their skin. It's soft and it's black. Um, they're bouncing back a little bit now, you know? Like most animals, if you leave them alone, they'll be fine. I mean, crocs have been through, you know, how many millions and millions of years on earth before us? I mean, that's even the joke with, with the joke, but that's the grim reality of tiger conservation. It's, there was a hundred thousand tigers in 1900. Now there's 4,000 tigers left on earth. It's not rocket science. All you have to do is not bulldoze their forest and allow there to be some deer and tigers will be fine.

• 2:07:40Paul Rosolie?

  That's it. It's so simple. And that's like sometimes where I feel like I have the dumbest job in the world. I'm like, guys, please stop killing the things that keep us alive. The Amazon regulates our global climate, produces medicine, is home to indigenous people. It's beautiful.

• 2:07:59Paul Rosolie?

  Rainforests only cover 3% of the planet's landmass. Like it's not that much to ask.

• 2:08:04Lex Fridman?

  If you leave their home untouched, they'll figure out how to have sex and multiply. Except for pandas, apparently, because pandas you have to convince.

• 2:08:12Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. Humpbacks, humpbacks, they went down to, they went from 130,000 down to I think about 8,000. At whaling times. And then when we banned whaling, since that time, where I think we're back up to over 100,000 humpback whales. They've bounced back. It's a success story. We're not going to lose them.

• 2:08:30Lex Fridman?

  Okay. So you're in a, on a solo with crocs looking at you.

• 2:08:36Paul Rosolie?

  See, this is why you're good at this, you know, I would have lost, we would have been.

• 2:08:39Lex Fridman?

  No, that's pretty epic with the fish. That was your mistake.

• 2:08:43Paul Rosolie?

  That was my mistake.

• 2:08:44Lex Fridman?

  I don't understand how you're still alive. I mean, I, it's really inspiring.

• 2:08:49Paul Rosolie?

  When you come, we're gonna, I'm gonna show you. You told me you're coming, right?

• 2:08:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, 100% coming, but you know, if there's any place, I mean, um.

• 2:09:01Lex Fridman?

  Sort of a grim joke, but if there's any way to die, that's a good one. If I'm being honest.

• 2:09:08Paul Rosolie?

  It's a cool one.

• 2:09:09Lex Fridman?

  It's a pretty cool one.

• 2:09:09Paul Rosolie?

  It'll become part of the.

• 2:09:10Lex Fridman?

  Part of, yeah. I mean, there's, I'm not even like joking. There's a, there's a oneness to the whole thing. Ever, all the stories, just reading your work, looking at your work. It seems like you're a part of this machine that is nature, this incredible machine. Like, we all die. And we're all part of this big thing. That humans do have the capability to also construct narratives and stories and myths and tell them to each other and share them with each other and have more sophisticated ways, therefore, to communicate love to each other. But animals do as well. They communicate love, maybe more simply. Maybe more honestly.

• 2:09:54Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, so you were the crocs and the fish.

• 2:09:57Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, so I messed up. I left the fish out. Croc showed up at some intent. But in the end, it was fine. I backed off. They had their way with the fish and then they all started biting each other. It was fun to watch.

• 2:10:08Lex Fridman?

  Is that a general, sorry to interrupt, is that a general rule you want to not leave?

• 2:10:12Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, just like if you're camping in the Northeast, you don't leave like, you do a bear bag or a bear canister. You don't, you don't want to invite the wild animals. I really did mess up. I kind of was just like, you know, whatever. I do this every now and then. I get a little too cavalier. And the ocean has almost, almost taken me down for that a few times. But yeah, so the crocs, and then you keep going for a few days. And my plan was to get to a point where I reached the end of the tributary. And this had a very,

• 2:10:44Paul Rosolie?

  you know, again, for me, this is like a pilgrimage. This is like, this is like me going into the heart of the, the very center and soul and essence of everything that I am fascinated with, like as close to God as you can get, because you're leaving every type of security, every human relationship. You're also pushing all your chips in.

• 2:11:07Paul Rosolie?

  And so it's, it's. You know, every step I took further upriver, it got weirder and weirder and more intense. And every day and every moment it changed and I would, I brought pictures at the time, there's no way to keep a phone charged. I didn't have like a power bank or anything. You know, I brought pictures from home. I brought a, I brought a National Geographic magazine, something just to, you know, and there came a day, right when I was getting to the end, like to the point where the river was so shallow that it was just a trickle and I was walking on the rocks and the Andes Mountains were in front of me and I was like reaching the, the place and the music was swelling and then all of a sudden I saw smoke around the next bend.

• 2:11:53Paul Rosolie?

  And I, I, like my spine is reacting right now as I talk about it because I, I knew, I knew what I was gonna see because I knew that it was impossible for loggers to be out there. There's no motor that could take you, the boat would have run aground miles ago. And so I, I went, and this is the other, this is the other idiot thing. It's like, just turn around. Yeah. Just do it. I'm that kid though, when you see like a wet paint sign, like I walk by and I touch the wall. Yep. And so I, I, I went around the bend.

• 2:12:26Paul Rosolie?

  And, and I see, I see a few naked people on the beach and they see me. And we're like a good distance apart. It's there on the other side of the river. But, you know, arrow in hand, bow in hand, the, the intention of pose. They're looking at me. They're clearly conversing.

• 2:12:46Paul Rosolie?

  And that moment lasted for a, a long moment where I said, this is the part of the story where they are going to rip me apart, dissect me to see what I eat. I mean, every other story in the region that we've heard. That's the ending of it. If you're alone with these people, it's not gonna go well. And I have nothing to defend myself with. Um, and I just, I turned and I ran for like three hours and I got in the river and I swam for a while and all my food got wet. I mean, everything I just, you know, all

• 2:13:19Lex Fridman?

  Just ran for dear life.

• 2:13:20Paul Rosolie?

  Just ran for dear life. And, and my, my get out plan, the thing after I crossed the mountains and came down into the next tributary was I had a pack raft. It's a tiny little inflatable raft, good enough to handle rapids. And I inflated the pack raft. Once the, once the river was like six inches deep, I inflated the pack raft and I went, and I went for the rest of that day. Into the night, I went into the point that my headlamp died and I was just floating, floating in a raft down the Amazon and hitting into things. And I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pop this raft. So I got out of the raft, set up my tent and I was like, I need some sleep. I was freaking out. I hadn't had food and now, you know, hours and hours and hours. As soon as I fell asleep, my asshole brain comes up with the dream of that I hear voices. They're right outside the tent.

• 2:14:06Paul Rosolie?

  I just, you know, sleeping was worse than being awake. So I woke up, got back in the tent and then at one point it was really cool because one of those, one of the same black Cayman that had come for the, the fish as I'm going down river, he came right up next to me and the two of us were going and he was just like motoring down river, this giant, like 16 foot crocodile. He just like came up to me and like looked at me as I was going and it was funny because I wasn't scared of him. I was scared of them. And yeah, it took me like a week to get back to town. And, and again, the things you learn in these moments. The, the, you know, the appreciation for your parents, the, the, the, what a hug feels like. You know, when you, when you are faced with

• 2:14:48Paul Rosolie?

  pretty much certainty that you're not going to get those things again. Whether it's from MRSA or uncontacted tribes or, you know.

• 2:14:57Paul Rosolie?

  I find that, that it brings, it brings, it brings you this new joy for life where you

• 2:15:02Lex Fridman?

  Just being that close to death.

• 2:15:04Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. You go, you go, my God, this is all a miracle.

• 2:15:08Lex Fridman?

  It's sad because they're human, just like you. Actually, how different are they? Like if you were forced to interact for a week together where they can't, they're not allowed to kill you.

• 2:15:23Paul Rosolie?

  Like not allowed to kill me.

• 2:15:24Lex Fridman?

  What would they are they how fundamentally different are they do you think?

• 2:15:29Paul Rosolie?

  I don't think they're different. I think they're like any other Amazonian natives. They're they're tall. They seem to have tall genetics. And there's places, you know, again, there's there's what is known and then there's what we know down there like there's there's one community where I don't know whether it was like a bad rainstorm or something, but some kid from the uncontacted tribes did end up in a village. And so we he learned Spanish or he learned whatever dialect they speak in that village. And so he's told us a little bit about what life was like with them, but like they're just people. They're just people. They have their own culture. They know about medicines that we don't know about. They definitely have hunting practices that that we don't understand. They can hit a spider monkey out of a hundred and sixty foot tree with a bamboo arrow.

• 2:16:14Paul Rosolie?

  We can't do that. I mean, they are incredible hunters and also like living naked in the jungle with the botflies and the mosquitoes. I don't know how they do it like sometimes at night. And again, we don't have night vision, whereas almost every other animal does. And sometimes we'll be sitting, you know, on our, you know, at the research station at night and we'll be just drinking and like looking out and at the, you know, we'll do we'll scare each other. We'll go, you know, realize if they were out there right now, they could be looking at us. And it's like, the truth is, is that when it's dark out there,

• 2:16:46Paul Rosolie?

  they can't see. It's not easy to start a fire with matches and a lighter and gasoline. They do it with friction. They have some some beads on survival that we could really learn from.

• 2:17:02Paul Rosolie?

  Not to mention that then you have people that believe that they're actually the guardians of the extinct giant ground sloth. And what they're doing is, you know, living out there because they're protecting a secret population of previously extinct megafauna. But there's all kinds. I mean, this it's like you. You go into the crypto world so quick. I've heard so many people be like.

• 2:17:21Lex Fridman?

  But then again, you have to be humble at how little we know about.

• 2:17:27Lex Fridman?

  About that world, about the world of life. Like you said, there's so much of life in the Amazon that we don't, uh, creature with no names.

• 2:17:34Paul Rosolie?

  Tons of them. We could go out on a night walk right now and I could show you something that, you know, you, I've done it. You, you, you, you pick up a bug and you go, that doesn't look right.

• 2:17:45Paul Rosolie?

  That's not right. He's got three heads.

• 2:17:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:47Paul Rosolie?

  You know, and then you send it to, to the, the, the greatest expert on that genus of insects and, and they go, look, I got no idea. And you're talking to a world expert and it's like, that's it. And then 50% of the life is up in the canopy. And so like, we started climbing the trees, like rock climbing, like what Alex Honnold does, like, well, like I'll climb up 50 feet and then I'll put a safety, like I'm basically trad climbing. And then I'll climb up another 50 feet and I'll have JJ belaying me from below. And then he'll be like, oh, look, a snake. I'm like, JJ, pay attention. Like you get up there and the, the branches are as thick as this table. So you can like walk around freely.

• 2:18:25Lex Fridman?

  Oh.

• 2:18:25Paul Rosolie?

  It's like total like Avatar when they're in the floating islands. Like you can, you can go run around if that's what you want to do. Vermelliads, orchids, cactuses, because up there it's against the sun. So it's a different environment up there.

• 2:18:37Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:18:38Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:38Lex Fridman?

  Interesting.

• 2:18:40Paul Rosolie?

  And then you start seeing lizards and snakes and birds and things that aren't down on the ground. And so how many scientists have actually gotten to really spend time up there and really inventory the life? And that's, that's why when you hear about, you like it, it's like a taxonomical discussion of how many species there are on earth. They're like between, you know, 10 and 30 million. And it's like, well, that's a big, it's a big swing.

• 2:19:04Lex Fridman?

  What about stuff on the ground? So you mentioned some insects. What about bullet ants? So it's supposed to be the most painful bite in the world. You been bitten by one?

• 2:19:13Paul Rosolie?

  Seven or eight times. Yeah.

• 2:19:15Lex Fridman?

  What does it feel like?

• 2:19:16Paul Rosolie?

  Okay. So the first time that we ever did bullet ants, um, JJ said, you know, okay, this is what we're gonna do. He goes, you know, it's bullet ant roulette. We're gonna get a bullet ant. I mean, we get like chopsticks. You like pick up this bullet ant and they're big, they're big and they're tough, like you. He goes, we're gonna put our forearms together and we're gonna drop the bullet and clamp our forearms together and just rub and whoever whoever it takes, it takes.

• 2:19:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:42Paul Rosolie?

  Of course, JJ did not get stung and I did. And it hurts every bit as much as they say it hurts. It really let me have it. And then, and then I was like hitting my arm against the table to try and like kill it or get it off. But it was holding on and just like really injecting the venom. And, uh, yeah, really letting you have it. And then it, it travels up and it goes into your like lymph nodes and into your here and you get a headache. And, and I think the, the brilliant thing about the, the venom of a bullet is that it makes you feel likes, like this, this feeling of alarm. It makes you feel like something's wrong. You don't just go, ow, this hurts. Like it's like a bee sting or you go, ah, this really hurts on my hand. It's like, no, no, no, no.

• 2:20:25Paul Rosolie?

  Your whole nervous system is freaking out and you start sweating and then you get cold and then you're tired. Then you get a little blurry vision and it's like, that's actually that bad. I mean, now after six or seven, I get bitten and I'm like, kinda okay.

• 2:20:38Lex Fridman?

  So it's a full body, full mind experience.

• 2:20:40Paul Rosolie?

  It's a full body, full mind experience, but then there's places in the Amazon where they, you know, stick their hand in a glove with like 70 of them.

• 2:20:47Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:20:47Paul Rosolie?

  And I think Steveo did that, which I, I would, I just don't understand how you could do that without going into complete anaphylactic shock and dying, cause one really sucks.

• 2:20:56Lex Fridman?

  Uh, well, just like, just like we said, with animals and with humans, there's different kinds.

• 2:21:00Paul Rosolie?

  There's different kinds, certainly.

• 2:21:02Lex Fridman?

  Definitely a special, unique.

• 2:21:03Paul Rosolie?

  The first of a species.

• 2:21:06Lex Fridman?

  Um, whoo.

• 2:21:12Lex Fridman?

  On the point of uncontacted tribes.

• 2:21:18Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting to think about what kind of civilizations have there been?

• 2:21:25Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:25Lex Fridman?

  This is something that you've talked about a little bit. Graham Hancock has written about.

• 2:21:33Lex Fridman?

  Ancient civilizations, sort of challenging the conventional, the mainstream thinking about the civilizations that have been there in the Amazon. Can you steel man and criticize the idea, so the pro and the con of the idea that there have been ancient, advanced ancient civilizations in the Amazon? Like, how much do we know? What are all the possibilities of what's in the Amazon in this past?

• 2:21:58Paul Rosolie?

  So like, when Oriana went down the Amazon, the reports were that there was great civilizations in the Amazon. And then, you know, a few hundred years later, when people got to actually check up on this stuff, it was all gone. And so was that because of disease that we wiped out all these civilizations and these communities of people? Potentially, probably. Was he just wrong? Probably not. This is a guy that navigated by the stars back to Spain after building his own boat, like, or did he, you know, or was he trying to just, I don't know, I don't know. But there clearly is a long history of complex civilizations in the Amazon. Hundred percent. There's no one that can deny that.

• 2:22:38Paul Rosolie?

  The thing that I reacted to was that I've heard videos, I've seen moments in podcasts where the narrative becomes not, there's more ancient civilization information in the Amazon than we previously thought. True statement. We're discovering with LIDAR, and this is what Graham Hancock is talking about, that we're discovering constantly that there's, there was more civilizations than we thought in various places. The place where I take offense is where they start to say that the Amazon, there's actually articles that are titled this, that the Amazon is a man-made garden, which is not true.

• 2:23:23Lex Fridman?

  So the actual, which I think is a really different idea, that the, the entire ecosystem and everything we've been talking about, all the species, all the forestry and the different, just life, life, one of the most diverse ecosystems on earth is initially created by humans.

• 2:23:44Paul Rosolie?

  It's ridiculous.

• 2:23:45Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's not, first of all, it's unlikely, but it's not ridiculous. So we can't, there's no ridiculous in.

• 2:23:54Lex Fridman?

  In science. But the complexity of life is very difficult to engineer. As you, the more you study about biological systems and so on, it's very difficult to create the kind of things that nature is able to do.

• 2:24:09Lex Fridman?

  That said, I don't know if you've heard, but the entire earth, the world has gone through a pandemic recently. And if, and everybody said, of course, it's natural origins. Viruses mutate all the time. And nevertheless, it seems more and more likely that in this particular case, it was of an artificial origin leaked from a lab. So humans are able to create stuff, at least modern technological genetic engineering.

• 2:24:39Paul Rosolie?

  Made golden retrievers. Come on.

• 2:24:43Lex Fridman?

  You can't be that nice and that good looking.

• 2:24:47Lex Fridman?

  Used to be a wolf. Yeah. But so that bothers you because it, it allows you to think that we don't need to preserve the Amazon, we can always engineer it.

• 2:24:57Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, exactly. Then just this is just to me, that's a slippery slope. Like I totally, I'm, it's just, it's so quick from, I'm a fan of expeditions to find ecological ruins and to learn more about the ancient civilizations to, which I don't think is what he's putting out is that then sort of like news articles, which I think they're trying to bait you where they're going, was the Amazon manmade? And it's like,

• 2:25:20Paul Rosolie?

  you know, because then you get, you're going to get a Brazilian president that goes, see, see what they said? It's manmade. So we might as well continue to engineer it and manage it. And it's like, there's such complex systems and interactions and such a, such a giant web of life there that at least in my opinion,

• 2:25:40Paul Rosolie?

  is clearly one of the most authentically natural things. And again, are there things that we've engineered? Do the uncontacted tribes, sometimes they, they have banana plants that they've stolen and we could see it from the air that they've, they have banana plants. We made banana plants. That's engineered by us. We know for a fact.

• 2:25:59Lex Fridman?

  So agricultural engineering.

• 2:26:01Paul Rosolie?

  Agricultural engineering and stuff like that, but suggesting that the Amazon basin. You know, it's just, it's just a weird way to think about it. I've just heard people dismiss the conserv, the, the protection of the Amazon based on the fact they're like, oh, well, if people made it and it's such a giant leap from, from, from, from zero to a hundred, um, you know, is there slash and burn that the ancient civilizations did? Of course. Are there areas that were affected by people? Of course. I just get worried when we start talking about, it was a man-made thing.

• 2:26:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Hear you loud and clear on that. And I personally think that's completely separate from wondering about what the ancient civilization have been able to accomplish.

• 2:26:47Paul Rosolie?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:26:47Lex Fridman?

  It's almost really sad because if all the humans on earth die now, how long does it take before all signs of humans ever existing disappear?

• 2:26:56Paul Rosolie?

  Ooh.

• 2:26:57Lex Fridman?

  For the most part.

• 2:27:01Lex Fridman?

  From an alien perspective.

• 2:27:03Paul Rosolie?

  How, what timeline are we talking about? I mean, like,

• 2:27:05Lex Fridman?

  I mean, there's,

• 2:27:06Paul Rosolie?

  Like a hundred thousand years, like,

• 2:27:08Lex Fridman?

  It could be less. It could be less. It could be like a few thousand. Cause a hundred thousand is complete destruction.

• 2:27:13Paul Rosolie?

  A hundred thousand is like nothing.

• 2:27:15Lex Fridman?

  But, but then it could be in, in just a few hundred years. It starts becoming, you're not, the, the government of the alien civilization is gonna have to pay quite a bit of money to do the research to find, cause they're gonna find other life first. They're gonna find the dolphins and the fish and so on. They're gonna find the trees. Maybe the trees are the interesting thing.

• 2:27:35Paul Rosolie?

  Sure.

• 2:27:35Lex Fridman?

  The, the buildings are not that interesting.

• 2:27:37Paul Rosolie?

  They crumble. But there must be examples of cities that have been left un, unattended for a few decades and like how quickly the, the, the plants push up through the street and everything starts to get broken down.

• 2:27:49Lex Fridman?

  If you really look, you'll be like, oh, there's some interesting geometry here for the buildings and so on. But most, most of the computer stuff,

• 2:27:55Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:55Lex Fridman?

  All of the, all the stuff of the past hundred years, the airplanes, all of that, all the technologies. All the paperwork, that all the hard drives that store all the information.

• 2:28:05Paul Rosolie?

  I wanna, I wanna actually know how long it takes like a 747 to like biodegrade. Like how like if you just leave it there, sitting on the runway, society stops.

• 2:28:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:14Paul Rosolie?

  How long does it take for that thing to disappear? Like that's a weird.

• 2:28:18Lex Fridman?

  Completely versus uh uh to a point where it's unidentifiable might be different, but.

• 2:28:23Paul Rosolie?

  Sure.

• 2:28:23Lex Fridman?

  I mean, the, the point I'm trying to say here is, as you've brilliantly put, the, the Amazon churns.

• 2:28:31Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 2:28:32Lex Fridman?

  And the fact that I, I wonder throughout its history, what are the peaks of the awesomeness?

• 2:28:42Lex Fridman?

  Well, how many banana, how many agricultural Einsteins of bananas?

• 2:28:46Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:47Lex Fridman?

  Were there? The creating different kinds of ideas, different kinds of geometry, different kinds of tools.

• 2:28:52Paul Rosolie?

  Well, yeah, look what the Incas did. I mean, the Incas, you know, Machu Picchu. I mean, when they found, when Hiram Bigum found Machu Picchu, it was covered in jungle. You could hardly see it. And I mean, the, the stonework they did, much like what the Egyptians did with the pyramids, a lot of it, we don't really understand how they did it. If you come to the jungle, you gotta go to Machu Picchu because it's not far from there. And I usually like, I'm, I'm the person like, I, I won't, I don't usually go see like the, you know, like I have never been to see the Taj Mahal after living in India for five years. Like, I'm just not. But when you look up and you see Machu Picchu, you go, either they were communicating with the gods there, or these people were so smart that they knew that anybody they brought, they were gonna impress.

• 2:29:35Paul Rosolie?

  They, they've built something there that when you look up at that mountain, you go, whoa, with those giant stones, the beauty of it, you know, it's just, it's just stunning to imagine that there was this culture of people that, that could achieve this. And so through the Amazon, I mean, that's sort of up in the Andes, but. There's all kinds of stuff in the Amazon. There are places where they say there's can, um, pyramids beneath the canopy that we just don't know about. Um, I mean, there's, it's endless.

• 2:30:07Lex Fridman?

  If you had, uh, billions of dollars, trillions of dollars, what, what would be the efforts in the Amazon? For the, for both conservation and for exploration.

• 2:30:18Paul Rosolie?

  All right. Well, first thing is.

• 2:30:19Lex Fridman?

  Which are tied together.

• 2:30:20Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, exactly. First, arrest the, the deforestation. So we don't have an ecological crisis on our hands. We don't want to keep losing species, losing indigenous cultures, losing the climate stabilizing services that the Amazon provides as a whole. Stop that. That's my first mission. Next, then we can play. And then it's like, let's go find, I mean, I've, I've flown over the Amazon in a Cessna and it's like, you see things. Where you go, we have to go see what that is, you know, weird lakes.

• 2:30:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:49Paul Rosolie?

  Or, or shapes in the jungle that don't make sense, that are, that are, that are strange and like.

• 2:30:55Lex Fridman?

  So even at that level, you can see weirdness. You can see different.

• 2:30:58Paul Rosolie?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:30:59Lex Fridman?

  Like signs of possible awesomeness.

• 2:31:01Paul Rosolie?

  Oh, the jungle is so weird. And here's the other thing is that most, so like the region I've been working in, you see where the researchers go. There's certain biological stations, there's certain places where like, oh, like this university has a relationship with this. This university is this. So everybody goes to the same few study sites. And then they walk on the same trails and they have the same guides. When you fly in a Cessna and you fly a few hours away from all that and you see a tiny little tributary. And then you fly for 40 minutes over unbroken green, just wild, before you reach another tributary. Even if somebody could survive going up that tributary, had the expeditionary expertise.

• 2:31:44Paul Rosolie?

  And the ability to survive getting shot at by arrows, if they could get up that tributary. Now, go cut perpendicular into the jungle, which I don't do on the solos. You can't, you can never, don't ever leave the river. But you're telling me that in that span of 70 miles between tiny tributaries at the edge of the world, no one's been there. None of us have been there. You know, maybe somebody 10,000 years ago was there, but we don't know what populations of things are there. We don't know what ruins are there. And so there's so much undiscovered stuff in the Amazon that is just waiting, just waiting.

• 2:32:22Lex Fridman?

  What, what is the process of exploring that? So how, how does money get converted towards exploration? Is there, is there safe ways of doing that?

• 2:32:32Paul Rosolie?

  There's places where, you know, we found out about things that have to be explored, but where you, you come up with, well, how do we do this without getting shot? And, and all, and not only without getting shot, but also without endangering them too. Cause how stupid are we if we, if we go in there to people that are living in the jungle, not bothering us and we go insert ourselves into there because we're curious about some rocks. That's, that doesn't seem fair for the loss of life. And so like, um, but yeah, that's, that's something that we're working on. And like one thing, of course, is like lidar and stuff, but eventually, eventually at the end of everything, it comes down to boots on the ground.

• 2:33:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. As somebody who has to ask that very question about how to deal with uncontacted tribes, they're, they're going to kill you, but you also don't want to disturb their environment. If you were an intelligent alien civilization.

• 2:33:24Paul Rosolie?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:33:26Lex Fridman?

  And you came about Earth. How, how would you interact with it? Can you put yourself in the mind of an alien civilization? Cause there seems to be some parallels here.

• 2:33:38Paul Rosolie?

  It is actually, right? It's like a microcosm of.

• 2:33:41Lex Fridman?

  We're very aggressive. Human civilization is very aggressive. So if we were easily, we get threatened easily.

• 2:33:49Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:50Lex Fridman?

  For stupid reasons, because we start like American military probably thinks it's like the Chinese or the Russians, if we see any kind of flying objects, they get very on edge.

• 2:34:02Paul Rosolie?

  I don't know. I mean, because you know, part of it is like, you just want to ask like, that's the thing. I just want to ask questions.

• 2:34:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:08Paul Rosolie?

  You know?

• 2:34:08Lex Fridman?

  But you don't know the same language.

• 2:34:09Paul Rosolie?

  You're gonna, yeah, you're gonna get, first of all.

• 2:34:11Lex Fridman?

  You send a boat of bananas.

• 2:34:12Paul Rosolie?

  You send a boat of bananas, you get shot. I mean, picture if aliens landed in New York, how long would it take for one of them to get shot? It'd be minutes. It'd be a matter of minutes.

• 2:34:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's because it's New York. Everywhere else.

• 2:34:25Paul Rosolie?

  Look where we are right now.

• 2:34:27Lex Fridman?

  That's true. It'd be even worse here. Yeah. But it makes me really, makes me wonder, what is the right way to interact with intelligent life that's not like our own? I hope, I, I dream of in our lifetime, we would interact with possibly life on Mars or on one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. And like, how do you interact with that thing?

• 2:34:53Paul Rosolie?

  Well.

• 2:34:54Lex Fridman?

  There's very technical, biological, chemical processes, but also if there's any kind of intelligence, how do you try to communicate with that intelligence?

• 2:35:02Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. So we're not talking about like a cockroach. We're talking about like some, something that's clearly like doing things, making things.

• 2:35:07Lex Fridman?

  Or cockroaches possibly. How do you know the difference between a cockroach? Like, how do you know? We were just talking about.

• 2:35:11Paul Rosolie?

  Just like a halieant.

• 2:35:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. We don't know. We don't know. We have.

• 2:35:15Paul Rosolie?

  Just like a race of like philosopher cockroaches.

• 2:35:17Lex Fridman?

  Right.

• 2:35:17Paul Rosolie?

  Just chilling on the rocks.

• 2:35:18Lex Fridman?

  Well, here on Earth, we kind of, there seems to be a strong correlation between size and intelligence. Like.

• 2:35:25Paul Rosolie?

  Yes.

• 2:35:26Lex Fridman?

  It seems like the bigger things have bigger nervous systems and brains. And so they're usually smarter. But that doesn't.

• 2:35:34Paul Rosolie?

  I think it's brain, it's the ratio, brain to body.

• 2:35:37Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 2:35:38Paul Rosolie?

  Because you have like crows.

• 2:35:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:40Paul Rosolie?

  That are up among the most intelligent. And it's like the size of the brain to the size of the body.

• 2:35:45Lex Fridman?

  But there also could be kinds of intelligence we're completely.

• 2:35:47Paul Rosolie?

  No idea.

• 2:35:48Lex Fridman?

  We're not appreciating. Maybe cockroaches. They survive the longest. They're talking shit about us right now. It's dumb humans.

• 2:35:55Paul Rosolie?

  Like, dude.

• 2:35:56Lex Fridman?

  They got.

• 2:35:57Paul Rosolie?

  These rocks are so great.

• 2:35:58Lex Fridman?

  Couple of hundred years. Exactly.

• 2:36:01Paul Rosolie?

  Did you ever, you ever hear that Kurt Vonnegut where the, the two space travelers get lost? This, this, this really impacted me as a kid because my dad was an English teacher. So he's always quoting Dostoevsky and Kurt Vonnegut. And there's this, these two space travelers get like crash landed in a cave. And on the walls of the cave are the harmoniums. And there's these kite shaped animals and they feed off the vibrations of the cave. And that's all they do. They don't hurt each other. They just do that. And so for like two years, these travelers are stuck and they're trying to fix their ship. And one of them starts playing music for the harmoniums. And the harmoniums love him for the music and they all come around him and and he plays this music for him. And finally, they they fix the ship.

• 2:36:44Paul Rosolie?

  And then the one guy is like, all right, let's let's get out of here. And the other guy's like, you know what? I'm staying. He goes, I I found a place where I can do good. I'm not hurting anybody and they love me.

• 2:36:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:56Paul Rosolie?

  I'm staying right here.

• 2:36:58Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, this whole ambition thing we got going on, always trying to build a bigger boat, bigger thing. That might not be the the ultimate conclusion of a of a happy existence as a civilization. That's prob that's one of the possibilities why we haven't met the aliens yet at scale. It's because there, once you get good enough at technology, you realize that happiness lies in a peaceful coexistence as possible.

• 2:37:28Paul Rosolie?

  So where do you stand on like aliens now? Like, there's a lot coming out about the the pilots and the the things people have been seeing. And again, like, I kind of come in and out of this stuff. Like, I'll be in the jungle for three months. I I miss I miss a lot. So like, update me like. Or are we are we being contacted right now? Like?

• 2:37:45Lex Fridman?

  Of course, nobody knows, but I tend to believe my intuition says there's there's aliens everywhere. That the our even our galaxy.

• 2:37:54Paul Rosolie?

  Sure.

• 2:37:54Lex Fridman?

  That's a bigger leap, but I believe our galaxy has probably billions, hundreds of millions of planets with life on it, like bacteria type of life.

• 2:38:08Paul Rosolie?

  Sure.

• 2:38:08Lex Fridman?

  And I believe there is, I don't know, thousands of alien civil intelligence, intelligent alien civilizations that exist or have existed. The problem is, there's a lot of time and it's very difficult to contact each other. So to achieve a kind of civilization that's able to actually send out enough signal or radiate enough energy where we would notice, I think that's really tough. That said, statistically speaking, it seems like that should have been possible inside our galaxy or maybe nearby. And so.

• 2:38:45Lex Fridman?

  I suspect that once an alien civilization is just many orders of magnitude smarter than us humans, the way it would contact us is going to be very difficult for us humans to understand. We're very egocentric. We want the message to be sent as like a, in English versus, you know, I think consciousness itself, emotion,

• 2:39:19Lex Fridman?

  thoughts could be like fingertips, could be words in the story that the aliens are telling us, or things that are just like a low dimensional projection of a much higher dimensional message that's being sent by aliens. And maybe our striving to create technology is to create the kind of sensor that's actually able to hear some of the message. Maybe that's what AI is trying to do. So I think that bridging that barrier of communication between us and cockroaches, I think that's the biggest challenge.

• 2:39:57Paul Rosolie?

  Interesting.

• 2:39:58Lex Fridman?

  Like the messages are all around us. They're here. I suspect the alien messages are here. The aliens are here. We're just too dumb to see it.

• 2:40:07Paul Rosolie?

  So first of all, the imagining planets where there are, like just picturing like a, not a silent planet, but just like a planet of alternate life forms, you know, maybe it's not something that's, that we can communicate and have a conversation with, but just like a planet of like butterflies and centipedes and weird, you know.

• 2:40:27Lex Fridman?

  Unfortunately, bacterias, for billions of years, it was bacteria, as single, prokaryotes and eukaryotes, but they're not, they're boring. But yeah.

• 2:40:39Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, but animals, animals of some sort in an environment of some sort, imagine that would just be such an interesting, beautiful, amazing thing. And I'm sure they're out. That I'm, yeah.

• 2:40:49Lex Fridman?

  The kind of viruses they got going on.

• 2:40:54Lex Fridman?

  It's, but they could also not be biologically based. There could be different chemistry. So you have to be humble to that, too.

• 2:41:00Paul Rosolie?

  Sure.

• 2:41:02Lex Fridman?

  But then, you know, it depends on the day. Like, I think you caught me on that day today, an optimistic one. Sometimes I think that we're all, this is all there is because you start, you ask that question, the Fermi paradox, like, why aren't they here? You can't imagine an advanced civilization that would not be explorers, because we're explorers.

• 2:41:25Paul Rosolie?

  Why is that depressing to you? That the idea that, that, let's just say you found out right now that there isn't anything else. Let's just say that, for, for example's sake, that the earth is the earth and the universe is the universe and it's sort of like the backdrop of a video game. And it's just, what's out there? Would that be tremendously depressing to you?

• 2:41:47Lex Fridman?

  I think it's exciting for an engineer. It's probably exciting for an explorer, but I would equate that to your going out hiking for three days with one match. It kind of terrifies me that we only got one match.

• 2:42:01Paul Rosolie?

  Really?

• 2:42:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:03Paul Rosolie?

  Really?

• 2:42:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. One, all you got is one match. This, no, no, no. Hold on a second. Hold on a second.

• 2:42:09Paul Rosolie?

  Wait.

• 2:42:10Lex Fridman?

  Paul, wait, wait a minute. You're going out. There's no more matches. This is the only match you got.

• 2:42:17Paul Rosolie?

  No one's going to extinguish the planet. Like, there's not, as far as we know, there's no, there's no meteor coming. I'm saying, like, do you live in a, so I'm saying, is that, is your worry then that we need to have a backup plan?

• 2:42:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:28Paul Rosolie?

  Really?

• 2:42:29Lex Fridman?

  Well, there has.

• 2:42:30Paul Rosolie?

  So like, what if we do, what if we do mess it up so bad that we can't live here anymore?

• 2:42:35Lex Fridman?

  Well, there's different ways to mess it up. There's, there's ways to mess it up to make life really difficult.

• 2:42:43Paul Rosolie?

  Mad Max type of thing.

• 2:42:45Lex Fridman?

  But there's nuclear war.

• 2:42:46Paul Rosolie?

  Yes.

• 2:42:47Lex Fridman?

  With the further and further advancement of technology that can destroy, destroy all of Earth. It just feels like that's going to be exponentially growing.

• 2:42:55Paul Rosolie?

  Yes. It's going to get worse.

• 2:42:57Lex Fridman?

  And that, it's, uh, listen, I'm, I'm very optimistic, but it's a, it's a heck of a Russian roulette we're playing.

• 2:43:08Paul Rosolie?

  Okay. So I'm still curious about your, your intention though, or like where your, where your, your passion for this comes from. Are you? Is your, or maybe it's both, but is it, is it, is it the need to have a backup plan for humans, which, which is, which is admirable for your intense love of humanity and our consciousness and love and art and everything? Or is it also just that, the, the, the raw fascination of imagining what's out there? Um, because I just, the, the way you said that about like, oh, you caught me on a positive day where I think it's, there was some, there was something in there that made me think that, that you need there to be.

• 2:43:42Lex Fridman?

  Uh, yeah, yeah, there's.

• 2:43:51Lex Fridman?

  I think I'm the kind of person that sees beauty in everything, but to me, a universe full of diverse life is more beautiful than one where it's just humans. It's just the earth life.

• 2:44:05Paul Rosolie?

  Interesting.

• 2:44:06Lex Fridman?

  There's more beauty. I mean, uh, I'm not egotistical about the awesomeness of humans. I like if humans are not the smartest in, uh, in our galaxy, uh, or not even close to being the smartest. And that to me is, I don't know, that, that to me is exciting about the possibility of what's, or what the universe can create.

• 2:44:30Paul Rosolie?

  Yes, I'm with you on that, that it, that it's wildly exciting to, to, to, like, if we found, even if it was just a distant inkling that we found out that there is, there is a planet that has life, there's no, there's no communication coming from it, but we know for a fact there's stuff going on there. It would just change how we think about our entire reality. We know now.

• 2:44:50Lex Fridman?

  And it could be, to, to me, I guess, the little inkling of a thing that is depressing, if all there is is earth and humans destroy it, then we're the coolest thing that the universe has ever created.

• 2:45:08Lex Fridman?

  It's over.

• 2:45:09Paul Rosolie?

  I'm interested to have this conversation. I'm really, I'm really, I'm saying like, I would be interested to bring you to the jungle.

• 2:45:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:17Paul Rosolie?

  And this, I like, now I'm also wondering, I'm wondering like, what, what your wilderness experience is. Cause I feel like for me, I'm so earth centric to the, to the point where I'm like, we differ in that for me, this is like, it's a curiosity. I feel wonder and I feel it's fun to talk about like, what's at the edge of space? Like, you know, there's the conundrums of, of spacetime and, but, but I'm so, to me, I'm like, what if, what if the aliens are watching us or what if the aliens aren't watching us? But what if the challenge here is, we've been put on, on earth as, as the most intellectually complex of these creatures? And, and, and we're being observed to see how we manage it. And it's like,

• 2:46:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:00Paul Rosolie?

  we haven't made a good job of managing each other. You know, before Oriana went down the, the Amazon, I mean, they showed up and just sacked the Incas. I mean, we, our history, I mean, I don't have to tell you, you've just got back, but it's, um, I just, sometimes I wonder, you know, what, what the, is, is there a grand narrative with, with what we're doing to wildlife? Cause it's like, we have all these other species and we're, we're struggling even here in this conversation to sort of quantify like, you know, I, I think that most people don't think outside of the human framework. You know what I mean? Like just driving around for me, living outside of the jungle, even just for a few weeks, I get,

• 2:46:41Paul Rosolie?

  you don't, you don't, you don't even think about the fact that there's other species around us. We really don't day to day. You look at TV and you look at, really listen to the radio and it doesn't, it's not very consequential to the average person living in a city that there are these, you know, islands covered in walruses and that there's rainforests, filled with birds and frogs and all these things happening and that, you know, the salmon are contributing to our fresh water and, and that, that life is literally given to us and made possible by these ecological systems. To me, that's where like the whole, you know, essence of my existence comes from. And so like,

• 2:47:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, thank you for that reminder because you're basically saying like the alien civilizations you dream about are here on Earth. Those worlds are here.

• 2:47:31Paul Rosolie?

  For me, yeah.

• 2:47:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, no, I agree with you. I think I agree with you. And I think that's actually the way I think most of the time. You know, I think I'm on mushrooms all the time genetically somehow, because when I go out in nature, it's just the beauty, even of, you talk about the Amazon, man, just basics of nature.

• 2:47:52Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:53Lex Fridman?

  Fill you, fill me with awe. The other thing that fills me with awe is our own mind, like the biology of these things firing, basically, not our own mind, but biology of any living organisms, because it's like an ecosystem. They've came, these cells came together, they somehow function, they delegate, they mostly operate in a local way, but they,

• 2:48:21Lex Fridman?

  first of all, it's just like you said with the anacondas, you start out as a tiny snake and you become giant. When you're a tiny snake, you're prey for everything. When you're a giant snake, you're a predator, or you're prey to no one. And like just that whole process, same, starting with a single embryo, single cells, a human, and through the embryogenic process, constructing this giant human that's able to have limbs, move about the world, think about things, write books, and so on. Just that is incredibly beautiful. And all of that is here on Earth, yes. And so actually, I was being sort of poetic about aliens and so on. I think I can spend 99.99% in terms of filling my mind with awe and beauty, just looking down

• 2:49:06Lex Fridman?

  here on Earth, for sure. I agree with you.

• 2:49:09Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, and they shouldn't cancel out. Like, I think it's beautiful that there's, that there's people that are fascinated and obsessed with looking out into space, and that will travel there. I mean, just to me, the idea of, I mean, I have a little piece of meteorite at home that I hold, and it does amazing things to my mind, because I'm like, everything I've ever touched is from this Earth. And I'm holding this thing that's been places that we can't even think about. And it blows my mind, and I love it. But, but when it comes to like, intelligence, I think it's like,

• 2:49:41Paul Rosolie?

  I'm so concerned with the fact that we're at this moment in history. And it's interesting to me that, you know, we had the internet and now that with the emergence of AI. And more and more, I feel like we are starting to resemble like an ant colony where there's more and more connection. And there's more and more interaction globally between everybody. In the next 10 years, we're gonna have to decide, are we gonna let our ocean ecosystems just collapse? Are we gonna just take that 3% of rainforest and just let them log the shit out of it until it's gone? And it's like, we're gonna be in a very different reality then. Then it's gonna be a very dystopian future. Or can we keep the good things about Earth? Transcend that, realize that we have these incredible alien species around us that are animals

• 2:50:25Paul Rosolie?

  that we grew up with, that we wouldn't be here without, that we owe something to. And I feel like at that stage, then the outward look becomes something else. It's almost like we've proven that if aliens came up to us, that's when I'd feel good. Aliens would come up to us and they said, you know, Louis has the thing where he goes, God comes back. And he goes, what did you do? He goes, the polar bears are brown. He's like, I left food for you. It's like, if the aliens came and were like, you know, and they interviewed the elephants and they said, how are you feeling? And the elephants would be like, listen, fuck these little primates. You know what they've done to us? And it's like, I mean, you know, I've seen people break an elephant. I've seen, I've seen, I've seen it all with that stuff.

• 2:51:08Paul Rosolie?

  And it's like, if, if, if anybody was to ask them, they'd be screaming. And, and so like, to me, it's just, you know, I have trouble, trouble looking out into space. I have trouble looking out into normal life as a human because I'm so concerned with trying to make sure that they're okay. Because not enough people are doing that.

• 2:51:29Lex Fridman?

  Well, the interesting thing about all the development with AI and just that we're living more and more of our life online. I think we're actually learning.

• 2:51:40Lex Fridman?

  What's missing when it's online? Like, I think people realize that

• 2:51:47Paul Rosolie?

  Yes.

• 2:51:47Lex Fridman?

  online interaction is shallow, but we're just learning that that's a reality.

• 2:51:52Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:52Lex Fridman?

  That we need that human connection. And I think there's going to be the swing back to like, sadly, AI systems of the future might be able to live fulfilling lives online. But us humans have have to have a deep connection with earth. And like with with each other, physical connection. I think there's going to be a phase somewhere in the century where we go back to deep physical connection. And there'll be a digital world.

• 2:52:17Paul Rosolie?

  True.

• 2:52:18Lex Fridman?

  That we visit, that it would be separate. And that's the you have a discussion with that with Twitter, with Instagram, with all of these social networks. That they don't, they seem to be dividing us, that it seems to not be bringing happiness. And you have to try to figure out like, okay, so how do we use them? In a way that does connect us, does educate us, grow our knowledge base, but also keeps us, keeps our lives fulfilling in a deep human way. That we're for good and for bad genetically designed, that we can't overcome, that we can't escape these meat vehicles.

• 2:52:57Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, but that's, to me, that's so reassuring.

• 2:53:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:00Paul Rosolie?

  It's like when you would like, I have, you know, we all have those friends that are like, you know, we got to live forever. And it's like, I don't know, man, do you?

• 2:53:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:06Paul Rosolie?

  I don't know, is it that bad that this is how it works? Like that we don't understand it?

• 2:53:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the, it's often from the tech sector, the discussions about immortality and so on.

• 2:53:16Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:17Lex Fridman?

  I think that's somehow trying to escape the the beauty of this earth, for sure. That that there's something beautiful.

• 2:53:23Paul Rosolie?

  Too bright to look at, like.

• 2:53:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And I, perhaps like you, I'm worried about the unintended negative consequences of trying to escape the way things are on this earth. Because this is an incredible mechanism.

• 2:53:38Paul Rosolie?

  How many times in the past has new technology come out that people have hailed as, you know, blasphemy? Or it's not going to work, or it's it goes against nature? And and now, well, heart transplants are pretty cool.

• 2:53:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:49Paul Rosolie?

  You know, and and you could say what you want about like television and like, oh, it's, you know, it rots your brain. It's like, yeah, but also, how many times have you sat in a room full of people being entertained and all laughing and interacting and eating popcorn? Because of the televisions there, it's not, it's not one or the other. And so I feel like with AI, we'll, we'll. We'll learn, we'll learn our way through it, you know?

• 2:54:10Lex Fridman?

  There's a like with the, with the legged robots especially and humanoid also. So anything on legs, four legs or two legs. I remember like the first time I interact, interacted with a legged robot.

• 2:54:24Lex Fridman?

  I saw magic there. Like

• 2:54:31Lex Fridman?

  that this too can have consciousness. This too can have this lifelike quality that a human being loves about other human beings, about other living creatures. Now, while I'm still, I grew up in the place with no internet, in a time with no internet. So I still like biological dogs better. I'm, I noticed the magic in robotic dogs. And it makes me wonder the way, same way we're just talking about aliens looking up. It makes you wonder about other aliens, civilizations. Now, the deep love is for dogs, for other humans.

• 2:55:09Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:09Lex Fridman?

  But there's still this wonder.

• 2:55:13Paul Rosolie?

  I struggle with that. Like you said, the, the whatever's going on in here. The idea, and there's so much talk about the fact, like, at what point does an artificially intelligent robot become something that has, and it's like, I get, I get very uncomfortable with that. It makes me, uh, I don't know how to, how to handle the things because I don't know enough about it probably. But it's like, I don't know how to handle like.

• 2:55:36Lex Fridman?

  I don't know how to handle it either. Nobody knows anything about it because the, it's really, everything is terrifying here because it could be as simple as consciousness is easy to fake. So what if we live in a, in a world 10 to 20 years from now where your toaster, there's a bunch of robots in your room that are faking consciousness. And then you fall in love with them and you have a deep connection with them. And then you actually have a deeper connection with your toaster than you do with any romantic human partner you've ever had. And you start to.

• 2:56:11Paul Rosolie?

  I was, I was upset about the dogs.

• 2:56:14Paul Rosolie?

  It's like, at least the robot doesn't take a shit on the floor. I was like, you just, you just took it way worse.

• 2:56:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, and then they, they start to, uh, I don't know if you've seen AI porn, but it gets pretty intense.

• 2:56:28Paul Rosolie?

  Like fully AI porn, like they're, they're fake people.

• 2:56:34Lex Fridman?

  Take people that can uh.

• 2:56:36Paul Rosolie?

  Things I've missed in the jungle.

• 2:56:37Lex Fridman?

  Things. Boy, do I have a lot to show you. Or not, not show you, not show you. Let me ask you about a touchy topic.

• 2:56:46Paul Rosolie?

  Uh oh.

• 2:56:48Lex Fridman?

  Uh, climate change.

• 2:56:49Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, boy.

• 2:56:51Lex Fridman?

  What's the effect of climate change on the uh, on the Amazon? Maybe species diversity? What, what, what is something that people should, should think about? Because there's different views on um, I think most people believe that climate change is human caused and that it's happening. But there is different perspectives on the degree of damage that it's going to do over the next several decades. And what our response should be as a society. And so it would be amazing to hear your perspective on it in, in, in small slices of your experience or in large.

• 2:57:36Paul Rosolie?

  To me, there's no denying the fact that we are experiencing changes. I think anybody that, that doesn't agree with that hasn't been outside in the last 20 years. Or hasn't interviewed old farmers who will tell you that it changed or, you know, it's that, I think a lot of us can agree with that. Where I deviate is that I am not a climate scientist. I am, I am not qualified. And so I, just like everybody else, am listening. And what happens to me is I see that the, someone like Santiago Duran, JJ's father, will, will tell me it's totally different than it was when I was a kid. The seasons have changed and moved and like, in New York, when I was a kid, like, we used to get like white Christmas, like, we used to get snow.

• 2:58:21Paul Rosolie?

  We don't, I was in shorts, like, I came off the plane right before coming here and I was in like shorts for a second. Like, I was like, this is a different reality. But my ability could, my, or my, my interpretation of climate change, you know, I feel like is just as dumb as those people that go like, you know. It's really cold. I thought they said it was getting warmer. It's like it's a very rudimentary thing. And so as a, as a someone that's fighting for the preservation of biodiversity, I, I, I don't feel like I'm any more qualified than the average person to, I can only provide anecdotal, anecdotal evidence of the stuff I've seen. What I, what I do do though, and I always, I always make a

• 2:59:03Paul Rosolie?

  strong delineation here is that I can speak to the fact that I've been places where the ocean fisheries have been depleted and the local fishermen can tell you and the scientists can tell you, there's no more fish here. I've been to the places where the rainforest line is being pushed back in Borneo and it's getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And I've been in the Amazon and I've walked through the killing fields and through the fires and I've burnt my lungs on it. And, and I'm a big believer personally, and instead of trying to take on all of it, I've tried very hard in my life to pick one thing. And to me, that one thing is protecting as many wild heartbeats as I can,

• 2:59:47Paul Rosolie?

  because they're under constant fire. And so, climate change, you know, there's so much arguing over it. And, and like you said, the, the, the degree to which we, we affect it and, and, and, and how do you, you know what I mean? Like, I like to have provable data points, like, you know, I can show you tropical deforestation. I can show you the decline in tigers over the last hundred years. I can't prove, I, you know what I mean? Like, I can't answer that question. I don't think, probably you can better than I can.

• 3:00:16Lex Fridman?

  No, I, I think one of the criticisms, I'd love to get your opinion on is, uh, one of the criticisms that somebody like Jordan Peterson provides.

• 3:00:24Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:24Lex Fridman?

  Is that the climate is such a complex system. There's so many variables that.

• 3:00:32Lex Fridman?

  Making conclusive statements about what's going to happen with the quote unquote climate in the next 10, 20, 50 years.

• 3:00:39Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:40Lex Fridman?

  Is a nearly impossible task. Therefore, as he would say, as, as people like Bjorn Lomborg would say, the kind of fear mongering that is done, saying we should spend humongous amounts of money to change the trajectory of everything we're doing in terms of energy, in terms of infrastructure and so on, in terms of how we allocate money, is not justified because predicting is very difficult. And instead, it's better, exactly what you're saying, which is focusing on local problem, local, saying, we need to protect the Amazon. What are the, what are the things attacking the Amazon this year?

• 3:01:24Lex Fridman?

  In the next five years, how can we stop the deforestation? How can we stop different things? And then, and then, and then humans are exceptionally good in, at coming up with solutions for that, especially when you put money behind it, you put attention to it. And that's the way we solve all the different problems that are going to, that are projected for the climate change in its worst case scenarios to be realized on this earth. So that, that's kind of the, the case he would make. And I should also mention that one of the reasons I was fortunate enough to discover your work is, first, a friend mentioned that I should definitely talk to you. And then I Googled you and I saw that somebody recommended that Jordan Peterson absolutely must talk to you on his podcast.

• 3:02:09Paul Rosolie?

  Wow.

• 3:02:10Lex Fridman?

  I think it was like a Reddit post.

• 3:02:12Paul Rosolie?

  Thank you, Reddit poster. That's, that's great.

• 3:02:14Lex Fridman?

  And I was like, oh, interesting. And then I looked and Jordan hasn't yet. I thought, my goal is for you to talk to, to, to Rogan and to Jordan Peterson for, for different reasons, but for the same reason, they get connected to a, a human being that deeply cares about this earth. And I think that's probably the right lens through which to look at the effects of climate change. In terms of focusing on the different things that are threatening, threatening the diversity of species in this most magical place on earth, which is the Amazon, but also, as you will talk about with, with elephants and tigers in India. And focusing on how to solve those problems. I don't know if there's any comment you want to make on folks like Jordan Peterson,

• 3:02:59Lex Fridman?

  who are sort of raising questions about how much do we really understand about the climate?

• 3:03:04Paul Rosolie?

  First of all, I'm such a Jordan Peterson fan, and I think the guy is heroic for a number of reasons, and I find his, his use of language and his use of theology and the message that he puts out wonderful. I cringe a little bit when he says, I feel like, and I might not even be accurate on this, but I cringe a little bit when I feel like he dismisses that there is an ecological emergency happening right now. Now, I'm not saying, I'm not talking about climate change specifically, but I've heard him say, you know, environmentalists upset me, and he goes, well, what do you mean by the environment? Everything? And it sort of seems to outrage him, and it's, and I kind of agree with him there.

• 3:03:44Paul Rosolie?

  Because, so are you telling me that we need to halt our global process and progress and economies and everything? I don't know. I don't know. And so, so to me, I don't, that doesn't bother me because he's exploring what the hell are these people talking about? When you say, you have, I have, I personally have friends and students and people filling my inboxes, I have young kids telling me that they're, they've become vegan and they ride a bicycle, and sometimes they don't watch TV because it uses electricity, and they're, I mean, they're just becoming so, so terrified of that they're killing the earth. And so it's this doomsday, anti-human sentimentist thing that we're, that we're evil. It's like, it's almost like a new religion about you're evil.

• 3:04:30Paul Rosolie?

  And so to me, it almost makes me, in a totally different camp, where like, climate change and the right-left politics and, you know, I considered a family, I considered Thanksgiving dinner and listened to, listened to the climate thing go back and forth.

• 3:04:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:47Paul Rosolie?

  And I'm like, I'm not even, I'm not even here. And that might actually annoy some people in the environmental field that might feel betrayed by me saying that, but I don't care. My job, and it's not just the Amazon, and that's one note I wanted to make is that... My career has has taken place largely in the Amazon and also in India and now a lot in Africa, but it's it's not even just these exotic places either. It's it's it's people realizing that, you know, the salmon runs in Canada and the the butterfly gardens in our backyards that there's biodiversity everywhere. And it's and I I strongly feel like, you know, the idea of jungle keepers, the idea of of of stewards of nature. And

• 3:05:31Paul Rosolie?

  so for me, my my my job, my one thing, and I I try to tell this to these kids that message me and that my my inboxes are full of this where they go, you know, the climate is burning and elephants are in decline and tigers and and this and that. Like, guys, look, first of all, pick calm down. First of all, like, go outside, go get laid, do something, have fun. Next, pick something that you can affect. And it doesn't have to be with the environment. Do something good on earth. Go help somebody that needs food. Go help your elderly neighbor, whatever it is. Practice, practice with being effective at one thing at a time. And so for me, like I said, from those early days of sitting there with JJ on the side

• 3:06:12Paul Rosolie?

  of a river and going, someone has to protect this. My concern is that we've lost 70% of the wildlife on this planet in the last 50 years. That's a huge problem. Wildlife, maintain the ecosystems. And so I have a very clear cut, very definable, very measurable and provable thing that I'm fighting against. And it's a very, to me, it's a very like small ask. Don't cut down the 3% of the world that has 50% of the biodiversity in it. Maybe let's keep some wild tigers for future generations and because tigers have their own inherent right to exist here. That's my thing. In terms of when we get to, you know, I get attacked for, you know, you should be a vegan. Okay.

• 3:06:55Paul Rosolie?

  You show you, you have me roll into a village in the Amazon when they offer me spider monkey and you tell me that I should be a vegan and you, you see how much they respect you and you tell them that you're a vegan. Like, um, but no, so for someone like Peterson, I think it's actually good that he's, first of all, telling everyone to make their damn beds and, uh, and, and exploring it through a different lens, you know, he's, he's coming at it from a totally different thing and saying, you know, it, are, are we just being alarmist here? Are we, what, I mean, again, imagine if, you know, that imagine if there isn't a problem and they're, then they're making one out of it and all the implications that that could have for progress. It's like, so I think what he's doing is, is perfectly reasonable.

• 3:07:37Paul Rosolie?

  Um, there is a podcast though, where he's, he's, it was a great one though, where he's, he's discussing animal intelligence.

• 3:07:44Lex Fridman?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:07:45Paul Rosolie?

  And, and I could really see that, that, you know, the human psyche and theology and, and religion is so much his world that, that the, the, really the, the idea of animals being intelligent was novel and it was, and it was fascinating.

• 3:08:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that's, that's why I would love for the two of you to talk just, I don't know, and I hopefully I'm not on a line here, but he is so focused on the human mind. That I think he forgets that there's other life out there. There's this whole

• 3:08:20Paul Rosolie?

  A lot of people do.

• 3:08:20Lex Fridman?

  Machine of intelligence, of a kind of intelligence out there. Uh, this entire trillions of species, tiny and big, just

• 3:08:31Paul Rosolie?

  Crawling, just moving.

• 3:08:33Lex Fridman?

  Everywhere.

• 3:08:34Paul Rosolie?

  Everywhere.

• 3:08:34Lex Fridman?

  And we're actually part of it. So like to look at a human psychology is distinct from that is missing at least some of the picture.

• 3:08:42Paul Rosolie?

  Some of the picture. I do believe though, I would agree with him on that humans are unique.

• 3:08:47Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:48Paul Rosolie?

  Human psychology is unique. We just are. But, but I also, you know, it's, it's, he's in such an interesting place because usually you have, you know, environmentalists who are like, you know, nature, nature, nature, and then you, and it's very anti-human. And then you have the other side and it's like, he's, he's, he's on this path where he's, he's starting to explore what those like diverse intelligences mean. And that, that to me is really amazing because I love hearing what he'll do with that.

• 3:09:17Lex Fridman?

  And I think also on top of that. I think if you're aware of nature, deeply aware of nature, it gives you another perspective on the evolutionary history of humans. It's one thing to be an evolutionary biologist and kind of study it from a like philosophical perspective, and it's the other to really, I think, experience it and deeply know it, to see, I don't know, to the fact that it came from fish.

• 3:09:42Paul Rosolie?

  Sure.

• 3:09:42Lex Fridman?

  Really be cognizant of that. That's something else. That's like, I don't know, to realize that we're part of a computing machine that created intelligence. We're part of the thing that started bacteria and is now creating AI.

• 3:10:00Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:01Lex Fridman?

  And, I don't know, Dunkin' Donuts. I don't know what else is impressive.

• 3:10:06Paul Rosolie?

  The other great human achievements.

• 3:10:07Lex Fridman?

  The other great, I was thinking, what's interesting about Boston?

• 3:10:10Paul Rosolie?

  But I feel like we keep, we keep scratching up against this thing in this conversation that, that, that it's so easy, 50, I think something like 50 or more percent of the humans on this planet live in cities. And I think it's so easy for people to forget that we share this planet with so many other things. And, and, and I think that that sort of, that we're, we're in a little, in a way, we're almost like ecological orphans and that we've left the, the things that actually make us feel at home. And that's a bit of a stretch because I don't know if everybody feels that way. But for me, I mean professionally, as an expedition guide, when I take people into nature, I see what happens to them. And they leave going, I mean, it doesn't have to be the Amazon.

• 3:10:55Paul Rosolie?

  It could be, you know, upstate New York. But it's like, if you do it the right way, if you, if you remove the fear of, you know, breaking an ankle, seeing a snake, being bitten by a mosquito, all that stuff, if you can get people to a peaceful moment and you're fly fishing. A lot of times they'll take that moment and they'll talk about it the rest of their life. If they don't, if they don't live in that, you know, then there's those of us who spend our lives doing that, but for a reason, because it's the only place we feel sane.

• 3:11:23Lex Fridman?

  And you were kind enough to suggest that we might travel together for a time at some point. If if we do that, if we journey together, where would you recommend we should go?

• 3:11:34Paul Rosolie?

  So what I would want to show you is, is sort of, I'd want to take you to church. I'd want to take you to, take you to, take you to see the giant trees, take you to meet the old, the old gods, really. There's places when you walk in off the river that are so deep in the forest, you know, and again, this is now we do this, we have the boats, we have the rangers, we protect this ecological corridor now. And so it would be taking you to meet some of those loggers that that we converted. It'd be taking you, we'd have to go to the floating forest, meet some of the trees that I love the most, go piranha

• 3:12:12Paul Rosolie?

  fishing, and like, really just spend, my ideal trip for you would be, would be to spend five days of, you know, airplane mode phone, completely living out, comfortable. I'm not saying I don't want to, you know, I don't want to torture you. I'm saying, go and live comfortably on an expedition in the Amazon. And that means a few days at this research station, maybe go upriver three days and camp up here just on the edge of where the uncontacted are, and then come back and then see the Jungle Keeper Station. But along the way, seeing all the special sacred places, it'd be almost like saying, like, let's go see, you know, all the treasures of Italy. It's like, this is one of the most beautiful

• 3:12:55Paul Rosolie?

  things on earth. And and I've had the incredible, almost unbelievable fortune to be responsible for protecting it. And, and I don't, you know, I think it's, I think it's a privilege to be able to share that with people.

• 3:13:09Lex Fridman?

  To be able to witness what this earth has created, just, it's, you know, it's been just a gift, just even to follow your Instagram. The window, the window you create on the, on this part of the world, is just really beautiful. I do want to ask on that.

• 3:13:31Lex Fridman?

  Maybe it's like behind the scenes a little bit, but like, how do you keep the equipment dry? Like, how do you, like, how hard is bringing the equipment to the cameras? You're an incredible filmmaker and photographer, so how do you make it work?

• 3:13:47Paul Rosolie?

  I don't know, it's not that hard. We, we-

• 3:13:49Lex Fridman?

  Really?

• 3:13:50Paul Rosolie?

  It's not that bad.

• 3:13:51Lex Fridman?

  It's wet.

• 3:13:51Paul Rosolie?

  It is wet. The new iPhones are waterproof. And if they don't get, I'm telling you dude, it's been such a weapon, it's been awesome. Um, if you drop it in the river, my one thing is you gotta have a tether, because I drop it all the time. And so I'll be hanging off a boat, and I'll be trying to take a video, and I'll be like, here we are in the Amazon, you can see the lung, and thunk.

• 3:14:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:11Paul Rosolie?

  That's the biggest thing. But the, the, we shoot on cannons, and uh, I don't know, it's worked out, it's not that bad.

• 3:14:19Lex Fridman?

  Oh really? So you can keep the equipment dry?

• 3:14:20Paul Rosolie?

  I keep the equipment dry, and I actually don't, a lot of people put their shit in silica at night and like, keep it dry and then they take it out. And I find that when you do that, the temperature change creates moisture inside the camera. So what I do is I never do that. I just keep my cameras in my backpack with a zipper, so they're more or less exposed to the elements.

• 3:14:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:42Paul Rosolie?

  And so it sort of always has a little bit of equilibrium, and that's it. I mean, I shoot on some pretty fancy equipment sometimes, and, and it's great. But I mean, the awesome thing though now is that like, with, with, with a cellphone, I mean like, I like, I like put my phone down on the ground a few weeks ago and like, let this rhino like, walk up to it and stuff. And it's like, you can get video footage that you can literally put on Netflix. Like, it's just like, it's, it's getting really exciting. And that's where like, um, right, where I deviate from the, the nature people that are like, we need to go back and live in cabins. I'm like, dude, this is awesome, and I love taking slow-mo's, like, like, no way.

• 3:15:20Lex Fridman?

  It makes you reapprreciate, but just by yourself, just reapprreciate over and over and over, and then you can also share it with the world.

• 3:15:26Paul Rosolie?

  Well, that's the thing, is sharing it with people. There's nothing better than like- Teaching a kid to catch a fish, you know, and like, and like, in a way Instagram has allowed us to do that where it's like, I can have this crazy ass moment that that is so unique and then and then put it up for people to see, you know, or, I mean, I remember one of the most recent things that got people, you never know what's going to get people excited. I literally just like, there was like, you know, 3,000 butterflies on the beach and they were all like black, red and blue. Beautiful butterflies. And I just like panned the phone across it and then like jumped in the river and swam away. And like threw that up on Instagram and people went berserk. They're like, this is the most amazing thing. Like four different accounts reached out to try and share it. And I was like,

• 3:16:07Paul Rosolie?

  butterflies, they're everywhere. There's 4,000 species of butterfly in the Amazon. Like, but, but sharing that with people is beautiful.

• 3:16:15Lex Fridman?

  How do you, how do you find the thing to shoot? How do you, how do you come up with the butterflies? How do you notice the thing that's beautiful and say, I'm gonna wait a minute, like pause, this is beautiful. Let me take a, let me, let me take a picture of this. Cause like sometimes you might get used to the beauty, right?

• 3:16:31Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah. Yeah. Or like sometimes simple crazy things like, like leaf cutter ants.

• 3:16:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:37Paul Rosolie?

  They're just walking by. They become, it becomes pedestrian. It's like, well, I mean, just like when you're, you know, you're living at the elephant camp and it's like, the elephant comes out and he starts like trashing the water bucket. We're all like, would you stop? We're trying to watch Peaky Blinders here. Just leave us alone. It becomes normal after a while.

• 3:16:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:57Paul Rosolie?

  Uh, but no, in the, in the jungle, I don't, I don't, that's never a struggle for me because as a photographer, it's like, whenever my eye hits on something, I went, I've never seen that many of those butterflies, all the same species together. And like, this, oh yeah, I'm trying to get this one thing that the butterflies do is in the dry season, the salt deposits, you'll get like three or four, maybe 5,000 butterflies. All coming onto this one area of sand because there'll be like some leaching, there'll be some, some salt deposit there or something. And they'll all be wings flat against the ground with their, with their proboscis on the sand. And if you go walk near them, they will vortex up.

• 3:17:38Paul Rosolie?

  And you have a rainbow vortex of butterflies and you can like go run through that. And it's surreal. And I want to, what I want to do is get the shot where I, I guess, leave the phone recording in slow mo facing up.

• 3:17:55Paul Rosolie?

  And leave it there for an hour, let the butterflies come in and settle and then disturb them. So I get the bottom of the vortex of the bug. I'm like, these are the ways I think where I'm like, how can I show people the absolute mind blowing, you know,

• 3:18:07Lex Fridman?

  With an iPhone.

• 3:18:07Paul Rosolie?

  perfection. I mean, that's what I have, you know, I'm sure that somebody else could do it with, you know, a red and, and nail it. But it's like, that's what I have in the jungle because I have to travel light and I, you know.

• 3:18:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think that, that, that really, that works. I have the same thing when I was traveling in Ukraine. The, the equipment was just a suitcase, it's that suitcase over there with the foam. And you just shove it full of equipment and who cares?

• 3:18:30Paul Rosolie?

  You can do the best you can.

• 3:18:30Lex Fridman?

  You can go to war zone. It doesn't matter. It doesn't like, I, it has to do with the, you're talking about like with the, like protecting your camera or not. It feels like the more you protect stuff, the more it's gonna get damaged.

• 3:18:46Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, like, so like, see, like, my cameras, they're all missing. This is like, this is amazing to me. So all my cameras are missing the, they're all, you can see the metal through the paint. So all this. And so like, they're all, because I'm constantly like, I like slide in and like, take a picture and like, they're banged up. But these, they're good, they're good machines.

• 3:19:04Lex Fridman?

  I think they get tougher over time. If you put them through, it's like the immune system.

• 3:19:08Paul Rosolie?

  It's like muscles. It's like David Goggins cameras. If you gotta, you gotta make them suffer every day.

• 3:19:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. What's your view on hunting? So you really hate poachers?

• 3:19:21Paul Rosolie?

  I really hate poachers.

• 3:19:23Lex Fridman?

  How do they operate? Who are they? What are they up to? What do they do?

• 3:19:27Paul Rosolie?

  Poachers to me are the people that are going in and annihilating wildlife for profit without any, you know, the people that are going in and, and, and machine gunning an elephant to take its tusks. The people that are sneaking into protected areas in Africa and shooting rhinos so that they can cut off their horns before the animal's even dead while its baby is beside it.

• 3:19:53Paul Rosolie?

  So, and, and, and there's a difference between a poacher and a hunter. I'm a hunter. JJ's a hunter. I, I work with an organization called Vet Paw in Africa and they use United States veterans who have come back, post nine 11 veterans who have come back from the war and have these skills. And they've been using these guys to protect the last black rhinos, white rhinos, elephants. And so we've, I've gotten to see this play out on a private reserve in Africa where these incredible people have decided to protect zebras, wildebeests, all types of impala, giraffes, several herds of elephants, white rhinos, black rhinos. All of this stuff is protected.

• 3:20:37Paul Rosolie?

  And what's interesting is it's a hunting preserve. And so it's been very interesting and challenging sharing my work there with the public because, for instance, I went to a very high profile photographer recently and I said, you have to get over here and see this. It's, it's amazing what these people have done. It's this, this reserve called Buffalo Clouf and they've, you know, this, this rescued families of elephants and they have, you can see a black rhino every day if you want to. This is, they're critically endangered. And it's because of the work that Vet Paw does, protecting these animals from poachers. But what people don't understand is that hunting happens all the time on the reserve. Not for the elephants and the rhinos.

• 3:21:19Paul Rosolie?

  Those are, those are special and they will never be hunted there. But things like an impala, things like an anyala, a wildebeest, a zebra, there aren't as many predators as there used to be. So if you leave those animals unhunted, you know, without the wolf to chase the herd, to thin off the ones that are old and dying or sick, well, then you just have animals that are old and dying and sick, walking around suffering. And so on, in reserves like this, they hunt and they take the old ones and they use the funding from hunting. No one's going to pay you $30,000 to take a picture of a buffalo, but they'll pay you $30,000 to hunt a buffalo. And so these reserves responsibly and ethically on foot.

• 3:22:05Paul Rosolie?

  Can go hunting and manage. And again, if they if they were hunting rhinos or if they're hunting elephants, I'd be out in a second.

• 3:22:11Lex Fridman?

  They're hunting non endangered species.

• 3:22:12Paul Rosolie?

  They're hunting non endangered species, hunting game species. And the the difference is that a poacher is gonna, so those are responsible hunters that are ecologists and conservationists, whereas a poacher is someone that will come in and kill recklessly and murder an animal for no reason, for a part to sell.

• 3:22:31Lex Fridman?

  I would love to travel together, actually. So let's, we'll talk offline. I would love to make that happen if you allow me.

• 3:22:39Paul Rosolie?

  I'm, I'm 100% serious, man. I have tremendous respect for your work and I've been watching you since the beginning. I would love to do that together.

• 3:22:50Lex Fridman?

  I've been, I've talked to Joe quite a bit about it. And I really

• 3:22:56Lex Fridman?

  love the idea of eating the meat that I've hunted. It's mostly what I eat is meat, not for dietary, I don't have any weird constraints on my diet and so on. I just really enjoy eating meat.

• 3:23:08Paul Rosolie?

  It's really good.

• 3:23:09Lex Fridman?

  And there is a part of me that's bothered by factory farming.

• 3:23:13Paul Rosolie?

  Yes, sure.

• 3:23:15Lex Fridman?

  That it's very easily accessible meat, but there's something deeply wrong with it. Part of the reason I love fishing and eating the fish that I catch, it just seems to be more ethical, but also a more intimate, deep connection, honest connection with with nature. You get to see the killing of the food that you're consuming versus removing that from the picture, not even thinking about it, not thinking about that this came from the meat. And yeah, I love the idea that you kill, I kill one animal and I eat that animal, basically for the whole year.

• 3:23:54Paul Rosolie?

  Yeah, an ethically slaughtered animal, whether it's a fish or a deer or whatever else. To me, that's, oh, God, how, I'm gonna, I'm gonna use the wrong religious term here, but there's a, there's a, I feel like I want to use the word like sacrament, but it's like, there's a, there's a, there's a deeply profound ritual. And honestly, honestly, if you, if you teach a kid to grow a vegetable, you show a kid how to grow a carrot, and the miracle of like, wait, I put a, this thing just grew in there, it just appeared because there was sunlight? And it's like, yeah. The, the, to me, yes, you that when you feel that fish tug on the line.

• 3:24:33Paul Rosolie?

  To me, it, it, it does something that, that awakens a deep primal something, this satisfaction.

• 3:24:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:40Paul Rosolie?

  And then when you eat that, you feel, you feel good. And, and so I think the other thing, like sort of functionally speaking, is that aside from the fact that I think it's one of the original. We were so disconnected, like we should be hunting. We should be gathering, walking more. I mean, look at like what, what we discussed now, like people are like, oh, you gotta get your steps in for the day. And it's like, that never used to be a problem.

• 3:25:05Paul Rosolie?

  You know, people like, well, should, should we be eating animals? And it's like, what do you think we do here on earth? Like, I'm not sure how you got so confused. But Walmart did it to you. Like, I don't know, like what I, it, living where I've lived and I mean, from 18 to 35, I feel like I've grown, I've grown up, I've lived more outside than I have inside and I've. It just to me, like showing people these things, I can see this miraculous wonder in their eyes when they, when they realize that they can reach out into the world and interact with something. And, and. So when I hear these like frantic people talking about, you know, whether or not it's right, it's like, no, of course it is. Then again, factory farming is, is awful, but, but I try to stay, I try and walk the line.

• 3:25:50Paul Rosolie?

  I'm worried about wild animals. I'm worried about wild ecosystems. The other thing that's sort of important about hunting is that if, if people's livelihoods depend on salmon and elk and, and ocean fisheries. Well, then they'll fight to protect it naturally because it's part of their life. And it's if everybody's going to Burger King and everybody's getting chicken wrapped in plastic. They forget that the fish are there because they're too busy watching sitcoms. And so then when the, when the conglomerate comes in and builds a dam. Nobody really cares. And then you just end up with a few hippies and signs standing next to the river and it becomes silly. We forget the meaning.

• 3:26:33Lex Fridman?

  You mentioned that.

• 3:26:37Lex Fridman?

  Ayahuasca reveals.

• 3:26:39Paul Rosolie?

  Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Oh, no.

• 3:26:42Lex Fridman?

  The darkness that's there in the jungle. There's beauty, but there's darkness. So what is it that ayahuasca reveals? What is the heart of darkness?

• 3:26:54Paul Rosolie?

  Fuck, it opens the heart of darkness right up. I'm going to show you a picture of our shaman and then I'm going to ask you if you want to do ayahuasca here. Not here in that sense. It can only be done in the jungle. Anybody that tells you, I've heard people be like, oh, I did ayahuasca in Brooklyn last week. And I'm like, no, you didn't. I actually told that to my native friends. I went, hey, guess what? I said, a bunch of gringos keep thinking they're doing ayahuasca in Brooklyn. And they were like howling laughing. They're like, you can't do it outside the jungle. And I was like, exactly.

• 3:27:23Lex Fridman?

  I've never done ayahuasca. I would love to have. I've done or eaten whatever mushrooms. It's a wonderful experience.

• 3:27:31Paul Rosolie?

  I think it's wonderful. But ayahuasca. Oh, man. Yeah, see, I had done mushrooms. I thought I was like, okay. And I, yeah, I was like, I got this. I had my notebook. I was like, I'm going to journal a little bit. You know, and then, but, but you quickly, I quickly, quickly realized how out of my depth I was and how unprepared I was for what was happening. Cause you sit in a circle with these native guys and there's one, you know, he's got the feathers and he's old and he's got a face like the map of the world. And he's, he's smoking his fat old tobacco thing. And he calls you forward and you kneel before him and you're going, is it too late to back up? And everyone's, you know, there's one candle and he blows smoke over the, over the cup.

• 3:28:14Paul Rosolie?

  And he hands it to you and you're like, again, it's these, it's these, it's these, like these things that you can't argue with. It's these facts. You're like, as soon as this goes down, I'm gone. I know it. And this is a moment in my life that I, I have to either embarrass myself in front of everybody or I'm going forward with this and.

• 3:28:34Paul Rosolie?

  And then I went and sat. And you're sitting in the dark and it's again, so we're on a platform with a with palm thatched roof. And the jungle is all around you. So all those million, tens of millions of frogs and insects are. And I'm like, all right, cool. And I remember I like, you know, like I tried to like light a cigarette or something. And I went, oh, that's not gonna happen. You know, and then I, I, I put my hands on the floor and like my experience, I mean, like we've done mushrooms. You know, it's like, it's, it's interesting. It's introspective. No, this, this was like somebody unzipped the universe. I, I, you know, I spent a lot of, without boring people with it. I spent a lot of time in, in, in like unconstructed dream space, like floating between nebulas.

• 3:29:19Paul Rosolie?

  Like there was a long period where there was no physical shape, where I lived without a name. And like, so it's like, it's like you get brought so deep down, so elementally lost in the universe. Where like, I truly felt like I was experiencing moving through places like, like that, like that, uh, like that. Asteroid that I have, like it's, it's like a piece of, your piece of something detached from the earth. And so I, I got back from it and

• 3:29:50Paul Rosolie?

  had a, had a interesting new appreciation for life. I strongly suggest that people just do mushrooms like a normal person, unless you're, unless you're ready.

• 3:30:00Lex Fridman?

  So it was really intense.

• 3:30:01Paul Rosolie?

  It was really intense, but to be fair, the shaman who did it was like the old school guy.

• 3:30:06Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:06Paul Rosolie?

  And he was, he was getting up there in years and he had forgotten and overboiled the brew.

• 3:30:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:11Paul Rosolie?

  And so we came back and it was like four in the morning and I had, you know, all this crazy shit. I'd been on journeys and years down there. And so when I came back and I had like hands, I started crying. I started absolutely weeping.

• 3:30:21Lex Fridman?

  Gratitude or what?

• 3:30:22Paul Rosolie?

  Gratitude that I was alive. I was gonna get to see my people again. I was like, I'm gonna get to see my parents again. I'm gonna get to talk.

• 3:30:29Lex Fridman?

  So you kinda thought you might have been gone.

• 3:30:31Paul Rosolie?

  I was gone. I was gone. I was, I was, I was a dimly conscious something floating in dark space. And spent what felt like years down there. And so when I, I really did feel like being reborn, which I was like, cheap trick. Like, yeah.

• 3:30:46Paul Rosolie?

  But no, the, the, the, the way it moves you through the jungle, the way the jungle moves through your skin. There are moments of absolute majesty and incredible discovery that happen along the way. And on the way up, the jungle brings you up and the shaman brings you up and you get to move through the forest in a way that it's almost like you're inhabiting the consciousness of animals. Very, very, very like, I didn't think that hallucinogenics could do this to a brain, you know? Mushrooms, you're like, oh, I can, I feel like I can feel music. Like, cool. You know, you guys want to watch March of the Penguins?

• 3:31:23Lex Fridman?

  This is transformative. Like, what? Did that, did that change you?

• 3:31:27Paul Rosolie?

  I don't know. I think it definitely, it definitely, I almost feel like it showed me the thing that I was scared the most of. And it's that, it was like, that it's all just cold, dark, nothing. It like brought me to like the basement of the universe. And I felt like the point of that was to, to come back to this place where there's all this life and light and love and, and all this amazing stuff that we experience on a day-to-day basis and don't take for granted. And so just like almost dying, this was like fully dying, like they're, you know? But the great part is, is that usually it's not that intense. This guy had overboiled the brew. He'd also, I saw the vine afterwards. Most ayahuasca vines are like as thick as your arm.

• 3:32:11Paul Rosolie?

  This one was like as thick as a garbage can. It was like the oldest ayahuasca vine you can imagine. And at like four in the morning, I like crawled over to my friend Chris, who's a tough New York City firefighter. And we were like holding each other, just like weeping, just like, thank God we're back. And then we had to go looking for the shaman. Where the hell is this guy? He was gone. We found him in the morning and he was laying in the stream naked, like ET at the, you know, at the end when he's like laying like in the, yeah, he, he kicked his own ass with that brew. And he retired after that.

• 3:32:43Lex Fridman?

  Oh shit.

• 3:32:44Paul Rosolie?

  So we really got like, we, somebody turned the dial all the way up on us. And so we got, we got blasted. So it's not supposed to be that bad.

• 3:32:52Lex Fridman?

  But I think you're somebody who's fearless in sort of diving into those kinds of places.

• 3:32:59Paul Rosolie?

  I think I also retire from ayahuasca. I could be fearless with other things, but I think I'm good.

• 3:33:04Lex Fridman?

  It sounds kind of, to me personally, kind of exciting.

• 3:33:11Paul Rosolie?

  Well, I think that you have a severely fearless aspect to you. I mean, you're, when you come up with something that intrigues you, like if somebody told you right now that you could go physically into deep space, I feel like you would do it.

• 3:33:25Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I did. Yeah, if go to Mars, yeah.

• 3:33:28Paul Rosolie?

  Right.

• 3:33:29Lex Fridman?

  And some of it is,

• 3:33:33Lex Fridman?

  I don't even know if you have that. Some of that is more Goggins like, I want to see where my mind breaks by pushing it to tough places. There's a curiosity of exploring the mind, the limits of the mind. I feel like you're-

• 3:33:51Paul Rosolie?

  It's not a cold plunge. That's like, you're not coming back.

• 3:33:54Lex Fridman?

  Right, right. And it's, it's okay.

• 3:33:58Paul Rosolie?

  See, no, I have, I do, I have, I'm with you on that. I love seeing my limits. I absolutely love seeing my limits. I love getting my ass kicked. I love being shown how insignificant I am. But when it comes to something like that, where you got to push your chips in, it's got to be something for me, it's got to be a hill that I believe in before I die on it. And it's like, like, to me, the, the promise of exploring space isn't enough. But like even just the way, I mean, you said, you're like, I'm going to Ukraine. Here I go. You know, there, there's a certain

• 3:34:34Paul Rosolie?

  dedication to, to curiosity

• 3:34:39Paul Rosolie?

  at any expense. And I think that that is something that maybe we share in very, in, in different directions.

• 3:34:46Lex Fridman?

  Something tells me with those, with those, with those crocodiles outside, I would have gotten eaten. Something tells me there's some, something trying to preserve you in this world. I'm not sure exactly what that is. Somehow you keep surviving. What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing? Why are we here? Like, do you ever ask yourself that question?

• 3:35:08Paul Rosolie?

  I feel like that's every day. I feel like I'm someone that lives with that a lot. And I think that, I think that it actually takes me away from the human world a little bit. I feel like I've always been a little bit apart.

• 3:35:19Paul Rosolie?

  Because I think that other people do,

• 3:35:24Paul Rosolie?

  you know, mushrooms and they go, wow, it really made me think about how amazing it is here. And I feel like on a daily basis,

• 3:35:33Paul Rosolie?

  I find myself where I'm like, I can't believe that any of this is possible. You know, I, I, and that, and that goes, that goes from how delicious something tastes to being able to talk to, to, to, to someone in your family or, or have a phone. There's times where I'm in the Amazon and I, I miss home and I even just FaceTiming with someone. I go, this is possible?

• 3:35:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:54Paul Rosolie?

  Like people were rubbing sticks together to try and survive saber-toothed tigers not that long ago. And I'm over there like, yo, mom, look at this. It's wild. Like I'm in a constant state of awe. And so, um,

• 3:36:08Paul Rosolie?

  I actually hope that this is, that this is a testing ground. And whether it's aliens or God or whatever it is, that, that this is all, that this is, that this is, that this is something crucially important. That would be nice because it feels like it is.

• 3:36:27Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I hope that too, that the universe almost created us to see what's possible. And that I'd like to believe that beauty and good is possible.

• 3:36:41Paul Rosolie?

  And, and those are the things that make me say that it's not, it's impossible for it to just mean nothing. And I'm very, and just like you said, there could be life forms that, that we can't even understand. There could, there, there, there are, there, I'm very open to the idea that there's meanings that we have no idea about. The, the few things I know are the things that I love and some of the things that I love, you know, are being pushed to extinction. So I try to protect them, but that's, that's, that's, that's, that's my mission. But I'm saying like, in terms of what are we doing here? I'm, I'm just, um, always, always amazed at, at the, at the simplest things. I mean, the, you know, that we can sit here doing this, exchanging.

• 3:37:23Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Using our imagination to fill in the gaps, exchanging feelings, experiences, images. Yeah, it fills you with awe. And every once in a while, you get a little glimpse of something, like a deeper meaning that might be there. You don't, you don't, you don't really know what it is, but you get a glimpse. Every now and then. And you keep searching. And then it's over before you know it, Paul. Uh, hopefully for you. You've got many more years. It's dark, man. You're an important, important and a beautiful man. Paul, thank you so much for talking today. Thank you for being who you are for everything you're doing. I hope to see you again soon, many times, and maybe one day soon in the jungle. I hope that happens. Thank you, Lex. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Paul Rosley.

• 3:38:06Lex Fridman?

  To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Jane Goodall. If we kill off the wild, then we're killing off a part of our souls. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.