How to catch an Anaconda | Paul Rosolie and Lex Fridman

in part you are a bit of a snake Whisperer so what what is it that 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 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 um the you know I started catching snakes when I was very young I'd watch Steven wouldn't go out and catch a garter snake or a black rat snake in New York and um 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 going to do anything to him but he wanted to you know beat his chest and show his wife that he was tough um 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 um 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 it would stand up and 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 yeah looking for food and they go no they eat snakes king cobra opio figures Hannah they eat snakes and he goes she's thirsty 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 the water and we poured it on our nose and she started she started drinking you can see you could see her just drinking and the snake just took this long drinks 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 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 and it's like this is it's one of the few animals like you can't really catch a bird and show it to people you're gonna scare the birds 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 because they have naturally a lot of fear towards this creature and to realize that the fear is not justified it's 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 snake here and there coming for me man uh well okay so back to the Anaconda how do you catch an anaconda like what uh how do you hand because it's such a 25 foot or even 12 foot yeah these giant snakes how do you how do you deal with this creature how do you interact with them 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 and JJ's like you know 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 I'm like she's awake and I'm like guys and like 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 you can't she can't get me I got it right behind the head and it's about this thick the neck what's that feel like excited to interrupt like grabbing this thing with this giant head it's exciting it's amazing it's it's scary how hard is it to hold it's not that hard to hold the scary part is the moment of it's like if you 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 your body's going do not do that yeah and then you're like I gotta just do it and you do it yeah because you can't just gently like flirt with it you have to cry no and it's like it's like crossing the street when there's a bus coming it's like 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 my collarbone is about to break and I tried to yell for JJ and all that came out was there's 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 you you started as the big spoon but then the snake became the big it very much became the big spoon and uh 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 you get you're the you're the the first the the point guy okay the the taking the big risky yes First Step yes although it could be argued that there's a similarly large risk for the tail guy because the anaconda's defense is to take a giant projectile and so the person that gets the tail is gonna smell like Anaconda for like at least a week yes it's the least Pleasant you're taking the the most dangerous one there um they have the least Pleasant job this is fascinating but what's really fascinating though is that because of 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 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 will 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 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 you know what can we learn from studying this very very little understood apex predator and one of the things you can learn is how Mercury moves through through the ecosystem which can damage the ecosystem with all kinds of different ways yeah it's it's brutal man the the gold mining 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 proving 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 way out past the machine gun guarded limit of the pumpus 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's 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 what's the machine gun limit exactly it's the border of this area that they call the pompous 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 and what the Russian guys you 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 a 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 okay thanks for the warning and then you know uh in June somebody pulled up beside me on a motorcycle and I got a more Stern warning but they pay attention to the flow of information because they don't want the world to yeah to find out oh the last thing they want is to be shut down but the gold miners are notorious for you know just uh 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 a war it's a war being fought in the Amazon so it's a it's possible to convert them into conservationists what's that process like or is that like uh you say that in jest no I say that in an absolute sincerity we we went up River uh 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 uh 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 I 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 we saw were so horrible and we're living with these gold miners that are you know they're they're getting their gold they're burning off the Mercury I watched the 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 gonna 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 sound of this explosion and there's just hot metal raining down all over 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 they and he looked at this and he went wow he goes you he goes that looks like so much fun and when it is so much fun 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 and he cut down like 17 palm trees and he built an ecotourism Lodge so you give them another channel of survival of making money and that's what we've been doing through jungle Keepers for loggers and for all kinds of extractors it's 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

Channel: Lex Clips

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Keywords: ai, ai clips, ai podcast, ai podcast clips, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, computer science, consciousness, deep learning, einstein, elon musk, engineering, friedman, joe rogan, lex ai, lex clips, lex fridman, lex fridman podcast, lex friedman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, math, math podcast, mathematics, mit ai, paul rosolie, philosophy, physics, physics podcast, science, tech, tech podcast, technology, turing

Id: C7nxqmCUMfM

Length: 14min 24sec (864 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2023