The secret to survival in the Amazon jungle | Paul Rosolie and Lex Fridman

without a machete in this environment you don't last yeah and you know that now like you you in that tangle to just take three steps that way would I would immediately be taking on I mean I'm not wearing shoes right now yeah bullet ants venomous snakes spikes through my feet tripping over myself I don't have a headlamp unbelievable risk right there we're sitting on the edge of tragedy can you explain what the the purpose of the machete in this situation is like what is a machete how does it work how does it allow you to navigate in this exceptionally dense environment so this is the tool that I spend most of my life carrying this is in my hand for 90% of my time and in the jungle you really need a machete there's so much plant life here that you have to cut your way through and like a Jaguar an ocelot a lot of these other animals that are more hard horizontally based and low to the ground they can make it like when we got stuck in those bamboo patches and we were just hacking through them and it's dangerous and there's as you hit the bamboo it ricochets and there spikes and then one piece Falls and it pulls a a train a Vine that has spikes on it and that hits you in the neck and it just the jungle is Savage to humans but if you are an a GTI a little rodent or a jaguar or a deer you can kind of slip through this stuff and the deer have developed really small antlers they can just kind of weave through low to the ground and so and so for us being these vertical beings walking through the jungle it it really helps to be able to move the sticks that are diagonally opposing your movement at all times so machete is just a very very useful tool um it could help you pull thorns out of your body as you saw last night we can use it to find food mhm you want machete fishing you cut a fish head off with a machete by like it was swimming and then you basically you know uh macheted the water and the other fascinating thing about that fish without his head it kept moving soing was just using I guess this nervous system to uh to swim beautifully I mean I that there's so many questions there about how nature works because well let's explain it because he the way the machete hit this fish it kind of kind of took his just his his eyes off of and his lower jaw was still there so it was really just like the brain and and the top jaw that came off and this fish the the dust cleared in this stream this fish was I found it very Haunting in a very like Interstellar way like it was just the programming was still there but the brain was gone and the fish was just still moving and it was going to die but it was still swimming and it looked like an like like a live fish it was it was something and you're still trying to catch it which is interesting I still had to work to catch it cuz every time I caught it it would it would freak out and then it would jump back in the water and I'm programmed here from years and years of living in the Amazon that everything can hurt you so you actually become quite you know if a moth lands on you you flick it because it could be a bullet an and so even the fish here a lot of the fish here have spikes coming out of them and so even though I know that fish I know its name I've eaten them many times as I was holding it when it would twitch with that explosive power just like the Cayman I would I would I would get that fear response and release it and so that happened three or four times before I finally said this is stupid even though he's slippery he hasn't got ahead I can hold on to him I put him in my pocket yeah you put him in pocket and then we fried him up and we and he was delicious so and I'm grateful for his existence and for his role and for my existence on this planet this brief existence that I was able to enjoy that delicious delicious fish so the machete is used to cut through this extremely dense jungle there's Vines by the way there's rope likee things that are extremely strong and they go all kinds of directions to go horizontal and all this I I don't even how treat we have a tree right above us that makes no sense there's like a tree that kind of failed and then a new tree was created on top of it that makes it just makes no sense it feels like sometimes trees come from the uh from the sky sometimes they come from the ground I don't I don't really quite understand the how that works cuz there's new trees that grow on Old trees and the old trees rot away and the new trees come up that whole mechanism Strangler figs and so Strangler figs as you go across the world's ecosystems that whole belt of you know whether you're in rainforest in the Amazon the Congo Indonesia all across the tropics you have Strangler figs and the amazing thing that this that this species does it's become a keystone species across the planet with a hyper influence on its ecosystem wherever it is because they produce fruit in the dry season when the rest of the forest is making it hard for animals to find fruit to find food and so the bats the birds the monkeys they all go to the Strangler fig they eat the fruit and the fruit of course is just tricking the animals the the the plantss are tricking the animals into carrying their seeds to another tree and so they're getting free Transportation monkey takes a poop on another tree after eating Strangler figs and then that Strangler fig sends out its Vines gets to the ground and then as soon as it begins sucking up nutrients out competes that tree for light grows hyperdrive around the trunk of that tree and then eventually that tree will die and the Strangler fig will win because it got a it got a boost up to the top whereas these little trees down here they're going to have to wait their turn they have to wait until a tree falls until there's a light Gap and then they have enough food to grow quick and so this whole thing is an energy economy everything is just trying to get sunlight and so Strangler figs yeah top down trees growing over parasitic top- down octopus trees growing over other giant trees and you've seen the size of some of the trees here so uh you know back to Percy F and exploration what do you think it was like for him back then a hundred years ago God damn going to the Jungle well see the thing is those guys didn't go with the locals they came down here with like mules and they tried to do it their way yeah and so he's one of the people that wrote about the green hell the jungle as the oppressive ah war zone where there's nothing to eat and everything is killing you and it's I I think I think that that image is so wrong CU as you saw last night we could go if we went out with JJ right now we would machete fish some fish we could start a little fire we' do it all in shorts like to to JJ it's green paradise and it's intense but but if you know what you're doing which the local people surely do well then just beneath the sand there's turtle eggs that you can eat and inside the nuts on the ground there's grubs that you can eat and if you really needed to you could just jump on a Cayman and eat that cuz their tails are pretty full of meat and it's like there's actually unending amount amounts of food here and so it's it's they were pretty you know they were strange bch if you're able to to tune into the that frequency I feel like you're you and JJ yeah are able to tune to the to the frequency of the Jungle that is a a provider not a destroyer of human life right like uh I think to be collaborated with not fought against yeah yes but we're coming at that with a with our modern lens cuz we're coming down here with I've survived how many infections in the jungle where those probably would have killed me before yeah so my dead ass opinion of the Jungle would have been overwhelming and Collective murder as Herzog says um and so Percy faet was coming down here with this view of it's trying to kill us at all times where we are flying down here and coming out here with our Superior medicines and our ability to survive infections and and so it's it is different for us is different we're we're we're we're coming at this very very different but faucet to me was like the last of like the real swashbucklers like the really batshit crazy explorers that just went out into the into the dark spaces on the map MH and it's very hard for me to identify with him but with for instance Richard Evans schulties from Harvard that's someone where you go okay now we're getting to the point where I can start to understand mean just like the Conquistadors and they tell you the Conquistador showed up you know they killed the Spanish killed 2,000 Inca on the first day and then they they marched to this city and they like when I hear about that can you imagine yourself just like slaughtering a bunch of women and children and and soldiers and then just like drinking some wine and doing it again tomorrow I can't actually wrap my head around that yeah it just seems like an entire different world no like different world different value system I value system the different relationship with violence and life and death I think we value life more we value we resist violence more yeah like I I just I can't like if we saw a car AC I feel like if I saw a car accident like you know or if you see a little bit of War some violence like it affects you these people were so comfortable with those things it was such a normal part of their the the Spartans the the commanches like they became so comfortable with war to the point that it became what they did M and they cated it they celebrated it and direct violence too like taking that machete and murdering me or if I got to the machete first me murdering you not a chance I and then I would put it on Instagram show off and the number of DMs I would get from murdering you with a machete meanwhile half the world right now is messaging me saying my DMs are filled with take care of Lex don't lose Lex make sure Lex comes back Lex is a National Treasure we love Lex make sure he holds a snake the amount of love that is out there meanwhile I emerge from The Jungle of blood around me with a machete and I take over your Instagram cup he's very humble he doesn't want to hear about the love

Channel: Lex Clips

Views: 11,880

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: jX5ol6Fvqvk

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Fri May 24 2024