Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…That’s actually a really good way to… There was this moment that I watched where you were washing a shirt in this pathetic puddle because we had no water and because we had walked all day and tripped all day and gotten thorns in our hands and our feet and our legs, and we were lost in the jungle and it was nighttime and we didn’t know if a big tree was going to just fall on us and mousetrap kill us. There was a lot of uncertainty, but I watched something very special happen to you, and that was, I saw you crouching by the side of this puddle, it wasn’t even a flowing stream, so we couldn’t drink it, and you were just trying to wash the sweat off of your shirt. And you looked at me and you just said, “The only thing that I care about right now is water.” And I feel like in that moment we were united in the simple reality of the fact that we were so thirsty that it hurt and that it was a little scary. Yeah, it was scary. But also there was a joy in the interaction with the water because it cools your body temperature down and there’s a faith in that interaction that eventually we’ll find clean water because water’s plentiful on earth. It’s like a delusional faith that eventually we’ll find. It was just a little celebration. I think the cooling aspect of the water, because the body temperature is really high from traversing the really dense jungle, just the cooling was somehow grounding in a way that nothing else really is. It was a little celebration of life, of life on earth, of earth, of the jungle, of everything. It was a nice moment. I think about that. Had a couple of those. There was one in the puddle and one in the river. One was full of delusion and fear, and the other one was full of relief and celebration. There’s this thing that they say where all the pleasure in life is derived from the transitions. When you’re cold, warm feels good. When you’re hot, cold feels good. When you’re hungry, food feels good. And when you’re that thirsty, water becomes God and it’s all you want. And also the other thing is that, when we’re out there, it felt so good to be so lost and so tired. How would you describe the physicality of what we were doing, the level of physical exertion?…

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