Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Well, see, the thing is those guys didn’t go with the locals. They came down here with mules and they tried to do it their way. And so he’s one of the people that wrote about the green hell, the jungle as the oppressive war zone where there’s nothing to eat and everything is killing you. I think that, that image is so wrong because, 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’d do it all in shorts. To JJ, it’s green paradise, and it’s intense, 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 caiman and eat that because their tails are pretty full of meat and it’s like there’s actually unending amounts of food here. They were a strange bunch. If you’re able to tune into that frequency, I feel like you and JJ are able to tune into the frequency of the jungle that is a provider, not a destroyer of human life. I think to be collaborated with, not fought against. Yes, but we’re coming at that with our modern lens because we’re coming down here with, I’ve survived how many infections in the jungle where those probably would’ve killed me before. So my dead-ass opinion of the jungle would’ve been “overwhelming and collective murder, as Herzog says. And so Percy Fawcett was coming down here with this view of it’s trying to kill us at all times. We are flying down here and coming out here with our superior medicines and our ability to survive infections, and so it is different for us. It is different. We’re coming at this very, very different. But Fawcett to me was the last of the real swashbucklers, the really batshit crazy explorers that just went out into the dark spaces on the map. And it’s very hard for me to identify with him. But. For instance, Richard Evans Schultes from Harvard, that’s someone where you go, okay, now we’re getting to the point where I can start to understand. Just like the conquistadors. And they tell you the conquistadors showed up, the Spanish killed 2,000 Inca on the first day, and then they marched to this city and can you imagine yourself just slaughtering a bunch of women and children and soldiers and then just drinking some wine and doing it again tomorrow? I can’t actually wrap my head around that.…

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