Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I think he was fun to watch because he had this indomitable spirit. He wasn’t there to commune with nature, he was there to win. And he was like, to me, that’s the pioneer mentality. He goes, “I’m a hunting guide. I’m out here. I’m going to win that money. I’m going to survive through the winter.” He wasn’t worried. I feel like so many people, they worry second guessing themselves, “Am I in a video game? I don’t know. What’s my…”, just questioning their entire existential identity. And this guy was like, “You know what? There’s a muskox over there. I’m going to shoot it. I’m going to stab it now. I’m going to make a pouch out of its ball sack and I’m going to live off that for the next few months and win a half a million dollars.” And that’s an amazing amount of pragmatic optimism that I just enjoyed. And every time he would go, “We got to get back to Rock House”, and it became, even though he is all alone, he had a big smile on his face. And what made that season so great was that it was him and then it was Callie. And Roland had the muscle and could make Rock House and then Callie was the opposite. She was this girl who, yes, she could hunt with her bow and she knew how to fish and she wasn’t using raw power, but what was so endearing about her was that how much she loved being out there. As hard as it was, and as isolationist as it was, she was smiling. Every time the show cut to her, she was like, “Hey everybody, it’s morning. Can you believe the frost?” You’ve been out there for a hundred days! Amazing. I think it was really an amazing show of that the game is all here. The game of life, the game of alone and the game of life because that’s the same thing. Yeah. She maintained that sort of silliness, the goofiness, all through it when the condition got really tough. And she had a very different perspective as you know Roland didn’t want any of the spirituality, it’s very pragmatic. And for Callie, it is very spiritual connection to the land. She said something like she wanted not only to take from the land, but to give back. I mean, there’s this kind of poetic spiritual connection to the land. It’s such a dire contrast to Roland. But she’s still a badass. I mean to survive no matter what, no matter the kind of personality, you have to be a badass. I think she took a porcupine quill from her shoulder. That was crazy. I think it went in somewhere completely different and it migrated to their shoulder.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.