#429 – Paul Rosolie: Jungle, Apex Predators, Aliens, Uncontacted Tribes, and God

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Paul Rosolie, his second time in the podcast. But this time, we did the conversation deep in the Amazon jungle. I traveled there to hang out with Paul, and it turned out to be an adventure of a lifetime. I will post a video capturing some aspects of that adventure in a week or so. It included everything from getting lost in dense unexplored wilderness with no contact to the outside world to taking very high doses of ayahuasca and much more. Paul, by the way, aside from being my good friend, is a naturalist, explorer, author, and is someone who has dedicated his life to protecting the rainforest. For this mission, he founded Junglekeepers. You can help him if you go to junglekeepers.org. This trip, for me, was life-changing. It expanded my understanding of myself and of the beautiful world I'm fortunate to exist in with all of you. So, I'm glad I went, and I'm glad I made it out alive. And now, a quick use that can mention a sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got ShipStation for fulfillment, Yahoo Finance for investors, BetterHelp for mental health, NetSuite for business management software, Aidsleeve for naps and Shopify for selling stuff on the internet. Choose Y as in my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team or just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfridman.com/contact. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. It's a software designed to save you time and money on fulfillment, shipping stuff that you sell on the internet. It integrates with Shopify and wherever else you sell stuff and allows businesses medium large to just ship stuff. I'm a huge fan of logistics and supply chains. Looking at that incredibly complicated network of how one package gets from point A to point B. Part of that is the theoretical computer scientist and me, because when you simplify that problem and formulate it as a graph theory problem, then you can perform all kinds of optimizations on it, which takes me back to some of my favorite courses on the theory and the practice. So numerical optimization, when you're talking about nonlinear programming, and then the more theoretical stuff with convex programming. A particular formulation of an optimization problem can be easy to solve or hard to solve. When I look at this world of logistics and shipping stuff from point A to point B, where there's a million point A's and a million point B's, and the combinatorial madness of that, it's really exciting that there is systems that enable that all to work. Anyway, I'm glad ShipStation exists, and I'm glad they're solving this tricky but extremely important problem. Go to shipstation.com/lex and use code Lex to sign up for your free 60-day trial. That's shipstation.com/lex.
This episode is also brought to you by Yahoo Finance. It's a site that provides financial management, reports, information, and news for investors. I use it for the cool little feature of it letting you add your portfolio, and thereby letting you monitor it and get news about really good things. So they have a TD Ameritrade account and mutual fund there, which I guess got switched over to Charles Schwab. There's a really nice interface that lets you monitor that. But of course, as part of that interface, you can also see news of the crazy stuff that's going on in the markets. It gives you an insight in what the people who really have money invested in the success of companies are thinking about, where they're excited about, where they're cynical about, all that kind of stuff. So it's a nice lens to which you see the world. One that contrasts with the more political and the geopolitical lens which I often look at, and also contrasts with the historical lens. I read a lot of history books and there, time is slowed down. The ephemeral ups and downs of every day are not as important. But of course, when you're living in the moment, in the day, this week, the ups and downs of the world are extremely important. And especially if you have money invested in certain small slices of that world. So I use Yahoo Finance for monitoring that perspective on the world. For comprehensive financial news and analysis, go to yahoofinance.com. That's yahoofinance.com. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. They figure out what you need to match with a licensed therapist in under 48 hours. It works for individuals, it works for couples. I remember seeing numbers, like crazy numbers, like 350 million messages, chat, phone, video sessions, over 35,000 licensed therapists, over 4.4 million people that got help. Talking about a network. So I was just talking about the logistics of shipping stuff from A to B. Here's the logistics of the human psyche, the collective intelligence and the collective psyche of the human species seeking to explore the shadow of the individual minds. But in so doing, exploring the collective shadow of our species. It'd be cool to visualize all that. Anyway, we're just individuals. We don't have a way to take the perspective of the species. We only have our own mind, our own conscious mind and the subjective view that it provides of the world. So for that subjective view, it's good to clean the lens, so to speak, every once in a while. And that's what I think talk therapy does. And BetterHelp is super easy to create, affordable, available everywhere. So you should definitely try it at betterhelp.com/lex. And if you go there, you'll save in your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex.