Julian Dorey Podcast - #333 - Egypt’s Lost Creatures, Uncontacted “Skull” Tribe & Congo’s “Big Foot” | Forrest Galante

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

SPONSORS: 1) PRIZEPICKS: Visit https://prizepicks.onelink.me/LME0/JULIAN and use code JULIAN and get $50 in lineups when you play your first $5 lineup! 2) FUM: Head to https://tryfum.com/products/zero-crisp-mint to start with Zero PATREON https://www.patreon.com/JulianDorey (***TIMESTAMPS in description below) ~ Forrest Galante is an American outdoor adventurer and television personality. He primarily seeks out animals on the brink of extinction. He is the host of the television shows Extinct or Alive on Animal Planet and Mysterious Creatures with Forrest Galante, as well as multiple Shark Week shows. FORREST'S LINKS - YT: https://www.youtube.com/@ForrestGalante - IG: https://www.instagram.com/forrest.galante/ FOLLOW JULIAN DOREY INSTAGRAM (Podcast): https://www.instagram.com/juliandoreypodcast/ INSTAGRAM (Personal): https://www.instagram.com/julianddorey/ X: https://twitter.com/julianddorey JULIAN YT CHANNELS - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Clips YT: https://www.youtube.com/@juliandoreyclips - SUBSCRIBE to Julian Dorey Daily YT: https://www.youtube.com/@JulianDoreyDaily - SUBSCRIBE to Best of JDP: https://www.youtube.com/@bestofJDP ****TIMESTAMPS**** 00:00 – Hippie roots, Zimbabwe, Mugabe, Oakland, culture shock 11:50 – Anger, ocean discovery, diving, UCSB, future wife 22:18 – UCSB professor, insect knowledge, biology, fieldwork, desk jobs 32:50 – Academia critique, media, Channel Islands, Naked and Afraid 40:17 – Naked and Afraid reality, survivalist, viral stories, TV offers 46:34 – Extinct or Alive pitch, rediscoveries, Zanzibar leopard, tortoise 58:09 – Fernandina tortoise, tracking tech, human instinct 01:07:15 – Colossal advisor, de-extinction risks, cloning, rollouts 01:18:08 – Jurassic Park, conservation business model, extinction rates 01:22:44 – Conservation funding, dinosaurs, sauropod skepticism, fossils 01:27:10 – Convergent evolution, biodiversity Jenga, bees, Amazon, Paul 01:39:01 – First Amazon trip, canoe, 19-ft anaconda, tribes, shamans 01:53:55 – Jungle vs Western medicine, rifle break, poaching, rhino horn 02:06:27 – Elephant translocation, helicopters, family bonds, survival 02:20:38 – Elephant trauma, Zimbabwe bull, India rescue, lost species 02:33:48 – Renegade scientists, ocean mysteries, Paul Watson arrest 02:49:32 – Laws vs conservation, Mota Island, cave of skulls, warriors 02:59:17 – Refugee roots, global expeditions, Animals on Drugs, YouTube CREDITS: - Host & Producer: Julian Dorey - Producer & Editor: Alessi Allaman - https://www.youtube.com/@UCyLKzv5fKxGmVQg3cMJJzyQ - In-Studio Producer: Joey Deef - https://www.instagram.com/joeydeef/ Julian Dorey Podcast Episode 333 - Forrest Galante Music by Artlist.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is a crazy story, but we went to this volcanic island in the Galapagos, a place that the California Academy of Science had only ever collected one other individual of the species in history, 114 years prior. But I met a scientist who's like, I swear to you, forest. When I was there, I found bite marks in a cactus, I found tracks, there's a tortoise on that island. So we found this, and I'm like freaking out. I'm like, oh my God, there is a tortoise here. I was holding in my hand, to this day, the rarest animal in the world, the Fernandina Island tortoise.

And we found eight species that had been declared extinct. What was the first one you found? Weird story. Off the coast of Africa is the island of Zanzibar. We went there to look for a rumored leopard that had been a stink for 30 or 40 years. And in Papua New Guinea, we're hiking up this river to look for this tribe that worships sharks. And I look up and there's a skull on a stick, a human skull. Let's go on and check that out.

And there's a cave opening. To go in the cave opening and I'm like, oh, I don't think we're supposed to be here. And I come out and the tribal warriors are standing there watching me. They're like, why are you in our cave? It's really bizarre. Hey, guys. If you're not following me on Spotify, please hit that follow button and leave a five-star review. They're both a huge huge help. Thank you. mom's name is Jacarando, which is a tree. My sister's name is Summer. I'm just lucky that my career

coincided with the fact that my parents were hippies, you know? Like, it's not a, it's not a TV name or a stage name or anything like that, which I often get asked. I'm like, no, just use my regular name. It is a great name. Faris Galande. Yeah, thank you. I'm just really lucky my parents were hippies. But you grew up out in Zimbabwe. You were telling me since you were like, until you're about 14. That's right. Yeah. So, so, so really, Raised in Zimbabwe, actually born in the States, but flew over when I was a baby. My parents just did that side of have a U.S. passport because my dad was American. And then flew over there and was there until I was 14.

Family ran safari businesses, did a bunch of farming out in the Shamba district. It was great, great childhood. Yeah, what was that like? Were you totally, was it completely rural or were you in like a town area? What was growing up like there? So I lived on a farm in a very rural area, but 45 minutes from the, the country's capital, Harari. So not, you know, not like we were in the sticks, like growing up on a farm. But, you know, it's not like being 45 minutes outside of New York. You're still, you know,

in New York, basically. This is like we were out there. But I'd go into school every day. You know, we had shops and stuff on the way. So Zimbabwe used to be the breadbasket Africa. It used to be very affluent, you know, country club lifestyle, farming, big farming culture, you know, different to the U.S., but very, very safe, very stable politically, everything else. Well, I don't know if I'd ever say that, but more stable politically. And then it just went to hell in the early 2000s. What happened? The Robert Mugabe regime.

So the Zanu P.F. Political Party tried to retain power, and they had the land reform campaign, which was where the president said that basically blamed all the white people that were in the country, some of which, like my family were six generation for, it was really like a hate campaign to keep power. And so he, it's similar to the genocide type of things that are happening in South Africa now. But he, you know, promoted the uprising of taking land back by, quote, war veterans from the early Rhodesian wars, which these war veterans were 14 years old and had AK-47s and had never seen a war. So it wasn't really war veterans. But, yeah, there was just a lot of instability. The country went from the richest country in Africa to one of, if not the poorest country in the world in 10 years.

So big, big turmoil, upset, gun fights. I mean, everything. Things got bad, torture, all kinds of stuff. And that's what caused you guys to leave? Yeah, so we were one of the last farms in an area that was slowly seized by this land reform. And because our farm was so small, we only had a 200-acre farm compared to some of our neighbors, which were hundreds of thousands of acres. We were one of the last farms to get seized. And because my mom was a single mother and it was two kids, instead of just killer, they're like,

you can leave if you want, but if you don't, we'll kill you. Oh, thank God, I wish you could leave. Yeah, so we did. It was violent, it was a crazy night, everything else, but we got out of there, came to the States. That's pretty traumatic, like 14 to be, like your whole reality just gets warped overnight. Yeah, it was definitely a big shift. Like you said, everything changed overnight. And, I mean, I remember, you know, they came, like, the war veterans came up the driveway.

We, like, lived on top of copy, which is in Africa. It's like a granite hilltop, and our house was on top. And they came up, surrounded the house with guns and stuff. There'd been lots going on. We'd been in shootouts before that. Our neighbors had gone through Punguiz, which is political indoctrination through torture. I mean, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, there'd been a lot going on.

So it wasn't, like, completely unexpected, but being Zabwean, we just dug our heels in and said it'll never happen to us kind of thing. Right. Anyway, I just remember they came up. They gave my mom the ultimatum. She's like, go and hide in your room, lock the door, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I, like, grab my knife, and I had a bunch of guns. I was a kid, right? like in Africa, and I was like, I'm going to go fight, and she's like, no, you're not.

Go and get in the car. Oh, my God. So you guys had been in shootouts before that. Yeah, we'd only been in one. Were you doing the shooting? Well, it's kind of funny because I was a kid, right? I was 14. I don't know if it's funny, but.

Well, I was, fair enough. But I was 14 and I had a pellet gun at the time. And there have been a couple things. Like, I'd been shot at by our dam. Well, I used to ride my little motorcycle down by the neighbor's fence line, down by fire dam. So I'd been shot at once there. And then one day coming home from school, we got followed to the gate, because we had a gate, big farm. And as we were waiting for the gate to open, like slow, automatic gate, we had two cars pulling behind us, start shooting. My mom pulled

a revolver out, started shooting out, you know, like, back window blew up. She started shooting out the back. And like, I grabbed my pellet gun and started shooting like that was going to do anything, you know. And then we like drove off and our security guard came out, started shooting and they drove off. So we'd had, you know, I don't know if it was a close call, but closer than most people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little different than grown up in South Jersey, for sure. Or Santa Barbara. Yeah, definitely Santa Barbara where you're from, too. But I guess shit gets real fast, and then, you know, you're growing up, though, in a country that had been doing well, but it's out there. It's so different. It's not, you're not growing up in suburbia or something

like that. You're growing up among some of the most amazing bush in the world, where you have creatures that, you know, most people will never see. exactly in their lifetime so when you were really little did i i imagine you had an appreciation of that pretty quickly yeah my whole childhood was spent if i wasn't in school i was in the bush whether that was just on the farm where we still had leopards and things like that coming to the farm all the time coming to the farm yeah because we were just outside of the city you know like out in zimbabwe it's not much different to having mountain lines on your property here you know not here but in california i haven't seen one on on the streets of hobo yeah not on the fifth

floor but but yeah but then when we weren't when I wasn't on the farm wasn't in school we were in the bush because my family ran safari businesses so we spent a ton of time in the bush in the Zambezi Valley and had you know the big five and all the snakes and all the spiders and elephants and blah blah blah blah so it was it was pretty awesome and I had a deep appreciation for wildlife so when I left there at 14 that was the thing I missed the most more than the big house or the dogs or the farm or the friends or anything it was just the wild wildlife and the freedom of the bush of Africa. So you left a lot of friends behind two who didn't get out?

Yeah, I mean, almost everybody left. So now my friends are scattered across the planet, a bunch in Australia, a bunch in England, a bunch in South Africa, Botswana. I think we're the only ones who came to the U.S. as far as I, one friend in South Carolina. But, you know, a couple people, just everybody left, basically. Like the country collapsed, the economy collapsed. Everybody left. We were lucky. We got out as, like, refugees because my dad was an American.

right um but yeah it was it was not great so everybody kind of took off yeah i had to be really hard for your mom too because she spent it sounds like most of her life there as well yeah oh yeah oh yeah six generation um well she was fifth generation i guess but um yeah no my family had been there a long time didn't know anything else left there when the zimbabwean dollar had already collapsed so we we had 400 us dollars to our name when we left oh my god so we literally left with nothing yeah um what'd you do when you came to the u.s went on welfare went into government housing in oakland california and oakland in the early 2000s is not the trendy coffee shop oakland that it is now yeah it was pretty rough um so we bounced around welfare housing my mom got really sick probably from the

stress and everything else got a pulmonary embolism so we landed she went straight into the hospital single mom two kids we were sleeping on the hospital floor it was crazy um but yeah went through it all and then came out the other side and started to build a life. And now I get to do what I love. Yeah, it turned out great. But you have to grow up fast when something like that happens. You know, where I grew up, you had to grow up fast anyway. Like I said, I was in shootouts.

My mom was a single mother in a culture that doesn't value or allow women to have authority or leadership. So I had to kind of run the farm as a 14-year-old. I didn't really run it. My mom would run it, but I'd give the orders and things. So they'd listen. So, you know, I was driving to school when I was 13 years old. Yeah, not legally, but that's what you do in Zimbabwe. You know, nobody cares.

So I had grown up a lot already. I was still immature. I was still 13, 14, 14 year old, whatever. Were you the older sibling? Yeah, older sibling. Yeah. So I, when I came to the United States, although I was weird and wore little cocky shorts and had a funny accent and a bad haircut, like I was still much more mature than my peers, if that makes sense.

So you had a different accent than you do now? Yeah, dude, I tried everything when I was 14 when I came over to lose my accent because I didn't like being made fun of for sounding different. Was it like a British kind of accent or? Zimbabwean accent. It's just, if you've ever seen Blood Diamond, it's Leonardo DiCaprio's accent. He's Rhodesian, which is what Zimbabwe was. Same exact accent. I mean, his is pretty rough, but that's exactly what all my friends sounded like, all their parents, so on and so forth.

They said that's one of the hardest accents to have to, like for an actor to have to learn. and perform in a movie. Apparently, yeah. It's so unique. Yeah. Yeah, I don't detect you got rid of it. Yeah, I mean, I didn't try. I just wanted to sound like everybody else so that I didn't stand out.

And 14 is right at that cusp, they say, where you either retain it or don't retain it. And in hindsight, I kind of wish I had, you know, or like tried to sound like myself. But at the time, I was like, I can't do this because, you know, we don't say hard A's. I'm like, I was trying very hard to blend in. so what was it like like going to now living in oakland you're it's that you didn't just move to america you move right into a city like yeah a completely different environment what was school like what was your life like it was all very very shocking like we came over my little sister and i my mom went to the hospital we're sleeping on the hospital floor for a couple weeks

then we went into into welfare housing you know which was crazy in itself and then like i remember one of the first days I was kind of like allowed to like go run around you know I literally threw on my little cocky shorts and ran out to go check out the streets and you know I was doing crazy stuff like I was hanging out in Tilden National Park which is like a part it's like it's like timed uh what do you call it central park you know but in Oakland but much much smaller and I'm nipples deep in a pond catching newts while there's like people walking by and they're like north face here and stuff you know because I'm like I'm a wildlife guy I'm catching animals and then I remember like trying to go and play and, you know, like, I saw a bunch of, like, African-American kids.

I was like, oh, I'll go play with them. Same as where I grew up, you know, a bunch of black kids in Zimbabwe, a bunch of African-American kids here. I go, like, run over to play with them and, like, hang out. And, like, they're playing basketball. I'm like, yeah, how's it going? Can I have a Joel with you boys? And they're like, get the fuck out of here, man.

I'm like, whoa, shit, I'm sorry. Like, I'm so scared. Like, I wasn't trying to cause any problems. You're going to get another shootout. Yeah, dude, totally. So it was, it was very shocking in that regard. And I was angry. I was angry as well.

We lost everything. I remember seeing my dog run down the driveways. We pulled out to never see her again, you know, stuff like that. And so I got in a lot of fights. It was going in a bad direction, I'd say, because I was getting fist fights on the street all the time, causing trouble. Not really being a bad kid, but I was an angry kid.

I was very aggressive trying to stand up for what I believed in. Anytime somebody would make fun in my accent, I'd punch him in the face, which in Oakland is not a good thing to do. So my mom was like, we've got to get out of here. So she grabbed me and my sister. and we flew down to Los Angeles to pick up my mom's sister's car. So my mother's sister had lived in L.A. for like six or eight years at that point. And we went to grab a, to borrow a car so that we had a way to get around.

And on the way back, we drove up Coastal California, up Highway 1, which is like that picturesque, you know, driving down the 101, California. And we landed in a tiny little town called Cayucas, California. 4,000 people, tiny little town, no trouble to get in. And so my mom was like, we're going to try and move here. So this episode is brought to you by prize picks. You and I make decisions every day, but on prize picks, being right can get you paid. Don't miss any of the excitement this season on prize picks, where it's good to be right.

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Took the whatever it was, like the welfare money that we got monthly, rented a tiny little studio, moved to Cayucas, got out of Oakland. Took a few weeks, but got out of there as quickly as possible, and then just started to rebuild the life, you know, just started to, my mom got a job was a waitress. My sister and I went into the public high school there, you know, just started to rebuild. Yeah. Now, are you, you obviously had the itch to be around wildlife and it's, you can't replace what you were doing in Zimbabwe. But at what point did outside of trying to catch some animals in the pond in Oakland, at what point did you start kind of dipping your toes in that again? So straight away, like it never went away. So like I said, I was chasing animals in

Oakland. I mean, I remember this is probably illegal, but statute of limitations. Like, I remember trying to catch seagulls on the beaches, and, you know, as soon as I got back to, as soon as we were in Cayucas and all that. You can't do that? I don't know. Probably not legally. By the way, great trick. Probably shouldn't be promoting this. You put a towel down.

You lay flat, put a towel down, put some bread on the towel, and then the seagulls come to eat the bread, and you jump up like that and you catch a seagull. Don't do it. Don't do it. I'm going to try it out on Hudson. Get some radioactive ways of blades in my body. But I, when we moved to Cayucas, Cajas, really small. There's literally nothing but rugged. coastline to the north little town called moribay to the south east is mountains farmland west

is ocean and straight away i was like all right i'm here like i was still pretty naughty so i was skipping school here's what happened to be honest with you jillian like when you come to america and they don't beat you when you do something wrong in school you're like wait a minute if i goof off i get to go home for longer like if i don't do my homework they tell me to stay at home so my grades plummeted all that the system didn't make sense to me i grew up in a very strict school system where if you didn't turn in your homework you got six lashings with a cane Yeah, very different. Oh, wow.

Oh, yeah, very different. So this was very, very different. So it was like, you didn't do your homework? Okay, we're going to affect your grade. I'm like, I don't give a shit. Go for it. It sounds great. Yeah, nobody's going to beat me.

Like, that's awesome. So I'd skip in school, and I go, like, running up into the mountains above Cayucas trespassing, hanging out on private property, like on farmlands, trying to find mountain lines and catch coyotes and do all this stupid shit. And I found out very quickly that Central California is very tank. boring you know like a lot of trees have been cut down there's a lot of you know happy cows come from california thing it's just like rolling hills of grass and stuff and you know there's a bald eagle once in a while but there's like nothing there compared to the bush of africa so i wasn't at all

like stimulated by the wildlife on above the surface but i was living on the beach in kayukas so one day i was skateboarding down through this tiny little town and i saw a a yard sale and there was a little bucket out and it was like honor system donation kind of thing and I bought a pole spear and a mask and snorkel for a dollar. So I put a dollar in and the guy was there, so he was cool with it. I wasn't like I stole it for it for a dollar. But he's like, yeah, I don't go for it, kid, so I took a pole spear, which I don't know if you know what that is, but it's like a stick or a Hawaiian sling. It's like a stick with a trident on the end, a rubber band, like a hand-powered spear.

Oh, yeah, I've seen this before. And a mask and snorkel, and I bought him for a dollar, and I grabbed, I grabbed this mask and snorkel and this pole spear and a pair of board shorts in about 58, degree water because it's central California and hopped in the ocean and straight away I was hooked as there were big sea lions and there were leopard sharks and swell sharks and horn sharks and I could hunt for fish and I could shoot lincod and shoot perch and I just got hooked and so that was that became my new like wildlife addiction I guess is I just I just I found above the surface in California to be tame and then I found below the surface to be like wild and rugged and all the things that's where I'm going exactly the Zimbabwe and Bush had so I was like

Like, that's it. So I just started focusing all my free time on being in the water. What did they have like in Zimbabwe? I mean, you got a river there, right? But you don't, there's no ocean. No ocean. Landlock country. But we have the Zambesi River, which they say you can line head to tail with crocodiles on either side. We've got tiger fish there, which are like a cousin of piranha, big crazy teeth. Sounds awesome. A beautiful fish. Tons of other species. And then all the wildlife I mentioned, you know, the big five and blah, blah, blah, blah. So it was just full of wildlife, but no diving, no fishing. So the ocean was completely far into me.

And I'd get out like this because I couldn't afford a wetsuit and I'd be in my board shorts as long. You know, but when you're a kid, you don't feel the cold, right? Yeah, like, fuck it. Yeah, and it was awesome. And I just fell in love with the ocean. So I just pursued that all through high school. And I got pretty good at surfing and I'd dive

and I'd just be a California boy, you know, spend time in the ocean. Yeah, I think like the adventurer side of you served you well to be out in California. It's a good place to have that trade. Yeah, if I'd moved to Nebraska, I'm not sure what would have happened. Yeah. I mean, there's a few cows out there. That's true.

Horses, but not much else. That's right. But did you start thinking to yourself you want to be like a scientist involved with wildlife or were you just like, I'm going to find my way to wildlife as an adventure and we'll figure it out later? Was there any plan? No plan. Well, I shouldn't say that. I had a plan or rather a thought, which was, okay, as soon as I graduated,

from high school, I'm going to go back to Zimbabwe and become a safari guide. Because the bush was still safe in Zimbabwe, right? Because there was no land to be stolen or political turmoil or whatever if you're out in the bush. So I always thought, as soon as I turn 18, I'm, let's say 15, 16 at this point in time. As soon as I turn 18, save up money, you know, I was working all jobs, my own law and stuff like that. Go back to Zimbabwe, become a pH, professional hunter, which is not an actual hunter, but the accreditation you need to become a safari guide. Become a pH, go live in the bush, safaris how realistic is it to be completely out in the bush so 365 days a year not at all you can't do it but i was 16 you know you live in an old fantasy world yeah but i was doing that

i was chasing the the ocean stuff and then i met a girl so i met a girl yeah that's what happens and she's like i'm going to ucsb and i was like what's ucsb and she's like it's the greatest school in the world blah blah well turns out ucsb has a great wildlife biology program um or biology not really wildlife biology and uh and so So a very long story because I had terrible grades, as I mentioned, and we can get into it if you like. But I somehow, through amazing situations and events, got into UCSB. And then when I was there...

So you turned it around. I turned it around. I need that story. How'd you turn it around? Why not? So this girl tells me she's going to UCSB. Beautiful little blonde girl named Jessica, blah, blah, blah. She tells me she's going to UCSB.

This isn't your wife now? This is my wife now. Oh, it is your wife now. Oh, it is your wife now. It is your wife now. It is worked out. It worked out. It worked out.

It's my wife, mother of two kids, everything. And they're nice kids. I'd like to meet their dad. She's going to kill me. So she tells me about UCSB. I go down there for a college tour. The high school counselor literally tells me. She's like, you shouldn't go for a college tour.

You're never going to get into university. Like, you can't go to a four-year school. Like, your grades suck and you're an idiot. And I was like, okay. And I went anyway. And this is so iconic. ums up how I was at that age. I'm 16, 17, whatever it is years old, and you go on college tour, you know? The only college I go tour is UCSB. And I'm, like, getting more and more bored

walking around UCSB, hearing about, you know, the whole of arts and lectures or whatever. So I fucking bail. I just sneak off from the tour group. And I just bail out from the tour group and start walking around and showing myself around. All of a sudden, I'm like, damn, there's a lot of hot chicks here. Like, oh, cool. There's the rugby program. Like, I was a big rugby players. I'm like, there's a rugby program. Sick. I could play rugby. And I'm like poking around, like just cruising by myself, being a little shit and, uh, walk

into this building. And I'm walking through this building and all of a sudden I look through a window and there's like a huge terrarium filled with stick insects. A terrarium? Uh, like a reptile cage. Oh, God. Yeah. But this one was filled with stick insects. Um, you know what those are?

No. It's like a bug that looks like a stick. And, uh, so I see this. I'll pull that up on Yeah, go for it. So I see this big cage filled with stick bugs and I'm like, oh, sick, I love stick insects. And I was always a nerd.

Like I tried to cover it up by playing rugby and, you know, being funny and cool and all that, but I was always a big nerd. Oh, shit, they're huge. Some of them, yeah, that's the gargantuan stick insect. But some of them are small. There's a ton of species. And I see this terrarium.

And I'm like, oh, fuck, that's cool. Like this at UCSP like office. So I walk around from the window where I spot it, open the door, let myself into this room. And at some guy's office, you know, it's a desk, there's piles of papers and a computer and this terrarium film was stick insects.

And I'm, like, peeking around. I'm such a little shit. You know, I'm like 17 years old. Peaking around. I'm looking. And this guy walks in big, burly guy, big beard, booming voice. And he goes, what are you doing in my office?

And I was like, oh, I'm sorry, but did you know that you have a gigantus here? And there's also, you know, it's kind of interesting. This shouldn't be a mixed species habitat because these ones are more aggressive than these and blah. And this guy just listens to me. And he listens, and he listens, and he listens, he goes,

what's your name, boy? And I'm like, oh, my name's Forrest Galante, sir, like, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, I was still very polite and respectful, even though he was shithing, because I was raised in this very strict Zimbabwean school system. And he's like, what's your name, boy? And I'm like, oh, my name's Forrest Kalante, Sir, Bobby. He's like, you're in my office, blah, blah, blah. So he listens to me, like, rattle off a bunch of facts about stick bugs.

And I'm like, you know, I probably shouldn't mix ones from Asia with ones with Africa. These ones are more aggressive, you know, these ones are more dominant, blah, blah, blah. He's just sort of listening quietly, this big guy, booming voice. Ask me for my name. I was, what are you doing here? I was like, oh, I'm on, he's like, well, what, what, what, you know, what program are you? And I was like, oh, I'm not. I'm in high school.

And I'm, uh, you know, looking to go to, like, on college tour here. He's like, write your name down. Write your school down. Yeah, he asked all these things. And, and so he didn't ask me about my grades. But turns out, long story made short, I was in the dean. I think it was the dean. But I was in one of the professors of the College of Creative Studies, which was like this

experimental program. I was in his office, this experimental program. for kids that had peculiar interests in a way, like almost advanced like an honors program, but kids that were really special. There was a kid when I was there, was 13 years old who started at UCSB. There was a woman there who had won like some crazy, you know,

kid degree in physics, and she was building rockets and shit. And just by pure happenstance, I snuck into this guy's office. He was the professor of entomology of insects. I started prattling off all these facts, And he liked me, because here was this 15-year-old kid talking about stickbugs and teaching him a thing or two. I don't know if I really did, but he pretended I did about stickbugs.

He contacted my high school and said, we want to get this kid in here. So they let me in on academic probation. Yeah, and it was the only school I applied to or anything. And they let me into UCSP because I had shit grades on academic probation into the specialized school. Now, to write an essay, I'd explain. I'd been a good student in Zimbabwe, but then I came over here and I was a shithead. You guys didn't beat me with a cane, so. I'd explain it all, yeah, but it all kind of worked out.

So I ended up going to UCSB. Did your girl get in? My girl got in. That's good. Yep, so we were together in, you know, typical college relationship kind of thing, blah, blah, blah. But all was good. And there is no, there are schools that offer this, I think, Clemson and places like that, where you can be hands-on with wildlife, which is all I ever wanted.

UCSB didn't offer that, and it was the only place I could go. So I went to UCSB instead of heading back to a business. Bob, we'd be a safari guide. Naturally, if I can't be hands-on with animals, I'll be a biologist, right? Like, I get to work, be a wildlife biologist. So I went into the biology program, had a roller coaster of college, but tons of fun. You know, I played on the rugby team all four years, you know, was involved with a frat and chase girls around and all the stuff you do in college.

So you took a little break. Well, not really, but, you know, like college, you know, college. But no, no real break was taken. but, you know, college, you know, I'm not going to go into detail. An unofficial break. Yeah. And, you know, just had fun and loved being there, settled in. By the time I was a junior, my grades got really good, you know. Like, I sort of really did turn my life around because I was in a train wreck, Ray.

And it's really thanks to Jessica, my wife, who then was my girlfriend. She really did push me into it. But you obviously enjoyed the study then. Like, there had to be a part of it that you're like, you know what, this is applicable to what I want to do. It's crazy. and I see these same traits in my older son now, I would go in as a freshman in college, and I'd go talk to the herpetology professor, and I'd say, look, study your reptiles and amphibians. Like, I'm super into herps, into herpetology. Can you please? I know, I know. Can you please

and he's like, oh, this is an upper level class. Like, you can only be in this if you're a senior, you know? I was like, can you please let me in? And I would end up being the number one student in the class, knowing more than the teachers. I'd read through the whole herpetology manual in like a or two like it sounds like a beautiful mind thing but then i'd get like an f in like biology 101 because i just wasn't interested in like how does the mitochondrial DNA affect a cell and i just right right you know so it was like i had these my grades were fine in the end whatever but i just the things i was interested in i'd go just like you in podcasting i'd just go nuts on it you know i'd just be so it's the only thing i'd read about the only thing i'd learn about i'd focus on i'd study it and

I get straight A's in my fish bio class, my reptile class, whatever. And then, you know, chemistry 101, I, like, would barely scrape by with, like, a D minus, you know, because I just didn't care. So I always was on this track of, like, I want to work with wildlife. And I figured if I couldn't do it hands-on as a far guide, I'd do it as a biologist. And I'd fix the world as a wildlife biologist. Turns out when you come out of college, you don't just save the world like you think you're going to. So that took a little figuring out. Yeah, what is it? What are the common places you can kind of break in outside of, you know, somehow landing a TV show and all that? We'll get to that.

But, you know, you come out of college with a degree like that. What kinds of jobs are you looking to take as, like, the entry level? It's kind of crazy because you think when you're studying that and you're in those programs, that you're going to come out of college and get this awesome $100,000 a year job and write papers and save the planet and study animals. I came out of college, broke, no job. I traveled for a while, whatever. But then when I got back, I went in as a biotech, you know, so a biology technician. I was basically a high-paid gardener.

I was pulling weeds. I was killing ants. I was surveying habitat, but surveying sounds so sexy. It was literally like walking around in genes getting stung by poison oak going, oh, there's a weed. There's a weed. So those entry-level jobs are rough. And you're like in the field all day, in the sun. cooking, studying things, but I love that.

Like, I'll, I'll take that over sitting at a desk. At a desk any day of the week. So I was thriving doing that, but it doesn't have a lot of long-term potential. And this is one of the problems with the system, and the system is broken. If you're really good at that, if you're really good at field science and wildlife biology like that, then you progress to sitting in an office, writing papers, having a team of biotex under you, applying for grants and you don't end up doing the stuff that you're good at, which is being in the field. And it's a really messed up broken system in wildlife biology. I'm writing a book on it right now,

actually. And it's, yeah, and it's... Just on that. Yeah, I mean, it's on, like, renegade biologists and like conservation cowboys that kind of, like, break the mold. And it's pretty cool. Like, I've interviewed a lot of really interesting people, but the problem is the system is flawed. Yes. Yeah. It feels like, and this is just one example of many, but when you look at it, a lot of these, I mean, when you look at a lot of these different fields and how they were set up over decades and decades and decades, it's almost like we got to this point where, well, this is just the way things are done. Yeah. And people would ask the question like, well, why do we do it? No, you don't ask that. You don't get to ask that. That's right. So this is just what it is. That's right. You know, this is the system we have. And now, you know, in this era of having the internet and being able to connect with people around the world and show people what you're doing, you have a lot of people like yourself. You know, like to use your word, like a renegade kind of like, hey, I'm good at this thing. I don't know why people are doing this shit this way. Right. Here's another way we can do it.

It doesn't even mean you're right about everything, but you can at least ask the questions and get attention for that. And maybe like, you know, everyone talks about breaking these systems, but maybe like just resetting them a little bit over time. Because I feel like as a country, like, look at this U.S.-centric, being able to have great academic institutions and great research centers and great ways to like kind of push the ball forward is very important. important, but we got to get with the time on so much of it, right? And not just that, but this is the United States, where you can make a career doing anything you choose if you give your all to it, right? That's what we stand for as a free nation, as a free country, as a free market. And in the sciences, in academia, it's crazy because if you think that way, you're belittled and ostracized, and probably not just the sciences, that's just what I know, and you have to follow

the path. But we live in a place with freedom of speech. So as long as you're able to go out there and make your mark and you're doing it ethically and responsibly. I'm not saying, you know, go Tiger King, you know, but if you're working, if you're working with wildlife and you're doing it a responsible way to educate people, you're doing that on Instagram or TikTok, I don't care. These people that, like, belittle TikTok, screw them, man. Like, if you're getting millions of people to watch you do some kids on TikTok to fall in love with wildlife, be a TikTok hero. Be a TikTok biologist. Who cares? Like, if you get 10 million views on your TikTok, video, fiddling with a snake, and you're teaching the audience about that snake or its conservation status, you've done so much more than the scientists who published a paper that he got

a grant for that worked on it for six years that 200 people are going to read. And has $10 words every other word. It's just like, I completely agree, man. You guys have heard my producer, Joe and I talk about his longtime vaping habit, and now he's getting the help of fume to help stop that. If you're ready to break a bad habit, the first step doesn't need to be hard or expensive. You just need the right tool to start. And that's exactly what Fume Zero gives you. The Fume Zero is the brand new grab-and-go flavored air device from the sponsor of this episode, Fume. Here's why it's different. It's affordable. At just 2499 for a sleek, pre-filled device, you're getting your money's worth. No commitment, no refills, no batteries. It's also completely clean. Zero nicotine,

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to start with zero. Once again, that's tryfume.com, link in description below. And there's a place in the world for both. I'm not saying stop the real hard science, but the fact that it's belittling the people that are bringing exposure and love and passion to wildlife, I think is nuts. I was talking, I'm not going to say who, but I was talking with someone recently who I wanted to have on the show who right now is not going to come on. Great guy, but he's dealing with the same thing because he's extremely charismatic. He's very good in the field that he's in and he understands how to speak to the younger generations extremely well because he's a younger guy yeah but he's getting so much pressure behind the scenes from like the old guard to be

like well you're going to do a phd program that's right do this stuff so this is what we do we don't talk to those people that's beneath us or whatever yep and it's like to your point you know over in china where tick to like from yeah they have their kids because they're communist government they get to like force what their kids do sure this is the one good thing yeah like like like I'm not in the communism, but this is the one advantage they have. They turn off TikTok at like 9 o'clock at night for their kids, so they go to bed and get a good night's sleep. And their kids watch like fun science, nature, and learning videos.

You know what I mean? And TikTok is like an educational platform in China, allegedly. And they may allegedly. I haven't been over there and check it out, but that's what I hear. So they make it fun. So, you know, we do have freedom here for kids to watch Titty videos too. But if there's more Farras Galanté's in the feed, actually like teaching them something

and making, I don't know, science fun for them. Yeah. I mean, I think it would have been awesome if Bill Nye, the science guy, had TikTok when I was growing up. You know what I mean? Fantastic. Now all we need to do is bring the titties into nature. Yes. Like, just combine them and then we'll get all the eyeballs. Yeah.

All right. So you start, though, as you said, on these, like, you know, the lower entry-level jobs you're out there as a statistical surveyor. Yeah. Or whatever. Yep. And then you ended up connecting with Discovery Channel, I think, right? Was that the first one? Over a very long process.

How did that even happen? What was that first show you did, too? So I'm working as a biotech, mostly on the California Channel Islands. If you look at the California Channel Islands, aside from Catalina, they're all very wild and very rugged. Catalina wine mixer. That's it. Yeah.

Catalina is great, by the way. But I was working on the Northern Islands, San Miguel, Santa Rosa, Santa Cruz, and Anacapa. And they're very rugged, very remote. I'm in hazmat suits carrying tons of Roundup, which, you're not. is like a spray pesticide chemical killing weeds literally literally counting ants like to figure out how many invasive ants like spending a day going 100 140,000 I swear to God 143,0006, 143,0007 like literally this is what the kind of stuff I was doing in 100 degree heat in a base camp with no hot water you know we had electricity this was pre-starlink there's no internet no cell phone service like

grinding it out my god so I'm painting that picture because one day I come back so we go on two-week stints at a time at the islands, right? And it didn't just work on the islands, but that was the hardest work. We go on these two-week stints on the island where you're in a hazmat suit, you're Karen weeds, counting ants, trapping rats, like shitty stuff, because I'm a low-down biologist. And I was doing really well. I kept getting asked to move into the office and, like, oversee a team. And I tried it a couple times, and I was like, this sucks. I want to be back in the field. Like, I'll go back to counting ants before I sit in the air-conditioned office and, like, put together ground proposals. Like, I'd rather count ants.

um anyway i was doing these odd jobs biology jobs with a bunch of different companies and i come home one day i'm fried i've been on the channel islands for two weeks in a hundred degree heat blah blah blah blah blah plop down on the couch i'm exhausted i'm filthy dirty i'm just like my jesska my girlfriend at the time she's like um she's like are you okay like how's it going blah blah blah i'm like yeah i'm just beat and she's like have you seen this stupid show on tv like what is this stupid show and it's naked and afraid, which is a survival reality show if you don't know it. And this was early, early days. It was like second episode or something of the whole series. I was like, what is this? And she's like, oh, it's these people like trying to survive out in the bush and they're like

crying and whining and doing all the shit. And she's like, I've seen you do this stuff for fun. And like, you know, you just go out there, not the naked part, but like you go out there and build a fire just to sleep in the hills of Cayucas, California for three nights just to look for bears that you never find, you know, and stuff like that. And I was like, yeah, yeah. So I didn't know this at the time. I've learned so much since then and started my production company, everything.

But TV shows are not made by Discovery Channel. They're made by production companies, right? And so the credits roll on The Naked and Afraid after watching this big burly Marine guy ball his eyes out or whatever about his fire going out. And the credits roll, and I'm like, I can do this so much better than these guys. I'm so cocky still.

And so I see that it comes up like the name of the production company. So I immediately reach out to the production company. I write an email, this arrogant pre-chat GPT email that's like, I'm better at these things. You guys suck, let me in. Exactly, dude. That was like the premise of it. And 10 days later, long story short, I'm on a plane to Panama to go jiggle my junk naked in the jungle for 21 days on naked afraid.

And I go down there, and it is literally, and I was very lucky with where I got placed. I got placed in a tropical jungle that I understood the environment as being a biologist, understood the habitat, understood what plants were edible, what plants were toxic. understood the water from all my spear fishing days, how to dive, everything else. So it was like a vacation. It was like a 21-day paid vacation for me. I had fun. I was smiling. I was giggling.

The whole thing was not serious to me at all. And the other survivalists are like, take this seriously, blah, blah, blah. I was like, I'm good. I got 30 pounds of jungle potatoes at the hut. Like, I'm good. I'm not taking this seriously. This is vacation. I got to go home and work after this.

And the producers are like, nobody's going to like you. They'd be like, how's it going? Like my partner's name was Cassie. and she was not very good, but the producers would be like, what's going on between you and Cassie? I'm like, oh, nothing. She's just hanging out, and I'm over here fishing, and they're like, is she the worst person you've ever met or not?

And I was like, no, not really. You know, and they're just like, everybody's going to hate you. Like, you've got to talk shit and you've got to cry, you've got to struggle. You're not the reality TV guy. And I'm just, that's not me. That's just not me at all. How real was it, though, like, you know, because some of these shows, it'll be like, it's highly produced,

and they're like, you stand there, you do this, and they're not really doing the stuff. And then other ones, of course, they still have to do the reality stuff. But it's actually like, you're in it. You're doing it. How real was it as far as, like, you doing the thing? When I did it, it was 100% real. Like, they left remote cameras at night.

There was no one there. The audio guys were not, like, nobody was allowed to talk to you. You know, nobody, except for one producer who'd ask you questions. They had to be hands off. They had to watch from a distance kind of thing. It was like 100% real. I've heard since then it's got pretty fake. But I don't know if that's true or not.

I heard that from one guy who went on the show. But I just went and did this 21-day naked, nudist colony at vacation. And I broke all the rules and did all the regular shit I do and got in trouble and everything else. And had a great time. And then I came out of there, went back to being a biologist, didn't think twice about it, just did my thing. They were just cool with you going to do that for 21 days? Yeah, because I was a contractor. So I'd come in, I'd do a job for a week or two.

Then I'd take two, three weeks off. Then I'd do another job because it's full-on jobs. It's like, where'd you go? I went to Panama to be on Discovery Channel I'm gonna go count some ants now Yeah, exactly And they were just like, you're weird

But went back to being a biologist Still thought that that was gonna be my career And the show came out like six months later And not only were the producers wrong About me being like disliked And nobody listening or small character or whatever All the stuff they said that I just didn't care about I ended up being the highest rated survivalist

In the show's history at that point Because it was easy Got tons of food you like this guy's a badass yeah that's how the audience saw saw me they were just like this guy's just joking and having fun and piling up food and drinks and shelters and everything else anyway that came out and then i got this this was back when reality tv was still important right in today's world it's like nobody even has cable lesser yeah but um that came out and like everybody that does survivor the bachelor love island naked and afraid you get your five minutes of fame with your

local press you know i don't mean like the new york times was calling me i mean the santa barbara independent that gets 45 reads a day hey listen they're important too they are 100% and they this is my whole point they helped launch my real career but i got my five seconds of fame with the local press and they call me and be like tell us about naked and afraid i think no thanks like what do you mean like i don't really want to talk about that that was just fun if you want i'll tell you about the largest lobster that i found that's ever been caught in the state of california this hammerhead that I saw at the Channel Islands that hasn't been documented that far north in over 100 years and all these science things that I thought were super-duper cool. And most of them were just like,

no thanks, click. And a couple of them were like, all right, tell me about that and we'll kind of weave in the naked and afraid angle. And a couple of these stories, like me with the giant lobster, the hammerhead one I mentioned, they went viral. They got picked up by like the daily mail in places like that. And they like blew up millions and millions of views. This is a bygone error. We're trying 10 years ago when those things were really impactful. Then I got called from people going, hey, like, we saw your naked afraid. We saw your viral news stories in the Daily Mail about the giant lobster and about the giant,

the hammerhead bite and blah, blah, blah, blah, all these things. And do you want to host a TV show? This only happened twice. It wasn't like a lot of people contacted me. And I was like, yeah, I'd love to host a TV show. Like, you know, be a Steve Irwin and I tell people about snakes and shit. You got to throw the accent back on. Yeah, totally.

And so they sent me stuff. And I remember one of them, I'm not. joke and Julian, if I'm lying, I'm dying, was a bear dating show. So I was going to, a bear dating show. So I forget how the show worked, but I was going to be the host, and there was going to be a bear, a male bear and a female bear, and then like a human male and female, and they were going to compare, and I was just like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. They were going to get the bears to date.

Apparently. So obviously, that never went forward, right? And I didn't sign on to that. I just looked at it and thought, this is so stupid. Oh, my God. But I started to learn the inner workings of, like, you find a piece, you find a talent, which was me, you develop an idea, you write it all out, you put out episodes as an outline, you create a budget, and I had been working as a scientist. Like, I took the data, I analyzed it, and I was like, this is stupid. I can create a TV show.

Like, if this is the best they've got, fucking bare dating shows, that was the best idea, really. That I got presented with. There were better ones out there, I'm sure. But I just said no to all the production companies. reached out to me because I was like, this is terrible. This is garbage media. And I created my own TV show, which was Extincter Alive, which is a show I did for a couple years. Was that, was that involving opening up your own production company to do that? That came later, many years later. Yeah. Okay. So how did you get that made? So I partnered with, so I looked at the

process. I partnered with a guy named Patrick DeLucah, who lived in L.A., and we wrote out this Extincter Alive TV show, created this concept because as a biologist, as someone who spent his whole life looking for rare animals, finding these things. Like I just mentioned, these giant lobster, these hammerheads. I want to come back to that, by the way, but keep going on. Yeah, I said to Patrick, I was like, listen, people declare things extinct that aren't extinct. And once you declare something extinct, it doesn't mean hiding in a bush or around the next corner. It means eradicated from the planet.

Like, doesn't exist any longer. So once that happens, all hope is given up. Funding dries up. Conservation efforts go away. I was like, we should go find extinct animals. Like, prove science wrong. You can tell there's a theme with me. And so he's like, yeah, I love that idea.

Let's do it. So he wrote it out, came up with these ideas. And then I saved up all my money. My wife was working on a part-time teacher salary. I was doing odd biology jobs, odd boating jobs, things like that, taking people fishing, like whatever I could do to make money. And I'd save up money, save up money, drive down to L.A., because nobody would take a meeting with me. And I'd literally knock on production companies doors.

Even after the success, they wouldn't take a meeting with them. But the success was minuscule, and it was fly by night. It was one naked, afraid show. couple like headlines in the news and then it had all gone away from when that happened to when i got a production company which was here in new york i'll tell that story in a second to agree took three years so for three years still that's surprising but okay yeah for three years i like people wouldn't even take meetings i mean some would but it wasn't like i could make a phone call and set a meeting i'd literally go knock on production company's doors including the production

company that did naked and afraid and pitch them and they're like nope not interested Anyway, one time I saved up for three months, came over to New York City, stayed in a hostel, walked into the office of my now business partner and said, hey, here's my idea for an extinct animal TV show. And after getting no, no, no for three years, he goes, yeah, let's do it. Get out of my office. And I was like, holy shit, okay, yes, sir, bye, bye. And so that was it. And then we built that out, pitched it to Animal Planet. That took like another year until they said yes. And then it became a pilot. And the pilot crushed it. And then it became a series. series, blah, blah, blah. And then eventually I built my production company. That's awesome, man. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, people are so fascinated with the unknown in anything. But, you know, there's something about the fact that we have these huge biospheres around

the world where we, scientists can even say definitively, we have not even discovered X percent of species in here. And X is a big fucking number. That's right. Then you take into account species that, like, as you say, we declared extinct just because we haven't seen it. Yep, but you don't know if they went into a different part of the environment or changed up where they were going. I mean, it's such a cool field of study. Especially because a lot of the times, it's changed a little bit recently, and it's created a larger field now, like a lost species, the extinction field. But at the time, it was like some stuffy-ass guy in a smoking jacket in London was like, that animal is extinct, you know. And it wasn't that bad, but, like, you know, some British dude would go on a survey for 10 days, stay in the four seasons and come.

back and be like, it's not there. And you're like, I don't know if this is correct, you know. But nobody was calling it out. And I'm being, I'm being dramatic for, you know, the sake of being dramatic. But it was like, it's very, very hard to say something's extinct, you know, like definitively after a short survey from some scientists that flew in to check it out. So we just pushed further and went harder and went deeper. And we found eight species that had been declared extinct. All right. What was the first one you found? The Zanzibar Leopard. How did you, like, how do you even do this? Just go and, like, all right, we're going to start looking. Roll cameras. Fuck it. Yeah, that's how I thought it was

going to go, because we started with a special for Monster Week, which used to be on Animal Planet. And that's how I thought it was going to go. I thought it was going to be like, roll cameras, let's go. But no, it's, it's, again, I'd lucky because I came up in the sciences. So I had surveys, I had processes. I bought trail cameras. I knew how to track stuff growing up in the Bush and Zimbabwe, being the son of safari business owners. I had all this, like, these unique ideas of like scent trailing things to bring them close to the camera, like dragging a dead carcass, you know, to make a scent trail. Yeah. And like, uh, spraying pheromones in the trees to get animals to come by. Like, I did all these weird things. And that's what actually made the show

famous. It wasn't really the discoveries, which helped, but it was like the tactics. The tactics. Yeah. And so the first one was, um, and to this day, we don't know definitively that it was a Zanzibar leopard as opposed to just an African leopard, but off the coast of Africa is the island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania. I'll pull that out. And we went there to look for a rumored leopard that had been extinct for 30 or 40 years, a smaller island leopard. Yeah, so if you zoom in, weigh in, you'll see the island there.

And so we went there. Long story short, we made a meat tree, which is a tree covered in meat, like a giant cat's play toy, like I said, unorthodox methods, and caught this leopard walking through the bushes on trail camera. And that was like our first big discovery. Is that like a, you know, pinch yourself kind of moment? Dude, where you're like, did I just see what I just fucking saw? So when I saw it, because we go through hundreds and hundreds of trails, you know, a game camera clips.

When I saw it, I was sitting on the back of the bus on the way back to the town because we'd been in the National Park for a few days. And we were like, we're going to go to town, get a hotel, get a shower, blah, blah, blah. And I'm sitting on the back of the bus on my laptop going through clips. And I, like, played it. I, like, looked up. Like, played it again. like played it again and then I just threw my laptop in the air

it's all on camera like the camera started rolling because they heard me start screaming I'm like pull over pull the bus over I ran up my guys like what's going what's going on and grabbed my audio guy by the collar pulled him in and headbut him like I just went nuts and he's like why did you do that I was like I don't know and I was like showing them the laptop

and it was just like I just went ape shit and they're like what's wrong with you like look at the tape yeah and then that was like our first big discovery and that rolled into, you know, a second season with a little bit more funding and so I could get more better tools and go for longer.

And, yeah, we ended up finding eight lost species on that series. Did you, on that first one, though, did you encounter, I imagine, right away, scientists like, that's definitely not that. Of course. Yeah. How do you even,

it just seems like there's people, and this relates to any field, that just have a preconceived notion on stuff, and you could take them to that wall right there and have, you know, the ghost of Michelangelo come back for art and the ghost of Leonardo da Vinci for science and art and tell them scientifically why it's white and they're going to say it's black correct yeah um yes we ran into lots of naysayers lots of haters um i mean not lots because it was pretty

like that one other ones i literally held the extinct animal in my hand you know and there were still people that were angry like i found this tortoise that was it was in time magazine and everything else like i literally like found it um the fernandina island island tortoise, but... Fernandina Island? Mm-hmm. And that was a big deal. And that came with its own controversies.

But no matter what we did, there was always some people getting upset, mostly because we broke the mold. I don't think it really had anything to do with me. I don't think it had anything to do with the wall being white or black. You know what I mean? I think it was just, we broke the mold of how things are supposed to be done. And that comes with hate. Yeah, there you go.

So what was the story here with the tortoise? Yeah, so that was some years later on the... the season two, maybe a year and a half, two years later, we went to this volcanic island of Fernandina in the Galapagos, a place that the California Academy of Sciences had only ever collected one other individual of the species in history, 114 years prior. And we went there, teamed up with the Galapagos Conservancy and the National Park System. And they, we didn't put any of this on camera because we didn't want to insult anybody. But they literally laughed at us when we said, we're going to go look for this tortoise. They're like, you're wasting your time. It's so stupid.

and then we went and found it and then there was like a big upset of who found it and why was it me who'd just come in for four days after they hadn't found it in 114 years all this criticism and I just didn't give a shit and I still don't give a shit because we found the tortoise all I care about is the tortoise

I don't care about me finding the tortoise there were two other guys I won't name their names who were like we found the tortoise not him I'm like yep you did good job good for who gives a shit it's all documented it's all on camera it was all on animal planet whoever wants to take credit can take credit all I care about is that we found the tortoise. What made you want to find that

tortoise, though? Because there's so many, I mean, there's millions of species that are cool that you can learn about that are extinct. Like, you know, you land on these eight. So what makes you go, this is the one right here. This is why I want to go to Fernandina and do this. It's a great question. So I live in Santa Barbara, like I said, Ohio, California, up the road for me, there's a place called the Turtle Conservancy. I'm just a nerd, right? Like I told you about reading the books and stuff. So I used to go up to the Turtle Conservancy, which is actually a guy from here from New York who started this that used to run nightclubs

who's obsessed with turtles and tortoises. Albanian? No, he's not Albanian. No, he's not. I don't think so. You ran nightclubs in New York? Yeah, yeah. Wow. The same guy who produced Tiger King, by the way.

Yeah. What a career. It's a weird, small world. Yes. But I used to go to the Turtle Conservancy and work with my friends up there, and they were like, you know, I was already aware of the Fernandina Island tortoise

as a lost species and only one before 114 years, blah, blah, but I met a scientist who was a turtle conservancy scientist who's like, I swear to you, Forrest, when I was there 30 years ago, I found bite marks in a cactus, I found tracks, there's a tortoise on that island. And I was like, oh, man, like, look, I'm getting goosebumps talking about it. Yeah, you got so excited. And I'm like, no way, dude, there's a tortoise there.

So we put this whole, yeah, you can see my hair's all standing up. I get so excited about this stuff. And so anyway, I put together all the research, got the permits, got chartered the boat, got the agreement from the Colombian government to let us go to that, sorry, Ecuadorian government to let us go to that specific island, blah, blah, and then, yeah, just launched the mission. And then found it in two and a half, three days, yeah, and then spent another day looking for a mate, but we're like, we got to get out of here.

We got to, because the tortoise when we found her, it's a female, super, you kind of see it in like that far, no, you kind of really see it. Super skinny, super sunken in eyes and stuff like that. So she was in pretty bad health. And the scientists I was working with from Fernandina, they made, or not from Fernandina, from the Galapagos, they made the decision they wanted to take her into the rescue facility. They have like a rescue center there and get her fat

and get her hydrated and healthy and then try and find a male and breed them. And mate them. Yeah, and save the species. So we moved her off the island, which it was the right thing to do. But at the time, I was like, is this the right thing to do? Yeah. But it was a great discovery. And I don't care.

I don't even want to harp on like the criticism. and the negativity because all that matters is that we brought millions of eyeballs, millions of eyeballs to the discovery of an animal that the world had given up on. And that's awesome. How did you come up upon her, like when you actually found her again? So we spent the first day following the Galapagos scientists up to the top of the mountain because they had reports that the animals liked high elevation, you know, where there was more greenery, blah, blah.

And then the second day, I led us to a lower elevation area that I saw more tree. And I was like, let's check that area. And as we got in, not to my credit, to theirs, the other scientists first found scat. Or no, sorry, I found the scat. I don't remember. Somebody found poop. And I started freaking out. I was like, this is tortoise poop.

Because tortoise poop's like that. You know, the only other thing on the island, it's like iguana poop. And it's like that. So I'm like, holy shit, there's a tortoise here. And it was still kind of damp. So it's like, this is within a weak alt. It's boiling hot, rugged, gnarly environment. You're saying the only other relatable thing would be iguana poop?

Yeah. Right. Because there's other types of animals. Yes, but the only thing that could look anything similar would be an iguana, and it's a fraction of the size. Got it. So we found this, and I'm like freaking out. I'm like, oh, my God, there is a tortoise here. This is tortoise poop, like holding it, screaming my head off, getting excited.

And then a couple seconds later, one of the scientists goes, there's a bedding, there's a den right here, like, where they bury into the sand, you know, to cool down. Yeah. And you could see this, like, little bowl that it dug out to, like, rub its belly in. So the poop might have been a week old, but the dig, the little berry site's probably like a day. And literally minutes later, somebody, there was like eight of us there, it was like, a tortoise, a tortoise. And I like dropped my water bottle and dove into this bush like it was a freaking cheetah. It was a tortoise. It couldn't go anywhere.

But like dove into this bush and grab this tortoise. Like freak out. There's videos of it online, but I was just freaking out because literally at that point in time, if you think about this, I was holding in my hand to this day the rarest animal in the world on planet Earth. the dire wolves the colossal just brought back there's three of them this is one one individual of the species in the last 114 years period the rarest animal the crown jewel of rare animals i was holding in my hand definition of like grain of sand yeah yeah i mean it was awesome to find that's so cool man you ended up finding eight of these total not tortoises but eight different lost animals yeah now real quick on the tortoise though they brought it back out of the wild and

And did they find the mate, did you say? No, so they brought it back. They took it to the Faustle Lorena Breeding Facility, which is where that other famous tortoise, Lonesome George was. I don't know if you ever heard that name. I don't know Lonesome George, no. It was a Pinta Island tortoise that was also the last of his species, and he spent like 100 years at this facility,

and people could visit him and stuff. So they took Fern to that facility, and they've launched, I believe, four return expeditions to look for a mate since then. Haven't found any. You know, they never found any before I came there. They've never found any since. I'm not saying I'm the only reason, but there's certain tricks and tools.

We've got to send the Galante back. I didn't say that. You did, but, you know, we're doing it. Yeah. So, unfortunately, because they got upset about our finding and, you know, the sort of machismo around it, they haven't asked me to come back and look, but I'd happily go look for a male. Do we know how old she is, approximately? Somebody did some kind of, like, isotopic analysis. I think she's around 70 or 80 years old.

And how long would that species be able to live? About 100. Yeah, maybe a little over 100. Yeah, like maybe 110, something like that. She's healthy now, though. I think if we left her. So what's crazy is Fernandina Island, the island, is one of the most volcanic islands in the world.

So there's lava flows constantly taking place. And when you have a little patch of, like, jungle, right? It's not really jungle, but like scrubland and bush and trees and stuff. Then all of a sudden a lava flow comes down, it just blankets that. It kills everything there and it's gone. And it doesn't exactly regrow through lava. So an island that used to be relatively green and have lots of patches of greenery, there's now like two patches of real greenery left.

So it's a relatively confined area. There is another tortoise there. I saw tracks of it. I'm almost certain. It's just hopefully a matter of time until they find it. But like a 70-year-old lady, she could have kids? Yep. So unlike humans and other mammals, they can reproduce almost up until the day they die.

Oh, wow. And they even have sprimal. Nope, no menopause, and they even have spermal retention. So if she had mated with a male five years ago, she could have hung on to that sperm in her system and then laid eggs five years later. Thank God humans don't have that. Yeah, I know, right? I think how many kids you'd have.

Woo! I said, I'm getting goosebumps now for all the wrong reasons. That's also pretty cool, though, that you found this one in the cradle of, the evolutionary, you know, invention itself in the Galapagos Islands. That's a place I've never been. My parents went, I think, like 30 years ago. But, I mean, that's got to be unlike anything else on Earth, no. That was my favorite discovery or find ever. We found four shark species, a primate species, a Cayman, which is like a crocodile. Oh, yeah, yeah. I went to the Amazon. Yeah, you know, of course you do. Yeah. But that one, that specific one, finding that animal that was

that rare. To me, that was the most incredible. In, like you said, the cradle of our understanding of evolution. It was such a cool thing. Yeah. Where did you find the Cayman again? The Rio Apoporos area of Columbia. Okay. Is that, that's not touching the Amazon. It does, but much further down than where I was.

Okay. It is Amazon, though. It is Amazon. Yeah. But doesn't touch the Amazon River. We were on a river called the Rio Apoporos River. Okay. Got it. Yeah, the the whole trail cam thing and like tracking species is like the coolest thing to me. I was down there with our mutual friend, Paul Rosalie.

So obviously, he does a lot of the same stuff. He has trail cams everywhere. Also trying to find species that we may have never even heard of in the Amazon. And he's very likely to do so. Yeah, I remember we were looking at some shots they had that are hard to see because they were close but not quite close enough. And he's like, that's not a Jaguar. That's not a such and such. Something different.

So what the fuck is that? which is really cool but we got to go out and actually lay a few new trail cams and like see the strategy of what it is and we didn't even do any of the more complex stuff you were talking about like dragging a dead car trails or stuff like that but it's really wild that you that we can actually use this technology now to be able to just put it there laying and weight and you're going to get animals who are just in their regular ecosystem coming by and they're not suspecting anything it's not just like the human sitting there or something like that. It's an amazing development. And it's evolving at such an incredible raid. I was just working with a woman two weeks ago in Texas, and she's using drone surveys at day and night. So nighttime, they use thermal ones and day they use camera ones to film elephant herds.

And then they take all the data of the elephants, and it's credible. It looks like something out of Iron Man. They take all these like points on the elephant's heads. If the elephant moves its head to the left, it's telling the, these two animals to go this way, but this one to stay there. If it moves, it's, you know, I'm making up the actual analysis, but it's like it's, it takes all these shots, composes them into a database.

Then AI runs all these analyses on it and goes, yeah, yeah. If the elephant moves left twice, nods left twice, it means be careful there's something in the bush over there. Oh my God. And it's literally decoding the way like it can take a herd of elephants go. That one's the matriarch. That one's the beta. That one's the omega.

These two are the babies. This one's this. This one's telling that one this. This one's saying go over here. This one's pointing to water this way. And like, it's breaking down language that we as a human observer can watch elephants our whole life and go, yeah, I think that one's leading them that way. But this is like, no, no, he's actually saying there's water here and watch out for that bush.

You know, it's like decoding the way they're communicating. And, you know, you know, like AI's garbage still. It's where at the tip of the iceberg for what that's going to be in 10 years. That we've been able to actually interact with publicly. Yeah. Who knows what they got privately. True, true, yeah. But yeah, the technology and the data is far surpassing me dragging dead animals around in the bush. But I think one thing that we can never forget from a wildlife science standpoint, and this is something that's gone away.

And part of that book I'm writing, your gut instinct is so important. And we, science denies that, like, feverishly denies that you should listen to your gut instinct. Like, field science. It goes against human nature. It goes against human nature, but they're like follow a protocol, create a grid. You know, so like if you're doing a camera trap survey for an animal, a scientific way, you build a grid, okay, every 100 feet, 500 feet, you put a camera here, 300 feet this way, you put a camera and you do a grid in a square.

Why? I am a human being. I'm a biological creature. I can look at an area and go, that's a game trail. That's where the animals will walk. There's water here. I know that they need water. They're going to go to water.

There's a food source here. See that beehive right there? we know that this animal eats honey. Okay, I'm going to put three cameras here, one here, and five here. Not a square grid. Like that, yes, you might cover more ground in your square grid, but use a combination of understanding and not just methodology, because just methodology is stupid.

Yeah, you answer my question for me. I was going to ask you, like, there's got to be room for both. Like, I'm feeling it could go there, but also, like, scientifically, we've got to cover X amount of space to get something realistic, data. Right. But you got to rely on that instinct. Like when we went to that bush, that area, that was pure instinct. It went against what I was being told, which is go up to the top where it's a little bit wetter and there's a little bit more greenery, check the high elevation. I just

looked at a map and went, trees there. That's my instinct and brain going, let's go to where there's trees. If I was a tortoise, I'd want to be where there's trees. That's it. You have such a, because you grew up among it as well, it's just second nature for you. You have that gene that you see when you go to some of these places like when i met some of paul's guys in the amazon jungle who had lived there their whole life yeah where like they'd hear a bird two miles away and they'd almost be able to talk back to it it's not they didn't have to sit there and google this stuff or read a book about it like obviously you've educated yourself over the years on a lot of different things but like you were in it you grew up among it you can like not to be too meta here but

you can't yes 100% you know i can't anyone else listening pretty much can't. Right, but you sitting here can tell when something's off with the audio in your podcast or, you know, I'm not in your space. But, you know, like, it's just different. It's whatever you train yourself to have instinct in. You know right now whether this is a good conversation for your show or not a great conversation. It's great, by the way. That's good. I'm glad to hear that. But you know that because this is what you're trained in. The average person does not know that. Sure. Just like I, not like Paul's guys, because I don't know the Amazon like they do, but I know big picture. If I work here, I'm more likely to find the animal or, you know, and it's just, it's same if you're an

investment banker, you know, like this is the stocks we should trade in. Trust me, I just, I got a feeling, you know, it's just human instinct is an incredible tool. It's just cool when it overlaps with nature. I think that's like the coolest of all. I agree. Real fast far as I just got around the bathroom, but we'll be right back. All right, we're back. So we, you and I were just saying this off camera, but by the way, alluding to it, so we might as well go into it. But you are an advisor for colossal, who I had Ben and Matt James in here together a few months ago. Fascinating stuff. We're going to have, I know, at least Matt coming back. I think in the fall, I was talking to he was here for like two days in July, so we couldn't make it work. But he's going to come back

because there was still so much more to go there. But we're getting into weird territory here. For sure. Yeah. Colossal is weird. I mean, what they're doing is weird, but it's cool. What made you want to be on it as an advisor? Well, I found out about a very early on, you know, like in the earth, because everything I've done, like what we've been talking about is in this, not everything, but a lot of it is in the space of looking for extinct animals, right? And Colossil is literally a de-extinction company. So Ben and Matt together, they reached out to me, and Matt's become a very good friend, but they reached out to me together, they both are really, but they both reached out to me very early on when there was probably

25 people like brainstorming and working at Colossil and just said, hey, you know, with you being this kind of figure in finding extinct species, would you be willing to be a part of what we're doing? And I had my reservations, like I think anybody does when you hear about what they're doing. And I was like, is this real? Is this some Theranos thing? Like, what is this? Well, you know, it sounds crazy. Like, now they've proven themselves. But at first, it sounded crazy. And we just had a few conversations. And I just said, I'd love to be an advisor. You know, I'd love to help you. If you do make woolly mammoths and dodoes and thylacine and all these things i'd love to help come up with the plans as to what to do with them from a conservation standpoint so that it's impactful and has big

purpose to the planet and something that i don't know if they talked about on your show or not but they they also do a lot of good conservation work that was the that was the key for me and that's what i want to continue to see moving forward because if and we can get into nitty gritty with this because you've been involved for a while. But if, in fact, trying to make a woolly mammoth and the work you're doing on just in gene sequencing before you even make a species can help solve the problem of, I forget what it's called, like the elephants, herpes disease that kills 20% of, right. If it can help solve something that kills 20% of all current elephants, and regardless of what we figure out or don't figure out with a woolly mammoth, that research legitimately is able to do that and help. you know, such a magnificent creature in conservation right now. Yeah.

Then to me, there's something that's very worth it there. That's it. I mean, a good example is, you know, the dire wolf news, right? You saw that and all came out. Big, loud, splashing news, controversy, everything else. That's great. And I think it's really interesting. It's interesting proof of concept, whatever.

Dyerwolves aren't going back into the wild life, into the wild. But the thing that didn't make the news that should have is the same technology they used for that. They used to clone Red Wolf. Yeah, North American Red Wolf. And it sounds like you guys talked about, so I won't go into detail. But, like, no, please do, because people got to hear this who haven't heard that episode. Sure. Well, just long story short, they, North American Red Wolf is the most critically endangered wolf species on planet Earth. And Colossil used the same technology, or some version of it, that they used to make the Dyer Wolf to clone Red Wolf.

So no matter what happens now, we'll never lose Red Wolf's as long as that company exists. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does make sense. That's a huge win. It sounds like it's a huge win. The question that I still have on any of this, and I don't know, like, you know, people like to point fingers at this stuff because you're working on something so new and it's controversial or whatever. But, like, I want people working on things. Like, I think I think it's cool to try to find something we haven't done before.

That's how the human race moves forward. But, like, if you clone a Red Wolf, you're cloning its DNA, you're cloning its sequencing. So you're obviously cloning its looks, it's features. all those things but can you clone its evolution meaning like I'm going to make something up right now this isn't real but let's say red wolves could could jump 30 feet because they you know over millions of years train themselves in their environment to be able to jump 30 feet away from a fucking bison that was chasing them or something yep can you really clone that trained behavior just by

grabbing its DNA sequencing and saying boom we cloned my understanding of it and I don't know because I'm not a geneticist I told you I basically failed those classes in college but my understanding of it is the hardware is the same the software is different yeah so we can make another Julian not me they maybe can make another Julian are you going to be a podcast host who has the same knowledge and skills and personality that you do now I don't think so because that's software right so you could still jump as high as you can jump you'll be the same height same color hair same eye color but your software is completely pro it's it's just different it's open to interpretation that's my understanding of so does that mean like again you and i aren't the science

experts here so just looking at it from like what is this rather than the software that goes into it does that mean that it's a new type of the same thing oh i see what you're saying no so i think if you took that cloned red wolf and put it out with other red wolves it would not stand out as any different does that make sense yes it would just be another red wolf as part of it now the dire wolves you know they're genetically modified from gray wolf blah blah that's different and that was a i think that was just a proof of concept that's my understanding yeah what do you mean that's different though because there's no other dire wolves to put them out with you've brought something back that wasn't there you're starting from scratch in a sense yes whereas cloning a red wolf

is you could take that red wolf and put it out with the pack. It'll get accepted by the others. It'll learn the same behaviors. It'll hunt the same way, howl the same way, den the same way, pup the same way. It'll be a red wolf. Because they exist right now. We're working with things that actually we can quite literally copy and paste.

That's right. And to me, like, a very good example of that is the northern white rhino. There's only two females left of that species in the world. If colossal and I think bio rescue and I think there's a third partner, but forgive me if I'm getting them wrong are working to clone that if they can clone a male and they can use their crazy

genetic engineering stuff to add diversity to the species of genetic diversity they can save that species. To me I'm getting the goosebumps again because that is the technology is for. The fact that human beings have fucked up so badly, do you care if I swear? You're in New Jersey

bro. You just say whatever the fuck you want. Human beings have fucked up the northern white rhinos so badly, poaching them for literally fingernail carotin. You know, that's what I agree. That's what rhino horn is. That now Income Colossal and Ben and Matt and all these guys with their big brains and their crazy technology and they can go, hey, wait a minute, before we lose this incredible thing, these two northern white rhinos, give us some blood, some hair, some tusks, some whatever, some fingernails. And I'm going to make a male. And then we can put that male back in. And I'm going to make a female and put that female back in. And in 10 years, we can,

and have 150 of these rhinos, like, that's what it's all about. You know, it's like we're fixing, we're writing humanity's wrongs, like the crimes we've committed against animals. It's not to stop. Extinction's a natural thing. You don't want to stop extinction. Like, you don't want to stop it. What you want to do is stop what human beings have done at speeding it up, you know,

and where it doesn't make sense. Human caused extinction because we wanted a skyscraper where this frog lives or, you know, whatever it happens to be. We just want to mitigate that. And if that technology can be used for that, I think it's the most wonderful technology. So you're in support of continued nature survival of the fittest. You just want to solve for 8 billion people in the world. That's it.

There's a perfect way to put it. Okay. Yeah. Got it. Now, going back to the dire wolf example, though, and let's even talk about the Willie Mammoth, which is one they're trying to bring back. In this case, you are bringing back something where it hasn't existed in thousands of years. We don't have, you know, the act.

DNA to be able to do it. So you're sequencing what you can to create it. Do you think that there is, there are potential downsides to trying to do something like that? Obviously, we can look at the conservation of current species that it can help with. But do you think there's a downside to creating a woolly mammoth or creating a dire wolf and putting it out into the wild when it's not evolved from there? 100%. There are going to be unintended consequences, just like there are unintended consequences with AI or any new technology. When we got cell phones, now we're all addicted to cell phones and we all hunch over staring at our cell phones. It's still allowed the whole world to communicate. Same with the internet. Now everybody's addicted to porn. Like, you know, like,

these things come up and there are things that you weren't accounting for, you know, that happened. I don't know what that will be. But what I do know, at least from my experiences with Glossal, they're anticipating that there will be those consequences. And it's not like a, okay, we made 100 mammoths. Let's put them out in Alaska, see how it goes. You know, it's not like that. It's like, it's very controlled. That's why there's a board of advisors like myself, scientific conservation, everything else. You guys got a lot of advisors. A lot. A lot. It's grown. When I became an advisor, I think there were six of us. Advises. Now there's like 6,000. I know. It's crazy. But that's a good thing. Yeah, there are these summits. Everybody talks.

Everybody has a place to talk. But the point is like, let's use a Willie Mammoth as an example. I don't know that this is what is Colossal is doing. That's not, I don't work with them day to day. But if they bring back one or five, they put it in a controlled environment and they study, like, what's happening in this control, you know, okay, now we can expand it from 10 acres to 100 acres to 100 acres to 1,000 acres. You know, like, it's got to be a very slow rollout. And that's, I hope, how we learn how to mitigate the bigger problems that it could cause, I hope. Yeah. And, you know, the people have seen the movies, right? Oh, of course.

So we see where the one guy goes crazy, he goes, let's do it with humans. or something like that, and you're like, all right. Put them on an island. Yeah, like we got to chill a little bit here. But maybe in our lifetime, I don't know if this is the case or if this is what you think, but within our lifetime, you know, do you think we could have something like a private island? I don't want to go too far, but like a Jurassic Park kind of thing, where we've created things that they're, you know, they're recreations,

but you could at least see how it might behave in the environment. I think it's awesome. The little kid in me, if you could tell me I could go to Pleistocene Park and see woolly mammoths and giant bison and all these Ice Age animals or, you know, go to Jurassic Park. Of course I want to see that. Do I know if that's what they're going to do or if that's a good thing for the environment or anything else?

No, probably not, you know, but the little kid in me goes, I can go to these places and see these things. Like, it would be insane to see. I don't think the technology is there yet. Maybe it will be. It's not. And I'm sure Matt and Ben explain that to you. But I don't think we can make T-Rexes and titano boas.

You know, I don't think that DNA is too fragmented, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I just don't think that that's what colossal stands for. I think it stands for trying to put a Band-Aid on the problem and write humanity's wrongs. Yeah, and I hope that's what they continue to do. Yeah. That was really, that was the bulk of our conversation was, I would say, a piece of it. This was episode 297 for people who didn't see it, but there was a piece of it that was, you know, certainly discussing like the scientific implications like can you actually recreate this what does

it mean if you recreate it what does a clone look like some of the stuff you and i just talked about but a lot of it had to do with what it can how the science can be used on current species like we obviously talked a lot about the middle of the sixth extinction we're in the numbers by the way it's crazy of like animals that are being declared extinct right now it's like north of 50 percent isn't it terrible yeah it's fucking insane man crazy so and that's why somebody's do and i what i think so great about colossal is like there's this idea i don't mean to interrupt you but like no no not at all there's been this idea that like if you're a biologist if you dedicate yourself to conservation you have to be poor you have to struggle you have to give up everything to dedicate your life to saving the planet

well if you become a doctor you know you're going to be rich right you know what i mean like if you're like i'm going to go to medical school and be a doctor it's like yeah i'm going to get rich and i'm to save people's lives. Like, colossal to me, and this is like a weird perspective, but they're a for-profit company. They've come along and been like, we can save the planet and get rich doing it. And it's like, why is that a bad thing? Like, good for you.

You know, who care? I'm not getting rich. Like, by me saying this, I'm not getting rid. I'm just an advisor. But, like, good for you. Like, flip the conservation model on its head. Like, conservation is a battle that we've been losing since its inception. We lose more and more species every single year.

The numbers are astounding, like you just pointed out. these guys are like we're going to try something different yeah we're going to break the mold we're going to make money off of saving species like do some good for the world and and make a billion dollar company it's great like why not try it because the other stuff's not working that was that was probably like one of the funnier moments where ben i think he was talking it was his first conversation with matt when they were back talking about matt being an advisor and obviously then eventually coming on yeah but matt's whole life had been in conservation right specifically a lot of work with elephants and so his big thing talking with ben was like look if you're going to do this like i

really we need help in the conservation here's all the statistics with elephants here's the problems we're having and ben was just like so how much would you need to really make a big dent in this yeah and matt goes 50 million dollars would really do something and ben goes you know, I'm a business guy. Yeah. I've built a lot of companies. I'm a billionaire. He didn't say that, but he is.

But he is, yeah. I just looked at him, I said, oh. Well, that's not much. So you need 50. I'll just go get 50 million dollars. Yeah. But to a wildlife guy, like me or Matt, you're like, I'm sorry, what? Yeah.

So we'll just go make that. No problem. I'm like, I need you to come do that here too. How do you just like say, I'm going to go make 50 million? And maybe I wouldn't have the studio in the master bedroom at that one of the days. It's so crazy. Yeah, the world is changing.

That dynamic is changing. And it's, yeah, the fact that you can fix the elephant problem for $50 million. And to some guys, that's their boat that they see twice a year. You know, it's like, and I love that, like, Ben, who I think is a really interesting guy, is just like, yeah, okay, let's do that. You know, it's like, fuck, yeah, let's do that.

Like, why not, man? Yeah. Yeah. Now, he also, Ben hooked me up with Ken Lackavara. Yeah, Ken's cool. He lives here. No, Jersey, right? Yeah, yeah.

So what's crazy is, I was telling you the first three and a half years I did this, I was in my parents' house in South Jersey, which is where I'm from. Yeah. Had no idea this was in my backyard. Literally, he's doing. The bone hub of the whole world. In Mantua, fucking New Jersey. Underneath a Home Depot.

Literally underneath a Home Depot. Like the most insane thing ever. But I loved that podcast. we record it's coming out really soon at the time of us recording this nice the the dinosaur thing is just like the the little kid in me loves that because it's just like the coolest thing ever but how much time have you spent you know like trying to find dinosaurs or you know obviously they're gone but they're gone to unearth what they were uh i've not a lot i'm not an archaeologist i haven't put or paleontologist, I haven't put a lot of time

into digging that stuff up. I know Ken from the Explorers Club. Yeah. And I think Ken is awesome. He's such a cool guy. And have you been to his place yet? We're going to do it because my parents still live down there. So we're going to do like a private tour. I'll swing over. Because he's invited me too. He's like, come over. Yeah.

Now that's going to be a crew now. Dude, I'm down. Yeah. Because I think what Ken's doing is so cool. But no, I mean, you know, there's some like crazy, like I've spoken to Joe Rogan about stuff like this. Like, you know, these mokola Membe, which is like this dinosaur of the Congo, and there's like these rumors and things that float around out there, I've put no effort into looking for living dinosaurs. I've done some

diving in the black waters of Florida to pull up fossils and shark teeth and stuff like that, but there are dinosaurs among us, you know, and this sounds cliche, but like chickens, chickens are basically T-Rexes, you know, like crocodiles have been around as long as dinosaurs. Sharks have been on this planet since before trees were here. You know, like, I, I find those things fascinating enough, and my interest really is in being hands-on with living stuff. So dinosaurs for me, my son absolutely loves them, and I'm now getting into him again with him,

but I like the tangible stuff. Like the, I wanna hold the tortoise, you know, not just look at the bones. I feel you there. What was the story with the dinosaur in the Congo? I think it's called, you could look it up if you want, Mokola Membe or something like that. And it's this, good luck with your spelling,

there. It's this rumored... I almost got it 100% right on this one letter. Nice. Nice. Yeah, so what does it say here? Legendary creature reported to inhabit the Congo River Basin described as a large sauropod like dinosaur. The name. Oh, I think, you know what? Ken talked about this with me. Oh, did he? Yeah. What did he say? What was his thought? Can't remember. Dude, we went through fucking a thousand dinosaurs. That was one of the coolest podcast ever. And that's the problem is Ken, Ken talks to you about dinosaurs, probably the same way I do about animals. Like everybody knows. a thousand dinosaurs and i can name like six but um yeah allegedly in the congo i think he's found like

six himself oh i know it's crazy including the largest one in existence yeah um but uh yeah so this mokalambe is this rumored to be extant dinosaur living in the congo and it's rumored because it's it's been reported by like hundreds and hundreds of people like they've all seen it you know allegedly like still living yeah allegedly i mean i don't don't you imagine you're just walking through the jungle and this fucking thing walks up. No, not really. I'd lose my shit. Like if I got that excited about a tortoise, imagine if I saw this thing.

We're in the simulation if that's happening. Dude, seriously. There's a glitch. Yeah, he was telling me a lot about like the lost dinosaurs of Egypt. Oh, interesting. Like more shit in Egypt? What else happened? Right. You know what I mean? Totally. But he's been all over. It's just, it's so cool.

I'm coming around on Egypt just being a complete alien experiment place. Bro, you know, you are not crazy to think that at all. It's just everything there that comes out, you're just like, oh, now there's pillars going down 10,000 feet into wells. And you're like, wait, what? It's so crazy. It's in the core of the earth. Like, what else is there? Yeah. Totally. And all these guys, you know, who's studying inside now, they got all these different theories and stuff. I'm like, it all sounds great. Right. Just put it all together. Yeah. Just maybe there's some truth like in the middle of all

that I'm a podcaster, bro. I'm not going to figure it out. But what's the, the environment and Congo. I might be mixing this up, but I remember way back when the first podcast I did with Paul number 124 a few years ago. I like how you remember all the numbers off the top of your head. That's pretty impressive, dude. Thanks, man. But he was telling me about how when the, when the continents were obviously like shaped differently and closer together, originally the rainforest that is the Amazon jungle emanated, I think, from. Congo. Maybe I fucked that up, but the Congolese rainforests. And so now there's even like a, I forget the term for it, but you can run the tape on it. I think he talked about this like two hours and something into that podcast. But there's like a wind that comes off of the African continent emanating from Congo that still goes across the Atlantic over time and makes its way. Interesting. Do you know what I'm talking about that? I don't know about the wind. I hope I didn't make that up. I'm sorry. I don't know about the wind. But if you look at, you know,

South America and Africa, they, during Pangaea, they fit together like this, and then they broke off. That's right. Right. And so what you have is creatures on both sides that evolved convergently. So called convergent evolution, meaning like, why does a dog here look like a dog here, even though they're not related? Well, it's because they both occupied the same niches in the environment. So they had to have four legs. They had to have a bushy tail. They had to have big canines. You know, whatever it happens to be. And then you get the variation. Like, well, this one's a gray wolf. or a white wolf because it lives in the Arctic and has a big shaggy coat. Well, this one's a sleek little North American Red Wolf because it lived in the Florida Everglades, you know,

and they're like the same thing, but different, if that makes sense. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, all those animals at one point in time stemmed off from the same route. And then they, I mean, it's like the simulation playing out in front of you. It's so crazy. Yeah, it's like the Sims or something. Like, you know, and it's funny because now with all the stuff, stuff we were talking about earlier with AI and stuff, we can sort of predict with a not very good

degree of certainty, but predict what is it going to be like in another several million years if we don't wipe ourselves out? Like, what animals are going to be, you know, for a point in time, insects were the biggest thing, then it was reptiles, now it's mammals, you know, what's coming next? Is it going to be giant birds? Are we going to have rats that turn into everything because we take over the planet? And, you know, I've seen the rats here in New York. Like, they're huge. They're fucking no joke. Dude, they're like bigger than my dog. dog um so you ever see how they catch them in new york now how do they do it they had there was a vice documentary on this a few years back you can watch it but like they have like rat hunting dogs

that run them down so they send him out at night they go like tear them up up good that's good yeah there's too many rats and they spread disease yeah um but yeah it's it's just crazy it's like we think we live in this here and now that is the way that things are and have always been but The planet was so different. I mean, even human civilization was so different 100 years ago. Oh, it's insane. Imagine what it's going to be like in a million years. Yeah, and it gets weird, though, like you're saying,

when you can actually, like, kind of use something like AI that's like a weed growing on itself and just, like, expanding into its own brush and forest to predict these things ahead of time and then be able to, like, I can't even conceive it because we don't even know where it goes yet, but then maybe be able to create it. digitally but also real like you know what i mean it gets very bizarre but hopefully as with all technology that we do throughout mankind it's used for really good things like this and where it can actually help species or something like that we do that i hope so yeah as long as yeah as long as we maintain good diversity on the planet yeah like as long as because things collapse when

we lose diversity that's when systems collapsed you know so the environmental system will collapse when you need a bug that feeds a fish that feeds a bird that you know what I mean that the bird dies and that creates soil that creates plants you know what I mean it's like you need diversity you need complexity as soon as we eliminate that too far so that there's only one kind of bug only one rat only whatever it happens to be you're fucked that's when we're fucked that's when we have system collapse yeah I mean but it's even like sometimes it's something simple where you just look at you you take one species and look at the environment and go, yo, we'd have a problem. People have talked in the past. I'm not the guy to ask on this. Maybe you would be, but like if bees went extinct, we'd all be fucked. Like just that one. Yeah, I've heard that because bees are our biggest pollinators. And they create all the crops and the food and everything else. They carry stuff. They have like the things drop from them along the way. So it, all these biospheres around the world. Yeah. They're basically like responsible for the seed that creates it. And bees are massively declined. Like they're at like 70% decline since.

you know, humans started farming or something like that. Yeah, so it's not a good, it's, there's all these things, man. I always describe it like the world is like a big game of Jenga, you know? And it's like, cool. Well, you, you pull, you know, you pull the first few tiles out and you're like, this tower is great, man. This thing's going to stay stable forever. And then, you know, you remove the bees.

You remove the clean water. You take away the swamps, whatever it happens to be. And the tower gets pretty wobbly. And I, I hate the doom and gloom thing. I don't think the tower is that wobbly yet. This is purely anecdotal. I don't think we're about to collapse the tower. But if we do keep pulling those tiles out, if we run out of bees, we kill all the sharks, we

cut down all the Amazon, the tower will collapse eventually. That's what I'm saying. There's an exponential point in the other direction in no return. This is what I talk with Paul about for years because he's been yelling out about. It's like you look at just the Amazon jungle, for example. You're talking about 20% of the global supply of oxygen for the- world on a piece of land that's a lot less than 20% of the world and we're burning it down we're burning it down and it's like paul can't sit here and say once we have depleted 37% of the

amazon it's the point in overturned we don't know exactly where that point is right it's a sliding scale it's a sliding scale but there is a point to which the slippery slope no longer has the physics to be able to get back up to the top that's right that's right right so there's things that i feel like a especially with tools like the internet now over the last 15 years specifically being able to connect all of us. There's things that like as a human species altogether, we should be able to at least on a generalized level come behind and be like, all right, well, that would be very bad, right? Yeah. We fight it. We make everything political. We fight over this bullshit and that bullshit. But like if you could be able to just educate people and say, hey, you know, if we lost the Amazon, here's legitimately what happens.

So, therefore, if everyone could just do this, we won't lose it. Then, you know, it's a small thing, but it can make a huge difference over the long term. It seems like it, but the problem is our nature, your nature, my nature. I mean, even on a granular level, we are reactive and not proactive. If my car is not going to break down, I'm going to keep driving it. That's right. You know, and only when my car breaks down, I'm like, oh, shit, I got to get to the mechanic. You know, I don't just take my car in to get checked.

I mean, yeah, you take it in for services. But like, you don't just take it to get checked when you hear a weird noise. You know what I mean? And that is just human nature. Like, we as a species are reactive. We're not proactive. And that's why, and I'm not saying Paul's falling on deaf ears. I love Paul.

I think his mission is so pure and great. But, like he probably, not probably, I know this from talking to him. He feels like sometimes he's preaching to a deaf audience. He's like, stop before it's too late. And people are like, we'll deal with it when it's too late. That's right. Yeah. 100%.

That's what I've been talking about with him since day one. And it's like, God bless the guys like that who are out there, like, living it and at least trying. And he is making a difference. Let's be clear. Like, he's raised a bunch of money. He's protected a giant chunk of land. Over 100,000 acres. Yeah.

I mean, he's an awesome dude, and his mission is true. And anybody listening to this, I just say, go support Paul. Please do it, like wholeheartedly because he's awesome. But I know that he feels like he's preaching to a deaf audience a lot. Have you been down there with him yet? No, we've been talking about it for about a year now. So I need to find the time. I just, I travel so much for work and shoots and shows and YouTube.

And I need to prioritize going to stay with him for a week. Yeah. I think like being in it with him. Yeah. I mean, you like to be detached and out there doing the shit like he's on the same page. It's so, it was, that was definitely a life-changing experience for me to be out there. Tell me a little bit about, and if you've talked about too many times on there. No, no, no.

I haven't talked about it in a while. Tell me about it. Because, like, I've heard Paul's take on it. He's like, come stay with me. Here's what we'll do. But as a guy from Jersey, like, tell me, what was it like going down there? It was. So I had in, at the time, I went down May, 2024.

I had been doing this podcast seven days a week since March 13th, 2020, and never taken time off. So I was like, all right, this was over four years in. I'm like, I want to go down, not turn on a fucking phone. And just be in it for a while. Like, I grew up with a huge animal guy. I love nature. Like, that's certainly a side of me. So I'm like, this is the coolest thing.

Like, the five-year-old me is pumped to do this. And obviously, I'd known Paul for a couple years. It'd been nice to see him grow. So I wanted to go see for myself all the things you always told me about. But you go down there. And it's really hard to describe. It's not like this emotional, like, oh, my God. It's more like, whoa, I'm so insignificant.

Yeah. This is, like, I'm living in at the time, 2024, you know, I'm coming from. this place right here that we see on the wall and i'm going down here to where you are just this little speck in the middle of this just thing that grows on top of itself yeah exactly but what really struck me is how safe you feel out there right and i don't mean that is like to be like the assholes like nothing's going to happen i mean there's shit that can kill you out there for sure yeah but you feel all the animals if you're not fucking with them they don't want to fuck with you yeah you know what i mean you are your own little thing and the river

we were on obviously he's in peru towards the brazilian border really beautiful area and to see how he lives you know there's a lot of people and i'm sure you've seen this over the years and and people you've come across there's a lot of people who say they do things or say they're about this life or it's really like this and then you see it and you're like no you're not right yeah yeah yeah you're living in like an Airbnb yeah totally but i got to paul's place and he's he lives about 200 yards back away from the research station into the jungle

in a spot with no running water on a wood floor to where the way I describe it is like you know how in college when you were fucking you'd put a sock on the door or whatever don't disturb me yeah so he has to put like a 20 foot industrial towel over like the outside fence to make sure that it's actually enclosed in when he's fucking and it's just like you see how legit it's been for at this point it's right at about 20 years

being down there most of the time most of the year and I had a great and even greater appreciation for just how about that life quote unquote he is he lives and breathes it there's no doubt about it yeah yeah I mean literally like I'll be on a Zoom call with him you know once in a while and he'll like oh I got to go we're hiking into the jungle like if you want to follow up I'll be back in three days I'm like, okay, bye, Paul. Like, don't die. Yeah, I'm not going to tell a full story now because we'll be here for way too long, but I told on my friend John Rondy's podcast after I got back,

but Paul almost got us killed by leaf cutter ants. Oh, yeah. Yeah, by the Brazilian border. That was the second to last day there, and that was when I was like, you know, I think I'm ready to go now. You're like, okay, I've seen it. I'm like, this was my personal 9-11, you know, where, We're going to get past this.

But he's just such a fucking, he's one of those guys that likes to touch the hot coffee just to see how long his fingers feel until they burn. Well, you're preaching the choir over here. I'm like, all right, dude. But you have spent a lot of time yourself in the Amazon previously. Not nearly as much as Paul. Not like him. But yes, I've done multiple like three to four week long expeditions down there. When was the first time you went?

first time i went i went for spring break as a junior in college yep true story who'd you go my best friend from university guy named nick and our friend who was working as a researcher down there named mike and we got together we went out of kokos ecuador up the rio cococo uh and then yeah i just camped lived out of the canoe caught a 19.8 foot anacondo which at the time this is kind of a crazy like weird ethereal story around that but um i mean you got to tell it that's why you're here for sure yeah but um yeah and just we literally just a couple 18 19 year olds just spent two weeks in the amazon uh took a week off of school and did a week of spring break and then just stayed there that was instead of going to Vegas or havasu yeah you did it the right way yeah you were

like living off the land had to we were so poor i remember i found my headlamp that i see you've got one there but i found my headlamp that i took there this is how poor i was at the time it was one from Kmart that cost 12 bucks that like you i probably couldn't see that wall and that was what i used as light at the night looking for snakes like it was so crazy um but you caught a 20 foot anaconda 19.8 foot and i've caught a lot since then in jersey that's 20 feet yeah i like that yeah um i've caught a lot since then never caught one that big again even including the huge one we caught for our animal planet research stuff but or discovery whatever it was um but it's a weird story so we're 18 19 years old We go down. We get in this boat. We're with this local, I think he's Sani Indian is the name, like the native tribes. I believe it's Sani Indian guy. His name's Fausto. And Fausto can barely speak a lick of English. But there's a boat driver who can. So there's just me, Mike, Nick, the boat driver, and Fausto. And we go up, and the first day he takes us to his home. And he's a native guy. So he has a home on the river that's like three hours from Coco. And you sleep in his home and you sleep on the floor. And his wife cooks you a meal. And you swim and catch piranha.

and all the stuff, I'm sure you did. It was epic. I wasn't catching piranha, just to be clear. No? Did you eat piranha, though? I did eat piranha. It's good, right? It's fucking fire.

Yeah. Not good after 20 days of eating boiled piranha, but for that first week, it's pretty good. Anyway, so we tell Fausto, you know, we're all big nerds. We're like, we just want to catch a big anaconda. Now it's like a thing, right? You've got like Garrett Galvin and these kids like chasing anaconda. Back then, we were just weird kids who wanted to catch a big snake. And I'll be very clear about this.

There was no research. There was no purpose, nothing. It was just like, I want to catch a big snake. And we tell Fausto, and he's like, ah, you know, maybe I've seen a few big ones. Like, we might get really lucky. Go on this whole trip. And we're like two or three days from leaving. And this big thunderstorm, lightning storm hits.

And so we're in like a hut or tents, whatever we were in that night. And we're sleeping and we're waiting for the rain to pass. And in the morning, Fausto comes up and he goes, today you will catch an anaconda. And we're like, wait, why? Fausto and through the translator he goes last night I had a dream of a woman in a white dress so that means today you will catch an anaconda and we're like okay fasto yeah and to this day I don't know if he was like pulling our leg and had a spot or what but it sure didn't seem like it and so he told us he had this weird dream that he saw this woman in the white dress and so we'd catch a big snake

sure enough literally two hours later we pull the boat into this random patch of bank we're gonna go on this hike through a game trail there's like an old abandoned like hut there it's all falling down and stuff from other i think it's sonny but sunny indian native people and get off the get off the canoe walk 10 feet and i go this way and i start filling with a little tiny venomous snake this big like a type of viper and then my buddy nick just goes get the fuck over here right now we run around and there's a snake and its coil is as big as you to me just coiled up and And yeah, we caught it, whatever, we took photos, measured it, blah, blah, blah. But the point is it was just so weird because the likelihood of us catching a snake was infinitely small.

Fausto said, like, you're probably not going to catch one. You know, they're very rare. We only see the big ones once in a while. This isn't, like, a predictable place, like, going into the Rio Benito area where they see them and they dive with them and film them. And I've done that, and it's incredible. We saw, like, five. This is, like, raw jungle, like, where Paul lives, where you have no idea what you're going to see on any given day. And then he comes in and goes, I had this dream.

Something to do with the weather, too. I don't remember. But he's like, I had this dream. And when you see lightning plus the woman in the white dress. I don't remember that part. Just remember the woman, the white dress part. Today, we'll catch a snake. And it was like, it was as if you had said, today we'll pick up a Starbucks latte.

It's like, it wasn't like maybe, you know, it was like, yeah, yeah, we'll grab a coffee today, you know. And he was just 100% convinced. And three hours later, we found one. And it was pretty quick to be able to, because you found it coiled up, it was pretty quick to be able to actually look at it. It was an old snake, really, like, sunken in eyes, like, very old animal. And so my buddy, Nick, grabbed it by the head. And then we uncoiled it from his body as it tried to coil him, you know, because they try and wrap you up and stuff.

And it was a, you know, probably a eight-minute fight or wrestle, if you will. And then the snake relaxed, and we could, he still had to hold his head, but you didn't have to hold it tightly. And we could, like, look at it and appreciate it. And it was just, honestly, like, it's not good for me to even admit this, but it was just kids being kids. Like, we were 18 years old. We just wanted to catch people.

big snakes. We'd saved up enough money to go visit our researcher buddy, and we just did it. And it was awesome. There was no purpose to it. It was just awesome. Now, did you interact with any natives out there in the Amazon on any of your trips? I mean, obviously, like, you're being taken around by some, but like, did you visit not necessarily uncontacted tribes? Because there's a reason they're uncontacted, but some of the tribes of the Amazon? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we were with the Sani people there, Fausto, and we met his wife and his kids, and we bumped into a couple others that were canoeing and fishing in the area. You know, we only saw like three people a whole time we were there, so it wasn't like

we were out there. And then in the Rio Apoporos, we worked with former FARC rebels. So... Farc rebels? Yeah, so the FARC controlled the Colombian Amazon and the cocaine and all of that and fought the government for like 30 years there. And then they finally reached a truce, and we flew in on... a, you might ask yourself why a World War II cargo plane used to fly in and out of the jungles of Columbia

for nothing but sightseeing and tourism. That's right. And had a lot of cargo hold for some very strange reason. Yeah, that's what you got to do. That's right. And we flew in and landed on this very well manicured strip that happened to be near coca plantations for some weird reason. Listen, it's a product that people need. That's right.

And, you know, it was interesting because on that one, we're going up the river with the sky. And then the boat driver, again, the boat driver, he goes, I was like talking to him, you know, and like broken Spanish and stuff. And I was like, so how are things here since like the truce and blah, blah, blah, it's been like a 30-year ongoing war, basically. And he's like, oh, yeah, really good, like where everything's calm now, like people can visit. Like, there's no conflict anymore. And I was like, cool, do you know any FARC rebels? And he's like, well, yeah, I was FARC. I was like, oh, wow, that's cool.

And then I go, so, you know, I was like kind of joking, but I'm like, what would have happened if I'd come a year ago? He's like, I would have cut your head off. I was like, oh, right on. And I'm like, okay. And he was dead serious. He was just like, yeah, I would have cut your head off. Like, you couldn't have been here a year ago. I'm like, cool.

It's a whole different reality down there. Yeah. But that's a thing. Like, you go into some of these places, the minute you go into the jungle, you go two miles in. That's two miles farther than anyone from the military or the police or what you may know is like, law and order civilization would be willing to go. That's right. So there's no, you can do, like, it's a, it's a no man's land out there. You can do what you want, which is kind of crazy to think about. I think that's why Paul loves it so much. In addition to everything he stands for, it's just he has complete freedom. Right. He is his own lawmaker where he lives. Right. There are no rules, you know. But you went back, that was your spring break. You went back down there a bunch, like in your adult life, too. Yeah, so I went there then. I went to that Rio Apoporos thing where the guy said he cut my head off. Oh, that was after. That was later. Yeah, that was a different trip. And then I've been to the Pontinol, which is the big wetland that's in South America that's connected to the Amazon. I've been to Benito, which is where they have that clear water, where we caught a bunch more big anacondas and took isotope analysis, scale samples, blah, blah, blah, like for purpose, not just for fun, like when we were kids. But yeah, I've spent some time down there. I love it down there. Yeah, it's really cool that, like, you know, a lot of places could certainly use Western medicine to be able to heal normal things.

that we have and stuff like that. But, like, Paul has a quote, we have a sap for that. A sap for that? Yeah, because they used all the tree sap, right? Yeah, like, they have amazing innovations down there as well to be able to heal, you know, common types things that we deal with that might drag us down a lot longer than it does them.

Definitely not everything, though. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, when we did that apoporous one where the Fargrabble guy was, this was like seven, eight years ago now. We got back from our trip. We found the Crocodillion we were looking for. It was a huge success. And when we got back to the village that we're staying in

where the cocaine dealer's airstrip was, the plane couldn't come that day because we got in like 3 o'clock in the afternoon or something. And the plane couldn't come, so they weren't going to come until the next day. And so we're like, oh, it's cool. We'll spend the night in the village. We stay in the huts. It's all good.

We've done this before. And our medic was with us, our medic, Josh. And this is a crazy story, but I did these, like, had to snort this powder out of a monkey bone to go up the river, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you can't skip over that for us. Hold on. Let's get the exposition here.

You had to snort powder out of a monkey bone to go up the river. So the tribal leader at that village was a guy named Lorenzo. And he invited us into his Moloko, which is a hut in the jungle. And he was also like the shaman of the area. And he said, like, I told him we had to get his permission. This is all on our animal planet show, by the way, which is crazy. They let me put this on air. But he said to us, like, I said to him, like, we need to go up the river.

river and look for the Cayman, the yellow Cayman, as they call it. And he's like, all right, well, if you want to go up there, it's very, very dangerous. Like, there used to be FARC up there, like, people die up there, blah, blah. There's big snakes. There's, there's Cayman. I caught big snake on that one, too. And he's like, you have to have this, this Jopu stuff, which Jopu's like a kind of a generic term for like a mix of powders and tobaccos and things. Again, I told you where this was and what they had. So who knows what was in it, but it was, but it was green it didn't it wasn't purified white that's for sure it had i know it had some roots ground up in there all kinds of things anyway we go around in the circle getting the stuff blown up your nose

by lorenzo the tribal chief and you know like i'm not a big drug guy i've never done a lot of drugs and it goes first like my sound guy and he's like oh man my brain my brain oh it hurts it feels like chlorine on the brain i'm like oh fuck and i'm like getting old nervous and anxious and stuff then it goes to my camera guy and he's like whoh whoa oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh it's And he's, like, doing it, you know? And then it comes to me, and I'm, like, about to have fucking panic attack because I, like, don't want to do this. I'm not a drugs guy, but I have to do it. You know, it's like, not just a when in Rome, but, like, if I don't do it, I'm not going to go off the river, blah, blah, blah.

So I do it. Again, this is all my animal planet show is a kid's show. I don't know how this food by. You're like, forgotten content. Let's go. Dude, it's crazy. So I do it, but I'm, like, hyperventilating ready. So I'm like, so I, like, shoot it into my brain.

Anyway, and immediately, I turn pale white, green, start projectile vomiting, all, over the ground, hands and knees, like puking up fetal position. And Lorenzo, who's like super stern this whole time, like cracks a smile. And our translator asks him, they're like, why are you smiling? Why are you laughing? He's like, he's cleansing himself. And we're like, what do you mean? He's like, he was the one who was going to die. If he hadn't done this and had a cleanse, he would have died when he went up the river. I'm the one who dives in the river and catches the crocodiles, who catches the snakes, who's hands on with the vipers. You know, like, I'm the lead. Like, I'm the guy that does the hands-on part.

And I always thought it was interesting, not that I necessarily believe in this, like, the voodoo-y stuff. But of everybody that had to blow stuff up their nose, there's only one guy who's waiting in the water and catching the snake, diving in and catching the crocodile. There's only one who's likely to die, and it's me. And I was the one that when it came to ended up cleansing all night and throwing up all night. And Lorenzo said, that's what made me safe. And then the next day I could go. Whoa. So when we got back to that village, a week and a half later, whatever.

it was we got back and Lorenzo said my wife's sick can you can you please look at her and so josh our medic was like yeah of course like happy to look and we're the expedition was over we're just waiting for the coke plane to take us out of the jungle and um so i'm like Josh just like give him all the medicine we have like do whatever you can long story short this is a village of like 20ish people 25ish people every single woman there had a yeast infection and he said it was pretty gnarly and so Josh like set up a little tent and like went in a hut and he treated every single woman doesn't seem like there was a sap for that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. To be

clear, what I'm not getting at is that it can heal all of me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's cool that there's some things that they can like take care of and there's literally a tree sap that has it, but they're still disconnected from the world in the sense that they don't have access to the Western medicine that we do. Everything, I'm going to get a little grandiose here for a second, but like everything we do as human beings is like so

pendulous. It's like one side or the other. You're either Republican or Democrat or, you know, you're, hey, you're left or you're right. Whatever. You're gray or you're blue. You know, it's like it's also divisive. Yes. There's always like a happy middle ground with these things. Of course. And medicine, just like I said with science, it's like, yeah, you need technology, but you also don't have to follow every protocol and you have to listen to your gut. I feel the same way about medicine. It's like there probably is a sap for that, but there also isn't a sap for this. So use a little bit of Western drugs and a little bit of, you know, jungle medicine. And you put those together. That would be nuance, Farras. We can't have that in society. It makes so much sense. And yet

it's like, it's so crazy that we think that that's like such a big, it's like, no, that stuff doesn't work. Only this works. It's so dumb, man. It's like, don't be fully homeopathic and don't be completely reliant on your hospital. Like, just find something in the middle that works. Moe is that old Bruce Lee quote where he's like, take what is good and discard what is bad, right? that simple there's there's positives and negatives to everything so try to find them and get on with life that way it's that simple yeah man and it's in everything i feel like politics religion medicine science like it's just just be like rational i've probably said we're in episode 320 or 3 30 something at this point i because i don't know when when i'm putting this one out but it'll be in that area

yeah and i've probably cited this over a hundred twenty five times on my podcast before it's not an exaggeration but the universal law of physics says for every action there's an equal but opposite reaction which is to create equilibrium and all i ever asked for in our world is that the actions are a little less violent and they're a little closer to each other but what we seem to be doing with everything to your point right now is it gets farther and farther apart to where you know the violence to create equilibrium gets stronger and stronger this right this is a lot easier than this huge clash right yeah and there's got to be a way to kind of mix the worlds a little bit. And also, you know, you being a world

traveler, going to all different cultures and whatever, let people do the things that are inherent to who they are and where they're from and what they're about. Like, we should keep, we don't want to be this homogenous society where everything's the same. I think the beauty of the world is that things are so different. Totally. But it also doesn't mean that you need to praise or go after every single thing that, you know, another group of people in whatever the context is, does. Yeah. The live and let live thing, it seems like it's become so hard, specifically us here in the U.S., I feel like, as a society, to just live and let live. Just let people who cares? Like, if you want to kill yourself by only taking this medicine and not visiting a doctor or you want to

believe that, don't get angry, just let people do it. Just live and let live. It's so weird. Have you had some situations, though, where it's difficult? for you to do that because you're like, man, we just do this thing and you wouldn't have to deal with that. I think so, but more for me, because I'm not, and I've been criticized for this, you know, by my family and my friends and everything else, like, I don't really care what people do. Like, there's billions of us people in the world. I don't care what you as an individual do. I don't want you to hurt people or be violent or be rude or anything like that. But like, the live and let live thing for me applies, and this is where I'm my own hypocrite, but like,

It applies to people, but you have to also live and let live with the planet. You know, and like you can't, so if I, for instance, when I say I got criticized, when I was working in Taiwan, there's one national park on the island of Taiwan, literally one. We get there, we meet some local hunters, some local guides, and they're going to take us in to look for an extinct cat, the Formosan Clouded Leopard, and go look for this cat. Formosan Clouded Leopard? Yeah, so like a clouded leopard, but it only existed on this one island. and we get there, and we're three hours into like a 10-hour hike to get to where we're building base camp, and these guys start pulling out rifles to shoot monkeys out of the trees to eat.

It's the one and only protected habitat in the entire country. There's nowhere else in the whole country, and these are our guides assigned by the government to take us in there. And I flipped out. I grabbed a guy's gun and broke it over my knee. You broke the gun over your knee? Yeah, I grabbed it and smashed. I was like, what the fuck are you doing?

And then we had a local scientist with us, And he's like, well, these are their native lands. They've been hunting here for a long time and blah, blah. And, like, I don't have sympathy for that because the rest of the entire country has nowhere else protected. This is the one little swath of land where animals and wildlife should be allowed to be at peace with people. And, you know, this is why I said, I'm my own hypocrite because I say live and let live. But I couldn't let those guys like live and let live because this is just the one. go outside the park and shoot all the monkeys you want you know like i don't agree with it but i'm not

going to stop you you're within the laws ethically that's up to you but if you're in this one little place and the law literally says you cannot kill here going under the guise of this is cultural and this is something they've been doing for a long time doesn't fly with me it's like we need these little pockets of protection yeah there's a line there's a line i mean you're also from Africa where I don't need to explain to you how rampant the problem of poaching is there. It's terrible. And that's part of my like frustration with it is I've grown up seeing it. Yeah. Oh, you grew up seeing that as well. Absolutely. I mean, we'd come up on a carcass of an elephant with its tusks cut off and stuff where poachers have come in and shot it in the head. And, you know,

those things used to happen all the time when we were kids. And it's just, and it's illegal and it's poaching. And it's wiped out. That's why the northern white rhino that we talked about earlier is down to two individuals from poaching. And those two have 24-7 security guards sitting with them. That's crazy. The big issue, it's like everything else in the world, the big issue is the money, right? You have a lot of, in this case, usually, and it's other places too, but Eastern Asian countries funding it and getting literal terrorist groups like al-Shabaab to do it or, you know, bring on contractors they force into doing it. And it's, worth a lot of money so they want to take a you know a horn from a rhino which by this is also

what bothers me so much first of all you shouldn't fucking take a rhino's horn correct but it fucks up all the evolution everything it's completely wrong on every level but like you could do that and not fucking kill the rhino but they're so they're they're so savage that they go in there and they if i mean you've seen it but like they literally hack off it's it's it's it's it's it's full horn and leave it there to bleed out an awful two-hour, three-hour slow death. Yeah, after they've shot it, you know, two or three times to stop it. Yeah, it's so terrible, man. And they'll never just, even if we were like, okay, it's legal to harvest rhino horn,

you just have to tranquilize them or whatever, they still wouldn't because there's a nub beneath the skin that's in the bone, and every ounce is worth so much, right? It's like worth more than gold. So they need to get every little piece of it. So they literally have to cut its face out, basically, to get the horn. That's horrible. It's, yeah, it's unreal. The poaching thing has become so problematic the world over

and the effort that we have to go to to stop it now, the amount of guns and military training and fighting just to stop poaching. I mean, it sounds insane. Wildlife, I don't know if you know this, but wildlife trafficking, animal trafficking, is the third largest illegal trafficking ring in the world. It's billions of dollars, yeah.

And it's just crazy. Like, how is that even an industry? How do you stop it when you do have, something that is that large of a financial incentive i think you have to well education's a big one and that's why people talk about it all the time and that's such a drab boring answer but just talking about look a rhino horn is literally the same thing as our fingernails or our hair like it has no medicinal properties that comes from education and then i think the the other way is to somehow change the market you know if you can rhino horn tiger whiskers

The reason they're so valuable is because they're rare. Anything that's rare is valuable. Wait, tiger whiskers? I haven't heard that one before. It gives you a nice big dick, dude. Don't you know that? Tiger whiskers. Tiger whiskers.

Yeah. Yeah. So if you, again, Asian medicine, Eastern medicine, if you, is it a tea or ground up? I don't remember. But something with tiger whiskers that you drink allegedly gives you virility. And so, you know, there's tiger whiskers, there's seahorses. There are all these things. that have zero research to support that they actually help.

Is there a way, like there's a group in San Francisco, I know, that was making synthetic rhino horn? You know, can you flood the market with rhino horn? So that if it's accessible to everybody and you can't tell the difference between real and fake, then it doesn't have the appeal any longer. Yeah, and I would hope something like that actually could help solve it.

Unfortunately, I think part of it is like same kind of human concept in that people, even though it's starting to get impressive, people aren't watching an AI movie right now because they know a human didn't make it. That's right. I do agree with that. So when you have the rhino horn,

they're like, well, I know that one was just a recreation. It's not the real thing. Yeah. There's something sick in the human spirit. Yeah. For some of these people that's like,

oh, I want to be able to have a rhino horn on my desk when we do that business meeting. And no, it came from a fucking rhino. Yeah. I think that's true. Yeah.

It's just, you know, when I've done a lot of research into this over the years because it bothers me so much. but you know when you look at the numbers i mean you mention it with the white rhino example but when you look at the numbers of how populations were just decimated in the 20th century particularly as it went along like what happened to elephants it went from like a million one in africa down to at one point it was like 275 i think it's back up to like maybe 465 something

like that right now it's crazy but like at least it's that's trending in the right direction but you still have that rampant problem and you have to you have to have people covering as you well know because you grow up in it you know hundreds of miles of land in some cases that they're responsible for where it's like yeah an elephant's a big animal but it's still like a needle in a haystack that's right and and those people that are tasked with protecting it are underfunded they don't they don't get the incentive you know if you're some local guy living in a hut who never you know the most money he's ever seen in his life so maybe a hundred bucks and then along come some mafioso Asian mafia guy and goes I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars if you give me a rhino horn and you're like my family

will never need food again they'll never need a house again they'll never want for clothing again you know and literally like I have a kid who's dying of AIDS over here like I'd do that I'd shoot a rhino I wouldn't but you know what i mean like if my son was dying of aids and i i was too poor to give him shoes or clothes or clean water or medicine or anything and i lived you know and somebody else one rhino what's one rhino like i've just i've just provided for my family for the rest of their life and that's the problem it's and those are the guys that end up in prison you know it's the guy who just got offered a hundred thousand dollars not the guy who actually made the offer yes and those are the guys that get shot and get in prison and everything else and they're not all they're not all

completely innocent but still like they're it's such a tough system to beat. Because they're just trying to support their family, provide. They're not trying to get rich or anything. And it's a short-term economic incentive for the minimal means for survival, like you said, that's long-term economically disincentivizing the entire continent if you would lose something like that. It's the biggest industry. And there's always another guy. Right? That guy gets shot. He gets killed. He gets busted by the cops. There's always the next guy. Because if you're an impoverished nations where everybody's desperate and people are literally starving to death there's always another guy now they made a really good documentary about seven eight years ago on netflix called the ivory game i remember that i haven't seen it but i

remember when that came out yeah it was good i think that was one of the ones leonard decaprio was involved with but there was one thing in there where it's like oh you see how complex it is and where i actually understood and it wasn't you know some dude being hired to like go kill an elephant or something like that. There was a situation where they show one of the scientists in the show and one of the conservationists with them meeting with local townspeople who live right outside the bush who were saying that the elephants, because they're free to Rome, obviously, and they eat the vegetation, they were coming in and eating their vegetation over and over again, but they were in one of these, like, protected areas where the antipotures are watching them. and the townspeople who were poor and relied on these crops to put food on the table were saying not over a dead elephant body over alive elephants they were saying it to the scientists right there like if they keep doing this and you don't stop it we're going to have to kill them because they're taking away our ability to put food on the table and i appreciate the fact that the documentary showed that because then it's not the elephant's fault they're doing what they're supposed to do but it shows how complex it is when you have such you know the most powerful creature in the junker

living among where people have to live and try to thrive. We conducted, my team and I conducted the largest elephant translocation in Mozambique's history. Translocation? Catching them and moving them to another location, like a relocation. But it's called translocation when you do it with animals. Yeah, watch that word these days. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

That's funny. It didn't even register to me. It's such a dork. But, yeah, so we did this big elephant move with 24 elephants. We ended up putting 14 on the TV show, but, you know, that was enough. But in the situation, we were in very similar to what you just mentioned in ivory games. The elephants were coming into this area near the Maputo Special Reserve outside of Mozambique, outside the capital of Mozambique and Puto.

And they were not only eating the crops, but because they'd been doing that, and they weren't protected, they weren't regulated, like you just mentioned, the farmers, and they're just substance farmers, you know, just subsistence farmers. They were shooting them and throwing rocks at them and throwing fire, you know, like fire on sticks at them and things like that. And so the elephants were now pissed off as well. So the elephants would come in, sneakily try and get, you know, some corn or something from the crops they're growing right next to their houses. Then some guy would come out and shoot a 22 at him, put a hole into its trunk.

Then the elephant would rampage through the village. When we got there, three weeks prior, one of the elephants that we caught had run through the village, trampled a hut and killed a pregnant mother and her three-year-old. And it's so complex because nobody wanted that ivory, but then. wanted the elephants gone but the elephants were there long before they were and now they had overpopulated that reserve to the point that they were pushing out of the park's boundaries and going into these villages it's just like it's something i try and explain to people that humans tend everybody seems to have a hard time wrapping their head around is there is no blanket solution to conservation every single species every single situation an animal is in is a unique problem

that needs solving and that's what's so hard like there can be a blanket economic solution. There can be a blanket political solution. There is no such thing as a blanket conservation solution. That's right. Yeah. Now, how did you, what does that full process look like when you're relocating elephants? Like, how do you really pull it off? It's hard. I mean, we had 65 personnel on the ground. We had three semi-trucks, three, sorry, six semi-trucks, three helicopters, a bunch of safari vehicles, five vets. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. And it was a big to do that we put together we funded it through discovery channels uh like discovery channel doesn't pay for it they love the credit but they pay me to make a tv show and then i instead of taking a profit pay for

these conservation things um and i don't do it all the time but when a situation like this comes up where it's like literally i was talking with my contacts over there and they're like look either we relocate these elephants or we're going to shoot them because they're killing people and to me it was like okay what does it cost to shoot them about 60 cents a bullet eight bullets all right does it cost to relocate them? About a quarter million dollars. You know, it's like, so the Mozambique government, which, or Mozambique, like, looks at this as a financial

problem, and they're like, well, it's pretty easy. We can solve the problem for eight bucks, you know, or you can do something for a half million, quarter million, but I'm not going to pay for it. Ain't it horrible how the moral solutions or the ethical solutions cost

more? You know, I can go get a fucking burger that's giving me cancer and AIDS or whatever the fuck. from fucking McDonald's for a dollar but if i want to buy like good fresh fruit from the earth it might be four dollars a pound it's crazy it makes no sense it's absolutely crazy anyway we fund so i sold this show called mysterious creatures the same one i caught anacondas on and some other stuff and i took the all the discovery i'll be so mad if they hear this but basically i took the i took like three of the episodes budgets and poured it into this

this one project to film it and, you know, I put it out there and everything else, but we used, we actually paid for the conservation work. And that was a choice by me, you know, it's like Discovery, can't do anything about it. But we did this unbelievable capture. And so, yeah, it's crazy. I mean, things that people don't talk about, like, when you're capturing an elephant, one, it's an elephant. So you have to herd them moving, like, helicopters working together to push them as close as you can to a road.

And any time one splits off, you have to send. the helicopter out and try and, like, hurt it closer. Meanwhile, the helicopter's going down and almost hitting the back of the elephant with the skids because if you go up five feet, elephant are super smart, they just run under it. Are they freaking out at all, too, when you're doing? Hugely. They got to be doing everything. Not only are they freaking out, now they have more adrenaline in their system.

Every different elephant, you have to estimate the amount of sleep drugs you're putting into them. And if you overestimate, you kill them on the spot. Like, if I shoot a baby with a trank rifle that has the amount for an adult in, that baby's dead in five minutes. Whoa, I didn't know that. Then, then once you shoot them, you have three minutes from when you hit them to when they hit the ground asleep. Sorry, you have about 11 minutes from when you hit them with the dart to when they hit the ground asleep.

But when they hit the ground asleep, when they fall over asleep, if they land on their trunks, elephants can only breathe from their trunks. They can't breathe from their mouths. You have three minutes before they die of asphyxiation. So you have to go from darting an elephant somewhere in the bush in a helicopter to on the ground, pulling its trunk out from, and you can't get on the ground before it hits the ground, it'll kill you because it's all upset and chaotic. So you have to wait till it hits the ground.

Then you have to literally find somewhere to jump out of a helicopter and get to that elephant in three minutes and pull its trunk out and monitor its breathing. Otherwise, it dies of asphyxiation. And then, wherever the elephant has hit the ground, you have to now cut a road in to bring a semi-truck because you can't just pick up an elephant to lift it with a crane onto the back of the semi-truck

where the road you've just cut. So this is all happening in minutes. and then you have to bring a crane in, lift this elephant onto a flatbed, move the elephant onto a conveyor belt truck, all custom built, into a containment to then wake it up because you can't leave them asleep for hours and then transport it 1,000 miles. And we had to do this at 24 elephants. And this only costs $250,000? That's what's crazy.

Like, it seems like it would cost even more than that. It did. There was, I paid for half of it, and there was a benefit, or whatever you call it, a contributor from Texas who paid for the other half that didn't. want the credit or anything. They just wanted to contribute. Wasn't Tiger King? It was not Tiger King. I don't think he pays for anything but himself. Yeah. I didn't think so. Just want to make sure. Gold pants. Wow. Yeah. That's, I

didn't know any of that, that you got to, how fast you got to get on the ground with that. It's like that. And we didn't lose a single animal. You imagine, like, and you don't hit one enough and then you guys get on the ground and just your, that happened. It did. So I was working with our vet, Zhao, and he shot the mom and the baby with Trank. And the mom went down and the baby like the needle hadn't gone in all the way so we get on the ground and we have to get on the ground because by the way a baby's still bigger than a bull like i mean a bowl like a cow yeah yeah yeah yeah so the mom goes down and we have to get to her to pull her trunk out or she's going to die and the baby's still standing like woozy so we go shooting in and the baby

comes to try and attack us you know like just trying to defend its mom it's not really trying to attack us but we pull the the trunk out from the mom now the baby isn't going down and because the trank hasn't gone enough, but we don't know how much of the serum's gone in. So now we're mixing more tiny micro doses of serum. So we mix like two more, bunk, shoot it, nothing. Mix another one, shoot it, bunk, nothing. Eventually, I go, that baby needs to go down. We cannot put any more fucking serum in it.

So the guy I'm with is like, what are we going to do? I'm like, I'm going to fucking tackle it. Oh my God. Because when their adrenaline's going, sometimes they don't. So I'll explain it like this. When you have trank in your system, if your adrenaline is cranking too high, high it takes the blood flow of you tipping over to put you to sleep but if you overdose it you'll kill it yeah so we get in we get mom's trunk out it's this whole dance where the baby's trying to

fucking kill us get the trunk out hiding the bushes baby goes back to trying to like stand around mom like all scared all confused wobbly boom shoot it boom shoot it not going down again shooting with trank not a gun and then eventually i'm like fuck it hold my gun so i give the guy a gun this is all on on our discovery channel show and i just run in and it's too big for me to like shoulder tackle So I just run in a double knee kick it and like grab it like this and put my knees up and tip the baby over and the baby hits the ground and goes straight out. But I think if we'd given it one more dose, it would have died. And it was fine.

It woke up fine with mom in the containment box. You just like, no hesitation said, I'm going to be Ray Lewis and then halfway through said I'm going to be Antonio Brown. It was me or the elephant, bro. If I didn't do it, it was probably going to die. So we had to do something. Yeah. And that was like one of the most intense moments of that whole thing.

That's nuts. Yeah. And you just see me run up. It's like, it sounds very like athletic. It was kind of slow motion. But I kind of like run up, put my arms over it, and just jump up with my knees. And then the baby hits the ground, passes right out next to mom. It's fucking nuts. It was crazy. Yeah. It's all, it's all on our show, too. All right. I got it. It's wild. You moved these things a thousand miles, and they stayed within the area, the new area that you put them? So we moved them from this area called Maputo Special Reserve to a place called Zanav, which is a new national park. Mozambique was ravaged by war. And during the war there, all the animals got eaten and killed and poached because people were hungry and starving. So then they built this new national park called Zanav, now that it's peaceful there, but there's no elephants left.

So we took elephants from an overpopulated and moved him 1,000 kilometers, so it's like 500 miles, something like that, to Zanav, and then let him go there. That's amazing. Yeah. It's so cool that, you know, at the end of that, you have to feel not only like, not only like you're making a difference, but you just move the biggest animal on Earth, 24 of them. Yeah.

And save their lives. Save their lives, created a new environment. Like, that's got to be like a Superman kind of feeling. It is. It is. I mean, like, I'm not like a very, I get very excited, as you can tell, but I'm not like a super emotional person. That was one of like two times working with wildlife in my life that I've cried. And I like don't even know why I cried. I wasn't sad. I was happy, but it wasn't like, it wasn't the joy of finding that tortoise where I'm like holding this thing. Like I just watched elephants go out of a box and I just sort of started weeping. And I was like, I don't even know why I'm crying. But it was just such an intense couple days and like, so much adrenaline and the adrenaline held with me until the last elephant went out of the box and then it was just like I wasn't like broken over crying but I literally had like tears running down my face as the last elephant went out and I was just like holy shit we did it like I can't

believe we did that like it we actually succeeded but everything that went into it too it's like that's part of it yeah and to save the largest animal land animal in the world and literally like the bull this big incredible bull that was in charge of the whole herd like I put my hand on him while he was lying there and you take the elephant's down you take its ears and you cover its eyes to you know you want it less light less stress so you cover its eyes and i put my hand on it and i just sat there when we finally got the bull we got the bull at the very end of the trip i was like holy shit like not only is this the largest animal to walk the earth this is the largest one of this group and the the bull that is in charge of this whole group of animals like this is the leader

and now we've got him and like with moving him elephants have such an intense EQ emotional intelligence yes we can't even understand it we really cannot I'm such a I'm Matt James will tell you the same thing like you and I will never feel the emotions an elephant can feel it's that strong I believe it is I believe it's they feel happiness way happier than we'll ever feel and sadness way sad they can die of a broken heart oh I've seen it yeah I mean I'm sure you've seen the video of like the mother weeping over her child and as it's as it's basically dying of dehydration yeah and then the videos we there's millions of them where they're where they're mourning one of their lost and they have like a funeral exactly an elephant funeral yeah exactly so i believe that their emotional range

is much larger than ours so to have we had to catch every animal like we couldn't leave one behind from this family group because of the emotional tear and damage it would have done to them in addition to just the stress and the scare and being caught and moved and everything else and anyway when we finally caught that bull like I just had this unbelievable like feeling of accomplishment and and this emotion and then we let them all go and knowing that we kept the whole herd together and what's crazy is you think an animal's an animal right like if you raise a dog one way like you could get a dog that was a fighting dog you know in the illegal underground fighting ring and you could hand raise its puppies and that dog would

probably love you, right? And lick you all over the face. Those elephants, from what studies have shown, it'll take six to eight generations before they forget what people did to them. So those elephants that we moved, yeah, how crazy is that? Those elephants that we moved to Zanab. It's not like their babies are going to like people all of a sudden because it's going to be calm and people aren't going to be chasing. Right. They're still going to be. They're going to have that information passed down from their grandfather's fathers, fathers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And for six to eight generations before they start trusting people again and being like okay if i see a person i'm either going to attack or run away well that's the thing they're the they're the largest creature out there so

by default they're therefore the most dangerous but they're not built to be that they're built to be these fun loving creatures that just say i'll do my business you do yours don't fuck with me but people in certain environments like that have made them have to be like oh fuck you that's right now when you grew up though and we're going out in the bush out there and said by Did you ever come across, you know, like friendly elephants that you could actually get close to and that you knew on a personal level? 100%. And so my family ran safari business in a handful of spots,

but Mauna Poole, Zimbabwe is, in my opinion, the greatest safari place on planet Earth. And I've been to a lot of them. And one of the reasons it's so fantastic is it's been a protected national park with very limited poaching for a very long time. And there, the elephants like you just, said they see you as you do your thing i'll do my thing and we won't bother each other one bit

doesn't mean you can walk up and tickle an elephant it's just like seeing a bison and yellowstone right don't go try to take a selfie with it but it's not going to attack you i can't believe people do that's wild um but that's how the elephants were in the place that i grew up and one of my most one of the things that was the most profound thing that ever happened to me was when i was a little boy i was like eight or ten years old we're fishing on the banks of the zambisi river my granddad and i and this bull elephant came down so there's like this bank and there's this little ravine and we walk down the ravine because there's the only way to get to the river because otherwise it's like a sheer bank. So I'd gone through this ravine to the river and I'm fishing and of course the elephant also

realized the only way to get to the river was come through the ravine. So all of a sudden I'm standing in a ravine that's no wider than this table fishing at the only spot you can access the water and this elephant comes up behind me. walls on each side and this long ravine. So there's nowhere for me to, I can't go on the water. This is the Zambezi River.

I'll be eaten by crocodile in two minutes. So I'm standing there fishing and this big elephant comes down, this bull elephant. And I actually have a photo of it from when I was a kid. My mom was watching and thought I was going to get killed

up on the bank and she took a photo. And this elephant... He's going to get killed. Let's get a picture of us. Well, she was like screaming and everything, which I should get a photo.

Hold still. Yeah. But this elephant comes down and with my granddad, my granddad goes, don't move for us. Don't move. So I just stands quietly sitting, like, up against the bank.

This elephant comes from me to you, looks at me, he goes, and then just puts its trunk in the water and starts drinking. And me being the idiot I was, I'm like, look at my grandpa. I'm like, don't move, don't move, don't move. And I was like, and I cast my line and kept fishing. And the elephant, like, looked at me and just went back to drinking. We couldn't get in or out of the ravine because of where the elephant's body was. He just had his drink, turned around, and left.

And it was, I was you to me from the elephant. completely wild animal but i posed him no threat he posed me no threat we were just two beings living in the same place occupying the same niche left each other alone respected each other's space and went about our day and it was so fucking cool it was one of the most profound things that's ever happened to me and you're like you're you're you're you're eight or ten years old something like that yeah i look pretty little picture way smaller like you're small now compared to an elephant but back then it's like you're literally looking at a giant oh yeah yeah no i mean move so majestically too.

Yep. And it's crazy because you think of an elephant, you think you're going to hear an elephant coming a mile away and stuff. They're silent in the bush. You don't hear them coming at all. They have those big pads on their feet. You know, we've now... You can't hear, like, shit moving a little bit?

Barely, barely hear them. Like, maybe a little bit of, like, leaf crunching. But the way an elephant moves through the bush, you or I walking through the bush is louder than an elephant walking through the bush. So how often, like, like, when they go to make their noises, is that's more during times of stress, right? Not necessarily. Like when they make like a loud one or something like that,

where they really... Yeah, like a big trumpet or something. It can be a warning signal. I mean, they can also call miles apart to call another herd, you know, like, hey, we're going over here for water or where are you, like a locator call, you know, but... So that doesn't necessarily mean danger

or something's in the environment that I don't like that. That can be a reason for them to make a loud sound, but oftentimes it's just communication. This place that I have been filming at a lot in India called Ventara, that's insane. They have a lot of Asiatic elephants, especially ones rescued from circuses and things like that. And they just, they have this, it's unbelievable. It doesn't even make sense. The world's only elephant jacuzzi. It's a giant, it's insane, dude. You'll see, you get showed you on my YouTube if you want. It'll blow your mind. It's the world's only hydrotherapy

pool for arthritic elephants. Yeah. And it's all heated and pressure treated and crystal clear and it's so bonkers nuts anyway the elephants go in there and they just make the same sound you or i would when you get in a hot tub after working out for really hard and you're just like ah and you see the elephants go into this hydrotherapy pool and they're like they just make this happy trumpet and you're just like it's like this heartwarming thing to hear them just like give this sigh of excitement for getting in the hot tub it's so nuts boris galante elephant Type in Forrest Galante, Vantara, V-A-N-T-A-R-A, and it should pop up.

Forrest, what was that V-A-R? V-A-N-T-A-R-A. It's this unbelievable place. Anod and Bonnie, the guy who had, like, Justin... It's somewhere in there. But that guy who had Justin Bieber singing at his wedding, you know, the really wealthy... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like the fucking $40 billion wedding. Yeah, that guy.

Is it this one? Sorry, go back to my channel, and it's... It's the second one down. This one, right? Yeah, I'll show you the elephant jacuzzi in here. If you just scroll over, go a little bit more. It's right. You're right there, right there.

That's it. Let's throw this on camera fire. Oh, shit. How crazy is this? Volume pumped into this one. I got that on. This is the world's first elephant jacuzzi? It is one plus 10% control.

Hey, give me a hug. Give me a hug. Give me a hug. I love this. This is amazing. This is blowing my mind. I'm so, doctor, I'm so overwhelmed with emotion being here, knowing what these animals have been through and seeing what you're all rescues, I mean, this is paradise. So they were logging elephants, they were in the circus, like pretty rough lives. Yeah.

This is unbelievable, doctor. Yeah, but if you think this is crazy, you know, let me show you some more stuff. Okay, let's go. You'll think this is crazy. That's so cool. But it goes on and on. It's a long video, but it's so cool because this guy that, that guy who had the $40 million wedding or whatever it was, Anandabani, he's created this rescue center for animals in northern India, and everything's like that, state-of-the-art, top-tier. It's like a paradise for animals. It's kind of crazy because the animals, whatever's there, they have over 200 tigers and they have, like, all the stuff that's been rescued.

And whatever's there has basically been through this, like, super hardship life and now lives a way better life than you or I or most billionaires. I mean, like, they are so pampered. there's shots in here of them getting foot rubs and being fed grapes while the elephants lie on their back. I mean, it's crazy, man. It's like the level of respect and care. That's why I love filming at this place because it's so cool. Yeah. India's got a crazy biosphere. All kinds of different cool animals over there. Yeah. I mean, spending a lot of time there, you said. In the last year, I've started spending a lot of time there. I'd been twice before, but now since meeting

Anad and getting invited to this place, this Ventara place, he's like, it's open doors, man, whatever you want to do. Um, you know, within reason. It's not like I can go like tick all the tigers, but he's like, you know, whatever you want to do, whatever you want to film, like, we got nothing to hide, like, come here and take a look and film it and share it if you want. And him and I have become pretty good friends. And so I go back and forth and I film there when I have free time and I've been putting out YouTube videos on it so people can see it. It's really cool. Yeah, your YouTube channel's great, great content. Thank you. You've been doing that a long time. So if people somehow have not checked that

out, we'll have that link down below. But are there, are there any mysterious, potential extinct species in India that you're interested in trying to find oh yeah there sure are um there's a there's a particular shark the ganges river shark that used to live yeah a river shark kind of like a bull shark here yeah they catch those fuckers right off the right off the hudson bridge right and not the bridge but right right on the uh the front park here well i don't know if you know this but they're the real reason behind jaws do you know that the bull sharks yeah i didn't know that i've jumped over jumped over one and jumped right around one twice in my life so i don't go in the water south of new jersey now but so new jersey itself and bull sharks are the foundation for jaws the movie

the story everything so most people don't know this but um there was an incident in a river where two days apart two kids were killed you've heard about this okay killed by bull sharks that's where they had this in the sopranos that what the fuck is that river called oh i don't know the name of the by new brunswick that's right yeah that's right yeah and anyway this this one individual bull shark figure they believe figured out that it could eat people in this river so it would come in out of the ocean and swim up and down this river and look for kids it would swim in there in the summertime and it killed two kids in like two days and there was all these news headlines about you know jaws the killer shark blah blah blah and that led to the author writing it and and spielberg making the movie and

and everything else. Yeah, that story, I remember, I didn't, I actually didn't know that was the basis of Jaws itself. But yeah, you're talking about the ones in 1916 in the Jersey Shore shark attacks. That's it, that's them. They were a series of shark attacks along the coast of New Jersey between July 1 and 12, 1916

where four people were killed. My mom was critically injured. Yeah, oh, fuck that, bro. That's the thing, like I do feel like a lot of my family's down in Ocean City, New Jersey, right down here. I do feel very safe swimming in Ocean City

I don't know why maybe I shouldn't but like when I've had my run-ins with sharks there were when I was a kid that's by the way that's the bridge I've never seen that yeah the shark bridge that's cool but there's there were the ones that I had the run-ins with were down in Florida and I remember

the second time I was in there it was like a calm day and then I was the only one in there and then I don't know where I'd just hear my mom like come in and I was a swimmer I was a year-round swimmer at the time. I was probably like 11. Uh-huh.

And so I was like, okay, so I turn around and you go to get one of those like jump starts. Yeah. Like when you jump off your back foot kind of like for sure. Start to dive and I get one of those jumps and I jump up like into a full like kind of dive and the fin goes like. No way. Oh, that's crazy. And I was like, yo, fuck that. It was only like 10, 12 yards to shore.

Yeah. Maybe maybe less than that because it was like a little gully. Sure. I got right in. I'm like, I'm retired. I'll go up to my ankles in Florida, I'm good. There's so many sharks. I mean, we just put out a show last week on Shark Week about New Smyrna Beach and why.

I don't know if you know this. It's the shark by capital of the world. Yes. There's more bites taking place on New Smyrna Beach than everywhere else on the planet combined. Danny Jones likes to go surf there, and I tell them not to do it because I'm like, this is Darwinism, bro. You will get bitten eventually. Yeah. Like, it's just a, it's like a statistical anomaly.

Like, you will, if you spend enough time in the water there, you will get bitten by a shark. It's not going to be life-ending because it's typically smaller black tips and things. Oh, that's reassuring. But it still hurts. You're still going to get stitches and might have a messed up foot. Yeah. No, thanks. Yeah.

But we were saying this because you're trying to find a potentially extinct shark in India? The Ganges River shark is of great interest to me. I believe they're still extant, meaning they're still around. There's another species that it's such a difficult one, but I'd love to work on. I also believe is still around called the pink-headed duck. That one's worth of Google. Yeah, because it's the only duck that looks like it in the world, and it's in that, like, Myanmar-India border area, which is a giant soupy wetland.

This is real? Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that cool? Yeah. Wow. Oh, search gets underway in Myanmar. It's so funny, there are all these people now in, like, offshoots that have started doing

these search for lost species. And I don't want to say we create. created it, but it definitely gained popularity when we made a show about it. Yeah, you inspired people. Yeah. You should feel great about that. I do. I love it. And the more people that find it, I don't want to be the one that if I'm being too old for that. I'd love it to be kids that are finding them and not me. Going into the swamps of Myanmar to search for a duck for six weeks sounds exhausting. I would love someone else to find it. There's also a lot of shit going down in Myanmar right now. Yeah, you won't be going. I won't be going back to

Miami anytime soon. Yeah, it's gnarly. But yeah, I mean, that animal could easily be on the India side. It might also be on the Myanmar side, but I mean, look how cool that thing is. That's amazing. Yeah. So they, so that's scientists have declared that extinct, but you think that's still, what, what evidence like are you going off of that makes you think it's still out there? That one, again, going back to my earlier point, it's gut feeling is one, but that gut feeling is a derivative of there's a ton of habitat. It's in an area that doesn't have a lot of Western science, you know, because when we say something's extinct, that's just us. That's just the Western world. You know, they don't, guys there that are killing eat and pig-headed ducks, they're just like, that's just food.

Like, that's not a special thing. And then there have been a lot of sightings reported, you know, people that have come through the woodworks, because, you know, this is what my team does. Like, we dig into this data. But people that have come through the woodwork and gone, like, yeah, I saw one of those when I was a teenager or, you know, two years ago, I was sitting out in a canoe and one of those ducks flew by and I can, you know, it had a bright pink head and a brown body. It's like, there's not a lot of other things. So if you look at all the factors, like, where is it, how much science is going on there? Like you said, nobody's going to Myanmar right now. What is the habitat?

Is there sufficient prey source, all those kind of things? And are there sightings? It checks a lot of the boxes. Now, are you, the book you said you're writing right now, we talked about that a couple hours ago. That was the one involving how they do science, right? Yeah, I mean, it's not really like belittling how science is currently done. it's more celebrating, like, renegade scientists, like people that break the mold

and usually have a ton of naysayers and people say, like, you're crazy and, like, you shouldn't do that and then come out at the other end of it, like, rewriting natural history. The reason I'm bringing up is because it's like how many times do you think you're going to have to do something like this,

especially as a guy who's now been a very clear public figure for a long time. You're respected by a lot of people whose voice very much should matter on the issue around the world. Like, how many times are you going to have to find something before some of these

fucking snobbed up people are like, you know what? Maybe he's not wrong about everything. Well, I think the problem is that I'm a public figure. You know what I mean? Like, and it's not everybody, right? Like, I think the majority, like, I think, and I don't know because I don't weigh myself against other public figures, but I think that we, I have a astoundingly positive. Like, people like what I do a lot. I agree. You're a likable guy. Yeah. Well, that's lucky for that. But I don't, I don't think it'll ever go away. Like, you know, I'm sure you have haters, too. Like, everybody that's in the public light, everybody that's on social media or YouTube, these people come out of the cracks that are just like, I hate them.

And you're like, I don't even know who you are. And I don't know why you hate me, but congrats, I guess, you know? And I don't think I have very many of them, but whoever, they're definitely out there. I see the comments on YouTube and stuff like that here and there. Yeah, listen, you're always going to have those where I worry about it more for a guy like you who's an expert in a field and literally a scientist is like when people who have, not a fucking YouTube commenter, but actual people who have pooled to do something about it, like in spaces like this or shutting you down because they're like, oh, well, he does YouTube or whatever. Well, fuck you.

I mean, we talked about this earlier. Yeah. You know, like, how the fuck else are you supposed to educate people these days and get the word out and get kids excited about this stuff? I would say I don't actually get that, which is lucky. Like, if I reach out to a government or an organization or something and want to work with them, they're usually like, oh, yes. Like, that would be awesome. Like, we love what you do, or I've seen what you do, or let me look it up. And, yeah, like, I'd love you to bring exposure to what we're doing.

The pushback, I don't get a lot of, like, professional. I did in the early days. In the early days of, like, hey, I'm going to go look for an extinct leopard. They're like, okay, tinfoil hat guy, you know, they're like, you're a lunatic. Like, have fun, buddy. But now, after proving myself, as you've said, a few times, I feel like most of the time, like, when my team reaches out to someone is like, hey, we'd love to come and, you know, work on your elephant project or film at Bentara or whatever.

it happens to be, they're like, yeah, that'd be great. That's awesome. Yeah, so really lucky in that regard. Yeah. Who inspires you the most, like in the conservation space? Even stuff from growing up people you may have never had a chance to meet. It's a good question. I mean, my biggest inspiration was my grandfather, and he was a shopkeep in Harari. He wasn't exactly like a world-renowned conservationist, but he was just someone who understood the bush, would spend a lot of time out in the bush, walk with elephants, learn, listen. Not like me, he didn't just yammer all the time. He actually listened. And that was always a big inspiration to me. But there are other people, like unsung heroes, again, what this book is about. David Ebert, he basically, he's, I don't

even know if he'll come up on Google, but his name's Dave Ebert, and you might want to type in sharks. He's basically the godfather of shark conservation. When Jaws and all these other things started, yeah, there you go. That guy. I love that guy, man. The Lost Shark guy, Dave Ebert, such an unsung hero, works in his little office, you know, and I'm not trying to be belittling at San Jose State in his tiny little crammed office. And this guy named more shark species than anyone else in the planet. He's basically the godfather of shark conservation. Ivan Carter, someone I've known since I was a little kid. Most people don't know his name. He was like a world-renowned trophy hunter who one day, I feel like he shot his last elephant

and was like, well, I'm never doing that again. It broke his heart and he changed his mind. And I don't care. Like, I don't, like, do I, obviously, I don't support that he used to kill all these things. Yeah, you got to win people over. But he did it himself. He literally just went, nope, not killing anything anymore. And now he's, like, the most outspoken, astounding conservationist. And the list like this goes on and on and on.

And, you know, so I take inspiration. I take inspiration from Ben Lamb. Ben is not a conservationist. I'm sorry. Like, he is now, by default, but he's a businessman, as you said earlier. He's a billionaire. He's a billionaire. man. But like, I find the fact that he came in having truly no real interest in wildlife or

conservation or anything as like a foundation and now going, yeah, 50 million to save, to fix EHV, let's do it. Yeah. I find that inspirational. I do. And that's the thing. Like, that's what I was really trying to get a read on when you're here. I'm like, is he just a business guy. He is, but he is, but I, you, you feel like he's, he's really actually into it. His job is to go make money for the company. Don't get me wrong. That is the job. Yeah. But like this is a guy who's having fun at the Explorers Club. And you can see when people light up when you talk about things. Totally. Now Matt will light up on every fucking thing ever because he's lived in it his whole life. Yeah. But then you'll see those, those, some of those topics you get to with Ben and he's like,

pro, I mean, let me tell you about this. Yeah. He freaks out. And it's like, all right, that's cool. Like you need people like that. You need people who are fans that that actually like can do something about it. too, you know what I mean? Oh yeah. Dude, Anat, Ambani, the billionaire Indian guy. You want to talk billionaires? Like, he's on another level of wealth. I will sit at dinner with him and we'll be talking. And it's like I'm talking with a, it's like I'm eight and he's eight and we're little kids. And I'm like, did you see this one crocodile that has this? I remember I was sitting there and I was talking about Ocopis with him, which is like a horse zebra looking animal. It's actually in that video too, but you can just Google it. It's like this Congo zebra horse

giraffe-looking animal, okay API. And I'm talking to him. Oh, copy. That's it, yeah. You're good. That animal. Beautiful creature. What the fuck?

They're unbelievable, super shy. This isn't extinct? No. Actually, go back to that YouTube video I was in and just scrub forward and you'll see me playing with one, which is a very rare thing to do. But anyway. I've never heard of this in my life. Aren't they crazy?

Okay, Delante. What did we type in for that again? It's right there. right. I mean, I don't want to take up your time. No, no, no, this is great. If you just go through that search bar, somewhere in there is me feeding, hand feeding one, which is, you see how big they are next to me. Keep going, keep going. But a knot, my point is, like, I was sitting at dinner with him one time talking. I go, oh, you know that albino a copy? And he goes, for us, it's lucistic. And I'm just like, you're such a dork. You know, he's just, yeah, there it is,

just like me. And I find that inspirational. This guy spends hundreds of millions of dollars, animals with no return. This isn't open to the public. No one can go there. This is just for him to save animals. That's so cool. Yeah. I love that stuff too. I find that inspirational. And then you've got this incredible creature. Look at it. Are they endangered at all? Like, um, you'd have to check their conservation status. They were at one point in time put on the endangered species list. That looks like a fucking unicorn. Isn't it? Isn't that crazy? So this, they're really interesting. They had, um, mythological status. mythological. So to the point that when people, when Western, like, I think it was Dutch, scientists first went to the Congo, people would tell them about all these animals.

They'd tell them about Moko Lembe, Mokal, whatever that thing was, the dinosaur we looked at, and gorillas and all this, and they're like, okay, yeah, maybe. And then they found gorillas. They're like, holy shit, gorillas are real. And then they found, you know, whatever, the snake. And they're like, oh, that's real. And then there was like, oh, but there's also this animal, this Okapi out there, that has the stripes of a zebra and the body of a giraffe, and the body of a giraffe, and

face of a horse and they're like okay you're full of shit like you know that's mythological and then one day sure enough some dutch scientists found them and they're like oh wow this wasn't a rumor this is a real one yeah yeah but they were considered a mythological animal for a long time what i don't expect you to notice off the top of your head but what like ballpark i can probably google this after i ask it but what ballpark percentage of species do we not even know about meaning not even ones that we knew and are declared extinct, but it's just like we can estimate that X percent of the Earth, we don't even know this percent that actually exists.

It's such a boring way to answer this question, but the thing is speciation has become such a weird field of science. Like now if you want to make your mark as a scientist, you go and look at like, okay, there's squirrels here and there's squirrels on the left side of the mountain and there's squirrels on the right side of the mountain. They look identical, but there's a mountain range between them. if we catch both squirrels and test them,

can we actually show that they're different species? So you or I might be like gray squirrel, gray squirrel, but speciation in the sciences has become a way to like make your marks. Semantics. Semantics. And they're dividing so many species up. So if you try to take that out of the question, because I just didn't want to give a blanket answer,

and just be like, how many animals are there like, Ocopi's still roaming around that we don't know about? I think it's like above the water, because the ocean's different. above the water it's like less than one percent we've found most of the big animals like we know most of the big things but there are still so many like every single biological expedition to papua new guinea western popua comes up with like 15 new species and i don't mean gray squirrel that's different from the other gray squirrel i mean like here's a deer we didn't know existed

here's a type of dog that we'd never seen before i mean there's like some big stuff there but for the most part humans have spread so far around this planet I mean, you know what it was like staying with Paul, and he probably knows all the animals, right? Yeah, and that's the thing. Like the Amazon, I could see with your logic there how that's more of an outlier because it's this actual one big congested of wildlife, just fucking untapped area because it's almost the size, it's like 85% the size of the continental United States or something. So, yeah, when human beings being able to go that deep into there where there's uncontacted tribes and shit isn't fully possible. Whereas other places are more reachable around the world. It's a smaller actual distance to cover.

So maybe if you go to like Sri Lanka and some of their, I think, rainforests and stuff there, like, I hope I'm getting like Indonesia or Sri Lanka. Like it's smaller so it's more accessible to get everywhere and that's find. Yeah. And there's islands that you can trade. But still, I mean, there are undeniably big animals that we haven't described yet. But there's not like, it's not like 10% or something like that. It's a small amount. Isn't it crazy though how we've only explored?

like five percent of the ocean tops yeah yeah it's crazy and there's there's a lot of speed i mean until think about this until i want to say 15 years ago now and that number's probably wrong we thought that the foundation of life all life in the universe required sunlight the foundation of our food chain was photosynthesis and it came from sunlight then all of a sudden we put an r ov or a submarine down in the bottom of the ocean they're like wait a minute there's hydrothermal vents here and there's entire ecosystems of creatures, literally entire complex food webs that have never had a single thing to do with sunlight

that have evolved independently of sunlight. Like, oh, huh, maybe we should rethink life. Yeah, it's like we literally have to rethink how life works because we found that life can exist on hydrothermal energy has nothing to do with solar energy. Yeah. That's crazy. That was like 15 years ago.

It's not like, you know, when Charles Darwin was cruising around. It was like, oh, wait a minute. We are 100% sure. is science that all life requires sunlight. Oh, no, no, we don't. And then you look at how they map what sums of, some of the bottom of the ocean could look like and everything. It's mountain ranges and valleys, just like we have here. It's just covered by water. Exactly. And it's like, what is even in those crevices? No idea, no idea, yeah. Fucking crazy, man. Giant squids and all kinds of stuff down there that we don't know about still. Also, though, have you followed this whole thing that's

going on with like Paul Watson with the with the arrest and finally they let him out and all that I'd love the spark nose version I know he did something he got arrested for like a year right and then he got released and now he's back on the boats creating conflict again that part I got to see how much he's actually doing but yeah he's this is the guy who essentially like saves some of our whale species the whale war whale wars guy like walk the talk with this whole thing and I guess because of that he was like wanted in japan or something where they have some interesting practices when it comes to see wildlife and so maybe it was the dutch please correct me in the comments if i'm misremembering all this but it was the dutch who like arrested him and were holding

him on like an interpol warrant or something like that something like that yeah to get him back but now they they got him out and all that but it it kind of disappointed me because it's like you literally have one of the true and blue clearest like legit made a mark on the earth conservationist of the last century and what kind of message are we sending when the guy has to like fight internationally for freedom to not be arrested and sent to jail for trying to protect some of these creatures and whatever you know it that is where it gets weird and you remember you got a bunch of different totally different incentives around governments around the world and yet we're all a part of the same populace where you know if we care a lot for example about the climate here in

america who's to say fucking china does exactly it gets so weird out there and that's a little bit disheartening when i see that are we also get this um because we do live in the united states and we get this sort of complacency about like that's what's important those are the laws you know that would never happen and then you go to any of these places we've talked about today and it's like their laws are completely different their incentive is economic like there's still developing nations. They don't care if you're a good at heart trying to save whales. If you slow down their economic development, which can be a whaling ship, they're going to kill you. And they'll either kill you by putting you in prison for the rest of your life or execute you or anything else. And, like,

you know, here we're like, that would never happen. Like, he's a hero to the whales. It's like, yeah, but that's not in Japan, not in China, not in wherever, you know, not in Denmark or Norway or whatever it happens to be. Like, they'll, it's completely different. Yeah. And then you have, environments around the world where people have lived there for you know thousands of years and they're outside of society too and you go in there and you're like hey we we can help bring into the new world you talked about a little bit yeah but it's like they don't want that they don't want you know what i mean like you got to respect that and when you do bring them to tie this all together like when you do bring them into the new world when you bring them cell phones and shotguns and

TVs and all these other things that's when the habitat goes to shit yes you know that's what destroys the environment. There's a reason the Sentinelese don't want to be contacted, right? They don't want to, they want to be left alone. These tribes in the Amazon, they want to remain uncontacted. They don't, not that they know what a cell phone is, but they don't want the outside world to come in and ruin their way of life. And they've maintained that way of life for many generations, which means they haven't wiped out all the animals. They haven't hunted it out. They haven't clear cut all the forests. They've kept things balanced. That's right. Yeah. And it's only us with all our modern tech and conveniences and things that imbalance it.

What was the most fascinating, I guess, like off-grid group you've had a chance to spend time with? Actually, pretty recently, I went to Mota Island in Vanuatu. I went there with the... I don't know where that is. Yeah, so exactly. Mota Island and Vanuatu, that does not narrow it down from it. I doubt Mota Island will even come up, but it might. It's in southern Vanuatu, and I went there because the Nelk boys reached out to me,

said we want to go meet an uncontacted tribe yeah so this island right here um is mota island yeah so it's that remote i mean you are out there yeah so this is like way off the coast of australia yeah yeah in an island nation called vanuatu and there is not much there but um we've had some really cool experiences with you know tribal people in papua new guinea and blah blah but what i what i loved about mota island take out the knelk boys and all that and we had a good time they're fun guys but um the tribe there is just they're they've managed to blend living a western style and a primitive style very very well like they have t-shirts and clothes but they still hunt no there we are first one that's you guys Kyle Kyle and myself Kyle from the Nalk boys and

myself with the Nalk boys um but yeah and they still hunt bats and they still wear grass skirts and yet they go back to their huts at night that have a little bit, oh, that's my post. They have like generators for electricity. Like, they've managed to keep it balanced. And that's why I found it so interesting. Like, I've been with other tribes that are completely remote, you know, and don't have any Western impact at all. I mean, some because I'm there, but like these guys I found really fascinating in the way they've balanced it. And they've maintained an island, which, you know, like Easter Island syndrome. Like, you can collapse an island. Can you explain that to people who aren't familiar with Easter Island?

Easter Island is the island with the big heads off the coast of Chile, I believe. And Easter Island syndrome is a thing where you're stuck on an island and your population grows. And so in order to sustain that population, you cut down all the trees, you eat all the fruit. And because you're so isolated, once you do that, your civilization collapses. So that's what they believe happened in Easter Island. Basically, they cut down the last tree to make a canoe to go fishing because their fish were so far out because they caught all the fish.

and once you cut down the last tree there was no coconuts there were no more canoes the whole population collapsed so these guys what i what i the reason you asked me what i found so fascinating it's not just because of their remote lifestyle been with lots of tribes that have remote lifestyle they have managed they're like forest gardeners and ecosystem engineers they're like we live on a small island mota island we can collapse it if we hunt every bat if we cut down every tree if we do that our way of life will be gone. So instead, when they eat a mango, they take that mango seed and plant it back in the dirt. Oh, wow. Or when they go to kill bats, they don't, they look for a bat that doesn't have babies and they kill one bat and they eat that bat, you know, per family. Like, they're constantly

regulating the environment and managing their island so that they can maintain their way of life. And not one, I mean, I was only there for a few days, but at no point in time did I get the inkling that they're like, man, we would love a Chili's here. You know what I mean? I don't think I don't think I know what Chili's is but you know what I mean nobody there was like wanting for like that Western lifestyle

I don't think I've ever talked to someone who said man I'd really love a Chili's yeah to be fair it's like saying I really want a Long John Silver That's right yeah good filet I've never seen someone walk in there No it doesn't Who eats there

It's got to be a drug ring or something No one goes to Long John Silvers Dude it's like what's the mattress store That's all over the country Like mattress firm or something it's in every small town America. Okay. No one's ever bought a mattress from that place, ever.

It's got to be like a cover-up for a drug ring or something. Like, who's going to mattress firm? Nobody. So you were with these guys for just a few days, you were saying? I went with the Nelph boys for a few days, and then I spent another two weeks there. How did you make, after enough boys left? Yeah. On a neighboring island, but we went back and forth. How did you make contact with them to, like, do this?

I met a guy named Brad, you know, you meet these people. travel. A guy named Brett. White guy named Brett from Australia. He's not in the tribe. No, he was Vanuatu and but he grew up in like the capital city and stuff. And then he, he lives on a neighboring island. It has this tiny little eco lodge type thing. So I met Brett. Brett invited me and then he told me about Mota, about these people. And he's the only white guy that's ever been indoctrinated into the Mota tribe. So he speaks the language. The language is insular to that area, not that island, but that area. He speaks the language. He went through a whole ceremony to be indoctrinated as a member of the tribe everything only white guy that's ever had

that we we you know i was just a visitor and so he's like a part of the like he's removed because he's a western guy but he's like part of the tribe so when he visits he's welcomed and things and so i went with him and that's how i found them what is it what does their language sound like is it relatable to anything that we know no it's it's like pigeon a little bit you know so like pigeon not the bird pigeon pigeon is like a hodgepodge of language Yeah, be careful. You're in Hoboken. We got a lot of pigeons around it. No, it's like a little bit pigeon where it's like a hodgepodge of English and tribal language and all these other varying things. And, you know, they had missionaries go through that area. So a lot of people speak English. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So, you know, it's like very, it's like not great English, but it's English enough to get through. Yeah.

Have you ever been in a situation where you've been spending, you know, you're embedded with some sort of tribe and it's actually sketchy as fuck and it's scary? yeah yeah i mean like not in an embedding situation but like in papua new guinea three years ago we're hiking up this river to look for this tribe that worships sharks to try and find this type of epaulet shark and we're walking up this creek we get told in town town town is this tiny little town of like a hundred people they're like oh you need to go meet the tribe people that come to town and trade with us blah blah but you need to meet them and talk to them about the sharks. No problem. We'll go to tent. We'll go to the tribe. Like, how do you find them? It's like, oh, you take a canoe to the end of the creek, then you walk up the creek. It's like, okay,

no problem. So we canoe up from the town to where the creek starts, go up the creek as far as you can. You know, certain times of the year you can go further, right, when it's wet season. So we're there in the dry season. So the canoe doesn't make it very far. Then we get off the canoe and start walking along the creek. So we're walking along the creek and I look up and there's a skull on a stick, a human skull. And I'm like, holy shit, there's a skull. And me being me, I'm like, does they do this in Popua, to be clear? But me being me, I'm like, let's go in and check that out. So I climb up this little hill where the skull on the stick is, and there's a cave

opening. So you go in the cave opening, and there's a picture on my Instagram, I think, but I go into this cave littered with human skulls, like hundreds of them, hundreds and hundreds of them, real human skulls. And I'm like, oh, shit, I don't think we're supposed to be here, you know, because I just popped in to see what it was. And I come out and the tribal warriors are standing there watching me with Spears, and they're like, why are you in our cave?

Again, missionaries have been through there, so they speak English. Oh, they're speaking English? Yeah, yeah. That's got to be creepy. It's different, you know, tribal guys named John Dudley and things like that because the missionaries have been through there. Yeah, it's really bizarre. Anyway, these warriors have watched me go in, like, they've stalked us because they're like, what are these white boys doing here? They've stalked us through the jungle.

Then they've watched me basically, it's not like I peed on the skulls, but like desecrate their tribal burial site because I hopped into it to see what it was. And I come out and they, they weren't. angry but they also weren't they were just very stern like they're like why are you in our cave to be honest they actually didn't say anything there they just took us to the village and then the chief was the one who communicated with us you're not shitting yourself when you're the whole time like like like like i had a pocket knife like uh on my back belt and i like had i remember i reach back and i put my hand on my pocket knife like i was going to do anything you know it was like a like a well you got to go down with a fight exactly and i remember my camera and was behind me and he literally

swatted my hand away because there was a guy looking over his shoulder and he saw me me like reach back at my blade you know and so he's like don't do because he didn't want you know we didn't want it to escalate um but yeah they took us in and then i explained the whole situation like we were trying to find the village so he came up the creek i saw the skull and i went in and he's like okay you know and then it was fine it was like yeah you know like you weren't here to do any damage i was like i'm just here to talk about sharks and he's like yeah what do you want to know just like i'm just going back away yeah exactly yeah we're good we got all the content we need Yeah. So been in some weird situations like that where you just like, you end up looking around, you're like, right, I'm in a cave filled with human skulls. I probably shouldn't have done this.

Well, minus the human skulls and happening upon some of those things, it does, it's very clear to me that like you're living out your dreams and actually doing the damn thing. For sure. There's a lot of people who never get to do that in their life. So that's really, really cool that you've been able, like you grew up among this and then you found your way back to it very quick. after you had to leave Zimbabwe, which is pretty wild story, by the way. And, you know, now you get to travel the world and go find shit that other people think doesn't exist or go look at the shit that most people will go their whole lives without seeing it. That's fucking awesome, man. Anyone can do it. That's the thing. You know, if a D student from Zimbabwe who came here as a refugee

can do what I've done, that's what I love about this country so much in America. It really is the land of opportunity. If you are that passionate about something and that motivated about it, it doesn't matter if it's looking for animals around the world and filming them or studying or being a finance bro or golfing or it just doesn't matter what it is, being a podcaster. If you are that passionate about something, you can become an expert at it. And if you become an expert at it, you can make a career out of it. And I'm so fortunate that I've got to do that with my passion. And I'm not here to be a motivational speaker, but I think anybody can that's motivating though to hear that i think anyone can do it i really do that's great yeah and

is this something are your young kids already shown a little interest like their dad i spent all day yesterday snorkeling for snapping turtles with my five-year-old there he caught two big ones himself yeah he's pumped he's pumped he loves it he loves it yeah and that's the future man the next those kids not just my own kids but the kids that we inspire with the youtube channel the discovery channel shows the the the the media that we're putting out that's the future of saving this planet in my opinion now you you're writing a book you've written books in the past you've been on several shows at this point you're traveling the world to do your youtube channel you also you guys put out i don't know where you fucking find this time you put out a podcast at least a couple times a month yeah i've seen

some of that's really good so i love that link down below like what what else do you got going on coming up yeah tomorrow night i have a new series launching on discovery channel called animals on drugs she didn't even talk about that but me catching animals on drugs it's a real thing it's a real problem with global human wildlife conflict, animals ending up intoxicated by human substances, meth getting flushed down the toilet, bears breaking into houses and drinking white claws because they're full of sugar,

literally me elbows deep doing hippo surgery in the field castrating Pablo Escobar's wild hippos in Colombia. It's a crazy show. Oh, you went and did that? Yeah, I worked to the Colombian government to solve that problem, to work on solving that problem. Holy shit. Yeah.

And that's all coming out on discovery. And my main thing now is my YouTube channel. We only started YouTube two years ago. You're killing it. I'm new to it. I try and put out a lot of informational and fun, entertaining content there. And that's my main thing. I'd love people to check that out, if anything.

Yeah, we'll have that link below. You already got, like, damn near two million there. So I'd say things are going pretty good. It is going well. Yeah, when you say animals on drugs, though, I keep thinking, what was that movie that came out? Cocaine Bear. Yeah, cocaine bear. It's not.

That is a bad Hollywood blockbuster. is the real version of that it's crazy that was you know that was just some dude sitting in a room going samuel l did snakes on a plane yep we're doing cocaine bear bitch give that fair drugs right now make him kill people all right man well this was awesome i was so glad to finally get you in here we got to do this again when you're in town and we're going and we're going to ken's place we have to go to tell you ever so when you come through to look at your office and in stanford we should schedule that around time where you can just get a day i'll take you down there it's like an hour 40 minutes from perfect dude thanks for having me bro thank you sick all right everyone else

go subscribe the farce channel follow everything he's doing buy his books we'll do this again all right everyone else you know what it is give it a thought get back to me peace thank you guys for watching the episode if you haven't already please hit that subscribe button and smash that like button on the video they're both a huge help and if you would like to follow me on instagram and x those links are in my description below Thank you.