The Joe Rogan Experience - #1240 - Forrest Galante

Episode Date: February 6, 2019

Forrest Galante is an international wildlife adventurer and conservationist. He's also the host of "Extinct of Alive" on The Animal Planet. https://www.instagram.com/forrest.galante

all right here we go five four three two one yes how are you man what's going on joe i'm stoked man i'm really good really glad to be here i'm stoked too yeah nice to meet you um dude you were on naked and afraid sure was ridiculous is that sure was uh dude it's so it's so ridiculous like to say ridiculous is such an understatement. See, because they oftentimes will have an actual survival expert or a wildlife expert or someone who knows how to live in the woods. Sure. And that was the idea with you, to get a wildlife expert? Definitely.

I mean, I'm kind of a combo. I've practiced primitive survival for many years in a means to get closer to wildlife. I just got back from the Amazon, and we had to feed ourselves every day. We had to build shelter, blah, blah, blah. And I don't do it, like, for fun. I do it as a means to be out further and stay longer kind of thing. But it's got to be a little bit of a conscious effort, right? Like, to have fun, like, fishing for your food and, you know, putting up shelter and stuff.

I mean, it's got to be, like, kind of cool to live like that for a little bit. It's human nature, you know? Like, we intrinsically want to hunt things and fish things and build a shelter and survive and so it's totally fun i think it's like to your core it's fun you know i mean you just feel it like you know that you're doing something that's like primal human nature yeah the amazon fishing clips that you have on your instagram page it's crazy like you just throw a cast out there and you were catching a big fish, like, instantly. Bonkers. Like, I've fished a lot of places I'm really into fishing and spearfishing,

and every, Joe, I'm not kidding, every single cast was a fish. A peacock, bass, or a piranha, every cast. And where we were in the Amazon, super remote, like, not a lot of people go there. I'm sure those fish have never, ever seen a lure, never seen a hook before. And it wasn't like sport fishing. It was like, okay, let's go catch 10 fish. In other words, take 10 casts and we have enough food. And that was it.

And it was amazing. Does it make you think of what the ocean must have been like before people fucked it up? Of course. I mean, of course. As a biologist, that's like all I can think about. Because I was in Hawaii recently and we did some snorkeling. And when you're swimming around with the goggles on looking down at the ocean one of the things that's kind of shocking is how few fish there are

i know like you think this should be like teeming with life you're over these reefs and you see like three or four fish or five fish or something like that it's so weird i mean there's there are these pockets left in the world that are completely untouched. And it's like, as soon as you get into one, you can see it. You're like, this is what it used to be like everywhere. And it's like humans haven't had an impact. I don't, you know, I don't want to disparage anyone in Hawaii, but I don't think there's anywhere in Hawaii like that because it's all so accessible. Yeah. And it's just, you know, I've been fortunate enough to see a couple of these pockets and they're just booming with stuff and it's like this is what it could be yeah i mean i guess that's like what it must be to just be in the amazon itself as well right for sure in the jungle not just the rivers and the lakes or whatever's out there but the actual jungle itself it's it was incredible the jungle there so we were in columbia and amazon and like talk about untouched by people there's

been this kind of ongoing going conflict in columbia for many many years so we were in colombia and amazon and like talk about untouched by people there's been this kind of ongoing going conflict in colombia for many many years so we were the first westerners to go there in over 60 years so the village we flew into they'd literally never seen white people before and then we went 200 kilometers from that so like middle of nowhere did they want to touch you so yeah hair because their hair was very dark and very different and like i'm not particularly fair but just to touch, the hair and see the blue eyes and stuff, they were just loving it. Were they friendly? Super friendly. Like, the culture was very stoic.

Like, there wasn't a lot of smiling or crying. You know, there wasn't, like, a lot of emotional exchange. But straight away they came and greeted us, like, shook hands, you know, said hello. It was really cool. Wow. That's got to be. Now, how do you set something like that up? Do you have like a liaison that acts as a go-between between you and the tribes?

Yeah. So we did in this case have one guy who communicated. I speak Spanish, Spanglish, I guess. And they all speak Spanish from back in the day. So we set it all up. It's part of the wildlife stuff that I do. We literally flew a DC-3, a World War II cargo plane, into this cocaine dealer's airstrip.

What? That's how we got there. I mean, like, mind-blowing stuff. Current cocaine dealer or former? Former. Former, yeah. Well, you know, TBD. It's still Columbia, right?

Exactly. Wow. So, yeah, that one was really cool, really remote. How crazy is it that they learned Spanish from people who came over on boats from Spain, and it just stuck? Isn't that nuts? And took over the whole, like... Region.

Yeah, the whole world. And here's this tribe in the middle of the Amazon that has this language from another continent. Well, and Brazil, right? From Portugal. Right. It's really incredible when you stop and think about it. I mean, it's incredible, but it's also part of it's a little sad. Like, wouldn't you have loved to have heard what their original language was?

Oh, absolutely. What it sounded like? Well, they did. So it's funny because when they didn't want us to understand what they were talking about, they would switch to their native Indian language. So they still had, they were bilingual, a community of 25 people that have never left and they're bilingual. Wow.

It's amazing. Now, their native language is what? What is it? It's an Amazonian Indian dialect. I honestly don't even, they might have said the name, but I don't recall. What is the name of their tribe? Also, I'm not even sure. They're so isolated, they're unaware of what country they live in.

They don't even know that they're in Colombia. Really? Really. They're just like, to them, they're unaware of what country they live in they don't even know that they're in colombia really really they're just like to them they're amazonian they're not colombian ecuadorian brazilian they're they're amazonian whoa yeah you know they just stay like where they are they stay and the village we were in is literally i think it's over 200 kilometers from the next next village of 15 or so people and they don't have fuel, they don't have motors, you know, they're just in this pocket, and they just substance live. And they're all barefoot, right?

Yeah. Do they have those crazy splayed-out feet? Big feet, you know, because they're not very big people. They're like small Indian people, but really big, kind of useful feet. And the way that, you know, they could run up and down trees and climb stuff i mean it was unbelievable like so much more athletic than you could imagine i'd imagine right

they've they've been doing that their whole life their whole lives yeah now when like when i say splayed out feet what i'm talking about is that people that walk barefoot in the jungle for long periods of time with their whole life their toes spread out and their feet almost look like a hand oh no way i did not like pay enough attention that might have been the case but i didn't notice it their feet exactly yeah it's kind of weird things stare at dude's feet yeah for sure but um yeah steve ranella uh who's a good friend of mine told me about that he was in guyana and is the same thing and they actually got some pictures and videos of these people's feet but look at these guys up there whoa oh no i didn't notice anything like that yeah um this is the uh that's

uh how do you say that horana horani horani horani sounds right horani you think horani horani indian splayed feet so it's very strange. It's kind of the opposite of what happens to women when they jam their feet into those little pointy shoes. Right. Where they get the toes kind of smooshed onto each other. The ballet feet. Yeah, it's horrible. Instead of that, they're all crazy spread out. What in the fuck is going on there?

The guy's got like- The top of his hands, I think. Yeah, the top of his hands. But the bottom is like wood feet. But that's got to be like what our feet are supposed to be probably right right yeah thick ass toes that actually have muscles in them that move that you can use like a tool like your hand yeah so when these guys just can climb up trees with them so they grip the the side of the tree with their feet like a hand oh i mean i didn't

notice like i say the feet just like that specifically but the way could like, everything's covered in mud down there, right? It's all wet. It rains every day. And they could run up and down these tree trunks like to get up and down the village. And here's me and my crew with our awkward cameras and stuff. And we're slipping and sliding and falling over. And like, they're literally like, what's wrong with these people? Why can't they walk?

We must have looked like infants today. Right. And you guys probably have like like, boots on and shit. Of course. They get muddy and fucked up. Oh, totally. Yeah, we're wearing, you know, muck boots, and my one buddy's got waders on, and, you know, we think we're all hard and cool because we got all this gear, and they're just, like, running around in shorts barefoot. It is so fascinating when you see people that don't have contact with the outside world like um i'm sure you're aware of uh that recent story the

missionary was killed by the people in north sentinel island absolutely which is one of the weirdest places because they've branched off from africa with 60 000 years ago or something like that right when when you're around these people like what what do they do if they get injured so funny you ask that because we we kind of had that same question right and they don't leave they stay in the village they have a shaman at the village who blessed us with a crazy green powder and that's a whole nother story but they have a shaman and he is their doctor however he has no access to any western medicine so it's only his learned knowledge handed down through generations plus jungle powders and whatnot.

And that's it. So we actually spent today, because we had a medic with us, doing kind of village help, if you will. Everybody had ringworm. Everybody had respiratory infections. There were a lot of lady problems in the village that our medic had to deal with. I mean, there was a lot of health issues, and you don't even realize it. I'm going to write something down before I forget. I'm sorry.

It's totally unrelated. No, all good. There's a doctor named Peter Hotez that's coming on the podcast, and I have to follow up on him. When you start talking about the people in the jungle, he's an actual doctor who specializes in infectious diseases in jungle and tropical climates and he's like everyone's infected with something everyone everyone he'd have a heyday down there yeah i'm sure it's probably been yeah but um the so when these people have ringworm and all these

different infections do they treat it do they have like some naturopathic cure or some shit i i think it's kind of a 50 50 like a lot of it they don't treat because it's just part of everyday life like when i say everybody had ringworm i meant everybody had it so i don't think there was any kind of treatment or cure it was just kind of part of it part of them but other things you know the the the witch doctor or the shaman was trying to treat um and then we kind of went in and we had like medication for ringworm so. So we dewormed everybody and with the shaman's blessing. And he was like super excited to have Western medicine in the village. And would you use like Lamisil or something like that?

I couldn't tell you. Um, I think it was not, it wasn't topical. I think it was like a Vermox, like a pill that you take that kills the, kills the worms. Hmm.

The weird thing about that is like, don't you, you leave and then they're going to get it again, right? I mean, there's only so much you can do, right? Yeah. Totally. We were having the same dilemma. And it was like, do we interfere because we're from the outside world?

Do we help? And we talked to the shaman through our translator and he said, please help. Please help. So we gave, including him, everybody this dewormer, but, you know, they'll just come back. Yeah, and also they probably don't understand the consequences of taking some antibiotic that's going to do some weird shit to your whole biome, right? Right, right. And these are all the good stuff, too. It's such a moral dilemma.

You're there and you're like, I want to help. Do I? Is it helpful? Is it hindering? Our medic was like, it's undeniably going to help. You know, they need this. And so we went for it. And it was,'s undeniably going to help you know they they need this and so we got we went for it and it was you know it seemed to help everybody felt fine but we were only there a couple more days before we left so who knows wow you know when you're talking about

ringworm like are these guys covered in it they have big patches of it like what's it like feet and legs had big patches of it yeah yeah and this is if you don't know that's the same shit that's athlete's foot oh i didn't know that ringworm and athlete's foot are the same kind of funk oh yeah that's why uh they people tell you to pee on your feet oh i thought that was just for fun it could be for fun depends on what you're into but uh i think that's uh the idea behind it is that you're um somehow or another you're killing the bad bacteria When you piss on your feet And you have athlete's foot That might be horseshit

With me you always have to check Yeah Definitely give that a little look-see But it's a real common thing with Jiu Jitsu Gotcha Just all the mats Yeah it's real common Guys get it

People really fuck up where they like put bleach on it and a bunch of different things to try to kill it and winds up getting worse and also fucks up all the natural skin flora jock itch athletes foot and ringworm are all types of fungal skin infections known collectively as tinea tinea tinea they're caused by fungi called dermatrophites that live on the skin hair and nails and thrive in warm moist areas the jungle so it seems like they're just gonna get it that's just what it sounds like you know but what do they do for it what do they do for it i didn't see them treating that at all and when we pointed it out they were like yeah yeah we know about it you know they were more concerned with things that were like dire.

Like there was an infant, maybe not infant, maybe three years old, and he was hacking up a lung. And he was asthmatic, according to our medic. So our medic gave them like an asthma medication, and he just said, you know, if he has an attack where he can't breathe, give him this. And like, you know, to be super real with you, when we walked away, our medic was like, I doubt he'll live to see adulthood. man yeah and were you giving him inhalers did you give him i'm not sure

to be honest what it was that he left with him and what about like injuries what if they break a leg or something like that what do they do i don't think anything yeah was anybody i mean you gotta think these people are climbing trees they must constantly fall get bitten by stuff there's tons of venomous snakes out there. It's wet. It's muddy. It's slippery. They're building stuff out of very rudimentary tools.

I mean, it's nuts. They have to get injured. It's so interesting that we have this understanding of medicine and doctors and hospitals, but that's probably pretty fucking recent. Oh, of course. Yeah yeah i'll tell you a story joe i was in uh myanmar early late last year and we're down there filming this thing and this kid like 22 year old crab fisherman gets bitten by a crocodile oh croc grabs him by the arm grabs him by the thigh and death rolls so it breaks the arm in like i don't know 15 places compound fracture

the real deal i can show you pictures of it'll blow your mind and we hear about this and we're minutes away we just it's kind of one of the similar situations where the first westerners to be there in a long time we go bombing over at high speed and we get there and the mom is like off mourning the death of her child but her child is sitting there still alive like they have written him off and it's mom is mom is literally mourning the death of her child and he's he's lying there conscious but like in total shock fortunately just because of the situation we had a speedboat everything else we bandaged him up you know tried to keep his arm stable and his leg stable put him in our speedboat and it was six

hours by speedboat to a village that had a or to a hospital really and so he got there and his life was saved but i asked we asked the the people in the village what were you going to do and they're like there's nothing we can do wow so he was just going to bleed out or go septic and that was the end of it oh what a fucking rough way to go right how did he get away from the crocodile uh i don't know I think he was just hitting it or hammering on it He was crab fishing in the water And it came up and grabbed him, rolled a few times And at some point he escaped How he even got back in the boat and made it back to the village

I have no idea, because his leg was shattered His arm was shattered It was brutal, and it was a canoe It wasn't like he had a little motor or a wheel to drive He canoed back One of the most disturbing stories i ever read was um these guys were kayaking in an african river and the guy in front of them got grabbed by a crocodile and that it went under and like it like plunged like a bobber as the crocodile pulled him out of

the bottom of the kayak yeah i'm like fuck that's awful imagine being the guy behind him and watching that just watching yeah and knowing that you're pretty much helpless. Did you see any jaguars or anything? I've never seen a jaguar. I've seen a lot of lions. I'm from Africa. I don't know if you knew that. So I've seen a lot of lions growing up.

My family did safaris. And then I've seen mountain lions here in California, leopards, stuff like that. I've never seen a wild jaguar. Really? Yeah. Even when you were in the Amazon? I think they're really elusive. I there's areas that are are hot spots all of the locals were very nervous and kind of knew about them like you know i went out for bushwalks at night and stuff and i just go me and one guy with a camera and uh they were like oh be careful like

peligroso you know very dangerous don't do it um but preter grosso means very dangerous peligroso like danger yeah and um so we just go and you know i'm not trying to act like we were tougher than them or anything we would love to have seen one but they were very aware of them so they were there we just didn't happen to run into one sort of like mountain lions exactly yeah like they say that mountain lions are like if you live in a place that has them, you know, Wyoming or Colorado or something like that, they know where you are. Right, right. They might be around you all the time, and you might rarely see them.

Maybe driving home, you see one skittering into the bush. There was a nuts video. I think it was from the L.A. area. Did you ever see it where the security cams picked up this mountain lion that was walking through this, like, very residential neighborhood? And you'd see, like, people would walk by, and then by and then 30 seconds later he'd like dip out of the shadows and then dip back in and then the next set of people would walk by and nobody had any clue he was there that's crazy that a giant predator can move around like that right yeah so when you're

there like what what would you have done if someone got bit by a venomous snake or a spider or something like that did you guys have any anti-venom were you prepared for something like that i mean that's my department right like as the wildlife guy that's that's kind of my my department is make sure nobody gets bitten make sure nothing like that happens and we handled very many venomous snakes and caught anacondas and all kinds of great stuff we did have like my main camera guy's name's mitch he got absolutely lit up by these wasps one night and we all were we got like 12 14 stings each but i look back in the canoe at one point and his eyes are just super swollen he's bright red he's sweating i'm like mitchy okay he's like uh uh his throat started to close up he was having an allergic reaction so we had to hit him with

antihistamines and i i'm not actually sure if the medic administered the EpiPen or not, but he was like, we're in the middle of the jungle, we're six hours from a village that's then a full day's travel by a charter plane from a hospital. I mean, middle of fucking nowhere, and his throat's closing up, and that's why we take a medic with us. Thankfully, we had this emergency medic, he administered the antihistamines, and Mitch was okay. But these things do happen. Do you ever, like, while you're on these crazy adventures do you ever out there going this is the last one no no no way no way man i love it i live for it wow how long have you been doing this i mean like for tv for animal planet uh three years i guess but to go on x the reason i got into that and doing it for tv is because

i've been doing it like my whole life i grew up in zimbabwe my mom was a bush pilot so when we weren't on safari she was like flying us these remote places in the middle of bush and we were going out on safari and like as long as i can remember this has been what i do now when you go on safari are you in those open jeeps walking safaris what yeah dude what are you doing we take a 458 an elephant gun okay put it on your shoulder it helps walking safari god damn man only during the day right obviously cannot move at night and what do you do when you're confronted i mean i've had some pretty close calls uh my wife jess, who's here with me, I saved her from a hippo. Yeah,

we've had some pretty close calls. Fuck, man. One of the scariest pictures I ever saw was this guy, this African guy running down the street and a hippo is chasing him. And you look at the size of the hippo and you're like, good Christ, that thing is huge.

They're, Joe, they are the scariest animals on earth. Like, interacting with a hippopotamus, they're so erratic, they're so unpredictable. If they feel threatened at all, at all i mean they're just this video is fucking bananas this guy's on a motorboat and the hippo is swimming after him like a torpedo so this is where i'm from this is zimbabwe really yeah so is this common that they swim that fast

they can move i mean this is that this is uncommon to have one chase the boat and come that close. How fucking big it is, man. Yeah. So when you've had these close encounters, what do you do? You shoot at the air? You shoot at the ground?

Scare them away? Fortunately, I've never had to put an animal down, but I know people that have. That's the picture. Look at that. That's it. That's the one. What in the fuck?

How fast is that big bastard run? I don't know. You'd have to look up the exact speed, but definitely at top speed, definitely faster than human, but they don't have the maneuverability. You know, you can kind of duck and dodge behind trees. So just don't run a straight line.

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Fuck that. 20 miles an hour. Yeah. Yeah. What does a person run?

A rhino runs 31. Jesus miles an hour. Yeah. What does a person run? A rhino. A rhino runs 31. Jesus Christ. Jesus. A fucking cheetah can run 75 miles an hour? Uh-huh. I thought it was like 50. Uh-uh. Fuck.

Yeah. 75? A crocodile's almost as fast as the fucking hippo. Yeah. They're quick. They're quick. 18 miles an hour for a croc. Fuck that.

Top speed for a sprinter is aroundinters around 21 22 maybe but that's not sustained yeah that's also a sprinter right saying a sprinter not a doughy white guy like us fuck jesus christ so you just if you're chased by a hippo is there a move that you do do you just have to go left and right zigzag yeah maneuverability get so like when we got chased we got behind a termite mound and then it kept going straight like you're hiding behind termites yeah nothing says safety like termites oh my god dude that's so crazy fuck man is that this so that's the scariest thing in africa in terms of like interacting with human beings you know what the scariest thing in Africa is? Mosquitoes.

Oh, of course, right? Like all stuff you can see, all the big wildlife, you can kind of feel it out and you put yourself in the bad situations. Mosquitoes, there's nothing, you know what I mean? There's nothing you can do about it. Yeah, my buddy Justin Wren, he runs Fight for the Forgotten Charity. They build wells for the pygmies. Okay. And he's been bitten.

He's gotten malaria three times. Ugh. times yeah and one time he got it like he didn't even get bit again the malaria just returned so it must be in some way systemic i think i believe it is i don't i don't never had it knock on wood my grandfather had it but i know that it know that it wrecks you for life. It can come back. You can get it again. It stays with you. I think that's his situation, and he's a professional athlete. He's actually a fighter for Bellator. He's one of their heavyweight contenders.

Damn. Yeah. Has he said that it's affected his performance? No, I don't think it has. I think he's been okay with it. He received treatment, but it's definitely wrecked him on three separate occasions where he was, you know, basically on death's door. Right, right. And one of them was when he was flying back.

Damn. You know, and he's just sweating and just rotting out on the inside. Oof. It's awful. So you want to ask what scares me? That's it. Yeah. Like, I would, I'll take a hippo, a snake, a croc, a leopard, anything over that.

Yeah, malaria is terrifying. Yeah. you say malaria has killed more people than anything ever really yeah malaria has killed half the people that have ever died oh my god that's insane just make sure that's right that might be bullshit too it sounds good i think it's real i think i think i think we actually have googled this before the malaria has literally killed 50 of all the people that have ever died. That's insane. Yeah, it's nuts.

I mean, people are worried about so many different things. You should be worried about mosquitoes. Exactly. Well, apparently they're trying to genetically engineer mosquitoes to be devoid of malaria. And they hybridize, right? void of malaria and they hybridize right so my understanding is the way that it's done is they genetically engineer the males to reproduce with the females which are the malaria carriers and then the offspring of that generation can no longer carry malaria oh yeah okay malaria killed half the people who've ever lived that is bonkers it's a myth it's a myth yeah it would have had to

kill it says like five and a half million people on average per year, every year for all of human history, and that's not possible. I think it kills half a million a year. I think the real number's like half a million. Yeah, it says it would have to be five and a half million to kill everyone. Oh, okay. So it's just one of those things that people say. I like it. Well, I should probably shut the fuck up.

But what else is new? So how many people have they killed? A lot. Okay. We'll go with a lot. So are there other diseases? I mean, is that like typhoid and shit? Isn't there like a fucking case of typhoid in California now?

Really? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we've got some weird situations in this country with measles returning and polio returning. Ebola came in. Yeah. What the hell? typhus outbreaks expands in la and long beach jesus cool thanks for having me down here joe congratulations

did you notice my hand was sweaty when i show they're different but it's different it's similar but different it's not typhoid it's typhus just a flea-borne disease that can be treated with antibiotics or something yeah i'm terrified of lime disease too have you had lime no but i have a gang of friends that have had it and it wrecks them well you spend a ton of time hiking around and stuff out here yeah well california doesn't have much lime right but east coast it's horrific it's like everybody that spends time outdoors in the northeast seems to get it yeah and i don't know what you can do about that there was a vaccine that they were doing for a while but um one of my friends her dad actually got lyme disease from the

vaccine huh like he didn't have it got vaccinated and wound up catching it from the vaccine and i think they were like okay fuck this vaccine sorry because they had it for a while i believe yeah that's no fun yeah so when you were a kid, you were doing this. Like, you've been involved. So, this is like the family business? Sort of. My family business was my mom's business, actually, was safari businesses. So, like you say, sit in a Land Rover, see the animals kind of thing.

And they did a little bit of tourist walking safaris. But then I grew up on a farm in the outskirts of Harare, Zimbabwe. And then whenever I wasn't in school, I was on the farm running around barefoot, catching snakes, fishing, yada, yada. And then when my mom wasn't booked up, she had this little bush plane that she used for safaris and we'd just adventure all over Africa. Wow. So it was a great childhood.

That sounds amazing, but fucking terrifying. I mean, it's like one of those things where it's what you're used to right i found moving to the states at age 14 and like trying to find my like place in the world being this weird little private school kid from africa way more terrifying than going to meet a tribe in the middle of the bush really for sure yeah why um like i'll give you examples like i always carry a pocket knife on me right my first day here in the states i go to school pull my pocket i'm sitting in my like uniform because i went to a very proper english boarding school pull out my pocket knife start cutting my

apple 15 minutes later i'm in handcuffs and i'm like what did i do what did i do i literally had no idea what i had done wrong but it's because i had a knife at school everybody i had ever been to school with had a knife to cut their apple like Like it was the standard thing. So here I am with like police and, you know, guns and badges, and they're throwing me in handcuffs and taking me out of the school on day one in America. And I'm like, this is the scariest thing I've ever seen. And I didn't even learn until later that day that it was because I had a pocket knife. And at no point did I think having a pocket knife was a bad thing. So they didn't tell you? No, they just grabbed me. There was like this whole thing, like the knife went flying.

I was chained up and I was like, what's going on? What's going on? And they're like, you're in big trouble. And I was like, why? And, you know, it was like little culture shock, things like that, that to me were like something I'd done every day

my whole life. And now I'm like getting thrown in juvie for it kind of thing. When you think back about that, do you think that's just the consequences of being in a large population for sure yeah yeah i mean like we like i say i went to school every day with a knife there was no violence issues there was nothing like that but then you come here where you know the stabbings and stuff like that and it's because you know we had a time i lived in a tiny country with a tiny population do you think that it's possible that

i mean i mean it's stupid but there's no way you could live like that over here i mean there's no way you can have kids with a bunch of knives no i don't know this culture i don't think so at all i think that would be terrible and i get it now as an adult nobody talked to you about it before you left the house no my mom didn't know she's from africa you know she's like here are your things here's your knife cool i'll put it in my pocket sharpen it before you go to school man wow so you were doing these always doing these walking safaris you started out doing the driving ones and then eventually you started doing the walking ones uh my family business did walking safaris they didn't do hunting it was all photographic um and we were in the zambesi valley so zambesi river is one of the biggest rivers in

the world so we do these walking safaris and then we did canoe safaris as well, which is why I have so many hippo and croc stories because we'd be canoeing down the Zambezi River and then taking photographs and seeing wildlife that way. Wow. What a crazy way to grow up, man. It was awesome. Your relationship to wildlife is just so different than the average person in this country. For sure. It's very intimate like i i i feel like i have like regardless of being a scientist by trade i feel like i have a very

intimate understanding of animals because i grew up completely surrounded by them now what other countries have you explored i'm over 60 countries now damn yeah so a lot all for wildlife work whether it's for the show that i do or for biology contracts before I did the show or just because, like, for instance, when I got done with college, I was like, I had a little tiny little business starting college, sold it and was like, I'm going to travel the world and try and photograph these animals. And I went to 28 countries looking for wildlife. Did you have something to do with looking for the Tasmanian tiger? Yeah. Yeah, I did. What do you think?

to do with looking for the Tasmanian tiger? Yeah. Yeah, I did. What do you think? I think of all the extinct animals that have gone extinct at the hand of man, given the range, I don't know if you know this, but the Tasmanian tiger at one point ranged from Papua New Guinea all the way down to Tasmania. So not just the island of Tasmania, but thousands, tens of thousands of miles. I think given the range, the frequency of sightings, the amount of untouched habitat in Australia and Tasmania and Papua New Guinea, where they just found a new dog species, by the way. They did? Yeah, the Highland dog in New Guinea, maybe a year ago now, incredible looking animal. Like, absolutely. Could there be a very small remnant population of thylacine, Tasmanian tiger,

hiding out in an isolated pocket of habitat? I totally think it's possible. And these sightings, are they coming from credible sources? Tasmanian tiger hiding out in a isolated pocket of habitat I totally think it's possible and these sightings are they coming from credible sources so I did I did one expedition I've done two expeditions looking for thylacine and one of them I was literally talking to the man who is the head park ranger for like the entire north Queensland so he's a scientist by trade a biologist by degree and he says I saw four of them whoa you know So this isn't like some crackpot drunk who's like, yeah, they're here. This is a guy who is, like myself, a scientist, a biologist, and spends his life in the bush. He knows every animal in that area, and he goes, I saw four of them.

Wow. So how do you not, like I get goosebumps talking about it, because how do you not take that as credible? No, that's about as credible as it gets. Whoa, look at that cool looking dog. There it is. What a freaky looking, the world's rarest and most ancient dog has been rediscovered in the wild so this new guinea highland dog was thought to be extinct is that the idea that's right yep wow so this thylacine this area is where where they are has there been a concerted effort to find these things sort of i mean it's it's one of those things where like

i would say the thylacine is like the icon of animals coming back from extinction for australia right it's kind of like everybody knows about in australia they all care about it but where these efforts are is like outside of sydney or you know what i mean it's it's close to home so there hasn't been a lot of expeditions really deep in to look for them and that's what i did so there's so much belief that the animal is still out there that the uh shoot it's the university in cans i'm blanking on the name of it right now the university itself put money towards funding to find it so when you have a credible institution like a university going here's money go and find this thing you've got to think and i'm not a big conspiracy theorist

but you've got to think they have some intel that says look we're not wasting our money to look for something that's not there we've heard something we've seen something we caught something on a trail camera let's prove it and so i actually teamed up with they caught something on a trail camera hard to say but what they did do is fund this expedition so myself and the university who's still ongoing with the research went and looked in in this area in North Queensland where I went. And how far deep did you go in? 1,200 miles. 1,200 miles?

Yep. Took 14 hours driving and then hiking from there. Whoa. Yeah, 14 hours on dirt roads. Because this is the area where they've been sighted the most numerous? This is where that sighting that I was talking about came from, from the biologist, as well as i think four other sightings the the community up there is a place called portland roads you could look it up i think it's 12 people and wow live totally not like the amazon off the grid but off the grid you know it's all like solar energy and build it yourself there's no power lines blah

blah so it's just this small group of kind of like people in the middle of nowhere and almost everybody in that community has seen them so that's that's where we based it out of and then went deep from there almost everyone in the community and no one's took a photograph they have cameras everybody's you know everybody's got a cell phone kind of thing but it's like it's all it's always the same story where it's like yeah it was there it was late at night by the time i reached my pocket it it had gone off except for the biologist i was telling you about who said it ran around with his dogs whoa yeah he's out camping and he's like oh there's this red eye shine and my dog goes nuts and runs over there and then there's four thylacine jumping around with my dog like for like 15

minutes and he's like i'm trying to get a picture and you know that's it's like 300 yards away it's in the dark and without the flashlight and the phone. Fuck. Yeah. So it's basically 100% that this thing's alive. I mean, as a scientist, you can never put that number. But to me, yes. That's why I've done two expeditions and I plan on doing more. I feel it's out there.

Wow. It's a gut feeling that it's there. Did you ever see that? There was a Willem Dafoe movie. Yeah. The Hunter. The Hunter. That's right. And he goes and shoots the last one.

Yeah. Bastard. It was a weird movie. It was a Willem Dafoe movie. Yeah. The Hunter. The Hunter, that's right. And he goes and shoots the last one. Yeah. Bastard. It was a weird movie. It was a weird movie. It didn't really work, right? The movie was off. It was very strange. And there was like a scientific reason he had to find it or kill it or I don't know.

It was weird. Someone was paying him, wasn't it? Didn't someone hire him to do it? But wasn't there a, like, he was a bounty hunter for the animal because it had some weird genome or I don't remember. I don't remember either. It was weird. Yeah. But that's how they died off, he was a bounty hunter for the animal because it had some weird genome? I don't remember. I don't remember either. It was weird. Yeah.

But that's how they died off, right? People hunting them? Put a bounty on them. That's how bad it was. Yeah. When settlers came to Tasmania, which was the last stronghold for them, they were killing sheep and sheep farmers things. And the government was like, get rid of them. You know, put a bounty on them.

And what year was this? You'd have to cross-check. It's been a while since I've read up on on that but the last ones died off in like the early 1900s right that's right the ones they think yeah they're all freaky looking animal there is one set of footage from it ever from the one in the hobart zoo and it's you look at it's an insane looking creature it's yeah just nuts you got that try to play the video it's not playing oh it's not playing. Yeah, it's a freaky animal.

It doesn't even look real. It looks like a cross between a tiger and a dog or something. And it's kangaroo by genetics. It's a marsupial. Yeah, it's a marsupial. So it's got a pouch, and it's just so weird. Stripes and... That's a strange thing about Australia and that whole area. It's like, how did...

What's this marsupial thing, and why didn't that catch on anywhere else? Dude, look at him. There it is. There's that freaky thing. And wait till you see the, there's a shot where he kind of turns his face and does like a yawn and you'll see he can open his jaw the way like a snake does to almost 180 degrees. I mean, it's, it's bizarre. Yeah. To swallow.

Well, coyotes are kind of like that too. Not quite so extreme, but when you see a coyote yawning, you're like, the fuck look at that oh that's so crazy isn't that insane yeah it's like a crocodile almost yeah yeah yeah a strange animal man i'm i'm obsessed with him i'm totally fascinated by him yeah i hope you get a photo of these fuckers me too man i mean do they so in that area did you guys set up trail cams and we did 200 trail cameras. Wow. Yeah. And then the university that we partnered with who didn't go as remote as we did, but they're still doing a big area. I think they have 10,000, 10,000 trails, something crazy. Like maybe it's a thousand. It's a huge number. So what do you do with those?

How does that work? So you do like a grid pattern, right? So you know how a trail camera works, motions activated, blah, blah, blah. So blah so they just they literally here's the mountains here's whatever and they set out all these uh like undergrads and they're like place one every 300 meters pointing you know in this direction blah blah blah blah and they just do a grid and they do that for a month two months whatever it is collect them all and then move to the next grid and then move to the next grid and just blanket the area. And I think I could be wrong on this, but I think the search that they're doing,

that university is going to be the most comprehensive trail camera survey ever conducted. And so as far as you know, they don't have a photo of one yet. As far as we know, but think of it this way. And again, I'm not a big conspiracy guy, but if you're,

if you're at a university, it might be when it's like my, that's probably as close as they have. There's a lot of these could be, but if you're a university... This is generous. It might be. It's probably as close as they have. There's a lot of these could be... Did you see that? There's a new one that just came out. Whoa. See, to me, that's a mangy fox.

That's not a thylacine. No? Look at the base of the tail. It's very thin. It's carrying in an upward curve instead of straight. If you look at a kangaroo's tail, it's very flat. There's a lot of fox problems in Australia where they're introduced.

Could be wrong. As a scientist, I try not to get too excited when I see something that I'm like, this is it. It's hard to tell because of the way the grass is. For sure. It makes it look like he's got stripes on his back

like a tiger. Wow. A trail cam has captured an image that has excited Tasmanian tiger hunters to the possibility the animal may roam freely across Australia. Wow. How big is that thing? They're like coyote-sized.

Very similar to a coyote in size. Wow. Yeah. So, don't you think, though, that if they had definitive footage that they would release it to try to get more funding? Dude, the problem is footage isn't definitive anymore like uh two years last year i got a photo of a leopard in zanzibar the first time in 25 years the animals declared extinct and we caught a video not even a photo a video of a zanzibar leopard and uh took it up the chain and they're like until unless we have genetic proof the animal remains extinct so i think you know it's so hard to say yeah yeah come on will um

so yeah i think i think you know if the university had something they're trying to get enough data to really present a case as opposed to like you know throwing up a flag over something into one individual is there a concern that's a bunch of amateur wildlife hunters would go there? What is this, Jamie? There it is. That's my leopard. Oh, that's the leopard. Yeah. Wow.

Have you seen that photo or the footage, rather, of the jaguar that they found in Arizona? Yeah. That's really interesting, too, right? Amazing. They're starting to make their way up from Mexico. It's such a weird region, that, because here's this huge Sonoran desert that you think none of these tropical animals can make it across and for whatever reason southern arizona gets jaguars and kodamundi and peccary and all these like tropical animals yeah what what the hell i don't know the answer what the hell's going on that all these rainforest creatures are making it through this thousand

mile stretch of desert and into southern arizona probably bored it could be looking for cool cool places to visit yeah you know maybe they i mean maybe it's just like a natural instinct to roam and expand your territory there he is yeah look at that thing amazing that's an incredible animal so beautiful and it's huge huge they're they're 200 plus pounds right it's a big fucking aggressive cat what's bigger a jaguar or a leopard leopard leopard yeah yeah and that's even bigger but it's or a leopard? Leopard, right? Leopard, yeah. Yeah, and that's even bigger. But it's such a beautiful animal, too. And apparently they were all over North America at one point in time. Yeah, like that area, like Texas and Arizona.

During the Pleistocene? Yeah. Oh, interesting. I didn't even know that. But when did they, I mean, they were pushed out of, I feel like, that might not be true, though. I feel like they were more numerous in like Arizona and like the Southwest. Makes sense. I mean, you know, we had so much megafauna here back in the day.

There would have been a lot of prey for them. Now, because of the fact that you spend so much time in the wild and, you know, and that you have this interest in these, what would you call cryptozoology animals? Well, I'm not a crypto guy so just to be clear and nothing against crypto guys but i don't do loch ness or bigfoot or anything i'm a true wildlife biologist so i only focus on wildlife so not to interrupt you but i'm just very very structured in the sense that i really only look for animals that we we have an understanding of right yeah right well yeah the bigfoot one is um the the most compelling but also probably the most bullshit i think there's a mix there i think people believe that they've seen certain things um you know it's it's do i think that there could

have been large primates that we attribute to bigfoot sure whether they're still here or not whether people have ever seen them i i'm so like not well read on that isn't it interesting though that if there was one it would probably be the most spectacular find ever absolutely but meanwhile we have chimps and bonobos right and we have all these things that are real well because there's so much like lore and culture associated with it now right and not just like our western culture but like cave paintings of big hairy creatures and like everything i mean it would be like this mind-blowing discovery have you ever went and looked for the bondo ape no i know what it is but no never gone and looked for it they're sure that's a real thing really yeah they've got skulls

and hair samples and photographs and video and for people don't know what we're talking about it's a gigantic chimpanzee right like a six foot tall chimpanzee which is just fucking nuts and it does walk erect right yeah sometimes yeah there's a camera trap photo there's a guy named dr carl oh no he's not a doctor i think his name is carl harmon call carl something harmon is that amon amon carl amon and he's a is it swiss wildlife photographer anyway he set up a bunch of camera traps and he got one of them walking amazing it's freaky and there's some photos of um these gentlemen that shot one uh near an airstrip huh and it's fucking

huge you don't know how big the the men are right they might be small and it's in front of them but it is without a doubt like one of the biggest chimpanzees you've they might be small and it's in front of them but it is without a doubt like one of the biggest chimpanzees you've ever seen it's insane yeah they have a crest on their head their skull has a crest like a gorilla huh yeah it has like the the bone of the skull it has it kind of fuses up yeah yeah do you have a picture of that i'd love to see it i'm not not familiar with the anatomy of them yeah it's um it's really interesting because i think for the longest time they didn't think they were real as a part of that michael crichton book congo okay remember

there was a really terrible movie i know the size of that fucker yeah that's insane yeah that's one of them and i think that doesn't look like forced perspective you know what i mean it looks like they're right in front of them and that's one from the early 1900s, I believe, where these guys shot one. And they were like, what is this? This is just giant chimp. See if you can find the one right above is the one where it's walking right there. Yeah. Oh, that's the trail camera?

That's the camera trap. Wow. The thing walking. And he's erect. Yeah, he's erect. And he's, you know. Is he? These people that one of the sightings they saw

one walk by a truck like walk across a road they said it was the same height as the truck that's insane so they have like you know like a toyota helix or something like that and it's literally the side the height like a six foot tall man but a giant chimp and i mean you know to go back to the bigfoot thing you can totally see where we get that from right for sure you look at this huge primate that's the size of a human being and your brain instantly goes it's mythological and i'm pretty sure that they didn't have photos of this thing until the 20th century like the late 20th century no kidding yeah that's amazing yeah it's a trip man this they nest on the ground like gorillas. Like a gorilla. Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. And the locals have two different names for chimps. They call them tree beaters and lion killers. Huh. And the tree beaters are the ones that are up in the trees, the smaller chimps. Sure. And the lion killers are these big ones.

That live on the ground. Yeah. And apparently there's some either video footage or there was some eyewitness account of one of them eating uh a leopard no way so it was a dead leopard that they were eating whether or not they killed it or they found it but they were eating this fucking thing regardless like to be a primate at the top of the food chain eating a big cat i mean that's nuts it's nuts would you ever think of going there and trying to find those things fuck yeah they're deep in there great yeah i think they're in a place called bealy bealy in the congo that's where they think they are they've

isolated a population of them there really my mom just got back from the congo and she still does like her own adventure stuff and she was saying it's just like she's been all well. She's like, it's mind blowing. Like there's so much remoteness and unstudied area that there could be all kinds of things. God damn, man. Now what, what kind of medication do you have to take if you're going to go there? Because you have to take some anti-malarial stuff, right? Dude, I'm a pin cushion. Like I've had so many shots and pills and you know, like preventativeative obviously i actually don't do malaria medication i just cover up because it messes with your brain i don't know if you know that like they say the modern ones aren't bad but the malarone like you have hallucinations at night

you have crazy sweats like especially if you're in hot sun so i i would rather be more focused especially if i'm working with reptiles or stuff like that, that can, you know, envenomate me. So I try to stay away from it and just cover up. Wow. Is there a specific type of clothing that's like anti-mosquito repellent clothing or anything like that? I just do long sleeves and some bug spray. And do you do a mask as well? No. No? That's silliness. Really? I look silly. It does look silly. No, I just just do you know good old deet god that

stuff's got to be bad for you too though no it melts you like if you get it on like say these things it will melt the painting off the paint off of the headphones it's so strong oh it's probably worse than the mallard have you ever used a thermos what is it called um fucking is it called a thermosel i think that's what it's called um it's um it's a device that heats up it's got like an element inside of it and like a little bit a little canister of uh gasoline and you put these sheets and it releases this very fine mist oh no kind of smell and mosquitoes fucking hate it no way yeah we used it in alberta huh alberta has very aggressive mosquitoes when they're out Yep

When they're out, they're out It's like clouds of them, right? Yeah, because they're only alive For like three months Right It's like Alaska You ever been to Alaska? It's the worst mosquitoes I've ever seen

Crazy, right? They can like pick you up Yeah, they're like They're the size of pigeons And they're fucking everywhere Totally I went fishing with my friend Ari And we pulled up the car

And we got out of the car And we opened the car door And within seconds A swarm we pulled up the the car and we got out of the car and we opened the car door and within seconds a swarm of mosquitoes was inside the car it's insane and we were screaming like what the fuck this is crazy it's like something out of a Stephen King movie like there's clouds and they I I yeah that's why you asked me what I'm scared of it's that fucking clouds of mosquitoes man well we're very fortunate we don't have malaria here in the united states yep absolutely if it if it made its way over here somehow you know i i um i wear this fabric you're talking about thermosel called hex um oh yeah you've heard hcs hex exactly and um i wear it for a lot of reasons because i definitely feel it helps me get closer to wildlife but i've noticed

mosquitoes do not like it really so that's that's one of my cover-ups. Explain what a hex suit is for people that don't know what we're talking about. Sure. So it's this interwoven carbon grid that actually holds the body's electrical energy and capacity, like the door of a microwave oven, like a Faraday cage, right? And so you naturally emit electrical energy, and then when you wear this clothing, it's got this conductive carbon grid, and when you touch the ground or something, it grounds it and releases all the energy. So birds migrate using...

Yeah, there you go. Now, has it been proven that this stuff actually works? I mean, it has been proven that it has an effect on the electrical energy that you release, but has it been proven that the animals can actually recognize that electrical energy? With certain animals, yes. So we know electroreception is... Certain wildlife is capable of it. Birds use it to migrate.

Sea turtles use magnetic poles to migrate. They just discovered, I believe, 2014, that lobsters' antennae have electrical detective sensors. Electroreception is the word. So it's proven on some things, not everything. You know, our understanding of animal behavior and animal adaptability is constantly growing so it's passive you know what i mean i wear it because it's a passive technology it's like i'm gonna wear a shirt anyway why not wear one that might or might not help so i feel it helps my friend john dudley is a bow hunter yep pretty famous bow hunter i know john yeah

okay and he he swears by it yeah yeah he wears them constantly he's like it makes a big difference i think so you know like i'm i'm not hunting i'm just trying to get close to stuff and interact with it or find something but i feel it makes a difference you notice a difference personally especially with birds um i've noticed a huge difference i've noticed a huge difference in the water some mammals i've noticed a difference um but yeah i i like john i feel like it's it helps me get closer and you know it keeps keeps the energy down do you know what i mean like you're emitting all this energy you see this bear or whatever it is your heart spikes your adrenaline

goes and it keeps that in capacity so i think we sense that i think certain creatures sense that and i i like to keep that out of the equation right the i guess it would be that there is something coming off of your body and it probably would be an advantage for animals to be able to recognize that just because we can't quantify it right and put it on a scale or weigh it or something like that it's probably something going on predator prey right like yeah if you're a lion and i'm i'm an antelope and uh my adrenaline spikes and my heart's going and you know you're going to come for me. But if that's out of the equation, the energy stays reduced. Well, that's one of the weirder videos, some of the weirder videos that I've seen, I should say,

is people that are interacting with predators, like people that have coyotes come right up to them while they're wearing those things. Yep. And turkeys as well. Totally. Like I said, birds, because birds have that in their brain. They have I'm going to quote it wrong, but they have something that they can detect electrical signals

that helps them migrate around the world. So for sure, I think it makes a difference. Yeah, so what else do you use? You use the hex suit? A ton of different tools, man. I mean, I customize stuff. You know, like in the Amazon, we were looking for caiman and type of crocodile, so I built like a beefed up dog catcher that I use to try and lasso them i have a snake hook on me

at all times a snake hook yeah it's a snake hook uh so it's just this like it's like a golf club with a hook on the end so i can work with venomous snakes without it reaching back and grabbing me doesn't restrain them it actually like their body sits in it i do a lot of reptile stuff so um always have a snake hook on me i mean the list goes on ton of trail cameras i use a lot of thermal imaging stuff like um especially like looking for wolves or something like that uh we you know wolves are active at night it's really hard to get a shot of them put a thermal bird in the air and you can see these these animals running through valleys wow yeah it's cool stuff you'd love it well i'm fascinated by wolves i think that wolves to me are probably the most

interesting animal in the wild canids man wild dogs of all kind are unbelievable they're so at the top of their respective food chain yeah we have a lot of coyotes around here and basically they're little wolves the little sneaky wolves but uh real wolves like wolves in yellowstone and you know wolves in the northwest area of the united states those they have got to be some of the most majestic animals oh they're fantastic they they're they operate together yeah always as these packs yep you know so there's some sort of weird kind of communication and and what's amazing is like the social dynamic like within the pack you know the hierarchy and then on a hunt like you go left i go right but without any verbal communication

and then coming together and making a kill i mean it's mind-blowing stuff you know you talk about not understanding wildlife we don't understand how they do that right right we don't understand what kind of communication is going on. Do you think there's some sort of like telepathic or is it just facial and recognizing cues and patterns that they've established before? If they see an animal, they know to flank it. I definitely believe it's that. Like, I definitely believe there is an intrinsic understanding of you go left, I go right. You know, facial recognition. You know, your expression tells me to do something.

You're dominant, I'm passive. Learning that way, but I also think there's something more than that. Whether it's telepathic, whether it's a low frequency sound that is not audible to us, I have no idea, but I do think it's more than just visual cues. That's where apparently the myth of the werewolf comes from, is that wolves are so smart, they think that a wolf and a person were like combined together. I don't believe that per se, but I can see how that came up.

You know what I mean? It's totally, they're so smart. African wild dogs are the same. They hunt in these huge packs. They go over these massive areas, and then they'll push a single animal into one area to make the same like they they hunt in these huge packs they go over these massive areas and then they'll push a single animal into one area to make the kill and they're not big animals they're again like a coyote size and they'll take down you know a kudu or some huge antelope i mean it's it's incredible well african wild dogs are so cool looking too with those

black spots and the yellow and all the stunning they just they they look angry they look freaky looking you know there's i i think they're they're my favorite of the can like you love wolves i love african wild dogs i just think they're so beautiful and majestic and unusual and they're just such a cool animal correct me if i'm wrong but i think all of them come from the united states i think all of them originally came from north america like i think canids yeah all canids came from north america i think that's coyote america the gentleman who's been on the podcast before I think all of them originally came from North America. Cannids? Yeah, all cannids came from North America. I think that's Coyote America, the gentleman who's been on the podcast before. What is his name?

It's escaping me right now. But he wrote about it, about all the various, Jackals. Dan Flores. Dan Flores. That's it. That is a fascinating book. Yeah, I'm going to write it down. I'd love to read it. Dan Flores. Dan Flores. That's it. That is a fascinating book. Yeah, I'm going to write it down. I'd love to read it.

It's great. And I did a podcast with him years ago that's excellent, too. And he has all sorts of crazy insight as to Native American, North American animals that went somewhere else, like horses. Like horses were native to North America, but they weren't here when the european settlers came they had they went extinct but they had been taken they had they there were other places like apparently wild horses from europe all originated from north america and were taken over and then somehow or another wow from whatever and then went extinct here and then were reintroduced with the european settlers huh that's interesting crazy yeah it's and that's the thingced with the European settlers. Huh, that's interesting. Crazy, yeah. And that's the thing, like, with what I do looking for extinct animals

or proof that they're still out there is, like, there are so many stories like that. I didn't know that one in specific. America's very well covered with eyeballs, but what's to say there isn't some remnant small population somewhere in the middle of nowhere that nobody has found these horses that have been untouched by human beings for millennia right and that's that's what i that's what i do that's what

drives me right find this pocket find this animal that's been hiding out undetected for thousands of years yeah so what other animals are you looking for a lot like we're talking about primates i'm going to borneo to look for an animal called the miller's grizzled langur it's a type of monkey um i just got back i was looking for an extinct caiman in the amazon um extinct caiman yeah what's the difference between that and the caimans that you see uh just a different species you know just like there's many types of crocodile there's many types of caiman you know you have saltwater crocodiles now crocodiles same thing with caiman and i was looking for one with a very weird morphological variant. It looks very, very different to any other.

What's different about it? It's got a very elongated snout. If you've ever seen a gharial, if you know what that is, a type of crocodile with this long, crazy nose, it's like the alligator family, the caiman family version of that. This really long, skinny face, super light light super yellow coloration just very different last time one was seen was 52 years ago and then they had one in a zoo that died in the 80s and nobody's found one since um so just really cool and so yeah the list goes on you know last year i did leopards and i did wolves in newfoundland and a bunch of really interesting stuff so it's fun man you love it'd love it. You should come with. I'll talk to Animal Planet.

I'm scared. I'm such a pussy. What about giant sloths? What are your feelings on those? So I've had probably three years of research into this, into giant sloths, because Manapuguri, I believe is how it's said. It's the South American name for giant sloths.

I don't want to give away too much info before I get to do a chance a chance at looking for it but after all the research i've compiled there is in my opinion one location on earth it's in high peru where nobody goes it's a bowl of mountains impenetrable the only way in is a helicopter in the center to me that that ball is going to be like a primordial eden all of the cultures surrounding it have old stories of giant slots they all have different names for it but they all have these stories of these giant slots right they were all hunted to extinction however they've handed down these traditions but nobody except for you know a tiny handful of like far out tribal people have ever really got into this impenetrable bowl. And I think if they're anywhere, they're in there.

Wow. I saw a documentary once about this scientist that was essentially risking his reputation trying to find a giant sloth somewhere. Maybe in the Amazon? Somewhere. Probably Peruvian Amazon. That's where I'm thinking too. And he kept talking to people that had seen it and he never could get a hold of it, but he had been there for years.

Isn't that crazy though? Like, why? Yeah. If you're a little Amazonian villager, you don't read, you don't have TV, there's no reason to make up scientific, you know, science fiction. Why say you've seen it?

Because you like to fuck with white people. Could be, could be. Like get that dude with the stringy hair. Yeah, I've seen that thing oh dinosaurs fuck yeah come on take you five days in yeah you know you're what you're exhausted covered with mosquito bites he's like any day now yeah just over the next hill he's gonna wait for you to fucking rot out that would be a mean man that's a mean guy that's a mean guy you want a log all right buddy pat you on the back.

This is the last spot for you. And I'll be taking this. Yeah. I'll take your binoculars. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's no reason for them to lie, but that doesn't, that's like the thing that people say about everything.

Why would someone lie? Well, I don't know. People lie for a bunch of weird reasons. People do it. People are crazy. They make shit up. True. Yeah.

Yeah. alive for a bunch of weird reasons people do it people are crazy they make shit up true yeah yeah i mean to me it's like you have to take an eyewitness report of an extinct creature or a crypto creature with a grain of salt yeah but you still have to take it do you know what i mean you still have to bank it and consider it yeah and so that's that's kind of the way i go i i i always talk to people but then i come up with, I do the biology, right? I track, I put the cameras out, I bait, I scent, I do all of that stuff to try and get evidence of my own. Because just going with eyewitness reports is, like you say, it's nothing. Is there ever been any eyewitness reports that are just too ridiculous?

Oh, for sure. Like what? Oh, man, loads. I mean, like, talk about the thylacine for instance there was a guy that we met there who's like yeah yeah there's thylacine everywhere they run around with the black cats and we're like what he's like yeah there's black panthers too they like hang out together black panthers in australia exactly that i made the same face you did so i'm like okay tell me more and he's like yeah you know they like to hang out over there they're behind the trash heap

they jump around with black panthers oh they're just fucking with you and i'm like i well that's the thing i'm like you're you're just you're either crazy or you're completely fucking with me and i'm not sure which one it is because your eyes are telling me crazy yeah well i mean how many different pockets in the world are there like that basin that you said you got to get helicoptered into there's a few there's a few yeah few. Yeah, you'd be surprised because, you know, we're here. We're in a city. We're so used to our modern conveniences. But there are totally untouched pieces of the world still.

Well, do you know David Cho, the artist? I don't. He went to the Congo. I think it was the Congo to look for a dinosaur. No way. It was a really early Vice piece back when vice was first starting out and david is one of the more eccentric people that i know he's a multi-millionaire made a shitload of money gambling and also he made a shitload of money because he was at facebook painted yeah he painted

facebook what does that mean like the wall yeah the inside they hired him to paint like do these murals and they gave him stock. And that stock wound up being worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And so now he's just this freaky, super talented artist who is just doing weird shit. And one of the things they did was like, hey, man, you want to go look for a dinosaur? He's like, fuck yeah, I'll go. Absolutely. Why wouldn't you?

Yeah. But there's this video of him. I want to say he was like 25 at the time too i think he was pretty young yeah look at him there oh yeah so he's in the jungle in search of a fucking dinosaur huh because and it was one of those things where the the locals were saying hey there's a there's a dinosaur in the congo right which doesn't totally make sense but it but yeah But who knows, right? Why not investigate it kind of thing?

I mean, how big of an area would there have to be for there to be a species that we are not aware of? Like, how big of an area? Oh, I mean, you know, it's a generic question because we discover you'd have to look up the numbers, but it's like 2,000 new species a year. But little stuff? But mostly little stuff. there's an animal discovered the most recently there's an animal

called the saula it's an animal that i'm actually working on later this year and it is a an antelope like they call it the asian unicorn because for generations people have been talking about this asian unicorn and western world's like yeah whatever whatever whatever and then finally somebody went down there into the laocean mountains and and was like here's a skull and here's a skin and they're like holy shit this is a real thing and this is like in a pot not populated but there's plenty of people living there you know what i mean this isn't like this isn't like the middle of nowhere this is where there's villages and tribes and people and they're like here's this animal here's a skin here's a skull and since then i think one trail camera has the photo has ever surfaced like nobody's ever successfully

documented it because it's just this incredibly elusive animal like whether it has super sensory organs you know hearing sight smell whatever it is or it's just super low density and population i've nobody really knows but this animal, this huge, like, antelope has been around forever. People, little tribal people have been talking about it in, like, a mythological way, the same way they would talk about dinosaurs in the Congo. And the Western world's going,

sure, buddy, whatever you say. And then somebody finally goes down there, does an expedition just like David did, and goes, oh, it turns out it's here. Wow. What is it about animals where we're so fascinated by the ones that might not be real or that might be hidden like what what is it about them I mean people love to study giraffes and things that are absolutely real sure but they

also have a even more compelling need to search for things that are not quite sure they're not quite sure if they exist or not i don't know man i think it's like it's human nature to want to know more right like we of course like not everybody you see a giraffe you're like it's real i know it banked it right some people go to the extreme they study every aspect of it but as a general populace i feel like once we know something's there we want to know what the next thing is yeah i mean we what do you think like what why why is it that we're so fascinated with it i don't know the answer i think it's probably a side effect of our compulsion for innovation like human beings are constantly trying to find out new secrets

and find you know like find out new discoveries and invent new things and explore new worlds. I mean, this is just something that's been a part of human nature forever, this desire to improve and to go further, find the next best spot, find the new thing. And then I think that also works with animals. I think we have this desire to find animals that we didn't know are real or weren't sure are real. Well, knowledge is the foundation of that right to to go to a new planet we have to have the knowledge of how to get there right to go to a new habitat we have to know what's there and i think maybe

that's that's kind of that deep-rooted desire is like we need to know about this thing in order to to understand if we can innovate off of it yeah maybe yeah um what did you think when they found that um flores man on in indonesia it's amazing i like i'm not an anthropologist so you know that's not quite has that been 100 is that 100 agreed upon i've only seen kind of headlines i i have to defer to you guys i think there was one there was some scientist that was disputing but but essentially they were talking about a three foot tall hobtall, hobbit-like man kind of thing. Cave-dwelling. Yeah.

Little person. That existed alongside human beings as recently as like 14,000 years ago. Right. Right. Which is like, what? I think it's completely believable. I mean, the Khoisan people in the Saharan desert are tiny. How big?

Like four feet. Oh. And until the the you might have to double check this but i believe until the 70s people used to go and hunt them maybe it was earlier it was 60s or 50s but you could go and hunt this primitive sized human being as like a you know as like a hunt like an old englishman with his big mustache and his musket would go hunt these people whoa and now we have an understanding that you know they're people like you can't fucking go and hunt them but like what's to say there weren't tribes like that

all over the world that other people used to hunt that drove to extinction jesus christ right what say the name of it again so jim you got it you got koi san yeah let me see what these people look like they're my opinion, they're beautiful. You'll see what you think, but they're very small. They're desert dwellers. There's not a lot of resources in the desert, so you don't get huge. So they're perfectly adapted to the desert life. They really used to hunt them?

Yeah. And they look just like people? I mean, you'll have... Yeah, I'm trying to find a good picture. But they're still around. These aren't an extinct race. They're still there. Oh, wow.'t an extinct race. They're still there. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Have you ever seen The Gods Must Be Crazy? Yes. Yeah. It's like those people. Those were kind of taller Khoisan, but those are Bushmen. Wow. So who are these people who used to hunt these? Like I say, I kid you not.

It was like the old English explorer would go and conquer africa and and hunt these people like they were an animal you know fuck crazy right and this was until the 1970s that might not be right that sounds too recent doesn't it god damn that sounds horrific yeah you might need to check that but it was not as long ago as you'd think you know what i mean it was like very recently they were still under under. And they're people. Yeah. Jesus Christ. Yeah, so that's probably what happened to a lot of the non-homo sapien human type people. I would think so. And even if it's not like for sport, it's for competition or resources or, you know what, any reason.

Yeah. And that's human nature. Conquer. Yeah, fuck, man. That is so dark. Right? They would go and hunt small people with a rifle yep you know it's not are there photos of people like posing with the dead ones um again i'm not an anthropologist i'm not sure yeah it's brutal yeah so what other pockets of the world are like mostly unexplored or could perhaps contain some of these animals? South America for sure.

Central Africa for sure. There's some very remote parts of like Russian Arctic, Norwegian Arctic. There's areas in Asia that are still unexplored, believe it or not, regardless of their populace. There really are. Deep, deep China. There's some very unexplored, believe it or not, regardless of their populace. There really are. Deep, deep China, there's some very unexplored areas. Northern Myanmar, ecological hotspot, nobody

goes there. Very impenetrable. I read something about some part of the world where they thought pterodactyls might still exist. There's so many of those things. I don't know that one specifically. Especially doing what I do, I hear them all the time, right? Oh, you gotta go look for Bigfoots or pterodactyls or whatever mammoths it's could there be a large reptile

that perhaps flies sure it's possible is there a pterodactyl as we know it i highly highly doubt it but a large reptile that can fly would be a fucking trip they were around right so you think it would be something that we don't know about? Yeah, basically. I think there's enough pieces of this world that are unexplored that there are still megafauna to be discovered. Not a lot. Not a lot by any means. And I might get ridiculed as I go back to my scientific community for saying this, but my belief is there are these isolated pockets where small populations of megafauna still exist that we don't know about. Whoa.

Yeah. Well, South America is, I mean, how much of South America is actually populated? I mean, you look at the size of the Amazon jungle or something and it's, sure, there's communities and stuff, but not that much. I mean, it's, Australia, you know, if you're not on the coast, there's nothing. Right. You know, there's all these huge chunks. Papua New Guinea, same thing.

Nobody goes up into the highlands there. They just found a dog there, as you saw. I mean coast there's nothing right you know there's all these huge chunks papua new guinea same thing nobody goes up into the highlands there they just found a dog there as you saw i mean there's crazy stuff now what do you think about these guys that are talking about bringing animals back um like as a scientist sure de-extinction is it's a weird word it is it is it's reintroduction is that a better word they call it de-extinction is that what they call that's what they call it yeah de-extinction is to me it's fascinating especially if it's something like say the passenger pigeon right we used to have billions of them in the united states wiped them out um and now they're saying you know they're we can take the closest living relative uh isolate some genes, and make a new passenger pigeon. Is that worth it because it's something we wiped out in the last hundred years?

Yes. I feel like we should heal the ecosystem by putting that back. That being said, we still need to learn from our mistakes. We need to take into account what we did and why we did it. Do I think there should be a Jurassic Park and a bunch of mammoths and T-Rexes? Absolutely not. That's a waste. Whether we can or can or cannot do it to me that's a waste of scientific resources that could go towards conserving things that are on the brink now when you say like heal or mend the environment or the ecosystem when you would bring back something like a

passenger pigeon isn't like 90 of everything that ever existed extinct sure absolutely so does the ecosystem adjust and evolve and would reintroducing something like a passenger pigeon would it kind of fuck things up that exists now where new animals have taken a different position on the hierarchy it's too short an evolutionary time so we are in what's called the sixth mass extinction event right there's been five others before us the one one we're in now, it's happening at 80% greater rate than it's ever happened before. So, we are wiping out things more quickly than the world can adapt. So, you know, you go into an environment and you take out all the apex predators, the prey explodes. The prey explodes, the grass gets eaten down, everything collapses. Now, if you left that environment over time over evolutionary time it would adapt right maybe say say all of the predators got a disease and they

died out died out over 300 generations during that time something would evolve within the environment to adapt the prey so that it didn't wipe out the environment that's just kind of the nature's balance but when you go in there and do it in 10 years or 5 years, it throws off the equilibrium. So when you, in theory, when you reintroduce something that's been, and it's not theory, it's science. They've shown this even right here in the California Channel Islands.

When you put something back that's missing from the ecosystem, it's like you're putting a piece of the puzzle back, right? And then you can allow it to do its thing over evolutionary time. What did do in the channel islands so i was actually a big part of that and i loved loved the project so the california channel islands were settled by agriculture there were sheeps goats pigs blah blah there was everything brought over there right and so not catalina but think about the northern channel islands um what happened was when all these animals were brought in all the farmers were there then golden eagles started coming over. Golden eagles came over to eat the pigs and everything else.

They flew across the ocean? Yep, flew across the channel, started preying on pigs and everything else. There was an animal on the channel islands called the channel island fox, a very gorgeous, cute, cuddly little fox. You can see him if you go to Santa Cruz Island. There's loads of them now, thanks to the work that scientists have done.

Anyway, they were like okay the the fox is being there it is oh isn't he gorgeous look cute face so the fox is being wiped out through habitat destruction through all these undulates that have been brought in so scientists got together and said what undulates like cows yeah yeah domestic animals cows sheep goats etc so scientists came in and said you know the habitat's getting destroyed the and that that's just the keystone there were several species that were on the decline the cows are getting the the livestock is wiping out the habitat the foxes are declining what do we do well obvious answer let's remove all the livestock so we removed all the livestock right through

helicopters there was a lot of pigs that were causing damage all that kind of stuff we removed it all then the golden eagle started preying on the foxes because their main habitat was gone. So now the foxes are under even more pressure. So then we removed the golden eagles. This is a very abridged version of what happened. But now we've got the golden eagles also pushed out the bald eagle, which are fish eaters, which lived on the island. So now after loads of years of removing golden eagles, like relocating them, removing all of the livestock, now you have a healthy population of Channel Island foxes. The bald eagles are back. They're eating fish. The

whole ecosystem is back in balance. Had it been left the way it was, what you would have found at the California Channel Islands over, say, 20 or 30 more years, 40 or 50 more years, no foxes, no bald eagles, a ton of golden eagles, and a ton of pigs. And likely over time, pigs would have exploded to the point that they Easter Islanded themselves themselves right they ate up all the resources destroyed all the habitat population collapsed golden eagles collapsed nothing left on the island what do you mean by easter island themselves so you're familiar with easter island in south america i know what those statues are and all that stuff but i i'm not familiar with what happened to the island so that island is was an ancient civilization that was the Mecca. It had everything.

Offland, it had big trees, tons of food, blah, blah, blah, blah. People settled there, and they said, this place is incredible. It's paradisiacal. And then they started cutting down the trees to fish. They started eating all the mammals. And what actually happened is because they were so remote, the middle of the ocean, nowhere near South America, nowhere near anywhere else, they cut down the down the last tree there were no more canoes there was no more food on the island and the population collapsed the island was barren it was void of trees void of life void of anything and they they didn't have the canoes or anything to leave anymore because they cut down the last

tree to build build a boat or make firewood and everybody there died oh shit. So that's what happens when you use up every last resource. God. So, wow. When did this happen? I couldn't tell you. Because I thought it was like a mystery to what happened to the population of Easter Island. So they're pretty sure that this happened. That's the scientifically accepted understanding.

And did they get this from fossils? They get this from bones? So they've sort of pieced it together yep they took they take you know isotope samples and measure carbon data and yada yada i think that the heads are still a pretty big mystery why i think uh certain people believe that the heads were like uh an ale you know calling to the gods to help save things because they were going so badly yada yada but i believe the heads are still a pretty big mystery but the actual actual anthropology, the population, the collapse is known to be due to running out of resources.

How long did it go for? Couldn't tell you. Do they have an idea of how long the population lasted? I think it's all published, yeah. I don't know off the top of my head, but it was a thriving population that flew too close to the sun, as they say. Because of Easter Island's small size, only 63 square miles,

it quickly became overpopulated and its resources were rapidly depleted. When Europeans arrived on Easter Island between the late 1700s and the early 1800s, it was reported that the Moai were knocked down and the island seemed to... Did I say that right? Moai? You don't know? Knocked down and the island seemed to have been a recent war site. Lack of supplies. Yeah.

See the next one there? Constant warfare between the tribes, lack of supplies and resources, disease, invasive species, and the opening of the island to foreign slave trade eventually led to Easter Island's collapse by the 1860s. Wow. So it didn't take long. 1700s to the 1860s. That was a wrap. Wow. It was annexed by Chile. And so they've never tried to repopulate the island with trees or anything else. And they just kind of leave it alone. I believe so. I know you can go there and visit it and see the heads.

And I think there are some things there now, but it it's barren there are no trees there's no you know it's all been depleted it's so crazy when they introduce animals to an island and it winds up fucking everything up like galapagos island you know and i'm sure you're familiar with the um judas judas goats judas goats are those the ones in the galapagos do you know how they do that i don't eradicate goats it's really interesting not from the helicopters yeah well this is how they do it? I don't How they eradicate goats It's really interesting Not from the helicopters? Yeah well this is how they do it They cast Goats like to hang out together right? But sometimes it's hard to locate them

Sure So they put a radio collar on one goat They castrate it And then they let it loose And they gun down all the goats around it And let that goat go find the rest of the goats No way He goes and finds the rest of the goats

And they gun down those goats Because they have the radio collar Yeah so these What is this Jamie? It's a picture of a judas goat i guess so he's just white wow that's what hey maybe look it up there's a couple other pictures how sad is that single goat's life he's like new friends what the yeah helicopters so i'm actually heading there on uh monday so the glove goes yeah they make you take your shoes off right scrub to sure that you don't have weird seeds in the bottom of your shoes. I have to stop eating seeds, quarantine for 48 hours when we arrive.

Stop eating seeds so you don't shit it out. Exactly. Wow. Yep. Quarantine for 48 hours. Yep. Wow. Why is there so much concern about this one area?

I mean, it's the dawn of evolution. You know, it's where Darwin came up with the theory of evolution due to the finches. It has been destroyed in some aspects, and the habitat has been fixed in a lot of places. There's been great conservation efforts, and personally, I love what they're doing because they're trying to keep it pristine. I think it's fantastic that there's a quarantine. I think it's great that I'm not supposed to eat seeds for two weeks before going there, and it's to keep it as perfect as it is now the island that i'm going to with with my small team has like nobody ever stepped foot on it it's an active

volcano it erupts every year it's this crazy harsh environment we have to have a new pair of boots every day because it melts melts and shreds your boots just walking on it whoa yeah it's been described as hell on earth, so I'm stoked. Wow. Now, what kind of protective gear do you have to wear other than your boots? Just long-sleeve clothing. How hot does it get? So the guy was telling me it's like 45 degrees Celsius,

so that's well over 100. And, yeah, we've got to be careful about water and hiking, and there's a lot of elements. But that's the thing is I'm looking for an animal nobody's seen in a very long amount of time so you got to go to these places nobody's going wow that's incredible you know it's it's interesting the idea of invasive species too right because like hawaii is a good example hawaii there's been talk of uh getting rid of pigs yep and a lot of the natives are like, well, slow down, because if we hunt them, we eat them, and if they're invasive, then what are we?

Right, totally. Because the pigs were here right around the same time the people were there, and we've existed together. They need each other, and it's culture. At that point, it's Polynesian culture to eat a fire-roasted pig and hunt your pig, and so it's a delicate balance. Like Hawaii is a perfect example. There's mongis that were introduced that destroyed the birds, and there's turtles, there's frogs,

there's all kinds of things that have been brought in there. But none of those are culturally significant, whereas the pig, as you're saying, is a huge cultural significance. So where is the balance? Well, one of the best examples of that would be like lanai because lanai has this insane population of axis deer we go and bow hunt them there every year they're delicious and yep they're plentiful and it's one of the most really ethical hunts because you have to hunt them right i mean they they're so overpopulated there's 20 000 of them on an island with 3 000 people yep and uh

have you ever been to lanai i have yeah i yeah. It's crazy, right? I was diving there. I was spearfishing there. Do you see all the axis deer? Everywhere. It's bananas. It's crazy. And they're so beautiful with their spots. And yeah, they're amazing animals. And you know, I'm all for it.

Like hunting is a tool for conservation. Absolutely. Yeah, but it's just bizarre that they did that. Yeah. They decided to let deer loose on an island with nothing to eat the deer but people. Right. And then when this is done there's like king kamehameha which is what year was that i couldn't say a long time ago yeah

long time ago so back then they i mean i don't even know if they had guns i mean how were they hunting these things back then bows and spears probably right and and they brought them over from asia right yep yep they're from asia same thing with New Zealand, right? There's axis deer, there's goats, there's all kinds of things, or not axis, but red deer. There's all kinds of things down there. Yeah. And same thing.

They're all brought in for sport. Yeah, New Zealand's a weird one, right? So is Australia. They brought a lot of stuff over there from Europe. But New Zealand specifically, they were trying to make it like a hunter's paradise, right? And I think it is, right? Tell me if I'm wrong.

No, it is. But it's a weird one because it's mostly high fence. Dude're gonna love this so onto my extinct animal thing they took moose into new zealand they took like 10 of them small population believe that they've been hunted out you know they shot the last one blah blah blah there's one guy crazy looking dude long hair long beard like nuts looking guy and he's been on the hunt not hunt hunt but like trying to prove that the new zealand moose is still there he's found antler sheds he's found bedding sites some guy even got a picture of one standing on a rock and you know moose

to me it's 100 of moose and so they're in theory somewhere down the south island there's one or two or three of these super elusive moose that have been in new zealand for like 50 years whoa yeah wow well new zealand is so fucking rugged yeah there's uh a friend of mine has been there uh my friend adam green tree he's been there he lives in australia and he goes there to hunt tar and you know they live in the on the steep the steepest craggiest shale where the rock's real slippery and it's just like cold as shit and really high altitude and you've seen them before right yeah yeah i have it looks like a science fiction animal they're as as me and my friend me and the guys i work with like to say stranger than fiction you look at it and you're like that's not a real creature like some kid drew that yeah

like a big old shaggy weird looking thing this is the area where they think they are in new zealand The moose? Yeah. Did you see that picture of the one on the rock, like, sticking out? It's right there. Yeah. Tell me that's not a moose. That's a moose.

That's the last one that was last picture taken. Oh, there's a 1952. There's a recent one, though. There's one from, like, two or three years ago, and I looked at it, and I'm like, that's a moose. Like, I don't know who's saying it's not, but it's a moose. Wow. Yeah. From 1952. Mm-hmm. Yeah, like, that's a moose. I don't know who's saying it's not, but it's a moose. Wow. Yeah. From 1952.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's 100% a moose. Right. But again, how weird is it that there's animals that you know are there, and then there's animals like, we must find this. So they spend incredible amounts of time and all these resources. Is that it? That's one.

Oh, yeah, that's 100% a moose. That's a freaking moose. That's no doubt about it. See? That's what I'm saying. God damn it, people. Yeah, that doesn't even make sense that anybody would argue that. Right.

That's a pretty clear picture. But that's not proof, because they need genetic material. They need fur, they need something. What do they think that is? A cloud? Exactly. A rubber moose that someone stuck there to goof on people? Are they like arguing that somebody could have computer generated it?

Yeah. Just to fool people? All those, you know people all those you know all those and i appreciate it right as a scientist i appreciate the fact that you have to have proof right but it does get to the point of ridiculousness yeah well it's certainly possible i mean it's certainly possible that they've i mean especially when you're looking at that insanely dense terrain right you know But so, there are some efforts right now to try to de-extinct some animals, right? There are. Thank you. Yeah.

You're giving me that new word. And, like, what is currently going on right now? They're calling it the dawn of de-extinction. And it's a lot of very, very intelligent genetic scientists that are trying to isolate specific genes that are specific to the animals that have been extinct and putting them into extant animals, animals that are still here,

to basically make this Frankenstein animal, because it'll never be the animal that's gone, right? It will look like it, it'll behave like it, it'll think like it, et cetera, but it will never actually be the animal that we've lost at least not yet we haven't we don't have that technology right now what we can do is isolate a genome put it into an existing animal that gives birth to an animal that looks and acts very much like the extinct animal but it's some degree different

because it's like part like a mammoth for instance they would have to take some dna from a mammoth right that they would somehow or another get and introduce it to an embryo of an elephant yeah and then the elephant would give birth to a very hairy very large tusk like these isolated genetic codes elephant right and it would look like a mammoth it would act like a mammoth but the reality is it's a shaggy elephant with big tusks right so if you did like 23 and me on it it would show oh it's mostly elephant exactly a little bit of a mammoth yeah i mean if you think of a double helix like a dna strand right you have these little bars in the middle of it so what they do is this is a very crude way to explain it but they

pull out a bar from an elephant and they put in a bar from um a mammoth and then eventually you get this mammoth and so this would be with like gene editing tools like crisper exactly on those lines exactly wow and so how far away are they from doing this uh it's i mean it's been successfully done a couple of times they've really yep they've given birth to a couple animals that are very, very close to the extinct animal. Most of the time, there's problems, right? It's infertile. It has lung issues, whatever it is. There's a couple different cases.

I'm not a geneticist. I'm a wildlife biologist, so I don't really understand it. But they've done it. They have successfully reproduced things that are gone, basically cloned things, and then the animal hasn't made it to adulthood man that seems really really like playing god doesn't it is it is absolutely like playing god so i i feel like i mean is are people doing it just because they can is it one of those things or is there like a real valid scientific reason for trying to reintroduce these animals or de-extinct them

well the valid reason is to conserve the ecosystem right like we talked about but i think it goes back to what we were saying half an hour ago which is it's just that that quest for knowledge that can we do it the innovation right can we play god can we fix it can we take this thing that's gone and say no it's not, we have the tools to make it not gone. Yeah, there was some article that I read where they were talking about reintroducing the mammoth to Siberia. And that there would be some ecological benefit to reintroducing the mammoth because of the way they forage for food. Sure. They would have some sort of an effect on global warming.

Sure. Do you know about that? I don't know about that specifically. can find that jamie the reintroducing the mammoth to siberia to benefit the environment look whether that's accurate or not until you put mammoths on the ground how do we actually know it's a great theory and that's what science is right it's coming up with hypotheses and then trying to prove them and it sounds cool like do i want to see a mammoth walking around Siberia? Fuck yeah.

But does that mean it's actually good for the world? Hard to say. Whoa. Could bringing back mammoths help stop climate change? Scientists say creating hybrids of extinct bees could fix the Arctic tundra and stop greenhouse gas emissions. I don't understand that. I find it hard to believe, to be honest.

Maybe it's just some scientist's clever way of sneaking it in because he wants to play god like yeah we're gonna fix everything yeah you fucking use coal who gives a shit yeah we got mammoths we got yeah just give me the funding give me the funding exactly man trying to make mammoths that's that's sadly very real well is it really oh yeah i mean look if you're a scientist right right you joe rogan is a scientist how are you going to make your career are you going to make your career by raising money through being like yeah sure like i'll study cricket legs or are you going to be like look give me the money to stop global warming by bringing back fucking mammoths like right you know like why you can make the outrageous claim if you think it's going to fund your research right that's how you make your bones

right and that's that's one of the sad realities of some certainly not all science well mammoths too are so iconic it's such a freaky animal to study you know we had them here california channel islands yeah i heard me mammoths yeah how long ago was that uh i want to say pre-ice age not actually sure but i mean still can you imagine like you know you're out fishing at catalina and you look up and there's a pygmy mammoth on the cliff there's a there's so many mammoth tusks in alaska in particular there's a there's a an instagram page we can i'll send it to you jamie um there's a a page where they go and look for them. Huh. And they basically use like a high-pressure hose and blow them out of the side of a hill. Is it like in ice or is it in like earth?

It's in earth. Huh. Yeah. Okay. The Boneyard Alaska is the Instagram page. If you go to the Boneyard Alaska, you'll see what I'm talking about. It's fucking incredible. I mean, they keep pulling these, they're using these hoses and cleaning

off this dirt, and they're pulling these intact tusks. That's insane. But there must have been so many of them that died. And they're preserved, I mean, whether it's mudslides or whatever, and they get preserved under these things. There's this one pocket where they're all concentrated. Well, apparently they find quite a bit of them. That's nuts. Yeah one of those in the uh in the studio mammoth

tusk yeah man yeah i guess but it seems like you shouldn't have it right it's like one of those things it seems like like it's like ivory yeah you don't want it in some rich asshole's house totally what is that a skull of a skull oh short face bear skull holy fuck man that's a cool animal that's a cool animal yeah we've uh we've drooled over those fucking things many times on the podcast um see right there you see those tusks oh yeah those are yeah bottom left right there those are some tusks that they pulled out that's nuts yeah and there's a ton of them man i mean these guys these guys are are constantly doing this and pulling these things out so let me me ask you, you're hiking through there, right?

You're on a hike or a hunt or whatever. You stub your toe on one. What do you do? You dig it out and put it on your pack? You leave it? Take a picture? What do you do? I don't know what the rules are.

If you're in certain places and you find an arrowhead, you're supposed to leave it. But rules aside, ethically, what do you do? Well, it depends on how far away you are right because that's a lot of weight so that's that's fair that's fair i would say you mark it mark a pin on a gps and come back because it's like it's something you want right as a human being it's a treasure like you found this incredible thing but ethically you probably shouldn't touch it you know what do you do well these guys obviously know what they're doing right for me i would say i mean if look at that one oh my god that's crazy it is did they wrap it up with tape is that what they did there to like it looks like all those those metal things together sort of

maybe i like to keep it from falling apart maybe as they pull it out of the water or the uh the dirt rather um if i was thinking of my best me yeah the best me would mark a pin and then alert some scientists and tell them where it is and leave it the fuck alone don't be a greedy dick so what happens my worst me i dig that bitch out and put it on my pack right not tell anybody and bring it back home i just don't know what the law is sure and even beyond the law like here's this gentleman right here is pulling this out even if you don't know what the law like here's this gentleman right here is pulling this out even if you don't know what the law is what's what's right that's the question yeah right what's right what's the right thing to do there might not be a good law yet right but there might be a i mean there

clearly is a finite number of these things of course there has to be and they're prehistoric now let me let me pose this to you so i know guy, he's a treasure hunter by trade, very cool old guy, Australian guy, lived in Perth. And for years, he's like, I know where this certain Spanish ship went down. Long story short of thousands of dollars, gets all this excavator equipment, goes to this very remote area of northwestern Australia, pulls up something like ten million dollars worth of treasure, takes it home, legally declares it all, tells the government, gets all confiscated. They give him three or four pieces.

You can see his treasure in the museum in Perth. Here's this guy who would have retired, been a wealthy man, you you know had his whole life taken care of because of this thing he was obsessed with and then found and then got the tools on his own dime to go and get it declares it and has it confiscated dude well that's weird because you find stuff in the ocean and they take it and people become billionaires right they find russian or roman sure ships filled with gold coins and But for whatever reason, this was considered historically valuable, so it was taken for the museum, right?

And he got, yeah, a few coins and no money. I got to look up the guy's name. I know a similar story. It's happened in America. Okay. The guy that went to hunt it got investors. Right. And when he got the gold, he just kept it.

When the investors asked for the money, he said, I don't know what you're talking about. I lost it. Or I don't know where I put it. Or I don't know where it is. So I think he's currently in jail under contempt of court. Oh, geez. Being asked, where is it? And he said, I don't know.

He's taking lie detector tests. People think his kids have it or something like that but they have no idea where it is it's a crazy story well that's a weird one too because like what are you gonna do with it right like if people are staring at you they're they're like constantly look where is it where is it you're like i don't have it they're gonna keep looking like how much is it worth millions i think each coin might be worth a million you might have something like 20 to 30 of them. It's like a lot of money.

It's insane. Well, you got to bring it to someone who's going to give you a piece. You got to bring it to someone, but then you're going to get caught. Where'd you get the five million bucks? Then what? Exactly. Then what? Oh, found it.

Yeah. What do you do? Well, it's interesting when things are historical, right? You don't know who, does it belong to a museum does it belong to the person who finds it right like what are the what are the rules and are we making these rules up as we go along it's yeah it's worth 20 million years i found a story it's still in jail right now wow jailed treasure hunter ordered to pay nearly 20 million tommy thompson tommy thompson's yeah that's not the kind of guy. That sounds like the kind of guy.

Yeah. What is that island? There's one island that has like this crazy hole in the ground that was made by pirates. Like Captain Cook or someone like that. There's a television show about it. You know what I'm talking about? The Curse of Oak Island. Yes.

That's the show. Oak Island. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's up in Canada, right? Oak Island's in Canada. Yes. And they have some crazy hole in the ground that they're trying to figure out how to get into, but there's all these weird little traps and...

Yep. That's exactly right. Yeah. What do they think's in there? Some astronomically valuable treasure, right? And I believe the island's changed hands like seven or eight times because people trying to find it have gone broke digging it up excavating and exploring it and there's booby traps and like all this crazy stuff yeah there's some sort of a

method that they've devised where if you go deep enough it just fills up with water so you can never get to the actual treasure itself right so the people made who put the treasure there might have fucked themselves like totally we're assuming they're so smart that they buried the treasure in a way that nobody could ever get it out but they might have just buried it in a way that they couldn't even get it out i think that's the case i think it's one of those like oh we're gonna keep it here and then they couldn't get it i mean who knows but yeah what a crazy story yeah so do they know who did it i'm not sure see if you can find something on that oak island so that television show it's just like, they're just like going, well, now what? Right?

I think they're just digging and trying. So you can't suck all the water out, right? Because he's getting water from the ocean. Well, it's subsea level. So yeah, it just, you know. Constantly filling up. Right. So unless you go down there with a submarine.

I think they've put divers in it. They've had metal detectors. I don't really know. I'm not super familiar with the show. I just know someone that was there. Yeah, I think it's this pretty serious ongoing thing. Buried treasure, right? Remember when you were a

kid, there was X marks the spot, the maps. The coolest. The so-called Knight's Templar Cross is one of the most exciting treasures found there. Really? They found it? So-called. It says, upon first glance, it resembles a Knight's Templar Cross. Do they have a picture of this thing? I think that's it? So-called. It says upon first glance, it resembles a Knights Templar cross. Do they have a picture of this thing?

I think that's in the show right here. So, yeah, when they find these, if they, in the open ocean, when they find these things, it's whoever finds it gets to keep it, right? I think so. If it's in international waters. I believe so. So when they have like these ancient Roman ships. But you still have to bring it back into port and declare it.

Yeah. What makes it historically valuable? Like I think there's, it's a lot. I feel like there's a lot of loopholes where you can get screwed out of your find. Yeah. Man. Yeah. It's, that's a weird one.

Yeah. Who owns that? Right. Who knows? Yeah. I don't know. It's just interesting to me that there were so many ships that went down that you can find these things in the ocean still. Yep.

And they're filled with gold, these Roman ships. And people retire off of it and, you know, spend their whole career and lose every dime they have trying to find one. Yeah. And how do they coordinate? Do they read, like, old logs or something like that and try to figure out which way the people went? I have no idea. Hmm. Man. logs or something like that and try to figure out which way the people went and i have no idea man so what other like uh crazy trips do you want to do that you haven't done yet oh there's a lot man i mean the one that i've had on my bucket list since i was a so there's a

couple one is there's one really one place on earth left where there's true cannibals it's papua new guinea and um unlike the missionary that went in with an agenda, I would just love to actually see these cannibalistic tribes. So I'd love to do that. Nobody has successfully, unless it's happened very recently and I'm aware of, successfully done source to sea of the Congo River from guerrilla warfare, from crazy waterfalls, disease. That's an expedition I'd like to try.

And then when it comes to wildlife, I mean, the list is infinite. There's so many of these animals that i'd like to try and then when it comes to wildlife i mean the list is infinite there's so many of these animals that i'm desperate to try and find those sound like very dangerous trips like visiting cannibals yeah i mean like i don't know how to say this without sounding arrogant but that's what sounds exciting to me right you know is giving that shot that other taking that shot that other people aren't taking. So have people visited these cannibals and come out of there before? Yep. There was a, there was a Nat Geo photographer who got some incredible photos. They're called the Carraway tribe. And, um, he went in there, took him a while for them to kind of assimilate and get comfortable. And then he got these photos that are just mind blowing.

Now, how often do they practice cannibalism? and then he got these photos that are just mind-blowing. Now, how often do they practice cannibalism? It is a, it's not a daily thing. It is a spiritual thing where they actually eat the other tribes deceased after a war or an intertribal conflict as a way to like ward off bad spirits. So it's not like a daily thing. It's not like they're going out hunting each other. It's more like a daily thing. It's not like they're going out hunting each other. It's more like when these things occur,

they have to eat a certain killer, a certain body to keep evil spirits at bay. Do they get that version of mad cow's disease that cannibals get? Was it Jakob's, Krutzfeld? I know what you're talking about. I'm not sure. I think it's probably infrequent enough

that they're not getting it. Because like in the South Pacific, they got that all the time, but they were eating each other all the time. Yeah. Well, I think you get it from nerves, right? In nerve tissue or brains. Brains, yeah.

That's where they're getting it from. It's essentially mad cow disease. Exactly, yeah. Yeah. Is this guy hanging out with them there? It starts off with sound and he's eating something. I don't think he's eating people with them. He's going to eat a fucking person?

That's not a person. That's a pig or something. Yeah. I don't think they'd show that. But yeah, look tribe i mean they just look amazing yeah but it is just so incredible that there's still people that live the way they lived many many many thousands of years ago and they essentially just get their resources from the land from the area they live and they're they're just rocking it old school and then for me it like the cultural significance is huge but what's the biological area like you're right nobody's going in there how much biological study's been done the answer is none and these people have large

pop like look at that lady oh my god she amazing wow yeah um have you uh read um sapiens sapiens no i'm not uh evolutionary book about human history noah uval haradi i think that's the name of his he's amazing writing it down yeah it's uh it's a great book but one of the things that they talk about in the book was these nomadic tribes that would yeah that's it uh uval noah haradi i fucked up his name um they would talk about these uh nomadic tribes that would kill the old ladies like kill the people that were burdens and like just shows like them no just kill them just just talking about like when people became a problem right they would just kill them and this was normal, but they got along together. Great.

Everybody was like laughing and smiling. Everybody's really friendly. But as soon as someone seemed to be a problem, they fucking club them from behind. And it's like, this is going to sound just awful, but doesn't that make sense? It kind of does.

It sucks, but it kind of does. Right. Like you're a burden on the community or on the society. You know, there's no fucking old folks home out there. Yeah. Like that's, it's crazy.

Like to us in our culture, that's absurd. But as a culture removed from the rest of the world, it makes sense. Like you're a burden, you know, you've had a good life. It's time to move on. And they're nomadic. That's the other thing. It's like they have to keep moving. So if someone stops and like there's one guy, he was sick.

And so they left him on a tree and he became covered with buzzard shit because the vultures would just sit over him and wait for him to die but he eventually recovered oh and he caught up with the rest of the tribe and for the rest of they called him something like buzzard shit or something like that that was their their nickname for him yeah imagine being that guy imagine sitting under a tree looking up at vultures being being like, it's moments till I die and they're going to drop down and eat me. At least they're polite enough to wait for you to die.

It's true. They don't just, the guy probably couldn't have fought him off. That was a hyena. Yeah. Yeah, dude. Hyenas. They're the trippiest of all the animals, the matriarchal society of them where the females have the fake dicks.

They're amazing. How bizarre. So weird. Crazy faces, crazy biology and anatomy. Yeah. You know, that fellow form, the cat-like, but doesn't belong to any family. Yeah.

Super weird. Love them. They have a giant fake dick. The females have a giant fake dick they give birth to. They do. Birth out of, rather. Yep. Yeah, they have unbelievable biting power, too, right?

Yep. The strongest mammalian jaw pressure on Earth. What a weird-looking animal, too. It don't look, even the way it walks. It's all shouldered and, you know, like, totally looks like a villain. Yeah. Yeah. Like, its upper body is, like, higher than its lower body.

It's very strange. Very. What is it like when you encounter those in the wild? Are they sketchy? Very cowardly. Very wary at all times like uh i've encountered them a lot and as as when you're in africa if they're taller if you're taller than it it generally won't attack you so people get like super scared of hyenas when i was a little boy i learned if you're running in the bush and you

see a hyena stand up and put your arms up like that. They say that about cats too, right? Like mountain lions? Look at that motherfucker. Jesus. Look at that thing, man. That's so cool. You don't like them, huh? Cool, I sure. It's very cool. It's not at my house.

It's so creepy looking. I love when they circle lions too. When they get enough of them together and they start circling and snapping at the lion's legs strength in numbers yeah yep if you ever there's a documentary on this one um male lion who uh would kill all these hyenas and he was like the enforcer for the tribe no way see how the hyenas would come in and fuck with the female lions and then this giant male would come out of nowhere and there's video of it video of him smashing these hyenas just grabbing them with his giant head shaking them snapping them and tossing them in the air and

then chasing after another one and and killing them too unreal no i haven't seen that that's amazing have you ever seen relentless enemies you ever seen that documentary no no no it's um it might be on net Dude, I've got so much homework to do. Relentless Enemies is a documentary about a very rare pack of lions that branched. The river changed its course and left them stranded on an island with water buffalo. Okay. So they developed like a much larger frame and and they're far larger than regular lions. The female lions in this pack are as big as male lions anywhere else. They're enormous.

They don't even look real. Is this relentless? Yeah, it's from 2006. Oh, it's not very old. There's also a book. Oh, okay. But what's really cool is that they've evolved to take down these enormous buffalo. Sure.

So the cats, when you look at them, they look like a lot. That looks normal there. But it's all relative, right? That looks like a normal one. But some of them look so muscular. Yeah. They almost look fake. Oof.

Oh, he's getting his. Oh, wow. She's got the calf. She's getting the calf. Yeah. Cape buffalo are terrifying, too, by the way. Fuck, yeah. wow. She's got the calf. She's getting the calf. Yeah, Cape buffalo are terrifying too, by the way. Fuck yeah. Yeah.

She's like, let that go. Fuck it. But there's very few things that they can eat on this one island. So they've developed this ability to just have larger frames and they're much more muscular. And apparently there's, what's really interesting is there's this pack That's really big But then there's another pack that lives on the island That's normal sized So they must be eating the smaller prey species

I don't know man I'm too stupid Look at the size of that fucker Look at the musculature in the hindquarters She's built like a male She's built like a large male lion On steroids That's a big female.

Yeah. The same thing that happened in Newfoundland, Canada, with the wolves. You love wolves? Mm-hmm. So there was this island, Newfoundland, and there's wolves, gray wolves were isolated there for a long, long time, and all they were eating were moose and caribou. So they just got huge, and they were bright white because it was a snow-covered island like 80% of the year, and there were just these massive white wolves, all jacked, all shredded, chasing around moose and caribou.

Wow. Yeah. It's just the way nature allows animals to adapt to their environment is just unbelievably interesting. It's what I live for, honestly. It's so fascinating the the eco the ecological niches that each animal like fulfills and the roles that they play within each other it's all perfectly balanced and to to see it and understand it like it's fantastic to see the individual but to understand the big picture of the environment and the roles that are filled as you say it's like it's mind-blowing

yeah there's a documentary on the congo from the b, I want to say, like the early 2000s, maybe even late 90s. And it goes into that, into detail about how all these animals have adapted. And like duikers, there's duikers in the Congo that swim underwater for as much as 100 yards. No way. And they eat fish. Some of them eat fish. A fish-eating antelope that swims. A fish-eating antelope that swims.

Nuts. Yeah, and then all these animals that got trapped as this area, these grasslands, turned into rainforest. These animals that were essentially like grasslands animals, like antelopes and stuff, are stuck in the fucking jungle, the swampy jungle. And you see these big packs of antelope running through this swampy jungle area where they just don't look like they belong there they belong in fields and that's how speciation occurs right so that daika over a millennia develops fangs to catch those fish and a crocodile like face and webbed hooves or you know i don't know i'm making shit up but the point is that's how you get these crazy new species and here in the middle of congo in this tiny little pocket is this animal that nobody's ever seen before kind of thing.

And that like, to me, that's what it's all about. Go to the Congo, find that thing. You know, is it there? What is it?

That's why someone like me is so incredibly thankful that there's someone like you out there because I don't want to go there. I don't want to go there, but I want to look at your Instagram page. I guarantee you'd love it. I'm sure I would love it. I'm a hundred percent sure. I'm a hundred percent sure you're right. I'm sure i'm 100 sure i'm 100 sure you're right

i'm also 100 sure i'm not going but but i'm happy that you go i mean it's thank you i'm i'm i'm so fascinated by animals and just animal life and adaptation i think it's one of the more interesting things about this planet definitely is these weird organisms that are trying to figure out their way to to survival you know and we're just one of them. And they're adapting and moving and changing. And we're always finding new ones. Like, I found a fucking snake. I posted it up on Twitter like a week or so ago.

A snake that has a tail that looks like a fake spider. Have you seen that fucking thing? I'm not sure. Do you know the species of it? I know the species if you said the name. I think it's from Iran. And it's a rattlesnake viper yeah scaled scaled pit viper is that it yeah it's a viper not a rattlesnake horned viper horned viper have you seen that thing i know what they are yeah it's incredible looks like a spider right and it tricks birds

into coming down and try to snatch the spider here Here we go. The Iranian spider viper. Spider-tailed viper. Like, look at its tail. That is crazy. I mean, I'm looking at that in a video, and it looks like a bug. Right. And so this thing moves its tail, and it perfectly blends into the rock around it. Like, look at that.

Unbelievable. I mean, that amount of camouflage and adaptation. Like, how does that happen? It's incredible. Like, look at this. It's incredible this it's boom oh gotcha bitch dunzo i mean the bird's like what was that that almost got me yeah it's insane what an adaptation i mean like you see the anglerfish that's a very bizarre adaptation as well same thing just out of the head yeah yeah it's it's unbelievable i mean the fact that creatures can create that without you know it's not like they're doing it knowingly right there's some some handful of snakes at one time started waggling their tail and realizing that birds came

in yeah right and then over generational time this tail evolved little spikes and little things and all of a sudden you have this whole population of animals that look like that like that's insane what is it how the fuck does that happen i mean how does something grow something like that a lure right grows a lure off of its head and it's like hey look it's something for you you know you want to eat it look at that one oh my god that's got a worm i mean that thing literally has a like a fishing worm like a bass worm i mean it's it's so amazing all of this adaptation and all these look at that fucking monster with a light growing i mean it's got a flashlight on its head but just it's so amazing how much adaptation there is and how all these things

sort of work together right like there's the bacteria and the fungi and the plant life and the animal life and the predators and the prey and it all sort of works together and when something doesn't work it just sort of drops off and then the the the system sort of resets itself exactly in a new order i mean to me there is no you saying it's one of the most fascinating things to me there is nothing more fascinating like i'm you know i'm obsessed with it i live for it because i find it so interesting now when you study these things and do you ever try to think like how the fuck that happened like if you see that that spider tailed snake is there anyone that has like an idea like that this was you know this was just a lucky break that this one snake had a freaky tail

and then he got to fuck a lot because he ate a lot of birds that's the idea man you just i swear to god you just summed it up like that is the idea one or two or three snakes kind of got this adaptation just a random random genetic sequencing that led to maybe a white watch on the tail something unique doesn't it not seem like that, though? It seems like they fashioned it. But over time. They did, but over millennia, right? Over thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years,

what happened was, say, there's two snakes with a white spot on their tail. Then they have a baby, and it has a little bit of deformation, right? A little thing sticking out. Then that snake all of a sudden catches more birds than the rest of the snakes. That snake now reproducesces offspring and its offspring that has a little bit bigger of a spike catches more birds and so those become the the prized animals to reproduce with to

continue the gene pool and so that's what happens it keeps evolving it's like a peacock right got this crazy big tail that it's attracting mates with it's not useful to the bird you know that's entirely made for showmanship for peacocking if you will and it over generational time it gets bigger and crazier and more elaborate more colorful and the females literally flock to them and that's the animal that continues on what i really wish there was a way and maybe there will be some time in the future where they're going to be able to show you with some sort of supercomputer sequencing, where they'll be able to look at the DNA of this thing and say, oh, this is the exact progression. Right. This is what it started off with, and this is what it became.

Right. This is how some sketchy-looking forest chicken became a peacock. Totally. This is how some freaky snake became perfectly adapted to its environment. I mean, that thing looks exactly like the rock that it sits on it's perfect yeah it is incredible like i would i'm like you i'd love to know who patient zero is you know who's the who's the first one yeah because stupid people like me look at that and they go okay well that's got to be a plan there's got to be something there's a higher power this is something that like is looking after these things and making them making them evolve this way right right it's yeah i mean it's it's super interesting what about

uh like cephalopods like octopus and cuttlefish and the way they adapt to their environment that's even freakier right because they do it instantaneously and have you ever heard the theory that octopus are from out of space yeah we talked about that with brian cox the other day yeah i'm not i'm not super well read on it but like it looks like a damn alien yeah he was very incredulous uh but you know he's obviously smarter than both of us right so so he gets to be it's like yeah it's like me looking at that going man it doesn't make sense of course it doesn't make sense i'm stupid right but he's he's you know when we're looking at this i but this is apparently like peer-reviewed published paper about the possibility of octopus being reintroduced and i think it has something to do with the way rna and dna is right on them

right do you know i don't understand it well but yes it's like the thought that the population came from out of space because the dna sequencing suggests something that makes it extraterrestrial adaptability yeah he was super skeptical because he was saying that they're essentially so close to everything else here right that it doesn't make sense but the other theory was it might be just this is the path of life right and the reason why it's so close to us is that this is the way all life even if it's extraterrestrial sure gets established sure this is just i don't believe octopus are from out of space, but I love the theory. I love the idea of it.

It looks like it's from out of space. It's just wacky. Well, it's such a cool thought. These things came from out of space. That's also a thought about psilocybin mushrooms from the weirder people. They came on asteroids and their spores. I've heard that.

I don't know if you know this, but they've proven that certain, I don't know about psilocybins, but certain mushroom spores. I've heard that. And they've, I don't know if you know this, but they've proven that certain, I don't know about psilocybin, but certain mushroom spores are impenetrable to the vacuum of space. Yeah, they can survive. Yeah, that's bananas. I pick a lot of mushrooms, not psilocybin,

but a lot of porcini, a lot of chanterelles. Like I do a lot of foraging. It's really fun. Are you aware of Paul Stamets? No, I don't know that. He's amazing, man. One of my favorite podcasts ever He's a mycologist

And a fucking trip In every sense of the word A super genius mycologist Who had the craziest story About being in high school And what did he say? He took 20 grams of mushrooms And climbed a tree

During a lightning storm Or something fucking Something where you hear him tell the story your hands start sweating no way 20 grams or 10 grams or 20 grams like something fucking bananas like something that would kill a moose yeah well it wouldn't kill it but it would definitely make it think it's not a moose anymore right and and it essentially changed his life stopped him from stuttering he used to stutter and he did this and he stopped stuttering no way yeah i've heard about guys that microdose with mushrooms with psilocybin and it it heightens their focus and cures their

autism and you know there's i'm not very well read on that but there's a whole idea that microdosing with these chemicals that are naturally produced can actually have very positive effects yeah there's quite a few people who do that. It's really common. Yeah. Yeah, I've talked to a lot of people that do that. Oh, really? They microdose with that, and they also microdose with LSD. Really? There's a lot of that going on. Yeah, a lot of Silicon Valley people are microdosing with LSD.

It's funny, because the one person that I know that's done the microdosing with mushrooms from Silicon Valley. Yeah, people grind them up into pill form. And in fact, a lot of fighters are doing that now. Really? Which is really strange. Yeah. So why would that why

would that help you like as a fighter is it's not a mental focus thing it's a it's a physical thing at that point right well it's gets you into the flow state interesting and so like with fighters the real thing is um it's not just your skill but it's your ability to execute that skill under pressure all right so there's an overwhelming amount of anxiety there's extreme consequences to sure getting hit or going wrong getting knocked out the losing a fight is absolutely devastating it's devastating emotionally it's devastating physically it's devastating psychologically it changes your perception of who you are and how you fit into the world and um that sometimes and i shouldn't say sometimes oftentimes impedes performance sure kind of come back from it kind of thing well it's not just that the the consequences of it

possibly go wrong make you hesitate and it just it's it's the stress of it all is very constricting it's very difficult to operate under that stress sure the mushrooms for some people alleviate that stress and put you in this elevated state where they say, and I haven't, I've never fought on mushrooms, but they say that when you're on mushrooms, you actually can see what a guy's going to do before he does it. Interesting. Yeah. You have a sense of what they're going to do. That's a much more heightened sense than you would if you were just in a normal sober state so are you picking do you think you're picking that up through like biological cues like you could see the muscles twitching in the arm before the punch comes or like what how do you think that's a good question i haven't done it i don't know you know i've never sparred on mushrooms it doesn't sound like a good idea but it's really common they say it is a good idea like the guys who do it love it yeah interesting and guys have like you know had some really extreme positive results. Huh.

Yeah. That's fascinating. I never thought as an athletic performer, athletic enhancement, that would be a thing. Yeah. It's not just the, I mean, I don't think it makes you move faster or hit stronger or hit harder, but I think what it does is it puts you in the zone. Interesting. There's states that you get into where you just, you't do no wrong and they're usually very elusive they come

and they go you know you get them like um do you ever play pool a little bit i mean but you know how sometimes you play pool for a few hours and then you just also feel like you can't miss yeah you just have this feeling of where everything's going to go that's even if you're not very good sometimes those those will come for like two three shots and it's the zone sure you know and um that elusive state of like and then sometimes you're like wow i can't believe i'm in the zone then it goes away right you know right maintaining that flow state but do you think it takes emotions out of it like is that is that why you're in that state like if you're not emotionally attached to that shot or that punch maybe you can execute it better it's possible i mean there's a lot of speculation of what's going on right what's causing this elevated state of consciousness it's interesting

yeah i don't know maybe i'll just start microdosing on mushrooms and going out to chase snakes around maybe like maybe you would be like more in tune with the environment or maybe i'd get bitten and die that's true too you're maybe like hello little snake i'm your friend he's like fuck you you are okay so i'm not i'm not like a big drug guy by any means but i think you'll love this story on this amazon trip i told you about we land in this airstrip and then this plane we meet we get into this village and i'm like cool boats have made it here it took the boats five days we're gonna head up river right and our like translator's like you can't do that yet like what do you mean like we've spent months planning this he's like you have to have the shaman's blessing to go up river and i'm like okay what does that mean he's like come to

the maloka which is the like spiritual house so we go to the spiritual house we sit around we talk and we talk and we talk and it's like hours of not like asking him to go but just like almost like idle conversation where he's almost like interviewing us. Like, well, what are you doing? Where are you going? Where are you from? And he doesn't really understand any of this, right? He's like, he's living in this community. Long story short, he goes, okay, you can go, but you have to take this blessing. And we're like, sure, well, whatever you need for us to go. So, he pulls out the snail shell. I could show you a picture of it. It's a snail shell with a monkey bone in the top and a tube worm to close it and in this snail shell is this green powder and he's like this is what you need for the blessing so he goes around the circle and through a monkey bone pipe

he blows this green stuff in your nose is that called a koo hay not not by that word that we heard i i couldn't tell the name of the pipe no, the stuff they blow up your nose Is it DMT? It's coca leaf Oh, okay Mixed with a bunch of A root and tobacco, I believe Like all together And Anyway, so he goes

There's five of us in my crew He goes around the circle And he hits three guys And they all go Whoa, my brain feels like I've got chlorine on the head You know, whatever He blows it into your nose

Yeah, so he gets really close He's got this long Tubular monkey bone pipe And he goes And it just blows it up Into your nose and uh hits three of my guys and i'm watching a little bit nervous because like i'm very like standoffish on drugs like i know things affect me very strangely anyway hits three of my guys they go you know eyes watering and they're like wow it's actually a great feeling gets to my turn in the nose all of a sudden i feel like i've got acid on my brain like chlorine in my

head i break into the sweat my eyes explode and i'm like wobbling like this and 30 seconds later i'm just curled over in the fetal position just projectile vomiting cannot hold it together and lorenzo this the the tribal shaman goes good good and we're like why is this good and he's like he had a bad spirit in him if he had gone up the river he would have been killed he's just got the bad spirit out this is why i had to bless you now you can go and i was the only one that hit like that out of our five person crew everybody else was like oh my brain sore whatever i was literally fetal position feverish puking crate and i've never done any drugs like hard drugs like it's just not my my thing and this thing just hit

me like a ton of bricks after he said that did you think was there a i mean you're a scientist you're a very smart guy but was there a part of you that was like man is this guy right yes that's what's so crazy because i I'm a fucking scientist. I don't want to believe that. I don't want to believe fucking jungle medicine made me not die. But this guy, here I am, nobody else fucking affected. I'm sitting in the fetal position, puking my brains out, and the guy's going, good, now you'll be safe.

And the whole fucking trip, I've got that in the back of my mind going, maybe the whole reason nothing's going wrong is because I just had green fucking powder blowed up my nose. Whoa. Yeah. Super weird. And I, nothing has ever affected me like that. I mean, curled up, puking, shivering.

Were you trying to make logical sense out of this? Were you trying, like, was there ever a thought where you're like, maybe in this extreme environment that's so utterly different than any other place in the world that these rules are different absolutely i mean i i'm sitting there going going into it i'm like cool yeah i'll do the stupid powder if it means i can go on my expedition you know what i mean like i'm not like embracing it i'm just like going through the motion to get my job done as a scientist and then i had this experience and i'm not saying i was enlightened or awoken or anything like that but all of a sudden i attributed my success and my safety in small part to this green fucking powder blown up my nose by a shaman through a monkey bone

and the thing about it is even if that's not true if you think it's true and then you wind up being okay and you have confidence that you're going to be okay and maybe you have less anxiety and make better critical decisions because you think that everything's going to work out. Exactly. Exactly. Totally. Because I was super focused on my mission. Right. We were very, very successful in what we set out to do. to do and i i feel like because i had that crazy experience and here's this old little jungle indian going now you're now you're going to be okay i didn't have any anxiety going into the

situation and before that i had no thought of it ever playing a part well like the mind fuck of the placebo effect right totally we know that that's real. Totally. So there's some sort of a physical effect by believing that something works. Right. But is there a change in the way you interface with reality if you believe that you've experienced some sort of spiritual enrichening and that some bad spirit has been released from your body? Is that possible? I think so. I think it changes your own reality because of your perception of the outside world.

That is a freaky thing for a scientist to say. Right? Right? And this is, like, I am a hardcore academic. I've never considered spirituality, religion, anything, and I had this just fucking 10 days ago, this crazy experience that has, like, changed my mindset on uh on crazy jungle

medicine and drugs and catching animals everything because this one guy blew crap up my nose and i puked everywhere wow now has this made you want to experiment with other plant medicines no the only reason i did that is because it was a necessity to do what i was doing it was coming from an expert if you will but a person who saw it as a necessity to do what I was doing. It was coming from an expert, if you will, but a person who saw it as a necessity to do what I was doing. And I was under his guidance to go out and, you know, pick a mushroom and try it and have an experience is I don't, I don't see the benefit in that. But when someone who lives in that community embraces that wild jungle says, this is my home and this is how you do it. I will absolutely do it. So you do it like out of respect absolutely yeah um what if they wanted you out of respect there's a bunch of those different

snuffs that they pump up their nose and one of them is uh i think it's it's some form of five methoxy dimethyltryptamine which is that stuff that comes off of toads oh gotcha yeah there's there's uh and it has a bunch of other stuff in it too and they do the same thing that's what i think that one's called a kouhei. I've read it, so I don't know if I'm saying that right. That must be a hallucinogenic, right? Yeah, they blow it up your nose and you see Jesus. I mean, look, if it was the same situation where he's telling me you got to do this to go to work, do your job, whatever,

absolutely I'd do it out of respect. Wouldn't you? Yes. Yeah, I think you kind of have to. Totally. I mean, you totally be an asshole i mean i think you know when you're in the world of these people and they've survived in this world for eons and this is their environment and like you kind of kind of have to let go and give into this

absolutely yeah you have to embrace it man dude you live a fucking cool life it's weird it's definitely cool thanks really cool well thank you for coming here man and sharing this stuff with us and and and thanks for doing what you do it's fucking awesome i love it it's been an absolute pleasure i've really enjoyed it yeah anytime sweaty thinking about all this shit uh tell people how to get a hold of you on instagram and twitter and all that jazz yep uh i'm my name forrest Galante, F-O-R-R-E-S-T, Galante. I'm on all the social media platforms. Is it Forrest.Galante? On Instagram, yes.

On Instagram. On the others, there's no dot. Look me up. Love chatting to people. And thank you again. My pleasure, man. It was really fun. Thank you.

Thanks, Joe. Thank you.