The Joe Rogan Experience - #1403 - Forrest Galante

Episode Date: December 19, 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

and what's happening brother how are you hey joe i'm good man it's great to be here thanks for having me i've been following your exploits on social media and uh the yellow caiman yes dude that is a wild looking creature isn't it it's unbelievable it was thought to be extinct uh yeah so this one's it's a little confusing it um it's a species that was last seen in when the last one died in a zoo in the 80s and because of the region that it occupies in colombia which has always been controlled by fark rebels nobody had been back down there to look for it and uh myself and there's actually this amazing colombian scientist named sergio riena we're both kind of going and prodding and

trying to see if we could get in and we both found it within a month of each other oh wow yeah now it's a beautiful looking creature look at that thing right it's such a wild green yellow color so wild looking it's you super unique dude you're just holding that thing by the neck yeah we just had a little wrestling match him and i so you don't even have body control don't you want to take mountain here maybe get a a back mount, get some hooks in? No, he was good. You know, reptiles, they tire out. So they're not like mammals. Once they expend all their energy, that's kind of it.

But yeah, absolutely amazing. Are they similar to regular crocodiles or alligators in that they don't have to eat for like a year? Yeah. So caiman, I mean, caiman don't have as slow of metabolism as certain other species, but they're a member of the alligator family, so to speak, and they can go very long times without food. What a crazy animal. Like, looks like a monster. Yep.

I mean, look at the teeth on that thing. Swallows things basically whole. Yep. It spins to take chunks off of things. Swallows them whole. It doesn't have to eat for a year. It can go underwater for how long without holding its breath? Like 40, 45 minutes, some of them. Yeah, some species.

So you have no idea it's there. Right. It's just waiting for you. And they're fairly small, right? This is like a 90-pound animal when it's fully grown? Well, these ones, it's so little is known about this particular species of caiman that it's hard to say. I would say, yeah, 100 pounds is probably about right. There's a great photo, Jamie, from the Nature is Metal Instagram page from yesterday.

That page is nuts. I love that page. I love it, too. I love that page. There's a great one of a jaguar with a caiman in its mouth, that one. Look at the eyes on that fucker. Yeah. Go expand. look at that

thing of nightmares look at those fangs right in the throat like just death grip and you can see that that caiman is death rolling in that scene right it's trying to get away it's rolling and that jag is just locked in the eyes on that thing my god unbelievable it's like nature has created like in those kind of eyes that's the perfect that's the the perfect vision of terror yeah like those eyes like you locked into those eyes like there's no forgiveness there's no emotions there's just ferocity and aggression and death it seems like nothing but testosterone is behind that. You know what I mean? Testosterone is probably the wrong chemical,

but it just seems so focused and motivated. And like you say, it looks like death. Yeah, I'm sure there's some testosterone involved in that equation too, but there's a bunch of other cat shit in there. Literally. And they have, apparently, the thing in the caption was saying that the caiman has one of the greatest bites per pound of any of the big cats. And they regularly eat these.

The jag, yeah. Jaguar, rather, has one of the greatest bites. And they regularly eat these caimans. Yeah. No, they're amazing. And, you know, back to the one that we found. It's so great because, like, I'm the hide-and-seek guy, right? Like, I look for them.

And now there's a scientist, Sergio Riena, down in Columbia, who's going to manage that species' ongoing existence. Oh, wow. So, it's really cool. So, what is involved in that, like managing their existence? What does he... I mean, you know, it's wildlife management. So, it's getting proper population dynamics, trying to understand them genetically, figure

out what their food source is, figure out how much hunting pressure they can take or cannot take, those kind of things. And that's not my department. You know, I go in and look for them. That's someone like Sergio who's in the field, lives in Colombia, can work with the species. It's really cool. I remember there was a documentary about this guy who was a scientist who was obsessed. It was a biologist and he was obsessed with the giant sloth and he was spending all of

his time down the Amazon. He had been down there for years and the documentary was following him at this stage and he was spending all of his time down the amazon he'd been down there for years and the the documentary was following him at this stage where he was getting really frustrated and not sure if he's wasting his career right like there was this feeling like fuck this thing might not be real yeah like because they were telling me yeah i saw it it's over the hill and he's like you sure you saw it right and they you know they'd bring these people in they would speak their native tongue and they'd have this discussion of this thing that they saw yep two years ago yeah big like a bear you know walks on its hind leg megatherium yeah they're uh we discussed this briefly last time i saw you i think it's funny we go straight back

to the same same wildlife stuff um but yeah no it's who knows right who knows if it's still out there there's definitely ongoing reports so much much so that, I forget what university, but some university actually launched an expedition to try and find the megatherium. Really? Recently? I'd have to look it up probably 10 years ago now. Not that long ago. But, you know, if an academic institution is putting resources behind an expedition

like that, there's a lot of faith and maybe even intel that they're not releasing publicly to say this animal's still here wow that would be crazy like how big was a giant sloth uh well there's a couple varieties like the there was a north american one that was enormous like bigger than a grizzly bear wow um yeah but so from what i've been what i've heard what i've read you're talking about something that stands 14 foot tall walking around the amazon's like like 14 foot tall like bigger than a kodiak grizzly that's what the reports say that's you gotta take everything with a grain of salt exactly i mean you got to take their existence with a grain of salt like but this page whatever this page is a bigfoot cousin the fuck is this page and look up there megalodon sightings is the megalodon shark still alive

yeah and straight away that's like discrediting you're right you're like okay what is this And look up there, Megalodon sightings. Is the Megalodon shark still alive? Yeah. And straight away, that's like discrediting. You're like, okay. What is this website you pull up there? There's an article from June about just lots of information about them. It's not even saying like it exists. It's just saying this is all the information we have about this. This animal?

Mapinguari sightings. People love finding undiscovered or mythical creatures that turn out to be like the Tasmanian tiger right like that's a perfect example like people they love to try to fuck what is a thylacine people love to try to find that thing like the idea that it's out there it's like what is it about people where it's so compelling to find a species that we thought didn't exist or we thought was extinct, like whether it's Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or the thylacine, which we know used to be real?

Right, right. I mean, what do you think? I think that people, you know, they long for the unknown and there's this big question mark surrounding cryptids or surrounding extinct animals as to whether it's still out there. And that's so much more inviting to the general populace to get an answer to than knowing, oh, you know, there's 700 of them left and we're trying to get them up to 1,400

or whatever the species dynamic is for some other animal as opposed to being like, there could be one out there. Where is it? And I personally, I've been on two different expeditions looking for thylacine really yeah yeah yeah i did one in northern australia up north of cans and then one i spent a couple weeks in tasmania with amazing biologist nick mooney who uh he's adamant that he's seen thylacine and he's a biologist this isn't you know someone who worked as a biologist that was out in the wilderness going yeah yeah i've seen thylacine and he was terrified to tell everybody and that that tells me that it's more credible right if you're scared to tell people because

of your reputation as opposed to like going out there going i saw it i saw it i saw it right that becomes more credible than the people who are just waving their arms in the air going i told you it's here when did he come out of the thylacine closet uh you're scared to tell people when do you like oh yeah i gotta go public with this um i'm not sure if he told us first or if it was public right before then but not long ago i mean maybe 10 years ago that's such a cool looking animal too because it's a marsupial tiger right right? Yeah. Or a marsupial predator. It's like a marsupial wolf with tiger stripes. It's so bizarre.

And it had this amazing jaw that would open like a snake's, like way wider than its head should. Stripes on the back. Just such a cool animal. Yeah. And the last one died in a zoo, right? The last one that we think. Yep. In Hobart in Tasmania.

Wow. But let me lay this on you. So my next expedition for that animal, because I'm like all those other people that are kind of obsessed with it. My next expedition for that animal is to Papua New Guinea. So this species, yeah, that's right. This species used to range all the way from Papua New Guinea down through mainland Australia and into Tasmania. When people came over and settled that area, they brought with them dogs, dingoes. And dingoes out-competed them in mainland Australia and possibly in Papua New Guinea 4,000 years ago.

But the thylacine remained in Tasmania where there are no dingoes to out-compete them. But in mainland Australia, you've got a diversity of habitats. So there are places the thylacine could still hide. But in Papua New Guinea, the terrain is so crazy that the idea is that in certain regions, dingoes could have never made it there. So perhaps there's these isolated regions where very small thylacine populations continued for the past 4,000 years. Have there been sightings? Many, but just the same kind of sightings as a giant sloth you know what i mean it's all hearsay oh people are so full of shit yes they are such a

problem if you're gonna be a guy like you actually looking for species yeah you know you gotta you gotta wade through so much bullshit you know it's just and it's funny because one thing can discredit the entire story that maybe it shouldn't because they're embellishing or or you can be on the hook for someone's story and be like i totally believe this guy it's it's all real and it could be complete bs and there it's just so hard to tell you just have to go with instinct oh god but it is incredibly compelling i mean if you really did get an absolute photograph of a thylacine and you knew it was real or captured one. Yeah, I think it would be the, you know, discovery of the century.

And I think it would kind of shift the scales for people that are on the fence about, why do I care about conservation? Why do I care about wildlife management? You know, those kind of things to be like, check this animal out. Something that, you know, last saw when we put a bounty on its head, and now it's back, like it's hung on by a thread. Like, that's such a message of hope. It is a message of hope.

Let's save it, let's bring it back. Yeah. Well, the whole environment in Australia is so strange, and now, because of the wildfires, you know, there's a lot of species. Like, we were just talking the other day about the koala bears. Yeah. That the koala bears, a lot of their habitat got burnt in a lot of these fires it's really sad really on fire and they're like losing their fur it's awful they're such a little cute little animal

they are but um and i don't have a lot of firsthand experience with them my understanding is they're actual jerks like they're really cute and cuddly looking but their behavior is pretty aggressive and jerkish and i don't know enough about them to really comment on it but my understanding is it's kind of like sea otters right do you know about this thing with sea otters what about them so like everybody loves sea otters they're so cute they're so cuddly sea otters are super destructive they rape each other like they're they're like gnarly animals they're like not that at all. Isn't that the thing with pandas too? Like pandas are ruthless.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. But you look at them and you're like, oh, I want to cuddle it. A little sweetie pie. My youngest daughter is really into polar bears. Oh, yeah. She thinks polar bears are adorable. And she wanted to get like a stuffed polar bear.

And I find it so fascinating that that animal, which is the most ruthless of all bears, we associate with Klondike bars and Coca-Cola. It's everybody's buddy, and they're sliding around in the snow. And I almost want to show her, like, this is what they do to seals. Right. Go up there and just watch one of these get torn to shreds. Just show a video. I want to show her. I know she's not looking at it.

Yeah. Like that picture. There's this image of this seal and they all have red faces from blood. What did they ever, did they ever figure out that one polar bear that was in Russia that had been sprayed, it said

like T-34 on it. You see it in that image right there? See that one, Jamie? I don't know about that. Right there. Someone had spray painted T and the number 34 on the side of a bear's body, and they don't know what happened. That's extremely ballsy to spray paint a polar bear. How do they do it?

And then the real concern is that this bear is going to have a real hard time hunting because they're going to be able to see it much better because of the fact that it has the spray paint on the side of it. I've never seen this story before. It's really interesting. Yeah, they have no idea what happened. Here it is. Russian scientists search for polar bear with black T-34 spray painted on its side. Cruel joke.

Can turn deadly for a predator now too visible for both prey and poachers. Right. Yeah. Do they have a both prey and poachers right yeah i mean do they have a hard time with they have a um a real issue with certain towns in siberia that are like on the outskirts where polar bears are invading and they have like dozens of polar bears entering their towns they they they've even evacuated towns because of so many polar bears being there from what i've heard would you imagine just having an army of polar bears roll into town? You have a town of like

150 people and in come 8 polar bears one day. It's like, what can you do? It's nothing. You gotta get out. You're either gonna kill them, you're gonna shoot them with rifles or you're gonna get out. Right. You probably should just get out. Yeah, you should get out. Polar bears are a strange animal. Bears in general are a strange animal because

people love them because we grew up with teddy bears. Right. And we see Yogi and they're so lovable on television and in the movies. Yep. And so people have this idea of them like they want to take bear selfies. Like, hey, take a bear selfie. Like, how many people get jacked taking bear selfies? Yeah.

No, that's a real thing. I have been contacted by people being like, hey, why don't you like not pose with wildlife because it's influencing other people to do that. I'm like, I'm a biologist. This is my job. I don't have another option here. Like I have to pose with wildlife. Like I'm working with it.

You're supposed to. You are the guy. I'm the guy. Supposed to take pictures. Right, like maybe instead don't do what I do. You know what I mean? Don't just jump out and try to get a selfie with somebody that's going to kill you.

It's common sense. Yeah, that whole idea of what you're doing is influencing people to do the same thing. Like, all right. Well, you know, come on. I think it's nuts. I mean, you know, how many pages on Instagram are there where people are chugging vodka and jumping off roofs and slamming tables and all this other stuff. Oh, yeah. Is everybody looking at being like, hey, I'm going to jump off a roof onto a

table. Yeah, there's so many of those pages. Yeah. So many of those videos. Right. People breaking their legs, jumping off balconies like, oh, just don't do it. Yeah. I think it's probably good to see people do stupid shit. Right. You don't do it. Right. Yeah. And I got the scars to prove it. You know, like there's there's shots of me getting

bitten by sharks and all this other stuff. It's like this is why you don't do it. You've Yeah, and I got the scars to prove it, you know? Like, there's shots of me getting bitten by sharks and all this other stuff. I was like, this is why you don't do it. You've been bitten by a shark? Just this year. I mean, it's pretty minor, but just this year, I took a single tooth from a lemon shark while I was working in the field with one. Dude, let me see that. Fuck, man. It's actually, it's on my Instagram page, I think.

You can pull it up. What's the scar below it? Oh, that's not a scar. I burned myself cooking crab last night on a pot. I should have only rolled this shirt down to here. Or made up a better story. Dude, I burned the top of my foot cooking spaghetti. Yeah, there you go. I was moving the...

Such a moron. I was cooking barefoot. I was moving the boiling water with the spaghetti in it to the sink, to put it in the strainer, and I spilled it on the top of my foot. And I had to keep my shit together because I was holding the pot. I was like, fuck. And then I poured it in there.

And then we were going to Hawaii the next day. So while I was in Hawaii, I had to have like ointment over the top of my foot, a bandage on it. And I went into the ocean with my chucks on. Yeah. One of my Converse All-Stars in the ocean with my uh my chucks on yeah they were my converse all-stars in the ocean i was like look i have to cover it like i'll just do this and then i'll just clean it after i go in i'm like i'm not gonna knock on the ocean man i'm right fucking hawaii

i'm like if it gets infected i'll i'll figure that out but how cool did you look going in the ocean with your chucks on i looked like a loser yeah and then the next the next day there was a um they had some sort of an issue with bacteria in the water where they told people to get out of the water. Great. And you got an open wound. Yeah. Well, it was never open, fortunately. It just – the skin over it, like, was – it was all totally red.

Gotcha. And then the skin over it bubbled. And then it eventually, after a while it healed and scratched up now i just have a big giant red mark so that's when you got bit yeah thank you smiley face oh it was kind of funny oh look i got bit oh well it was totally my fault and i was being an idiot and uh we were working off the back of the boat we had all these lemon sharks around and we were working to get tiger sharks um and uh i just dropped my guard for a second and as i looked back to where my hand was in the water i saw the shark coming like that

and i just pulled my arm back and i literally just clipped a single tooth but i think if it had been a fraction of a second later that would have been the hand fuck how big was the shark uh it's probably like it's it's on it's probably the next page over it's probably eight-foot shark, so it would have got me, and I was lucky it just... Oh, my God, dude. You could have lost your arm. For sure. Oh, this is a different... This is a tiger shark, but this is pretty cool nonetheless.

Don't they have like Kevlar suits that sharks can't bite through? They do. Neptunic. Why don't you wear that everywhere you go? That's a good question. You should wear that when you go to the mall. So I'd look about as cool as you with your converse in the ocean. Well, you couldn't see the converse until I got out of the ocean. That's a good question. You should wear that when you go to the mall. So I'd look about as cool as you with your Converse in the ocean. Well, you couldn't see the Converse until I got out of the ocean.

That's true. You can see my Kevlar in the mall no matter where you are. No, I don't know. I don't like anything that inhibits the movement like that. Does that stuff inhibit the Kevlar stuff? I've never worn it. Is that it? Yeah, it's those sharks behind, and that's the situation I was in.

I was on the back of the boat like that. Apparently Catalina, like off Catalina, there's a high shark population. Yeah, white sharks, and they're increasing every year. Really? Mm-hmm. Why? Well, because we used to hunt them, first of all, and we used to hunt seals and sea lions as well,

and that's all been banned for a long time. So there's way more seals and sea lions now, and there's more sharks reproducing. And I think there's something to be said for them the water being consistently warmer and them staying further north than they used to as well or south depending on which way they're going yeah but like where i live in santa barbara um there's a single bay where my buddy and i have been going for the last four years. And it's only for like three, four weeks in the summertime that there's like six to eight juvenile great white sharks around. And when we started going there four years ago, they were like six feet long. And then the next

year they were like eight feet long. This year, I didn't go because I was traveling, but my buddy went and filmed them. He's like, dude, they're getting up to like 10 feet. And it's the same animals in the same spot. What happens when those are like 14-foot animals? It's a very popular swimming beach. Oh. Yeah. So who knows?

Maybe they'll move on. Maybe they won't. Maybe they eat people. Maybe they eat people. Yeah. Well, someone got eaten in Santa Barbara a few years back, right? I believe a surfer. There's a Pismo Beach one.

I don't know about Santa Barbara. Possibly. It happens. It's like once a year, you know, there's some kind of attack, a bite. Usually in October, around lobster season or when the swells start to pick up, somebody gets chomped somewhere. Why is it around then? I think October, I'd have to check on their ecology.

I think it's right around when they start breeding, so they're a little fueled up. But October is also when lobster season starts, so all the free divers are free diving in and out of caves looking like a seal the waves start to kick in for the winter swells so you got more people on surfboards it just seems like the perfect cocktail of timing for miss id that makes sense yeah that makes sense it's uh it's such a beautiful creature and it's so cool that they're there but it's also you're like this thing can kill people and it's right there and and we go in the water yeah and we swim around like yeah

we have we're so helpless out there completely and you i think that's just the you just have to know that going into it right it's it's not like you're gonna you know kiss your life goodbye every time you get in the ocean but you're playing some audio it's not should be coming out but yeah what is it from that shark attack and it's not this was two years ago this guy caught it on his uh gopro he caught an attack remember we played this a while ago yeah oh jesus christ oh my god dude you're just so slow in there Yeah That's what's Oh Jesus

So is he prodding it To keep it away from him He's swimming backwards I think And that's the right move You know Give it a poke Keep it off you It bit his toe

Wow barely That is a best case scenario Oh my god The best case He had a cool scar You have to take your shoes off To show everybody Fuck man He kept his little toe I but that's a little toe yeah literally

no it must have just sliced by they're such cool animals they deserve a ton of respect you know and i think you just have to realize they're there like that's just a part of it there's also a way to to be smart about it right don't go in there's bait balls and tons of birds diving and tons of fish in the water you know stay out of the the immediate surf zone and low viz in a high seal area you know there's ways to like really reduce the risk we did new year's in hawaii last year and we got to see some whales nice dude that is it's we were real close it's so wild man they're so big aren't they they're so big and so beautiful it's's like it's, you're so happy that they're there. Right.

You know? Right. And whales are one of those weird ones where you're looking at it and you're like, am I seeing this? Is this really a whale in the water? Like, they're so magical. Yeah. And so intelligent. That's what's amazing. Like, they're, you know, the general consensus is that they're restricted by

their morphology like their body type doesn't allow them to share with us how much more intelligent they are than we really realize but we know a little bit you know we know how they can sing across oceans and communicate and all get together and you know it's amazing synchronizing the way they swim yeah amazing creatures well and then there's orcas who eat them yeah which is even more fucked up because we love orcas then you see when you see an orca killing a whale, you're like, oh, well, that's where they got their name, right? Mm-hmm.

Killer whale. Yeah. It's because they kill whales. Yep. And they are a whale. They're in that family. Yeah. They're marine mammals.

They kill dolphins too, right? Yeah. They're dolphins, whales, fish, stingrays, seals, sea lions, sharks. They're the captain. They're amazing predators. Yeah. They really are are and it's like that polar bear thing we were talking about earlier they're like you know shamu like cuddly

get your stuff toy they're smiling in every cartoon but aren't they pretty cool to people in general in the wild yeah that's strange i believe there has never been an attack on a human being by an orca in the wild period there have been multiple in aquariums um you know well there's been shows going on that kind of stuff but i believe there's never actually been a recorded case of a death by orca in the wild that's kind of crazy when you think about it well it just shows their intelligence right it shows they look at you and go nope that's not on the menu like that's not that's not something i need to eat but they must be hungry sometimes well what's interesting about orcas is there's really two sects of their diet.

There's orcas that only eat marine mammals, and there's orcas that only eat stingrays and some other fish species. And so I think, you know, for those people, you see some of those incredible photographers like Paul Nicklin and stuff like that that get those images of them underwater. They're diving with the fish-eating orcas. I think a few people have been successful in diving with the mammal eating ones but that's i feel like that's a dice roll

precision yeah they might mistake you well you you're a mammal and you're not you're a seal size you know jamie who are we talking to about orcas and the um the population that lives in the north uh the pacific northwest like around seattle that only eats the chinook salmon remember we were having this conversation the other day with somebody phil demers was it phil i mean there's a clip from probably yeah okay so that's a crazy situation right you have a population of orcas that only eats chinook salmon and then there's a decline in the population of chinook salmon so they're trying to figure out how to get them to eat seals right they're trying they're like they won't do it right they're the local population but then they have these migratory

populations that come in and do eat seals and they're like hey you assholes are starving to death there's fucking food everywhere right but they won't do it they won't switch over it's very strange isn't it and you got to wonder how much of that is learned behavior right how many parent orcas are passing down this is the food you know this is how you hunt salmon this is what you eat right everything else is off the menu versus what's instinctual like how did that one group of orcas learn to eat seals whereas the other one is so dedicated to salmon it's it's amazing well it's amazing that they didn't adapt, right? They're starving and they don't branch out. Right. Or maybe they're just unsuccessful. Maybe they've never learned how to hunt seals, because it's definitely a different behavior to scooping up a fish.

Right. So, yeah, it is amazing. You'd think they would get to this kind of tipping point where they're like, there's not enough to eat, we need to make a transition. And then are they unsuccessful in that transition because they can't figure out how to do it? they just not doing it they just don't know about it it's who knows it's a real bummer man when you hear that they're almost starving to death out there and they're trying to actually bring chinook salmon to them you know like like you know i it's it's one of those things it's like that whole kind of micro environment is a game of Jenga, right? And you pull one piece out and you're like, ah, tower's still standing.

Pull another piece out, eh, tower's still standing. You know, it just takes that one piece till it all collapses. That is an interesting way of looking at it, right? You know, they were talking about Hawaii, you know, and all these different invasive species that live in Hawaii. And there was this discussion about pigs. And they were saying, you know, like we should really take the pigs live in Hawaii. And there was this discussion about pigs and they were saying, you know,

like we should really take the pigs off of Hawaii. And a lot of the people in Hawaii are like, hang on, right. We've been here as long as the pigs. Right. So like, are we invasive?

Right. Like what's invasive now? Right. When does it become, because obviously like luau's they're synonymous with like eating pigs And wild pigs are a big part of, you know, the people that hunt in Hawaii. That's their food source. Yeah. So they're like, well, what did...

But then you have a situation like Lanai, where I go every year. The axis deer. Yeah, which is terrible. Environmentally, it's a disaster. Right. Like it's all wrong. There's 30,000 deer on this one island that many 30 000 they don't know really they're guessing this the estimate's between 20 and 30 000 right

and there's 3 000 people yeah and dude you ain't never seen anything like it because it's a little ass island you drive around the whole thing in an hour i mean maybe a little bit more than that but not much sure it's a tiny fucking island right and there's so many deer yeah that's you'll see them on like you'll you get your binoculars out you look at this huge field and you're like oh my god you'll see a thousand oh you're kidding no no it's crazy it's great it's so unnatural no predators only humans plenty of food right right and they're just populations exploded everywhere and they're damn delicious right I have heard that before.

For people who live there, it's amazing. You don't have to have much money to eat really well. You get a rifle, you go out there, bang, you got a deer, and you can shoot as many as you want. You can shoot seven in a day and stockpile your freezer and have all your meat for the year. And they're that abundant? Like if someone wanted to stockpile it.

The only thing that keeps me from killing a ton of them is that I use a bow and arrow, and it's really hard to do with the bow and arrow because they're so fast and they evolved in asia to get away from tigers they're an indian animal right right so it's uh super fast it's it's a tough argument that could because you're right like hawaiian people pig is culturally significant to them you know just like probably access deers to the people of lanai and has been for however long the deer have been there but i guess it's like at what cost right at what cost if and i don't think this is the case but if someone said look if i know these pigs are culturally significant to you but if we leave them here the whole island's ecosystem will

collapse there'll be no birds no fish you know no lizards nothing is it worth it to have pigs right like that's and it's delicate the pigs in particular right because they eat everything they ground nesting birds they'll devastate everything that's in front of a roots they'll fuck up every tree everything that's coming up all the sprouts everything yeah they're super destructive here there's destructive here in california yeah it's not it's not isolated to hawaii everywhere that we've brought pigs they've done a lot of damage. Well, we're actually going to,

we were talking about this out here. We're going to film something about hunting pigs at Tohon Ranch because Tohon Ranch, the place gets devastated. The agriculture gets devastated by these pigs. There's so many of them. Right.

And they're all over. Northern California has a problem in San Jose. They're in people's yards. They're destroying shit because they're if you don't kill them, they just breed and breed and breed and breed and breed and then they just expand. Right. And they're dealing with them now even in the

northern part of the United States. Right. They're dealing with them in the northeast. There was a New York Times article about it. See if you can find that from two days ago about the expansion of wild pigs is that they're starting to make their way into the northeastern states and they're just they can't be stopped they can survive in any weather yep they breed three times a year they can they're viable i think from the time they're five to six months old they have their first litter feral pigs roam the south now even the northern states

aren't safe the swine have established themselves in in Canada and are encroaching on border states like Montana and North Dakota. Fuck, man. If they get into Montana, they'll do so much damage. You know what's crazy about the feral pigs in the United States? They were brought here by, I believe, Christopher Columbus, starting with six animals. Whoa. So the entire 200 million or whatever it is across the U.S.,

I don't know the number, it was like six or eight or ten original pigs that were brought in by christopher columbus and dropped in florida that's insane that's you want to talk about how crazy they can reproduce and how much damage they do like think of the biomass of those animals stemming off of like six of them that's insane and they're so tough you can put them on a boat and they'll make it across the ocean oh yeah no they're amazing and and they are terrible for the environment like they do so much damage to native species to riparian habitat i mean they're i like you said we were talking about it out there briefly and um it's it's a good thing people should realize that invasive species like that

should not be in an ecosystem well they certainly shouldn't be in an ecosystem when there's no balance right if they're like warthogs and be in an ecosystem when there's no balance, right? Correct. If they're like warthogs and they're in Africa, there's a system for that. Exactly. Like they're all, they're supposed to be there. Warthogs are wild looking creatures, aren't they?

They're amazing. You've seen one in person? Yeah, I grew up there. I grew up in Zimbabwe. Oh, that's right. Yeah, so. That's right. Actually, I got a pretty funny story about a warthog.

My uncle, my mom's brother, we were out on safari one time and he was he was young you know he's much younger than my mother so he's maybe a teenager or something and he grabbed this plum and started going for a walk across camp and anyway this warthog decided it wanted this plum and so it came trotting after my uncle and started chasing him in circles around this tree but my uncle was so panicked by this thing chasing him around this big baobab tree that he wouldn't drop the plum so he's just in this perpetual cycle of being of being chased around this tree until he eventually threw the

plum and the warthog just veered off and went for the plum lucky didn't want him yeah they're they're very funny very mischievous i love the way their tails stick up through the grass when they're they're very funny very mischievous i love the way their tails stick up through the grass when they're running around they're weird looking very they're they're they're related to pigs right in some sort of way yeah oh yeah yeah they're all that same family speaking of weird pigs are you familiar with the barbarusa no this is one we should pull up you're gonna love this animal yeah you're gonna love this it's one of my top bucket list animals to see in the wild it's a great name. Yeah. Barbarossa. I don't even want to tell you what it is until you see the image because you're going to be like, no way that's real.

It looks like something out of Star Wars. Really? And it's a pig. Where does it live? Indonesia. How big does it get? Maybe 200 pounds. I'm not positive on the size.

Whoa. Look at that thing. Look at those tusks growing out of its face. What the fuck is those things that grow out of the middle of its head? Yep. That's crazy.

Yeah. Look at that one. What the... Bro, that does not look real. Right? Doesn't that look like something out of Star Wars? Yes.

That's a real animal. That looks like an avatar creature. That's what it looks like. Is that fighting something? Looks like it. What's it fighting there? Oh my God. Barbarossa's going to war. It's a pig deer. They call it a pig deer? Yeah, it. What's it fighting there? Oh my god. Barbarossa is going to war.

It says pig deer. They call it a pig deer? Yeah, it says Barbarossa or pig deer. Oh wow. Somebody just making a guess. Like their nickname of it? I actually think they're having sex. Oh, getting it on. That's not fighting. Making more Barbarossas. That's just shitty Barbarossa

Jiu Jitsu. Yeah, that's the kind of fighting mommy and daddy do late at night. Mommy and daddy were just playing. Don't worry. No one's getting hurt. Mommy was gagging. Yeah, but aren't they wild? Look at that one right there, Jamie.

Look where your cursor is. Click on that one. What the fuck, man? Isn't that a wild pig? The things coming out of it, the tusks that come out of the middle of its head are so strange. Like, where did that come from? I don't know why you evolve that maybe maybe like a peacock's tail you know for uh showmanship but what's really crazy about them evolving those two two teeth their tusks out of their their

bridge of their snout is they if they're not broken in fights and rooting around they can grow long enough that they will puncture the animal in the head and kill it i've heard of that oh that's you know why because i put a an image of it on my my uh instagram it was one of those jeffrey epstein didn't kill himself memes oh yeah i saw a few of those you threw up and it was a barbarous a skull actually oh saying that it can do that it actually was driving into its own head growing into its own head yeah like that yeah own head. Yeah, like that. Yeah, insane. That's crazy. Like maybe that's nature's way of saying, all right, enough. Check, please.

Your assholes will live forever and eat everything in front of you. Like that one. Look at that. Yeah, there it is. Growing into its own brain. Imagine one day you have a little bit of a headache, and the next day it just gets a little worse. You're like, what is going on?

And what do you do? It's like if you go and hit that against the ground, it's only going to get worse. Right. It's already in your brain. Yeah. You'd have to get it. You'd have to be smart enough to find a branch

where you could slip that over and torque your head. Yeah. And snap it off. I don't think that's happening if you're a pig. Is this awful? I mean, often that this happens where they kill themselves by growing that tusk into their brain i don't know that looks like two of them heading that direction fuck a crazy animal

what a beautiful animal so there's an extinct subspecies of those called the malocan barbarusa which in the single island near sulu wesi used to be and then they think people have hunted them um you know to extinction localized extinction within that island and that subspecies. But some people I know that worked over there ate one. So, they're like, yeah, no, we ate this wild pig with these crazy horns. And I was like, yeah, this was like two years ago. You know, and they have no proof and they don't have the skull and they don't have the picture. They were like, they were traveling and they're like, yeah, yeah, we got back and we ate this pig with these wild horns on this particular island. And I was like, wait, is that possibly a Malucan Barbarossa? I was like, I don't know.

And you look where they were and what they said and what they ate. And it's like, oh, that could be an extinct subspecies that you guys consumed. Well, how many biologists are actually actively out there looking for these creatures? Well, those I would say zero currently, that species. But with regards to this field of presumed extinct animals, it seems to be a movement that's expanding, you know, and I think one of the reasons for that is we have a rate of something like 2,000 species a year being deemed extinct, right? So, when you have that many animals being deemed extinct every year, there's flags being put up.

Is it really extinct? Have we looked everywhere? And so, this, you know, I don't want to say I was the first, but I feel like I was in that wave of first people to start looking into extinction um as far as ongoing animals wrongfully deemed extinct and now it's like it's like mainstream in the biology world it's like there's a lot of people that are like i'm gonna go see if i can find this thing is it because it's a romantic sort of thing there's a lot of cash like if you can find an a seem to be extinct barbarusa i think so i think it's very romantic you know as opposed to just setting out to study something that we know

that's there this like harrowing journey to find this creature that the world has written off it's very romantic you have you ever heard of the aurang pendek oh what is this is like uh this is a cryptid right yes what is i've heard this tiny monkey person that's right did we talk about this last time we might have yeah i'm very repetitive that's okay i don't know it's still fun it's not in my wheelhouse you know like the cryptids the loch ness monsters i think that one they think is in vietnam um i think it's in vietnam and maybe some other parts of Southeast Asia. And most people thought it was nonsense until the Homo floriensis,

until they found out about that hobbit person that lives in the island of Flores. And then they're like, okay, hold on, or lived, I should say. As recently as 14,000 years ago, right? So when they found out about that thing they're like well maybe maybe these little fuckers are still hanging around out there somewhere yeah just you're dealing with incredibly dense jungle and they're very wary if you're a person stomping through the jungle something that lives there hears you a mile away for sure you you're not sneaking up on a monkey no well we this year um i went into song doong which is the world's largest cave that was only discovered in 1995 it's this massive opening six miles of underground cave you know you don't see daylight

for two days six miles it's you should look at the pictures of this place you'll love it i mean it's just this it looks like something out of avatar i mean this cave you can fit new york city skyscrapers inside of it it's so so big. It has its own weather system. What? Yeah. Where is this? So it's in the Annamite Mountain Range between Vietnam and Laos. And we got to go into it this year because we were looking for this habitat.

In fact, this is my show that comes out tonight. We were looking for this habitat. Where is it on so people can hear it when we're fresh? Extinct or Alive tonight at 9pm on Animal Planet we go into Songdoon Cave set your DVRs kids plug yeah

so let's see this oh my god yeah there's you know Hang Songdoon that's the entrance to it and like look at the size of it the scope of it

is massive I need something to compare it to what am I looking at I'm seeing the those are little tents people oh those are tents there's full lake systems in there

and oh my god that's inside the tent i mean that's inside the cave yeah look at the wedding cake that one right there that's called the wedding cake it's yeah that one it's this pyres i mean it's just it's the most fantastic looking thing there's a person standing on top of that little pyre uh right there oh my my God. Yeah. That's insane. It's insane. More people have summited Everest than have been through that cave. Wow. Well, people summit Everest every day now.

Well, that's why. But yeah, so we, that's the wedding cake. Oh my God, that's incredible. I have a picture just like that that I'm very proud of. My God, that's so spectacular. But what's amazing is about two-thirds of the way through the system you can see where what you're looking at is areas where the cave roof has collapsed and there's isolated pockets of ecosystem right so we were talking about the the pygmy people that could

live in the forests of vietnam this is the kind of my point is this giant six mile long cave with these huge openings wasn't even discovered until i think 95 so what's to say a tribe of small people couldn't hide in something like that and move in and out and never be seen i mean it's it's fantastic there was a stupid movie about people that lived on the ground that ate people remember that there's a bunch of chicks was that the cave the descent the descent that's what it was yes yes so my whole team watched we we spent like when we were going like leading up to this expedition we're like all right let's watch a bunch of bad horror cave movies before we go

the first one's bad the second one is so bad it's it's funny yeah right because they did a descent too and you're like wait as you were bringing that up i stumbled across a video potential it's obviously probably not real of an oaring pen deck no it's totally real jamie have you ever seen this these guys are on bikes such a dick and this thing runs out in front of them let me see it doesn't look like cgi is the only thing i'm going with at the moment it's obviously probably that's definitely a person it had a tail or something they were doing like freeze frames of it. What?

I stopped watching because you guys took me on the cave thing. What? It's a 10-minute video. Neither of you have seen this before. I've never seen it before. Where are they? I kind of knew. They're in Vietnam?

I think so. Bro. They were just out riding their bikes, and they caught it on their GoPros, and they were trying to find it. Let's see. They could also be trying to troll everyone on the internet i don't know do these guys have a troll uh video i mean what is their their youtube page have you gone to their youtube page it's on a it's like on a bigfoot website sasquatch chronicles but that's the problem is it remember in men in

black how they used to always check the uh whatever it was called they check like the national inquirer for like tips on aliens yeah where else do you go to get this info though right let me see this again pop out right here here it goes they're right there like what the fuck is that that's definitely a person or a humanoid it's really tiny whatever it is yeah it's running pretty fast well it also could be like bullshit yeah yeah could be bullshit but it could be a little monkey

person look we know those little monkey people were real yeah exactly god damn imagine if that's real and keep in mind and again i'm not like a huge cryptid guy but keep in mind you know as a as a homo sapien they have a higher intellect which means they're better at avoiding people right so it's you know it's it's not unreasonable to say if there was a group of small humanoids out there that didn't want to be discovered they could stay hidden yeah and if it's really small you know and and also some sort of a hominid that has intelligence right it's probably got a pretty decent food source in the jungle yep but they would find a dead one wouldn't they that's always the argument right why isn't there

a roadkill yes or why yeah but the thing is like there's a lot of mountain lions good luck finding a dead one yeah yeah look at that look at that yeah that's like the best screenshot i don't think that's a tail that looks like a spear yeah and who knows who's what's to say that isn't a short guy who's been poaching and he's like crap i'm getting busted right but doesn't mean it's not fascinating and this is the kind of stuff that we wade through in droves to try and figure out, you know, are these animals, are these creatures still out there? Look at that. That's so weird. God, I'm such a sucker, though.

Oh, that thing looks like it's wearing shorts, dude. Doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. And it's running exactly like a person. Yeah, that's a little person. But it's so little. Right. It could be a little kid. That but it's so little right it could be a little kid that's the thing about the it could be a little kid yeah but that's the thing about the orang pendek is that they think it was like the homo floriensis i think they think it's really the same thing and the homo floriensis was really a three foot tall human four feet yeah

right some yeah some subset yep there's another image oh wow yeah that looks like a little person the head looks weird though it's got a hat the thing looks like it's wearing a hat wearing a disneyland hat not the ears because it matches the orang pendek images of that sasquatch type head or something dude that is a person with a stick and there and there that creature looks naked It doesn't look like there's shorts on it Yeah it does So how tall do you think that is

That looks really short And moving fast Really short and like 3 feet tall Going into tall grass right What's that 3 foot grass 4 foot grass That's so weird Okay so here's size comparison See I'm such a sucker It's that three-foot grass, four-foot grass. That's so weird.

Okay, so here's size comparison. See, I'm such a sucker. Look out. There's a size comparison. That is fucking tiny, man. That's tiny. It's really tiny. Oh, my God, it's real. I want to believe so bad.

I know. I'm such a moron. I'm such a moron when it comes to this stuff. I believed in bigfoot for so long they estimated it was between 80 and 150 centimeters which is somewhere between 30 and 60 inches tall so that's three to five feet three to four feet yeah tiny little thing it's amazing i hope it's real yeah i do too i do too yeah i mean it's fantastic but do you hope would you rather not knowing and it lives or someone kills it and you find

out that it's real? I'd rather not knowing and it lives. Me too. For sure. Yeah. Me too, but I feel like a bitch. Yeah. I want to know, but I don't want it to die.

Right, right. You know what? Come on, man. Just tell me. And how blurry does the line get in that situation? Because it's humanoid, right? Yes. So it's like right it's not

like you're catching and putting them in zoos you know to breed them and keep the population up like like that gets really dicey that's super dicey yeah didn't they do that with an african man in the bronx zoo in like the turn of the century they put an african man in the bronx yes they did yeah they had an african man i believe it was the bronx zoo oh and like the 1800s or the early 1900s a pygmy yeah what year was it 1906 oh god wow yeah it's they had him in the zoo man it's insane look at that wow dude's in the zoo yeah well you know what man people were just figuring life out back then right right this is the reality of human beings is that we have not been alive that long and we

have not been civilized in terms of how we view the world today with inclusivity and objectivity and care and you know kindness towards others like this compassion and altruism this is on a global scale this is fairly recent yeah we're figuring things out as we go i mean the history is a perfect it can show you how we've progressed yeah it's a document documentation of how we've progressed but yet still that was still 50 years after slavery. Yeah. Right. That's crazy. Yeah. 40, 45 years after slavery. What the fuck guys. So Bronx zoo,

you know, speaking in our like weird cryptid realm reminded me of something. So get this Chupacabra has been attributed to the possibility that there are thylacine in North America. And here's what supports that. There is documented proof that however many years ago, I don't remember the dates, there were two breeding pair of thylacine bound for the Bronx Zoo. And the boat crashed into the shore and most of the animals escaped, including the two breeding

pair of thylacine. Fast forward 10, 15 years, you start having these chubacabra sightings pop up in the northeast. And these animals were adapted to living in Tasmania, which is a pretty similar climate to the North American northeast. And so there's people that have kind of drawn these parallels and said, oh, the chubacabra that we've reported running around, you know, the United States is actually a tiny remnant population of these thylacine that were brought here for the Bronx Zoo that escaped. What? You buy into this? No.

Not personally. Sounds good though, right? But it sounds, it's an amazing story. Boy, you had me. If you said yes, I'd be ready to go on an expedition. I've got a quick question off of stuff you've talked about. If someone could get one for the Bronx Zoo then, would a rich person have been able to buy one, like a rich guy in Texas, for instance?

A thylacine? Been able to purchase one privately? Yeah. in texas for instance a thylacine been able to purchase one privately yeah back then you could probably get one today if you want to find a thylacine yeah go to bubba's house right but especially back then there were no like import export laws about wildlife you know you could just bring in whatever you liked if you had money you know what's to say everybody was in a race to collect stuff for zoos and museums like what's to say somebody didn't bring some in texas and the their exotics it's so strange i mean i had a bit about it in my act in 2016 my netflix special that there's more tigers in captivity in texas and private collections than there are in all of the wild of the world isn't that insane just texas

and that's like in guys living rooms in you, you know, a cage. Yeehaw. Fade a mistake. It's nuts. Yeah, it is nuts. The rules there are so strange. It's also, that's one of the rare states where the vast majority of the state is private land. Oh, really? There's very little public land in Texas.

So, like, for yourself, when you go hunting there, it's all private? Yes. If you're going to hunt in Texas, you're going to hunt most likely on a private ranch. Just some small patches of public land. But in comparison, I think it's in the 90% range. Interesting. Yeah. It's all giant ranches.

Right. And what's really interesting is I've been reading a lot about over the last two to three months, I've been obsessed with Wild West stories. Did you put that book away? Empire of the Summer Moon, S.C. Gwynn wrote this fantastic book about the Comanches. Okay. And the battle with people in Texas and the Texas Rangers in the 1800s and trying to take over that land from the Comanches. It's crazy that this stuff happened just 150 years ago.

It was so insane and really sad, really sad because there's something incredibly romantic about their lifestyle that was just 150 years ago when all of Europe, they were having horse-driven carriages, and people were living in these fancy buildings. But right here in North America, people were living like they were in the Stone Age. Right. And they had this incredible nomadic life where they were following around the buffalo

and killing the buffalo, and they were all just about war. They were this wild, ferocious tribe that was about war and hunting buffaloes some it's fucking amazing man and that's like while our great-grandparents were walking the earth yes really recent you know i mean they they kind of they they put the kibosh on it all by the time it was like 1870s in that range that's when they they eventually moved them all into reservations but on it all by the time it was like 1870s in that range that's when they they eventually moved them all into reservations but fucking and not the comanches the comanches they never moved into reservations right right they just gave them plots of land they did to this

day don't have a reservation but and bad land is my understanding terrible assholes yeah yeah but they were assholes to each other too right that's what's really fucked up like you you get this idea that like the natives all lived in peace and harmony and the you know you know the europeans came over and they fucked everything up right they were killing each other left and right right they were the tribes would raid on other tribes and they would i mean horrific things and this guy goes into amazing detail about the way they would torture uh both captives from other tribes and europeans and anybody that was over they cut their legs off they cut their arms off throw them on the fire watch them wiggle around while they were still alive like wild shit man and he said that he even

left some of it out because it was so distasteful really yeah he's trying to figure out like how he could put it in a book and literally not have people vomit unbelievable yeah so it's fucking amazing though but that's this whole country this whole continent used to be this wild ecosystem of human beings riding horses chasing buffalo all these animals all over the place i mean during during the 150 plus years or 250 plus years, they eradicated so many animals. They extirpated them from so many different parts of the country. And then market hunting came in and they just almost wiped out like so many different species of North American animals.

And not just almost, but did, you know, like pre-human settlement, they say that the North American continent. And not just almost, but did. You know, like pre-human settlement, they say that the North American continent had more biomass, like larger game and more abundant megafauna than the plains of Africa. Yeah. You know, huge animals roaming around. And, you know, European settlement and Native American settlement,

it's all attributed to the decline. But things like, more recently, like the passenger pigeon. Yeah. Right? Billions. Billions. Billions. It used to black out the sky. Black out the passenger pigeon yeah right billions billions billions used to black out the sky yeah and down to zero how the fuck did they do that i honestly like i know by reading but i personally don't know you know what i mean how do you kill billions of

birds yeah and that that gets intricate because the animal's ecology is such that it needs many others you know their their tactic is confusion like they don't they don't run away they just get in a big giant flock and then you're like oh i don't know which one to pick but so that it made them easier to hunt and there was commercial they'd actually hunt them commercially for meat it was cheap meat blah blah blah but it just it's crazy to think that we're able to wipe out billions of anything in such a short amount of time well we came real close to doing it to the buffalo. Yeah.

And some of those, well, the bison, I should say, some of those images of those bison skulls, like, stacked up. Piles, yeah. Like a mountain. It's really disturbing. It used to be, you know, considered entertainment to shoot them from the railway as you were traveling across the country for fun. Like, you just kind of hang out the window and be like, boom, got one. Well, the other thing is that they would go and mostly what they would take from them is their tongues,

which is crazy. It's the best meat in the world. And they wouldn't even eat the meat. They would shoot them and take their tongues and they would pickle their tongues. And they would use the fur. They would sell the hides and make buffalo capes and all this different shit.

It just shows what abundance we had you know what i mean nowadays and not that i'm pro wiping out anything but nowadays you have a small population of whatever this the animal is and most people are utilizing every part of it right because we don't have that crazy abundance like imagine if you just went out like like you for instance imagine if you just went out to shoot elk for the tongue. It doesn't make any sense, right? Like why on earth would you ever consider doing that? But if you looked out of the studio here and you saw 200 of them, you'd be like, yeah, right, I might grab a tongue today.

Right? That's the difference. Make a taco. Yeah. That's the difference of the abundance. Yeah. Well, there were basically two elk, right? A bison is like twice the size of an elk.

Yeah. They're enormous. It's so ridiculous that they just cut the tongue out it's awful it is yeah and it's also crazy because it's such a it's such an iconic symbol of the american west my friend steve ranello wrote a great book it's called american buffalo and uh he actually did the audio version of it too and he's a really good narrator it's it's excellent i'll check it out. But it's all about the history of the Plains tribes and the North American buffalo. Fuck, man.

Sorry, what did you say it's called? It's called American Buffalo. American Buffalo. Get the audio version if you're into audio books because he reads it and he does an amazing job and it's his book. He actually had sold it and then someone else had got the rights, whatever whatever the book company had decided to

have an actor read it okay and it was terrible apparently according to steve yeah yeah it's like it was terrible and then 10 years later the rights he got the rights back and then he was able to oh great do it himself it's awesome yeah i fly so much audiobooks are my best friend man i love them i've been i haven't listened to podcasts in months like the last two months have been mostly listening to audiobooks i mean i have a little bit but yeah mostly just audiobooks yeah you ever done the power of one oh yeah i've read that was a couple of years ago it's one of my favorites yeah it's a great audiobook too because i read it who's the author of that again oh i don't recall i think he's kind of a one-hit

wonder with that book i can't remember remember his name, but absolutely love the story. Pull that up, Jamie. Let's see what's up. A movie came up first. A movie? They made a movie? That's not about that. Probably like some kung fu movie.

Yeah, right. The Power of One. Bryce Court. That's right, Bryce Court. Can you pull up the image of the book? What's the description of the book? What's the description of the book? What does it say?

I don't know. Is that it? The Power of One. Is that a novel, actually? No, I don't think that's it. No, that's definitely not it. Clayton? I don't know. No, no the bryce courtney one for sure it is about it's about a young boy growing up in africa so it is a novel

yeah i've okay i read it first and then i then i listened to the all right i'm confused so i know i have not read this okay it's very good there's a there's something that has a similar title that's like a self-help book oh no, no, this is not a self-help book. This is about a young boy growing up in Africa during apartheid. He's very, like, ostracized from his peers because he's not, I believe, I'd have to listen to it again, because he's not, you know, Bora, he's not a Dutch-African, he's English-African. And it's just his journey through life through life basically and it's really good yeah but it what reminded me of it is we're talking about all the wildlife and he grows up very much so in the

bush in africa and around wildlife and you know he's juggling that and a kind of defunct social system and it's it's really good africa is so special it's such a when whenever i watch documentaries on africa and african wildlife it's like what a crazy place yeah where all the nutty things live you know pretty much and a lot of them too that's what's great i mean we have some nutty things here we have mountain lions and grizzlies and stuff like that but it ain't shit compared to what they have in africa there's no you know having walked kind of through the wilds basic in a lot of different places there's nowhere i've been like africa where you're so like okay i'm just a part of the food system now. Like I'm not at the top anymore.

Like I'm in the food web. You know, lions can be hunting me. Elephants can charge. There's leopards in the trees. You know what I mean? You're just like you just fit into the food web. You're not at the top of it any longer. Yeah, it's such a weird place too when it comes to wildlife.

of it any longer yeah it's such a weird place too when it comes to wildlife when you know they brought so many animals back from the brink of extinction only because they have value for hunting right right so it's so tall everyone's so torn on that because it's on one hand like you would you would love it if people had donated enough money to keep these animals healthy and keep them in good populations because we appreciate them. Right. But that's not really the case. It's mostly people that want to shoot them that are paying money and because they have value, now their populations are so large.

Yep. And so everyone's like really torn on that. They're like, oh, this is weird. And it's- Even hunters are torn on it. For sure. And it's full spectrum. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

No, it's okay because they're all fenced in, I was going to say. Right, right. So it's not, like when you think of hunting, you think of I'm going to go to the wild. Right. And I'm going to experience these animals. But no, these animals, like they're making sure there's a large population of them because Mike from Cleveland is coming over there with his Creedmoor and he's going to, you know, shoot some.

Yeah. And it's such a spectrum is what I was going to say because you have these national parks that absolutely do work. People pay enough money for tourism, ecotourism dollars to do photo safaris and the wildlife's managed. You have these other areas that are managed by hunting dollars

and they're managed beautifully well. They're sustaining animals. They're reproducing them and they're putting them in other habitats and ecosystems and parts of Africa. And then you have ones that are supposed to be managed properly, both from ecotourism and hunting dollars. And they're funding people's pockets.

The animals are getting devastated. It's super unethical and everything in between. And that's the problem with Africa is like, I'm all for hunting as a tool for conservation if it keeps the species around and keeps the animals up. But you got to be careful where you're going, those dollars are going because it's so easy to line someone's pocket and it never returns to the species yeah there's a giant issue with corruption there huge huge yeah i mean the never have poverty right yeah where i grew up in zimbabwe the mugabe

regime i mean it's it's notorious for being as corrupt as it was and you know created violence and uprisings. And that's why my family came here because we got thrown off our land and like crazy stuff. It's very, very corrupt. Yeah. It's a wild place, man. Yeah. My buddy Justin Bren runs this charity.

Do you know who he is? I don't know. He runs Fight for the Forgotten. They build wells for the pygmies. Okay. We work with them with the cash app and he came back with a terrible disease i heard that on one of your podcasts yes he doesn't know what it is they don't know what it is he's got some crazy parasite and they think it might be

in his brain oh boy not only that he goes so deep into the congo that they feel like it might be an undiscovered parasite yeah like he might be the first one i shouldn't laugh it's like that's the worst way to find a new species ever yeah it's been going on for six months and he's he's like in really poor health he's all fucked up yeah and he's a fighter for bellator he's one of their top heavyweights yeah and so you know he's in the prime of his career and he can't really work out right like he'll work out and then he'll break out into cold sweats, and they have to get him in the shower and, you know, heat his body up. Like, it's a mess. It's really bad.

And the, you know, the drugs that they put them on, the other thing is when you're on antibiotics, one of the side effects of some antibiotics, like Cipro, is that your ligaments get weak. Oof. Yeah, and so he's a fucking cage fighter right right so he's tearing his shoulders like both of his shoulders are fucked up now um because your your connective tissue is just not as strong because of the you know our whole system apparently i mean i really don't know what I'm talking about, but apparently our whole system is fueled sort of, it's one gigantic unit. And so when you do something like you introduce antibiotics and you crush all these invading diseases or these invading bacteria or whatever the fuck, staph or whatever is fucking with you.

The microorganisms yeah all the microbiome the rest of your body gets devastated as well sure including like people who are prone more prone to depression afterwards and dr ronda patrick was talking about that she had a staph infection and it screwed her up for a long time really just because her whole body was out of whack from the antibiotics because you know you get staffed they're worried about you're gonna die oh yeah so they just pump you full of anything they try to kill of course moral of the story no no good deed goes unpunished you know don't try help people stare like it's i'm kidding i'm kidding he's got malaria three times too oh geez yeah yeah but i bet he's passionate about what he does and you know he's made he's made an impact so the most

passionate yeah he's like the most generous person i and he's made an impact. The most passionate. Yeah. He's like the most generous person I've ever met in my life. It's fantastic. Every time I talk to him, I feel like a selfish piece of shit. He's dedicating his whole life, and everything is for other people. Everything is for the Congo. Everything is for the Pygmies. It's amazing.

It's fucking amazing. It is. It really is. Very admirable. However, he's fucked. Yeah. Like you said, they don't know what, and they think it might be in his brain which is a giant issue of course yeah jeez i mean and obviously if it's in his brain i mean depending upon what kind of parasite it is it could be growing it's just i hate parasites it's

like the one thing that makes my skin crawl that's weird because i love them yeah yeah i'm sure they're your favorite yeah who's out there like man i love parasites i mean birds are cool but but parasites where it's at i had a professor like that in college actually really yeah he's a parasitologist he loved him uh well he's obsessed field of study yeah yeah yeah um so the last time i saw you i think was right before we headed to the galapagos i was telling you about that crazy island we went on. We found that tortoise. Do you know that? Yeah.

First, only one specimen has ever been found before, 114 years ago. And we found the second one. The biggest discovery in my entire career was the week after I saw you last. Wow. Yeah. It was amazing. What kind of tortoise is this?

The Fernandina Island tortoise. Big Galapagos tortoise on this crazy active volcano on far remote Galapagos. We had gnarly sunstroke, heatstroke, I mean, everything. And after a few days of hiking up and down this volcano, we found scat, and then we found a dig like a tortoise had been digging, and 15 minutes later, we found the animal. I mean, how many of them are in the wild? There's a return trip that just one more turn trip just went right now and then another one will go in january but what's great is

on the first return trip they had to bail because of weather and the weather is very harsh there um they found evidence of two more animals so things are looking really good so there might be like four alive on the planet well right now there now there's one, the one we found. She's literally the rarest animal in the world. Do you have an image of this? It's on my Instagram, but it was on Forbes, Times, New York, you know, everywhere. It was like big, big stuff. So you can look up Fernandina Island tortoise.

When you find something like that, what gets done to ensure the population remains? There she is. There it is. Wow. So how did you know? What's the distinguishing factors? What's the only animal on the island? It's the only tortoise There she is. There it is. Wow. So how did you know? What's the distinguishing factors? What's the only animal on the island?

It's the only tortoise on the island. Oh. So because tortoises kind of swim, at least not across the ocean. Whoa. So because of where they were, if we had found a tortoise, it was going to be the Fernandina tortoise. Now, that being said, the unique shell ridging, the shape. Actually, there's a video.

Yeah, there you go. There she is. So cool. There's a video. Oh, I think it's the one on the top right of your screen right now where we actually find her. So you picked it up and carried it away? Yeah, we put her in a – she was super malnourished, underweight, dehydrated. She was stuck in an isolated pocket of vegetation because there's nothing but lava around her um now this video is boring but there's there's a cool one where you

actually see me like find her in the bushes um and yeah it was big you're crying i was pretty happy wow it was just such a big find and such you know the tortoise like lonesome george is an icon of conservation so to find the species that the world had lost for 114 years was pretty great. Imagine being a tortoise, just chilling on this fucking island, hanging out, and some famous biologist flies from all the way around the world to find you. Like, you're here. He's like crying and shit. You're like, I'm fucking here every day.

Leave me alone. Yeah. I'm trying to find some plants, bro. But I think in this case, she was stoked. And I'll tell you why. She was super dehydrated, super underweight. It's terrible living conditions this case she was stoked and i'll tell you why she was super dehydrated super underweight it's terrible living conditions and she was stuck right so it's not like she could roam around the island and find lots of food and water there's five foot shards of lava rock surrounding this little pocket of vegetation so we moved her to the fausto lorraine

breeding facility which is where lonesome george was kept that other famous tortoise she put on like seven pounds or 17 pounds in like three weeks because she was so happy to eat she didn't leave her water dish for like 10 days because she was just so happy to see water like oh wow she was stoked and now they're now they're trying to find a male and trying to get some freak on yeah trying to get the freak on and this is this is spurred like a ton of you know resources conservation dollars return efforts like it's just it's really big for the galapagos so how does that work if you do find a male if you do find what if she's an old lady she doesn't want to fuck and you bring some male and he's like hey baby and he's like 15 and she's 80 she's like come on dude fortunately reptiles water yeah fortunately

reptiles breed until they die so um so we should be good. And even more interesting than that is tortoises can retain viable sperm. So what we had hoped when we found her was that, you know, maybe she had copulated with a male 10 years prior and had been under such tough environmental stress that she hadn't had the biological energy to lay eggs. And we're thinking, oh, let's get her some food, get her some water. Who knows? Maybe she'll give some offspring.

So she might already have fertilized eggs inside of her from 10 years ago yeah they can sperm can live in them to like up to 20 years that's some serious sperm yeah tortoise sperm slow and steady serious sperm what god damn what fucking what longevity yeah you know amazing really yeah so if they find a viable male and then they bring him to the facility and introduce him to all the food and water do they have success in taking these wild tortoise tortoises and getting them to breed absolutely and you know i think when you hear this yeah and i think when you hear this you're thinking they're like in a box you know what i mean in a zoo they're in this thing that's bigger than your studio here i don't mean this room the whole studio you know what i mean it's all natural vegetation

basically we just moved her from one island to another where there's less stress and now if they get a male they'll just have them together hopefully they'll be offspring then they can release the offspring back on the island the population can remain stable that's awesome wow so that was cool that was fun but i remember I was sitting here and we were talking about it. I was like, yeah, you know, tomorrow I leave for the Galapagos. It's going to be gnarly. It's going to suck. And then we had this amazing find.

So it was really cool. Now, the Galapagos is so protected that don't they make you, like, put fresh shoes on? Like, you can't bring shoes that you wore somewhere else that might carry seeds. Yep. We had to go to quarantine for 48 hours. Everything we brought with us had to go into a giant freezer yeah freezer um and sit there for two days and we kind of had to twiddle our thumbs just waiting and then we got all our stuff back got on the boats and went out to that island so the giant freezer supposedly kills any sort of spores or anything it gets really cold if i remember

correctly and they go you know you go through everything they look they go through your boots you look for any seeds you go through your underwear like literally everything to see if you're bringing any contaminants in god that's so fucking cool it is so the galapagos is really the place where darwin started formulating a lot of his theories of evolution right with the finches and the tortoises look at that that crazy skeleton what is that from uh some kind of marine mammal sea lion possibly whale it's hard to say they got beach there or something wow and then that's fernandina that's the stark island in the background actually where we found the tortoise oh wow yeah it's a big ass island man to find one turtle tortoise excuse me it's all good uh i have a hard time with that i want to get lazy and just

call them all turtles you got a shell shell. Fuck's the problem. Yeah. Just swim better. Yeah, no, so that was cool. It was crazy. It was very difficult and hot and, you know, all those things and just so exciting. That's amazing. Yeah, that was fun. So when you do have a discovery like this, I mean, that's got to, like, open up the door for more funding, more research possibilities, more trips.

Hugely. What do you want to do next? Well, it's, so that's twofold, right? One is it doesn't necessarily open the door for me more, which is good. It doesn't need to. It opens the door for the species. And what I mean by that is when an animal is declared extinct, that's it. It's gone, right?

Extinct means vanished, like no longer in existence. So when you find it back, that opens up the dollars for return efforts, management, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's what's going on currently for that particular species. It's great for me in the sense that it's like, oh, this guy is furthering his reputation of being able to find these things that other people aren't, which really just boils down to me being willing to embrace shittier conditions than I think a lot of other people are. But what's next for me?

I mean, I take off for Africa, I think, January 4th, January 5th, and I'll be there for five weeks working on some missing sharks. Missing sharks? Yeah. What kind of sharks? There's four species that in the wild coast, which is like from Durban up to Mozambique on the east, southeastern Africa that haven't been seen in 30 years or more. And it's not necessarily that they're extinct so much as nobody looks for them.

And, you know, it's like it's a very gray area of are these animals still there or not? And so myself, this guy named Dave Ebert, he's the president of the North American Elastomeric Society, like big shark guy, you know, big other bio nerd like myself. We're teaming up and we're going down there to try and find some of these animals. I was reading something recently about great whites in South Africa, that there's a massive decline. Orcas. Orcas were killing white sharks in Muscle Bay, that area where, in Hans Bay, yeah. And I don't exactly remember the reason. I think they were eating their livers out of the white sharks. Yeah, they like their liver, right?

Why do they like their liver so much? Minerals, full of minerals, yeah. Because, you know, your liver acts as the filter for the body, basically. And so it's pretty well known that big predators, orcas, leopards, lions, you know, everything, they like to target the liver. Yeah. And it gives them lots of minerals that otherwise they can't get from flesh. I was watching a documentary on wolves, and that was one of the ways that the alpha establishes itself that when there's a kill, it's the first to eat the liver. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. And there's a guy who was living with these wolves, and he was, like, tricking them that he was a wolf. And one of the ways he would do it was he would eat a liver in front of them and so they're like wow this guy might be the shit yeah and and then the guy went away because he's a wolf expert and um he went away because there was a farmer that was having issues with wolves and they were trying to figure out a way to get the wolves to leave his livestock alone so what they did was they set up a speaker system so they put these gigantic speakers up, and they started broadcasting these aggressive wolf howls

to let this other wolf pack know that a new wolf pack had moved into the area. So this guy was on this project for several months, came back to the original wolf pack that he was conning into thinking that he was, and a new alpha had taken over. Oh, wow. And the new alpha was threatening him, and that he was, and a new alpha had taken over. Oh, wow. And the new alpha was threatening him, and so he had a whimper, and he was really in danger of being torn apart by a wolf.

And on camera. Oh, wow. He's inches away from this wolf, and it's bearing its teeth. He's like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Jesus. I mean, he's with real wolves. Right. And so this guy's curled up in a fetal position and whimpering and putting his paw out like this.

And this fucking wolf is baring its teeth just inches from him. Huge wolf. 150-pound wolf. Like inches from him, just ready to tear him to shreds. Because they kill each other all the time. Oh, yeah. Where was this? In the U.S.?

No. No, it wasn't in the U.S. I don't remember where it was, but it was really weird. Like, this guy's life was so strange because he was, for a long period of time, when he was, like, running this research, was living with wolves. So, he's with them. You know, he's a part of the pack. I got to ask you this, and don't answer it if it's uncomfortable, but in my field, working with specialized experts, like him, obviously that's a whole nother level. They start to take on characteristics of these animals, I've noticed. So, like, I worked with a guy who was a bear expert, right? And he spent his whole life with bears. And this man was basically a bear. Do you know what I mean? He was grumpy, he was cranky,

he was big, he was hairy. Like, every part of him seemed like a human bear. I'm wondering if this guy was like that. Was he, had he started to, did it seem to you like he had started him seemed like a human bear i'm wondering if this guy was like that was he had he started to did it seem to you like he had started to like kind of lose touch with social norms and he was starting to take on traits of a wolf that's a good question it's hard to tell is this it yeah this is the guy so this guy is this the guy this is a documentary from 2007-8 called the wolf man yeah i think this is it yeah um so so they're like jesus the way they threaten each other you know i mean so so he would have a kill and he would drag it over and uh he would eat the liver in front of them and so by doing that he would trick them and thinking he was the shit see he's

got the liver yeah tell me tell me that guy doesn't express wolf characteristics like look at his body language and every i know he's doing that intentionally for the animal but to me that guy looks like he thinks he's a wolf look at that i mean that's insane how are the cameramen able to get this close and they're safe too very good question hey look at this guy he's out of his fucking mind Yeah that's something else Like bro you're made out of jello You are literally a water balloon Filled with jello And you're hanging around these super predators

It's nuts I love wolves They're one of my favorite animals on the planet I just think they're so fascinating And now that they've been reintroduced into the west You know I know Look at that Like it's growling

The thing's kissing him To show that it's submissling the thing's kissing him to show the submissive so he's eating the liver in front of it have you ever been to the wolf sanctuary out here in pond no no i heard it's awesome no if you ever want to go let me know i would love to they're it's incredible it's it's you know they don't do it for like the general public but they rescue wolves and wolf dogs and rehabilitate them and a lot of times they've been in fights and they've you know come out of terrible places and they've them. And a lot of times they've been in fights and they've, you know, come out of terrible places. And they've got a few animals that they're very closely related to full-blood wild wolves.

And you can go in and interact with them. You're not petting them. It's not a puppy. You know what I mean? They don't behave like a dog. But you can go in and have one come up and approach you and sniff you. And it's a pretty fantastic experience. It really is.

I'd like to go. Let's do it, man. Let's do it. I'm in. I'll set it up. Yeah. Not doing I'd like to go. Let's do it, man. Let's do it. I'm in. I'll set it up. Yeah. Not doing what that asshole's doing. You can do that.

I'll be behind the camera. What I was saying is that since they've reintroduced them into the West, there's been a lot of controversy behind that. And there's talks about doing that in Colorado. And people are really freaking out. Right. Ranchers are freaking out. Like, hey, there's a reason why everybody killed these things off right like don't fucking bring them back because you know there was another surplus killing that

they found i think in wyoming where they just wiped out a bunch like they'll just go ham and kill like you know 14 15 elk cows just because they can. And they don't eat them. There's a term for that. It's hen house syndrome. Have you heard of that? No. So it's basically like when a fox gets into the hen house, they get in this like killing frenzy state.

It's not like they're going to eat 30 different chickens, but they're going to kill everyone because they're in this state. Right. And I don't know that's necessarily the case for that. But it is scary to think of an apex predator like a wolf getting into that hen house type syndrome killing 30 elk just because they can yeah um but you know what's really interesting joe is um if you look as i've done a little bit of reading on this if you look at how many instances of wolf fatalities there are

in north america for humans for humans it's like two or three it's some very very low number yeah there's one in alaska like a couple years back there was a woman i think she was a jogger and um there's one other one yeah and that's kind of it you know that's documented however i have a friend who actually shot an elk in bc in british columbia and they didn't know it but the elk expired right next to a wolf den oh what and the wolves tried to claim the elk they like came out and stood over it he and the guy that he was with had their back to a tree and they shot and killed three attacking wolves and he killed two of them with a bow and arrow and the other guy killed one with a rifle and they were like almost out of bullets and he had one

arrow left and they're surrounded by wolves but they had killed enough so you know wolves they do this um they do like a roll call they howl and they see who responds and they realize that they had lost three and so they bailed and they took off out of the area but they were in the den he said there was bones in there And then they realized Like that They just were hunting And they shot an elk

And it just happened to be Right Right where the wolves Had a den It's terrifying I have one of the skulls At home on my desk Of the wolves?

Yeah Oh wow It's crazy The story's nuts When John tells the story Is that John Dudley? Yeah Oh no kidding

Yeah yeah There's a video of it You can watch it on YouTube Oh okay And he's telling the story It's like He's like? Yeah. Oh, no kidding. Yeah, yeah. There's a video of it. You can watch it on YouTube. Okay. When he's telling the story, it's like, you could see him going back to the moment.

It's fucking crazy. That sounds like a scene out of The Grey. Yes. You know, they're like in the den and back to back. In the den. In the den. Yeah. Like, I spend my life working with animals

that are considered dangerous and there's wolves, bears, there's a handful of others. You just don't want to be in that situation. Obviously, it wasn't intentional, but it's just a no-win situation. We had Glenn Villeneuve from that show Life Below Zero. Oh, yeah, I know the show. Yeah, and he was on the podcast recently, and he was talking about the time that he got chased by wolves. Okay. And this was also on camera. Like, he's got video footage of this and photographic footage of this

where he's living in this little tiny shack that's right next to a lake, and these wolves had killed a moose. And they were in the middle of this frozen lake. There was 20 of them. It was in a huge wolf pack. That's enormous. That is an enormous wolf pack. Yeah, he's got all the photos Of this All on his Facebook page

See if you can pull that up Pull up Glenville News 20 wolves in a pack Yeah yeah It's amazing John Dudley's picture There's John Dudley With one of the wolves

That he killed That was trying to To kill him Yeah Steal his elk They were running at him They were running at him Full clip

He shot two wolves That were running at him Wow He said they were Charging at him Full clip And he's at full draw And and it's, you know, he kills one, and then another one comes running down, bang, they kill that one.

He only carries a four-arrow quiver. Right. So he had one arrow that he killed the elk, two arrows that he killed wolves. One left. One arrow left, and he's got his back to a tree, and the guy he's with had three bullets. Jesus. No sidearm? Nothing.

They were just elk hunting. They're like, fuck! Yeah, so see this Glenn Villeneuve picture. So he's got a series of amazing photographs that he took from his shack and they chased him. They chased him back to his... He got close

to them, like within 100 yards or so to take photographs. And they started circling him and looking at him. And then he starts backing up, and they start trotting, and then he just runs, and they run. And he got to the fucking door of his cabin, and this happened twice. And then he got

a rifle out and just started shooting them. They were running at him. He shot three of them. I mean, I don't know the situation, but turning your back on a pack of wolves and running. I mean, maybe they were ready advancing. I don't know the situation, but turning your back on a pack of wolves and running. I mean, maybe they were already advancing. I don't know, but that just sounds terrible. Acting like prey is a good way to get killed. Yeah.

I mean, he's a really wise man. He really understands the woods and nature as good as anybody. But I think it was one of those situations where he knew he could get back to the cabin. And if he didn't get back to the cabin, the way they were approaching him, they were getting closer and closer. Look at that pack. Oh, my God. Isn't that amazing? That is a phenomenon phenomenon in itself you don't see packs of 20 wolves yes he was saying that one of the like largest documented packs in that area was 18

right this is actually bigger than that and they had a a moose down so they had this moose down a moose calf down in the middle of this frozen lake. That guy is so interesting, man. Yeah. I really loved the podcast with him because, you know, he had just decided, like, I want to try to live, like, as close to nature as possible. No vehicles, nothing. Just snowshoes and a rifle, living in a tiny little cabin, eating nothing but meat. Really?

Nothing but meat and fat. Wow. And, you know, got really close to starving at one point in time. That's when he started. This is what it looked like. It says 2004. Yeah.

So he, I'm familiar with the show, but I haven't actually watched it. He's on The Life Below Zero. He was. Gotcha. He didn't get along with them. Gotcha.

You know, he's a really unique character and I think they had a hard time with his uniqueness. Sure. He's, out of all those people on that show, he's living the weirdest life. Right. Because all the other ones are like, oh, they have sled dogs,

and they gather salmon for their dogs with one of those salmon wheels, and then they have a cabin, and they have a fire in the cabin, and then they're living, and they're eating dinner on plates and shit like that. Not him, man. He's living in this one little shack that he built himself. Everything he's eating is food that he shot and killed walking around. Wow. He stole a caribou from a wolf.

What? A wolf killed a caribou and he ran up and stole it because he was starving. I mean, it's like the guy's living as close to wild as you could possibly get. Other than the fact that he has bullets and a gun and some. But even he starts fires. He wasn't using matches to start fires because he could run out of matches. That's unbelievable. So he's using like flint and steel and shit.

What's his motivation? Why does he just want to be closer to nature? Like that's it? Yeah. You should listen to it if you get a chance. He's a really, really unique person. Wow. He doesn't have an outhouse today.

He doesn't have a toilet. He doesn't have running water today in Fairbanks. No way. Yeah. So he's got a plot of land in Fairbanks. He built a house there. And he doesn't have plumbing. He's like, ah, that's too much work.

Right. He just goes outside. It's 50 below outside. He's shitting in a hole in the ground. He's like, ah, that's too much work. You got to, you know, you got to, like, he just goes outside and 50 below outside. He's shitting in a hole in the ground. I have so much respect for that. I mean, I'll do it for two, three, four weeks at a time on an excursion. I'm very happy to get back to a bed and a shower. And, you know, that's, it's, that's a whole nother level. I've never gone more than seven days.

Yeah. I've done these seven day hunts. Like the, the one where I got this, this mule deer right here with my friend steve rinella but he introduced us to uh hunting and this was in montana and uh it was october and it got down to you know like nine degrees outside we're sleeping in these tents and it was wonderful i mean it was a fantastic experience it really opened my eyes to real wild and wilderness and what it's like to hunt. And then at the end of this week, we went back to Billings and we got a hotel room and I got a shower. And I was like, oh, my God.

A hot shower after a week in the woods. Like, oh. Yeah. I was with Brian Callen and me and Callenyle was like how good was that shower oh my god it's not what you think the most amazing shower ever you don't appreciate showers because you get in them all the time no especially in california because it doesn't get nine degrees here right right yeah being outside freezing your ass off and then but also having the the reward of like actually shooting a deer and then we we ate a lot of it that night, and we were cooking it over the fire.

And then, you know, the whole trip was done on the Missouri breaks. So we're on the Missouri River. And so we took the river 40 miles. Oh, wow. Canoes? Yeah. Yeah. Canoes.

And, you know, we had all our cargo and all our shit in there and we're rowing and so just a long ass journey it was pretty intense yeah and to go back to civilization after that it's like you appreciate civilization because most of the time you don't appreciate like it was a janky little hotel in billings but to me it was like a palace totally it's like oh look at this bed yeah this blanket luxury a television why i don't mind if i do i know the feeling yeah i'm i'm on your page for that i like returning and like decompressing and then within for me it's like within a couple weeks i'm like all right ready to go for the next one you know i go back to not appreciating the comforts of home then i'm like ready to. Well, you've probably developed like a taste for both things, right?

For sure. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. That's cool, though. Like, you're experiencing so many different facets of life on Earth. Like, you're going to all these different environments and ecosystems. You're in the water. You're on the land.

You're in jungles. You're on islands. You're living, man. I love it. You're fucking living. It's very cool i admire it but it comes you know like your buddy um you know who got the diseases from the congo it comes with its costs like you know we were in borneo this year and we were at a research station in the middle of the jungle

and i don't know enough about bee ecology but it was like bee season and i mean you you should see some of our videos on instagram it's like i, I'm talking about covered, head to toe in bees. We were taking like 40 to 50 stings on average per day, per person. You know, and it's just so miserable. 40 to 50 a day? There's eight hours in a day. Yeah. So you're literally taking stings all day long.

Well, no, it's worse than that because we were only at the station in the morning or evenings right before waking up or going to bed the rest of time we're out in the field not taking stings so you're taking like 25 when you wake up and like 25 before you go to bed oh my god it's like ow ow it's just i'm saying eight hours a day as if a day is a work day so when you're doing this is there a way to prevent it? Is there, like, can you use, like, a repellent? Nothing worked.

You know, we, like, put, like, scarves over our heads and, you know, and that's just one instance. And these are bees, not hornets, right? So every time they sting you,

they die. Yes, but then when we were on that, getting that caiman, we encountered hornets that put my cameraman into anaphylactic shock. They were so bad. Oh, great.

Yeah, so we, it comes with its costs, which I think my point was, it makes you appreciate the comfort so much more when you get back. See that tarantula hawk in that little glass vial? I did. I was picking it up right before you walked in. My buddy Maynard sent me that.

Yeah? Yeah, it's from his farm. Yeah, he's got it from Arizona, man. Yeah. That's from his, he owns a vineyard, and he's got a farm in Arizona, and he was telling me about about these things and he got a dead one sent it to me they're super cool look at the size of that fucker it's a bird and they come out of holes in the ground hunt tarantulas like you know their story yeah yeah tell everybody yeah so i mean the the tarantula

hawk it's a parasitic wasp right so it comes out it hunts for tarantulas it lays its eggs i believe in the abdomen of the tarantula and then the eggs hatch and explode out of the tarantula and that's the life cycle nature you cruel bitch right you beautiful fantastic complicated cruel bitch it's insane oh my god i'm sure you've seen the video of those hornets That visit this beehive They visit a honeybee hive And just start these Japanese hornets And they just start chopping off the heads off the bees No way I don't know about this

You don't know about this? I can't believe I'm telling you about animals Teach me There's a certain species of hornets That flies into honeybees I think it's Japanese hornets They fly into these hives of honeybees and just decimate the honeybees. They cut their heads off with their mandibles.

Chomp, chomp, chomp. And they're so much bigger. So they fly in and there's this slow motion video of these enormous hornets flying in and decapitating thousands and thousands of honeybees. So what's interesting is the honeybees, they're so outsized. I mean, the hornets are literally like 50, 60 times larger than that. You see it there. Maybe that's not the right number, but they're much, much larger and they're much more powerful.

But the honeybees figured out a strategy to kill the hornets and what they do is they surround them they get on top of them and then they beat their wings they all generate heat and then they kill the the hornets with the heat of their body that's unbelievable unbelievable yeah so here's this thing that's decapitating everyone in your little village, right? And so you have to jump on top of it and flex. And heat it up. Right, yeah. And heat it up.

Yeah. But the fact that they were able to devise this strategy. See, look how they do it, man. They just grab a hold of these bees and just decapitate them. It's unbelievable. They have these horrific faces, right? These giant mandibles. Yeah, I can see that.

And they just swarm in and they just, look at them. They're just chopping these fucking honeybees apart you you said it nature you cruel beautiful bitch cruel beautiful bitch so 30 hornets versus 30 000 bees do you know why the hornets are doing this are they getting honey you want the larva larva yeah yeah they probably want the larva or they want the honey they want something but look at all these dead fucking bees with no heads. Bizarre. It's crazy. It's nuts. I mean, it's just so weird.

Right. That nature devises these sort of strategies to prevent overpopulation and that there's this balance that takes place where the bees are threatened by something that's very bee-like. So you see how they're getting on top of him? Yeah. So that's their strategy for dealing. They all get on top of him. See, you see a bunch of them now.

And he's trying to get away, but he can't fly away. And so then they swarm, and then they eventually kill him. So you think that actually, like, cooks the wasp? Something that overheats their body. See, Look how many of them are on there. Yeah. There's something that it does where it overheats their body. Wow. I mean look at the size

of the size comparison. There's so much bigger. Imagine if you had that hornet, you know, that was six feet long. Oh my god. Like I think giant insects would be the worst. The worst. Yeah. The worst I think would be praying mantises. They scare the shit out of me.

We've been on a praying mantis kick lately, been watching them kill rats and everything. Hummingbirds. The hummingbird one is the wildest one. They sit by a hummingbird feeder, just sit there not moving, and the hummingbird comes to feed, and they just, ah! Just spear it. Snatch them. It's crazy, right?

They're so strong for their size. Yeah. You know, there was one with a mouse and the mouse is so much bigger than the pragmatus but the pragmatus just jacks this mouse it's crazy it's wild it is wild creature man yeah they're amazing really cool looking though i see them all the time i find them all the time when i'm running i find them here in la right oh yeah yeah they're all over the place yeah yeah no they're they're amazingly cool and very diverse you know there's huge ones they're small ones they're spread out all over the world they're amazing group of animals and

what is this one got a snake snakes this is lots of them it's like a highlight video oh my god look at that he's got a fucking snake i i think we can't even imagine how strong they would be if they were our size no i think they would run right through walls. Oh, yeah. They would. I mean, look at this fucker. He's taking on a giant snake. Now he's eating it.

That snake is like two feet long. And he's a little ass pregnantus and he's fucking it up. He's literally eating it. Yeah. Yeah. Just pulling chunks out of it. They're insane. And they have such crazy eyesight and they're literally covered in body armor with their

exoskeleton. Yeah. They're just, they're amazing. Well, they seem like what you would think of as being like a horrific animal that lives on another planet. Totally. Totally. Like, do you remember that movie Starship Troopers? Of course. I love that movie.

That was a great movie, right? Yeah, I loved it. And that was one of the things in the Starship Troopers, like these big giant insect things. Bursting out of the ground and shooting stuff out of their butts. they were great i love that movie yeah corey rico yeah yeah that was a fun movie right yeah kind of tongue-in-cheek totally but also like really gory and totally and yeah neil patrick harris yeah it's like the genius yeah it's great that was such a fun movie i mean that's great stuff it's like we're really fortunate that those things are small that all all insects are small we would be on the menu otherwise no doubt about it like there are two

like indiscriminately perfect hunters big big you know predatory insects is there a history on the fossil record of enormous bugs uh like isopods and things like that but i can't not that i know of like, like six foot long praying mantises. It's weird how things sort of figure out what size they should be. Yeah, just based on what the environment can support and what their lifestyle supports. Like island dwarfism? Mm-hmm. Insular dwarfism. That's pretty bizarre too. And there's insular gigantism as well. Right. It exists in both spectrums. Like if there's tons of prey and something gets there it gets bigger and bigger if there's not enough resources it gets smaller and smaller do you know do you know about the lions that are in a very specific part

of africa where the river branched off and left them on an island with only buffalo i we discussed this last time i don't know if it was on the podcast or in in the back there but i that's how i learned more about it chatting with you last time i remember we looked it up there's a great documentary for people don't know about it's called relentless enemies and uh it's these enormous lions these lions have evolved to only kill buffalo so the female lions are as big as regular male lions just jacked yeah they look fake they look like bodybuilder lions they do and they just all they do and what's weird this is what's weird this is what's really weird about the documentary there's several packs that live on this island but one

pack has these enormous super lions and then there's another pack of regular size lions really yeah so does that pride of the super size lions are they dominant over the other one or are they just preying on different species i don't know it's interesting i don't know but but i found it weird that one pack evolved and became enormous right and then the other pack just kind of didn't selective breeding yeah if you're big and jacked hang out over here and eat buffalo if you're if you're a wimpy go over there yeah go hang out over there but it's what's crazy also is that how recently it took place that it was i think it was less than 100 years that the oh for sure it switched and that these animals started to adapt.

And they put on, I mean, they literally are twice the size of a normal female lion. It's crazy. And it's huge. But also, they're only eating buffalo. Right. I bet if you ate water buffalo every day, you'd just get jacked by default. I'd look like The Rock. Yeah, you would, bro.

You should do it. It's carnivore month i think those things often rise and fall you know and we're in a state where we understand it what i mean by that is you know so the river changes you've got nothing but lines in buffalo lines get bigger and bigger and bigger eventually they get to the point where they they wipe out all the buffalo because it's not sustainable then the lines collapse so what's cool is that we can actually see that in action right over over our lifespan we can see this generational change in the lions it might not it might not collapse it could last tens of thousands of years but it's interesting that

you can actually see it in taking place it's it's evolution in action basically there's there's a documentary from the bbc about the congo that gets into that, and they talk about how quickly the rainforest had grown, and what used to be grasslands became this enormous, dense rainforest, and a lot of these animals that were plains animals had to figure out a way to survive, and so they adapted. And they were talking about the duiker, that little tiny little antelope that swims underwater for as much as 100 yards and eats fish. Isn't that crazy?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you just summed it up. It's nuts. A fucking antelope that eats fish. Right, and can hold its breath and free dive. God, nature's crazy. Nature is metal. Have you always been fascinated by nature?

I mean, you obviously are now. What a perfect career you have. Yeah, I mean, I feel like I have the perfect job. And I have. From when I was a little kid, you know, so growing up in Zimbabwe, my family owned safari businesses. That was what we did. But when you're a little kid in the bush in Zimbabwe, you can't just go out running around,

you know, so you're kind of stuck in camp. So I'd be the one flipping over logs and grabbing earthworms and catching snakes and the way you just said can't i heard south africa there you go it's the hard way down then it pops out yep it's the hard days you mostly mostly blend in i try but yeah no i started young and and just it's just been my my driving force since i was a little kid that's so cool yeah well it's such an amazing subject and there's so much to look at you will never run out of things to study never i mean and you never stopped learning like today i learned about the wasps and the bees like i've considered myself pretty well read in the field of wildlife that's all new to me i'm gonna go home i'm gonna google it i'm it's just so fantastic it never ends

do you know about the bees in nepal that makeic honey? I do. Yeah, I do. That's wild. And how they harvest that honey? Yes. Dude, pull up some videos or some images of that, because these guys are risking their life to trip balls on this crazy honey. Yeah. What's the pollen that they're getting it from? What are they getting it from that's causing it to be psychedelic? All I know is what you just said, which is it's the pollen that they're creating the

honey out of that is making it psychedelic. But I don't know what it is. I want to trip balls on that honey. There you go. Can you imagine? Go lick some honey off a cliff in Nepal and see what happens. It must be really good. You know what I mean?

If you can get honey other places, but this honey makes you trip, I wonder what the actual psychoactive substance in the honey is. No idea. I've never even looked into it yeah what does it say jamie but uh these guys they've they've apparently just decided it's worth repelling right side of these mountains because it grows off the side of cliffs yeah it's like it looks like big like shelf fungus and like grows out horizontally off these vertical cliffs yeah and these as these guys are harvesting it, they're hanging on ropes from cliffs, getting lit up by bees. And then popping psychedelic honey in their mouth.

It's worth it, man. Do, do, do, do. Do, do, do, do, do, do. Now, when you... You got something? The speculation on it was that maybe the higher altitudes allow this neurotoxin to develop called gray anotoxin, which is in it. It's called like red honey specifically.

Oh, you can buy it? It says the potency diminishes over time. So it might not last that long. Oh, you got to get it fresh. Right, yeah. Hmm. Interesting. White rhododendrons.

Oh, rhododendrons. Click on that again, please. We have rhododendrons, probably different family here, as pretty plants around California. Oh, that's just a descriptive of the actual plant. It might be that specific one in the altitude because it stays up there, lack of oxygen. So it's exported from Nepal to Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong.

The red honey is prized for its purported medicinal value and intoxicating qualities and are attributed to this gray nanotoxin present in the nectar collected from white rhododendrons. The Gurung, am I saying that right? Gurung people in Nepal are renowned for their use of this mad honey. Mad honey. Dude, we need to buy mad honey. That's great. Is mad honey for sale?

See if we can buy mad honey. That should be the name of a band. It's a good name. Mad honey. That's a good name. That's a great band name. Yeah. Mad honey. Ladies and gentlemen, mad honey.

They come out frothing at the mouth. There it is. Where's the mad honey, bro? Let's see. the mouth. There it is. Where's the Mad Honey, bro? Come on. Mad Honey safe? I don't want to know if it's safe. I just want to know if I can get it.

I'll take a chance. Buy Mad Honey. Here we go. Come on, baby. Amazon. What do you got? Madhoney.net? Uh-oh.

Oh, Madhoney.net. There you go. There it is. Mad Honey from Nepal. Or? Uh-oh. Oh, Madhoney.net. There you go. There it is. Madhoney from Nepal. 40 bucks. Or that shit, son. 115 grams for how much? It was like 40 bucks. Wow.

It's up there on the top right. Strongest, most potent Madhoney available. Done. Ooh! Look at that. Add to cart. Order it. All right.

Here we go. Okay, we'll order something. We're going to get some Madhoney. I like that. Now I'm very excited. I'll order something we're gonna get some mad i like that now i'm very excited i'm very excited we're not live too because that way you assholes out there can't just steal up all the mad honey because if we were alive we would never have a chance they would scoop up all the mad honey yeah that's true yeah that's true i'm gonna buy you a jug i'm in we're mixing it in coffee next time what do you think it does to you if you had a guess would you be willing to just sit here and use some mad honey and some tea?

Absolutely. Something organic like that, I'm totally into it. Just get an Uber, right? Exactly. Back to Santa Barbara. Yeah. It says it's a psychedelic, right? Yes.

Yeah. I wonder what kind. It says you have to be 18 to order it. I'm 18. It says their mad honey does contain the gray gray anotoxins or otherwise it would just be regular honey and it is laboratory tested to assure consistent quality and it is safe and effective it says what is effective it's not fda tested i wouldn't imagine it tastes good is it effective right tastes good or does it make you feel weird yeah what are you saying

is it make you trip and how long does it last and also do you have to eat the entire jar of honey to feel anything right right what kind of dosage are we talking about anything else i should know they have not been evaluated by the fda these statements have not been evaluated uh intended for education and research purposes only of course of course dude i'm all about education research there's some r&d going on and some honey over here. Yeah. But it's these parts of the world where people are willing to harvest things like that. Like, how did they figure that out? Who was the first guy that's like, you see that fucking beehive up there? Right.

I'm going to get some of that honey, dude. Right. I'm going to dangle off a cliff. Yeah. Like, good luck, my friend. I was saying this the other day to some buddies. Who was the first guy to figure out caviar? Who's the first guy to suck off a sturgeon and be like this is delicious you know good point i guess they probably just eat

everything they can out of a fish yeah and if you catch a sturgeon man the whole village is eating yeah i mean some are nine ten feet long dude they are so big my friends john and jen they live in alberta and they went sturgeon fishing and uh they they caught them and put them on their instagram page and you're looking at like that is a prehistoric dinosaur type creature that thing is enormous those big scales down the sides and down the back and the weird mouth and whiskers they're bizarre yeah there's something about the way you you're looking at them you're like i don't feel like you should be catching that right looks too Looks too old. Yeah. It looks like you should probably leave that thing alone. They think that that might be one of the, you know, there's a lot of those North American things that they think are monsters, like Nessie.

You know, like the Loch Ness monster. They also have, like, ones in Lake Michigan. What do they call it? Lake Champlain. They have a Lake Champlain one. And they think that it might be sturgeon oh interesting because you know if especially because people have a tendency to exaggerate if you see a 10 foot sturgeon you would think it's a 20 feet long yeah it's a dinosaur totally totally do you know that um this is kind of interesting they actually had documented bull

sharks stuck in the great lakes yes Yes, I'd heard about that. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, that is nuts. Sharks swimming 1,000 miles from Louisiana up rivers and getting stuck in the Great Lakes. Well, they're one of the rare sharks that can breathe fresh water, right? Mm-hmm, catadromous. That's what it is? Yeah, in and out of fresh water.

They go through osmoregulation. They can get the salt out or in, whatever they need, and then go then go into the rivers spend time in the rivers go back into the ocean to hunt the inspiration for the movie jaws was apparently bull sharks in new jersey a series of attacks in fresh water on a river system right but near an ocean i believe right like at a river mouth yeah yeah that was my understanding yeah these people were going into the river and these bull sharks were killing them right like in a river yeah like what nowhere safe nowhere safe well they're really aggressive right yeah they have the highest testosterone of any species of shark um and so they're just they're just jacked up and they're

like yeah they're just ready all the time like they're they're bullish and you know their shoulders are kind of arched over their pecs are locked are locked and they look ready at any time to just snap. Yeah, they found them all the way up in Illinois. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy. What the fuck? Think of the temperature in Chicago right now.

Oh, and the shark swims all the way up there, cold-blooded monster. Yeah. How did they get into the Great Lakes? Well, they used to go up the Mississippi River, but I think with all the locks that are there now in place, I think the idea was that they got stuck there when they were building the locks and then they died out over time.

Ah, when was the last known sighting of one? I think two years ago. Oh, there you go. There's been one found in Iowa, Texas. Iowa? How the fuck is a shark getting to Iowa? Imagine, yeah, we lost Billy? How the fuck is a shark getting to Iowa? Imagine, yeah, we lost Billy. He got bit by a shark.

What, was he surfing? No, he was in Iowa. Right, right. He was plowing corn and got killed by a shark. Billy might be an asshole. In Ohio, they found him. Really? Yeah. Ohio? Sharks in Ohio. What? How did they get in Ohio? I mean, all those rivers are connected. God damn, that in Ohio. What? How did they get in Ohio?

I mean, all those rivers are connected. God damn, that's amazing. Right? Nature finds a way. Whenever I look at those videos of bears catching salmon as they're jumping up the river, what was the first salmon thinking when it decided, hey, I'm going to go up rocks right back to the place where i was born right and and and spawn there put a target on my back yeah oh this gigantic fucking bear waiting to catch me in the air right like those images of bears catching them with their mouths as the

salmon are flying through the air trying to make it up the it's just but it's so weird like what a weird system it's like nature's assuring robustness they're sure assuring that these fragile fish don't make it because in order to be able to make that trip to the ocean and back to get through the rivers and streams to survive you have to be rugged right and so they're ensuring it yeah so they're going upstream swimming against the current oh oh and by the way here's a fucking 1800 pound bear looking to eat you it's amazing it's crazy it's so cool but that that is a viable system is this is the system that's been in place forever right so strange right and and that and

that you know we can destroy that so quickly oh Oh, yeah. We put one dam in and that ruins that whole ecosystem for that river and the bears and the salmon and the spawning. And, you know, we can remedy it. We put salmon ladders in and yada, yada. But it's interesting that everything seems so tough, as you just said. And at the same time, it's so fragile because we, you know, we do one thing like put in a hydroelectric dam and it ruins the entire ecosystem. Yeah, we were in Seattle. And in Seattle, there's a place where you can go, and it's like underneath this bridge, and there's these clear plexiglass walls.

And you can actually see the salmon making their way through and up the river. And they were explaining how they had put dams in and didn't really understand the consequences of putting these dams back when they did. And then all these salmon would go to the mouth of the river where they thought they were going to go up river and it would be blocked. Right. And they would be fucked. And they were stuck there.

And they just died. And they didn't breed. And so the population drastically diminished. These salmon died in the harbor. Yep. Like really wild stuff. Yeah. It's crazy.

And that supports, you know, like that food source that protein supports not just like the bears and the birds but like the whole river is ecology right like the river the algaes that live in the river the little bugs that live in the algae depend on those salmon dying up that river and fertilizing the river yeah so it's like the whole thing is so interconnected and then you know one little thing and poof did you yeah that is really crazy did you see that video of the uh octopus that had captured an eagle that captured an eagle yes it was in vancouver island i know the octopus had captured an eagle and was trying to eat the eagle and these fishermen saw the struggle and released the eagle from the grasp of the octopus to which to me

is like that is a like here it is right here holy crap that eagle's like fuck help bro help help help help hello little help like but to me it's weird it's like why are you getting involved in this right it's not like right like people want to think that eagles are in endangered species they are absolutely not endangered you go to alaska they're like pigeons up there there are a lot of them there giant pacific octopus they're amazing those animals yeah but that's the thing it's like i kind of like octopus more than i like eagles they're much smarter they're way smarter yeah yeah they're really interesting i mean i love eagles too right but you kind of got to lay a play out look if i saw

like a lion that that eagle might not make it anyway look at him right he's fucked he's on the side of the water going what happened what happened the monkey people saved me from the fucking from the kraken yeah he was uh i don't even know how the octopus got them but the like what octopus can do is nothing short of spectacular you know we're talking about uh my friend remy warren earlier and he had a show on television before called apex predator and it was basically they would study apex predators and you know the different strategies they used to be successful as a hunter. And when they did the one on the octopus, he was in here and he was like,

dude, they're from another planet. He's like, that is, the way they change their texture and their color and the way they do it instantaneously to adapt to their environment and how well they blend in, they're so interesting. I think they're the most alien creature

that exists on planet earth yeah i agree there's a there's a new documentary out on i think it's pbs called making contact that's just about octopus intelligence this guy he's a fisheries biologist and he gets an octopus and basically lives with it in his living room like he figures out that this thing likes being petted like it knows how to it's just it's the diverse array of things that this thing can process mentally it's like on par with like what chimpanzees do you know what i mean it's like it's just like it can open jars it can close them it can come out of the aquarium go back into it it'll swim over if it knows you it knows if it doesn't like you like it's unbelievable yeah really weird

right yeah is that how we got this video the octopus dreaming i just looked it up and it starts with the octopus this is living room this is it this is this is making contact this is amazing this video went super viral yeah well they apparently as the octopus is asleep and dreaming it's changing the outside color and texture of its skin in relation to whatever the fuck is going on in its head right that's so wild man isn't that nuts it's just so weird how they can instantaneously change their coloration and their texture and then perfectly blend in with coral right like when you see them like stop on a coral reef and just become the reef you're like what are you instantly too it's like and it's gone

look at the colors in this thing you know it, there are people that actually believe they are from out of space. I've seen that. I was going to bring that up to you, that there's biologists that believe that they came in in asteroids and eggs. You got it. Yeah. That's exactly right. What do you think about that?

Like, look, I believe in life outside of Earth, but I don't necessarily think that octopus came from that. I think they're, you know, they have other cephalopods, like there are other cephalopods that they're related to genetically, squid and cuttlefish and things like that. I don't necessarily think they came from out of space, but I can see why there's science to support that it's a possibility, and then I can also see why people think that seeing them.

Well, there's thoughts about that with a lot of different life forms like spores. There's thoughts about that when it comes to psilocybin mushrooms. Yep. There's like the real freaky psychedelic heads think that psilocybin mushrooms came from asteroids. Right. And the proof and the pudding in that one, so to speak, is the fact that you can take mushroom spores into the vacuum of space and bring them back to Earth and they still fruit. Yeah. Trying to grow weed right now to see what happens up there you want to send a little bit of weed into something

on the space station i think they're gonna test it for 30 days and see if it's viable really some way that's when we get into the weed business us and elon space weed space x right is we elon sent weed into space legitimately i don't think this is the first time it's been done but the story went around because it's not that's interesting because when he was on? I don't think this is the first time it's been done But the story went around That's interesting because when he was on here I don't even think he inhaled You know? He's growing weed in space

Look at what the octopus eggs look like Whoa And so they're developing those intelligent chromatophores That thing that basically the skin Picks up the color and changes to match Right there in the embryo god look at their little eyeballs how weird and look how many of them like an invasion imagine if your wife gave birth to that many people no thanks you'd be like how i have a school it was school for kids first of of all, I'm getting fucking snipped.

Look at that. Look how they drop off. That's what the Matrix looked like. Remember that? Exactly. Yeah, it is. Dude, the Matrix is not that far off. And it seems like the further we go in time, in human evolutionary time, the more it seems like it's accurate.

You know what I mean? It's like we're getting more and more plugged in every day. It's like a combination of the matrix and the terminator totally together yeah i'm i'm very concerned about the future of our species but but going back to octopus octopus and cuttlefish are closely related right and they both can change their texture and their color yeah uh cuttlefish have lack less textural changes they're more color based oh okay yeah what was the one they did where they had them over a chess board and it was trying to you ever seen that where an octopus is trying to mimic a chess board that's cool yeah it's really weird because it throws their system off because it's so many right angles and it's a hard

contrast yeah the one zero contrast so when you look at it like this octopus like trying to like figure out right what to do yeah could you see actual like lines in his color i don't remember i remember it being weird it's a cuttlefish that they did is it a cuttlefish yeah yeah let's see if we can see it here it's very strange pictures are good yeah look at that i mean that's pretty good like pretty fucking good yeah look it's got white squares man right the guy the damn thing's growing white squares started with zebra stripes and then i think it maybe it figured out the squares after a couple minutes that's pretty impressive i like the picture in the bottom right there where the guy looks like he's playing chess against the

cuttlefish oh never mind i thought there was a cuttlefish on them yeah just what a strange ability that these uh animals have unbelievable figured out i mean just how the fuck did that evolve right they're devising strategies in order to be more effective predators while they're in the ocean and hide from other predators right and they figured out a way to change the color and the texture of their skin like how long did that take exactly exactly millions of years yeah oh this is like it's an endless source of fascination like wildlife documentaries to me are just truly an endless source of fascination they're i mean you don't you preach in the choir but yeah i think they're phenomenal. There's just so much we can learn. And it's more than just what we learn.

Oh, that's cool. That's a nice fact about an octopus. But we took how we shape jets off of the shape of birds. We've taken so much inspiration from nature into our everyday lives. Look at this. Look at this. Squidskin. Squidskin. So squid or... Oh, my God. It's crazy looking. Squidskin. Squidskin.

So squid are... Oh, my God. It's crazy looking. It's like a television. Yeah. Like the pixels on a television. I didn't know squid could do that, too. Mm-hmm.

Whoa! This is so weird. Look at that. Oh, my God. They're so strange. Such a strange, strange animal. But the ocean is so bizarre in and of itself there's just so many weird creatures so motion it's such an alien environment to us as terrestrial mammals

do you remember when the tsunami hit thailand and then there was all these animals that they were finding that they had never really seen before washed up on the shores i remember that yeah yeah and they were documenting them there was a whole website dedicated to tsunami deep sea creatures oh i didn't know that yeah it was really crazy like some of these things that are living you know a fucking mile down under the earth and you're like what what are you and they they forget what the number was but they got like 30 or 40 new species or something crazy like that literally like combing through the streets of the cities where these where the tsunami had hit yeah is that a richer source of bio resources of the the ocean of of biodiversity i should say the ocean then then earth oh there's more life in the ocean than on terrestrial land for sure yeah you mean is there more diversity in general

weirdness oh yeah there's way more i i guess it depends how you define weirdness but like look at an octopus look at a cuttlefish you know look at those deep sea creatures crabs um and all the way into the marine mammals and all the way down to the tiny little insects or isopods that live in the ocean i think i think the ocean creatures are very bizarre how about those giant squid that they found on that oil tanker? They had a camera down there. Yeah, and they saw that one come through.

A hundred foot giant squid with the crazy crab legs. Yep. Have you seen that one? The crab legs? Maybe not. Never seen that one? With the crab legs? Is he walking along the bottom?

No. It looks like it has appendages. What? With the joints. Yeah. I haven't seen that one. Oh, my God. Oh, I'm going to show you something else.

I'm learning a lot today i like this uh crazy alien looking squid what's up i found the thing about those pictures they've been gone around uh multiple times after tsunamis apparently they don't have anything to do with the tsunami they are just they are real photographs of real strange sea creatures they just didn't wash up on shore after tsunami but what about the thing that you had saw that's what i that's what i was heard 2004 and 2011 the same photos oh so people are bullshitting so it's like russians i blame the russians go to uh pull up that uh alien squid discovered uh near oil rig so they had a camera deep under this oil rig and they spotted this thing with these insane long appendages look at this oh whoa yeah that's different i thought that's not what i thought you're talking about look at the fucking length of those what are

those things that dangle from it what do you what'd you call those things tentacles legs what is it but look at the legs on it it's like an insect that's very bizarre see how they have like very like obvious bends video courtesy of shell oil company doing a good job for nature yeah right i see the deep there's another one is that another image of it but look how weird it is how it has like clear bends like when you see that thing underwater floating around like that like that looks like an alien totally totally that is that is our exact kind of depiction of what an alien species go to that green one right next to it on the yeah look

at that like look at that thing it's crazy i mean if you saw that underwater you would shit your pants 100 100 and it's 100 feet. Yeah. It's huge. It's nuts. I mean, is it that big? How big did they say it was? Am I making that up? Didn't they say the tentacles go crazy long? It looks like it.

Yeah, they said the thing was enormous, but that the length of the actual tentacles, whatever the fuck it is, was really long. So strange. And this, before they got this video footage of it they didn't even know something like this was real and there's there's like a lot of those where you get these deep sea cameras and you're like oh there's a species we haven't ever documented before so it's in the gulf of mexico they caught it at a depth of 7 800 feet but feet. Does it say how big they think it is? You can just type in that magnipina squid size. Big fin.

Look at how fucking, just how weird it looked. Like the way that the head of it sort of pulsates and moves with the waves. It's like a Steven Spielberg creation. Yeah, there's that and then there's also a puppy. Right. You know? Right. That's how diverse life is.

Okay, the length is up to 15 to 20 times the mantle. 26 feet. 26 feet. Okay, that's pretty big. Or more. Or more. Yeah. Well, giant octopuses, too, right?

Giant squids were thought to be bullshit until, like, fairly recently, right? Correct. Yeah, I don't know when specifically, but they found a few that have washed up and then they got some they got some actual footage of some that's what i thought you were talking about on some rigs um which is just crazy what about octopi what's the largest of the octopi the giant pacific octopus so the species that you saw attacking that eagle that's not a huge one but as far as as far as i know that's the largest one look at the fucker yeah look at that thing look at that dead one that's a giant squid it, but as far as I know, that's the largest one. Look at the fucker. Yeah. Look at that thing. Look at that dead one.

That's a giant squid? It's a big cephalopod. Wow. Giant squid, yeah. That thing's huge. That looks like it's more than 28 feet. If you stretch that bitch out. No, those ones are like 100 plus feet.

Okay, that's what I'm thinking about. A giant squid, yeah. 100 plus feet. They can get up to that, yeah. That is so nuts. Isn't it? A 100 foot jelly creature you know and you know what's interesting is sperm whales will leave the surface of the ocean and dive down to their depths to hunt those jeez that's what their teeth are for

it's a lot of calamari calamari is good look at that fucker so weird so the the large pacific octopus how big giant giant pacific octopus how big does that guy get um i don't know and i mean you know because they're fan out so i'm not sure maybe five feet long six feet long but but heavy like 40 50 60 pounds something like that they've got a really big one in the monterey Bay Aquarium. Really? Yeah, really cool one. Oh, I've been to that. I've been to that aquarium back in the day. Yeah. The legend of the Kraken,

they used to think that that was all total horseshit until they found some fossilized cups. They found some suction cups that were some fossilized evidence of enormous cups right that they think are indicative of this you know real hundred foot octopus or huge fucking octopus well or just a hundred foot squid on the surface you know what like you said those stories always get embellished so even if it was a 60 foot squid on the surface say it was injured or dying and it was alive and the boat hit it and it starts slapping the boat with its tentacles.

Hi mate, it's the Kraken trying to get us. Like that's not going to turn into a crazy sea fable. Can you imagine though if you were one of those dudes that was like making your way across the ocean and you you know in the 1100s or some shit and you jump in the water to wash off and you get eaten by a giant octopus in front of your friends.

Yeah, that's... You see something come out of their desk and it eats you with a beak right chomps you oh it's literally suction cups that rip you apart oh it's crazy and it's totally possible that those things were huge we just don't have the fossil evidence because they're all made out of jelly right you know they're just like they don't fossilize yeah yeah all you get is like if you those fossilized um the uh images of the the the cups is just because it left an imprint right in some sort of soil or something at the bottom of the ocean so you you like these kind of far out there ideas how do you like this idea there's a cut there's a group of people that say that dragons were real, and I'll explain.

So around the same time period, so to speak, and I'm not one of these people, so I'm probably going to get the details wrong a little bit. This is like a Matthew McConaughey movie right now. Yeah, seriously. But so around the same time period in China, South America, Africa, Rome, all these places, images depicted people fighting dragons, right? And every dragon was slightly different, but it was all a giant scaly animal that could fly. So, when you break that

down, you think about the fact that large birds had a hard time being fossilized because their bones are so porous, right? So, because bones, they have like hollowish bones, they break down very easily and they don't fossilize. So, the group that says this, basically, they're saying the evidence is the reason there's no fossils of dragons is because they had bird bones and they were actually very delicate animals. But a handful of these small, a small population of these giant flying lizards existed and basically encompassed all these different countries where they all depicted fighting dragons in their own way and they were all killed off by you know knights or whatever it is and then didn't fossilize what so it's like the science is saying that if there were lizards

big enough to fly around and eat people they didn't have bones that could fossilize so it'd be like an eagle right and so and that's why. And that's why all these human populations around the world have depictions of them, because they did actually exist. Now, are there any stories of dragons written in the times of people that actually had the written word, or is it just depictions? I don't know. Not my field. That would be interesting, because are these depictions ancient accounts told by generation after generation, like, passed down?

I think so. I don't know. I don't know anything about dragons or whether it's real. But I think it's interesting to think, oh, well, the science supports that if there were flying lizards, their bones wouldn't have fossilized. And these have been passed down, stories that have been exaggerated and passed down from generation to generation. And some of them breathe fire, but some of them don't, depending upon... Which culture it was significant to. I'm wondering what the fire is supposed to represent.

Or are they just people are full of shit? Probably that one. Yeah, it's probably made it sound even cooler. Yeah, exactly. Not only did I kill him, he was trying to burn me. Do you think that holds any weight? Do you think that holds any weight? No. Like like no there's

actually dragons i i i mean we know there were large flying lizards during the times of dinosaurs right the only weight that it could possibly hold is that like a few of those somehow survived much later than we previously thought but i do i think that there were dragons attacking human beings and civilizations no i don't but it's still interesting it's so much cooler if there were right and the fact that we know that pterodactyls did exist, that's cool. Right. It would be way cooler if they existed with people. Right, 2,000 years ago.

Why is that? Why is that so much cooler to us? I don't know. It's like I would be, I mean, people would dedicate giant chunks of their life trying to find out if pterodactyls did coexist with human beings at one point in time. They really would. Absolutely. Imagine if there was a 100-foot pterodactyl snatching kids. It would be terrifying.

Oh, my God. Do you know about the Moa Eagle? Yeah. The Host Eagle? The Host, exactly. I call it Moa Eagle because they used to attack moas. They weren't that big. No, but they did supposedly snatch children yeah but but when i googled it i remember i think the the large ones were like 40 pounds or

something like that i don't think they were that big that all it is yeah like an eagle is really light right but their wingspan is still enormous yeah i mean they're they have incredible power like when you see an eagle snatch a salmon with its claws and fly away with this 10 pound salmon right and it's I mean that's insane it is because that salmon probably weighs more than it right right like birds are weird right they sit on you like oh you're not very heavy no they don't weigh anything and again that goes back to that whole hollow bone type thing right that's why chickens are strange because they're fat yeah they weigh a lot like you pick up a chicken like you're like, you fat fuck. You're trying to fly. But bird, like a hawk, fairly light.

Yeah. Yeah. For what it is. Yeah. Yeah. I think, what was the biggest host eagle? How big was the host eagle? But they were hunted by people.

Right. Because they posed a threat. And because people hunted the moa to extinction, giant bird that they that the host eagle primarily preyed on and so the twofold kind of made them collapse yeah large gigantic ancient things eight and a half let's see wingspan uh for females typically eight and a half feet possibly up to 10 in a few cases why female i'm trying to talk that's just the first thing i see i want to know about the big dudes uh males 25 pounds females 31 pounds oh females are bigger largest female could have been 36 pounds in mass yeah but still a big but a 10 foot wingspan is pretty huge oh huge yeah i mean you know talons they've got i don't know but they

had to have been enormous yeah flying knives yeah well you've seen the videos that the um the mongols use where they uh uh they train golden eagles to kill wolves and they fly down them out and yeah it's crazy it's unbelievable they fuck up wolves like they're way smaller than a wolf oh yeah and the wolf has zero chance right they swoop down and grab a wolf by the back of the neck and just fuck them up isn't it crazy the wolf's like trying to get away and they're just killing them and i believe maybe it's not mongolian culture but one of those um you know uh falconry cultures you have to like as a teenage boy or something like that your right of passage is to go climb the cliff and take the chick out of the nest and it's like this crazy process where you know a number of kids die trying to get to the eagle chick and the ones that come

back that's their bird for however long the bird lives or i don't really know the whole process that's right out of avatar isn't that nuts right yeah that's bananas you gotta steal the chick from the nest and raise it uh--huh. Who figured that out? Who figured out you're going to train a fucking raptor? I don't know. Like, how weird are people? Yeah. That they figure these things out.

And someone was the first. You know what I mean? Someone was like, I'm going to go get that baby bird. You know what he probably did? He probably got high off that honey. He said, I'm going to keep climbing. That's right. I'm going to get me a fucking bird and have the bird do all the hunting.

That's right. Everyone's like, you're crazy, man. Bro, you can't have a bird do the hunting. When I was in Venice this summer, there was a guy that had a hawk that he had trained that was sitting on his arm that he would stand there to keep the pigeons from disturbing all the customers that were eating in this restaurant. No way. Yeah, because the pigeons in Venice are so aggressive. Yeah. That this place we were staying at called the Gritty Palace, which is this beautiful old hotel in Rome, or in Venice, rather.

And now it was, like, up until really recently, I think the water subsided, but it was up under, like, four feet of water in the lobby. I saw that. I saw the flooding, yeah. Shit's changing. It sure is. Get out of there, folks. Yeah. But this guy was standing there as we arrived with a hawk on his arm and i think it was an american hawk that he had trained and just to

keep these pigeons on check because the pigeons see the hawk and be like fuck this and they just get out of there would he send them or he was just standing there all day i don't know maybe he did which would have been dope right i would have loved it to see a hawk jack a pigeon while meeting linguine with clams. Right. You're like, well, this is perfect. Yeah. Yeah, look at this hawk. No, these are falcons.

Oh, these are falcons. These guys are these. Planes. They take them on the planes. Are these emotional support falcons? Yes, I think so. That's hilarious. It literally says plane with emotional support falcons.

Here's one with a lot of them on there. What? I don't know if they're transporting them or where they're going. Get the fuck out of here. Imagine being on that flight. You'd be like, listen, man, I'm going to wait for the next flight. I'm not flying with a bunch of fucking birds that are wearing masks over their head. They have execution hoods over their heads.

It does look like that. It's so strange. They have execution hoods over their heads. It does look like that. It's so strange. But humans are so weird in our ability to domesticate and capture animals. But there is evidence that other animals do it too. Have you ever seen the baboons that raise dogs?

I know what you're talking about, yeah. There's a couple different primates that have basically had pets. They steal dogs and then bring the dogs and feed them and put them in the camp because the dogs will bark when things are coming so they can sleep. So they can eat and sleep. So the hyenas just hang out with these dogs. So the dogs become like their buddies. Isn't that crazy? But they steal them and they literally know that if they get this dog and bring it over here and then feed it, the dog will be like their guard dog. This is my pet.

Yeah, which is what we think happened with humans and wolves right which sort of fostered this relationship with people and dogs exactly yeah but these hyenas have figured that out isn't that nuts what the fuck man how are hyenas figuring that out have you uh read any of sapolsky's work on um on on baboons i don't think so ro Robert Sapolsky is a fascinating guy. He's out of Stanford. I found out about Sapolsky initially because I became obsessed with toxoplasmosis. That's that cat parasite that alters the behavior of rodents and makes them attracted to cat urine. it actually makes the rodents erect their testicles,

their scrotum enlarges and engorges with blood when they smell cat urine. What? They become sexually aroused by the smell of cat urine. So this makes them get eaten by cats because the only place where this parasite can grow and breed uh reproduce is inside the gut of a cat so it's crazy so it rewires the rodent's sexual reward system and makes them lose all their fear of cats not just all their fear but they become sexually aroused by cat urine so they run around and actually chase cats like you see cats and it's like trying to get the fuck away from these rats that have toxo. That's insane.

Right. So then it gets in the cat, and then it gets in the people. Okay. And Sapolsky, when he was studying, he found, I think he was doing his residency, one of the doctors he was working with was telling them when they get a motorcycle patient in, check them for toxo. Because there's a disproportion like a giant percentage of the population on earth is infected with toxoplasmosis wow and this

toxoplasmosis gandhi apparently changes human behavior and it makes people more reckless and there's a direct correlation between motorcycle accidents and infection with toxoplasmosis and they think that what happens is look at this rat this rat is sexually attracted to this cat so this rat is like running about on this these cats look at him he's running towards them they don't know what the fuck to do look he's running on top of the cat look at it he's louise he's on his back and the cat's like what the fuck is going on like look at this look at him yeah that's nuts that's so strange they have their their whole brain is rewired because of this parasite so then

the parasite gets in people it makes people more aggressive it makes uh it it makes them more impulsive wow and they think that that's related to the disproportionate number of motorcycle accidents that are connected to people that are toxoplasmosis positive. Wow. So they have this infection and they just take risks and they wind up crashing. That's crazy. Dude! What a crazy correlation to put those together.

In some countries, the rate of infection is crazy. Like in France, at one point in time, it was more than 50%. Oh, wow. More than 50% of the population was positive for toxoplasmosis. And they think that, I don't know what the number is now, but they think that in the United States, more than 50 million people. No way. Yes, more than 50 million people test positive for, yeah.

And is it cat owners? Yes, cat owners or people who live in rural populations where there's feral cats and they step in the shit and then the shit gets in their skin or they eat something that shit and then the shit gets in their skin or they eat something that has eaten this cat shit or, you know, the cat shit infects the cows. Right. There's all sorts of different methods of infection, but the thing about it is it's not fatal. Right. But it does have these marked behavioral changes in human hosts. Wow. Massive

changes in rodent hosts. hosts. Nothing to the cat. The cat seems to have no noticeable change in cat behavior. But the gut of the cat is where they breed. It's nuts. They reproduce inside a cat's digestive system. And the only way they get in there is by

tricking a rat to try to go near a cat. To hump a cat. Yeah. What? What? Yeah. It's crazy. So Sapolsky did a bunch of work with baboons and these ruthless, vicious baboon tribes. And one of the things that they found was that these certain baboons started eating human food because they started eating at dumpster sites, and they got poisoned by poisoned food. The food was bad or it was infected with a disease.

Sure. And the alphas were the first to eat, right? So these alphas died. And so the ruthless, vicious, bully hyenas, or not hyenas. Did I say hyenas? You said hyenas. I meant baboons. I meant baboons.

You said that earlier, too. Did I say hyenas earlier? You're good. I got you. I blame the weed. It's goddamn weed. Baboons, sorry. hyenas i said hyenas you said that earlier too but did i say you're good you're good i got i blame the weed it's goddamn weed baboons sorry baboon populations are the ones that had the dogs right i said that i didn't say hyenas yeah uh you you got you slipped one hyena in there but i got you i i was following trying to keep up with biologists so the baboons raised the dogs

the baboons the alpha baboons that sapolsky worked with were uh eating this poison food and the alphas died right so they were left with a bunch of beta baboons right and these beta baboons changed their behavior they didn't stop being ruthless to each other they started grooming each other and it lasted like several generations so he would return to africa to study these baboon populations right and there was a complete shift in baboon culture. Wow. Yeah. And he's got this really great speech on it where he goes into depth about how extraordinary

it is that they, you know, we thought this was just how baboons existed and behaved and they completely changed. Right. And it's attributed down to one individual. and they completely changed. Right. And it's attributed down to one individual. Well, it's attributed to several that died off because they were eating this poison food

and then the ones that remained were like the ones that used to get bullied. Sure. And they're just like, let's just be cool with each other. Softer, yeah. And they became a different kind of baboon population. It's amazing. Yeah, but they got like really sick and fat

from all the human food. I bet. It's really unhealthy. There's a lot of that globally, you know, these populations of primates that depend on human food have you ever seen the famous like obese monkey there's a famous obese macaque um they put him in fat camp they put him in monkey fat camp no he's pretty funny what was he eating human garbage basically but he there he is yep this is literally on my page yeah i've seen that picture that's real that's real i forget his name oh my god yeah so fat oh yeah and look at the one behind him super fat like they're just they're just eating human trash and getting absolutely it looks like

someone's feeding them because that human trash is cut up cooked corn that corn looks really they are and i think they've restricted it wherever this was and it is sad because it's basically a form of animal cruelty you know know, you're just making them enormous. But it's... Right. I mean, look at it. It's insane. Yeah, they're fat fuck.

He's got a lot of corn there, though. He's not aggressive towards anyone. He's just chilling. Yeah. Monkeys will fuck you up, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Primates are...

Baboons are terrible. I mean, they can be super aggressive. And old primates, I mean, they're sweet by nature, but if you're a threat to them, they can be terrible. Yeah, but those little monkeys will steal shit from you too. Oh, yeah. Steal your phone. Oh, yeah.

Try to get it back, they'll kick your ass. My partner in production and I have this ongoing joke where we say we're going to make a show called Monkeys Are Assholes. And it's just a show traveling the world where monkeys pickpocket and bully people and like jump on trains and steal stuff and well they exhibit some of the worst aspects of of human behavior you know we we see how monkeys behave you know how well chimps you know we love chimps right chimps are adorable when you see them in movies they're adorable and in concept but they're absolutely vicious and ruthless including to each other they gang up and they'll do they'll wage war and they'll go capture a neighboring chimp and kill them yep no they're they're brutal they are i mean they're

they're like as they're like a step backwards from human beings you look at how they behave and you're like oh if we had no you know social order no structure no laws nothing this is kind of what we'd be like but what's amazing is that we coexist yeah what's amazing is that we get to see oh this is probably our past right you know right like what was it like back when humans like you know australia pithicus we were like barely removed from monkeys right exactly around with them like how did we figure it out and they didn't yeah i mean at some point it was like oh if we collaborate we benefit more right and they were like if we fight we benefit more and it's just kind of

diverged from that well that's what's interesting to me is how some animals their progress or their evolution remains stagnant like crocodiles they're essentially the same way they were tens of millions of years ago. Yep. Whereas humans, it's this marked change over the last half a million years, a spectacular change. Yep. You know, or two million years ago, the doubling of the human brain size.

Yep. Like really quickly. Right. Like special moments in evolution. But then other things don't grow at all. But then you have these lions that get trapped on this island. They go, okay, we got to get way bigger. And they go, we got to fuck up these buffaloes. It's the only thing thing we can eat you can't fuck up a buffalo if you're little right and the bigger survived and

those are the ones that bred i mean it's it's so interesting to see how this stuff sort of plays out and that we're studying it and really over the last only few hundred years are really getting an understanding of it even less than that i mean years are really getting an understanding of it. Even less than that. I mean, we're really only starting to understand it on a big picture now. Wow. Yeah, it is amazing. And everything in between, like you said, these crocodiles reaching their pinnacle of evolution tens of millions of years ago and us constantly evolving. It's just insane.

The world, the living world is so fascinating. Have you ever seen the video of these people? They're in a crocodile park and they're feeding these crocodiles and this lady's like chucking chickens like chickens out oh yeah and then the one crocodile bites the other crocodile's leg off and does the death roll and the other one straight even moves it's just like leg comes off and just was like what the fuck bro yeah it doesn't even move it doesn't react in pain just nothing i know the exact video you're talking about it went totally viral.

Yeah. He just rolls and the leg just pops right off. And then he swallows his foot. Swallows his buddy's foot. Like, fucking A. It's nuts. It's absolutely nuts. That is a cleanup machine.

Yeah. That's a 65 million year old cleanup machine. Yep. And they figured out, this is is a great it's like a hammer yeah you know how to make a hammer right right there's no new hammers exactly right hammer is like this is it there's a stick and then the end there's a metal thing and bang bang bang hammer that's a hammer and it's a perfect tool yeah it's perfect yep i mean there's different size hammers you got a cayman yep you got a nile crocodile exactly right that is a very

good analogy i'm going to use that the next time that someone asks me to explain that because that's genius it's this is a hammer it really it's like they nailed it there's no reason to make another knife knives are knives right so sharp edge handle the bottom got it right it's exactly right now i i love crocodilians i think they're just so interesting um i don't know if i told you the story we uh when we were in myanmar we were retracing the ramri Massacre. Are you familiar with the Ramri Massacre? No. You'll love this.

So, during World War II, when the Japanese were holding Ramri Island in Burma, Myanmar, the Allies came in and started making the Japanese retreat. In the course of like two days, a thousand Japanese soldiers were eaten by crocodiles, by saltwater crocodiles. What? Yeah. So they were retreating in two days. I mean, some reports say it was over a couple weeks, but the general consensus is a thousand soldiers were eaten by crocodiles in a very short amount of time. And it was this kind of perfect storm of situations where, because there were all these soldiers, they were eating all the prey.

All the crocodiles were particularly hungry because of that. When the Allies pushed all the Japanese back into the swamps, you know, they started screaming and one scream would trigger all the others, like all the crocodiles to get into a frenzy and it just wiped out this entire populace of people that ran through the swamp. So, we went and retraced these steps to figure it out we're like why did this happen to try and understand it better and while we were there this kid got attacked by a crocodile that was a hundred years old so probably the same animal that had eaten people during world war one or one of them right and we we saved this kid's life like

we got to the village and he had just been pulled out from this croc attack his arm was broken in like 25 places he was torn up he had lacerations all over his leg his ankle his arm and how'd you get him out of the crocodile's mouth we didn't so he fought off the crocodile basically and then the buddy he was with fishing pulled him into the boat and got him back to the village. What a savage that kid is. Totally. He fought off a fucking crocodile? And a big one. How did he do it? We don't know. We were so focused on saving the kid because myself and one other guy had medical training,

so we were stopping the bleeding and bandaging him up. And we had the only speedboat because we had to get to this island. And this is very, very remote. So we got this kid on the speedboat and got him back to a hospital. And he lived. I think he lost the arm. But he was just going to bleed out and die right there in the village. A hundred-year-old crocodile that probably was one of the crocodiles that ate the Japanese people.

During the rat and marine massacre. Yeah. God damn. My friend Jim Shockey was in Africa and they had hired him to hunt crocodiles that were terrorizing this one village. These people had fenced off this area where they could get water and clean, and crocodiles had figured out a way to get through that. And everyone in the village had a bite mark here, a missing hand, a bite on their head. had like a bite mark here, a missing hand, a bite on their head. Like so many people had lost loved ones and friends.

And while he was there, a woman who was washing clothes got killed by a crocodile while he was in the village. And these are Nile crocodiles. These enormous, 20-foot long plus huge killing machines. And these are, you know, I try and dispel anybody that says to me, oh, these animals were hunting people. And I'm like, no, they were not. Crocodiles are. Do you know, I try and dispel anybody that says to me, oh, these animals were hunting people. And I'm like, no, they were not. Crocodiles are. Do you know what I mean?

Crocodiles will hunt human beings. They will lock in outside of a small village or an area that someone's collecting water. They'll spend weeks watching, studying the pattern, learning the behavior, and just wait for the perfect time where they can sink under, sit right there waiting for someone to gather water. In my opinion, they're not distinguishing that from another prey animal. They just know this thing's coming to water here at this pattern, and they will absolutely target people. 100%. They don't care if you're a person. That's the weird thing about people. We feel like we have some sort of a deal.

Well, they're not really after you. Sharks aren't after people. What are you talking to sharks? do you have a treaty with sharks like what are you talking about man you know like people have this weird thing about animals you know and you know when animals find out how easy we are to eat yeah then it becomes a real problem yeah i mean lions of savo right those famous lions they were they were targeting people. The Ghosts of the Darkness. That's a great movie. Fantastic movie. Yeah.

And they were targeting people. They knew that people were easy prey, and they're like, cool, we're going to keep eating them. Once they get a few meals, and they're like, not bad. Yeah. Fucking real easy to catch. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.

It's the opposite of fast food. Yeah. We're like mussels growing on the beach. Yeah. Just pluck them. Totally. Yeah. There's, you know about the

sundar bands in india yes that's a crazy place crazy i i did a bit about that in my act as well back in 2009 my comedy central special where over a period of 200 years they think somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 000 people have been killed by tigers in the sundar bands isn't that nuts i mean it's just like that that number it's all it's unfathomable there was a story that i uh talked about in my in that set where there was a boat filled with five guys and one tiger swam out to the boat killed a guy dragged his body to the shore jumped back in the water swam out to the boat killed another guy did it with three different guys until he got tired of killing people.

That's insane. Killed three people in a boat of five. So these two guys lost three of their friends. Just getting picked off. Shit in their pants. They swim. Yeah. Oh, yeah. They swim.

Tigers are crazy. And what's crazy about the Sundarbans, too, is there's saltwater crocodiles. There's tigers. There's bear. I mean, there's elephants. Yeah, there's Asiatic sun bear there. It's just like, it's just got, it's this crazy little habitat. And I know a couple of photographers that have been in there and they're like, you don't see anything.

It's like huge tall tufts of grass. You know, everything can hide perfectly and it's all there and you just don't see it coming. Oh, fuck. And a bunch of people that are living in these huts and these villages. They have no protection. But you said something earlier today about how your friend projected the wolf howl into the not my friend that guy in that oh sorry that that weird wolf guy gotcha the wolf expert but what i i love i find that those non-conflict mitigations

are going to be the wave of the future right using technology to come up with biocontrols like a wolf growl to other wolves or an alarming sound or a smell that animals don't want to interfere because of territories, I think that stuff's fascinating. It is. Yeah, I agree. It really is interesting. And I think one of the cool things about all this wildlife is that if we handle it correctly, we can make sure that these things are sustainable and they stay around. We can still be like just marvel at their presence. Yeah. And, you know, it is possible to keep wolves here.

Yeah. It's possible to keep grizzly bears here. It's possible to keep all these things here. And we really, really, really, really should. Yeah. keep grizzly bears here it's possible to keep all these things here and we really really really really should yeah because if you go back in time i mean how amazing would it be if we could go back in time and see saber-toothed tigers like incredible to be able to see some of these animals that you only see depictions of or you see skulls of you know that were caught in the

labrea tar pits or something like we have those things right now we have a lot of them and we can save them and we have the knowledge the power the technology the tools the finance we have all the pieces of the puzzle to make it work well i think that's one of the really cool things about what you do is you you broadcast all this stuff and you let people know and you have a big signal and you show people all this cool stuff like that tortoise that you found or like all these other different animals and you let people know like this is this is interesting this is exciting this is and it's something that it's like it's in our dna to be fascinated by other life forms right and it's worth saving yeah you know like like we don't want to be sitting here our great grandkids joe sitting at the same table you know a hundred years from now going man imagine if

we could have seen a grizzly bear. Yeah. We don't want that. Well, we still have them here in California. It's in our state flag. It's in our flag, the golden grizzly. Yeah, but there's not a single one left. No, there's not.

They killed all those fuckers. Yeah. Possibly, I don't want to get down a weird rabbit hole here, possibly in Mexico, the silver grizzly bear in the high Mexican Sierras. What? Ongoing reports of grizzlies. So the same species that would have been here, right, that hung out in the Sierras,

traveling all the way down into the Sierra Madres of Mexico, and then in these what they call sky islands, if you're familiar with that term. I'll explain in a second. These islands of isolated habitat up in the sky where they get more rainfall and everything else. There's big tracts of private land down there in mexico where a couple of these farmers are like something's killing my cattle and it's not a mountain lion um and it could potentially be like

half a dozen mexican grizzly bears couldn't it be getting jaguars though could be but they're saying it's not cats there's like reported sightings of seeing bears really and if you look up the mexican grizzly bear, it was declared extinct 20 years before another one was killed. So they're like, nah, they're gone. They're declared extinct. Then 20 years later, some guy shoots one. Google Mexican grizzly bear.

I need to see this. So what'd you say? I'm trying to find some, like, this just shows pictures of grizzly bears and stuff. So I'm trying to find, like, silver. You can add the word silver in my guide. Why silver? I think it's just the fur color. Oh, so they have, like, a silvery color to them?

Like, oh, wow. It's a black and white photo here, so, you know, it's hard to tell. What? Those are real? Stuff. That's in Chicago, but they're from Mexico. Yeah. So what year is this?

That's probably World Fair time. i don't know wow 1899 this says but take a look at when the last one was killed and then if you if you can find it see where it says they were extinct and it's many many years later we took this one on parade of some sort whoa look at that fucker 1960 1960s yeah interesting so it might be possible that that thing is still alive somewhere there are reports floating in and i mean the 60s that's not long ago right so you know there's reports that on these giant tracks of private land up in these mountains there's potentially a very small population of mexican grizzly bears wow which i think is fascinating and it's one of those things that i don't think it's like so crazy that i don't think anybody's gone and looked you know what i mean like if some rancher who owns

half a million acres in mexico is like yeah i've got a bear killing my cows it's like sure you do right but maybe he does like who's gone to investigate up in the high mountain peak areas of this million acre ranch well there's not supposed to be grizzly bears in colorado but my friend adam green tree who's a very experienced outdoorsman he was hunting in the san juan mountains and he got a grizzly bear filmed on camera. He's looking at it through a scope, and he documented it on his Instagram page. And he's like, that is a fucking grizzly bear. And there's sightings of them from the past.

That was when he was getting chased by one, but I believe that believe that was in either idaho or wyoming places where they're known about grizzly bears his uh sighting of this is when he's like he's holding up a gun and a female kept bluff charging him so you're standing there in the background oh yeah she's not happy not happy fuck that wasn't his gun not right it wasn't no his gun he had the wrong caliber bullet in his gun so it didn't really load all the way into the pistol and he didn't know that until after this altercation so even if he had like pulled the trigger nothing would have happened right no bueno but she bluff charged him she got within like 30 feet a couple of times

yeah did i uh did i show you that that lion that we were extracting dna from in zimbabwe did i tell you about this i don't think so dude this was pretty nuts um so in uh late last year i was tracking this giant lion that this friend of mine had told me that he'd seen in this in limpopo valley of zimbabwe like just north of the south african border and we surmised that there was a potential that this animal, because it was so big, it had such unique behavior in the fact that it was hunting buffalo and even juvenile elephants, might have remnant cape lion DNA in it. Because the cape lion is this extinct subspecies of African lion, it's bigger than your regular lion, and they would

follow the elephant migrations north and then back south, but generally they hung out in South Africa. Anyway, long story short, we wanted to test thena of this lion to see if it had any cape lion dna in it and it was this one individual animal so we tracked it for over a week hung bait every night you know did the collars did everything that you do to get get a lion in and then finally um this massive black main lion came in and i i darted it from about 30 feet away from a blind 30 feet but wait it gets worse i was in a blind so i felt kind of safe right but when i hit it i had dosed for and it wasn't even me we had a vet with us he had dosed for a regular sized african lion so the animal takes off running as we hit in the i hit in the back rear quarters and we

you know trot after it on foot looking for it and we get up to it we're like oh he's down okay time to do our workup and i start walking up to it to check it as you do when you've tranked an animal i get joe from me to that to that television the big one right there and it pops up and he's like hello it's not all the way asleep and i just drop to the ground and just go just go limp right because i'm like crap this he's gonna come and kill me and fortunately he was drugged up enough even though he wasn't asleep to just kind of like not know where i was and like didn't really charge but growled and came forward a step or two and then kind of turned turned off and lay back down again then we got another trank into him and he went to sleep but it was really scary how big was he i think there's a do you want to show him the picture on my page? Huge.

I mean, I don't know lion weights or points or any of the hunting stats. But unusually large. Oh, yeah. Biggest one I've ever seen, and I grew up there. Huge. Did you get the DNA, and did they run the tests? We did, and there was a 14% discrepancy. No, it's not.

This is the tortoise, actually. It was a lion. Oh. What?ise actually oh what yeah why is it running that oh that's weird uh no i think this is just an ad and i just sorry i just used the line it scrolled down a little ways um keep going down you got a fucking awesome instagram page man so cool you got so much cool imagery yeah it's a little further yeah it's further down i'm sorry i don't mean to make no worries but it was huge i mean it was it was just you'll find it it's down if down a little way so you said there was a 14 discrepancy between it and regular south african lion dna so there's something off so there's something off so we

couldn't quite figure out what it was we drew blood we took hair clippings um and the latest is you know it's not again i'm not a geneticist but the latest is that sample has been sent down to south africa to run against cape lion dna to try and figure out what the discrepancy is but yeah there was a discrepancy so there is something unique and unusual definitely something unique and unusual got it there no it's uh let me see if i can find it what um how long ago do you think this image would be what do you mean like how long a year ago yeah no it shouldn't be that long ago it should be just a couple weeks ago because it only came on a couple weeks ago let's see if i can find it quickly it's a big big animal and i've got on my phone otherwise i know this is boring for no don't worry but it's just this massive lion and to have him charge me

on foot it was pretty terrifying so are you talking about something that's twice the size of a normal lion i would say like one and a half yeah yeah 25 to 50 percent larger i mean the paws were just it's just yeah i'll show you on my phone. I can send it to you guys. But it's just huge. Huge. Big, black mane. Unbelievable animal.

We'll get you to airdrop it to Jamie. Sure. If you got the image. Yeah, I got it here. Sorry, Jamie. Maybe I didn't end up putting the actual images. Yeah, that's the first line I see on your... Yeah, sorry about that.

You might not put it on Instagram? Is that even possible? In this day and age? Well, you have so much cool shit on Instagram, you probably forgot. You might not put it on Instagram? Is that even possible? In this day and age? Well, you have so much cool shit on Instagram, you probably forgot. I do lose track. Yeah, man, your Instagram is just all like crocodiles and monkeys and grills and shit.

So much wildlife. It's lots of fun. Here we go. I got it here. Where did you eat that food that you sent me? You sent me a picture of some delicious elk that you were eating. Dude, so the elk came from, remember we were talking about hex? The technology? Those hex guys are friends of mine that created that technology.

And I've tested it in the field. I'm wearing it in these lion photos. And here you go, Jim. I'll just give that to you. You can just airdrop it or email, whatever you like. Explain to people. Well, hex, I actually use give that to you. You can just airdrop it or email, whatever you like. Explain to people. Well, hex, I actually use that when I hunt now too, particularly in Lanai. Yeah.

So it's a screen that keeps animals from recognizing your magnetic signal. Right. Exactly. Right. Um, you think you 100% think that's real? I completely believe in it. Um, especially for certain species, sharks, birds, things that are known to detect. Particularly for water.

Yes. And the water, it's like almost 100%. Yeah. And you can measure it, right? Like you can get a meter that measures the body's electrical impulse, put hex on it, run your arm over it, and the meter doesn't move. But what is the mechanism? Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

So that's when he's tranked? Yeah. So that's it. See the dart in his back? Oh my god That's just a picture of a picture But that's the time he pops up When we go to check on him

Oh my god, dude He's so big Huge, huge And there's some pictures You'll see in a second Of him on the ground When we're doing the workup Is that him right there?

Yeah, we're putting a collar on him Jesus, he's jacked I mean, just a massive, massive animal Do you guys know how Look at the size of his sack Yeah, he's jacked i mean just a massive massive animal do you guys know how look at the size of his sack yeah he's hung jesus um you guys know how old he is um we didn't actually look into that i'm not sure i'd be fascinated by that yeah so but this was crazy but um keep us informed on what that discrepancy turns out to be yeah it's fascinating you know that work takes a long time and it travels around but we've got the sample which was the main objective so there used to be a north american lion that was even larger than

the african lion significantly yeah yeah significantly crazy yeah and that was not that long ago right like when the last 15 000 years ago or something something like that i believe it was definitely coexisted with human beings fuck yeah we had lions yep huge ones yeah and big planes game and everything else but um oh shoot so the heck yeah so the the stew anyway the hex guys gave me some elk um you know that they had got and hex is that that technology that blocks the body's naturally occurring electrical energy and they got giving me some elk and we were on that foraging trip where i brought those porcinis from for you yes and we picked porcini and chanterelles and we had a cauliflower mushroom and we just made this

amazing stew and i was like joe's the only person i know would appreciate this as much as i do are you you're headed back to santa barbara tonight uh-huh i have some elk for you i'll take you up on it dude any day beautiful thank you well listen man we just did three hours if you believe it or not yeah it, Louis. Yeah, it's already 3.35. I had no idea. Time flies when you have fun. I would have guessed 30-ish minutes. I know. Crazy. Really, I appreciate you, man. I appreciate all the stuff you're doing.

I appreciate your social media and tell people again about your show. Yes, Extinct or Alive on Animal Planet, Wednesdays at 9pm. We travel the world searching for animals wrongfully deemed extinct and we're pretty damn successful that's amazing thank you thank you appreciate you man thanks joe bye everybody man that was i had no idea what you're talking about