The Joe Rogan Experience - #1927 - Forrest Galante

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

Forrest Galante is an international wildlife adventurer, conservationist, author of "Still Alive: A Wild Life of Rediscovery" and host on Discovery Channel. www.instagram.com/forrest.galante

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. What's up, buddy? Hey, bro. Still alive. You are still alive. This is a truthful title to this book. That's true. It's ridiculous, but it's true. And it's catchy. That's the whole point.

Dude, I watched your show the other day, the television show. What is the television show? Mysterious Creatures? Yes. The new one? Yeah. And you were looking for some wolf thing. The red wolf.

Yes. But they didn't think it was a red wolf. They thought it was like some mystical beast. A howler. An Ozark howler. Oh my goodness. Which, you know, I mean, wolves do howl. Yeah.

No, that was an interesting story. If you look at the timeline from when this cryptid, this howler popped up, it's right when the red wolf was starting to plummet in its numbers. And as soon as wolves plummet, they call to each other, right? They howl. Oh, that makes sense. It's like, well, yeah, it's wolves trying to find each other. And it happened to also overlap with when moonshining was like a big deal. So they perpetuated the rumor of the howler to keep people out of the woods. So it like checked all these boxes to like make up this animal. Is there any cryptid that you find compelling? Just the, I think we talked about it before, the Megatherium, the giant ground sloth in Peru. Yeah.

That's the only one. I mean, depends what you talked about it before, the Megatherium, the giant ground sloth in Peru. Yeah. That's the only one. I mean, depends what you define as cryptid, right? Like I'm not a Bigfoot guy or Loch Ness monster, but thylacine could be considered a cryptid, right? Yeah, because it was alive. We do have video footage of it and there's been a bunch of sightings. Yes, but now you have all these Bigfoot-esque people, right? All these sort of tinfoil hat guys who are like, it's here, I've seen it or whatever. And so it's like started to fade into this cryptid realm.

And I still think that in Papua New Guinea, there could be an extant population. Why in Papua New Guinea? So they used to range, we got right into this. This is great, by the way. So they used to range from PNG from New Guinea all the way down to Tasmania. And then as people came over, they brought dingoes with them, right? And this was like 4,000 years ago. And then the dingoes out-competed the thylacine in mainland Australia and, in theory, in Papua New Guinea.

But dingoes were never introduced into Tasmania, which is why thylacine occurred for so much longer in Tasmania. However, why in Papua New Guinea is because it's such a dramatic habitat. There's so many like valleys and canyons and things that that dingoes just probably couldn't traverse. That would mean that there's isolated unexplored areas that the thylacine, because it had evolved there, could still be thriving without the competition. And for people who don't know what a thylacine is, it's a Tasmanian tiger. Yeah. It's a marsupial, wolf, crazy jaw, stripes.

Crazy jaw. Really wild looking. 180 degrees. Yeah. Yeah. Cool looking animal. Yeah. Look at that thing.

So when you talk about cryptids and blah, blah, blah, I still think that these animals could be out there. Didn't you go looking for one at one point in time? Twice. Twice. And did you have looking for one at one point in time? Twice. Twice. And did you have any sightings or any, at least, I mean, amongst the people that you were around, or any credible reports? No.

Well, reports, yes. I mean, there's a guy named Nick Mooney who is like an incredible, that's Benjamin, the last living thylacine in the zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. last living thylacine in the zoo in Hobart, Tasmania. A guy named Nick Mooney, who's like a state biologist, like world, like renowned naturalist and biologist who has no reason to make this up or anything. And he swears that he saw one in Tasmania about 25 years ago. And he's like, I, you know, he's like,

I know every animal in Tasmania. I am a biologist. I work with fish and game or fish, whatever their equivalent is. He's like, why would I make this up? He's like, I didn't even tell anybody for a year or two because I didn't want to be called a kook. Wow. And then he came out with it and sort of began this whole thing.

But, yeah, I mean, definitely some credible sightings. How would one even do a survey of those areas? If you're talking about like rainforests and tropical jungles and just dense wooded areas, how would one even find what's in there? And for the most part, unexplored too, especially when it comes to PNG in Western Papua. Well, that's the thing. I think that's the barrier to entry, right? Anybody can go to Tasmania, drive down a highway and be like, oh, I looked and I didn't find it, which is basically what I did. But to get into those places that they could be extant requires helicopter support, refuels, tons of local ground support, you know, like local hunters and tribal people that know the land. And so it's a

big expensive operation to try and get into these places. And then, that's just getting in, then you'd pepper it with trail cameras, baited cameras, you'd do some scent trailing, some sound calling, you know, all these, I mean, you're a hunter, you know these techniques. Well, it's interesting because we know that mountain lions are real, but most people don't ever see a mountain lion. And a lot of people that live in these heavily wooded areas don't see mountain lions. Yeah. Like, it's hard to find one. And they're everywhere.

They live in our cities. Yeah. There's a shit ton of them. Yeah. So you might get lucky and catch one. But the populations are pretty great in terms of, like, if you're in Colorado or if you're in Utah. I mean, they have a lot of mountain lions. Right.

And it's very rare that you see one. Exactly. So imagine if there was a very small population of mountain lions or Tasmanian tigers, and you went looking in a much more wooded area, much more dense environment. Much larger, too. Huge swaths of unpopulated land. And if they were intelligent and cryptic like a mountain lion, which they probably were because they were at the top of the food chain, they know

and they choose not to be seen. Like P-22, right? The mountain lion that lived in L.A. We have a big photo of him out here. The one with the Hollywood sign? Yeah. It's a great picture. I just love that photo. He's dead now. Yeah, exactly. Did they kill him? Did they euthanize him? They euthanized him, yeah.

Something's wrong with him, right? He was badly injured or something? I think he got hit by a car. I think. Don't quote me on that. But yeah, some injury. I think it was a car strike. And he was an old cat as well. What do you think of the Orang Pendek?

I think it's interesting. Have you ever seen that motorcycle video where the guy's on the motorcycle and he sees the little guy run across? Yeah. So that's supposed to be Orang Pendek, right? Well, let's see if we can find that. That one is weird because is that

real? And is this a kid? That one looks over embellished, but if you watch the actual video Yeah, so this is the video I've seen. I think that we love humanoids It looks over embellished, but if you watch the actual video Yeah, so this is the video I've seen I think that we love humanoids like as a species We love the idea of the video. It's not it doesn't play. It's all still frames all of it It's all someone talking about this. It's not oh well that looks so fake. Yeah, it does

That's a still frame of it But that could just be a naked dude. Totally. That totally looks like a dude. That doesn't even look that hairy. But I think... Look at the proportions. Looks like a person. Did they have something to judge it by? I've seen the actual video, though,

Jamie. See if we can find the actual video, because that's not it. Yeah, this is the same one I've seen. I think in relation to the like, the motorcycle and the guy, even though there's some forced perspective, it's tiny. Yeah. Right? So it looks like a dude, but that would be, like, a four-foot-tall guy.

So here's these guys. They're on this motorcycle racing along. Was that the one? I felt like it ran across before. Yeah, that one looks fake. That one looks fake. This one looks fake. I'm certain I saw a different one. That one looks like a full-on setup.

The guys slow their bike down just in time. Yeah, this one's nonsense. What? Well, that was where it ran across the road. The one that I saw, though, I thought it was dark-haired. And it ran like this way across the road, right? Yeah, and it was a very quick and brief video. Same. That's the one that I'm, though, I thought it was dark-haired. And it ran like this way across the road, right? Yeah, and it was a very quick and brief video. Same.

That's the one that I'm thinking of as well. It has 17 million views. Well, maybe this is probably it then. But I don't—it's hard to remember because I've seen so many stupid fucking videos. But I seem to remember it looking almost like an ape person. I think my opinion, and I'm not really— You can't find anything, Jimmy. I'm looking. Okay. But I seem to remember it looking almost like an ape person. I think my opinion, and I'm not really, you know. You can find anything, Jimmy. I'm looking.

Okay. I'm not really qualified to speak on like these humanoid cryptid things. But like we have Khoisan in Southern Africa, right? The small bushman. Mm-hmm. You know, in Borneo, Sumatra, and places like this, there are still very isolated groups of tribal people. You know, and sure, they're talking about proportions of small people and all of that, but what's stopping a teenager, doesn't matter, I don't care what tribe you're from, if you're a teenager,

you're going out there and you're being rebellious, right? Right. From going out with a spear to go on a hunt and deciding to continue going and then he crosses a road, you know, and now it's become a Bigfoot or an Pendek or whatever because he gets startled. Maybe he's doing something illegal or wrong or whatever and runs. Somebody catches it on their helmet cam and now it's perpetuating into this big thing. Or they see it in low light.

They see it at dawn. Yeah, if you think about that island of Flores, though, that's where things get interesting. Mia Flores, though, that's where things get interesting. Mia Flores, right? Well, the Homo Floresis. How do you say it? I'm not sure. I think it's Homo Floresis. Yeah, I'm not sure.

Floresis. But that's the little hobbit person that they've confirmed lived alongside people as recently as, I forget how long ago. It's like 8,000 or 10,000 years ago or something like that. They think it was fairly recent. Yeah. Within, you know, like after the Ice Age. Yeah. Which is pretty crazy.

Yeah. I mean, you know, and there are, across the human species, there are so many diverse looking cultures and tribes and peoples, right? We're all humans, but, you know, Aboriginal people, African people, Indonesian people, Asian people, we all look different, you know, and we all have these own distinct characteristics. And so to think about, you know, imagine being a Westerner or whatever, being an Indonesian, like in that video, and then you see someone who looks so different than your own culture

and you're not expectant of it it's very easy to let your imagination turn into this whole other species this cryptic thing versus like maybe this is someone from a different tribe who's in a different area I mean I don't know I'm just saying it's it's then there's also they keep finding new extinct species of humans right like the ass ovens and all I think there was another one that they found recently that they're trying to figure out what it is but they're very human like right as a homo sapien light but a slightly different branch of the chain yeah with different like jaw morphology

cranium shapes or whatever and yeah I think we used to up until 15 20 years ago only think that there was like two or three species of humanoid Ever right, right and now there's like I want to say eight. Yeah, which is pretty crazy Well that leads me to Bigfoot because I think that all these stories of Bigfoot I think like that Native Americans have a bunch of different names for some creature that lives some large hairy creature And we know about Gigantopithecus. I think that's what that is. I think people just have a distant memory of it.

Like a remnant memory that's evolved over time. Yeah. Yeah. Which is probably the same thing as dragons. And I know we talked about that before. We talked about that. Yeah. And also, by the way, it could be the same thing as thylacine, going back to that, right?

Like they could have been in PNG where these tribes are still talking about them 4,000 years ago and this lore of the striped dog that sounds weird that has this funny jaw has been passed down generation to generation to the point where somebody is out on a hunt or a walk and they see a

flash and they go, oh that was that striped dog my grandfather told me about. Now it's real. I saw a squirrel once in Alberta and for a full second, I thought it was a wolf. Please tell me how that happened. I was looking for wolves. Yeah. I was looking for it to be a wolf. I definitely saw a wolf once.

Yeah. And it was pretty cool. It was either a wolf or a large coyote, but I'm pretty sure it was a wolf. In Alberta? Yeah. Because it was at dusk and it ran across the road. And I was with Cam Haynes and we both noticed it. And it looked like a wolf.

Just too big and stocky. But it was, you know, distant, getting dark. Yeah. Hard to tell, but they're up there. There's a shit ton of them. For sure. I mean, they have tons of trail cameras of them. Yeah, yeah. And they're up there. There's a shit ton of them. For sure. I mean, they have tons of trail cameras of them. Yeah, yeah.

And they see them there all the time. But I saw this thing run across this downed tree. And it was the tail of this squirrel. And for a full second, I was like, oh my god, is that a wolf fur? That's a fucking squirrel. God, you're dumb. That was how it played out in my mind but you had already made it to be a wolf

in your head and if you hadn't seen the rest of the squirrel you had always seen a wolf oh yeah I saw a wolf bro yeah exactly which is what I think people do with black bears that stand up on hind legs and they see bigfoot black panthers you see a house cat run across the road out in the woods and it's black

and the perspective, you don't have any scale and you go, I saw a Black Panther. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, the wolf thing is interesting because it's like, you know, they're reintroducing wolves in different parts of America and now they're trying to do it to Colorado. And it's like, I hope you guys know what you're doing wolves in different parts of America. And now they're trying to do it to Colorado. And it's like, I hope you guys know what you're doing.

Because this idea that you're going to be able to control their populations once you reintroduce them, you're not going to. You're not even going to find them. Correct. Yeah. And I mean, you know, like we've seen a wolf pack. I'm blanking on the name of it now. But it's moved all the way down from Washington through Oregon. Now it's all the way to Central California.

Right. San Luis Obispo way to Central California, right? San Luis Obispo County, Central California. Really? I don't think they're resident, but they've dipped in because we have tracking collars on them, right? Wow. So they've come all the way from Washington, all the way through Oregon. San Luis Obispo. Isn't that wild?

Wow. Yeah. They're amazing. Incredible. And they are helpful to the environment. They do fill a role. And they out-compete the coyotes and, you know, their population's insane. They'll also kill your kids.

They'll also kill your kids. Yeah. They can. I mean, they are fucking predators. Yeah. And they don't have any rules. Like, we are so goofy and naive when it comes to the idea of predators. We think, like, well, we have an agreement, a spoken agreement with the people of the forest. Living beings of the forest, I am your friend.

I used to live in Boulder, Colorado, and there's this lady I knew who was a yoga instructor. That says a lot. I told her. She's the best. I told her that I saw a mountain lion. She goes, well, when I go into the woods, I literally say a prayer and I let the creatures of the woods know I know them and I offer no harm. I am there only to just peacefully walk amongst them. I am not a threat.

Will you shut the fuck up? Go for a walk through the African bush for one night and see how well that does. What are you talking about, lady? You zig when you could have zagged and you run into a bear and you're fucking dead. Shut up. 100%. Just shut up. They eat yoga instructors, too.

This idea that you're going to, like, I send out a message of peace. We've become so jaded in the sense of, like like nature is in harmony and balance that's like this western idea of like everything so harmonious in nature it's terrifying it's the opposite you know it's such a dumb perspective it is it's so misinformed it's just based on idealistic

perspectives it's based on you know this idea of a utopia that exists in the woods it's just not it's tooth fang and, and claw. Correct. It's fucking chaos. It's also based on disconnect, in my opinion. Yes. If you've spent time in the wild, if you've spent time, I don't care if you're fishing, hunting, hiking, camping, whatever,

but like somewhere that is really raw, you're like, holy shit, no, that's not, it's not, you know, all Shangri-La out here. Like it is eat or be eaten. Yeah. Yeah, not at all. No other video of the Orang Pendek? That seems to be it. I found a video that looks less fake, but it's the same video, so it just did a better job. All right, let's see what that one looks like.

It looks less fake. Oh, actually, I just lost it, I'll be honest with you. I have the one that we looked up. It's that video. It's the same one? All the stories, all the Daily Mail, everything goes back to that video. Oh, okay. Must have been that.

I think I might have seen just a clip of it, not that longer. Yeah. Yeah, they probably didn't show the one where he's running on the road itself because it looks so fake.

So it looks like shit. Yeah. Versus the one where he darts across. Yeah, it looks like a naked person. Yeah, it does. Like a person

in a spandex costume. Dude, I went to a wedding in a spandex costume. Dude, I went to a wedding in downtown Los Angeles a couple years ago, and there was a guy probably had a mental illness, but he was like 6'5", walking down downtown LA, butt naked with this massive schlong just bouncing

between his knees. It looked like a different species to me. I mean, this huge beard, like 6'5", massive dude just trotting down the street. If you saw that in the woods going in between the trees from a distance, you'd say, oh my god, there's giants in the woods. I'm a Bigfoot believer

like that. If I had seen that exact guy cruising through a park, cruising out in the woods, I'm a believer. Especially if he's covered in dirt and it's dark out. Exactly. Well, mentally ill people do wind up moving to the woods. It's happened. Yeah, I mean, it happens all the time.

I remember there was this one guy who was famous in Maine. He was a legend that he would break into people's houses and steal their stuff. And then they found out that he was a real person and he he had dropped out of society in like the 1970s and just decided to completely live by himself like he didn't talk to people for decades oh wow and he was by himself alone in a tent in the woods and he would just steal stuff from people's houses when they weren't around wow yeah and like live off of whatever he found or ate and i i don't know like what is uh like woods craft was like is this it stranger in the woods yeah this sounds like it for 27 years that's christopher knight lived alone in a clandestine wooded camp in a tiny in in tiny

rome i don't know what that is, undiscovered and unaided, breaking into camps to steal what he needed to survive. When he finally captured and arrested in April 2013, the story of the North Pond Hermit made headlines worldwide. But Knight spoke only to one journalist, Michael Finkel. In an exclusive excerpt from his new book, Finkel explains the origins of the whispered myth that haunted central Maine for decades. The legend of the stranger in the woods. It's pretty cool.

It is kind of cool. It's cool. He like did his own. Yeah. Look, I mean, I'm sure he had all kinds of probably issues, right? Oh, yeah, for sure. But he lived his own, like he made his own path. He lived off of stuff.

It reminds me, have you ever heard of the Japanese survivor in Guam? Have you heard about that story? Yes, I did. Yeah. Tell that story. So from my understanding, during World War II, there was a crash in Guam from a dogfight. And this Japanese pilot or guy who was in the plane went and hid in a cave up on a mountain in Guam. went and hid in a cave up on a mountain in Guam.

And he spent until like 2002 living in this cave, thinking that World War II was continuing. And he thought he had a better life living in a cave and living off of the jungle because Guam is like a hub for, I think, United or Delta, one of the major airlines. So all these planes are coming in and out every day and he thinks it's World War II continuing. Wow.

Yeah, and there's military bases and everything else in Guam. Was it really 2002? Jamie would have to look, but it was very recent. I thought it was like the 80s or something. I didn't know it was like... He must have been old as fuck. Yeah, he was like in his 70s. I'm probably getting the date wrong.

We'll find it. That's so crazy. How would you know? How would you know? How would you know? And what if you fucked up and went in too early? Right. You know, and it is still World War II and they shoot you. Exactly.

You just hang out for another year. Yep. Just spend a couple more days in the cave. Oh, my God. So what is it? There's two stories, actually. We'll go with this one first. This is the one you were talking about. Okay.

This is the same. This one. 97. 97. Oh, died in 97. He died in 97. Yeah. So so years of service 41 to 45 and then it says 1972 i guess you see that 28 years of hiding in the jungles of guam yeah i think that's uh that's what we're talking about there with 45 so i found him in 72 i just saw a story this morning, which it's not new. Apparently it was in 2013.

There was a man. A man took his two sons after Vietnam came, and they were hidden in the woods for 40 years. Wow. Forced to live off rats and make loincloths out of tree bark. A man who spent 41 years living in the jungle after fleeing Vietnam War makes emotional return to his former home. 41 years. Look at the picture of him. Social skills, obviously, and he didn't know what a woman was. Really?

His father didn't tell him what a woman was. They saw five people their whole life and hid from them in the woods and they saw them. This is according to what I read earlier today. God. Do you think... Oh my God. Like, would you... If you're put into his position? Is it worth living 85 his father was Oh father 85. I just looked at that really quick. I'm like god damn He looks great. Maybe that's how we're supposed to live

Yeah, rat head was his favorite rat head who doesn't like a good rat head. Why is his haircut so good? That's a good question Bullshit, I think this is after they found him and they took him back to take pictures and he was probably showing them what he was doing the whole time. They redressed him. This is horseshit. Yeah, they redressed him. After three years.

They redressed him in rags. Yeah. That's what he looked like for the photos. That's what he looked like when they found him. That's a little better. Yeah, that looks like a guy living in the woods. Wow. Rathead.

He was eating ratheads. What does it say? His son was killed? What does it say? I'm not sure. One day his wife and two of his sons were killed by a mine explosion, putting him in a state of shock. He took his two-year-old son and fled into the jungle, thereafter never having any contact with anyone else. The pair survived by foraging fruit and cassava from the forest and planting corn.

They wore loincloths, made a tree bark, and lived in a timber hut raised five meters above the ground. So cassava is not the stuff that you need to boil and filter and strain. No, no, no. What am I thinking of? That's the other stuff. Probably taro. Taro root? Is that what it is?

Yeah. Cassava is like a potato, basically. Right, right. What is the one that actually has strychnine in it? It's very common in the jungle of Central America and South America. I think taro is what you're referring to, because it's very starchy and basically inedible until you boil it down. Is that what it is? I think so.

That doesn't sound familiar. It doesn't sound right. Taro, I know what tarot is. But tarot, like they make tarot chips. Yeah. Like you could eat tarot chips. This stuff, they boil down. They turn it into like a meal.

Oh, I'm not sure. Smash it and do all kinds. I thought it was cassava. Everything, like when we've worked down in the amazon and stuff in the remote areas of the amazon everything's boiled that's just how everything's like day one you're like oh man this fresh boiled piranha is so good day 13 you're like please god no boiled piranha for breakfast yeah isn't it interesting we've gotten to this point as a society where we eat what we enjoy right instead. Instead of what just keeps you alive.

Right. I was with Steve Rinella once, and he caught a beaver, and we cooked the beaver. And one of the things that he cooked was the beaver tail. And he said that it was a staple amongst trappers. Okay. They really like beaver tail because it was a good concentration of fat. It was a great source of fat. I imagine it's just a big fatty tissue.

It's disgusting. Yeah, I bet. But when you're dying of fat, like you need fat, like you're starving. Right. Like fat is literally what you crave. Then it becomes delicious. Sure. Then it's not a matter of, you know, oh, I prefer fried chicken.

Well, I'm a pizza guy myself. We eat based on our flavor preferences. It is interesting because taste is so elemental to what we decide to do every single day. Oh, I like this. I like that. But that's not the point of food. Right. The point of food is nourishment, right?

It's to keep your body strong and you continue to have energy. And yet we just like we've completely abandoned that notion. In fact, so much so that we have the opposite problem where we're overnourishing, you know, at least with fats and oils and things like that constantly. Yeah. Yeah. It's I mean, if people could come from the past back from those pioneer days and see people today, they'd be like, oh my God, this is wild. They probably think it was great.

Like everyone's fat. They probably, because that was like a sign of being healthy back then and wealthy, right? Yeah. If you could afford to be fat, they'd be like, wow, this is great. Well, I don't know about healthy, but it was definitely a sign of wealth and the fact that you didn't have to work. And so like when you look at those paintings from the Renaissance, those Rubenesque women, yeah, like that was attractive. Like we were psyched if you found a big fat lady. Yeah. Those Rubenesque women. Yeah.

Like, that was attractive. Like, we were psyched if we found a big fat lady. Yeah, big old gal. Yeah, that girl, she's eating good. That's what I like. That's what I need at home. I like some skinny farmer lady. I like some royal lady who gets to just have fruit given to her while she lays down. Last time we hung out, you were doing pure carnivore.

Yeah, I'm doing that now. You're doing it now? Yeah, because it's, you were doing pure carnivore. Yeah. How was that? You're doing it now? Yeah. Because it's January. Oh. January's world carnivore month. I don't know who fucking made that up, but yeah. Why not?

I, I mixed in a little fruit. I eat fruit because I find when I don't do that, I, I did straight carnivore for the first few days. Like I think like the first eight or nine days, but it was, uh, it's hard. I was slogging through workouts. Just no energy? Yeah. And they say there's an adjustment period just like keto.

You know, they call it like the – have you ever done a keto diet? Not for more than like a week at a time. It takes a while to really get your body to turn ketogenic and to start burning fat instead of carbohydrates. And there's a thing they call the keto flu, where it feels almost like you've got the flu. That sounds awful. Not really like the flu. It's a bad way of describing it. It's more like you're not well-rested.

Gotcha. Gotcha. So when I would work out, I would have to really push through these workouts. You feel like you're missing a gear. Sure. That's what it feels like. Just none of that extra ATP to like burn. You can't get into fourth gear.

It's weird. It's like it doesn't feel good. After. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I'm just saying. But when I added fruit, that goes away. That's what I was going to ask.

Yeah. After we hung out and you were doing that, I read Paul Saladino's book, The Carnivore Code. I think it's called The Carnivore Diet. The one where he eats meat, fruit, and honey and bases it. Because he's been on your show before, right? Yeah. So I read his book and I thought it was really interesting, you know, the whole idea of like those are the most sought after foods in the world.

And they are for most cultures, but definitely not all cultures, right? Which I think is maybe a bad idea. It all depends on what the resources are, right? Of course. Yeah. I mean, if you're dealing with a culture that has access to an enormous amount of rice, an enormous amount of, or cassava or whatever those things are, you know, there's, there's different things that people eat where they, you know, they just eat it because of convenience. That's availability and cost and effort, right? But if you have

access to all the food and you really wanted to live an optimal lifestyle, I do think that organs are primary. It's like eating liver and eating heart is very, very good for you. And then eating red meat, especially like lean red meat, is very good for you. It's all about Lucky Charms. I saw your post. Isn't that nuts? That was wild.

Isn't that nuts that that's a real NIH-funded food chart that places Lucky Charms above eggs? There were so many things, too, not just the Lucky Charms. I mean, that was preposterous, but there were so many things that I'm like— Chocolate-covered almonds. Right. That's healthier than a steak. Fuck off. That's candy.

Exactly. That's literally chocolate. Yeah, there's almonds, but it's fucking chocolate, which is sugar and some cacao. Yeah, that was wild. Straight horse shit. These people are criminals. They're all being paid off. They've all been paid off by these big food corporations.

By the big food industries. For sure. Well, it's been proven that there's been a bunch of these people that are like fat doctors that are trying to tell you that there are no junk foods and it's really- Oh, I haven't heard that. It's shaming people. Yeah, big fat ladies that are saying this. The same kind of ones don't want you using the term fat.

Sure. But they're being paid off by these companies that make fucking ho-hos and ringdings and Oreos and blah, blah, ringdings and cookies and shit. I mean, that kind of food, maybe not those in specific, but those kinds of foods where they're readily available at supermarkets. In general, other than rice and some beans and some other stuff that you get in the center of the grocery store, all the shit around the edges is what you want.

You want the stuff that's fresh. You want the stuff like the vegetables. They have to replace, all the shit around the edges is what you want. You want the stuff that's fresh. You want the stuff like the vegetables. They have to like – they replace them all the time. That shit in the boxes in the middle, most of that stuff is not good for you. Of course. Unless it's canned or bottled. I mean there's tomato sauces and stuff that's in the center that's fine for you.

Still packed with sugar though, right? Some of them. I mean there's organic ones that aren't. But the outside, that's what you want. You want where the milk is, where's the cheese, where's the eggs. It's on the outside. It's refrigerated. Yep.

Yeah. There's a reason you have to eat it fresh. Yeah, you got to eat it quick. Right. And it's really like a lot of the stuff, especially like pasteurized and homogenized milk, there's a real good argument that that's not even good because your body's like, what is this weird liquid protein stuff? This is not, like, where's the enzymes that are supposed to be available in raw milk so what what's your feeling on like a protein shake like you're doing this carnivore thing you're obviously getting tons of protein you're not doing a protein shake as well are you no it's not

necessary yeah i mean if you're eating meat most most of what i'm eating is meat and eggs sure that's what mostly what i mean That's a dream diet, really. But the thing is, I feel great. My mind, I'm very clear-headed, and I have a lot of energy. Every time I do it, every January, I'm like, God, why don't I eat this way all the time? The problem is, I'm a glutton. Yeah. And I really love pasta, and I really love cheeseburgers, and I really love pizza.

I fucking love pizza, man. Yeah. Woo, I love bread. Yeah. It tastes great. I love bread. But it's definitely not my thing in terms of like what my body responds to the best. My body responds the best to fruit and meat and eggs and, you know, organ meats and that's really, and fish.

Yeah. My body responds the best when I eat that stuff. Yeah. And when I eat that stuff, my body's that stuff my body's like yeah great this is awesome like i can eat a steak and then go right on stage yeah and you feel fine you feel good but if i eat a bowl of spaghetti and go on stage i'm fucking you're a drip yeah for sure you eat a whole pizza and go on stage i'm so dumb it's like it takes away like 30 of my mind capacity. Clarity, yeah. So let me ask you this.

And if you've covered this kind of stuff before, by all means, we can skip over it. Do you get more aggressive when you're on the carnivore diet? I think you do. Yeah. Yeah. Why? Well, you think about carnivores worldwide, right? Taking humans out of the equation, just pure carnivores, lions, wolves, so on and so forth. There's definitely a correlation between the need to eat meat and the drive for eating

meat, right? And that drive comes from aggression, right? That's why they're fighting. That's why they're in competition. That's why they're at the top of the food chain, right? So this is a personal theory that's grounded in nothing. But I would think when you're eating nothing but meat, which is going to spike your testosterone, it's going to make you feel and act more like a carnivore and less like an omnivore, right?

And be more aggressive and be more dominant. I don't know. Again, you've had people on the show far more qualified. But it's just thinking as a biologist who's studied carnivores, you see that aggression comes from a place of it's cyclical. The food makes them aggressive. The aggression makes them acquire food. Yeah, I noticed that the first time I did it. The first time I did it, the very first carnivore month,

I noticed I was like, oh, aggro. But I also wonder because that was when I went very strict carnivore and I was having a really hard time working out. Yeah. Like my workouts were pretty diminished and I think maybe I wasn't exerting enough energy because my body's very accustomed to

working out really hard almost every day. Sure. So it's like I've I feel like if you just maintain like if you get your body to a point where it's accustomed to like exertion, especially explosive exertion, jujitsu, kickboxing, kettlebells, like that kind of thing. My body's very accustomed to that. Sure. And so when I backed off of it, I wonder if that is what was responsible.

Because you had this pent up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes sense. Interesting. And then I think on top of that, there's the only eating meat thing. And then I also think maybe it's not that that gets you aggressive, but that the bread and the pasta sedates you. That's probably more accurate. Probably more accurate.

Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I think that's probably it. I feel like crap, and I'm not strict on diet like you are or anything, but if I eat a big bowl of pasta or half a pizza, it's the same thing. You just feel like I'm going to go sit on the couch. I'm not strict on diet like you are anything but if I eat a big bowl of pasta or half a pizza I'm same thing you know you just feel like I'm gonna go sit on the couch like I'm not gonna do anything it makes a difference anybody who says it doesn't is in denial you just really like that bread and pasta which is understandable because it's delicious yeah I fucking love it man but I just limit it to treats and I know that I'm gonna get wrecked almost I

almost feel like it's like me going out and getting drunk. I don't like to do that very often, but when I do do it, let's go. Eat a cake. Eat a whole cake. Eat a whole cake. Good for you, man. That's great. But if I have to choose between cake and pasta, I go pasta every time. Oh, really? Yeah. Sweets are okay. Sweets are okay, but I'll have a small bowl of ice cream and it doesn't seem to affect me very much.

I don't think it's the sugar, and sugar clearly does affect me, but I think the big effect is the bread. Oh, interesting. Yeah, I don't think my body likes that. And in fact, my daughters have legitimate gluten sensitivities. They have allergies. Yeah, like they've gone to allergist to get tested. And one of my daughters is allergic to basically like all kinds of stuff. She's allergic to dogs and cats and horses. You have a dog, don't you?

Yeah. But he's washed. Gotcha. He's clean all the time. And they're used to him. Yeah. Because he's, you know, and we had dogs before him. Like they've always had dogs.

So they've grown up with it. Yeah. And that doesn't develop an immunity over time? I think it does. Okay. It does. I would think so. But cats didn't.

Yeah. The cat thing is think it does. Okay. It does. I would think so. But cats didn't. Yeah. The cat thing is rough with them. Yeah. You know, like their grandmother has cats in her house. And when we go over there, like, they don't react very well. Huh. Yeah. Hmm.

Cats, like that cat dander. Yeah. The thing is, you can't wash a cat. Right. Right. Yeah. They don't scratch you to shit. When I wash my dog, he likes it.

Yeah. He's like getting a massage. He's oh yeah man rub my back so my cat's like don't try to fuck you up you try to wash them in a sink my some cats you can though yes some cats are calm i have no allergies to a house cat that i've ever experienced rub a cat in my face whatever right i don't we don't have a cat but i've just never been allergic to one. If I'm around big cats, lions, elephants, or sorry, elephants, lions, tigers, not that I've been that close to tigers, but with lions like hands-on and stuff, I am dripping my nose, my eyes, everything. So I don't know what the divide is there, but yeah,

I definitely have a major allergy to big cats. My daughter has a major allergy to big cats. My daughter has a major allergy to horses to the point where we were in Italy and we got a ride on one of those horse-driven carriages in Rome and we're like, ah, this will be fun, get driven around. And my daughter's

eyes started swelling and then we realized like, oh, she's having a reaction to the horse and it's up there. It's just being downwind of this horse outside outside outside the crazy that's sensitive oh yeah very sensitive so we got off the thing and we had to get to a pharmacy and find some like benedrine or some shit uh-huh whatever their italian equivalent is benedrilla yeah can i tell you a funny allergy reaction story? Sure. So we're working in the Amazon 2019, and we got this camera guy. His name's Johnny, right?

We call him Boogie. He's got these big old knees. He always wears cargo shorts. Ridiculous looking guy. He's got big knees? He's all knees because he's got long legs, a tall guy. Anyway, we love Johnny. So we love Johnny, and we're working in this area that has these parasitic wasps.

And these wasps, yeah, these wasps are attracted to our headlights because we're working at night. We're doing crocodile work. And so every night we're getting zapped like in the neck and in the face, like one or two, whatever. My one cameraman, Mitch, he has like a pretty bad reaction, like puffy eyes, has to get the EpiPen, everything, right? We're hanging out at camp like one of the mornings after everything, you know, well, it's stung up every night, it blows, whatever, but it's not the end of the world. And you hear Johnny, our camera guy, hops out of his hammock and he goes, Oh, shit!

And we're like, look, and he's dancing around, like holding his junk, right? No. And we're like, ah, ha, ha, you got stung, you got stung. One of these parasitic wasps flew up his shorts and got him on the tip, right on the head. It gets so much better, Joe. Oh, no, it planted something in there? No, not quite. So he's dancing around, he's howling about his dick, and we're laughing our asses off

and making fun of him, right? As you do with a group of guys in the jungle on a field expedition. And we have this medic named Josh. He's, like, the calmest, quietest. You know, he's, like, your typical, like, military medic. Like, he's never going to, like, get upset or excited because it just makes everybody get upset and excited, right? And Johnny, after a couple hours, he goes to Josh,

and he's like, hey, man, like, can you take a look at this? And we're all, like, we're in camp watching this go down. And we're like, yeah, we got to, we gotta just keep an eye on what happens. And Johnny goes sort of around the trees, and Josh is with him. He pulls his pants down. We can't see anything. We just see Josh's back, and Josh goes, oh, shit! Like, this is coming from the medic,

and so we just burst into laughter, and we're like, we gotta see this thing, Johnny. What is it? Like, we gotta see it. Dude, Joe, it looked like a baby's arm holding an apple. Like, it was just, the head was the size of a softball. That big? It was that big? So big.

And Johnny was like, what am I gonna do? Like, I've never, my penis is never gonna work again. Oh my god. And we're like two days from anything. And so, anyway, the medic treated it, he gave it a shot, whatever, whatever, but just... Did it work? Yeah, it a shot whatever whatever but just did it work yeah it did it did it johnny said it took like three weeks for it to come down all the way

oh but it went down the majority of it i wonder if he jerked off during those three weeks i'm certain he did yeah oh my god imagine dude i've never seen anything like it imagine if like when you nutted you screamed in pain? Because you're stupid enough? I shouldn't have heard the story and I shouldn't bring it up. You should. Yeah, definitely bring it up. It said it was a 12-year-old boy shoved a thermometer

down the hole while he was masturbating and it got stuck. You're right, Jamie. You should not have brought that up. So they had to go and do a keyhole surgery to get it out because it would have fucked up the organs or something crazy. Oh my god, oh my god you dummy. What kind of crazy kid is that? What's he gonna go up? What's he gonna be like when he's 30? Too much involved in this story. He's 12, he's stuck with thermometers in his dickhole.

Dude, while we're on the dickhole conversation, do you know about the candiru? Yes. Okay. Do you know how they have to get it out? No. Okay, so for those that don't know... Chinese boy 12 shoved a thermometer down his... Look at it. I like how they write thermometer in all capital letters.

Down his penis needs it surgically removed from his bladder after pushing it too far. Dude. Oh, Jesus. He dealt with it for nine hours. But look at this. Boy opted to insert the object into, he opted. Opted. Ah, he opted.

As opposed to. That's like, you know, choosing your insurance policy. He opted to insert the object into his urethra. A risky practice. It's risky. It's called sounding. It's got a name. So it's so common.

People are so crazy that they're just been stuffing stuff up their dick so many times they can't even have a name for it. When it got stuck, he endured agonizing pain for nine hours before seeking help. Chinese medics extracted the tool by cutting a tiny surgical hole in his bladder. Yikes. It definitely didn't come from any app. I'm sure that idea. I'm sure he didn't get the come from any app. I'm sure that idea. I'm sure he didn't get the idea from an app.

From an app? Where would a 12-year-old get an idea like that? Oh, like TikTok? He's saying it's a TikTok thing. I'm not saying that. Their TikTok is very regulated. I've never used it. You're right. We're just talking out of our ass.

That's a good point. Very good point. Kandiru. Yeah. You should explain what it is. It swims up your dick hole. So it's this tiny parasitic catfish in the Amazon. And what it does is it's attracted to urea, which comes out of fish's gills. And it's a parasite.

So it swims into fish's gills and lodges its spines into those fish's gills to feed. But this nasty little bugger, because it's attracted to urea, will swim up your urethra. Now, that's all fine and well, if you will, but it has reversed facing spines. So once it swims in, there's no swimming back out. The same spines it uses to lodge into fish gills. No, that's a lamprey. That's nonsense. But once it's lodged in, the only way to get it out is to butterfly and lift it out.

Oh, God. I'm not even going to say it. How often does that happen? I don't think it's very regular, but yeah. I can tell you when I'm in the Amazon, I'm like peeing back and forth just because I'm scared something will like swim up the stream. Yeah, when you pee, like, are these people peeing with pants on? I think so, yeah. Or like, do they wear shorts and it still swims up the legs and gets in there?

I mean, I think it's just incredibly unlucky. But it's happened a lot more than once. It's a, you know, a relatively regular thing. Oh, is that an operation? Oh, look at that Reddit picture. That's not real. That's not real, but that's funny. But this one is probably.

It's on its leg, not anything. Get out of here. Oh, get out of here. I don't want to see this. Yeah. This is a fun show. Yeah, everything's trying to kill you. Everything's trying to kill you.

But I go into the forest With a peaceful intention I am your friend I'm here to wander Do not eat me Please fish don't swim up into my urinary tract Plus I only eat vegetables So they know that I'm in harmony Well so does a deer bitch

Deer only eat vegetables too They fuck them up She's gonna be listening to this podcast and be very upset She does not listen to this podcast and be very upset She does not listen to my podcast. I will guarantee you that She's nice. Yeah, just kind of wacko. Yeah, a lot of them yoga people are wacko Yeah, like something about like that path the path to satnam The path is you know the self enlightenment. Yeah. Yes. Yep. I live in Santa Barbara. Trust me. Oh yeah.

There's a lot of them up there. A lot of rich ladies. They try to find meaning after the kids leave the house. Yeah. And they really get into yoga. Right. Or into their yoga instructor sometimes. Oh, there was a yoga instructor that I knew that was doing that.

He was banging all these ladies. Yeah. He was just, he was like so cheesy. Like I couldn't believe it worked. Like the ponytail and like the whole thing. Yeah, he didn't have the ponytail, but he was like, he would like sing yoga songs in class, but he was like really into himself. It was like. Yikes.

You know, people just like give off a vibe. Yeah. Like, hey bro. Yeah, that's. You know, like almost like a televangelist-y vibe. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

I'm sure he'd be a great cult leader. Yeah. No, not really. No.ist-y vibe. Yeah, I'm sure he'd be a great cult leader. Yeah, no, not really. No. Only for dummies. Yeah. It wouldn't work. You gotta, like, to be a really good cult leader, like, I think it's like a balancing act. Well, you have to trick everybody into your thing, right?

Which takes some smarts, for sure. There's a lot of them out there, though. Yeah. I don't think you have to be that good to be a cult leader. No? Like, you could be pretty shitty at it. How do you find your followers? That's a good question.

I think you start off being a self-help guru. Oh, that makes sense. Self-help guru, and then you eventually move people into some sort of a communal situation. Yep. Like, we don't need society, man. Right. We can do it better. Yeah.

I'll be your leader. And then he's banging everybody's wife. Everybody. And then he wants all your money. Doesn't sound terrible. It does if you're the guy whose wife is getting banged. Like, honey, I thought we were just going to be peaceful out here living off the land. Well, you know, he wants to bless me.

Again, on Tuesday. With his sex. Parasitic wasps freak me out. And there's a shitload of them. There's so many. There's so many species of parasitic wasps. Yeah out. And there's a shitload of them. There's so many. There's so many species of parasitic wasps. Yeah. That's what's really fascinating.

And not only just parasitic in terms of entering humans, but also they inject their larvae into plants and logs and shit. And can manipulate certain spiders, like the brain process. And tarantula wasps, which we have in the States, are incredible. They can come down, lay eggs into a tarantula. That manipulates the behavior of the tarantula, something about the chemicals and the brain chemistry, and then the eggs hatch out of the thing. I thought it kills the tarantula first.

It does. No, not first. Eventually. Oh, I was confused. Well, I know, I think I'm thinking of something else. I might be mixing them up with another one, too. There's so many. Yeah.

There are so, I read there's like a hundred. There's like a hundred different, like, parasitic wasps. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Nuts. Like, it's a, what a weird thing that, like, nature has invented this creature that shoves its babies into some other creature's body with a needle. Yep.

Look at this. So this is the... This is a tarantula hawk going after a tarantula. Yeah. It's also parasitic. Stinging it from the bottom. Yeah, that's... I've never seen a tarantula stand up like that.

Yeah, he's like jacked. Getting a flow. He's like, oh boy, I'm confused. So look how it crawls on its back and then jabs it in the body. That's what's nuts.

Look how it reaches up. Oh, I think he's dead. I think you're right. It does kill that. Oh, you're right. Watts will leave a single egg inside the spider's belly

once it's paralyzed. What a fucking nutty situation. It's changing the oil. Yeah. Well, there's so many of them, and then there's even more bizarre shit. See that? When the egg hatches.

The wasp larva will eat the spider from the inside out. Yikes. And then there's even weirder shit, which is fungus. Yes. Fungus that like- I saw that for the first time recently in India. Really? I saw that for the first time recently in India. Yeah, I was finding these hollowed out, I forget, like exoskeletons of mantises and all kinds of beetles that had mushrooms growing out of their heads. Like weird tentacles.

Yeah, and it was, you know, I only know about it what I've read about it and seen. I've never, it's not something I've been very deeply involved in. It's not something I've been very deeply involved in, but the idea that a mushroom can manipulate the brain chemistry of a living creature, it's unbelievable. It's wild. Not only does it manipulate it, but when they hatch, when the spores explode to infect all the other bugs around them. Right. Which is crazy. It's a vast area, too. And it's all transmitted by air.

So they just have to be around, and then it's like, whoop, now I got a mushroom growing out my brain. And what's also wild is that ants realize this is happening. So they will drag an infected ant far away from their colony. Oh, I didn't know that. So that it explodes on its own. That's fascinating. Yeah. I didn't know that.

They figured it out. How do ants fucking communicate? Because if you see leafcutter ants, which I have in my neighborhood, leafcutter ants colonies that they have underground where there are these sophisticated systems of ventilation and they're literally fermenting leaves down there. It's like, what? I know. How do you know? How are you doing this? How are you building a village?

It's like what I know how do you know how are you doing this? How are you building a village and and like some may like just recently? I saw this thing where these ants made a rope to cross this It's incredible they linked arms. Yeah, someone's gonna drown someone has to go down They have to think about that when they let go yeah like some shit It's not like everyone's not gonna make it, but they don't but that's what's so amazing about things like ants and bees is that hive mind. They don't all have to make it. Right. Right.

And that's like it's for the greater good of the hive. And like. Yeah. Here it is. Yeah. This is the same exact one. This is fucking bonkers, man. Army ants build a bridge to invade wasp nest.

Yeah. Look at that. And see the eggs? They're carrying the wasp eggs out of the nest. Oh, my God. What a bunch of creeps. We were... I do a podcast called The Wild Times, and we were looking at this on The Wild Times podcast,

and everybody that commented was like, there's a rope in the middle of that. That's not real. There's no rope. No, look. You can see right through it. That's what's crazy. Yeah. That is just all ants.

That is just bodies. That is just ant bodies working in this hive mind to figure out how collectively to accomplish a task as one unit. It's unbelievable. Why do they make such a long rope? That's pretty stupid. I guess they probably had to just swing over there. I don't know.

How did they swing over there? How is it connected? How are they doing that? I don't know. Imagine how fucking strong the ants at the very top that are hanging on to the board. Holding the whole. Holding a giant rope of ants. Yeah. That are all a bunch of egg stealers.

You can see right through it. Look at that. It's unbelievable. It is nuts. Yeah. It's really nuts. What a crazy organism. Yeah.

It's fascinating. And the fact that they're the biomass of ants, I think the biomass of ants on Earth is equal to the biomass of humans. Oh, really? I thought it was actually more. I thought there was more biomass of ants than there are of human beings. Wow, is that

true? Let's find out that. It's pretty impressive enough with 8 billion fatso humans. Correct. And these little bitty things. These little tiny things weigh as much as us. If they weigh more, that's even crazier. I used to work on a project. I don't know what that number is.

Hold on. I'm trying to understand it. It says the ant biomass is around 20% of human biomass, or the mass of carbon from nearly 8 billion humans now living. That's why I don't understand what it's saying. Mass of carbon? I don't know why I brought that up. The ant biomass also weighs around 12 megatons, which is about the equivalent of two pyramids of Giza

on a scale. That's cool. That's two pyramids of ants. This other thing says ants make two-thirds of all the insects. Really? It's only 20% of the biomass. Human biomass. Oh. I was totally

wrong. Sounds better when you say as much. Yeah, let's go back to the other way. Even 20% when you see how fucking little they are. Yeah, I know. I mean, what are they, what, one millionth of a human? If that, right. Yeah. They weigh nothing. I used to work at the

California Channel Islands in front of Santa Barbara where I live. And one of the projects that I worked on for way too long was ant eradication. So they were trying to restore the Channel Islands back to, you know, before human settlement and really just rewild them and keep them pristine. And the most difficult species to remove, hands down, were the Argentinian ants. most difficult species to remove hands down were the Argentinian ants. So all over California, we have these invasive Argentine ants and they, you know, on one boat or another, they'd made it over to the islands. And it's just like, how do you remove that? You know, it's easy to remove pigs or sheep or whatever from an island because it's a

closed off area. But trying to remove millions of ants, I mean, it's just, it's massively difficult. The Channel Islands, I think is the Channel Islands, used to be a big bow hunting destination. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, because they used to have a bunch of different species that someone had brought over there at one point in time, like elk and deer, and they killed them all from a helicopter.

So there was elk on Santa Rosa, and then Santa Cruz, which is the biggest one, had sheep and pigs. I think goats as well back in the day. And then, you know, even Catalina still has bison. And for a while they opened up. They're like farmed, right? They're not wild. Yeah, they're not wild.

I mean, they're like semi-wild, right? They just reproduce, but it's all very managed. But for a while they opened up like tag hunting, like come out and get your elk and get your pig. Yeah. But then eventually the state just said like, it's, we got to do something about it. And this was kind of interesting. The pigs on Santa Cruz Island. Have you heard about the Judas goat?

Do you know what that is? Yeah. Yeah. So they did explain that. Yeah. The Judas goat is what happens when you can't, they did it in Galapagos, right? I think so. I think that might be where it started.

But, um, the Judas goat is a process in which say you're trying to eradicate goats from an island. Well, the goats wake up. They get aware that there's a helicopter buzzing overhead and somebody's shooting them, and they all start scattering and getting scared. And it becomes harder and harder to get the last 10%. So 10% of the work is eradicating 90% of the animals, and then 90% of the work is getting the last 10% of the animals. of the work is eradicating 90% of the animals and then 90% of the work is getting the last 10% of the animals. So they do this thing called a Judas goat where they go and catch

a goat, put a collar on it and then let the goat go and the goat finds its friends 100% of the time and they mow down all of the other animals and leave the Judas goat who then pops over to the next group of goats. So you're a real shitty friend if you're the Judas goat. Or you're just dumb

as shit and you're being manipulated by people. True. I think they castrate them too. Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure, yeah. But anyway, yeah, so the Channel Islands, they got rid of all the sheep, got rid of the goats, if there were goats, I'm not sure, turkey, a few other things. But they couldn't get rid of the pigs. And so they brought in hunters for a while.

They opened it up. Pig guys came and shot them. And then they tried to get guys, I think actually from here, from Texas to come and fly and shoot the pigs and stuff. And the Channel Islands, Santa Cruz Island in particular, is so canyonous and difficult, they're having a really hard time. And for whatever reason, they brought in these helicopter pilots from New Zealand who fly the fjords down there. And I was lucky enough to work on some of these projects. So I was actually in those helicopters going through these slough canyons and stuff. It was really cool.

I wasn't doing any pig shooting. I was going in for ants, like I said, and weeds and some other stuff. And, yeah, and the helicopter pilots and shooters from New Zealand were the ones who managed to take out the final pigs on Santa Cruz. Pigs can have three litters a year. Yeah. That's what's nuts. Well, we have, what is it, six million pigs in the United States now? They came from 11. Is that real? Yeah. That's what's nuts. Well, we have, what is it, 6 million pigs in the United States now? They came from 11.

Is that real? Yeah. Wow. 11 pigs that were dropped off in the Florida, I think mainland Florida, maybe the Keys, but 11 pigs is what they believe. And that was by the Spaniards, right? Correct. Yeah.

Nuts. Isn't that crazy? I mean, that's crazy, but maybe it's even crazier the fact they brought smallpox as well and killed 90% of the Native Americans. Yeah, that's nuts. That's a little worse. Yeah, when you tell people that, because so many people, most people are aware there was a genocide of Native Americans. Sure. But most people are not aware that most of it was due to disease.

Right. When I had explained that to someone that it was 90% of the people were killed by smallpox We're like what and it was purposely introduced disease correct. I don't believe so. Oh, it just came. Yeah with people Yeah, I just came with people interesting I don't think they really understood how to introduce diseases back then like the idea that They thought that you could have it on a blanket and yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't think that's true Interesting, let's find that out. I believe that myth has been busted. But they know now that that's what killed off the Mayans.

Yeah. Because there was always this big mystery. Like, where did the Mayans go? Where did these people go? They had this incredible civilization, so complex. Yeah. Mimic the cosmos and their architecture. There's no evidence that the scheme worked.

Oh, this is regarding the blanket. Infection of the blankets was apparently old, so no one could catch smallpox from the blankets. Besides, the Indians just had smallpox. Smallpox had reached Fort Pitt and had come from Indians, and anyone susceptible to smallpox had already had it. Yeah, I just think it was just a thing that people had, and they brought it over, and then it killed everybody. It also killed everybody in the Amazon. And people here in the Americas had no tolerance to it, right? Because they hadn't evolved alongside the disease, which had evolved over thousands of years. Exactly. They had no natural immunity to it. Right. And then that's also what they believe

was responsible for decimating the Amazon. Like they think the Amazon had millions of people. The Incans and the Mayans and all those things. All those people. I didn't realize that. That's really interesting. The really wild stuff that's being done on the Amazon is LIDAR. Oh, I know. Where they're finding all this evidence of these ancient structures that were just overcome by the jungle.

Have you seen the Honduran lost city of the monkey god? Yes. Yes. So cool. There's a like legit full civilization in Honduras. Like a bustling city that they found in LIDAR

two or three years ago. Using LIDAR two or three years ago. Just empty. Empty. Gone. But like a full scale city. Not like a village

or a town. Like tens of thousands. Yeah. Look at that. Fucking wild. Yeah. But it totally makes sense, man. If you bring in smallpox. I mean smallpox kills like 90% of the people that, look at that. Fucking wild. Yeah. But it totally makes sense, man, if you bring in smallpox.

I mean, smallpox kills like 90% of the people that get it. Right, right. So it just fucking decimated the populations of these places where these European settlers made through. That's the whole story behind the lost city of Z, you know. Well, I knew that the city went away and Percy went to look for it with his son and his son's friend, blah, blah, blah. But I didn't realize that the idea that smallpox had wiped it out was the reason behind it. Well, the theory behind it is, and all sorts of diseases, not just smallpox, but that when the Europeans first came through and they first reported about these immense cities. They were there.

Yeah, they were there. Yeah. And so then when people came back like 100 years later, they're like, this is bullshit. Right. Because the jungle would just overcome everything. And it can in so little time. So little time. It's crazy. The rate of growth when the jungle's left alone is unbelievable.

And then there's the weirdness that the jungle itself is actually man-made. Whoa, hold on. I don't know about this. Yeah, you didn't know that? No, tell me. Yes. Most of the plants that are overwhelming the rainforest are from agriculture. From ancient civilizations. Yeah. I think it's like the ice cream bean tree and a bunch of other different trees. But these trees were all trees that had been grown. Yes, it is actually man-made. One of thousands of earthworks built by remarkable but little known ancient

societies. The Amazon prior to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas in 1492 is commonly depicted as a pristine wilderness dotted with small, simple communities. Wow. The Amazon rainforest created. Yeah, click on that one. The supposedly pristine, untouched Amazon rainforest was actually shaped by humans. Over thousands of years, native people played a strong role in molding the ecology of this vast wilderness. So these trees that overwhelm the rainforest, they were planted. They're cultivated.

Yeah, and then they just run amok. Interesting. Yeah, they're just really fertile. And the ground, they had developed this type. Was it called terra prata? Terra prata? Is that what it's called? They had developed a very specific type of soil that they actually.

Oh, yes. I know about this. And we've been unable to replicate it. Exactly. Yes, I do know a bit about that. Yeah. But I guess the difference. Terra prata. Yeah, that replicate it. Exactly. Yes, I do know a bit about that. Yeah. But I guess the difference... Terra preta.

Yeah, that's it. Terra preta. But I guess the difference being those were all native plants, right? So while the Amazon may have been cultivated by different tribes in the Amazon, they're not getting those plants or trees from anywhere but the immediate surrounding area, right? I mean, maybe not immediate, but within the South Americas. I'm not exactly sure. Right?

Because it's not like they're importing olives from Spain, right? Right. They're using the resources. I don't think they're saying they're invasive. I'm just thinking they're cultivated. But that's fascinating. Yeah, it's amazing. Because you certainly don't think of that.

And you don't think of, at least in today's world, I don't think of the Amazon as being populous. I mean, I'm not talking about Manaus and cities. I'm talking about the wild Amazon. You don't think of civilizations being able to impact that much vastness. Graham Hancock thinks there's 20 million people living in it. 20 million? Yeah.

Wow. That's unbelievable. He thinks it is a vast society. Wow. It was filled with human beings and structures. And this is all being like they have only used LIDAR in a very small percentage of the Amazon. Of course, yeah. And they're showing all sorts of structures and irrigation systems and grids that indicate cities and blocks. It's wild stuff, man.

I mean, it sort of makes sense in the sense of the abundance of resources down there, right? It's easy to grow a population when you have so much natural resources. Everything that you plant grows. You know, there's sort of there's another side of that argument that I've heard paleontologists make where like when things are too easy, people don't evolve, right? That's a different side of that coin. But if you think about it from like a logical standpoint of when things are easy, it's easy to increase your population.

And, you know, when you're not fighting for survival every day because there's coconuts and palm trees and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's easy to reproduce and have more kids and grow a society versus when you're spending half of your life just trying to get by. That's an interesting argument that when things are easy that people don't grow or evolve. That seems weird to me because it would seem to me that once your resources were taken care of, once you have food and shelter, you have more time to think.

So you have more time to make life convenient, more time to sell goods that would be valuable to people, more time to improve and innovate on those goods. But the argument is when things are too easy, you don't push the status quo. So because there are so many abundant resources, you have no need to develop tools and technologies that advance society. So the argument, I don't remember the scientist that said this, is basically if you look along the band of the equator, those are at this time, and this is an older publication, I believe, those were the least developed societies in the world. As you get further away from the equator, you know, up into the Arctic, not the Arctic,

but like up into Scandinavia and so on and so forth, you get more and more advanced civilizations because when there's a hard winter coming or it's just harder to survive, even though there's abundant resources, you need to adapt and overcome and develop in order to prepare for that winter, in order to prepare for a famine time period versus when it's all just available to you at any time. The reason why that doesn't make any sense is Egypt. Sure. Yeah.

That doesn't make any sense because that's the absolutely most sophisticated culture pre what we understand of history. Yeah. True. But not on the equator. It is quite far from the equator. It is far from the equator, but it's also like very, very lush. Very.

Like the Nile Valley, they think 9,000 plus years ago was like extremely lush, which is one of the reasons why they were able to reach this high level of sophistication is because they had access to resources. Which aligns with the idea that the Amazon had the same thing. Yeah. And I agree with you, by the way. Which aligns with the idea that the Amazon had the same things. And I agree with you, by the way. I think that if you have an abundance of food and resources, you have a better ability to create. Yeah, that makes more sense to me.

But I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think both things could exist. I agree. Like you could have it too easy or you could have it to the point where there's plenty of food to hunt and gather. And you see no need to move out of the hunter-gatherer stage. Sure. But then you could also see like super sophisticated societies that lived in that area like they think the Amazon was. Right. That they would innovate.

Totally. Yeah. And it makes sense. Also, you have a large population. Even if it's a small percentage of people innovating, it's going to impact impact the the great number of people if you have enough people there's gonna be people that are creating right there's no way they're on yeah and then people came through there with their coughed on everybody and fucking killed them all and that's that yeah it's really wild man it's really wild if you think if that is true that how how horrific that is, that they just basically reset everybody back to the Stone Age.

And if you think about has that happened before and will it happen again? You know, I remember distinctly thinking, well, at first, I think I told you, might have told you the story. When COVID hit, I was in Indonesia and I was like, this is stupid. It's like bird flu. It'll all be over in 10 days. And boy, was I wrong. But I remember shortly after that distinctly thinking like this might be the beginning of the collapse right like this could be where? Human population collapses like this is the plane that the planet has been waiting for this is our this generation of smallpox

But it obviously science and medicine overcame that at too fast of a rate, and it really wasn't that lethal But I wasn't it was the fact that it wasn't lethal. Right. Even if science and medicine didn't do anything, it wasn't going to kill everybody off. True, true. But I remember thinking, because there was a lot of hysteria around it. Yeah. I remember thinking maybe this is it.

But I guess my point being, do you think that that's going to happen again? It certainly could. I mean, it has before. It probably will again. I mean, I was scared of it, too. In March of 2020, I thought, oh my God, it's going down. Right. When they were shutting the country down.

Totally. Jesus Christ, we're living in a movie. Everything, right? You couldn't go into a hospital. You couldn't like visit a grocery, like everything. It felt like the whole world was collapsing. The problem is there was an irresponsible level of fear that was promoted by the media because the media has an interest in getting you to pay

attention to what they're saying. And that irresponsible level of fear, the problem with that is like, even if they know what they're doing, they know that it's propaganda, people get sucked in and then they get scared forever. And if you don't ever give them good data and you're always exaggerating the threat and exaggerating the death number and Dr. Lena Nguyen, who was like the biggest proponent a recent article where she said they overestimated the amount of people that actually died from COVID. And I think she said the real number is about 30% of what they're claiming. Oh, you're kidding. Oh, wow. Because when you die of COVID, if you also have cancer, if you're dying of something else, but you test positive for COVID, they call it a COVID death.

They call it a COVID death. I remember reading that. Even accidents and even people that like, because there was a financial incentive. Yeah. Which is part of the problem. Dr. Lena Wynn slammed after admitting there's been an overcounting of COVID deaths two and a half years late. Wynn claimed the actual COVID-19 death could be only 30% of what's currently reported. There's also been, I mean, I don't know how the system exactly works, but there's been doctors

that explained what incentive there is to put someone on a ventilator, what incentive there is to prescribe remdesivir. Because it's all financial decisions, right? Exactly. Because of the emergency use authorization, because of the pandemic, there's all these. And when you have money involved, things get fucking squirrely. Always. They get real weird. Always. And then, I didn't realize, I'm so ignorant, I didn't know that

most hospitals, or a large number of hospitals, are privately owned. They're businesses. I was like, what? Yeah. You're like, wait a minute. I thought like hospitals- Where's this money coming from?

Something that like the government funds so that we all take care of each other. Not here. Nope. Not in this country. Yeah. No. And then you have the fact that pharmaceutical companies are responsible for 75% of the ads on television.

Really? Yes. 75%? 75% of the ads on television. Really? 75%? 75% of the ads on television. We're one of two countries on earth that allows pharmaceutical companies to advertise. I had no idea. The other one is New Zealand and they're far more restrictive

than we are. So you have so much financial incentive. And we lost people in terms of losing their mind and their anxiety that never came back yeah like i just saw an article today about how i think it's time to mask up at award shows again oh really yeah see if you can find that i was like what the fuck are you talking about yeah it's a cold right it's

basically gotten down to a cold to the point yeah it's become so benign yeah human beings if you're that vulnerable you shouldn't be going to the award show. In the first place. Yes. Yeah. If you're not healthy. Right. And also. Right, right.

Just make smart choices, right? Protect yourself. Stay back. And there's still, still, after all these years, still no encouraging people to take vitamin D. No encouraging people to lose weight. No encouraging people to take care of their overall metabolic health so that they'll have a more robust immune system and they can survive these things. No. Nothing.

Nothing. Almost the opposite. I would say junk food's more prevalent than ever and pushing, you know, that whole I mean, fucking Lucky Charms, right? Yeah, the Lucky Charms thing. It might be time to mask up at award shows. It might be time to stop your fucking award shows. How about that?

Nobody likes them. You guys like them. We don't even like them. We watch them because there's nothing else on them. The kind of people that really like award shows, they wish they were there. Yeah, that makes sense. I wish I was getting that award. I don't think, do they even televise them anymore?

I don't even see them anymore. I mean, they televise the Oscars. Yeah. Well, I mean, I remember when that was like a big thing. Like you sit around and watch the Oscars. I don't think I even heard the last time there was an Oscars. Yeah. You heard when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. I did see that. That's it.

Yeah, I did see that. That was the last fucking dying breath of the Oscars. Yeah. I can't be so fucking about that stuff. They don't work. That's the other thing. The other thing Lena Wynn said, the cloth masks are essentially facial coverings. Like she didn't say that at the beginning of the pandemic, but she said it recently. Interesting. On CNN, they're like, oh. Oh, they must have been very upset.

What? Yeah. Well, I think she's realizing that her reputation is at stake. I see. And she's got to actually report real facts. Yeah. And so that like, and also the writing on the wall. Like when we're looking back at this from five years from now or 10 years from now,

we're looking at adverse reactions and we're looking back at this from five years from now or ten years from now, we're looking at adverse reactions and we're looking at all these different things and what we did to kids, how we stunted their development by masking everybody and keeping them at home. The whole thing is nuts. And it was a very mild pandemic in terms of

the Spanish flu and the Black Plague and the horrific pandemics of the past. Very true. One of my best friends sadly passed Spanish flu and the Black Plague and the horrific pandemics of the past. Right, right. Very true. One of my best friends sadly passed away during COVID in a rock climbing accident, not from COVID. But when he went to the hospital, he was climbing in Utah, fell without his helmet and did his skull in. And it was terrible.

Tommy Dutra, he was one of my best friends. Amazing guy, incredible athlete. Anyway, he went to the hospital and his dad called all of us, right? All of his close friends and his family and everything else. Nobody was allowed in the hospital. His own parents had to say goodbye to him over Zoom when they pulled the plug. Oh, God. All of it. And it was right during the height of it all. And because he was getting out and climbing and doing something active during the pandemic,

you know, when everybody else was sitting inside. His own fault for not wearing his helmet, so on and so forth. But terrible tragedy. But just imagine not being able to say goodbye to your son in that situation because of that whole heightened, like we're talking about the heightened fear thing, right? The heightened hysteria. It wasn't even COVID positive. It doesn't even make sense. But they weren't allowed in the hospital.

Yeah. Unbelievable. I mean, there's two tragedies simultaneously, right? The big ones that he died hitting his head. Of course. Of course, yeah. What a way to go. Yeah. Yeah, poor guy. Oh, God. But he died doing what he loved, though.

He was an incredible climber and very passionate about it. Yeah, I talked to But he died doing what he loved, though. He was an incredible climber and very passionate about it. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I talked to Gabor Mate about that, who's an expert in addictions and trauma. And he thinks that people that are drawn to, like, free solo climbing, like the Alex Honnold types of the world. The addiction of the adrenaline.

Yeah. He's like, there's something wrong with the way they developed. Sure. And they're muted. And like, maybe because of so much persistent trauma when they were young. Oh, interesting. They need some, I forget exactly how he described it, but that this is a reaction to trauma, like youthful trauma.

So they're putting themselves in trauma's way or harm's way to compensate for something that's happened is starting themselves in Trauma's way because that's the only way they feel things yeah I mean I that's the only way they feel alive like they get this I Don't know how you feel what someone else feels right? How would you how do you answer that yeah, right? I mean I can sort of understand that in a sense of like I'm not an adrenaline junkie like I don't know how you feel what someone else feels right how would you how do you answer that yeah right i mean i can sort of understand that in a sense of like i'm not an adrenaline junkie like i don't go for skydives or you know any of that stuff it doesn't drive me but that thrill and rush i get of you know darting a bear or working with a lion or doing you know swimming with an anaconda like that fuels me for weeks like i i like i get getting goosebumps thinking about some of them right now because i get so excited by and it's not just for a personal rush but rather you

know we're doing it for work or whatever but those moments stick with me forever and i i sort of get that but not like i'm just gonna risk my life over this climb or whatever you know what are your thoughts on giant anacondas? Because there's always been this thing about enormous anacondas that live in the rainforest. So, yeah, there's fascinating. So I love anacondas. I believe,

and I've got a colleague, Brian Fry, in Australia, actually, and he has a similar belief, that there are 30-foot anacondas. Now, 30 is a big anaconda, but you're talking about those mysterious like 50, 100 footers. Okay. So take out the Amazon and take out anacondas for a second. Okay.

All right. Think about where all the largest snakes are in the world. Florida. Well, now, yes. But, you know, we've got all these wet tropical environments that house these huge stakes. In Indonesia, you have reticulated pythons. You have Burmese pythons. You have African rock pythons, Indian rock pythons, anacondas, all these big snakes.

The only place that has a wet, tropical, humid, high-density of prey environment that doesn't have a massive snake is the Congo, Central Africa. Now, stay with me. That area is home to some African rockbite and stuff, but not big monster anaconda-sized ones, right? But during World War II, there was a colonel who flew over there, and this was a well-respected colonel.

I'm sure, Jamie, you'll be able to find this very quickly. A well-respected, like, I forget, he had, like, his wings or his patch of honor or whatever, like very distinguished, who him and his two passengers in the plane both reported a hundred foot long snake. They flew over it once. They're like, wait a minute, what is that? They were, they were Dutch Belgium in the Congo. They flew over it once, went, what is that? And flew over it two more times to verify it and got so low to the ground that they said the snake struck at the airplane. And all three people, the pilot, this well-respected Colonel and the two passengers had the exact same story of this giant snake in

Central Africa. Interesting. Yeah. And yet no big snake has ever been proven from there, but it's also a very poorly biologically explored area. And most of the time, when these animals get this big, snakes or otherwise, they're in very low... Yeah, here's the picture. They took a photo of it? They did. Yeah. They did. They're in very low densities. So...

Hmm. That's the real photo over on the left there. What do they think it was? They thought it was a giant snake. A 50foot long... So that's the photo right there? I believe so. But the story's fascinating. Of these kernels...

But they don't know, like, what kind of snake. They don't know if it was an anaconda or a python or... It would be an undescribed species because the only snake there, the African rock python, doesn't get that big.

What is the biggest snake that we know? Oh, it says it measured approximately 50 feet in length, saw brown-green with a white belly, has a triangle-shaped jaw and a head three by two feet. Oh, my God. A three-foot head. The photo was later analyzed and verified to be genuine.

Van Lierde claims that, is that how you say his name? I'm not sure, but that was the Colonel Remy Van Lierde. As he flew lower for a closer inspection, the snake rose up approximately 10 feet, giving a warning that it would have attacked a helicopter if it had been within striking range. But imagine flying over and having a snake

sort of lunge at a helicopter. I have a three foot snake head. Jesus Christ. So, Jamie, do you mind going to my Instagram quickly? Literally swallow you alive easily. Dude, look at this one. I posted a picture day before yesterday. This is 18 feet and look at the size of it compared to me and how scary this snake is. Now to think of, yeah, like you said, you're like an M&M to a snake that size.

You're a Tic Tac. You and them chocolate covered almonds that are so good for you. Whoa, look at the size of that thing. That's an 18-footer. Oh, my God. Granted, it's not 3-foot by 2-foot head, but still, that thing, you know. What's the weight on something like that? It was over 200.

It broke our scale. Wow. Yeah, it was over 200 pounds. Wow. Indonesian villagers claim to have captured a python that is almost 49 feet long and weighs nearly 990 pounds. I've seen this. It's not verified at all. Do they have an image of it?

This might be the one that's on the tractor. No, it's not. There's a fake one on a tractor that floated around. Well, it's just very forced perspective. It's like a wide-angle lens, and the snake is right in front, but it looks massive. But this is NBC. This is NBC News. Let's see if it has images of this sucker.

So these are all like retics, and, you know, there are big snakes out there. Look at the size of that goddamn thing. Yeah. Jesus. So what is the biggest snake? Is it a python, the biggest snake that we know of? So the heaviest is the reticulated python. Look at the size of that thing. Yeah.

How big is that? That's big. That's probably 20-ish. So there's quite a lot of 20-foot snakes out there. And then there's a couple 21, 22 but that's it and so there's all these rumors of 30 foot snakes and 40 foot snakes and blah blah blah and there's nothing that's been verified outside of one skin i believe i want to say from indonesia that is like but skin stretch that's the other thing it turns out to be a tall tale it says when uh recreation park in indonesia

put a huge reticulated python on show last week, keepers insisted to reporters it was 49 feet long, make it the longest ever caught, but the find turned out to be a tall tail. Yeah. So how big was it exactly? I bet it was 20-ish. 21, there it is. Yeah, 21 feet still. Yeah. It's a big snake,

man. But not 50. Not 50. I have no idea why the snake has shrunk, said one keeper when asked about the discrepancy as the snake lounged on a tree branch inside the cave. But things do shrivel up when you catch them. You know, like fish do. Like when you catch a fish. Yeah.

Well, definitely when you tell people about it. That's when you show people. Yeah. Yeah. I went fishing here in Austin this morning Oh did you really? Right downtown, literally right in front of the Google building Lady Bird Lake

Yeah, there's a lot of bass out there It was awesome man Right in front of the Google building Right in front of it, yeah So the biggest in the world is the python So they're bigger than anacondas? So it's sort of a toss up The reticulated python has been clocked as the heaviest snake in the world because they get fatter.

But the anacondas have been clocked in slightly longer. I think 26 feet is the longest ever recorded. Did you ever see the Jennifer Lopez movie, Anaconda? The documentary? Yeah. Yeah, it's great. It's such a corny movie, man. It's so good.

The bad snake head, if you watch it today. Oh, it's so bad. It's so bad. It's so good. The bad snake head, if you watch it today. Oh, it's so bad. It's so bad. It's so bad. But that was always the rumor, is that there was enormous snakes in the Amazon, and that you just didn't see them. I do believe that there are some megafauna out there that are yet to be found, that are in low populations.

You believe in the sloth, the giant sloth? I believe that has a... And again, that's like the thylacine. It's a proven animal. It's been 10,000 years, but it doesn't mean that it couldn't be extant in certain remote areas. Same with some of these big snakes, maybe not 50 because maybe these things are embellished, but maybe 30, maybe 35, right?

And I just think that there are a few, not a lot of these big things out there. If you're one of these uncontacted Amazonian tribes, of which there are still several, West Papuan tribes, whatever, and you're seeing a 50-foot snake, nobody in the Western world, we're not hearing about that. Right. You know, like those things can be happening and those stories get embellished and passed on and all of that. But we wouldn't even know until Western science gets in there. And it's sort of a double-edged sword because once it does, it sort of ruins certain aspects of that, right? But I do believe that there are big animals to be found still. And the sloth one, I watched a documentary on it once.

It was this guy who was risking his reputation. He was a biologist, and he had spent months in the Amazon. He was very frustrated because he couldn't find anything. And they kept saying, we saw it, we saw it. He's like, where? I know that feeling well. It's very frustrating because I've even had people tell me they've eaten

the thing that I'm looking for. When we were doing extinct, looking for the extinct animals, of which we had success quite a lot, but I've had guys be like, oh yeah, yeah, they're delicious. I'm like, what? Tell me where to find it. You've eaten it and you have no reason to lie

about this whatsoever. Please just help me. What was this that they ate? That was regarding that caiman. Remember that yellow caiman? And we did find them, so that worked out. But literally, I remember we're walking through the village day one before we even get in the canoes and I'm like showing people these pictures of all the different species of caiman.

And I kept pointing to the trompa largo amarillo, the long-nosed yellow one, right? And everybody's like, yes, no, maybe one time. And then one guy's like, oh, those are delicious. And I'm like, oh, God, can we put this on Animal Planet? I don't even know. Can you say that, that this thing is delicious? Endangered species that you're eating. Well, there was always these rumors of like these places where these billionaires would fly into in China and eat like gorilla.

Yeah. Have you ever heard of that kind of stuff? Oh, yeah, I've heard about it. I believe it, too. Do you? I really do, yeah. I think that especially, you know, you say like especially with China where the Eastern medicine and the status symbol of eating tiger whiskers and this, that and the other thing. There's a status symbol of eating something that's forbidden and very difficult to acquire.

Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, China has so many billionaires now. I forget what it is, but dozens and dozens of them. Right. Like if if that status symbol is important to someone with that much power and money How are you not getting it? Yeah, that's what a weird culture where you your your status is based on eating something that's endangered

It doesn't even click in my head like I cannot physically understand it like no part of me is like oh I get that Like I really want to eat some tiger whiskers. Have we ever talked about the bondo ape? Yes, you have yeah, I know you like the Bondo ape a lot. Yeah Big lion killing apes well. This is a big chimpanzee the gym that lives in the Congo Yeah, which is the Congo so incredible. It's like god. What an insanely rich resource ridden place That's also a war zone and being and being ridden place that's also a war zone. And being absolutely raped and pillaged by big corporations in the Western world for resources and minerals.

I had said Darth Kara on who his book, I think his book comes out. Does it come out next week? It comes out the end of January. Okay. But his book is all about cobalt mining. Oh, interesting. It's horrifying. i do want to read it yeah horrifying 19 year old girls with babies on their back oh yeah hand chipping cobalt out of the ground and then inhaling all these toxic fumes and powder this dust and then that is in your cell phone.

Right. That's how the cobalt gets into your fucking cell phone. That's at your Apple store. It's nuts. It's the new blood diamond, right? It's the new, and it's funny because I feel like the whole blood diamond thing and, you know, there's been lots of these things, but it all sort of went away because it got exposed, but I feel like no one's talking about the inhumane things that are taking place for our modern conveniences.

It's one thing when it's a luxury, like a diamond, right, or whatever. But when it's like, oh, well, I can't live without my iPhone, you know, then it's like we're willing to turn a blind eye to it. It's like people choose not to accept it because it's it's part of their life Let's just think about how many people who consider themselves social justice warriors, and they do this complaining on a phone That's made by slaves totally yeah, they're they're literally tweeting or texting or whatever their complaints on a thing that is Contributing to the thing they're complaining about it's well the contributing to the worst version of it right in humanity right now Isn't it really crazy? I mean, it's like literally human trafficking So in the book does he actually go into the Congo and witnesses and oh, yeah video footage

Oh, you're kidding. His story is so compelling I must listen so or and he talks about it with such passion because he worked on this for years and years. Yeah. And risked his life to obtain footage and to get access and to go to these what they're supposedly ethical minds. Yeah. And he's like, this is all horrible. It goes, all of it is tainted. Yeah. All the cobalt that we have, all of it is at least in some part coming from these, you know, what they would call, it's basically just the most primitive version. People in flip flops with hammers.

Yeah. Chipping it out of the ground. What's extreme poverty? Yes. Right. And it's more like slavery. It is. Calling it extreme poverty, I think, is not quite accurate enough.

They call them artisanal mines, which is hilarious. Anytime you slap that word onto anything, it's fun. Oh, it's artisanal. Yeah. Oh, great. I think someone's making pottery somewhere. Yeah, totally, totally. So back to the Bondo ape.

Sure. Is that – because I know there was some controversy behind that, and there's some people that sort of denied its existence But then Carl Armand got photographs of them and they obtained Skulls that were a chimpanzee skull that had a crest Yeah, well they also had a like like a crest like the same way that a gorilla does My understanding and this is not something I'm super familiar with but but there's no denying that they existed, right? There was this insular gigantism that took place within this group of chimpanzees. There was heightened aggression,

you know, that's all like known and documented, but it wasn't a new species. It wasn't a distinct species. It was sexual or rather natural selection that led to these animals being different and isolated and turning into larger, more aggressive chimpanzees. That's my understanding of it. But would that also make their skulls different? It can do. Because like, okay, oddly enough, we have a skull of a chimpanzee. This is made by Shane Against the Machine, who's a guy on Instagram who's an incredible artist.

He's made a couple of pieces for the podcast. The difference is with this skull versus what they think the Bondo ape skull is that the Bondo ape has like a bone mohawk down the center. Yeah, like a gorilla does. Sure. A bone mohawk down the center. Yeah. Yeah, like a gorilla does. Sure.

So, you know, sexual selection over time can evolve for anything, can adapt for anything, right? It's why peacocks have the silly tail they have. It doesn't help them fly, right? It's only sexual selection. It's being bred for. So, you get a bunch of chimps stuck on an island, stuck in a region, and the females decide, for whatever reason, that a bump on the head is sexy okay now every chimp that has a slight bump on its head is being selected for by the females to reproduce offspring fast forward 15 20 generations maybe 200 generations whatever they all have a crest on their head that is how evolution begins because now you fast forward

millions of years and the sexual selection has been selected for over and over and over and over. And you're starting to turn into a new creature, a new organism altogether. If I'm not, I don't think I'm incorrect here. I think the crest indicates enormous mandible muscles. Because the muscles attach up there. Yeah, I think that's what the crest is for. Because that's how it is with dogs. Sure.

Like, have you ever noticed a difference between a dog that's castrated and a dog that's not fixed? In temperament, sure. The size of their heads. Oh, interesting, yeah. Like, my dog is a golden retriever, the sweetest dog in the world, but he has a pretty big head. Yeah.

And the muscles in his head are big on the sides of his head because he has his testosterone. Whereas we met this other golden retriever that was fixed, and he has this narrow little tiny head, and it's because he doesn't have any muscles. So that's the difference of sexual selection, like the peacock or what I explained, and natural selection. So if these Bondo apes are only eating, and I'm just making this up, and I know the theories of them killing lions and everything, but if they're only eating coconuts, let's say, right? And they have to tear them apart. They have to rip through a coconut with strong jaws.

Well, if you got weak jaws or weak jaw muscles or weak mandibles, whatever, you're gonna die. Right. You know? So over time, again, the only ones that are surviving are the ones that have this ridge on their head that are naturally being selected for stronger muscles. Yeah. So it's a different mechanism.

So they just think it's like a subspecies of chimp? That's my understanding of it. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I had thought. They don't think it's a different chimp, but they do think it's different in terms of its size and temperament. And we see that all the time, right? We see insular dwarfism where things are stuck on an island.

They get smaller and smaller because of the lack of resources or gigantism for the opposite reason. Like, we see that all the time within species. Or people that live in Iceland. Enormous, giant fucking people. Big dudes. Vikings. Exactly, yeah. How many world strongman champions

have come from Iceland? All of them? A shitload of them. They're all like that guy, the mountain from Game of Thrones. I was just gonna ask you, is he from Iceland? He's from somewhere up there. I think he is. Yeah. Is he from Iceland? All of them? Shitload of them. Yeah. They're all like that guy, the mountain from Game of Thrones. I was just going to ask you, is he from Iceland? He's from somewhere up there. I think he is. Yeah. Is he from Iceland? Well, his name is from Iceland. Thor. Thor Hafursund. Exactly, yeah.

Try saying his fucking name. But, I mean, that part of the world has produced an exorbitant number. Look at the size of that fucker. Yeah. Iceland. Look at that name, though.

Yeah. Yeah, look at that name. Julius Bjornason? Bjorn? First of all, they're not even using real letters. No. What's that thing after the F? I have no idea.

That's like a half a P, a half a B. A brjublur. Háfrblur. Hafthor. Oh, it's literally transliterated as Hafthor in English. Yeah. Crazy. That's a different species.

I'm sorry. That's a different species right there. Look at the size of that fucker. Look at that guy. How big is that fucker? Was he 6'9 or something? But then his weight is astronomical. Is he more than that?

6'8. I see it there. 203 centimeters. Which, like, Shaquille O'Neal's looking down on that dude, going, come on, bitch. He's 7'1". 230. He's gotta be more than that now, right? Oh, yeah. Oh, that's nonsense. That's not true at all. Each of his quads weighs that.

Oh, maybe when he was 16. Even then. Yeah, it's when he started basketball, he started at 230. Oh, he's got it. Well, I think he got really heavy. But then

he slimmed 463. Okay. But then he slimmed down to have a boxing match. He had a boxing match With Eddie Hall Did he win? Yeah he won Did he?

He actually looked really good Yeah And showed really good technique too Like it wasn't like Winging punches He was like Fighting like a boxer I mean

He trained for a long time for it I cannot imagine Taking a hit from a guy like that Oh my god No matter who you are Can you imagine The size of his fucking mitts The momentum

Yeah Like coming into that Yeah Just the sheer gravity Behind each punch. Boom. It is fascinating how people in that part of the world, I mean, they were the Vikings. Yeah. That's

why they're so fucking giant. That's where they've come from. Yeah. That's amazing. So I wanted to talk to you about this cloning and the rewilding and the mammoths and all of that stuff. I'm going to Colossal tomorrow to learn a little bit more about it myself. Explain Colossal.

Yeah, so Colossal Biosciences is this, if you ask me, incredible company. And they are, by their own declaration, a de-extinction company. So it's this guy, Ben Lamb, and he's got George Church, who's a world-leading cellular scientist. I don't know the specifics, you know,

of de-extinction and cloning and CRISPR and so on and so forth. And they've come together and raised a ton of money and they are de-extincting animals. And the science is there. Like, it's done. All it took was the money, basically, behind it. And they've put together this incredible rolodex

of scientists and people. And it's real-life Jurassic Park with purpose. Where are they going to put them? So there's a couple different things going on. So the first one they're working on is the woolly mammoth, right? And this isn't just for fun. This has real important conservation implications, which is really fascinating.

But they are planning on starting with, I think, 100 mammoths and putting them in this place called Pleistocene Park, not Pleistocene Park, something like that, this park in Siberia, that they've been doing this experiment on as to what happens when you add megafauna back into the Arctic tundra to offset carbon emissions. Wow. And so they're using what DNA? They're using elephant DNA and mixing it with something else?

So it's Indian elephant is the closest living relative to the woolly mammoth And what does an Indian elephant look like is it similar to an elephant? Yeah, it's a smaller So African elephants are bigger. They have the really big ears Indian elephants are typically the ones you'd see at the circus You know with the red the pink in the ears the smaller triangular shaped ears. So just a different species of elephant. And so they're taking Indian elephants and they're using CRISPR technology and they're using existing mammoth DNA. And they're making an embryo and then they're implanting it into the Indian elephant. And 22 months later, in Indian elephant's gestation period, she will give birth to a mammoth.

A real mammoth? A real mammoth. So it's not like a hybrid? That's okay. birth to a mammoth. A real mammoth? A real mammoth. So it's not like a hybrid? That's okay. That's a good point. So it is in the sense of what they do is if you imagine like, if you imagine the DNA of an animal, right? And then you imagine the fragments that are broken out of it, right?

What they're doing is they're taking that DNA of the, and I don't understand the cellular side of it very well. This is just my base level understanding of it. I can talk about the conservation side of it. But they're taking that double helix, that DNA, and all those pieces that are missing from the mammoth, they're putting in Indian elephant pieces. physically and morphologically identical to a mammoth, but has used all of the DNA from the closest living relatives in order to get there. Phew.

Boy. And this process, how long does this take? So I think they've been going for about five years on the science, but the science of de-extinction and cloning, I mean, you remember Dolly the sheep, right? That was like a known thing. So that's been going on for a long time. Well, you can get your cat cloned.

Exactly. Or your dog cloned. Exactly. For like 20 grand, you can clone your dog. Yeah. It's kind of creepy. It is. It's bizarre.

But the point is the science has been there for a while. There just hasn't really been the funding or the motivation for it. But what I think is so fascinating, the reason I'm so emotionally invested in it, is the conservation implications that it has. Because what this company is ultimately doing is rewilding species that humans have removed. And that's going to, in theory, in a lot of places, sort of fix the offset, the imbalance of the ecosystem. That's interesting.

That's really interesting. There's a lot of debate about whether or not humans killed off the woolly mammoth though, isn't there? I think there is. Yeah, I think there is. And I can't really speak on that, but I do know that when the mammoths disappeared, so the Arctic used to be like the savannas of Africa. It used to be big grasslands, right? It wasn't all covered in trees and things. And that's a recent adaptation since the mammoths went away 10, 20,000 years ago. And so that's what's happened is the permafrost up there is melting pretty rapidly, right? Underneath that permafrost is like one and a half trillion tons of carbon. And once that carbon enters the atmosphere, it heats things up like crazy.

So with, by removing those mammoths, and I can explain why the mammoths keep it colder, but by removing those mammoths, it's allowing that permafrost to melt much quicker and release more carbon. So the idea from a financial standpoint of how they make money is the carbon offset of putting mammoths back into the environment. How do they make it colder?

So it's a couple different things. It's basically when there's trees and shrubs, they take in more heat, and that heat transfers into the ground. So in this Pleistocene Park, this park that they've been doing this experiment in Siberia for a while, they've put in a couple hundred animals that aren't mammoths, right? They've put in ox and reindeer and things like that, and they're knocking trees over with the tractors. And once they knock trees over and they simulate a mammoth knocking the trees and shr like that, and they're knocking trees over with the tractors. And once they knock trees over and they simulate a mammoth

knocking the trees and shrubs over, the fleet grazers are able to keep the vegetation from regrowing. So when the vegetation doesn't regrow, you get all this grassland, and the grassland has snowpack. The snowpack gets stumped, so there's no insulation. It reflects more light. It's like three or four different processes that make the ground. I think on average, it's like eight degrees colder. So it keeps things more frozen. So once we removed all the megafauna from the Arctic through hunting or maybe other means, regardless, once they were removed, the Arctic got warmer. The Siberia and Alaska got warmer. And so slowly we're getting more and more carbon emissions from up there. But by putting these animals back, and I just love the idea of going up to the Arctic and it looking like the African savanna, right, with all of these incredible animals. But by putting these animals back, it in theory will make the Arctic colder, slow down the melting of the permafrost, which will in turn trap the carbon for longer in the ground.

So they're going to start with the woolly mammoth. Yeah. And what other animals are they thinking about doing this to? So what I know of right now is the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, which is another reason I'm so excited. So they are going to bring back the thylacine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how are they going to do that?

So there's, it used to be the quoll, but now it's an animal called a dunart that's the closest living relative. And so, you know, thylacines were around pretty recently, right? I mean, we're just looking at video of one. so they have really good DNA from the thylacine And then they're gonna use the existing DNA from a dun art Which is a very small marsupial put them together remake the thylacine the only problem is my understanding is They cannot use the dun art for surrogacy because the dun arts are like this big So they have to do an artificial womb and all of that.

But yeah, I think the technology is there. Artificial womb? Yeah. This sounds like a fucking horror movie. Isn't it crazy we're living in this time? Yeah, it sounds like a horror movie. But it's so insane like even five, three years ago if you're like, hey, we're bringing animals back, we're going to put mammoths back in the Arctic. You're like, shut up. Like, put on your tinfoil hat.

It's happening. It's so crazy. When are they projecting the first woolly mammoth will be launched? 2024. What? Yeah. Next year? Next year. End of next year.

Oh, my God. Yeah. And they're going to bring it to Siberia. And put it in this Pleistocene Park where there are all these other animals. And they're going to see how it does. Like, how does it behave? How does it interact with the environment? Does it replace the tractors in the sense of cooling down this little park area?

Yeah, it'll be gonna do saber-toothed tigers. I hope so. No, I don't know What a wild animal those must have been to look at saber-toothed giant teeth Yeah, like literally hang out of their mouth. It's and apparently are so sensitive that they could find jugulars. With those teeth? Yeah. They could feel the pulsating jugular with their teeth. Just because of the nerve endings? I didn't know that. That's amazing. Homotherium, right? That's what

that genus was called? I don't know. And that stuff, that's the fun Jurassic Park side of it. Would I like to see a saber-toothed cat? Yes, who wouldn't? But the idea that 10 years of it, right? Like, would I like to see a saber-toothed cat? Yes, who wouldn't? Fuck yeah. But the idea that like, hey, 10 years from now, there's going to be several thousand thylacine back in Tasmania. Facial tumor disease is going to go away. The overabundance of prey is going to disappear.

Facial tumor disease? Facial tumor disease is a thing that a lot of the animals and particularly the Tasmanian devils have in Tasmania. It's herpes on the face But it comes from an overabundance of prey because the alpha predator the thylacine has been knocked out so If you go drive down a road yeah look at it poor bastards It's bad. It's herpes. It's actual herpes It's horrible horrible, and that's the Tasmanian tiger, which is what?

The Tasmanian devil. Sorry, Tasmanian devil. What a crazy little animal that fucker is. They're so cool, man. And the noises they make. Yeah, they're wild. See if you can find a recording of Tasmanian devil noises. Yeah. But anyway, I'm just excited because it's like, it seems like we live in an alternate universe where these things are real now which is just so crazy compared to a few years ago what does it here we go look at those little fuckers. They're going mouth to mouth with each other.

If you're camping in Tasmania, which I've done for thylacine searches and stuff, and you hear that, it is the most blood-curdling, terrifying, and then they're this big. But you hear this and you're like, something is going to rip me to shreds. It looks like a French bulldog. Yeah, look at them. Yeah. They're real cute.

Really cute. Does anybody ever have them as pets? I wonder if you can domesticate them. I don't know. But my number one pet's a wombat. Have you ever seen a pet wombat? No, they have them? Oh, my God, dude.

People have them as pets? I mean, in Australia, like as rescues and stuff. I don't know if they're in the pet trade, but I went to a place in South Australia. Aww. Look at that guy. Look at that guy in Devo. Aww, look, he's a little puppy. They're adorable.

They are. So do people, but this is like little tiny babies. Like I wonder what, you know, maybe it's like some animals, like you get to a certain age, you can't really keep them anymore. I wouldn't think they'd make very good pets. I went to a place in Tasmania where they dragged a wallaby carcass in that had been hit by the road. It was like the cartoon version of piranhas, you know, where they come in and it's like

and they rip it to shreds. These things ripped this dead wallaby to nothing. It was like maybe 10 of them in under a minute. Really? Just to nothing, to just bones and gnawing. It was wild to see. Most people think of the Tasmanian devil as that cartoon. The bleh!

That's literally, when people think about that, it's one of the only animals where the cartoon is more popular than the actual animal. Agreed. Yeah, agreed. Like, I couldn't pick that animal out of a lineup. If you tell me, I mean, now I can because I'm looking at it right now. Yeah. But if, look at these little, looking at it right now. Yeah.

Look at these little, let me hear some volume. Wow. They're only weigh about seven kilos. Gotta love Australians. There's also a wombat here too. Little cutie. That's a wombat here. Look, look, look, look.

This is what I'm talking about. That's a wombat. Yeah. That's a juvenile one, but they're just little trucks. Little cutie. I love wombats. I think they're so adorable. So people keep those as pets as adults? Yes, they do.

There was a woman I met who had one in her house. Man, we had this video on our little podcast. I don't know how to find it, but it was hilarious. And this woman hand-raised this wombatbat and it ran around her house like your dog does. But the thing is, it's like this truck, you know, they're like super low to the ground, huge shoulders, and like, if it decided to run, like

through the dog gate or through the refrigerator, it just went like bowling straight through it. It was amazing. Cute little guys. Oh, I think they're so cute. But these guys have unbelievable mange in Tasmania. Jamie, if you type in wombat mange,

we've looked at a lot of gross animal stuff today, but it's brutal. And the reason the mange is so bad, there's no predators, and they're way overpopulated. And so when there's that many animals in a small environment with overpopulation, they get diseases. Oh, look.

So all this is potentially fixable if you put a predator, the right predator, in a small environment with overpopulation, they get diseases. Oh, look. Yeah. So all this is potentially fixable, you know, if you put a predator, the right predator, back in Tasmania. Right. And so that would help Tasmania. And are they planning on doing this to other continents? Oh, that's terrible.

That's what they look like, though. Oh, God. That image you saw for a split second there, that's what they, not all, but that's what a ton of them look like in Tasmania with this rampant mage. Well, that's the chupacabra. Straight up. The chupacabra is a coyote

that has horrible mange. Yeah. Yeah, and they've captured them. Like, people, we caught a chupacabra. And it's sitting in a cage, all terrified. It's just fucked up.

Eyes are swollen shut. Yeah. Yeah, it's just a fucked up coyote. Yep. The North American mammals, like, are they planning on eventually doing that North American mammals as well and reintroducing some? I'm not sure. Well, the mammoth would be in Alaska. So that's North America.

They are going to do it in Alaska. Siberia all the way to Alaska. So that mammoth steppe environment, those grasslands, used to range from Spain all the way to North America. Like all across the Bering land bridge. And all that ice was like trampled and blah, blah, blah. All these Savannah lands that are now big forests. Are you aware of the Alaskan Boneyard? Did you watch that?

I heard pieces of it because a couple people texted me about it. But I need to listen to the whole show. I mean, John sounds like a fascinating guy. He's the best yeah but his place that he has in Alaska like they've been on and it's not a big area where he's finding this stuff yeah he's got two areas and one of them that he's been getting bones what he calls boning this one area for decades yeah is only six acres That's all it is? Dude, it's nuts. The concentration,

so that's what it looks like. It's like the side of a cliff, and they blast it with water until they see things, and then they pull out these bones. But they've found animals that were not supposed to be there. I remember he said that. He said, like, I believe

scimitar cats were the cat that was native to that continent to Alaska, right? Not saber tooth, saber tooth, big teeth scimitar is like a smaller tooth version. And then he's found saber tooth skulls on his property. So all of history, all of humans are like, Oh no, there's only scimitar cats in Alaska. They were never saber tooths. And he saber-toothed. Yes. And he's only looked in six acres. Can you imagine? That's crazy. I mean, they don't know what was going on in that

area. Like, why are there so many dead animals? And why did they all get, like, frozen into the permafrost? Into one spot. Yeah. Right. Tar pit or who knows? So, I've connected him with Randall Carlson. Look at that.

Isn't that incredible? That's got to be a saber tooth, right? Oh, cave lion. That's a cave lion. Cool. I don't know if they thought that was there, too. So I've connected him with Randall Carlson, or I'm in the process of doing that. And Randall is a proponent of the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.

And the Younger Dryas Impact Theory is somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 years ago, there was some impacts from comets. Oh, interesting. And it probably wiped out most of the animals that we're thinking about, like North American megafauna, like 65% of them were wiped out somewhere around that time period. From impact. He thinks they're wiped out from comet impact. Interesting.

And he thinks that's why you're finding these massive storages of these dead animals in this one specific area. So why would that funnel animals into one area? Because they were already there, but they died all at once. I see. So it's not like over the years. Right.

It's like an instantaneous mass die-off. A grave site. And he's got photographic evidence of these mass die-offs as well, too, because one of the things that they found in terms of with woolly mammoths, they found enormous fields of them where they've not just found one dead one, but hundreds of them. And they find them with broken legs. Right. And he thinks that's indicative of the impact of whatever happened. I mean, it's almost like a bomb going off.

They just get smacked back. But that these things most likely died in mass. And that this area where John Reeves has in Alaska is a particularly fertile area, a particularly rich area for finding these skeletons. And it makes sense, right? Like, why else would you have 300 dead animals with fractured bones in one spot? Exactly. Or whatever the numbers are.

And he has so much. He has thousands and thousands of bones. And many, many, many, many full tusks of woolly mammoths. Which are worth millions of dollars, right? He's got millions of dollars worth of tusks. He's got them all over the place. He's got stacks

of them. They find them all the time. Jaws. Jaws, yeah. So it's the Boneyard Alaska. That must be a mammoth jaw, right? Because it's got the flat grinding teeth. Yeah, yeah. Look at those teeth, man. Isn't that incredible? Yeah. So it's the Boneyard Alaska on Instagram, and he's got

it very detailed. He's invited me up there, actually. He sent me a message after I think our first show. Somehow we got on the same topic and he sent me a message. We talked about him and he said he got 15,000 new Instagram followers from our conversation. Good for him. That's great. He's like, alright, I'm only going to talk to Joe

and tell my whole story. So we had him on. He's wealthy. He doesn't have to talk to people about stuff right he's choosing to yeah so he just does it because he wants to yeah so he's like he won't talk to journalists he's getting all these phone calls from new york times these people he's like fuck off well i i read a thing the day or two after you guys did your show that he started like a bone rush in the east river of new york people going to look for bones that have been dumped in the East River.

Apparently they were. According to the records, they dumped a shitload of them, and he gave out the very specific location. So now there's guys combing the bottom with radar and looking for these things. Wow. It's really interesting. Do you know if anybody's found anything yet? I don't believe anybody has.

Yeah. That would be fascinating. I mean, it's been there for, wasn't it the 1930s that they did this? 40s? Yeah, there was a bunch of articles yesterday about it. Oh, look at this. Treasure hunters search New York City's East River. Ha ha.

Isn't that funny? This all came from my stupid little podcast. All from your show. You created a rush. CBS News is reporting this. Look at this. Look, it even says spurred on by Joe Rogan podcast. Look at that.

The New York Post, they always show me some love. Oh, nice. That's so funny. Yeah, no, that's incredible. I don't know. That whole extinct megafauna thing. The fact that North America, we used to have cheetahs and giant llamas and like- Huge lions that are bigger than African lions.

Huge lions. Like the amount of, and the abundance too. It wasn't like today we have great animals in North America, but the abundance is so much lower than Southern Africa. But it used to be like something like eight times higher. Yeah. Can you imagine like just walking? Imagine like this wasn't here in Austin.

You decided to walk three blocks and you saw like 500 giant animals. I mean, it's amazing. Yeah. That used to be here. Yeah. Nuts. Have you ever heard of the American Prairie Reserve? Prairie Reserve?

I don't think so. Is that what it's called, Jamie? What is that thing? We never talked about that. They're trying to buy up massive swaths of land and reintroduce bison. Yeah, American prairie. So they're going to reintroduce bison and a bunch of different animals to this area. And they're even doing block management in these places.

And they essentially want to rewild some of the Great Plains. I think that's great, man. I think rewilding is the key to conservation in the future. I mean, have you seen that in... Scroll back up, please, so I can read that, Jamie. It says, bison used to number in the millions on the Great Plains, but animals and conservation herds now stand at around 31,000 and are considered near threatened.

Because most conservation herds are less than 500 on small landscapes, the species is listed as ecologically extinct, meaning bison no longer play their critical roles in shaping prairie biodiversity. So what they want to do is bring them back. Yep. And allow them to influence the environment and help the ecosystem. Only an estimated 360,000 bison remain in North America today. Of these, less than 10% live in conservation herds.

Most of the bison on the landscape today are raised for commercial purposes. And what's really crazy is they got down to like almost extinct. Yeah. Yeah. They got real close to extinct. A few hundred, I think. There's an incredible place, the Bass Pro Shops headquarters in Springfield, Missouri. The guy, Johnny Morris, the guy who runs it, he's built a museum next to the Bass Pro headquarters.

It's like a personal museum, but anybody can go to it. And his big thing is the bison. And so you walk through this hallway, and they have all these ancient pictures of the bison and these piles of skulls. Guys used to stand on a literal... You can probably find it, Jamie. There's this picture of these two hunters that killed...

I don't know how many bison, but it's literally a mountain of skulls that they're standing on top of. And because they used to... I'm sure you know this. Just sit on the railway and ping them off and all of that. And anyway, it's just fascinating the amount, the abundance of those animals that used to be in the American prairie. Yeah, the pictures of people standing on piles of bones are so horrible.

Revolting. It's so gross. Like what they did and the quickness in which they did it where they almost eradicated the bison from North America. And, you know, they weren't even eating them. No. They were eating tongues. Right. And they were getting the skins from some of them later on.

But a lot of it they were doing it for the tongues. Well, and I don't know if you know this or not, but the majority of the reason they killed them was in order to diminish the survival of the Native American people. Was that really the majority of it? I believe so. That was the big motivator, at least in the early days, to kill bison was because it allowed the Native Americans to survive off of that animal, right? Because they were so reliant on them. So they were all these campaigns like, go out and kill the bison, head out west, have

fun, shoot them from the train. Because if you depleted those numbers, the Native Americans were forced to move or they just didn't have. Forced to go into the reservations. Exactly. Yeah. And so it was a very ugly thing. And that part of it sort of covered up, right? That doesn't get spoken about a lot. I mean, it most certainly was a tragedy, but like almost like inexcusable to the point of extinction.

They got so close. I'd say it's inexcusable. It was obviously inexcusable to the point of extinction. They got so close. I'd say it's inexcusable. It was... Well, obviously inexcusable. I don't mean inexcusable, like unfixable. Yeah. That's a better word. Sorry, I see what you're saying.

When you look at the size of the piles of bones that they were standing on, and that they didn't see how fucked up this was. I don't believe that. We always say, oh, we didn't realize. We thought it would last forever. I don't believe that. You know, we always say, oh, we didn't realize, like, we thought it would last forever. I don't believe, especially because it happened in one generation.

Yeah, quickly. Very quickly. I don't believe that those guys, whomever they were, whether they loved hunting, didn't love hunting, loved shooting bison, whatever, I don't believe that they couldn't tell that they were having a massive impact. Oh, they had to, quickly. They had to. I mean, if you're shooting millions of them, which is just nuts. Are you aware of Dan Flores? Dan Flores, he's a professor, I think, out of New Mexico. I think one of the universities in New Mexico. But he had a paper that he wrote called Bison Ecology and bison diplomacy okay and his his belief is that

when you look at the millions and millions of bison that were in north america at one point in time with these massive herds yeah he's like that is not historically it's not what people initially saw when they first came to North America. And he believes the reason for that is that the Native Americans, when they got knocked down by 90%, they were the primary predators of the bison. And so then the bison numbers rose to these extraordinary numbers. Sure. And that it was due to the fact that these Native American populations had been killed off by smallpox. That allowed.

Yeah. So it's his belief that with the use of the horse and with the use of rifles, that Native Americans on their own were on their way to extirpating the the bison I don't I don't doubt it You know there's quite a lot of species throughout history that have gone extinct at the hand of man that were already Even without man like not even Native Americans. I mean no no human being they were ready Their timeline was running out like they were on their way out the great. Auk is a great example What is that so is this basically a penguin from the north. Because, you know, penguins are from the southern hemisphere.

It was basically a penguin from the northern hemisphere. How do you spell it? A-U-K. Great Auk. Is there a photo of those fuckers? I don't think there's any photos, but there's a lot of artist illustrations. The Great Auk. Yeah.

Look at that. Beautiful, beautiful bird. And they... Real penguin-like. Very, yeah. And they provided oil and mostly down. meat as well, but mostly down so there was a huge rush I've actually held that specimen But there was a huge rush for walk down for their feathers

But these animals they numbered in the millions when humans quote-unquote wiped him out, which they did I'm not saying they didn't, but they only see their range over there on that range map. They see the red one, see the little spots. Those are actually, so their range was massive, but those 19 or whatever spots you're looking at are their only isolated populations. So while there were millions and millions of auk, they only lived in like 19 spots. And what that means is they were on their way to extinction already from other forces because they used to have this vast range. And then it was isolated into these handful of isolated populations. And then humans found them and wiped them out.

But had humans not found them, likely over another million years or so, maybe less, they probably were on their way out because they were already isolating into these small pockets and the, um, I'm blanking on it now, the gilliamot, is it the gilliamot? No, it's a different bird, was out competing them. Another native bird was out competing them. Not the gilliamot, I'm blanking on what it's called now. How did people kill off the

passenger pigeon? Because it wasn't the passenger, weren't there millions and millions of passenger pigeons? Millions, millions. Yeah, they used, they said they'd black out the sky right here, right here in Texas, yeah. So one, they were hunted tremendously, but the main reason that they totally went extinct was

they were such a flocking bird that once their numbers were reduced to the point that they couldn't have such large flocks, they weren't successful any longer. So they weren't able to continue their normal behavior once their flock density got too low.

So it wasn't like they shot every, I think they did shoot every last passenger pigeon, you know, like down, they shot the last one, but it wasn't the last one because they had shot every single other surviving one. It was the last one because we shot them up and then their population started to decline and once their

their population got to a certain like capacity, they no longer had the ability to behave the way that they had typically behaved in these huge flocks and that was making them unsuccessful. How did they not know that they were on their way to getting rid of them? How did they not know that that was happening? Again, I don't believe they didn't. I think they did. Isn't it crazy how different people look at things like wildlife conservation today versus just a few hundred years ago? It's like, whoops, guess we killed all the bison. Yeah, totally.

That's why radical conservation like bringing back mammoths and rewilding wolves and stuff like that, we need that, Joe. Because conservation, I'm sorry, and this is going to upset a lot of people, I don't give a shit. We fucking suck at it. We've been doing it for like 100 years, and we are losing every single year. We are not winning.

There are small little successful stories, don't get me wrong, but on a grand scale, we are losing the conservation game. So radical conservation, I don't care what it is, coming up with crazy science experiments and bringing stuff back, putting wolves in the elm stone, whatever it is,

trying something is better than not trying anything and continuing down the path we've been going. The only animals that we're really good at conserving are the ones we want to eat. Oh yeah. The ones we want to shoot. Yeah. Which is great. So like there's more white-tailed deer in North America today than there were when Columbus arrived. Right.

And that's fine. Which is 100% because of hunting. It is. And also because of agriculture. Right. Because they flock to these agriculture areas. Cornfields. That's why, yeah, like places like Iowa, all these farms, like there's so many deer, giant deer in Iowa.

Right. Yeah. But that's fine. You know, placing a monetary value on an animal in order to save it is great, but nobody's going to start hunting Tasmanian tigers, Tasmanian devils, right? Like, what for? So, there are, I completely agree with you. I'm pro-hunting when those

funds are used the right way. They can be mismanaged, and they are all the time, especially in places that are more corrupt. But, yeah, it's actually amazing the job that wildlife biologists have done in this country, and conservationists have done in this country. Like, they're really pretty goddamn good at setting up like the correct number of tags and making sure that the habitat is preserved and

allocating that money for rangers and wardens and making sure that these people, you know, like monitor these animals and stop poaching and... In North America, we are very good at it, like on a global scale. The problem is we always, doesn't matter if you're North America or anywhere, wait until the very end to do it. We wait until shit's really bad. Right. Oh, there's only 12 of them left or whatever. Now we're going to put in all this effort.

It's like being preventative instead of reactive is the ticket moving forward. And we are starting to make that shift. I am so interested in seeing what they decide to do. If this really takes off in Siberia with the woolly mammoths, if they reintroduce them not just in Alaska, but then bring them into Montana, and bring them into the lower 48, and then start reintroducing other things. If they can figure out how to do that with a saber-toothed tiger, that would be fucking wild.

That would be so scary. That would be wild. They're talking about, I think, I might have these numbers wrong, but I believe their 10 or maybe 20-year goal is 600,000 mammoths over like 1.3 million miles. So covering that whole, you know, because the thing is... 600,000 mammoths. That's a lot of mammoths.

But they'll start reproducing on their own, right? It's not like they're going to make them all. Well, just think about tourism involved. I mean, how many people would want to go and travel to see woolly mammoths? We're going. You and I are going to see them. We're going. 100%. Yes. Zero question. Let's go. Let's go. Yeah.

I wonder if there's going to be, like, groups of people that want to hunt them with spears and, like, put, like, loincloths on and shit. Fine. It's just like the whitetail dude. Who cares? If that funds it and it keeps it going. You can hunt them but you can only hunt them using the tools and weapons that were available when they

were alive. Barefoot in the Arctic with a stone spear. Yeah, no boots. Fuck you. No tents. Fuck off. Like you can have a teepee. Yeah. You gotta make it yourself with the mammoth skin yeah right yeah yeah that would be wild people would do it would you do it no no fuck that dude i'm hunting with a bow and arrow is tricky enough hunting with a spear fuck off that's crazy there are people that do it though right there are spear hunters like that's a thing

hunters no i mean like as a sport assholes oh okay. Yeah, I mean, it's not that good. It's too unsuccessful. Yeah, it's like, you're not good at it. It used to be legal to hunt with a spear in Alberta until a guy killed a bear with a spear and made this awful video about it. It was a big deal. And then Under Armour, you know, got in trouble because, like, they didn't support these people that were – they weren't even really sponsored by Under Armour. These people, since there was just, like, this recent thing with them with poaching and they got accused of poaching and I think they got sentenced to probation and they're not allowed to hunt in certain states. But it's like why would you hunt with a spear?

Like hunting with a bow and arrow is very effective. Sure. If you're disciplined and, like, I am very accurate with a bow. Sure. I can shoot. I shoot an index card that I set up at a target regularly at 85 yards. And you're consistent. Yes.

And I'm consistent. I practice every day. It's not like, this is not a thing where, with a rifle, much more accurate. Sure. And I'm much more consistent. It's much easier to do. So you could make the argument that it's better to hunt with a rifle. I definitely could see that.

But if you do the work and if you are disciplined enough and if you practice enough and if your technique is right, you can be very, very effective with a bow. I mean, you can go out there and see all the skulls I have. Yeah, yeah. I've seen them. I've killed a lot of elk with bows and arrows and a lot of deer. I eat them all. This is a very effective way to get meat. But a spear is so inefficient.

And you're maiming the animal. Yes, and you're not going to kill it quickly. Right. You know, I mean, unless you get the drop on one that's sleeping, and you're like five feet away and you chuck it right the ribcage and kill it quickly. What's the likelihood of that? Not very likely. The likelihood is that you're going to wound this thing, and then you're going to chase it down,

and then you're probably going to stick it again. Right, and it's miserable for everything. Yeah, this guy, I think he threw a... I think the spear he threw it had a GoPro on it. Oh, okay. So you got this horrible perspective. Yeah, and it's like, it was all for social media. It was all for social media. It was all for the clicks. And then they made it illegal. So now it's illegal in Alberta to hunt with a spear

because of this one individual. That's probably good. And I think it is good. Yeah. Like you use a rifle, use a bow and arrow. Right. You know, you can kill them very easily with a bow and arrow. I mean, they allow baiting up there because they have to reduce the populations. They have a very high number of black bears up there. Very high. And so they use baiting, which is they'll set out donuts. Sure, sure. And the bears smell it. The bears come. And you can shoot

two bear a year. Oh, wow. Yeah, so you're... And they're trying to give out tags because they want people to hunt these things. Is the number of black bear overpopulated due to them eating people's garbage, due to not enough grizzly bears? Why are there too many black bears up there? The grizzly bear population is increasing, too, to the point where they're making an argument that you should have tags for grizzly bears. Interesting.

My friends John and Jen, who live up in Alberta, I've been up to their place before, they're seeing a lot of grizzlies now. They're seeing them all over the place. Oh, interesting. But by far more black bear. But you know what the biggest population of black bear in North America is? Where? New Jersey. Really? More black bear per capita in New Jersey than anywhere else in the country. They're everywhere. I've had an ongoing, I don't know if you've seen any of this on my Instagram stories. I haven't posted on my page, but I have had an ongoing battle with a mother black bear and her cub. Have you been seeing this? No.

In your yard? In my yard, yeah. In Santa Barbara? In Santa Barbara. Yeah, there are a lot of them. I've lived there for 15 years. I saw one once on a hike on a hillside. And then six months ago, I wake up, there's all this ruckus.

You know, I'm fast asleep. What's going on? The dogs bark. And I head outside, and there is a black bear on top of our chicken coop ripping the panels off. Whoa. And I run up to it, I'm screaming, I'm like, hey, get out of here, bear! I'm in my boxers, I don't even have a light on, nothing.

Because it was Santa Barbara, nothing happens at night there, right? And we have an acre, and so it's pretty spacious, but it's all fenced in. This black bear has torn through our fence, come in, ripped the chicken coop to shreds, killed my kid's favorite chicken, killed all the other, you know, killed like, we have like 20 chickens. Well, we did then. Now we have like five. And it has just been gone through these chickens. And so I scare that bear off.

I'm like, that was an anomaly. It'll never happen again. Happens again the next night. Well, now they know where the chickens are. Now they know. It's going to happen constantly. But so I've been trying all these non-lethal mitigation methods, right? So I've been, we reinforced the fence.

Didn't work. I put up these proximity alarms. That worked at least for a few months. Bear came back, killed our rabbits. We had two Flemish giant rabbits. They're a child now. Now I'm thinking about getting a paintball gun and putting some mace in it or something. I don't want to kill the thing.

You're not allowed to kill them. That's part of the problem. And I wouldn't anyway. I would. You'd have to get a depredation permit. A tag, yeah, sure. And I mean, I'm sure if I called Fish and Game or maybe they're going to hear this, it's going to become a thing. They're never going to stop.

The thing about bears is when— Once they know. Yeah, once they know. And you can't stop them. You cannot stop them. Any other animal I've ever encountered or worked with you can mitigate almost very easily. Put up a

fence, no problem. Right? Done. They're gonna keep coming. This girl and her cub. Have you ever seen the video of these giant bears brawling in far Rockaway New Jersey? No. Oh, you need to see this because it's crazy. It's a very residential neighborhood.

And they're just clawing at each other. Normal suburbs where kids are waiting for the school bus. And we're talking like 300-pound-plus black bear going at it. Look at this. They're on the guy's porch practically. Holy crap. So they're fighting over garbage.

Like, who gets access to the garbage? Look at the size of these fuckers. These are big bears. I mean, this is the kind of bear, like, both of these bears are the kind of bear that you'd want to hunt. Now, the governor of New Jersey, the most recent governor, he ran on a platform of stopping the bear hunt. Oh, interesting. Because all the dork New Jersey, the most recent governor, he ran on a platform of stopping

the bear hunt. Because all the dorky liberals that live in the nice cities, they don't have any idea what the problem is like. The majority of the voters don't understand or connect with the problem. Exactly. Which is the same in a lot of places where these urban areas vote on things that happen in rural areas where they have no idea what the problem is. Yeah. So the amount of human-bear interactions went up so much, by over 200%, that they had to reinstate the bear hunt within two years of him being the governor.

Really? Yeah. Wow. So like right away. So what did he get in 2020? And then by 2022, he's like, okay, enough. And has it made an impact? Has it helped?

Yeah. Well, they're going to start hunting them again now. And they're actually going to raise the number of bears you're allowed to kill. Gotcha. And raise the number of tags. Just to level it out. They have to. But there's so many of them.

That's the thing people don't understand is like we're at a state where we have to manage the wildlife. We don't have a choice. This idea that like, let's just let it all roam free and everything. It doesn't work that way anymore. There's too much human development. There's too many urban areas. And we have made an imbalance. If everything was wild and natural, sure, I completely agree.

Leave it alone. But it's not. This is not natural. These bears have bred in a residential area. They're feeding on garbage. It's totally natural for them to be fighting on stairs. Totally. Yeah, that's what I mean. That's their natural battling habitat.

And I'm not saying get rid of the bears. Don't wipe out bears. No one's saying that. But it has to be managed. You have to manage them. And you also have to make them fearful of humans. Right. I mean, the thing about what you're doing, trying to scare that bear off, it's not going to work.

No, I agree with you. I mean, when they've catched bears going into people's garbage, they have to relocate the bears. Yeah. They call them naughty bears. Yeah. Naughty bears. Naughty bear.

And then they relocate them. Because if you don't relocate them, they're going to, they know where the garbage is. Yeah. Why would they go hunt a deer when they could just go into your garbage? Right. And pull out that Subway sandwich that you didn't finish. Well, my ultimate solution is we have five chickens left, and if those five chickens go, we're done with chickens for a little bit.

That's my ultimate solution. Unfortunately, you live in a state where there's no way you can get a permit to shoot that thing. Yeah, I don't know. Especially if you live in only one acre. Yeah. One acre is not good even with a bow and arrow because you get a pass through and it can hit somebody's fucking. Totally. As a matter of fact, my friend Bruce said that one of his neighbors, someone shot a crossbow through a deer and it went through their window and stuck into their wall.

Holy shit. Yeah. Can you imagine that? One of his neighbor's walls got penetrated by a crossbow bolt. But that, whoever did that is a fucking asshole. Yeah, they're an idiot. And it's not legal either. I'm sure.

It's like some jackass. I'm sure. Who wanted to shoot a deer, maybe for food. Probably poaching the deer with a crossbow and yeah. Yeah, probably. I mean, that does happen. I mean, it does happen, especially in poor neighborhoods. Yeah.

Like you could get so much meat off of a deer. Oh, yeah. You're eating it for weeks and weeks. Dude, last time I saw you at your LA studio, you gave me like 40 pounds of elk. I think I had my last piece like three months ago. I savored that. I kept it. I doled it out. I'd only have it on special occasions. It was so good.

Yeah, I eat so much of that. I know you do. Thank you for that. My pleasure. It's so good for you, too. It's so nutrient-dense. It's like no other meat. It really pleasure. It's so good. It's so good for you, too. It's so nutrient dense. Yeah. It's like no other meat. It really is. It tastes different.

It feels different. It looks different. It's more firm when you push on it. And you do the liver, the heart, everything. Yeah, I eat everything. Yeah, I do everything. I've been feeding the liver a lot to my dog, too. Yeah?

Yeah, I cook it. Maybe that's why he's got that big head. No, he's just... I'm kidding. But my God, the way he eats it. It's Yeah? Yeah, I cook it. Maybe that's why he's got that big head. No, he's just, but my God, the way he eats it, it's crazy. He goes nuts for it. Like frenzied,

like he's a little crackhead. Like he can't help himself. I do that with, we get tuna in California, you know, I think I've shown you some pictures and like I'll scrape

the carcass, scrape the frame and get all the bits of mushy, fatty tuna that's quite delicious to be honest, but then I'll just boil it for the dog. The house stinks when you're boiling it.

You have to cook it outside, whatever. But then you give this dog just a bowl of boiled tuna meat. Oh, my God. They go nuts. They go nuts. I've never seen him look at his dog food or kibble or a treat or anything like that. No, that stuff sucks. Yeah, exactly.

But you give him some elk liver, they go bonkers. Yeah. He loves it. Yeah, he loves it. Yeah, yeah. He sits there staring at me, salivating, little drips on the ground. He goes nuts. It's funny. He probably knows when you're cooking it, right?

Oh, yeah. He's dialed in. Yeah, he knows also when I'm using a chopping board that there's a 1 out of 10 chance he's getting some of that. Yeah. So he'll sit there, he hears chop, chop, chop. Wired in. Come on, bro. Let this be the time.

Let it be liver. Yeah, but, you know, animal organs, it's funny how human beings at one point in time favored animal organs. Right. But it was the primary thing that we liked to eat. Yeah. You know, like I had Sonny from Best Ever Food Review. He's got that.

Have you ever seen that YouTube show? No, I don't know. It's a great YouTube show. And he travels all over the world eating with tribal people and going to exotic locations and eating their foods. And it was amazing. Like he spent time with the Hadza in Tanzania. time with the Hadza in Tanzania, and he spent time with all these different tribal people where they killed a goat, and they're scooping up the blood, the coagulated blood, and swarming it.

So he's eating it there with them. He's like, oh. Yeah, that's gnarly. And they also take raw liver and squirt bile on it and gallbladder juice. Oh, don't eat bile. No. Yes, yes. Oh, that's gnarly.

And they enjoy it. That's what they like. They like to dip it in bile and blood and a mixture of the two. I get eating liver. I've had the blood mixed with milk that the Maasai drink. They put a plug in the neck. I've had that. It's palatable.

I've accidentally cut the bile open on a fish once or twice and just, oh, dude. I mean, maybe mammal bile is is better but I highly doubt it. He says it's not. Yeah. He says it's awful. So gross dude. He says it's fucking disgusting. Yeah, I bet.

But for whatever reason these people have developed a taste for it which is really fascinating. But it probably goes back to what we were saying earlier which is it's, have they developed a taste for it or do they just know that it's that good for them? So their brain is telling them because of the options available eat it right this is going to benefit you yeah there's no options it's just survival right yeah yeah but liver was always a big thing with the comanche the comanche would take liver raw liver and they would squirt bile on it oh i didn't realize that as well it's crazy like it's it's a very common thing

to eat it that way. It's become trendy again, too. And maybe it's just the pages that I follow or whatever, but I'm seeing way more of the eat animal organs that consume every part of it now than I ever did even a year ago. I think that started off with Paul Saladino, and then it moved its way to

the liver king. Sure. And unfortunately, I think there's a lot of people that were duped into thinking they could actually look like that guy if they were eating raw liver and raw testicles. But the message of eat those things is a good message. Yes. Eat those things. Yeah. Eat organs. That's really good for you.

But the idea that that's going to turn you into, but I did read something about, um, oh, actually I was informed by a friend that eating testicles, that it is possible that eating testicles has an androgenic effect. Oh, interesting. And you can actually get some oral form of testosterone from eating testicles. See if you can Google that. See if you can Google that. Because they've tested some testicle supplements.

And through testing these testicle supplements, they found trace amounts of what would show up in a drug test as taking oral testosterone. No kidding. Yeah. Also, just saying testing testicle supplements three times fast is – I was like waiting for you to fumble. It was testing testicle supplements. That's, that's cool. I mean, you're eating testosterone, right? So it's just, there is something there. You're not just digesting it, I guess. You're actually absorbing it. Right. And well, Rocky Mountain oysters was always like a big thing that cowboys would eat whenever they would castrate bowls. Yep, yep, yep.

And turn them into steers. It's good. Have you had it? I have. It's good. It tastes great. It's not bad. I mean, everything deep fried tastes good.

Yeah, I mean, it's not the best thing in the world. Right. You know, there's definitely, I'd rather have a ribeye. Yeah, any day. That's better. Yeah. But it's edible. You're not like forcing it down. Right, right, right.

You're like, this is not bad. Yeah, it's not nasty. Right. It's just like, this is not bad. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, right. You're like, this is not bad. Yeah, it's not nasty. Right. It's just like, this is not bad. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, you see anything about that? No.

Some people have looked at this. Google. This is an explanation about it. No, I understand. I was going to tell you, Google the whole package. Google testosterone found in the whole package, desiccated testicle supplements. Because I think the whole package is one of these companies, whether it's Ancestral Supplements or the other one, where they sell desiccated or dehydrated liver and heart and kidneys. And I've taken their supplements.

They're really excellent. But I think one of them, I think it's called the whole package, has been shown to contain some oral form of testosterone. Is it the whole beast? Because I've seen that being... No. Oh, whole package. You're right.

Yeah, okay. It says it's got testicle in it, but I don't see anything about testosterone. Yeah, but I mean the actual testing of it, not from them, from someone else. But I think that's great that people are choosing to eat these things, not just for their health, but the fact that there's much less animal waste. It's not all just going to dog food and things like that. It's like people are starting. It's trendy. It's cool.

Paul, Liver King, whomever, they're turning this into a thing. Yeah. Jamie, I actually, he actually sent it to me. Hold on a second. I can send it to you. Now I'm remembering. Hang on one second. I can send it to you. Now I'm remembering. Hang on one second. Yeah, it is.

I mean, it is good in that regard. Yeah. Give me one second. Here it is. Jamie. Why? Is your airdrop on? There it goes.

All right. Okay. Are you receiving that? Okay. So pull that up. So this is someone actually tested it. And this is what the results were that they had found. And this is from the whole package.

So androstene 3, 17 dione, 20 nanograms per gram. I don't know what any of this means. 30 nanograms. Testosterone, 250 nanograms to 300 nanograms per gram. So what it is is showing that there's some kind of androgens that are available that people have detected in this supplement. Now, is that orally active? That's the question. Like, does it actually increase your testosterone by eating it? Sure.

I have no idea. Yeah. I'm not the guy for that. But eating organs, just the sheer nutrient content of, like, liver, per se. I know a lot of people who, like my friend Derek, he eats one ounce of liver every day. Does he do it raw? No, he cooks it.

Okay. But he does it just for health benefits. And he feels a genuine change from eating it. It's undeniable that it's like a nutrient-dense food. It's really a superfood. I mean, I know it's been said, you know, on social media and stuff, but it's a lot of animals pick the liver if they have

their choice. A lot of predators pick out livers. You know, orcas, lions, hyenas, all kinds of things. Wolves. Wolves, if they have the choice, they are eating the liver immediately. Yeah, it's fascinating. Well, that tells you something, right? That really does. It tells you that there is so much vital nutrient in that organ that it's being selected for over muscle meat,

over other tissue, you know, and you get different stuff from different parts of the animal. Skin has different stuff, you know, but the fact that that's being selected for first, I mean, that should be an indicator. I think we can live our lives by things animals show us. Yeah. Well, you definitely can learn something from them. You've done a lot of diving and, you know, you do a lot of fishing. Are you concerned at all about mercury levels in fish? Yeah. Yeah. I think that, you know, if I had a diet of exclusively bluefin tuna, I'm certain I'd get, you know, mercury poisoning, foggy headed, you know, all the things that come from that. But as long as you're varying it, you know, and you're not like, I think being pescatarian with wild apex fish, like there's

certain choices, right? Certain fish have much lower mercury levels than others. And it's the apex ones, the ones that are the predators, they're the ones who get the higher fish content or the higher mercury content because they're eating all these other fish that spend a lot of time in the depths of the ocean where the heavy metal poisoning is. Is that the idea? a higher mercury content because they're eating all these other fish that spend a lot of time in the depths of the ocean where the heavy metal poisoning is. Is that the idea? That's part of it. It's really just the bioaccumulation.

So every fish has the same amount. This is very vague, but every fish has the same amount of mercury. But if you're a fish at the top of the food chain and you eat a thousand small fish, that's all that mercury is accumulating because it doesn't dissipate. Versus if you're a fish lower down in the food chain, like a sardine, that's just eating microorganisms and algae. It's not accumulating a lot of mercury. It's interesting you say that because I tested positive for arsenic from sardines.

Really? Yeah. How does that happen? I got a blood test and my doctor was like, you got arsenic in your blood. I was like, what? That's terrible. Yeah. How does that happen? I got a blood test and my doctor was like, you got arsenic in your blood. I was like, what? That's terrible. Yeah. And he goes, it's not a lot.

He goes, it's a very small amount. He goes, but what are you eating? And he goes, are you eating any sardines? I go, yeah, I eat a lot. I eat like three cans a day. I was eating a lot of sardines. That's a lot. Young and single and stupid.

Yeah. And he said, don't do that. He said, let's do it again in a couple of months. Just cut that out of your diet. Cut it out of my diet, went back, nothing. Do you know how the arsenic is in sardines? I don't even know about that. Just heavy metal toxins.

They spend a lot of time in the low depths of the ocean where a lot of that stuff accumulates apparently. And all the radiation is more, yeah. So there was a lot of concern about our eastern bluefin tuna population, right? There's a population of bluefin tuna that basically just swim between Central America, us in California, Northern America, and over to Japan and back. They just do this big circle every year. And there's a lot of concern that when they're going over to Japan from Hiroshima and things like that, they're picking up a lot of radiation and that's actually activating the mercury, right? Oh, really? Yeah.

So there's been published studies on this and I don't know exactly how much it's affected in those fish, but the fish going over there undeniably have higher amounts of mercury than the fish over on the West Coast of the United States. Wow. Yeah. The radiation activates the mercury. Yeah. There's been some, I don't understand how, I don't understand how it's connected, but yeah.

How much time is there left in the ocean for these fish? If you think about how quickly, we want to talk about how we wiped out woolly mammoths and we wiped out bison. We are wiping out fish at a fucking staggering rate. An alarming rate. Yeah. Yeah. And what's crazy, before we talk about how much time is left,

scientists predict that eight years is all it would take to bring it back to 100%, or maybe it was 98%. What? If we stopped fishing the ocean for eight years, it would be back to nearly 100% fecundancy, 100% perfect, nearly. But we'd have to get all the countries on board. Yeah. That means for eight years, all the fishermen would starve.

And not to mention, fish is the primary source of protein for the majority of the planet. Is it really? It is, yeah. The majority of the planet? Yeah. That's certainly everywhere coastal. But the majority of the planet's majority of protein comes from fish. Wow.

Yeah, which is why. And we are. I mean, we are wiping out, you know, it's 100 million sharks a from fish. Wow. Yeah. Which is why, and we are, I mean, we are wiping out, you know, it's a hundred million sharks a year. We're killing just sharks, a hundred million a year. Just think about that. That is so many animals. Um, yeah. So, I mean, are the oceans fucked? My short answer is no, because I don't like to think in that doom and gloom. I think that we have the ability and the knowledge to overcome it. We just have to figure out how we're going to do that. I think if we continue at the rate that we're doing it, we're going to see a big collapse. And by the way, people seem to forget about this.

If we lose the ocean, we all die. It's the biggest carbon neutralizer. It gives us all of our protein. Like there's a million reasons why the ocean, it's where all our rain comes from. Everything is connected to the ocean. And if we fuck that up completely we're gone yeah and yet here we are like day after day doing everything we can just dumping stuff into the ocean using giant nets and scooping up every fucking living thing that gets caught in it everything those trawlers that are like scraping the bottom all the starfish and skates and Carl Reeves

It's crazy that we know I love sushi. It's the best favorite food in the whole world. I know We're all hypocrites in that regard. So fuck. There's just so many goddamn people and so much need. Yep Yeah I mean if people were forced to gather their own food and hunt for their own food, and you had a few months out of the year that all you did was hunt and fish, and then you stored it all and stockpiled it, we'd have a completely different thought about where food comes from. 100%. But the fact that you could just pull in a jack-in-the-box, get a burger, or- Eat a piece of cow, no problem. Flay a fish.

Yeah. Yeah. It's the connectedness, man. I stand by that. I think I've become more and more of a proponent for it as I get older. But it's just like people need to connect with nature and connect with animals. If they can do that, they can have appreciation. They're more willing to make smart choices.

I'm not saying don't eat sushi. I fucking love sushi. It's my favorite food in the whole world. But I still try and make smart choices. Like I try not to get five orders of bluefin tuna for the obvious reason that that's typically bluefin tuna that's getting wiped out. Right. Like, but it's because I'm connected because I go diving and I love the ocean and I see those fish. And so I just think people need to connect to nature more. Yeah, we're very disconnected. It's just such a new thing, too, that human beings live in these massive population centers like Los Angeles and New York and are so removed from the process of like where their food comes from. oh my God, how can you cut that fish up?

Or how can you fillet that deer or clean that elk or whatever? It's like, where the fuck do you think your food's coming from? And they're disgusted by the process. And yet those are the same people that are going and eating it. And they're the same people, if they're not eating fish and meat, they don't understand what monocrop agriculture is doing to the earth. And that's 10 times worse. It's the worst. Dude, we went to Borneo.

I've never been so heartbroken in my entire life looking at an environment. We went to Borneo to look for this primate species, Miller's grizzled langur. What are you looking for? You just mumbled that out. Sorry. The Miller's grizzled langur, called the Dracula monkey. It's a monkey with this big collar. We found it.

First one seen in 30 years. We got it on a trail camera. What does that look like? It's awesome. Jamie can pull it up. You know what a langer is? So you found one? They were thought to be extinct? Yeah, for 30 years.

Wow. They call them a Dracula monkey? Yeah. Whoa. What a cool looking monkey. The picture to the left is our picture. That one right there. Right there? Yeah, that's my picture. Wow.

I think. Yeah, I think that's our picture. Rare monkey discovered in Borneo. Yep. So they hadn't been seen for like 30 years and there's this incredible professor I worked with and she pointed me in the right direction. Then we worked with the right people. There's me right there in the Dracula monkey.

And anyway, yeah. So we went and found this guy. But the point being, we landed in Borneo. We drove for two days to get to this primary piece of jungle. For two days, all we saw was oil palm. for two days to get to this primary piece of jungle. For two days, all we saw was oil palm. For two days. I'm not joking.

It's just like eight, nine hours of driving per day, plantation after plantation of monoculture. One singular crop. Wiping out virgin primary jungle to plant this oil palm. It was devastating. Nothing lives in it. And palm oil is used for everything. Everything. Your Nutella, your peanut butter, your, it's like the cheapest version of oil.

And so it's in tons, especially sweet food products. It's in everything. And again, I love Nutella, but I try not to buy it because I've been to Borneo and I've seen it. I'm not saying everybody can do that, but at least I've been connected to it enough to now try and make those decisions, you know? And it's just, man, that monoculture and seeing it. And then you get into this tiny little patch of virgin jungle, right? That's like, whatever, a couple hundred miles or whatever, tiny compared to the island. And it's so alive and verdant. Yeah, this is what it looks like.

Wow. Just for days, Joe. I'm not kidding. It is devastating to see. And so all that wildlife, all that habitat is all destroyed for this monocrop. Yep, all gone. Yes, look at that picture. 1950 versus 2020.

Look at that. 1950, look at the amount of virgin jungle. 2020, look what's that. 1950. Look at the amount of virgin jungle. 2020. Look what's left. Wow. It's literally like there's maybe 30% left. And so we drove up that sort of coastline that you see there and it's just, you just see nothing. Yeah, exactly. Thanks, Jamie. And you just, it's, it's unfathomable that we can do this. And it's because it's cheap. It's because labor in Indonesia is cheap. It's cheap to produce the crop. Everything's getting torn up like that, looking like those mines,

and that's just for plantation. And nothing, you go into it at night, right? Like with a headlamp or whatever. Silent. Just silent. No crickets, no bats, no birds. Silent. You get into these little patches of jungle,

noises and crickets and bugs and bees and monkeys. I heard the night in the jungle is just deafening. It's amazing. It's deafening, but I don't care who you are, you will sleep well listening to it because it's natural. It's like the kind of thing you pay for to play, you know, when you go to sleep, sleep sounds. And it's like loud and crazy, but like you lay down and you listen to it and you just drift off right to sleep whereas if i'm if i'm in new york you know and like in a high rise staying there i can't sleep at all listening to the ambulances and the you know it's crazy yeah no

i can't either yeah i don't like hearing that shit well for us still alive it's your book it's available now did you do the audio version of it i I did. Did you narrate it? I did. Yes. Yeah. Nice. My scratchy voice, if you want. Happy. I love when an author reads their own book. It's really depressing when they hire some actor to read it when you know they're disconnected

from the subject matter. You helped me write that. I did. You don't even know that. How did I help you? When we went to see the wolves together, we're sitting in the car, and you're like, dude, get out from under the thumb of these networks. Do your own thing.

Do more of it. Because I was griping about how tough it is to get, you know, Animal Planet Discovery, whatever, on board for some of these projects.

And you're like, just go fucking do it, dude. Yeah. And I was like, all right. And that was like, I think we hung out in January

and COVID hit in March. Yes. And COVID hit and I was like, well, I'm stuck at home. I'm going to write a book. Well, I'm glad you did, Ben. I'm glad you're thinking along those ways because I think if you did a show and just did it on YouTube or did it on some other platform, I mean, you'd probably have way more views even than you're getting off of the networks because people just aren't watching TV like they used to.

People are really fascinated by the internet. They're watching things on their phones. They're watching Apple TV and Netflix, and that's where people are getting it from the internet. They're watching things on their phones. They're watching Apple TV and Netflix. And that's where people are getting it from the internet. You're right. And that's where I'm going. We've started this thing called The Wild Times, which is our YouTube thing. And it's super fun. It's very talk show.

But we talk about wildlife news and what's happening in the world and started to do some content for it. Beautiful. It's fun, man. And I'm still doing the shows. How do people find that? It's on YouTube and Spotify and all those places called The Wild Times. Is it your YouTube channel? What is the channel itself? There it is.

Right there. Okay. Wild Times Pod on YouTube. Yeah. All right. And it's fun. And that's the book. And I'm still doing Shark Week shows and stuff like that.

I'm just trying to do all of it. And a big part of that is thanks to you. My pleasure, brother. My pleasure. I'm excited you're doing that. Thank you very much for being here. Go get the book, folks. It's out now. Thanks. Thanks, dude. Bye, everybody.