The Jordan Harbinger Show - 898: Forrest Galante | Seeking Unicorns and Resurrecting the Dodo

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

Wildlife biologist Forrest Galante rejoins us to discuss rediscovering "lost" species and why we should resurrect the dodo, thylacine, and woolly mammoth. What We Discuss with Forrest Galante: What's Forrest been up to since his last visit to this show? Just milking venomous sea snakes and trying to find out why orcas are slaughtering great white sharks en masse. Where are the world's biggest snakes found, and do they ever eat people? What did Forrest find inside the world's largest cave — besides a variety of isolated ecosystems with their own weather systems? Why following leads for unknown or thought-to-be-extinct species isn't tinfoil hat territory — and the clever ways Forrest and his team track them. How likely is it that science will be used to resurrect extinct species like the woolly mammoth, dodo bird, and thylacine in the near future — and how does this ambitious goal fit into the conservation of existing ecosystems? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/898  This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals  Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to checkout is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. What I can say is, without a doubt, thylacine, the animal I mentioned, dodo birds, and woolly mammoth. They're all going to be walking the planet thanks to colossal in our lifetime.

And this is a big deal. This isn't, oh, I'm just this crazy, eccentric, Jurassic Parky billionaire. This has phenomenal, grandiose conservation application. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people,

and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional gold smuggler, economic hitman, national security advisor, or astronaut. And if you are new to the show or you want to tell your friends and family about the show, and I love it when you do that, by the way. Thank you so much.

Our episode starter packs are a place to do it. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion, negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation in cyber warfare, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, back on the show, my friend Forrest Galante, he's a wildlife explorer for lack of a better term. He travels to some of the most dangerous places in the world. He looks for extinct animals or.

with, well, animals thought to be extinct. And he grew up in Zimbabwe on a farm, came to the U.S. as a refugee. If you haven't heard the first episode with him, came out in like February, definitely go back and check it out. We are doing kind of a part two. He is just up to all kinds of shenanigans

with snakes and milk and snake venom and looking for more extinct species and all kinds of giant snakes and just insane caving. The dude is, I could never do any of this. I would never want to even watch him do this in real life anywhere other than television. That's absolutely as close as I get to this. These conversations are as close as I get to the level of nature that Forrest gets into.

And if you like the wildlife stuff, you're going to love this episode. So here we go with Forrest Galante. You last came on, I want to say late 2022, early 2023. Where have you been since then? I know you're never home, but you also probably weren't, you know, in the coast of Spain on a beach. Oh, God. I talk about your brain fog. Where have I been since we last spoke? You might have to look at your calendar to answer this question. If I worked backwards, I just got back from Baja, Mexico about four days ago. We spent two weeks down there. Before that, I had two really exciting trips. One was on the west coast of Australia, really remote area, looking at the effects of sea snake venom on shark tissue. That came with its whole own list of difficulties, which included cats. catching sea snakes, taking venom, finding big sharks, taking tissue from them, you know, all the typical Wednesday job stuff.

And then before that, we were in South Africa looking at endemic species of sharks and what's going on with the orca situation. I don't know if you're aware of this, but there are two infamous orcas there that are just annihilating the great white shark and seven-gill shark populations. Wow. And so, yeah, we went and studied that for about a month. So, yeah, it's been a good year so far. What I thought you were going to mention is you've probably seen this, I'm sure.

There's orcas that figured out how to sink boats. Yeah. Have you heard about this? Yeah, I just read about this the other day. It's incredible. So that's terrifying because I'm already like, don't go in the water for no reason. Like I realize I'm probably mostly safe in the ocean unless I'm with you, in which case I'm chasing the most venomous snakes on the planet.

But most of the time you're safe in the water and everyone's like, it's fine. And like, killer whale, oh, they just called that because they kill sharks and look like dot, dot, dot, dot, shamoo. And meanwhile, they're like sinking yachts that are just mining their own business. And they're like, no, we've had enough of your shit, humanity. We're taking you down. We do know it's a learned behavior. But we don't know whether it's a learned behavior of aggression because one orca had a bad

instant experience with a boat and now is taking it out on boats. Or if it's a learned behavior of play because they find it fun. It's like an activity for them to go and harass these boats. And we don't know. And I mean, like how much of, if that was a human being, you would say, say that this is a psychopath, right? Like, oh, are they enjoying it? Are they doing it out of aggression? We don't know the answer, but because we don't fluently speak orca, and we do actually speak orca a little bit, but because we as humans don't fluently speak orca, we don't know the

answer, which is pretty crazy. It is crazy. I understand how terrifying that would be, and I'm not saying, like, good, those boaters that were just enjoying a relaxing weekend deserved it. But I totally get the perspective of the orca being like, huh, most of the time when these come through, they throw garbage off, we choke on it, we die from this, we get hit by their propellers, they make a ton of noise, they leak poisonous substances, maybe we should keep these things away from our kids. And they're like, I know how to do that, bash into it as hard as you can. And eventually there'll be a hole in it. And it'll tip over and they'll never come back.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, it's pretty wild. I mean, it's, wouldn't it be crazy if we looked back, you know, in 15 years and we're like, hey, remember when we used to be able to go on the ocean? Those were good days. Yeah. Well, you'll still be able to go. You just need like a metal hull that is orca-proof. It'll be like, totally.

If you want orca-proofed yachts, you need to add $25,000 per square foot for the protective coating that makes it so that an orca can't destroy your boat. They'll have to retrofit all these rich people will be crying because they have to retrofit their catamaran. As if the world isn't crazy enough. Now we have orcas attacking boats

and we've got to retrofit our boats to go out in the sea. I mean, that's not really the case, but how funny would that be? You know they call us killer whales? Let's show them what we're made of here. Totally. Let's earn this reputation, this moniker. The sea snake thing sounds scary.

Sea snakes are poisonous if memory serves, right? I watched a couple Nat Geos. They look really scared. And if they bite sharks, I assume they're smaller than sharks and they kill them with the poison, which means the poison's got to be pretty potent stuff. Yeah, so first of all, I'm going to be that annoying kid from school that corrects you because snakes are poisonous. They're venomous. They're venomous.

Yes, I knew that. I knew that from last time because I think we had this exact exchange last time. I'm never going to get that right, by the way. I'm never going to get it right. Just accept that. That's okay. But yeah, the difference being so venom, an envenomation occurs when toxic substance is injected into you versus when you consume it. That's a poison, right?

Okay. So the question, and maybe we even talked about this. I might have been getting ready to go for this one. I don't even remember. But sea snakes are lethally venomous, you know, to the point. And it's interesting because they're totally silent killers. What their venom does is it's paralytic. It paralyzes their prey, which is fish.

And it does that by stopping their heart and stopping their lungs. And it's pretty much untraceable. So it's a very, very scary toxin. And I had a pretty ridiculous mistake run-in, probably one of the closest run-ins I've ever had, actually. So we're out in Western Australia. We're looking for these sea snakes to test the toxicity of their venom, right? And milking them and so on.

Wait, wait. Hold on. Pause. Yeah. How do you milk a sea snake? snake. Is that literal or are you like juicing its head somehow? No, no. You can milk anything with nipples, Greg. Um, no. I have nipples. I have nipples. I have nipples for us. Can you milk me? There we go. No, yeah. So, so milking it is a process done where you take the snakes and, you know, with traditional snakes, you have like a jar with a clear film over it and the snake bites on and the venom drips out of the fangs from the venom glands. Okay. Sea snakes, however, have tiny little

venom. So you have to catch them, hold their mouths open, and then take a pipette and run that pipet up the tooth, up the fang, and then pipet out the venom from the venom plant. So it's a very, very delicate process. And what's crazy is, you know, you can't do this with big bulky gloves on because you don't have the dexterity. I was going to ask if you have snake venom gloves or if you're just winging it, man. I mean, we have gloves that we use for some of the handling, but you can't do the venom extraction using the gloves because you need the dexterity of your fingers and you need to be able to operate these micropypets and things like that. Oh, man.

And so you're there holding literally the most lethal biotoxin in the world where one microgram, one drop, one flick getting in a crack, in your skin, in a cut, in your eyes or ears or mouth or nose will ultimately just kill you in a matter of six hours without any real side effects other than feeling a bit lethargic. Oh, no. And so do you want to hear about what I did, which was dumber than dirt? I do. but I want to highlight that for a second

because that's that amount of poison that's like ricin or something and I only know that from Breaking Bad, right? But this tiny little piece of this or it's like how they say like enough fentanyl to cover the head of a pin can make you have an overdose. That's like that level of toxicity and you say no side effects

meaning you don't know if you've ingested where you're like oh God my lips are numb I better run to the nearest hospital and get them ready to have me on life support. You're just like I'm fine and you go eat lunch and then you keel over and you're like, guess that wasn't fine and you're dead. And not only that, but the life support that they can offer is pretty minimal. You know, the anti-venin for sea snakes, it does exist, but in very low frequencies and low, low, it's just like, it's a no-win scenario.

You're not getting out of there alive. Okay. So how did you almost succumb to this particular toxic? So dumb, Jordan. I'm sitting there, milking the snake. I've got adrenaline coursing through my veins, because I've got this lethally deadly snake in my hands. I'm holding its mouth open. We're pipetting, you know, we're pipeting up vertically. So if you imagine the snake's mouth is open, and I've got the pipette up like this, and I'm taking the venom, and I'm putting it into the vials.

And some of the venom and other liquids are running down, because you're dealing with a sea snake. It's just come out of the ocean. Everything's wet. Your hands are wet. I just caught it in the ocean. There's liquid around, right? When I'm doing something that borders on, you know,

just life-threatening like this, I'm usually laser-focused. And this case was no difference. There was no exception. I'm laser-focused. I'm focused on the snake. I'm focused on the job that I'm doing. And I'm pipetting this venom. And I'm putting it in the vial. And I get all done. And the snake goes back in the cooling bucket so that the snake doesn't overheat. And the venom goes into the cooler. And then my cameraman, who I will name here so that he gets in trouble because he's one of my best friends, Mitchell, who's always arguing with me. We're always arguing. We're like a married couple in that regard. He starts arguing with me about a shot or a drone shot or something. And I'm one of those people that when they're frustrated, they put their fingers in their eyes.

So he starts arguing with me. As soon as I'm done, I go like this and I rub my eyes like this with my fingers. And I'm like, God damn it, Mitch, I don't care about your drone shot or whatever it is. And as I'm doing this, as I'm rubbing my fingers in my eyes and frustration, I just like have this moment of, oh, fuck. Yeah, clarity. Because I haven't washed my hands. I haven't done anything. I've literally just put the snake away seconds ago with all of this fluid around, like I said, not knowing if some of the venom had leaked down the pipette and into my fingers, the same exact fingers I've just stuck in my eyeballs.

And it can absorb through your eyeballs? Oh, yeah. It can just go through your mucus membranes or whatever. Yeah, and it enters into your bloodstream. It's just the same as being bitten. And so I did this and all of a sudden I just went silent and Mitch was like, wait, what's wrong? Because he used to me arguing with him.

And I'm like, I think I just killed myself. And he's like, what? And I was like, uh, nothing. And so I just said nothing because I didn't want to like freak the whole team out. Because there's a, there's a crew of us out there, right? There's 12 of us. We're hour, we're like 10 hours from civilization. Like we're not, we're not, there's no help coming. And so I know what I've done. He like brushes it off and I just get kind of quiet and I'm on the boat. And this was at the very end of the day. So I'm like, okay, we're done for the day. You know, we finish up shooting and finish up getting our samples. And we're in the boat back to the place that we're staying and we're boating back. And whether you've been injected by sea snake venom or whether

you've just had a really long day of diving and catching snakes, you start to feel fatigued because you're exhausted, right? I've been in the water for 10 hours and I'm like, fuck, is this it? Like, the fatigue is really kicking in. I'm exhausted. Yeah. And so we go back to the house. Everybody cracks a beer. Like, I'm having a beer. I'm not saying anything. I'm a little bit quiet. It might as well. Yeah, I might as well. Everybody, have two beers while you're at it. Everybody keeps asking what's wrong. Are you okay? I'm like, yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm good. Sorry, I'm just tired. And so then I literally, they're like, all right, we're going to go out and get some dinner because there's a little like restaurant near the house we were staying in. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to skip dinner. You guys. You guys have a good night. I'm tired. I go to my room. I write a note to my wife and son saying like, I love you guys. You know, if anything happens, blah, blah. I put it on the nightstand next to the bed. I get into bed and I go to sleep. And I don't even think about it. Wake up in the morning, feeling totally fine. crumple up that letter, throw it in the trash. I'm like, I'm good to go.

Nothing happened. You could still call the wife and kids and tell him you love him, but I bet it was a pretty nice morning. Best morning you've ever had. Hangover, no hangover, three, four hours of sleep, no problem. Best, best freshest morning in your life. I tell this story to my buddy Patrick, and he goes, well, why didn't you just call Jess, your wife?

And, like, say something. And I was like, if I had randomly called her out of the blue to start professing my love to her and my son, she would have known something was up. And then I would have had to tell her what had happened. And then she would have been freaking out all night. You know, like it just would have snowballed the whole thing. And so I just said nothing.

I wrote a little note. I apologized to the crew and the note about having to deal with me in that situation. And, and yeah, I woke up and everything was fine, crumpled up the letter, went out, had a cup of coffee, didn't say anything. It was like, I'm good, baby. I'm back. Oh, my God. Like apologies in advance to his name Mitch for having, thinking that he killed

me by arguing about a drone shot. Not your fault. Nope. Love you, bro. Like all these little loose ends. Like, what else? Here's my Bitcoin wallet password. Yep.

Yeah, that's, that's, that is so ridiculous. I mean, because there's not, nothing you can do, right? Did you try to wash your eyes out or anything? Is it, there's no point? There's no, it's too late. It makes no difference. I mean, I sort of did. You know what I mean?

And the sense of like, I, like, I, like, poured some water over my head, but it was just like, it's done at that point. venom was on my fingers and in my tear duts, that's that. There was nothing more that could be done. So if the sea snake bites a shark, are we talking about a big shark? Because it kills this big thing. How does it eat that thing? It can only have a few bites for it's full and then what the rest just rots? That's a good question. So a sea snake would never eat a shark typically. Okay, okay. Instead, what happens is you have tiger sharks, which are known as the dumpsters of the sea, that'll come along and eat pretty much anything they can fit in their mouths. Now, this is where the mystery sort of gets really

interesting. When a tiger shark would come up and eat a sea snake that was lounging on the surface, sunning itself, whatever, odds are it would kill it. But as many people know, sometimes when you decapitate a snake, it stays alive, right? Like the head keeps biting. It's like you see those videos on YouTube or whatever. Now, a sea snake would never have the ability to envenate a shark through its skin because sharks have big, tough, rough, sandpapery skin. But, and this is where it becomes so fascinating. If a tiger shark were to come to the surface, chow down on a sea snake, bite it in half, let's say, and put the bitey end in its mouth, that sea snake would then have access while still alive but dying to the soft tissue, esophagus, throat, stomach, etc. of the tiger shark. And all it needs

in a defensive strike is to bite once and inject that venom into the mouth or stomach of the tiger shark, the lining, and then the venom's in the bloodstream. So, you know, we had to go through a pretty rigorous test to see would tiger sharks eat a sea snake? How would they do it? Would they be able to bite it in half? And we did all this for Shark Week, by the way. It's all coming out in discovery later this year in July. But it's pretty cool. It was a pretty wild adventure. This is probably a dumb question. Is this knowledge just for the sake of, hey, we want to know this random, these kinds of random things and we're also finding out the toxicity of the venom? Or is it just like you're looking for something else and you find out these kind of random factoids.

Because it seems a little weird to be like, hey, you know what? I really want to know if a tiger shark would bite a sea snake. And if the sea snake would then bite the tiger shark's inner mouth lining. Let's spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the answer to that question while filming it. So it's actually motivated by the fact that tiger sharks have mysteriously been washing up dead on beaches of Western Australia. Interesting.

With absolutely no known issues. Like you look at them and the autopsy goes, they're perfect. There's no microplastics in the gut. There's no lacerations. There's no injuries. There's no bruising. There's no hemorrhaging. Nothing.

These animals are perfect. Why is a 16-foot immaculate, healthy-looking tiger shark washed up dead on a beach flawless? And so my theory, my hypothesis was this was the reason, these sea snakes. And so we went to study this to try and answer whether or not that was those, they were the culprits. God, it just seems like such a random confluence of events that a tiger shark would be like, let me eat this. Oh, there was a sea snake in there. Ah, I bit it in half.

And that half is in my mouth. And it bit me. Yep. It just seems like that's like winning the lottery or getting hit by, that's the shark equivalent of getting hit by lightning. Yep, it is. But it happens, right? It happens.

And that's the thing. What is it? Not Freudian. What's the thing? Anything that can happen will happen? Yeah, just straight up probability, but I don't know exactly what you're aiming at right now. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter.

But anyway, yeah, but it was really cool. interesting. That part of Australia is absolutely incredible. Super wild. That Ningaloo Reef region is, you know, next to the Great Barrier Reef. Honestly, it's way more impressive than the Great Barrier Reef, if you ask me as far as life and biodiversity. But yeah, it's just a really cool place to be. Tons of marine life. Big snakes, big sharks, like you name it. It was awesome. How big are the sea snakes? They're not that big because you can lift it up with one hand while milking it with the other, right? Yeah. It's like six, seven feet long. You know, some of them get about as thick as your forearm. some of them are sort of skinnier and lankier.

The problem is the maneuverability of them. They're not big snakes are usually not scary. It's the small ones that are scary. They're more maneuverable. They're faster. They can whip around and get you. If a snake's eight feet long, you can grab it by the tail and sort of pull and its head kind of get there very quickly.

If it's a foot long, the second you touch its tail can whip around and bite you. So yeah, no, they're very maneuverable little buggers. Jeez, I remember getting bitten by this baby brown snake. and I don't know if it's poisonous or venomous, sorry, in the United States. I know in, is it in Australia? The brown snakes are super venomous. Brown snakes are, yeah, deadly for sure. There's something in the United States that's a brown, it's literally a brown snake.

And it does bite because it bit me, but luckily, I remember it was in Boy Scouts, it was a tiny little, it was like three inches long baby snake. It bit me, but I had a callus on my finger from doing stuff with wood, firewood at Boy Scout camp. and it didn't, the teeth didn't go through the callous. And I remember thinking, did I just narrowly avoid going to the hospital slash dying? Or is this just a snake that has no venom that just happened to bite me because I was screwing with it? Where was this? What part of the country?

This is Michigan, northern Michigan. Odzar, it was a harmless garter snake or water snake. But you'll never know. You will never know. I will never know. I found it in a vending machine, in a coin return of a vending machine. Wow. That's bizarre.

It was warm in there. Yeah. It was warm in there. So it probably, like, figured out how to get in the vending machine. We look for quarters in the coin return, as you do when you're a kid. Sure, of course. And I found a little tiny snake. That's crazy.

It was cool at the time. Now it would absolutely give me nightmares, and I would never touch it. But as a kid, I was like, whoa, I found a snake. And everyone's like, sweet, bring it back to the tent and keep it next to where you sleep. What could go wrong? Well, I still do that, and I'm not a kid, so don't sweat it. Yeah, you get paid to do that. Exactly.

You get paid to do that now. You're famous for that. Yeah, all I did was either almost, at least have a puncture wound on my hand at the very sort of best case scenario. What about giant anacondas? People tell me these stories like, oh, when I was in the Amazon, I saw a 20, 30, whatever, add number of foot anaconda or snake. But it always sounds like something, I'm like, oh, did you do ayahuasca when you were down there? And they're like, yeah. I'm like, that didn't really happen then.

You're just confused and had a fever dream and now you think you rode a snake or something. like that. Right. Are those real? Do they exist? And how big do they get? Well, it depends on your definition of giant, but there are certainly giant snakes. I mean, my team and I were catching 19 to 21 foot anacondas in Brazil. Oh, wow. Yeah, just about a year and a half ago now. And, you know, I've caught bigger articulated pythons around that length. I've seen African rock pythons that get up to like 18 feet. So, I mean, there are big snakes. I think the stories you hear are the 40 foot snake and things like that. I don't think people realize how, you know, large 40 feet is. You know, if you see a 20 foot snake, which weighs 500 pounds, by the way,

and as thick around as the trunk of our bodies, you think that that's a 40 foot long animal, right? You look at it and go, holy crap, look at the size of that thing. And you just, you know, you tell your friends, oh, I saw a 40 foot long snake or a 30 foot. Everybody embellishes everything. That's part of storytelling, right? Yeah. But, you know, I think that's what happens. And the rumors and the legends go bigger and bigger. But I'll say this, snakes like most reptiles, while it does slow down, they grow until they die. So all it really takes is a snake to live a really long time of a large species to live a really long time. And sure enough, you get a really big snake. I was curious about this because every photo that I see, it's either a super wide angle lens

or it's next to a person that would have to be like two feet tall for it to scale correctly. Right. And if you just look at it for more than a few minutes or seconds, you realize it's, What is it called when something, when they do deliberately distort the photo using a lens? Forced perspective. Forced perspective. Yeah, it's forced perspective. Yep. Where you see this and you go, wait a minute, that would make this tractor really, really tiny.

Yeah. Or something along those lines. Like, this doesn't make it. This car must be the smallest car anywhere if it's this length. Right. It just doesn't make any sense. Or our huge biggest car. So where do these big snakes live?

Amazon definitely heard the guys who are the guides talking about big snakes. but again, storytelling, where else would these live? The ocean seems like a likely place for a big-ass snake. Yeah, so Amazon and Indonesia, Southeast Asia are the main two, because that's where you get reticulated Python, Burmese Python, referring to Southeast Asia and Indonesia. And then the Amazon is where you get anacondas. But, and I was telling, I was telling Rogan about this,

there's a fascinating story of a Colonel Remy something or other, who was a Dutch pilot during World War II, highly decorated, where him and his two colleagues in the helicopter were flying over the Congo, a location where giant snakes are not reported to live, and all three of them reported, I want to say 50, I don't know, I said it wrong on Joe Rogan, got blasted, but they reported like a 50-foot snake in the Congo,

and all three of them saw it. They even got a photo of it, if you Google it. Yeah, I'm looking it up. Yeah, they flew over it three times and got a photograph of it, and it's pretty remarkable, because there are not supposed to be big snakes in the Congo. And the Congo is, undeniably, one of the least well-studied jungles and areas in the world. And also, by the way, it makes perfect sense for there to be a giant snake there

because all these snakes hang out in wet tropical dense forest, which is exactly what the Congo is. Every large wet tropical dense forest on the planet has its own version of a large snake, except for the Congo for some weird reason. So why it doesn't have a big wetland snake, like a reticulated python or anaconda, with all those prey sources is hard to say. So I believe there's a lot of validity to the story. I don't believe that it was 50 feet long

and lunged at the helicopter the way that they think it did. It says 25 feet here, according to like the guy's own account, which still is enormous. And also they were in a helicopter. So how do they know how long it wasn't? I mean, they do have a photo, but it's a World War II photo taken from a moving helicopter

and a handheld camera, so whatever. Yep. That's still a big darn snake, man. I think any snake over a couple feet long is like hard pass for me. I don't know how to pull up photos on here. I'd show you some of the like 20 footers that we've caught, but they don't look 20 feet. I mean, I look tiny next to a 20 foot snake.

Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to explain. A 25 foot snake is a very, very large snake that's incredibly powerful and incredibly capable of hurting someone. I mean, that's a big animal. What would they do to a human? Would they actually eat a person or would they just squeeze you until all your bones break and let you writhe around until you die?

Well, both. I mean, uh, anacondas have never really done it, but, uh, there's a tribe called the Ieda tribe in the Philippines. And they're a tribe of pygmies,

who have regular incursions from reticulated pythons, where the reticulated pythons will come out of the jungle canopy and eat people. Now, they're smaller people. Like I said, I mean, I was going to say they're pygmies. Yeah.

Sucks. Sucks to be food size, snack sized, fun size, a fun size person in a jungle with big snake. is not a good. It's not a good combo for survival. But just scale it up, right?

So those are 18 foot snakes eating five foot people, and I'm making up these numbers, you know, rounding out these numbers. So a 25 foot snake would very easily eat a six foot person. And they have, by the way, like there have been accounts of larger people being eaten, especially by reticulated pythons. They're much more likely to attack than an anaconda.

So yeah, no, they would eat a person. They'd come in, bite you, wrap you up, crunch, you know, basically just asphyxiate you, break all your ribs and crunch you to nothing. And then, sure enough, they'd, uh, they'd, uh, they'd, uh, they'd, uh, they'd swallow you up. And I don't want to say this because I'm fearmongering about something that doesn't really happen. I'm just pointing out it's very, very capable of doing that.

We've all seen the movie Anaconda where, right, John Voight gets eaten alive. So, uh, yeah, I just remember Ice Cube in it. It's been a minute since I've watched a documentary as fine as Anaconda. That's right. And Jennifer Lopez, yep. Uh-huh. Right. Oh, God, I forgot she was in that.

That's right. Oh, my gosh. So let's talk about something that's not going to give us nightmares. You went into this cave system in Laos that you said was so big, it has its own weather system. Is that for real or is it just humid in there? No, it's for real. So, you know, you're in like super tropical, dense Vietnamese jungle where it's like 105 degrees out. The air is heavy.

It's so humid. And you go into this cave system. and parts of it are warm, sticky, humid, other parts of it are freezing cold and windy. I mean, you know, keep in mind, you can fit an upright Empire State building inside of this cave. Like, this is not... Are you for real? Oh, I'm dead serious. It's a big kid.

It's a big thing. How big that is. That's so... Wow. Not only is it hard to imagine. It's hard to like, because you're in complete blackness for the most part, and you're shining around, even with like our very high-powered flashlight, you still have a field of vision that's like, you know, the size of a flashlight spot, you know,

so maybe six feet wide at the end or something. And you're shining around this cavern that is like 10 Walmart super centers in width plus 100 of them stacked tall. Like it's unbelievably large. It's hard to actually like, yeah, like I said, I mean, you can, you know, you can stand up the Empire State Building. You could land a jetliner inside of them. They're so big. And it's just, yeah, it's sort of unfathomable, to be honest. It is incredible how big, the Sang-Dung cave system is. This obviously has animals in it that can't exist anywhere else, then I would imagine if there's that much room in there.

There's got to have their own ecosystem and everything. You always see those like blind fish and blind frogs that live in caves. Yep. I'm having a little bit of a moment here because that big of an empty black, dark space is somewhat terrifying for absolutely no good reason. And it's crazy too, because within it, not only do you have its own weather system, its own endemic species, albeit most of them are smaller, but still, you know, there's unique snails, frogs, fish,

so on and so forth. Eels, you also have its own terrain. So part of it has like white sandy beaches with clear water. Part of it has rushing rivers. Part of it has, you know, very little vegetation where there's no light, as you can imagine. But, you know, part of it's really rough, like rocky, difficult to traverse. And where we camped multiple times was like beautiful white sand beaches next to clear water just in close to pitch blackness. Wow. It's pretty fascinating. Yeah. What did you go in there to do to look at some kind of animals inside these caves? Yeah. So at the end of the six mile long cave system is a big collapse in the cave roof and there is its own jungle that sits below the floor of the main jungle above. And we were looking for an

animal called the Sala, also known as the Asian unicorn, the most recently described large mammal. They were only described, and I want to say 95, it's a bovid, meaning related to cows. Beautiful, beautiful creature. And nobody knows whether they're extinct or alive, whether they're gone, whether they're still there, there's odd sightings, blah, blah, blah. And so I had this theory that potentially in this jungle, which was so inaccessible, if Sala had made it in there, because they were known to have some presence around caves and things like that, they would at least remain unharmed. And we also, this never made the show, but we also collected a bunch of ticks and leeches of which there were many and took their blood to check their DNA to see if the blood

in the leeches had been eating sala. That was inconclusive. But regardless, the idea was to look for this unicorn, pretty much, this real unicorn, not a fake unicorn, yeah. When you say unicorn, do you just mean it's rare, or does it have a horn in the center of its head? like a unicorn. It has two perfectly symmetrical horns that when looking at it from a side profile, a line so perfectly that it looks as though it has one staggering unicorn horn. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Forrest Galante. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, it is because of my circle of people around me. You might call it a network, but that word's gross. We don't use that

anymore. I mean, I guess we don't, aside from the name of the course, which is six-minute networking. and is it available for free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The course is about improving your relationship building skills, developing relationships in a non-cringy, non-cheasy, non-gross way. Just a few minutes a day is all it takes, and many of the guests on the show. Subscribe and contribute to the course. So hey, come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong.

You can find the course at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Now, back to Forrest Galante. Fascinating. So you said it's a really inaccessible remote place. I'm going to Laos in October of 2024. Nice. And I'm like, oh, I wonder if we'll go check out this cave. But if it's super in the middle of nowhere, it's unlikely.

It's in Vietnam. It's in the very middle of nowhere. It's in Vietnam. I don't even have the right country. Never mind. That's okay. But I will say this. If you're going to Laos, where are you going in Laos?

I'm not even sure. It's an adventure trip with an itinerary where they don't really tell you. They just tell you what to pack because they don't want everybody to complain or make suggestions. Gotcha. Well, I went to Laos in my younger years, and there's probably stories I shouldn't share from Laos, but we went to a place. It was Vyang Vienne, and Viann was this, I think they shut it down, somebody told me, but it was this backpackers paradise. It was this river in the middle of the mountains where, and I'll try and not, try and not, what's the word,

like condemn myself here too much, but it's this backpackers paradise in the middle of nowhere with this river floating through and all of these like hookah bars that serve you anything you can think not just hookah. Got it. With a bunch of futon couches and, you know, you spend like 15 cents on a bowl of fa. And they bring you the fa and there's like family guy on all these TVs in Vietnamese. And then you go float down this river. And along this river, it's lined with all these makeshift like rope swings, rubber inner tubes, crazy slides.

And each bar serves its own specialty cocktail of drugs and alcohol. And it's, you know, and there's a reason that kids die there because they go. And I mean, you know, I won't go into too much detail, but you rock up to the crazy looking bar with the weird techno that's all over this stunning river in this insane location, the bunch of people partying and backpackers. And you're like, how it's like that, the Brad Pitt movie, the, or no, Leo DiCaprio movie, the island. The beach, the beach, that's it.

The beach, yeah, the beach. Yeah, you're like, how did these people get here? Like, this is the middle of nowhere. How did we find this place? Yeah. And then, yeah, you like rock up to the bar and the guy's like, you want a milkshake? And I'm like, no, I don't want a milkshake. He's like, you know, like milkshake?

You know, milkshake. I put mushroom. I put ecstasy. I put weed. I put, you know, and I'm like, you know, opium. I'm like, no, no, no, I don't want any of those things in my milkshake. In fact, I'm going to just have a beer. But it's a crazy place.

Yes. I want to see you open the bottle when you have anything you serve me. Yeah, exactly. I'll open it myself. Yeah, that is, no wonder kids die. That sounds like a terrible milkshake, not even just the taste, which I can imagine is absolutely vile, but mixing ecstasy, weed, opium, and mushrooms. Yep.

It does not sound like a good time. And then just, hey, go ahead and have fun swinging from high altitude into the water. Exactly. What could go wrong. Exactly. No, it's a pretty wild place. So anyway, if you're going there, make sure you have yourself a nice opium milkshake and good luck to you. Yeah.

Oh, my goodness. For 15 cents. That sounds terrible. I would, yeah, I'm too old for that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, way too old. Yeah, I was too old for it at 23, so yeah, no. Yeah, man.

It's gnarly. If you survive that milkshake, the hangover has really got to be something special. Like an unforgettable four days where you are just hating every minute of life. No question. Oh, my God. You searching for these extinct or thought to be extinct species, are they just missing in inaccessible areas like this bovid unicorn creature you were looking for? basically like, look, we don't know if it's extinct, but nobody's seen one because it's either so

remote or it's in a dangerous place. Is that generally the case? That's a huge part of it. And look, since we did that Extincter Alive show and I put in all this work looking for these lost species, it's become way more of a thing now in wildlife science and biology. I think we talked about this last time. Like when I first proposed the idea, I was like a Bigfoot hunter tinfoil hack guy, right? It was like, you're insane. Like, it's declared extinct. it's gone. What's the matter with you? Like I had all these old professors and stuff that I worked with who literally like wrote me off and said I was a lunatic for even proposing such a stupid idea. And then we found one, two, three, eight different lost species. And then all of a sudden there's now,

it's pretty funny when I look at it. There's like, and I won't name organizations or point fingers, but there's like six or seven different groups and organizations that are on the quest for lost species, hunting missing animals and like, not hunting to kill, but like all these like, very notable groups, some of which were the same exact groups that laughed at me and called me a quack, are now doing it themselves and, you know, hiring their own trackers and biologists and blah, blah, blah, which is pretty hilarious because, yeah, it came from a place of like, you don't know what you're talking about. And the reason, that's a very long-winded way of answering your question, but the reason that I always thought, hey, wait a minute, like, this isn't

whack job tinfoil hat stuff is because it's so incredibly arrogant to assume that we definitively know whether or not something is gone, especially when it comes to super remote, like other countries, incredibly hard to access places, places. And you look at like, oh, when was this declared extinct? Oh, in 1973, some British scientist went there for two weeks, you know, probably hung out in like a really luxurious camp, looked for it. I'm not saying they didn't give it a good shot, but looked for it, didn't find it, came home and said it was extinct. And it's like, that's it. Now we've written off the species as gone. all conservation and funding and hope for it has dried up and gone away completely.

Doesn't that seem like a wax system that we just trusted this one guy who went there once 30 years ago for two weeks? And it's like, wait a minute, there's something, the system's broken. And I think that was the thing is like, I realized the system was broken more so than like I have all these incredibly special talents for finding animals. It was just like the system's wrong and I'm going to go show you how. That makes sense. Plus, also they didn't have, you mentioned looking at a,

ticks blood looking for DNA. They didn't have anything like that. Exactly. They probably went there, looked around at the usual spots, then asked the guides, hey, when's the last time you saw one of these? Oh, man, I haven't seen one of those for at least a few years. All right, they're all gone. Nobody was looking inside a leeches gut or whatever leeches have for the blood of the

species that you're looking for. I mean, you said it was inconclusive, but it was a pretty clever way of looking for clues. We did a lot of that kind of stuff and still do, by the way, like E-DNA, environmental DNA where you can take a water sample and go, hey, did this rare fish or turtle poop in this water at all in the last three weeks? You know, like, let's check the water or taking the blood from leeches or mosquitoes, you know, catching a bunch of them and taking the blood and going, did it bite this animal? We took fecal samples from sharks to see if they were eating these rare seals, you know, like we've these sort of innovative techniques of sort of wildlife forensics are, the technology is

advancing. So it's allowing us to be more creative and do more and more of these kinds of tests and things. It's just, it's a real headache still. Yeah, I bet. You said you found eight or was that just a random number? No, that's how many of you, wow. It is the number thus far. Yeah, eight species that were previously lost to science. It's actually nine. It's just we didn't make a show about the ninth one. Okay. We were there doing a human wildlife conflict on spectacle bears in Peru. And then literally the gardener, it wasn't a gardener, but it was like the guy that was in the makeshift kitchen was raking through the kitchen scrap slash compost heap and found this tiny little what looks like an earthworm was a species of blind snake that hadn't been seen in 70 years. So we've actually found nine

at this point. Yeah. So, you know, I kind of take all the credit certainly because there have been collaborations. And like I said, it wasn't me who found the blind snake. It was the guy cleaning the kitchen. But he handed me this sort of beat up worm looking thing. And I was like, wait a minute, that's a blind snake. And I didn't even know blind snakes occurred in this part of Peru, which ended up being, you know, a lost species. So yeah, no, we found nine, and a big part of the message is just going, look. I didn't realize how common it is to find new species.

You know, you think it just never happens or it requires a decade-long expedition because you see things like that in movies. Sure. But when I went to the Amazon last, or a couple of years ago, and they have a guy who collects moths. Like, that's his whole thing. And he's like, come tonight and look at the moth cloth,

and there's this cloth of the light shining on it. There's a billion different moths. And we all went out there and he's like, hey, collect moths with me and help me label them and all this stuff, basically real science kind of grunt work as an intern would do. And he's like, you might find a new species. And I was like, yeah, whatever. And it turns out that somebody on our trip did find a new species of moth. And I said, how often does this happen? And he goes, oh, I would say every couple months we find a new one.

I'm like, wait, every couple of months, you find a brand new species of moth, not like a different color of the same one. And he's like, no, totally different. Yep. That is incredible. That there are just hundreds of thousands or millions of different species of insect animals that no one's looked for them because they only exist in this area where there's one guy collecting 100 samples a night. And he's literally recruiting like dumbass, half drunk tourists, backpackers to help label and categorize these things because there's too many. What's crazy is so speciation is one thing, like how you determine a new species. and I won't get into the whole thing of that

because as time has progressed, we've got, with technology progressing, we've got more and more and more ways to decide that something's its own species. So you have a lot of hardened academics who's really excited to just name new species, so they look for reasons for something to be a new species.

So they look at two moths that are identical that occur in the exact same location that have the same role in the environment, but they go, hey, these are two different species because one comes out during the day and one comes out during the night. And here's a time. tiny piece of genetic evidence that supports that, and then they get to write a paper and name a

moth after themselves. So I'm not saying this guy was doing that, but that is sort of one of the shady's the wrong word, but one of the things that scientists are doing now to sort of give themselves an edge and be like, oh, I named a species. I did this. So there's that factor. And then the other is, like you said, a lot of it's just not looking in places that there's, it's just understudied, right? Like who's going to the heart of the Amazon to count moths? Who's going to the middle of Sumatra or Borneo or certain places in Africa or South America or wherever to look at beetles or or look at snails or whatever. And then people do it and go, yeah, yeah, find a new species every few months, you know, because nobody else has ever looked or tried to do this. So, you know, it's not

happening in our backyards in California because that's so well studied by First World Science, but it is happening in these remote locations with high species diversity like tropical wetlands and things like that. And it's, yeah, it's fascinating. It's so interesting. And I would imagine there's a lot of, especially with insects, because in 1950, it was probably really hard to catch a fly that you can barely see and then go, oh, well, this one has different, I don't know, exoskeleton properties. It would just be hard to even examine something like that at that 100 years ago. And so you have new tech that's even able to look at like the, what is it, the genetic, what do you call it, the genotype of something and they're like, oh, this is actually new. And we didn't know

because it looks just like another aunt. Exactly. How much has conflict and war prohibited exploration of certain areas? I'm thinking like Columbia, right? The FARC controlled all this territory. And then it's like, oh, peace deal. And now you can walk into a place where you would never, ever in a million years have gone

a couple decades ago because you would have been immediately killed or kidnapped for 20 years by the FARC. I don't know if that's your perfect setup for what we did in FARC rebel control Columbia or not, But go for it. Yeah, no, it's a. So exactly to your point, you know, there was a species of crocodilian called the Rio Apoporos

Cayman, which is a long-nosed yellow crocodileian that lived in one and only drainage, the Rio Apoporos drainage, which had been controlled by the FARC rebels since the 80s, 70s, I don't remember anymore. I don't know. And, you know, literally immediately after the peace treaty was made, when things were still very, very, and they still are very dangerous down there. It's like there's still a lot of FARC issues. We went and grabbed a cocaine dealer's giant B, like cargo plane and flew into the strip in the middle of Columbia and went and found this lost to science species of crocodilian, which couldn't

have been doing better, by the way. It was absolutely thriving in this remote Colombian jungle. It's not like there was one or two left and we found it and oh my God, you know, what a, what a hero's we are for finding it. Not at all. Myself, this other scientist, Sergio, who's working in a different part of the region. found out later, had found massive populations of these Cayman because nobody had been going there because the FARC rebels had controlled it and they weren't interested in killing these crocodiles.

So there was just tons of them and they were absolutely thriving. They're super healthy. They had tons to eat. Things couldn't have been better for the crocodilians. They weren't so great for the people of the region, but for the crocodilians, things couldn't. It wasn't that bad. I mean, everybody was happy and healthy. But, you know, I remember that our like river guy, the guy taking us up the river, was like, hey, you know, like, we were chatting with him one night around the fire. And he's like, yeah, you know, been running, running drugs for a lot of years and come up here and blah, blah, blah. And he's like, yeah, if you guys had come like a year ago, we definitely would have cut your heads off. But, you know, things are okay now. And we're like,

oh, that's cool. I was going to say alleged cocaine dealer, but that's by far that, that's the least of his crimes, apparently. Oh, no, he said it like it wasn't even a thing. Jeez. Yeah. That's a little scary. To have somebody say, yeah, we would have cut your off, but nah, it's fine now. It's like, really? What? So this piece of paper that's over in Bogota is the reason I'm alive right now? That's mildly terrifying. And keep in mind, we were like the middle and, you know, like he could have cut all our heads off and just buried us and gone about his day, you know, doing whatever he did. And nobody would have known, nobody would have, he wouldn't, it wouldn't have made no difference. But his, whoever his higher ups were,

obviously didn't care anymore. So they were like, yeah, you don't need to murder them. And it was like, all right, we'll just take you up the river instead. Sure. I read somewhere that you found a tortoise where they'd only seen one ever. Yeah. And of course, they killed it immediately as a specimen because that's what science was 100 years ago. And you found it, I want to say, because somebody said, I saw tortoise bites in a cactus a few years ago, and that was the clue. That's such a small shred of hope to bank on.

Well, we do all of our expeditions based on like a list of criteria to say, is it likely to still be there. And this one didn't meet that full list of criteria, but my gut instinct, I'm a turtle tortoise guy, right? Like, I got turtles and tortoises all over. I love them. And anyway, my ins I'm friends with the guys at the Turtle Conservancy up in Ohio, which, by the way, if you're listening to this, go and Google it. It's an incredible facility. This guy who's, I don't know how he's raised the money, but he's built this insane facility to breed turtles and tortoises, which are one of the most endangered groups of animals in the world because they're being collected for soup, habitat loss, pet trade, blah, blah, blah.

And anyway, I'm friends with the Turtle Conservancy guys. I went up there. I spoke to this guy, Russ, I can't remember his last name, who'd been on Isla Fernandina in the Galapagos some 30 years prior and had seen bite marks on this cactus and alleged scat, alleged tortoise poop on an island that only one specimen of tortoise had ever been found 114 years prior by the California Academy of Sciences, and it had immediately been bopped on the head and stuffed and collected, as you said.

And that was the only known specimen of this species in recorded history period. There had never been another known animal ever. And so, you know, Russ told me about these bite marks. I knew the story from 114 years prior about the California Academy of Sciences. And I was like, man, we got to, we got to go look, you know, like Fernandina Island is incredibly remote. It's incredibly barren and harsh, very difficult to traverse over, volcanic. boiling hot, not a lot of vegetation. And so we partnered with a couple people, the Galapagos Conservancy, the Galapagos National Parks, and we funded this expedition to head out there.

And myself and those two other organizations all went together. And they sent representatives from their organizations. And we had a great collaboration working together. They wanted to go to the top of the mountain because it was the wettest area, which I just didn't believe in. And I wanted to go to a lowland area that had the most vegetation because I thought that made the most sense. And we did their thing first, we're unsuccessful, then on the second or third day, we did my thing and went to this vegetative area, and within a couple hours found this tortoise. And everything was wonderful, collaboration was great, and then it all went a little sour after that. But we found, literally, I dove into this bush and picked up the rarest animal in the world, the only specimen

living of the Fernandina Island tortoise, the one and only of its entire species. So yeah, it was pretty incredible. Let me back up a little bit. Is the running theory, okay, there's cactus bites and or sorry, tortoise bites in the cactus and scat from this tortoise, they live so long that it doesn't matter that this was 30 years ago or whatever. It could still be there because tortoises live 100 years or 200, whatever it is. Pretty much. Wow. It could have been that exact same animal.

The problem is it's a very active volcano. I think it's a second or third most active volcano in the world. So these limited swaths of habitat get covered up by lava regularly and it's down to only a few locations of habitat. So, yeah, we went to the one that, like I said, I did a lot. You know, look, it's not like we just cowboy at all, right? Where we're like, oh, let's go. Let's check it out.

Like, we do a lot of research and prep and planning. And I'd found this location on a map that just based on the vegetation alone, I was like, that's where we got to go. And then, yeah, sure enough, we went there. And knowing that the same animal that Russ had seen some 30 years prior could potentially have been in this swath of habitat. Sorry, he hadn't seen the animal. The same animal that left those bite marks could still.

be alive today, we went to look and we found her. Oh my God. What are the odds seem incredibly slim. Yeah, I guess you're also lucky that that guy knew what tortoise bites look like because otherwise, I mean, if he wasn't an expert in that particular thing, you'd be like, what did this guy really see? You saw some poop. He thinks it's from this rare species.

Come on. For sure. He just happened to be like one of the few people in the world where you'd go, that guy knows tortoise poop when he sees it. And that's the thing, too, is because I, as you can imagine, I get dozens to hundreds of messages per week of people reporting to have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker, a thylosine, a this, and that the amount that are credible... What's a thylosine?

What is that? What is that? What is that? A Tasmanian tiger. Super, yeah, animal I'm obsessed with. We can talk about that next. But yeah, the amount of reports that are credible are very, very, very slim. But when you have a PhD'd doctor in turtles and tortoises who had been working on that island doing

other surveys, I forget vegetation surveys or something and goes, yeah, no, I saw a tortoise bite mark, and we're literally sitting at the turtle conservancy with, you know, a hundred different species of turtle and tortoise around all taking bites out of cactuses. He's like, yeah, it looked like that. You take that pretty seriously. You know, that's a credible event. So, yeah, that's the thing is getting these credible reports and being able to follow those leads and we and weeding through that. Where do you get most of this stuff that I like, like Instagram DMs where it's like,

hey, man, I know you're just track it out. My dad was hunting and he saw this huge and you're like, okay, delete. Probably send you a screenshot of exactly what you just said. An Instagram DM, where somebody goes, my dad was hunting and he saw blank. But it comes in everywhere. I mean, in the beginning, we just scrub the hell out of the internet and would just look everywhere and libraries and old papers and research. And then as we began to make a name for ourselves in the space of wildlife and conservation,

people would start reaching out to us. And now, you know, I get a ton of reports through social media, through my website, and most of them are garbage. more than most of them. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah, it's, you're finding, it's probably harder to find a credible DM or message incoming than it is to find a tortoise and Galapagos. And the amount of dick picks you got a weed through to get to those sightings. Well, that's just a bonus. You're welcome. Yeah, literally. How do you get something like that, what do you do when you find that tortoise? Do you try to get them to reproduce? But if it's the only one, well, do tortoises asexually reproduce? I don't even know. They lay eggs. They do not asexually reproduce, but they are able to retain sperm for very, very long amounts of time. So if that's female, so I want to say like up to 60 years. Maybe it's less, maybe it's 40. I'd have to check. I was not expecting that answer. I thought you were going to say like

up to a month. No, no, no, no. Wow. 60 years. It might be 30, but whatever it is, it's a long period of time. So, you know, when we found Fern, which was the female tortoise that we found, the one I was mentioning, she was very underweight, very mulnourst, had a lot of ticks on her and so on and so forth. So we, not something I really wanted to do, but the Galapagos National Parks insisted we take her to the breeding center, the Faustola Arena Breeding Center on Eastl of Santa Cruz. So we, we scooped her up, we took her to this breeding center. She put on like 11 pounds in like three weeks, which by tortoise stats is wild because she was very hungry, very dehydrated, blah, blah, and the hope was, well, there were, there were multiple hopes coming from my end. One was that, you know, maybe she had some sperm retention and was able to lay some fertilized eggs. That never took place. And the other hope was that we'd go back and find a male because once we

found her, all attention was on that, right? There was no like, all right, let's chuck her in the bag and look for another one. And that's not really what you do, right? So all attention was on her. But then, yeah, the Galapagos National Parks, Conservancy, whatever, I don't even know the group's names exactly. They've been back three or four times and been completely unsuccessful, which is a pity, Because I think if I went back, we probably would be successful again, but they're doing it on their own and they're not doing very well. So you said you didn't really want to take it to the breeding center. Why?

I should restate that. It wasn't that I didn't want to take her to the breeding center. It was that we found this crown jewel rarity of a creature. And she seemed like the right thing to do is what we did. But it seemed difficult to take this animal out of her habitat. You know, that being said, her habitat, fucking. sucked. Like it was boiling hot. There was nothing to eat. She was super dehydrated. She was buried in under a bush. Like her life was not good. Now she lives in this tropical, like, giant enclosure where

she's fed cactus fruit all day long and like lounges around in a swimming pool. And I'm not joking when I say that. So her life is great now. But if there were another male in that same patch of habitat, which I don't believe there was. But if there was, he's now got one less breeding female to mate with, right? if there's even any of them left. So, you know, it was the right thing to do if the management organizations were able to continue successful conservation efforts or continue repeated surveys,

but they were not. And so that is really sad and difficult for the species because the outlook for that species is, it's very grim at the moment. It sounds like there's a little bit of competition among scientists for discoveries and stuff. A little bit. A little bit, yeah, a little bit.

Because you mentioned the moth naming thing and the speciation thing, and then I'm, I don't know, I'm no expert, but I'm detecting a little bit of, maybe a little bit of, you said it went sour, and maybe it's like, oh, okay,

you said if we could go back, but I mean, I assume it's not you who can't go back. You haven't been able to go back. No, I haven't been invited back. I mean, look, I don't want to throw shade at anybody. I'm not going to name any organizations here

and say they fucked up or anything like that. You don't have to do that. Here's what happens, right? Everybody goes to school. Everybody loves animals. They all get doctorates or PhDs and become researchers or biologists or scientists,

and then find out that there's absolutely no money in our field, right? There's none. There's like no money in wildlife. And so everybody, first of all, they all have egos. They all think they did it the right way, like any doctor in anything. If it's not their idea, it's a bad idea. They're socially awkward because they're used to, they're animal people and not human people. And they're all competing for little bits of resources because they care about their

species, by the way. And that's the important thing to point out here. They're not bad people. There are always bad eggs and everything. But for the most part, they're people who genuinely care about their species. And if the difference of $5,000 can make a huge difference to them, any of these researchers in any of these locations, and if they can be the one to name a species or accept credit or point out that they found something or point out that they saved something, they might get

that $5,000 that otherwise would go elsewhere. And so, you know, their entire careers, reputations, lives, and species rely on these career milestones of accomplishing something. And so there becomes massive, like, ego and competition and all this stuff, which Jordan, it freaking sucks because it should be a giant collaboration where we all work together and figure out how to do the best for the species. But the system does not support that. The system supports everybody working for themselves and trying to do something for their species, which in turn makes people like greedy and selfish, and then you throw human ego into the equation, and it becomes a mess.

This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Forrest Galante. We'll be right back. Hey, if you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment to support one of our sponsors or multiple sponsors. I mean, I'm not going to stop you. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support. the show are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also use the AI chatbot on the website.

It should know all the sponsors. And when it doesn't, y'all tell me, and that's great. And I appreciate that. You can even email me or whatever. I'll send you the code if you're that lazy. But I just really need you to support those who support the show. And now for the rest of my conversation with Forrest Galante. It's a shame because you're right.

It should be like a giant collab. But science already is at war with other interests for money and attention. and the environment essentially, so it's kind of a shame that there's also infighting just by the design of the way the whole thing works. Exactly.

Some of the finds are skill and experience, but other stuff sounds like it, there's just a little bit of a luck component. Didn't you find a rare shark in a fish market that some guy had caught by a mistake or something? I can't remember if I read this in your book, but you found some shark basically like,

wait, you're selling this incredibly rare shark in the middle of nowhere? A luck component is definitely, there, but it takes perseverance and the initiative to go and do the thing before you can get lucky, right? You're not, like, if we hadn't known, and I'll explain the shark thing in a second, that we were looking for ponda cherry shark, it would have just been another dead shark on the table, right? And so you only get lucky because you're already targeting something and looking for it and putting energy into it. So with that being said, my wife and I were in Sri Lanka investigating

reports that the believed to be extinct ponder cherry shark had been in the yala river in this yala national park and uh me being the you know the hero that i am poking fun at myself here i was like i'm going to go offshore i'm going to take 10 000 pounds of chum i'm going to look i'm going to get all these sharks around the boat i'm going to find the ponticherry shark i'm going to catch it i'm going to do all this crazy stuff charter this boat get this team get this captain get all the divers do do all this stuff and my wife's like she's a zoologist she's like all right well will you do that i'm just going to go ask around. And so like I'm out on this like six day like mission spending way too much money, like, you know, dumping bait in the water, doing all the things that I thought would genuinely

attract the shark I was looking for. But, you know, like doing this like big preposterous thing. And my wife's literally walking around fishing villages, chatting to people, showing them pictures of a shark on her phone. And the one guy, she's like, hey, have you seen the shark? And he goes, oh no, I have shark. Shark no good. Buy lobster. Buy lobster. And she's like, no, no, I don't want lobster. Do you know the shark? He said, yes, I have two shark, two sharks. And she's like, all right, well, can you show me the sharks? He's like, come with me, come with me. So she, like, walks with him through his hut and lying on a table is literally like 15 beautiful, big succulent lobster, a pile of little fish, a dead bull shark and a dead ponda cherry shark. And she's like, oh my God, that's the

shark we're looking for. And he's like, shark no good, shark no good. You buy lobster. And she's like, no, no, I don't want lobster. I want that shark. Right, like, I'm not trying to eat this. Yeah. And it was so valueless to him that he didn't even want to sell it to her. So She traded him for a box of, she doesn't smoke, but she went and bought him. Someone on the crew did. She traded him a box of cigarettes for a lost species of shark that is now in the Sri Lankan National Museum. So, yeah, it's pretty wild. I assume the next round of questioning is like, where exactly did you catch this shark?

Do you know? Because theoretically, there's not just one there, right? You do the whole thing. You do the whole thing. Where did you get it? What time of day? What time of night? Can we go out fishing?

with you. We then spent a week fishing with him and of course never caught another one. You know, we found out what estuary mouth it was hanging out at. We turned all this information over to the people in Sri Lanka that managed the conservation efforts of that habitat, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, you do the whole thing. It's not like, oh, cool, got the shark moving on. But, you know, like what I do, I'm like the mercenary, right? Like, I'm the guy you just call in to find the thing or catch the thing and then hand it off to way more capable scientists than myself to do the ongoing species management. Like I don't have time to like be like, okay, you know, like I found this now. Let's come up with a 12 point plan that's going to take 15 years. And like, all I can do is be like,

all right, we found this animal. You now have a flagship species with which to build a conservation program around and show how important it is because this animal that we thought was gone is still there. Now you can extend your national park in force regulations, ideally unlock some funding, you know, so on and so forth. And so that's that's sort of what. we do, but we certainly get as much information as we can while on the ground and dealing with it. I would imagine it takes some persuasion. Do these fishermen think, like, I'm going to get in trouble, these white people came in and I caught this rare thing and now they want to, like, bring it to the capital? Are they worried they're going to get heat for this? Sometimes, but most of the time

it's in such unregulated places that it's not even a factor. You know, it's more like, oh, cool, like you like the shark. Like, here, you can have the shark. It's worthless to me because there is no fishing regulation. There is no enforcement. It's okay that they were gill netting or whatever. Like there's no, they're not breaking any laws or doing anything wrong. So most of the time, they don't care. The things that are hilarious that happened is like when we're in Columbia, and I'm showing pictures of this Cayman asking if they've seen the Cayman. And the one guy goes, oh, yeah, very good, delicious. And I'm like, that's what everybody wants to hear. Like the extinct animal you're looking for is really tasty. So, you know, you just, most of them don't care. Most of them are

really happy to show you what they know and where the animals are and so on and so forth. I think you showed me this on Instagram. You might have posed to this. They're using they. This company is using DNA to bring back things like the Willie Mammoth. Yeah. How real is that? Extremely. Yeah. So I'm on the board of conservation advisors for colossal biosciences and colossal biosciences. Yeah. It's what a company they are. Headed up by Ben Lamb and George Church. Oh, he's legit. Yeah. He's like the OG. Yeah. DNA. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, that should tell you enough in itself. But I can't say too much, but what I can say is you're going to want to see what happens at the end of this year, because there's going to be something that the whole world is going to go, holy shit, at the end of this year. Other than that, what I can say is without a doubt, Thylacine, the animal I mentioned, Dodo birds and Woolly Mammoth are all going to be walking around the planet in our lifetime. And I'm working with the team that's coming up with the conservation management plans for these species. they're all going to be walking the planet thanks to colossal in our lifetime. And this is a big deal.

This isn't, you know, oh, I'm just this crazy eccentric Jurassic Parky billionaire. This has phenomenal, grandiose conservation applications. Like the carbon emission offset from putting mammoths back in the Arctic tundra, the regulation of disease and explosion of undulet, or not undulates, but fleet grazers in Tasmania by reintroducing the thylacine, you know, just the amount of hope and writing humanity's wrongs that putting the dodo bird back in Mauritius is going to do it. It's the most, everybody in the world knows what a dodo is, yet nobody alive today has ever even seen one. And, you know, it's crazy. And this company is going to bring these animals back and like fix humanity's wrongs when it comes to wildlife. So it's very, very exciting. I don't know about that dodo thing,

man. My uncle went hunting once and he swears he saw one out there. Send me the picture. Yeah. I'll send you the phone. on Instagram. No, that's really fascinating. Can you walk me through the conservation thing? I didn't quite get how putting a woolly mammoth back has a carbon offset. Can you explain that to me? With pleasure.

Yeah. So a lot of people don't know this, but during the Pleistocene epoch, during the Ice Age, up in northern, like Alaska, Canada, that area, the Bering Land Bridge, that was not big, giant icebergs and crazy deep forest. That was an African savanna-like grassland. I shouldn't say African. It was like an African savanna grasslands. You know what I mean?

It was this big open savanna. And the reason being, woolly mammoths were up there, and they used to knock over trees, and they would propagate all of these grass seeds. And so what that does is that has multiple effects that ultimately keep the permafrost on the ground longer. And while the permafrost is on the ground and not receding,

all of the carbon that's trapped underneath that permafrost remains trapped. because the habitat stays cooler. So let me explain it as simply as I can. By putting mammoths back up in what used to be mammoth-steppy environment, the mammoths come along, they knock over the trees, okay? When they knock over the trees, that allows the grasses to grow and the ice to form and melt and ice and snow to create an ice cap over all of that. The mammoths then come along and trample that ice as they walk back and forth over it

and push the snowpack into the ground. All of these effects together, no trees that are pulling, in sunlight that are breaking up the snow, no insulating snow layer that has a bubble of air under it, so on and so forth, allow the earth to be cooled more up to six degrees and with that cooling that allows the permafrost to stay there longer. As the permafrost recedes, as I'm sure you know, that releases all of that dead vegetation that's under there, which has a massive, massive carbon offput. So by putting mammoths back up in that environment, they're going to tailor that environment to be the way that it was before human beings drove those animals to extinction

30,000 years ago and keep the Arctic colder, change the tundra, change the environment. I'm not talking about the whole Arctic. This is going to happen in portions and it's going to be done very regulated and cleverly. And ultimately, slow down the carbon release some insane number. I don't remember the metric off the top of my head, which is going to combat global warming. You know, it's going to slow down climate change substantially because we're not losing all of that Arctic ice. That is really incredible.

I had no idea. I just thought it, I guess I never thought about how animals could contribute to, oh yeah, protect against global warming. That's really, that is just one of those examples of all the environment and ecosystems being like interlinked to the point of,

you know, like, you know that game Jenga? Yeah. Where everything is stacked together. But then if you plot enough pieces, the whole thing falls apart, that's probably a decent analogy for this kind of thing. I think I'm the one who might have told that.

to you, but I use that analogy all the time. I do that often where I repeat crap to people and they're like, wow, that's really smart. And then I look at their book and I'm like, crap, this is on chapter three. That's okay. That's okay. But yeah, it is just like Jenga. It's all connected and you pull out the wrong tile and the whole thing collapses. So what, what colossal is doing is they're putting some of those tiles back in. They're making the tower stronger. And that's really exciting. And look, from a selfish standpoint, I'm so excited. You know, I get to see mammoth, thylosine dodo. I get to interact with these animals. that are just so incredible that our early human ancestors got to see and interact with

and write those wrongs that humanity have caused. You know, Dodo birds, we just would come along and bop them on the head out of boredom. They weren't even good eating. And, you know, and we wiped them out very, very rapidly. The fact that Mauritius is going to have its national bird back for the first time in human history running around the island, like, that's so exciting. It's super exciting and it's fascinating that it's going to be possible. Okay, not to rain on the parade.

I have another possibly dumb question here, but if you bring a woolly mammoth back using this new technology, how is it born? Is it born out of an elephant? Correct. Okay, so something gives birth to it, and it's just, it doesn't give birth to its own species, basically.

Correct. So what they do is they take lolly mammoth, and I'm going to try and simplify this as much as I can, and by the way, I'm not George Church. I'm not a geneticist, so I'm the guy that goes, hey, here's how we take care of these animals, you know, not here's how we make them. So the how we make them is in the simplest form of my understanding is you take the closest living relative, in this case, the Indian elephant, and then you take existing DNA from Willie mammoth, of which we have tons. There's mammoth tusks all that, you know, being found all the time and frozen mammoths in the ice and blah, blah, and you compare the two and go, all right, we take this mammoth DNA. Here are the pieces of the DNA of the double helix that are missing. Let's pull those pieces over from the Indian elephant because they're super close. All right. So now we have the same.

Indian elephant. Okay, well, we know that a mammoth was basically an Indian elephant that had a crazy cold tolerance. Add that. All right, we know that a mammoth had a big, shaggy coat, add that. We know they had bigger tusks, add that. We know they had a larger forehead, add that. And they genetically engineer all of these pieces of the puzzle and then impregnate a female Indian elephant with an embryo of this woolly mammoth, you know, artificially inseminate it. And then 22 months later, the gestation period of an Indian elephant, it gives birth to a really hairy, big foreheaded, so on and so forth, Indian elephant that's actually a woolly mammoth, a recreated woolly mammoth. And so that's, yeah, that's the process.

That's so interesting. It must freak out the elephant that gives birth to this hairy, freakish-looking beast. Especially an elephant, because they're so intelligent. They're probably like, oh, I fucked up. Yeah, who did I sleep with? What happened last night? Yeah, exactly. that is so okay that that that's amazing for sure it's mostly the same DNA but maybe not exactly the same as a real mammoth is that the case then

i'm sorry i'm just blanking on the number right now i want to say it's like 99.6 or 99.8 percent the same so i mean close enough very very close is it habituated like a real mammoth would have been you know how sometimes animals that don't have a mother they raise them in a zoo and that like can't find its own food because it doesn't know how. Is that going to be a problem for these mammoths? So it shouldn't be because, you know, if myself and the other conservation advisors, and by the way, they have an incredible board of people.

Like, I highly encourage anybody to go check out Colossal Bioc Sciences website and see who's on their team. People way more qualified and smarter than I am. Their goal is to not make this, you know, a fluffy scruffy pat, right? Not something that runs around following a person around because it was hand raised in a zoo. The goal is, I'm sure with the first generation or maybe several generations, there's going to have to be a pretty good amount of human involvement,

right? They kind of just throw it out there and be like, figure it out. But the idea would be after reaching a certain point of these animals, you know, they start to replicate and then they can raise their young and so on and so forth. Human contact should become very, very minimal. And it should just end up being the same as any other animal, you know, a deer or an elephant or anything else. Maybe they're not scared of people, but they're not habituated and need people for their survival. That's the idea. Are there any unintended consequences that they might be worried about? Maybe this is a George Church question. But you know how there's pigs in Hawaii because they brought them for food and now they screw up everything and dig up everything? Totally. Is there a big time?

Is there an issue that could happen with a woolly mammoth with that population? There shouldn't be because we're not putting mammoths in Hawaii. You know what I mean? We're not we're not introducing animals. We're not putting them in places they shouldn't be. We're not bringing animals and relocating them and, you know, there's no Jurassic Park Zoo being made. This is being made very intentionally and ethically in order to restore the environment, restore species that have been lost. And so all of the consequences should be similar to everything that we faced in human history. So for instance, a thylacine was driven to extinction due to the fact that farmers put a bounty on its head because they were killing Tasmanian's sheep. Okay. So if we get a bunch of thylacine, it's not like we're going to

just dump them in Tasmania and be like, hey, good luck to you. You know, because three weeks later, they're going to start killing sheep. So there's going to be a fenced in area. They're going to be monitored, blah, blah, blah, there's going to be a big campaign to let people know if reintroductions, rewilding ever truly takes place into the whole island. Hey, everybody, you know, make sure you have a fence around your sheep and it should be an electric fence and blah, blah. So it's not like there's like, like Jurassic Park, for instance, right? Oh, here's an island where we just dumped all the animals come and take a train ride. You'll be fine. It's not like that. You know, it's very calculated. It's very thought through. I'm only a tiny, tiny piece of that group of people that are

working on that. But it should, there shouldn't be any unintended consequences. That being said, who knows, right? When you put a mammoth back, we're probably going to learn stuff about mammoths. We didn't know because they haven't been around for 30,000 years. Maybe they're incredibly docile. Maybe they're super dumb and come walking through people's living rooms. You know, maybe they're really, really violent. The history tells us they're not. But you don't really know. But the point is that we're not going to be so hands on with them that we really need to encounter problems. I suppose you could also breed the first few generations of these to not be super violent and to be mostly docile but still walk around and crunch down snow. It seems like that's something where it's, I mean, it's so

fascinating to be in the beginning of a species. Exactly. You have a blank slate with what you can do with this. This is going to be the biggest news in the world, first of all. It already sort of is in some regards, but when it actually happens, the whole world's going to come to a screeching halt to see this, right? For sure. We've been able to engineer them with bigger fur and longer tusks and larger size and blah, blah, I think we could probably make sure, and I'd have to check with George, I'm pretty sure we can make sure they're not, you know, overly aggressive or whatever else, because this is genetic

engineering, by the way, you know, like, we're not trying to, not trying to pretend it's not. We are, we are engineering animals to be back to what they were some 30,000 years ago. So amazing. Man, we'll have to do another. show when the stuff is all public because I know there's a lot you can't talk about on the record, but I'm blown away by this. And it seems like we could do with that technology, I mean, you could, there's so many endless possibilities. I'm speechless. Yeah. Mosquitoes that can't transmit disease. Oh yeah. But outcompete current mosquitoes, for example. And that's just mosquitoes. So this is a big company, by the way. It's not like it's like me in a group of nerds in a room,

you know, on the weekends. Yeah. This is a large company that's growing very rapidly and so on and so forth. What we should do at some point, Jordan, is you me or maybe just you and Ben Lamb, the CEO should jump on because he can talk you through, you know, I'm probably being too cautious because for obvious reasons there's certain information I can't divulge. But he runs the show. So yeah, he's someone you'd be worth chatting with. But it is fascinating what they're doing, what the group is doing, the future of this, like the profitability side of the business, the other animals that are on deck,

some of the larger implications for conservation, some of the larger implications for human health. Like, there's a lot going on with this. And it's really exciting. Yeah, definitely introduce me to Ben. I would love to talk with him. I think that, I mean, provided that he's able to slowly explain a lot of this stuff to me, because a lot of it's kind of complex. I mean, I didn't even understand the carbon footprint thing, and that's probably the easy part. He's smart enough to explain it to me, and I'm a dumb dumb. So I definitely think he can get it through to you. Thank you very much, man. I really appreciate you coming back on the show. We'll have you back again at some point, I'm sure. And just always,

appreciate the work that you do. There's no scenario where I would go milk sea snakes. So it really does take a special breed. Two or three more podcasts. We're going to talk again about that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Thank you so much. All right, buddy. Thanks for having me. I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, here's a preview of my conversation with one of Al Qaeda's most respected bomb and poison makers who swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden himself. Here's a quick listen. We took so many prisoners, 80 of them. were taken to a clearing and it was decided there and then that these people will have to pay for the crimes what they did. Seeing the bloodthirsty nature of people who just until a year ago, I used to see them as sweet, tender, decent, good people,

suddenly basically became people who would use chainsaws to dismember these people alive. How could one year in Bosnia, one year of ugly conflict turn these wonderful souls, into ugly, bloodthirsty individuals. When I went to sleep that night, all I could think about was, how could I unsee what I've seen? None other than the mastermind of Nun 11, Khalus Sheikh Mohammed,

he said to us, you should go to Afghanistan, where the training camps are reopening, to become good at bomb-making, to become good at urban warfare, to become good at assassinations, at kidnapping, a new kind of war that will never be,

fought in the mountains anymore, but it will be fought in every urban center from the pole to the pole. Suddenly, you know, I thought that the nature of the war is changing from, you know, fighting in the mountains of Bosnia. I mean, basically, we are talking about gassing people in cinemas and nightclubs and trains. Of course, that was unsettling, but I thought this is just the ranting of one insane individual. Al-Qaida carried out its first serious attack against American interests. Everyone was jubilant in the camps that were firing bullets into the air in celebration and shouting Allah-u-A-A-Qabar. We are no longer just a bunch of freedom fighters. We are now bona fide terrorists. To hear why and how Amin Dean eventually switched sides from being a jihadi to spending eight years

as an MI6 spy trying to take al-Qaeda down from the inside, check out episode 383 on the Jordan Harbinger show. Like I told y'all, fascinating guy. I mentioned some of the stuff about the woolly mammoth coming back. I'm actually doing a whole show about that, so stay tuned for that. I'm doing that with the CEO of the company that is doing that. So we're going to get a real deep dive into bringing back extinct species using their DNA. Straight out of Jurassic Park, y'all.

Really interesting. And worth doing a whole show. I almost didn't even finish in time because it was so dang interesting. Man, the ecosystem, the wildlife stuff. It is fascinating. and if I wasn't so comfortable in my air condition, Casa here in California, I would consider, no, I would never consider going to the jungle with Forrest,

but I'm glad that we can do it through these conversations. All things, Forrest Galante will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com or ask the AI chatbot also on the website. Transcripts are in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support this show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We also have our newsletter.

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