Wild Times: Wildlife Education - Hippo Homicide Stories, Herpetology Banter, & Race Car Driver Nick Mancuso

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

Forrest, Patrick, + Retep and racecar driver Nick Mancuso, talk race car driving, and reminisce about being college herpetology dorks. The gang create the most ferocious creatures you can fit inside your carry on luggage. Patreon @ https://patreon.com/wildtimespod All the links @ https://thewildtimespodcast.com/info Love you!

Wild Times. Do do, do, do. You're doing the jingle. Do do do, do. All right, we are back. It is episode number 66 of the Wild Times, the greatest show on the air. Welcome, everybody.

How's everybody doing tonight? Great. Cheers. Cheers, guys. Cheers. Nick, are you drinking something? Cheers. I heard this with a thing.

I got my white claw. He's got a claw. He's got a claw. Hey, match me, black cherry. This is like my fourth one I've ever had in my life. That's very... That's about how many you should have, period. Well, this is the Wild Times,

if you're joining us for the first time. The greatest show on the air. I'm your host, Forrest Galante, the broologist, the one and only, the guy who chases animals around, dittles them occasionally, you know, sees what happens. Joining me tonight,

the most wonderful, the most fantastic, the most lovely, Patrick DeLuca, he is the bro-ducer. How are you, Patrick? I'm good. Why he's staring into the camera like that? Just trying to be a good host. Yeah, I'm good, man.

Thanks, dude. You look good. Thank you. Yeah, that's important. He keeps looking at the camera. It's really weird. All right. And as always, the PhD in podcasting, the professor,

Mr. Retepp. What's up, Retepp? What's up, fellas? Happy to be here in this very complicated technical setup studio with a remote guest on Riverside and in studio. We're combining the best of both worlds.

Happy to be here. Happy to have a fucking white cloth. Hey, cheers. Somehow I got the Coors Seltzer, which is, this is not good. And happy to have Nick on and Will at the helm again. W.T. Willie is back. He is at the helm. But let me introduce our guests, Gesta, singular, the one and only. The guy that I introduce as my more handsome, slightly shorter best friend, the guy that is a professional race car driver,

professional jerkhole, Mr. Nick Mancuso. How are you, Nick? Hello, hello. I have no qualifications to be on here and no idea how this works. It's a really good friend of Forrest. I hadn't listened to any until he invited me to come on. I was like, oh, shit. Neither have I. So I did about 10 minutes of research last night.

I'm ready to roll. Yeah. Nick, well, how long have we known each other? probably longer than almost anyone you've had on this podcast if I had a guess which would be 12 or 13 years we're getting old quite a long time Nick sent Nick sent some pictures over to me and I mean in one of them you look like you're maybe 12 you're maybe 12 yeah once you sit down you've gone through many stages of fat my friend are you guys high school friends or are we talking college first

week of freshman year of college. Got it. Okay. Nice. All right. So you've been on a couple adventures together, y'alls. Would you say that, Nick? Would you say we've been on some adventures? Forest has almost gotten me killed more than anyone I know. That seems to be a reoccurring

theme on the spot. I would imagine. Anytime we have a guest on, it's always like, yeah, it was on a boat with Forrest. We were in the middle of the ocean and almost capsized, and he was like, let's just try and... Yeah. Nick, so are you a real-life race car driver?

Is that just what you tell chicks? Although I saw you were wearing a wedding ring, so maybe maybe. Yeah, it's a little bit of both. She doesn't care at all about it. So, yeah, I joke with my buddies that I'm retired racing. But I spent basically 10 years as a professional driver. I started late when I was 18. Long story, short, just went on this kind of really quick ladder.

That's late. And racing is a whole thing. right? And I can answer any questions. We can talk as much or a little about it. But like, it's so different from how most people think it works, right? It's, you know, mainly like a business. So it's all about money and sponsorship and all that. So I race in small, series, mediums. And you were doing Formula One, right? So you were doing Formula One as opposed to NASCAR? And then I, yes, there's like three main types, right? There's sports cars, like cars that look

like what you see on the street, just really fast and they run 24 hours of Daytona, Le Mans, things like that. There's stock car, which owns. Only Americans care about NASCAR. Then there's Open Wheel, which is like Formula One and IndyCar. So F1 is the biggest worldwide. IndyCar is the biggest in the U.S. And then actually after the Netflix show, Drive to Survive, F1 is actually climbing the ranks in the U.S. in terms of popularity.

But I did one year of Open Wheel, but most of my time was in sports car. How the fuck do you get into that, man? Were you just, were you the best go-kart driver when you were a kid? I smoked him on the go-kart track once. It's true story. He knows it's true too. That doesn't sound true. Yeah.

I'll have to really think about that. We went to, we went. Yeah, but like, okay. I wanted to be a professional baseball player and thought I was going to be. Right. But you realize you have zero hand-eye coordination. Dude, by the time I was- You close your eyes when someone throws a ball to you.

Yeah. By the time I was 12, I was just like, it's not in the cards. I'm the fifth best player on my little league team. But how do you, you don't drive till you're 16, so how do you even, and how the fuck is 18-11? late start. It's a good question. Yeah, so I started, so my dad was a pro racer actually back in the 70s, like back when the drivers were fat and the tires were skinny and now it's the other way around. Yeah. And so I grew up kind of watching it, but just not really doing it. And my dad had kind of tapered

off by the time I was getting older and so did a race here and there and I just didn't think much about it. And then when I was 18, my brother was racing and he's older than me and I just knew there's no way that I can't be faster than him and he was like top three guy in the country so I was like if he's that good I'd be top two so then I got on the same time of the car he was driving and actually got to learn a lot from

him these little tiny cars called Sports 2000s 150 horsepower doesn't sound like a lot but it'd be faster around the track than any Ferrari you can pick which is a 1,100 pounds and has downforce and brakes and all those things so I got into that which is basically like a really big go-kart

But most people actually start in karting. So when I did my first, that was in 2006. And then my first pro season was in 2008. And I was picked up through a Volkswagen program. Actually, you'd submit a video. You take a five-minute video and send it in. They basically held a contest, like want to be a pro driver. And they had a million plus applicants, right?

All the baseball dreamers and stuff. And then they picked from that, I forget, a couple hundred. brought us out to Arizona and had like a full-on shootout. So you go through fitness testing, media tests, you were in a go-car, they put you in a race car, and they do all these different kind of pressure tests, and then they picked from that 35.

So that's one of the 35. So you still had to come up with some sponsorship to do it, but a series that would normally cost like half a million to run, you only had to pick up like 50 grand, and Volkswagen did all the rest. So that's the big barrier between racing, is it's so expensive. So not just anyone can say, oh, yeah, I want to try that.

Right. So you're probably not getting the best of the best, right? Not a lot of inner city youth involved in the old Ferrari race car championships for some reason. I don't know why. There must be all skiing. Yeah, they're all skiing and snowboarding. Yeah, they're all at vale. Yeah.

Yeah. Or golfing, yeah. There's definitely a handful of those sports that are just a lot of fucking barrier to entry. Well, as interesting as that is, This is a podcast about wildlife. And I met Nick Mancuso. We were a freshman in college. Okay.

We were the only two freshmen. This is how nerdy we were, contrary to our rugged good looks. We both petitioned to take an upper division class, aka herpetology, study of snakes and amphibians. Reptals. Herpes? Yeah, that's right. And neither of us read the emails that were sent out on the first day to say that the first, like, lab session or class session was canceled. So I walked into a hole of like, you know, 70 seats and saw one dushy-looking kid in a pink shirt with puka shells in the front left corner.

And it wasn't you? No, no, I was the other one in Pookas. Yeah, I was going to say. And I just saw that in the mirror. Like, Pookabros. I went high right, and he was low left. And after 20 minutes of sitting there looking cool, this was back before the days of smartphones you could stare at. He goes, hey, bro, I don't think anybody else is coming.

And I'm like, yeah, probably. Probably not. It broke. and I think the rest was history. But yeah, Nick and I have known each other a long time. Like real weirdos, we used to spend our spring breaks in college. Everybody was going to, so we, Jesus Christ, I mean, Nick and I spent literally every single day hanging out for four years after that,

which was disgusting. Wait, wait, everyone else was doing what on spring breaks? They were going to Lake Havasu or Vegas or stuff that normal kids do. Nick and I were going camping in the Amazon and getting wasted and spending time overlanding and doing all kinds of fun. Oh, my God. Is Nick the guy who beat up the machete dude? No, that's Mike.

That's Mike. No, Mike would be a terrible podcast guest. He's incredibly monotone. But Nick was on that trip. It was Nick, Mike, and I on that trip. Oh, nice. Yeah. I don't know.

Nick, what do you got to dig into here? So on this show, we like to talk about how a regal, handsome, attractive, tall, you know, athletic I am. You got anything to contribute to any of that? kind of said it all, but I'd almost like to start from the beginning and finish for his story. So we sat there in this big hall awkwardly, then started talking. I mistakenly thought he was super cool because he was from Africa. And like two snake guys, we just talked to us.

And that was kind of it. So what have you thought? You got any African rock pythons? Nice. Then from there, we actually went on like a full-blown kind of man date. We were like, so do you want to like go hurt again? We did. And next day, this is the beginning of a love story, legit.

Yeah. It gets even more romantic. We climb into his old shitty pickup truck. Yeah, this green Ford. We drive up just somewhere random into the mountains, just us. I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm excited. And then anyone who all seen the movie. Broke back mountain.

Snake back mountain. So then we just start hiking and looking for stuff, and we don't know. Forrest won't probably like to admit when other people do cool things, but we were just walking. And then this, what's called a striped racer, super, super fast snake in California, just goes bolting by. And, you know, 90% of the time you see those, it's like, oh, there goes. It's true. And then I just went for it, fully laid out, launched through the air, into the bush, thought that was it. And then I just came back out, kind of bloodied up and pull up the snake.

And that was one forest. I could see him outwardly gushing and just he really felt for me that. You knew for us. I actually think my balls dropped at that moment. I was a late bloomer. Like, it hadn't happened to me. And it happened and I was just like, oh, God, okay, that's, that's my friend. It was vertically the only way your genitalia was dropping that day?

As opposed to horizontally? Well, his, the other part of his genitalia. I get what he's saying. He's asked if I got a boner. Yeah, and if I did, I tucked it into my waistband. Too complicated? A gentleman. Yeah, like you're a gentleman.

That's right. He was like, is that a striped racer? Patrick keeps looking at the camera and doing weird things. It's part of my schick, man. It's part of your stick, yeah, it's good. Yeah, so that is very accurate. Nick did exactly that. I was highly impressed.

Also, I'd caught hundreds of them and never bothered to do that maneuver. Nick, do you have any pets? Do you have any lizards or snakes or anything now? Like Forrest has about 17 of them? Yeah, so now I actually have two would have. called Brazilian rainbow boas. And they're actually the type of snake. I think you pull up a picture here that even

if people don't like snakes, they look at them and they're like, that's fucking beautiful. I hate snakes. Dude, those are sick. Good looking snake. Yeah. It's like, they're just cool. They don't get that big. They're not that's intimidating, right? They're five or six feet. But so if you look at their scales, they have this

like eardustaceous. Yours are assholes. They bite. Puddle. They're not too bad. I have. I've had worse. And they breed, which is probably by forest jealous. You can't breed any of his snakes. And these things keep spitting out babies. I can't get my snakes to breed. Dude, get them horny mates.

You got to get in there, give them a little champagne. You know, a box of chocolates. Dude, you do what I did freshman year in college. Which is? Blast, rage against the machine. Really? Rage Against. That's the key.

Into the snake tank? For your dates. Yeah. Interesting. Not like once they were back in the room. Yeah. Got it. I thought it would work.

It didn't. It didn't, surprisingly. Yeah. Chicks don't love Rage Against, I've heard. Like a good. Rom-com. Just pop on a rom-com in front of the snake tank. Okay. A little champagne.

I'll definitely not try that. Thank you. Rose petals. Rose petals, huh? Anyway. So, low volume rage. Well, dude, Nick, we have a ton of HRP listeners because we do get a disproportionate amount of questions on the live about herp. I'm sure. A lot.

So what is the key since you've been breeding snakes since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, man? What is the key to getting your snakes to breed? Like, what do you have to do? it's a good question so because when I started I was like at like 12 right and so back then the internet wasn't much of a thing if it was it was aOL dial up and whatever right so you'd have books and you'd have to read about it and it depends on the types of snakes right so some are just like if you keep two like redtail bows together whatever you're just going to like have baby some snakes just bone down some snakes are much more particular so like I had green tree pythons that was kind of

my big claim to fame back in the day. It's still my favorite snake. Okay. They're just, they're gorgeous. They spend like 95% of their time in the trees. They're just cool. But they come from Papua New Guinea, and you have to basically, like,

try to exactly replicate their climate to induce the mood, basically. So with that, you know, you would set up basically like nighttime temperature drops, right? So if you're keeping them at, like, 85 during the day or whatever, you would cut it starting in a certain time of year when the days are naturally getting shorter. Right.

the lights off earlier, drop the temps, maybe 10 or 15 degrees at night instead of nothing, start, like, misting the cage a bunch. Just basically, yeah, there you go. Kind of recreate what happens in Papua New Guinea during the winter. And then you come out of that cycle, and they're just rearing to go, right?

And you can tell. Like, if you've got a male, you've got a male, and he can tell that female's there. He's just like, he's like, the weather's just right. Yeah, he's like this. It's, dude, it's like going to Cabo and, you know, like you're 19 and you're,

You have a couple margaritas. It's hot out. Everybody's in a bikini. The weather's just right. Yeah. The vibe's there. It's a total party. As my good friend Owen once said,

summer is the sexiest season. It's straight up, dude. Straight up. And then winter comes, you're like, ah, what have I done? Now I'm stuck dealing with it. And so you'll like this. Peter's from Chicago, by the way, Nick.

Nice. So, Reteb. Yeah, so Nick lives in Chicago. Oh, you do? Nice. I didn't know that. It's favorite place. Yeah.

All jokes aside, I went there three times. I was like, this is the greatest city in the world. Everybody should live here. And then I went for New Year's Eve and I'll never go back. Yeah. Yeah. Chicago in the summer. For the winter?

I went three times in the summer. I was like, this is the greatest city I've ever been to. Like, I could live here tomorrow. I love it here. Then I went once for New Year's Eve for four days and I was like, I'll never go back, ever. Yeah. I'll never step foot there ever again. Forrest showed up and his first question, he's looking around.

He's genuinely, he wasn't cracking a joke. We're driving through the city. He's looking like this. It's kind of quiet. And he's like, where are all the fat people? What do you mean? He's like, where? Yeah, he's like, I thought this was going to be like cornfields and life.

Are you nuts? Overall. Yes, I am. But that had nothing to do with my impression of Chicago. Yeah, like Chicago, though, is the architecture. They called America's biggest little city because there's so many little neighborhoods that are everywhere. They do. Okay.

No, dude, Chicago's amazing. The way that I look at it, I mean, granted, it's in the news every fucking weekend because there's a big problem of crime right now. Someone's getting shot, yeah. No, hundreds of people are getting shot every weekend. Every day. Yeah, but that's the south side of Chicago. It's different on the north. Nick and I, I'm going to have Nick tell you about the story.

We drove as Miata through the south side of Chicago in a minute. Oh, my God. But, dude, it's the food, man. The food and the people. Like you, driving through the south side of Chicago and a Miata? No, it wasn't a Miata. What were we in? Were you in your Exterra, Nick?

I don't even remember. We're coming back. Do you remember this? Do you know what I'm talking about? We're coming back from a camping trip in Illinois. Yeah. I'm wearing big fucking aviators in a tank top. Nick has got a pink bandana on.

Swear to God. This is exactly what I was picturing when you said it. We're listening to John Mayer. John Mayer with the windows down on like good volume. Like other people should hear our music kind of volume. I'm like Cicero and Ogden or some shit. I don't know where we are. Nick might know.

And we pull into a gas and it literally goes, Pond shop, bale shop, gun shop, liquor store, like over and over and over. And I'm like, this is not a good place. And we're out of gas. We're out of gas. We have to stop. Oh, no. It's probably, like, I've had a gun in my mouth and I was more scared at the gas station in Chicago.

Yikes. I see about that story later, but yeah. There were like a lot, there's a lot of homoerotic undertones of force and nice story, but we were coming out of like seven days of camp. camping or whatever. Gross and dirty. And we're both wearing stupid hats. I believe we both still had like gigantic knives on our belts.

Because that's something you do when you're like ages 14 to like 26. Whenever you go camping or hiking, like you just put. Yeah. Because you saw a crocodile Dundee do it. Oh, a thousand percent. Yeah. And I definitely don't still do that on TV. No.

And as you realize, it's just not practical at all. It's got a little capsule on the back. He got about like a compass and a starter match. I think those things were basically like our saving grace. We got out and I just fueled up the truck. I knew this was suspect. There were probably like 40 people at the gas station, which why? There were so many people.

There were so many. It's like any 7-Eleven in L.A. It's just looking at us. Yeah, of course. And I think they just didn't know what to make of us. And we just looked like we were crazier than anyone else that was there. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

I mean, I told the story, I think it was on the Patreon AMA, but about how I was down there and I got in a car accident, you know, on the south side of Chicago. And man, like, it's not a comfortable feeling to be walking around there exposed when there's literally groups, coordinated groups of people selling drugs on every corner. It's a very scary place. Like, it's wild down there, man. It really is. And it has been since I've lived there. There's something, though, about the Midwest and the people.

Like, you know, when you come to L.A., very few of your friends are people who grew up in L.A. I don't have any friends from California. It's the weirdest thing. I've lived here for a fucking, geez, 16, 17 years. And most of my crew is either people, well, four of them are from my hometown, Oswego. Yeah. And then either people from Minnesota or Chicago. Yeah.

I don't know why, dude. Because, I mean, let me tell you. Dush bags. Yeah, exactly. Dude, Nick, totally. When I first came out here, Oh boy. You opened up for a little bit of a warms here.

No, when I first, that'll be quick, but when I first came out here, it was, you know, it was rough, man, because you go, yeah, a bunch of, bunch of douchebags running around. You'll sit at a bar. In Chicago, you go to a bar, and you sit down,

and you just naturally fall into a conversation about with somebody, maybe about something that's on TV, sports, whatever, anything, the bartender, then they hop in. Out here, everybody, everybody's like, what do you do? Like, what can you do for me?

It's like, what do you do? I don't want to talk about my fucking job every two seconds, and that's all it was when you get out of it. It's all anybody knows how to talk about. Especially your job. You're a podcast producer. That's not impressive. No, 10 years ago, I mean, it's in,

everybody's in the industry. I want to talk about it. But in Chicago, it's people from, people, and I don't want to, like, I'm not bashing on people from L.A. There's actually, you know, but. That's exactly what you're doing. No, but all my friends, it's just all the people from,

different areas tend to gravitate towards each other. Like, I met Pat, and I hated him when I first met him. Oh, yeah, he's very unlikely. I was his boss. Yeah. Well, I mean, I, like, he was walking by in the parking lot, and I gave, like, a nod and a what's up. He literally saw it, looked at me, put his head down, and, like, just kept walking as

if, like, just a total fuck you. That's a power play. But then, dude, now we've been friends for like a decade. Right. It's proximity to Canada, because we're under. even though it was in New York, we're right up against Canada. Okay.

Minnesota and Chicago, I feel like people who are close to Canada just across that band. Just better people. Not better with each other. There's a lot. Yeah. Yeah.

Real quick, though, Nick, ask me what I do. Pretend we just met at a bar. Hey, Pat, what do you do, bro? I race Ferraris. I mean, that's like, he wants people to ask what he does. Absolutely.

It's so much better. Nick, Nick, do you come in better out here? Yeah, yeah. Do you come in with that, Nick? Like, have you ever just straight up been like, yeah, I'm a race car driver? Or is it something you kind of, you put to the side until you get into it?

Yeah, I like to ease my way into that. It's like, yeah, I was in the sports world. Because he's from Chicago. He's not a douchebag. Right. I was in the sports world. Not the L.A. I'll tell you as a teeth, though.

They literally carry around their racing license, which you literally only need to get into the track and you barely need it down. In my gear bag, like a normal person. And I know guys they carry it in their wallet. To show off. Oops. Oh, I was looking for my credit card. Is that my- Yeah.

Sometimes I carry my gym membership card around just on a necklace when I go to the bar. That adds up. Well, dude, when you are in L.A., and people do inevitably ask that a lot, I don't say I'm in entertainment. I don't even, I don't say I'm a producer anymore because after many, many years, if you say I'm a producer, then they go, oh, like anything I would have seen? Yeah. And that's a very, it's like very snarky and almost derogatory

because they're expecting the answer to be like, well, I did the short film and blah, blah, blah, right, right. They, they're like, yeah, I produced whale wars, bitch. Yeah. Mike drop and walk out. So he did produce whale. You know, I did produce whale. Well, you know?

So I just go, oh, no. I don't work. Yeah. I don't want to talk about it. I made some smart investments. I haven't worked in about two decades. Yeah. I'm 30.

I bought the first thousand Bitcoin. Smart. The first 1,000. It actually seemed like a terrible investment at the time, but hey, it worked out. Nick, what is... So we have been to the Caribbean together. We've been to Central America. We can talk about my party in Central America, if you like, which was, wow, what a mess.

we've been to the Amazon together, we've been to Africa together. What's your most standout memory of something ridiculous that we did? It's got to be Africa. Because that was just the most forest trip ever. Maybe it's like a single moment.

Go on. We should definitely chat about. But Africa is such a unique place. Like it's so different from anywhere else in the world. That's for sure. Forrest was on his spoiled kid around the world trip after college. Yeah.

Heard about it. That's right. Blah, blah, blah. It's some tradition. And, you know, went to like 60 countries or whatever. Yep. And got super fat, and I've got just awesome pictures. Yeah.

I'll touch into that. Nick, thank you. He ate his way around the world. That's what we were waiting for. He was in a food tour. Yeah. Will, I think you got a few pictures of Forrest's faces. He came back.

We might have to take a quick detour because there's a picture of him. her voice. Okay, so my wife now, a girlfriend at the time, and really only like three-month girlfriend at the time, right? So like still kind of new, still trying to impress her, right? And I'm like, trying to talk up this guy and I'm like, yeah, and we're just in Africa. And like, he's so cool. And he's blah, blah, blah, blah. And we do it. And she knew all the trips we did

and this and that. And I'm like, I just basically the gist of the story was just like, Forrest is cool. Like, you'll love him, like, trying to, I don't know, maybe for a thing. And she does love me, by the way. I didn't say, unfortunately, she thinks for us is the one of the funniest people ever. I am pretty fond. It drives me nuts. But so I talk this guy up more than I've ever talked anyone up in my life.

It's a hard sell. Patrick knows the Chicago. We're in this town town. We're in this apartment on the 33rd floor, downtown Chicago. Everything's kind of like swanky. And this motherfucker walks in like looking like a lass. He just got back from this round-the-world trip. He was probably 45 pounds heavier that.

he's ever been. He bought some clothes of something in Thailand. And he decided that for his first intro, he would be dressed from head to toe like a fucking genie. All silk, turquoise and gold

pants, just... Are you serious? His hair was based on my shoulders. And it was just like the record like... It was to my shoulders. And I was like... Yeah, of course. Yeah, porous.

Have you had hyped him up? Oh, it's great. I was not 45 pounds heavier. I was like maybe 25 pounds heavier. I had this silk ensemble that I had traded. I'm so glad there is no picture of this. I'm very sad. I think it was in Istanbul for like local drab.

And I was like, you know what? I'm cultured now. I'm done. Like I'm going to be that guy and, you know, leather sandals with the silk ordeal with hair down to his shoulders. That's how I show up. So you went hair to your shoulders as well? Hair to my shoulders, bro.

What was your facial hair situation? None. Oh. It's a bad look. Yeah. What? I mean, there is a photo. It's a bad look.

I think I sent it to Will if we can pull it up because it's like, it's worse than whatever you're picturing right now. Oh my God. Dude. And this chick stuck around and married you. She loves Gary. I'm not kidding. It was great because then I wasn't like,

I tried. I'm not. Like, this guy's not taking anyone's girlfriend. Right. Yeah. It's a good play. Where did you guys go in Africa? Which countries?

Zimbabwe? Yeah. Oh, nice, dude. It was fun. He came by. We went on a safari. Yeah, we saw elephants and caught cobras. And we had to get on.

And so I say it's just like, it's just the most forest-type trip. Because it's hard to talk when he's moving around all these countries, right? And so I just kind of booked a flight to Zimbabwe. I'm like, all right. I'm in Harari. I hope he's here. he's at the airport so most of forest trips there's like everything can go wrong usually does and then just works out and then uh so we're driving back to like one of his old friend's house because he's from there and i'm like

so what's the plan he's like i don't know i'm like well okay i just flew around the world um time's limited like what are we doing he's like uh we should probably get a car i'm like uh okay uh you probably should i know where this is going and so we just basically basically Basically, like, we spent four days, basically, doing what should have just taken, like, an hour and a half if you planned to head a little bit. You know, like, driving around, finding cars. I apologize for this. I apologize for this. I was buying a car.

I think we did. I crashed it. I remember that much. Yeah, I remember you hit a tree. And then we tried to pop it out using, like, a 550 paracord, thinking we could, like, MacGyver it. And we just snapped a bunch of cord and almost heard ourselves. It didn't work. Yeah, it didn't work.

And then the first thing we do. it would go well. Is we then drive to a river safari camp, middle in nowhere, a place called Monopools. A guy had just gotten murked by a lion like four days before we go there. So my mom was thrilled. And we drive up there. Basically, his mom used to have a partnership with this guy in the safari camp. So we just let us go and stay.

But we drive, I don't know, 10 hours or whatever to get there. And we get in there. And I'm like, okay, so where do we go? And forth is like, I don't know. We'll just drive around. I'm like, okay, it's like thousands of hectares or whatever. Just open full on wilderness. Africa style.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not even supposed to be out. Everything's everywhere. Yeah, and they don't even want you out at night, right? So we're just driving through this game part off road in this, who knows how good SUV. Fucking hyenas are everywhere. Oh, man, just screeching. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. And then you're not supposed to be out. And so after about an hour of driving, we're getting ready to basically sleep in the car. We see another pair of house. headlights and we're like, oh shit. I mean, are these game wardens? Are these poachers? I don't know. This car pulls up and this guy goes, forie. This guy's name Stretch, who was like the 6-7 African Bush guide and exactly the guy we're looking for. And so it's like, oh, come follow me. He was the other guy out kind of breaking the rules. This sounds like the adventures of a video game right now.

100%. Yeah, you're just walking around, like, see who you wander into and it changes the course of your trip. But then we ended up going to this, like, awesome safari camp right on this river. 20 minutes later, we're sitting by a campfire, and a big ass bull elephant walks between us, basically, and the fire 10 feet away. And that was the first thing that shocked me. I was like, I know a lot about animals. And I didn't hear this thing until it was literally 15 feet behind me.

And I'm like, it's a fucking elephant and just walked through this forest that I would have a hard time, like, navigating. And I didn't hear a thing. Yeah. Wait, how do they do that forest? So they have super soft pads on the bottom of their feet. People always think like an elephant's coming through the bush. You're going to hear it a mile away.

Right. Just like Nick described, they are so nimble and so agile. They move silently through huge amounts of bush, thick, dense bush. You would sound like you were fucking shaking marimbas running through that thing. And an elephant pops up like Nick said, 15 feet behind you. You have no idea. It's amazing that they're capable. That's nuts.

Yeah. Yeah. And then this thing literally walks between us and a fire. and so it's like 20, 25 feet maybe from this thing. And the main guy's stretch, he's just like, hold still, you know, kind of quiet, but you can hear him. He's got the super deep boy. I love your impression of stretch, by the way.

Good guy. Oh, I've got one. I've got another one of them, too, if we tell the hippo story. So then he walks through the fire. That's an important story. And then you can't see him anymore because he kind of went down this cliff. And then you just hear him get in the water. And he just swims across the Zambezi River.

And I was like, that was pretty fucking cool. And I've been out in Africa for basically a day. And I just saw like 10 things that would kill me. And like, it's just the most unique place you can ever go. Before you get into the hippo story, which I do want to come back, there's a picture that Nick sent me if you want to switch to this, Pat. That I, I mean, I need to know the story behind this. I just don't want, I don't see it on my screen yet.

I'm hoping. It's behind you. Oh, he can't see it. Nick can't see it, Nick? Nick, I can't see. It's the eyes perils. Yeah. Oh, Alaska?

It's Alaska, yeah. Naked. Well, no, let's be clear. Forest is naked. Nick is very appropriately. Maintainting is right. With a speedo. He's wearing my speedo.

True story. It is his speedo. The look on Nick's face, you are horrified here, and it's great. Every story we tell, we just get a little bit gayer. I can tell that both guys in the room here are very interested in... Imagine if we just brought these pictures up and then didn't talk about it at all. I can see Patrick's here very interested in a lot of what's going on here. Yeah.

Yeah. So, Nick, what if you did in? It looks very cold. I, like a normal person, had my bachelor party in basically remote places of Alaska. Because, so Forrest and I and our buddies Adam and Jordan and all these guys from college, right? We just constantly try to one-up each. other not only if we're at the bar but also with our trips and with our weddings and with our bachelor parties so yeah force went 100 rica he had to go further than in you know Alaska so anyways

there's you know 50 stories from that including um the fact that I land and force hands me a cup that just says I love vagina I was like all right it's a large solo cup yeah that's right I forgot about that figures I'm in a public place and he goes he said something like okay so-and-so use this on their bachelor party and it hasn't been washed and you can't wash and that's the only rule and you have to drink out of it the entire trip and I was like no man that's how we do it that we do things even on that trip there was I think vomit and beer and uh caviar and all sorts of stuff in that cup but so what I think made me do the second they're left at the airport love doing that shit I do as you guys may know too because Forrest probably talks about every 30 seconds he's a big rugby guy which I find a lot

of no I've never never brought up I've never brought it up no A lot of bros are. So one of the things that rugby guys do, because they're so tough, is they don't take normal shots at the bar, right? They do tequila suicides. And I've never heard of that. Oh, yeah, the tequila suicide. Do you guys know tequila suicide? No, but I assume Nick's going to tell us.

Okay, Nick's going to tell you, yeah. It's very good. We'll do one tonight. Yeah, so the shot of tequila, it's a little bit of salt, and it's a lime. So kind of like you probably. had it before except you take it out of your friend's asshole you snort it up your nose no snort the shot you take the shot of tequila then you take the lime and you hold open your eye and you squeeze the lime straight into your eye tequila suicide nobody's salt shot a tequila lime in the eye

listen i'll watch we're doing it tonight no we're doing it tonight i didn't think it was a real thing it's not 25 of them wait so let me ask you this is the lime hurt when it goes in your eye i would imagine it Oh, my God. The lime was the worst part. I thought, to be honest, I was pushing out on the salt because I've never done cocaine or any that stuff. I'm like, oh, okay, this is going to be so weird.

Like, it's going to just go on my brain. And that was just going to end. I was like, huh? All right. Right. I should do cocaine. Yep. That's the lesson.

And then I did the lime. And I think on my first one, too. I did it. And it's burning. And Forrest is like, no, bro. And he takes it from me and holds my eye open and jams it in my eye. I think I did that. I think I'm going to go home after this.

session tonight. It turns around for any of this. This is how he shows love. Yeah, that's true. So that's literally the first seven minutes of my bachelor party. But to jump forward, probably two days.

The first seven. We went, we went ice climbing. Yep. Because, again, just a couple insecure guys. We have to just do the most extreme possible. Yeah. I love this guy. How do we show everybody how insecure we are?

Let's go ice climbing. And then squeeze lime in our eye. Yep. Even that. I mean, just tell me to speed up if you want, but we get in, we like, we stay in this little island off, then we're camping, and we link up with these guys, they're going to take us ice climbing. And there's like, there's 11 of us just rowing out. And we get, we pile into this like 15 passenger van and there's these two like very innocent, like probably Canadian women sitting up front. They're like 55.

And then there's us. And we're just rowdy already. Yeah. And this guy pokes his head in the van. He goes, excuse me, ladies, we have another car going to a different part. Would you like to go in that one? And they're like, oh, that'd be nice. And they leave.

He pops his head back in. He's like, I got rid of those fucking bitches. Let's go, boys. Slams the door on the van. What are you doing, man? They sound lovely. And then he hops up front. This other guy hops in.

They're both probably so stoned. They were so stoned. I've only heard of an eight-track player, and he jams it into the front of this thing. And it only plays one song, which is a song by Clarence Carter, called stroken. Yeah.

And it is unbelievable. Yeah. And they just, all ass, speed to this glacier. They literally drove off about a three foot drop in this van

and like slid sideways into a parking spot. And they're like, all right, let's go. Like, perfect. So I said, take me to the most dangerous place

that you can, like, commonsensically take 11 people I've never done this before. And they were like, fuck yeah. So we hike like way out

on the glacier. And these guys go out. they basically freclimb this crazy glacier so that they can put up the guide ropes and I mean this I don't know 150 foot wall maybe just almost straight up and I think I sent pictures if not I can send them after I was trying to find one to show up these ropes

and then they basically set up like a blade system and you do it and you just everybody sucks at it I think force and I might have been the only ones to actually make it up to the top we were the only ones that made it to the top and we were the only two the double picket remember we went with the double ice pick strategy Yeah, smart. Men fucking doing manly things.

That's right. Well, I had a weird thought about this the other day. Thinking about the first time I went up a glacier, it is, you can't comprehend how slippery it is. It's a totally different kind of slippery than ice that would just happen during winter. It's not even the same fucking substance. 100%, which leads me to the photo. So after time, we're hiking back, and we see just a giant lake, basically.

And so Forrest and I are trying to basically rally the troops. We're like, all right, let's fucking go in there. It's getting fucking wild. Yeah. And everyone's like, you know, all these are idiots. Like, and these are our friends who are idiots. By the way, to be clear, everybody else at the Bachelor Party hated Nick and I. Of course.

Bachelor party. They were just like, fuck those two. Like, they keep making us do stupid shit. We came to drink. Yeah, we were on our own level. Yeah, we were on our own level. Yeah. So these guys were like,

No, you guys are kidding, right? You're coming. They're like, absolutely not. Like, that water is as cold as water can be. It's sitting completely surrounded on ice. Yep. And so we're like, all right, let's go. And Forrest and I start walking.

And the guys are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, man. Like, let me put in a guideline. And Forrest and I are like, fuck it, we're good. And the guy's like, it's the one place I got to draw the line. And it's like, all right. He's like, you're going to die in there. Yeah, takes his ice pick, jams it in the ice. He ties just a rope and just chucks it into the water.

Thank God. And so Forrest and I go walk in. out and I'm kind of strutton, peacock, and then I just go, wham! And both my feet basically go over my head, because it's the slickest surface I've ever felt. I am on my ass. Forrest is laughing. He starts falling. We both basically, it goes from about 18 inches deep to like four and a half feet, five feet deep

or more, and we just drop in up to our face, basically, in what is as cold as you can imagine. And that's what this picture is right here. Oh, yeah. It's just a polar plunge on steroids. And what happened to Forrest's shorts? He's asking why I'm naked. The same thing that happens. Oh, to any time.

I mean, within days of meeting, Forrest, I'd seen his genitalia. Yeah, true. Well, we know that. More than any man or woman I've ever met. It's true. And so he just, he didn't even question. He just stripped straight down. And I was like, I'm with, like, my brother and my brother-in-law.

Yeah. Both brother-in-laws. Both-brother-in-laws. A little bit. Yeah, both of them, yeah. My penis just a little. a little bit. I at least kept a little bit of coverage. But if you can see in that picture, actually,

we basically, we wouldn't have died, right? But like, we would not have gotten out of that water very fast without that. Because you can see how deep it goes to how shallow, instantaneously in, like, pure ice. Yep. If that guide rope that they forced us to put there was not there,

it would have been real bad. I mean, Forrest's hand could be gone and you wouldn't see anything, right? This was 32. Right. And if that guide rope wasn't sitting right next to us. Yeah. just seen him and I, like, two sad seals trying to get out of this. Like, help, help.

Like, I don't know what we would have done. And then we just crawled out and everyone's like, you're still idiots. And we're like, wasn't that bad. Yeah. It was true. Time for a suicide. Tequila shot. Dude, tequila suicide.

You're doing one tonight, Peter. Zero. I want me ready. Real quick. I've been kind of chomping at the bit all week to talk about something that was in the news. I don't want to do a ton of news this time. Okay. No, we do in the news. It's fun. So Billy Weigel, who's a great Brostner, sent this article in.

Okay. It's your fucking worst nightmare. It's the thing, the urban legend that you've heard your whole life come true. Okay. I'm listening. So when I was a kid, there was an urban legend that, like, alligators, like could come, like little tiny baby alligators could come into your toilet. Yeah, it's come up from the sewer. Yeah.

Like C-U-M? But I know what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. So, a 65-year-old man. sat down on the toilet at 6 a.m. for his morning constitution. Okay. Okay? This is in Austria.

Austria? Austria, not Australia. For Australia. It sounds like Australia. The home of Schwarzenegger. Nope, Austria. He's got it right. He sits down, all of a sudden, searing pain in his testicles. He looks down. Polar plunge? Looks down. Starfish.

Sees the head of a five and a half foot long python. Oh, come on. That had climbed into his toilet from the sewer. Come on. Legit. He called after a bit of time, a reptile guy comes. He has a five and a half foot python. His neighbor had reported that 11 of his snakes had gotten loose,

climbed into the sewer, up through the fucking pipes, into the toilet, bit him in the testicles. Nails the guy's nutsack. Yeah. Wow. You know when you can feel someone else's pitiful? pain. Yes.

Yeah. This is one of those times. I just got bit in a sack by a python. It is one of those things that you're like terrified of whenever you use the bathroom when you're out camping. You know how the house? Yeah. The ones that don't have any running water. Right.

It's, I'm just like, well, I got to do it. But I mean, what are the snakes doing if they're hanging out in there? Do they like, like? They're just looking for testicles. That's just what they're doing. That's a big part of their diet. Yeah. So look, snakes escape.

It depends on the species of python. Nick, what do you think that is? Is that a carpet python? It's tiny right there. It looks like a carpet python to me. Now, is it python or python? Because I've always wondered at this forest. Or if you're from Zimbabwe and you've had a few drinks and you're at the bar trying to impress some ladies.

Yep. You say python and brew. That's right. Python. Python. Yeah, high eye. My girlfriend just always calls it out when you say. She's like, oh, Forrest with the python again.

But yeah, I'm guessing it. So you're asking, how does this happen? I'm saying, I think it's a carpet python. Nick agrees. You know, gets out from someone's house. They like water. They just do. Heads into something wet, nice and warm,

decides it needs to go up as snakes like to do to climb. Sure enough, crawls into a nice, dark toilet ball. It's relatively warm. It's in someone's house. You know, sitting in strike position, looking for that frog. And in comes this big, googly-eyed frog. that's dangling right in front of the eyes.

You know, things happen. Man, if I jumped off the toilet, though, and five foot a snake came with me, I wouldn't like that. I don't care much for that idea. Well, let me ask you this. You guys know a lot about snakes. What's a five-foot python bite going to feel like?

It's not good. It's not good when it's on your hand. Yeah, on your hand, you're still maybe getting some stitches. Okay. Okay, on your testicles, it's looking like a paper shredder. It's not good. So they basically have like hundreds and hundreds of teeth.

They have four rows of teeth on the top, two rows of teeth on the bottom. And those teeth are designed to just not let go with things. So they're curved back like this. So they go into the testee and they don't want to come out of the testee. So I'm sure he went. It's the worst thing you can do. Yeah, you don't want to pull back. You don't want to pull.

In fact, you want to push forward. What do you do? I mean, this thing's attached to you too. And I know I always ask you this forest, but what do you do? What do you do? How do you get it off? See, the problem is you always ask me this, like, as though I've sat on a toilet and had a python latch to my testicles. What would you do as well?

Okay, okay, how about this? It's not on your testicles. You take your friends and they have a toddler out. Okay. Toddler starts screaming and it's got a five and a half foot carpet python stuck to its arm. Okay. What's the best way to get it out and do the least damage? Nick and I have been in situations where we're tackling very large python.

And one guy is holding the head while the other guy unwraps the snake from around your body before it gets a chance to get down. But yeah, I mean, honestly, the short answer is you cut the head off of the snake. Now, we'd never want to do that. Right. And you don't always just have a machete on hand, especially when you're out with your toddler. So, you know, best thing you can do is keep that snake straight because it's not the bite that's going to kill you. It's the reticulation. Sure.

It's going to kill you. So you want to keep it from coiling up. So once you've done that, how do you get it to get the mouth off? Yeah, so then you want to basically get them behind the head. And because of what I was talking about with the teeth being backwards, you want to almost try and push them forward, like a fish hook out, and then kind of pull away. And then if that doesn't work, and I had snakes that that just wouldn't work on,

you dump them in some water. That sucker is going to have to breathe at some point. So if you got a couple minutes to stay out, hold them underwater until they need to breathe. So you're basically holding the toddler's arm in the water. Yeah. Nick's a wealth of information here. People that might have a toddler

attacked by a python, someone's going to survive because of this. 100%. Agreed. Yeah. I do like that the instruction is similar to what it's like when I'm trying to fiddle with like a connector on electronics.

Like put it in and then like kind of squeeze the sides and pull it out. But in this case, like you have sharp teeth in your arm and you're like, yeah, you're dunking a toddler. You're seeing who can hold their breath longer, a python or a toddler. Put some butter on there.

See if you can get the teeth. Yeah, it's like getting one of those old Nintendo cartridges to work. It's like, just do anything. Blowing its ass. Wedge a book. Yeah, pull it out, blowing it. Yeah. I like that story, Pat.

Nice. Oh, we got to go back to the hippo story. We should go back to the hippo story. All right, so Nick set it up, right? He's come to Zimbabwe. He's never been to Africa before. We're on safari. He's seeing amazing things.

We got stretched there. He was a world-class Bushman. Survive Night One. and Nick, Nick says, Nick's obsessed. He just wants to catch snakes, right? There's the world's greatest megafauna is right in front of us, and he wants to flip over logs and look for, look for cobras. And I'm like, all right, let's go for a hike, right?

Let's go for a walk. Now, Monopool is the place he described, one of the last places in the world where you can truly go on like a walking safari. And it's very dangerous and no one should do this. No fences, no paved roads. Wow. Nothing. No fences, no paved roads.

You just take a rifle, sling it over your shirt. shoulder and just go for a long. It's back to that whole, like, who can do the most dangerous thing competition that you guys always have done. No, we've been at home court. Forrest is like, no, Nick's like, yeah, exactly that. Home court advantage over here. We're going for it. Anyway, so Nick and I, and by the way, one thing we should point out, and it's been insinuated, but not directly nailed on the, on the nose here, Nick and I compete ferociously in everything. Do we? I haven't. Oh, no, never. Gors just tries to keep on.

He's like out of one. You're at like a 10. Yeah. But I mean, ferocious competition. Like we would fight. We would... You name a sport.

Tennis, I'd try and beat him in a race car, which was a waste of time. You name it. We would compete in it. Throw the rock, you name it. So anyway, we're in Africa, naturally, the competition kicks in, right? I see...

We're like walking up this trail, and all of a sudden, Nick's like five feet ahead of me. I'm fuck that. He's not getting ahead of me. You know? That's ridiculous. So now I'm getting two feet ahead of. him. I'm going to flip that log before he does.

Anyway, Nick, why don't you take it from there as a guy who'd never seen a hippo before this? Yeah, so we're with Stretch, who's literally, they call him that, because he grew so fast, look like he stretched one day. He's like 6-7, 6-8. He's a man of a man. Yeah, huge. And even that morning before we left for this hike,

he told us that he went to check in, kick some honey badgers out of the kitchen in the middle of the night, which I guess is a thing. And he walked out of the door. And he said he looked down to his right, and he said, four feet away from him was a leopard crouched down. That's right. I remember that.

He said it was the closest he thought he's been to being killed in a long time. That's right. I remember saying right outside the door like a cat, right? Yeah. Pounced, ready to pounce on the next honey badger. At the camp. He was the next one coming out. Right. Right.

And he said they just stared at each other and it just turned away and went away. And so that was how the morning started, right? That's 6.30 a.m. I'm like, all right. Still in Africa. Here we go. So, yeah, we're on this drive. Still alive.

And what it's alive, what a normal group of people would do on a hike with a guy like that is you would tuck tail behind stretch and just be like, sir, you lead the way and don't let us do anything stupid. Forrest and I basically keep going further and further out from where you're supposed to walk. Flipping logs, looking for stuff, cobras, whatever. Then there's this little drop off and we kind of both kind of crested at the same time. We look down and probably 15, 20 feet, so close than you want to be, but it's kind of down from you. so not immediate threat is big hippo, big bull hippo. And things just go and it just tries to drop down, but it's in this drying up river and it can't get underwater.

And so hippos, like, that's their, like, security blanket. They can just go underwater and they feel good. We've talked about this on the show. If they can't, of course, it mentioned it. It gets bad. It's funny that this is when you learned it in this moment. Yeah, live. He learned this right then and there.

Live record. Real time. So we start backing up, right? We don't know what's going to happen. real slowly. I know you don't want to run and there's probably something else over there

that will kill you if you run and so we're backing up towards stretch we're still probably 50 feet away from them we're getting back getting back nothing's happening

so I think we're fine and then we see this hippo head come over the crest where we just wear and we're like fuck and it just starts walking

but it's not walking towards us no literally exactly like that like that could have been our pick it's walking parallel like that

kind of to our right literally that picture is that they are some mean looking motherfuckers too. Dude, just wait. The story gets gnarly. Yeah, the story gets gnarly.

They can literally, I'm sure you guys all know, especially for your animal fans, but they can move like a horse on the land. Oh, yeah. It's just like, they kill more people in Africa than lions and crocodiles combined. Right. They go 30 miles an hour.

You're not running. The fastest human in the world runs, what, 22 or something? Right, right. I run one mile an hour. Yeah. As it's unfolding, I know how bad this is. But I'm like, ah, I've got fours. Stretch, we'll be fine, we'll be fine, backing up, back in a house.

Things walking away, walking away, I'm like, okay, I think we're going to be okay. It basically is just as it's going to walk away, it just stops. And I'm like, okay, it's probably not good. Turns, opens its mouth, basically 180 degrees, and comes at us at 30 miles an hour. Oh, boy. Oh, my God. I know the one rule in Africa. Stretch even told us this multiple times.

Just don't run, don't run, right? Because you run from a lion, it's going to, like, click in a prey, like, reflex. So I'm trying to still back up, but running backwards. And I look back and I just see stretch and he goes, run. To one way. Oh, no. I felt that. What about feeling that.

And I'm running. It's terrifying. It's a lot of force is. Forrest's wife was there. Forrest left his wife to die. I left Forrest to die. We're both running. Not true.

I pushed her behind to turn my mound. There was a termite mound. I remember the termite mound. Probably, like, pushed her down and, like, went over. But so everyone was looking out for themselves. Yeah, but it looked here. And I see Stretch. He fired off a shot, and I'm still running.

So I don't know if the hippo died or not. I don't know what's happening. I'm still running. I think I found a tree or something. And I look back and I see Stretch, rifle to his shoulder, still lined up. Hippo's still coming at him and basically turned. I mean, I want to say it was like five feet away. It was like as close as close can be.

Just turned the last minute. Stress just stood there like a badass. And you didn't get a picture? I should have like, oh my God. And so I asked Stretch afterwards. I was like, well, what happened? And he was like, well, you guys are idiots? Yeah.

And then he said that. He's like, I almost died this morning because of a leopard. And he was like, that was a real situation. This wasn't a mock charge. Like he goes, I fire one warning shot over the animal. And he goes, my next shot, I'm going to shoot it through the mouth and the brain. I'm going to drop it. And he's like, I was like half a second from doing that.

Um, so that is as close as you have been killed by a hippo without being killed by a hippo. Then, good Lord. I legit have like chills a little bit. I told you guys. I've had a lot of bad instances with hippos. They're fucking scary. Wild times.

Listen to that. So there are, you know, we're in monopoles for another week or so. And there's 10 more stories like that. You know, we can do it on Zambi's River. Like, you know, not quite full near death, but like partial near death. Then we go to this other place, which is this. lake, I forget what it was, Krabah or something. And anyways, this is a fishing village, Kribe.

So we're in this little hut. And Forest Nile, naturally, we're going out to catch Nile Krocks at night. So we have our headlamps, we've got some rope, we've got snake hooks, you know, cameras, all the things you need. We're going out and we'd see a Nile and we'd be like, okay, that one will eat us. Let's keep going. We'd go another 10, 15 feet. We'd see one that's like six feet and we're like, eh, no.

Then we go another, you know, 20 feet. We find like a three-footer. We snare them, we get them, we catch them, which is badass, because I never caught an aisle crack before. And anyways, we're doing that for like three hours because we're catching chameleons. And I think we caught all night. And we just got further and further and further away from our hut.

So then we're like, okay, it's like two in the morning. Like we're driving the next morning. Let's go back to our hut. We turn around, put on the spotlight. What do we see? Fucking 20 hippos. Just out. Oh, my God.

They brought friends. No, it's all hippos. They all come out. No, I mean, the hippo that almost killed you brought friends. Sideways. I mean, there were, I could see at least 20 hippos between us and where we needed to go. Yep. I'm like, God damn it.

Like, all the things. So then we spend. Do you still love in Africa at this point? Love Africa, still number one. So then we like a walk that should have taken us 15 minutes max, right, just to walk back to our hut. We took like another two hours in fours to just make sure we didn't die. Right? So it was like an action movie right?

Like we'd get behind one hut and we'd like hide. We'd wait for one to pass. We'd walk out. We'd get to the next hut like a game, like a video game. So anyways we get back to the hut and we're like ah yeah, we're badass, cool, crocs and dodge the hippos. We wake up the next morning. We're talking to one of the guys that was there and he's like, oh, you see all those hippos out last night? Like yeah, they're friends of the farm. They come up every night. Like you could basically slap him in the ass and nothing would happen.

And you just walk past them. We're like, huh? They're like, yeah, they're like puppy dogs. These ones I see humans every day. After you're, after you just had like the most terrifying encounter ever with a hippo. Yep. Forrest, can you beatbox us a jingle? Oh, yeah, I got you.

You ready? It's all coming from here. Have fun editing the audio on that, Retep. Oh, I will. All day. All night. Nick, this is a game we play called the Battle Royale. I mean, I've gotten over 10,000 DMs.

this week saying that there's people that just love it. It's crazy. So here's the situation. He's never won one, surprisingly. I've won. I've won almost all of them. I've actually never won one. That's true.

So what we do here is I give you a scenario. I give out a scenario. And then we do a snake draft. You go one at a time. The people on the ends get two picks in a row. What we're going to do is draft the head of an animal, the body of an animal, and the legs of an animal. They must be extant, not cryptids.

Yep. I think this is a fantastic category. All right. It's really hard. Lay it on us. What's the hypo? Me, you, Retep, and Nick all have to take a flight to get to a location in which we will have a fight till death. Perfect.

Okay. Fight till death. This is a traditional. You can bring with you this creature that you create. Yep. But here's the thing. You have to smuggle it in in your carry-on bag. Oh, wow.

Oh, this is good. So you can't take... This is good. You can't take the body of a bull elephant. No. You can't take the legs of a giraffe. A giraffe? No, yeah, no.

You're smuggling it and you're carry-on luggage. And then it's going to help you fight till death against everyone else. Wow. Yeah. So legs, body, head. Legs body head. Yes. Yeah.

No, it's great. And it's got to fit in a carry-on. It's got to fit in a carry-on suitcase. Yeah. Yeah, I see Nick's fingers on his keyboard as he frantically types in small animals. Does the animal have to be quiet? Nope, that's up to you. Okay, I like this.

Patrick, you want to start? Oh, I'd love to start. Please. You got your little notes? You're going to jot them down? I'm working on it as we go. Oh, boy. Okay, well, I'll just go ahead and win right now.

Oh, wow. I'm going to go for the head. Yep. Let me take the head of a Tasmanian devil. Wow. Okay, I like that small, compact, ferocious. It's a small enough head. It's utterly ferocious.

It's got a strong enough bite force to chew through bone. It's going to be biting your finger. off left and right. It's going to devour your animals, head of a Tasmanian devil. Forest, you go second. All right. Look, I'll be honest. I think Patrick came out of the gate real strong, the Tasmanian devil. I was going to go for something similar, although I'll be it less menacing. So I'm going to take this off the table early. I'm going to go for the head of an inland Tai Pan. Oh, shit. Very deadly, very dangerous.

It's got the venom aspect. Nobody else can pick snakes. I'm going with something very aggressive inland Ta-Pan head. Okay. Peter, you're up for one. Is a black mamba snake? Yes.

I'm sorry, I'm not a herpesatologist. I will be picking a Wolverine. It will destroy what part of it? The head. The head. Yeah, yeah, the head.

Ferocious fucking head. The thing is wild. If it was just the head, It's a good size. It's a good size head, so he's going to need a very small body and tiny legs. I'm thinking about just going with the head and that's it. Just a head. You just roll it at us like a bowling ball?

Exactly. Okay. All right, so Nick, you're now up for two since you're on the end. So you can pick one head, a body, or a legs. You get two of them. Any order you like, pick two, create your animal. I get cock-locked by, I can't pick snake or a... No, no, no.

It's got to be a species and a part of it. Yeah, snakes. I mean, you could pick a different snake, but you're going to lose because I got the inland type band. All right. Okay. Well, let's see here. So I'm going to go with the head of a Hawksbill Sea Turtle. Ooh.

That's nice. I lost my nipple to one next to forest. Of course. Real sharp. Oh, yeah. I remember that. Right? I forgot about that.

Yeah. I was holding one under my arm like this. I just caught snorkeling. And I was going to just kind of adjust my mask for a picture or something. And if you put the shell right here, you put the head right here, and this thing doesn't want anything to do with you, and it just goes, and I let out a scream like a little girl and was 50-50. Not sure that I was going to have a nipple when I got the thing off.

That's a good pick. Okay. It's not a pick you'd consider, but it's a menacing head. Very sharp beak. Yeah, and it's just, you know, you put that on a deadly body, like, get out of it. You're not taking that. nice legs unless you're going to fight in a pool. Yeah, true.

True. All right, so we all went ahead. So you've got a second pick before we run it back, Nick. Who are you going to go for, body or legs? What's your second pick? Keeping in mind, got to fit in your carry-on luggage. Okay, so I'm going to do the legs of a basilisk lizard. They call them the Jesus Christ lizard.

Because if I see some sort of like Wolverine Taipan thing get out of the suitcase and like I really need to go, that thing's fucking booking it out of it. Yeah, the river exes runs straight across the river. It's the only thing that can run on water. I'm gone. Because they can run across water, right? They can run across water. You've seen them in the pick right there.

They can run across water. They're incredibly fast. Jump up on their hind legs like that. So his body pick, this could be huge. Because his body pick, you know that it can go to back legs. It can move real quick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It could be huge.

Okay. It looks like it skips leg day at the gym, but it's good. Okay. So for my body. It's going to have to be such a small body to fit in the carry-on with the big head that he picked. Oh, a carry-in. Yeah, I mean, he's going to need the body of essentially an ant. Yeah.

No, not an ant. Something really small, yeah. It's fine. My body, it needs to be able to fly. So it will have the body of a, well, what's a good bird? An owl. You know two birds and pigeon is one of them. No, he's got an eagle and owl.

The body of an owl. Any specific owl? Name a species of owl. Snowy owl. That's close. Snowy-eyed owl. Yeah, snowy-eyed owl. The American barn owl. A barn owl, that's good.

Thank you. Good. Yeah, barn owl. You did it. You got there. All right, so you've got the, all right, very nice. They have a wolverine, the body of an owl. It's going to have a hard time flying without a doubt.

No, it's burly. It's going to have such a hard time. in that carry-on. In the carry-on, I mean, we're looking. You guys want to see what I was Googling? How big is the carri-on? Small burly animals. Until I had a switch.

Small burly animals. You're going to end up on like a gay site. Okay. So Retep's got a huge carry-on. I guess he paid extra. This is, anyway. This would fit in the carry-on that I bring on to Spirit Airlines. Copy that.

That's fair. Yeah, that's fair. Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay. All right. I'm up. Body pick.

You know, I'm going, I'm going hard venom. That's what I'm going to do. So I've already got the head of an inland Tai Pan. Why not give myself another venomous advantage with the body of a duck bill platypus? For those that don't know that have... Yeah, how does the body have venomous back claws? It's one of the only... I think if you're no mammal, you're out.

I think that's in the air and you're locked in. But that's not on the body. So I think all you picked was a nice supple beaver-like midsection. That's right. Just a supple beaver. Yeah, you know, he's kind of right. Wow. And it's taken up.

You really fucked my longer. Did you mean to say legs? Going right through that. No, no, he didn't. He's not allowed to switch. I didn't. Yeah, I went with body. I just knew is honest about it.

I really backed myself into a corner there. This is the kind of reason I haven't had Nick on the show. You guys wouldn't have called that. We would not. I'm too much. I'm too thinking of my own gun picked. That's fucked. That's fucked.

That's fucked. Okay, so basically he just picked a big meat pillow for our animals to a sack. Yes! It looks like a middle-aged dad bod. Well, so now you've got to wait for my two brilliant picks. Yeah, what do you got going on there? Yikes. Okay, I've got to really come back from that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go ahead. All right, all right. I think I know what I'm going to do here. I think I know what I'm going to do. Now I'm worried about it fitting. All right, so I've got this ferocious, ferocious head. Okay.

I'm going to pair with that the very, very hard shell. Mine? No, I'm going to pick a turtle body. Okay? No specific kind of turtle, but one that's about... I'm gonna pick like a smallish... No, no, it's gonna be so hard. Like a little box turtle.

It's gonna get so hard for you, Nick. You've gotta squeeze that into your carry-on. That's gonna be wrong. The body's gonna be about this big. No, it's small turtle. It's way easier than the owl wolverine creature. Ows very squishy, dude. And we can squishy.

So picture me this, fellas. Yeah. Okay. Okay, you've got this Tasmanian Devil bone-crushing head. And then you've got a body about this big of a, uh, a turkyy-o-oh with a very hard show. Okay. I'm going to give it the mobility, yalls,

and opposable thumbs of a spider monkey. Wow. It's going to be running, jumping, climbing, grabbing. I hope this thing doesn't get out in the plane, man. No, if this gets out of the plane, everybody's dead. No, dude, I got a Jansport. It's not getting out, doesn't it? It's going to be dope.

Guys, how are you going to compete with me now that you've got a flesh pillow? I've got a meat pillow. And a tiny head that's this big? That's brutal. Okay, well, I'm up for my last pick. I really fucked myself over there unintentionally. So, all right, I've got, yeah, I've got a marshmallow for a body. I've got a dope inland typhan on a head.

You know, at this point, I'm just picking up side points. So I'm going to go for the appendages of an I-I. You know, maybe I can just creep you out enough with the I-I hands that you just don't want to touch me. I mean, this is an ugly critical. This is a mess. Yeah. Out of the box. With a little finger, you know what I'm in.

One long finger. Don't hurt my good hair. By the way, his animal is just going to come up to you and go, excuse me. Yeah. It's very disjointed because it's like you're trying to be cute, draw something up, but freak them out, and then poison them. No, it's atrocious. It's a trojan. I would love to see if any of the brosters, I don't like to ask for stuff like this.

Yeah. But if any of you would be willing to draw this animal that Forest is created. I would really love to see this one. This might be the worst one of all time. You guys screwed me out or Nick really just called me out on my bullshit with the body. That really threw me for a loop. All right, Peter, you got one more pick. These things are so ugly that the local villagers think they're the devil and kill them.

Oh, yeah, that's where they don't have a big population. That's the hand. They created the hand from the movie the Gremlins on the Gremlins from that hand. Yeah. Certainly. I'm going to be honest. I might get my little bassless legs and get out of there if I saw those hands. That's what I'm seeing.

I might have got one guy beat. Maybe. You're going to run away. Yeah, just a runaway move. My flying Wolverine head will not be running away. Okay. Wolverine head, owl. What do you got for legs?

Very lopsided. When it has the feet and or mostly the feet. So not the full legs, but just the feet of a cassowary. Oh, wow. This is not fitting into any known carry. The cassowary foot's like this big itself. Bro, the cassowary foot's like this big itself. A single foot?

Single foot. One foot is fine. He's going with one foot. He's just hopping around. I contest that two cassowary feet, a barn owl and a wolverine head could fit into the carryon that I have at home. Okay, look. You pack him like gym shoes, you kind of like. Yeah.

If it could fold. on top of its feet. Maybe he could slot it into a carry-on. This is cool. I mean, it's atrocious. It's almost as ugly as my critter. I hope somebody mocks these up. Brosner, somebody mock this up, please.

I mean, this is a hell of a battle. This really is maybe the best one we've ever done. Brosner's, go to build a bear and see if they can create this for you. All right, Nick, how are you going to round out your very run-forward animal? You've so far designed an animal that's good at escaping. With a relatively scary head.

What was his head? Hawksbilt C-Turna. Oh, yeah. How are you going to round it out? What kind of body you put in this critter on? All right. I'm reaching deep into my animal nerd bank, mostly just to impress forest. It's an animal that I've actually captured in the wild as well.

I'm going to choose the body of... Notice how he had to put that in? Yeah. We certainly noticed that. A ten wreck. It lives in Madagascar, only found in Madagascar. objectively cute, but also covered in deadly spines. Oh, that's a good one.

We caught one when we were, we caught a bunch when we were in Madagascar. Was that after you left? That might have been after you left. Oh, yeah, it might have been up in Mashwala. Yeah, no, I was gown. And now I... Cannot handle them. They're ridiculous looking.

And now I like that Forrest has completed the circle and one-uped Nick. I'm capturing many. Do you notice this? They do have a subtle... Yeah. Nick's like I caught one once. For us couldn't quickly enough get in. He was like, remember we caught like,

I mean, what do we get? Like 60, 70? Yeah, I think I found a new species of 10 rec one. He's like, he's like, we described a couple new ones. We, I became part of their village. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. I mean, it's whatever. I'm just saying we've done it.

All right, well, this is great. This is a, what a fabulous battle royal this is. This is one of the best ones in a long time. Let's recap. Browsners, please, somebody mock these up. They're incredible. And then Forrest will get a tattoo of his on him. Oh, yeah, full chest.

Coming to fight on an island in your carry-on. We've got Patrick with the head of a Tasmanian devil, the body of a nice box turtle, and the agility and limbs of a spider monkey. I mean, Jesus, that's terrifying. Wow. Yeah, I'm coming in a little less hot with the head of an inland typin, started good.

The pillow-like furry body of a platypus, and the grotesque hands of an eye-eye. Peter's atrocity is some oversized combination of a Wolverine's head, a barnal's flying body. The flying is a nice advantage. And the foot singular, perhaps, maybe feet, of a cassoward. Just notice, he was looking at his camera

and showing the size to clearly demonstrate. It's too big and making it smaller. Yeah. He could fit into his fucking thing. Body. And Nick's also a good, also a good, critter. I mean, it's definitely hard on the defense. You got a Hawksville turtle

head. Yeah, it's going to take a nipple up. It's probably not going to kill you, but he might lose a toe. Sure. The body of a ten wreck, real spiky, so if you want to handle this adorable critter. How big is a tenric? It's tiny. It's like this. Oh, so it's not going to be able to move with that head.

No, it's a man. It's not moving anyway. But he might be moving on the legs of a basalt. Yeah. Yeah, let's not even run on water. Yeah. So, it's, it's It's, yeah, it's quite a BR tonight. Well, and let's not forget that the object of the BR is not just to get them smuggled in. It's who would win in the fight when you get out of the plane.

It's a four-way fight. We'll let the Brosner's decide. Nick, it was your first battle royal. Don't sweat the fact that you bombed it so bad. It's not. I think I'd beat Forrest. That's true. Yeah, exactly.

You definitely came in second. Yeah. Beat that marshmallow. Right. And Peter shows up with no animal because they wouldn't let him carry it on. It's bullshit. So it's between me and Nick. Please vote.

Peter, do the thing. Where can they find us? Well, also real quick. Good call by you having Nick on. Obviously, it would have been great if he could be here in the studio. But tons of interesting stories. Lots of fun. If you liked Nick, let us know.

We'll have him back when he's in town. If you hated him, let him know directly. Yeah. What's your name? A lot of hate mail. Yeah. Cell phone, 555. Yeah.

Give it out. Peter, what should everyone do? Yeah, so go to the Wild Times Podcast. com forward slash info if you just want a nice, succinct list of all the links where you can find the podcast, the merch, the Patreon, and as you know, we love you. Five stars, leave us a review. Thank you for all the shit.

And good night. Good night. He's doing the same dance you did. Oh, did the bottom dance? Same thing. You guys are so cute. Oh, it's a song. Santa Barbara.