Wild Times: Wildlife Education - TWT #75 - Bradley Trevor Greive

Episode Date: September 13, 2021

Bradley Trevor Greive joins the Wild Times to talk about his upcoming adventures, news, and play some games. Enjoy! Love you! Patreon @ https://patreon.com/wildtimespod

Wild Times. Woo! What's up, everybody? Wild Times number 75. BTG. Everybody's favorite guests on the Wild Times is here filling in for Forrest Galante. But first, you know me. I'm the producer, Papa P.

Along with me is your, what are you, the professor, Retepp? Sure. Rattapas for us says. What's up, buddy? Not much. Now, does BTG stand for big teddy grimace? Wait, I was going to say big teddy bear, but then I realized it was a G. Never mind.

Bad joke. Glad to be here. Cheers, makes. Well, he's wearing purple. What's up, BTG? How are you, buddy? I'm just glad you led with that classic Riteppian joke as no value whatsoever. How about big tubby grimace guy?

He might come to the studio. Yeah, I'm going to say. To my face. You know, it's interesting because you look at me and you go, there's a retired wrestler past his best days, and you'd be right. But in actual fact, I'm a very cerebral creature. I'm a gentleman of letters. And what I love coming on the show and listening to you, too, in Forrest,

is it's the kind of intellectual punch in the dick that I need to stay grounded. So thank you. He's sitting the bar solo. Here's to a great podcast. Cheers. Cheers. What are you guys drinking on? Yeah, you switched it up from your gallon jug of milk and vodka that you had last time.

I seriously almost killed me. That my eyes closing. I had to kind of dribble down the stairs like a boneless salamander. And I just said, that's it. No more cocktails. I'm back on the whiskey. It's all good. That's a boy.

That looks like a fancy. That looks like a fancy one. So let me throw this out. Since this is your, what, fourth, fifth, sixth time on the show, and a lot of the, the Brosners are constantly asking for more. I think it's official that you need, you need a nickname. Now, I'm the producer. I need a bro-name.

It's like the fifth time on SNL. You get the jacket. I feel like, I feel like I'm entitled to a. Broly Trevor Green. Huh? Huh? Reptillion? His last name's Grieve, A.

B. Yeah, I know, I said green. It's a nickname, you fucking idiot. What about the, what about the professional? Yeah, I like that. I like that. It bespeaks a certain dignity and purpose otherwise lacking in this voyage. I also thought the neck bromancer was good.

I like that. I'm going to keep that for the after dark episodes that we do in person. Oh, sweet. We're doing afterdollic. Professional it is. I'm honored to take that mantle. I shall attempt to serve it, you know, with a similar level of injustice as we tend to does. Well, let's let the Brosters decide. Pop it in the comments on the YouTube or the iTunes or Apple Podcasts.

Tweet it at us. I don't know, whatever you do. So it's been a while, Bradley. What has been kind of going on in that world besides the fact that it appears that you're painting a wall? Right. So can you see the roof? So this just happened. The roof just started leaking. of the ceiling of my study. So that was last night. So we've had contractors in today. So yeah, not exactly. I'm not, it's not a home renovation show,

although I'm prepared to host that, if you would like. But, you know, I figure that the physical chaos and the, you know, intellectual disheaval of this show is kind of on part. But yeah, it's basically a shit fight right here right now. So you're calling the show then,

a shit fight is what you're saying. No, I'm merely affirming what everybody else thinks of it. Fair enough. I'll be busy. You know, it's still, you know, with the rise of COVID infections, we've been playing it safe.

We have an unvaccinated toddler, so we don't want to, we had some friends who's toddler got really, really sick, and so we've been extra careful. But being working on a few projects, got a very big thing to announce next month on Netflix,

but that's all I can say, but I will come back on the podcast, for the premier. I can promise you that. Yeah, in about what? Four or five weeks, something like that you'll come back to announce? Yeah, whenever you'll have me. Beautiful.

Sweet. Well, let me ask you this, because you brought up COVID, and I know that you know more about this stuff than I do. When a virus, so we've got all these variants, right? You've got the Delta variant. Now people are talking about the mu variant. When a virus mutates, what is the purpose of the virus mutating? Well, first of all, everything mutates.

Every living thing evolves in real time, and we get used to these incredibly long timelines of millions and billions of years, but in fact, genetic change, both, omnidirectional genetic change is a very real thing. You probably know about this, but we've seen gene exchanges laterally through the food chain between species of fish.

And we've measured that one fish picks up a genetic attribute previously only belonging to another fish. I had not seen that. That's actually mind-blowing. Say that again. Because that is crazy. Okay. So I'm one of the four people

who watched the Natalie Portman movie Oblivion, right? Yes. If you haven't watched it, maybe don't. But there is an element of truth in that genetics, genes can be swapped from animal to animal and from plant to animal and vice versa.

We're constantly evolving, looking for ways to have an advantage. And yeah, I don't recall the exact study. I think it was between herring and smelt, two very similar but different fish, and one picked up this genetic advantage in order to be a more successful species. But we also see it in an adaptation that is just on gene acquisition.

So, for example, there is a little tiny sea slug, marine animal, that lives off the coast of Florida, and it's neither plant or animal, but both, in that it actually harvests genes from the algae that it eats, and it repurposes them to allow itself an animal to have photosynthesis in order to generate sugars and energy. So it doesn't have to eat as much,

and it's remarkable, right? It's superhero shit right there. 100%, legit superhero shit. And if you pull it up, it looks like, a sort of a leaf made out of gelatinous jade. You're not even sure if it's an animal or a, it's quite a remarkable thing.

So getting back to the original question, which is never really the purpose of this show. Of course. It's bacteria, viruses, everything is looking for a genetic advantage. Everything is looking to be more successful. And sometimes the change, in every case,

the changes are largely accidental, but when one succeeds, which is classic Darwinism, as opposed to the Lamarckian theory, which is you desire a change to, for example, the difference is very simple. You have a giraffe, right?

The Lamarck principle is that the giraffe wants to be taller. Well, that's the little, amazing little C-Sloat. Isn't it beautiful? Beautiful. It looks like a vagina. Yeah, that's what he's saying.

It's beautiful. Lovely. Yeah. What were you going to say? Sorry, did. No, I'm glad that you love She-Hulk. That's great. Don't know what that word means, but okay.

The Lamarckian principle is that the animal that preceded the giraffe wanted to reach higher into the thorny occasion to get the leaves, and that desire produced over time the long neck that realize its ambition. We know that's not true. The Darwinian model is that somehow a genetic shift resulted in an animal that had a slightly longer neck, it was more successful, it bred, and other ones, and so on. That principle applies to everything. Now that we know there can be lateral gene exchanges,

the whole world of shift and change is bigger than we ever imagined. And that's exactly what happens with the virus. It evolves between hosts for various different reasons, different temperatures, different defenses, different drugs, different antibodies. Everything's fighting to survive down to an atomic level. And therefore, now we have the muvary, which is more resistant to things that stopped the delta variant, which was more resistant to things

that stopped the original version of the virus. Theoretically, a virus, you would think of a virus that's very, very deadly, a virus shouldn't want its host to die, right? Because then it dies inside the host. So don't viruses typically evolve to become less deadly to the host over time? That is not necessarily correct.

It is often the case, and that's a very successful model, but no, you're inferring a parasitic relationship, ship. This is a search and destroy mission. And so we can move on. You can think about fungi and moving through decaying bodies. They're there to consume and to move on. They're not there to shake hands and sing songs. So it's a very different, it's a very different dynamic. Sure, sure, sure. So does this mean that Noah had two of each virus variant on the arc? Is that we were going?

Okay. Because my understanding was that everything that's alive today. We laugh about the Noah thing because it's like, what is it? It was like 4,000 years ago and somehow they picked up a pair of everything,

even though there was only in Europe and Eurasia, and they transported to a mountain in Turkey, it's got to be the most poorly organized, documented wildlife breeding, release program in the history. We'd never get funded today.

We'd never get funded today. I don't think so. No. I don't know what happened to all the kangaroos and things that way but that. No, the answer to your question is things exist today that didn't exist yesterday, let alone a thousand years ago, a little alone a million years ago, et cetera. So many things can come into being in that time. And they may not have originally been a negative.

They may have been something that we could have, like the various bacteria and the various fungal spores that we carried our body all the time, that's a certain degree of passive mutualism, but they could easily evolve into something horrific in that time and become a mortal enemy, quite literally. Did you guys see what happened in Nashville or in Tennessee this week? No. What happened?

So this was all over the news. I thought you would have loved this, Peter. I'm not heard of it. A few nights ago, there was a huge explosion somewhere near Nashville, Tennessee. Massive explosion, lit up the entire sky. And there's a bunch of different ring cameras and security cameras that get this.

Shook everybody's houses, right? Yeah. So the police got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of calls. So the, shit, whatever. The geological survey did not register an earthquake and nobody knows what the cause of the explosion was. What caused it? Nobody has any clue what this event was.

Yeah. Yeah. There was no debris from space found. There were no training missions going. But it's on video, the actual explosion, all over the place. Well, you don't see the explosion. You just see the entire sky light up. And, you know, people, for miles and miles, their houses shook.

And the floors were out. They thought an earthquake had happened. So, of course, immediately, the people that Peter hangs out with on Reddit were like, this was some sort of something. The aliens did something. Yeah. But I found it really fascinating. And apparently in 2002, there was a similar event in Charlotte.

North Carolina. What are your initial thoughts? Is this definite aliens? Or what are we talking about here? Me or BTG? This is a podcast. It's whoever answers first. Same rules as the first 74.

I just want to put out there that I didn't realize you could go on Reddit after you being banned from 4chan. Well, I'm also banned from Reddit, but I've circumvented that ban. Fuck you, Reddit. I'm smart. Eat my dick. None of that's true. So I didn't know about this, but I have a theory.

The combination of the concussion waves and the light reminds me of cavitation. Specifically, in the natural world, you're familiar with pistol shrimp and some of these. Okay, the ones that kill with a sonic blast by clapping their pinches so hard together but they create pure energy, and there's a burst of light between their claws, produces an incredible temperature hotter than the surface of the sun, kind of resulting shockwaves and an air bubble, so they never actually use their weaponized pinches to actually grab and tear until the thing's dead. It's this shockwave that actually kills the fish or whatever they're praying upon.

And this principle, a lot of people watch, you know, you're watching top gun movies and things like that, Hollywood is completely miscued everybody on how missiles, any tank weapons, and any aircraft weapons work. They almost never, ever hit the actual target. They're not designed to. They're designed to blow up near enough that the shrapnel goes through it from a distance. It could be several tennis courts away. So this idea of Maverick just putting this, you know, supersonic phallic stamen up the anus for me. Never happens. Never happens.

It blows up about 100 yards away and shreds the jet. Remember, there's fuel kept in the wings, and that's how it goes. So proximal strike. That's crazy. Wait, so you were in the Air Force, right? Was that your branch of the military? I will fucking scheme. Special forces.

You're an Air Force guy, right? Do I look like I own pleated polyester pants? There's a weight limit on fucking aircraft, dude, especially in the military. You know what? Here's an embarrassing story. I would join a project, and I want. I wanted to renew my skydiving license. And America has some of the best drops on the world.

And particularly, I think, in Ohio and Arizona, these huge airfields with very consistent air temperatures and no wind, and you can just jump, jump, jump. And I called up and I said, hey, I want to renew my license. I said, great. I said, I got my own rig. And they said, no problem. They said, well, what we do for renewing your license

if you haven't jumped for a little while is we want you to jump on our rigs. And they said, you know, how big I have. know, how big are you? I'm like, you know, I'm six and a half feet tall, roughly 300 pounds. They said, no. No. We have nothing.

Nothing. And I said, I've got my own rig. I just take my own rig that was built for me. Yeah. And I remember, I'm a big unit, but there are plenty of guys who are bigger than me. Of course. And, and we carry our own body weight in toys. You know, we get out of the plane.

We don't jump out in a speedo, you know. That's a terrible mental picture, by the way. So we jump out Yeah I wasn't as heavy then as I am now But even then I'm like You know 240 250 and I'm carrying

You know up to over 300 pounds When I was doing heavy machine guns Dude that's funny crazy Right And so you know So this powerages carry a lot Anyway They wouldn't

They wouldn't get me up in the air They said I'm too big For their rigs Which I resent And I thank you for bringing that up That's fucked up But so I find that what you're just saying about the way that the missiles,

I feel like that's something I should know with my just general level of curiosity about how things work. I never knew that. I assume that the missile hit the other aircraft and that caused the explosion. So is the missile timed to explode at a certain time? Or how does it, how does, how do they control when it explodes? It's got to be proximity, right?

That's right. In that case, well, there are many, first of all, you're talking about the fuse system in the broad sense. And so there are, first of all, on radar, these are smart weapons. They know when they're close enough. Remember, they follow the jet by reading the heat signature. And so they get within a certain distance, they blow up, and that does the job.

But there are many different ways of doing it. So, for example, in artillery, at artillery, there are many different types of ordinance. We have a thing called VT or variable timer, also known as prox, or proximity. But you can set it. And artillery guys are obviously smarter than grunts like myself. And they just do the math. Okay, they have calculators now, special ones. But gun calculators, but they're doing the math for exactly how long it takes.

And if they want to do an air burst, then they time it. So it's a split second before it would hit the ground. That's when it goes off and it showers everything in hot liquid metal death. Or for a bunker busster, that's the opposite. Now it's not going to go off. until a split second after it hits the ground. And so now you've got something about the mass of a VW, that I picked that particular vehicle,

but only the size of, say, I don't know, 10 watermelons, and that gets driven into the substrate, and then, of course, it goes up. But there are many different ways of doing it. So when I was a heavy machine gun and an anti-armor specialist, and we would use all sorts of different types. of rockets and ordinance. And one of the ones that's interesting is that evolve

because it's very much like nature. You know, it's like the old archetype of the better mouse, better mousetrap problem, but nature goes back and forth trying to build defenses and build better offense in order to eat or to not be eaten. And so with tanks, what we had was initially like a torpedo, which mostly do hit the target, but then again, they don't have to,

don't have to, underwater, but that impact detonates the fuse, and detonates the ordinance. But what we did was in armor, tanks were getting thicker and thicker armor to stop these ordnance, these bombs from blowing up and blowing through them. And so what we did was we invented an ordinance called a swash head. It's like a flat-headed missile type thing, a flat-headed projectile. And it's not designed to go through. It hits the tank, pancakes out, creates a concussion wave,

which breaks off a scab of the inside of the armor of the tank, and the inside of the arm of the tank becomes the weapon and blows up everybody inside. That's just pure evil. That's an evil thing for someone to have thought of. Yeah, good God. Retech has to live with that. Yeah, I know.

I'm living, man. And then we have a thing called these hyperkinetics, these standoff probes. And what happens there, you see these rockets and the end of them, you know, like those pink river dolphins, the bargy? Yeah. And the Amazon has a nose like that, okay, like the boat tow. And what happens is it's a standoff probe. So a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a millisecond, the standoff probe hits the actual armoured vehicle. It pushes in, it crushes a piezoelectric crystal, like a grain of sugar.

that detonates the weapon and then in that infinitimally small amount of time the charge is shaped, explodes becomes a perfect tear-shaped blob of pure energy and that just drills through everything. But the point is,

that evolution of weaponry in combat is very much, there it is. That is a lot like a Carl Gustav Annie I'm around with a piece of electric crystal standoff.

that's what we have. So these shrimp, and remember, you don't just get the ones that are in the ocean, these giant peacock mantis shrimps. There are some, there's one called the pink Floyd shrimp

here in the Americas, these beautiful pink claws. And again, it just snaps its little pinches together so hard, get a little piece of pure sunshine below the water and kills everything.

Dude. And I think something of that effect is what happened out east with that mysterious light followed by the earthquake like shuddering. So it's just like some really obese guy farted, something like that? And littered, yes.

Yeah. I would say, I mean, of all the, we've talked about this actually recently because I used the pistol shrimp for one of my animal superpowers as Retept just spilled his drink all over his desk. I would say it's probably my favorite. I think that's like the animal power I would want

if I was going to morph into a superhero. But every time you snap your fingers, everyone's going to die. I could just do that. Exactly. The problem is I have a bad temper, so I might not be able to control myself. I would just constantly be snapping. Also, you too would have to suffer.

You'd have to be wearing some sort of protection. This brings me to the case of the bulldog bat, and it's this shrieking bat. Isn't it like the loudest sound produced in the animal kingdom above ground or something like that? It's the loudest mammal. Okay. I think overall volume record still goes to either a tie between the Walker's Cicator and the Green Gros of Cicator.

But in terms of pound for pound, but the mammal, it's just so funny because, yes, it's this incredibly deafening shriek. But what's awesome about it is in the act of shrieking, its own muscles naturally compress its own hearing. So it is deaf to the shriek going out. So it hurts everybody else, but doesn't hurt itself. You would need a similar thing to protect you from your pistol shrimp fingers. Well, Bradley, as an author and a writer of screenplays and stuff, I mean, you know, we've both dabbled in that world enough to know that if we turned in a script where someone had that power, they would just be like, that's not believable. Like, now. No.

It actually exists in the animal kingdom. This is why I hate Spider-Man. It's just like the lamest spider qualities. I know. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, they didn't even take like the cool, like, he should have been a trapdoor Spider-Man or something like that. Like something that did one more thing that was cool besides just the web.

That's all they gave them. Yeah, just the web. It doesn't even use it in special ways. Like, you know, you think about a golden orb spider that has a big globule of sticky web, like a bolus and he throws it. Exactly. I've never seen him do that. The ones that use them that have this, like a, it's like a circular lassoe,

and they throw it forward with just four limbs. Also, what about the fact that they use their petapalps for sex and break it off inside the female so no other male can do that? I didn't see him doing that to Mary Jane. They shot that scene and then they were just like they got the NC17 rating when his dick broke off, you know? How does he only have two eyes? I know. I know. Well, this is a great segue to a game that I wanted to play.

with you here, Bradley. So last week on the podcast, we played a new game show that I invented, and I'm the host of. If anyone from Game Show Networks watching, I'm available, I will do it. It's called, can I get a game show jingle, Peter? He's so flustered because he just spilled his entire gin and soda all over his fucking keyboard. Welcome to episode number two of Is BTG Smarter Than an Idiot. Much like popular game show, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grater? What we're going to do here is see if a...

Are you a biologist technically? I think so. Yes, yes, I am. Thank you. Is a biologist smarter than the layman Retep? So what I've done here is I've chosen. Bradley, you had a show, a very fun show on Animal Planet, called Little Giants. That was really about tiny creatures.

A lot of them were insects. So all the questions are... Okay, I see how this is. These are all about insect superpowers, things like that. We're going to alternate who goes first. There's one point awarded. New drink. Oh, you got the new drink.

That's why he's gone for so long. All right. Brosner's play along. This is a lot of fun. You might learn something. Use it at a bar to a member of the same sex, opposite sex, to try to impress them. Probably won't work because people don't want to talk about insects when they're out at the bar. All right.

here we go. Here we go. Retep, you're first, since you're the idiot. So house flies, the common housefly finds sugar by using its feet. Its taste receptors are on its feet. We learned that in the last one, yeah. How many times more sensitive than the human taste bud is the house flies ability to taste through its feet? How many times more sensitive?

than the human tongue. A thousand. Okay. Bradley? Wow. I know. I don't know. But...

That'd be weird if you did. I don't think that you would spend so much time walking on dog shit if your feet were super sensitive in terms of... Unless you like the taste. That's a very broad palate. Ooh, sugar or fickle slurry out of that dog. Yeah. I'm going to say... I'm going to say 100.

times. The correct answer. Retap gets a point. Ten million times more sensitive. And just so you know, the source for all of these is the Smithsonian Institute. So I actually believe this. This is not just some stupid blogs. That's extraordinary.

So what I'm hearing then is that their taste is so sensitive that there's actually a deeper level of culinary appreciation for dog shit than I had ever imagined. Exactly. I'm missing out. I'm missing out. You are. Let's see if you can get the, if we can get those genes in your body and you can walk around with taste buds that are a million times more powerful in your hands and feet. On my, on my battle scard scaly feet. Yeah. I have a friend who's probably one of my dumbest friends, but he claims to be a supertaster.

He says this is a thing that exists, that he's a supertaster and that he has, it's been proven and he's been diagnosed as having these. wildly effective taste buds. And he has the diet of, like, me when I was 13 if I got to plan dinner every night. Oh, really? Yeah, like 7-11 takedos for dinner every night. Los Cheetos pizza. Exactly. Bagle bites.

Yeah. I just, yeah, I like to think I have a decent palette. I feel like my sense of taste is one of the few senses I have left. But once you get a toddler, if it's on a place, late, that's dinner. Right. It's just the rule. Right.

And I just point out in terms of being a human fly. I don't recall Jeff Goldblum in the fly again, embracing those qualities. Exactly. They keep fucking this up. The guys that write these movies. He had the hairy back and everything,

which I have. And I'm like, that doesn't make you a fly mate. I think just mentally, the transformation as being a human turning into a fly, you're really worried about some other things No, but you wouldn't be able to think about anything else.

You would be having a 10 million times more sensitive taste of sweaty sock all day long. You kill yourself in seconds. You would have to. All right, number two. Bradley, you're up first. While gathering food, the typical North American bee flies how many miles in a single day? Wow. I'm going to say about,

I'm going to say about 25 miles. Okay, Peter. But usually, usually it's no more than a seven-mile return trip. So 14 is more common, but up to 25. And I'll also say that relative to mass, that's the equivalent of the space shuttle, of the Apollo mission going to the moon and back like four times. Amazing. I mean, even just that's amazing. I'm just going to give him the point no matter what you say, Peter, but go ahead.

BTG might want to hold off his explanations until after I answer because I'm going with 25.1. This is. You are prices riding me. Wow. Sure. I'm going to award you each a point because technically Retep gets the point, but the bonus fact gets you a point on this game show. Up to 60 miles in a single day. Right.

That's unusual and requires a tailwind. I actually do know this because. I wrote a book on insects, and the average is 14. When you write your next book... When you write your next book, can you hire me to do some math stuff for you? Because I love doing that shit. You know what? I would love that.

And the great thing about any kind of biological math is you just... This was little giants. It's... I don't think this is a gang that exists in America, but in Commonwealth countries in Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, when you little kids, used to get these things called Trump... and they would have like cars on them or jets or whatever and they would have the basic statistics of the vehicle

so this is how fast how far can go and then you would like a trading card game and you would try to get so I pick a fight with you because I had the concord and it would be the fastest domestic aircraft that's what I would go for but it was that kind of training game I feel like that needs to exist trump cards with insects and with mammals because there's so many cool ways of bending the math Yeah. Well, I agree. And we may have an announcement about something like that at some point soon.

Oh. That's all I can say. Steve preview. Peter, you're up first here. Great. The queen of a termite species, and this is a certain species of termite that lays the most eggs per day. How many eggs in a single day might the queen of those termites lay? How many eggs in just one day?

I mean, you've got to think about the fact that you get termites in a house. It's bad. It's bad news. Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're tiny. I mean, the queen is probably eight times the size of a regular termite. I'm going to say that she lays up to 5,000 eggs a day, Pat. Thank you.

Bradley Trevor Greif. That's a tough one. Again, this is a specific termite. I'm assuming it's that giant species from Africa. with the big head, the big bulldog termites. Do that what it is? It doesn't say it just says the species that... But you're talking about the one where you see just the huge mounds.

The huge termite mounds. And we have a civil one in Australia, northern Australia, and also in sub-Saharan Africa. I'm going to go over on that one because... Do you remember not giving birth to live young? It's just little tiny eggs. and even as she's pumping out one, she's making another. I'm going to double that estimate.

10.K. To Bradley, Trevor Greve, they will lay up to 40,000 eggs in a single day. Tied it up. Bradley, right now you have the same intelligence as a layman. Save it that moment. It's tasty. I think we can let the audience decide who knows more about insects. But, all right, I like this one here.

This is a good one. Definitely not the Smithsonian. You okay, Pat? Are you frozen or are you just... No, I'm not frozen. I'm just reacting to your inner ludes. Okay. This is just a multiple choice.

So this is going to be worth two points if you get this right. Wow. Are there more species of birds or ants in the world? What's up your first? Birds. I'm going birds, just because I know that cats in the U.S. kill billions of birds. So it's just, I know that fact, and this just translates. I'm going birds.

What is the correlation between body count and species diversity? I've seen just a lot of birds. I've only seen one or two types of ants. Red and black. That's it. The problem is that I am actually. you're also going to go birds. But the reason I'm doing that is because you said species.

That's correct. And I'm going to say there are a lot of ant subspecies, but not a lot of ant species relative to bird species. So that's my answer. You are both correct. But here's why it's interesting. There's only 200 more species of bird in the world than species of ant. Wow.

See, I would have thought there was like, 50 species of ant. I would not have thought there was almost 9,000 ant species in the world. Well, what's interesting about this, though, and there's two aspects to it, is one, that an enormous number of bird species are now extinct, whereas ant numbers largely have continued to remain the same. So I think how it is today is not how it was once upon a time. Remember, the flying creatures are once the smartest things in the world. So it was, that that's one aspect. is the inside knowledge I have on this pertains to I was in Fiji and it was probably the most extravagant thing I've ever done in principle. I flew from Australia to Fiji for one dinner

just to lobby government ministers to help us save this species of iguana. Because remember, Fiji is the only place other than South America that has iguanas. No, I didn't know that. No primary species. Yes, the crested and the striped iguana. And And there's a whole backstory that involves Tom Hanks and a whole bunch of goats. I'll cover that at another time. Yeah. Okay. Don't say we all those.

You and Tom Hanks went out goat tipping. And then you got on the plane. Sure. It's called goat jacking, but yes. Oh, man. And anyway, but anyway, but the long story short, we wanted to continue to get more reasonable rates on renting islands from the indigenous people so that we can.

could have a goat and cat-free habitat for these ground-laying iguanas. Otherwise, the cats eat their eggs, the goat step on them, and so forth. But anyway, I'd had my dinner, did my job. The next morning, I'm waiting for my plane, I'm eating breakfast, and you wouldn't believe it, an ant researcher from the Wildlife Conservation Society out of New York looking for a table, sits down next to me, and I just couldn't believe that they'd send him all the way across it, Pacific to study ants and feed you. I thought it was so awesome.

Yeah, right. One of the best surprise breakfast guests I've ever enjoyed the company of. Nice. He's an ant, antomologist. Sorry. Well, I think he's a pharmacologist, I think it is. I don't know. Real quick, before you move on to the next question, Pat, last week, I think we talked about scientists, they observed cockatoos making sharp tools to get open. I forget to get into some kind of nut or something, to get their food, which was a pretty dramatic finding.

A little more, I looked into that a little bit. And it turns out they were making their own entire cutlery set, crafting the equivalent of a crowbar, an ice pick, and a spoon to pry open their favorite fruit, which is on par with fucking primates in terms of toolmaking. Like, we talked about this a little bit, and I came to the conclusion. that birds are going to take over the world within 100 years, but the fact that they made multiple tools and they all had specific tasks in

getting and consuming the fruit is fucking fascinating. Yeah. No, absolutely. But I think, in no disrespect to Jane Goodall, but had anybody stopped to give some consideration to any species, sooner or later they would see tool use. I mean, even insects use tools.

I mean, paper was use hammers, rocks is hammers. to flatten out sheets of mud. You know, they're, look at the way termites. Crazy. Mix the saliva with various sediments to create concrete. There's so many different creatures from the smallest or the largest that use tools in some fashion. Yeah.

The notion that is what makes them different or special. It's absurd. Literally everything is intelligent at some level. Agreed. Well, speaking of which. Or are they? Or are they? Right. Speaking of which.

I think that's a jab at me. So the average human can smell ammonia at about one part per million, okay? And that's the specific scent that we are the most capable of smelling. So at about one part per million, we can smell ammonia. Okay. The male silk moth. Bradley, you're up first. The male silk moth can smell the reproductive chemicals of the female silk moth.

in the air at a ratio of one part per what? I'm going to say one part per trillion. So a hundred billion, or is it a thousand billion? A trillion would be a thousand billion.

So I'm going to give you a point just because you understood the question and I know Retepp would have just said like blue or something like that. I understand the question and I disagree with Brad. Bradley, in that their capability to smell the scent is more sensitive, and it's one part per thousand, I'm going to say. That would be less. But Bradley, it's the point, because they can smell it at one part per 25 trillion they can

detect in the air that a female silk moth is in heat and ready to fuck. God. Have you ever, well, two things on that. First of all, they're using some of the scent. capacities of moths to detect landmines. What? Yeah, they're trying to re...

You know how they train those giant African cane rats? Yeah. For landmines. Yeah, and dogs too, obviously. Right, but rats are better because they don't set up the landmine. Most anti-personnel landmines have a detonation point of five kilograms,

okay? And you think that's pretty light for a guy, but you've got to get that on the actual top of the mine. So any part of you, That's why even a side of your foot will be enough, particularly the old M14A1 tome poppers. You know, it's just a metal diaphragm, five kilos. Yeah. So anyway, that's why rats are better than dogs.

You want no weight and let it sniff around. But they're now trying to re-engineer the moths, the moths ability to scent these different things and put it into a electronic device to be like a new super sniffer thing, which I find very impressive. the sensory capacities of moths in terms of scent and hearing are unbelievable. Because when you think about it, a moth is nothing but a fuzzy flying marshmallow in the real world. Everything wants to eat it. There's a few poisonous ones, but otherwise everybody wants to eat them. So in order to get away, and it's slow as hell.

I mean, they're about as aerodynamic as a fart. They're useless. And so that low speed, the appetizing, demeanor, the only things they have in their favor is to hear, smell, or sense in other ways their predators first, and that's what makes them super special, which is super cool. The other thing is, when was the last time you really smelled a bunch of ammonia? I remember going to one of those old-fashioned circuses with a friend and her kids years ago, and, you know, this is before these things were banned.

I was a lot younger. I don't support the idea of Captain Animal Entertainment. Sure. Sure. They had this little lion show. It was all pretty pitiful. And this lion did a dump about two feet in front of us and then urinated everywhere. And the ammonia smell was so great that I immediately had a headache behind my eye and the little kid started crying.

Oh my God. So potent. So potent. And so I'm actually surprised. We could only smell one part of a million because. Because that stuck with me for a long time. It's, uh, it's, I, one time I opened a package of ground beef and it just reeked like ammonia. And I was like, what the fuck?

And apparently that's obviously one of the signs that it's gone bad. If it smells at all like ammonia, same with like lobster tails, anything like that. Any detection of pneumonia, you got to throw that shit out because it's some bacteria or whatever. But, dude, it is disgusting when you open a package of meat. in the old face. Dude, I just got chills through my whole body. Like, I feel like I want to run as fast as I came away from this situation. Do you remember when we were in Alaska Pat?

And we were like always smelling the stuff to see where the bears were. Yeah, yeah. Because the bears, in particular the males, the boys, they deliberately urinate on their legs onto their feet. It runs down their legs on their feet. And the sank glands on their feet combined with their urine and feces. And that leaves an aperture of who they are and how big they are. Wow.

So, and the forest up there, the giant hemlock on spruce, it's so dense and so dark. I say to Pat even before we got there, it's like you're going to smell them before you see him. You did. You did. I'll tell you a little bit about that, Bradley, is that, you know, so I've done a lot of outdoor stuff, but going up to do Fear Island, I was a bit nervous. And you probably remember the first day we went out just to check, because you had been up there. We went just to check some trail cameras. And I was kind of like, I was like, I was scared.

You know, like, why wouldn't you be? I just had never willingly put myself into a situation where you're looking for gigantic Alaskan brown bear that are just everywhere. Right. And obviously over the course of a couple days, I started to get used to it and realized that we were, you know, everything that you taught myself and the crew, we got used to, okay, this is what you do when the bear comes around. And they're not just vicious killers that want to attack you. Just do what you're supposed to do. So, but the first couple days when we were just sort of scouting.

before the rest of the crew got there, I was definitely like just a little out of my comfort zone, and I don't usually feel that way. But I remember you, myself, and your brother, Elvin, your Klinget brother, were walking around, and it was the first time that I got that smell. And it was, I don't know if you remember this, but it was very, very strong.

Yeah, no, I know we were at the bottom of, uh, uh, was it that one? I thought it was when we go down, uh, we were down, We were down the bottom, and we got out the bottom, hook inlet down the south side, and we got out of the boat. And I thought you smelled something. Then you went, yeah, no, I'm good.

Let's get back in the boat. Oh, maybe that. You're right. That's what it was. That's what it was. But it was a musk on, like, you know, if you ate about 45 pounds of Piston cat litter, that's what that smelled like. I mean, it is intense.

It's strong. And remember that, and they're enormous. I mean, they're the largest carnivores in the planet. Wow. They smell like it. I felt bad for you because you had been briefed by the production company producer and he'd come up with me a couple of weeks. Because I got up early to clear some parks and also to set up some trial camps,

which had to be changed every three days. So, and this is a huge area and it takes days to get them all in. Long story short, he came up for like a day and a half. and he came out in the boat with his once and it was maybe the best postcard day in the history of Alaska. I mean, it was like 60 degrees Fahrenheit,

zero win, the water was glass, it was just perfect. And we showed around, so some bears in the distance, took some pictures, he had the best time ever, and he calls you, and I actually saw him make the call

at the back of where we were saying, and he calls you and goes, oh, it's beautiful, you love it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's so amazing. He leaves. Pat arrives, for an advanced thing before the crew, like a few days before the crew.

And it was just every shipwreck you've ever seen. It was just howling wind, freezing cold, heavy rain, massive seas. Fucking brutal. And I just felt invisibility just shrunk to nothing. And so I felt terrible for you because you got this bullshit about how perfect it was. And it's absolute hell. And I felt really bad for it. I feel really good about it.

I'm pretty happy that happened to pack. I respected you more for being honest that you were unnerved by these bears. I go, this guy's not an idiot. He's done wildlife stuff. And this proves it because the idiot, well, again, I don't want to bank Johnny Inches. Who's my mate? He was just like, you know, can I pat it? I'm like, no.

No. Yeah. Yeah, Johnny Inches was, he was quite cavalier. My thought is that he, he'd been in front of a camera a few times and he knew that he supposed to do. I got a quick question from a layman here about the bears. If they, if they're so pungent, they smell, and, you know, humans are out there and you guys can detect them by the scent, like, isn't that a disadvantage for them when they're

trying to get food because they can be easily discovered by other animals? Or what's up with that? They very fast. They choose when they want to do this particular act, right? That's my understanding, right? Bradley, they intentionally piss all over their fur. Well, they're doing that most of the time, but you have to think of them. Don't think of them for a second.

There's sharks, all right? Okay. So with Great White sharks, and I don't know you've been shark diving or Great White, whatever you're tagging, but what happens is, so I did that off the Neptunes, and we tagged about four or five sharks over four days, plus one Mako, which was insane, a really big Mako. Wow. But none of them with giants, not pretty big.

I mean, we got two sharks at about five meters, and one at a number. about four and a half. So that's what's that 15, 15 feet. They're big sharks, but not like, but not like, you know. Big, huge. A basketball hoop and a half, yo. Plenty, plenty of shock. Plenty of shock.

Yeah. But the thing that fascinated me about that was we're dripping in tuna oil the whole time and occasionally a bucket of burly to try to get things going chum, as you call it here. And I expected the, and in the middle of a seal collie that split over a series of rocks. That's what the Neptunes are, a series of rocky islets. covered in first seals. Yeah, yeah. And so I expected to be, having not been in the situation before,

I expected sharks to be just rushing us, throwing themselves on the boat like drunk mermaid. I thought it was going to be game on. Not true. They sense each other, and the large of the shark, the more potent, the electrical signal they give, just as true of any marine animal.

And they came in in pecking order one at a time. Wow. So not until one shark had gone, one big white, white and he was gone for a while. I say here because there's one called Mr. Grumpy, who was the big fellow who'd also lost the part of his tail.

And when he was gone, then you give it an hour or so, and then another one would come in. And it was relatively orderly. And I'm not saying this is true, all sharks. But these are the biggest of the predatory sharks. That's a little bit how bears are. There's a natural spacing between predators.

Their stink is advertising, both for sexual advantage and advertising and predators, stay out of my way. But here's the thing. Just like sharks, they choose their moment, they go downwind and they come up and they rip you to pieces. They are gifted, genetically programmed predators.

Right. Okay, these are carnivorous gods. These are not big, bumbling teddy bears who occasionally want to snack on Retech's stinking fetid meat sack. Carnivorous gods. Right. These are gods of flesh and claw, and that's how they operate. Now, getting back to the shark thing, I'm in this cage, and we broke off, one of the cages got damage, and we couldn't put it out, and the buoy's busted, and so we had to lash it to the back of the bow.

Now, I get a little bit seasick. I got my middle ear damage during a military thing back in the day where I got a middle ear infection, and I wasn't allowed to eat or sleep five days. Oh, brutal. And by the time it came out of it, it really set in, and I fell over in the dark. I couldn't see which way it was up. I had to get a piece of grass and drop it and work out. Okay, that's the opposite and get up. So I get a little bit seasick as a result of the residual damage to my middle ear.

So I'm getting turned around on the back of the boat. Finally, this big great white starts circling the boat. And I got my camera out, I'm trying to get that perfect shot. And I'm timing it so he's just to be perfectly in the frame with a gap in the cage when I press the button. And I finally lined it up and he was gone. I went, I'm kidding me. and I'm looking around, I look down, and he's directly under the cage,

vertical, with his face maybe two feet away. Oh, man. He read me, he timed me, trying to time him. Yeah. And had I not been in the cage, that's when he would have got me. And bears are exactly the same. They work it out.

They know how to hide their scent by going downwind, and they come and get you when the opportunity presents. It's fucking terrifying. Pat, knowing that now, would you go on this trip again, knowing if these bears are just waiting to hunt you perfectly. So considering

that, you know, Bradley, you spent a lot of time there in advance, you know, the main production of that show was, you know, about three weeks, right? So, which is amazing in TV standards. I mean, it was a nice long run. Yeah, it's one of the most fun I've ever had on

a shoot and it never wasn't raining. So it was just you were wet for 14 to 15 hours a day. We were eating really just fucking disgusting lunches. Our breakfast and dinners were incredible. But it was just, it was, it is gorgeous. I mean, that island and those inlets and just all the islands there, it's like breathtaking

to a degree that you can't. I mean, it's, it's as good as anywhere I've been aside from Greenland, I would say. And, and also just like, you know, we'd be on the little, what does Elvin have? A little whaler? Was that the boat that he had? Yeah, they had a whale. Do you remember the day on the scout in the whaler where there were just humpback whales

like 30, 40 feet off the boat, playing everywhere? Was that the day we can of like 12 or 13 of them all around? Was that that that day? Yeah, exactly. There were two different days. They were just everywhere.

And that's shallow. So they chased the fish in. I'd say shallow. It's like 40 feet. Right. And they chase the fish in and then they can't actually easily maneuver a full diving up.

So they actually come in sideways and it turns it all up. It's really beautiful. So they go in sideways to like turn the fish all up and get them disoriented so they can hunt it?

Yeah. Well, no, no. What happens is they're bubble netting by large, but most bubble netting often in deep water they get low, really, really deep in the water

and then come their way up and like a big cone. But in this case, because it's relatively shallow and this bay, and it's an very open-faced bay, gets full of small fish and krill and a bunch of things.

And they just come in kind of sidewise. ways, they do a bubble lap, but it's a more interesting maneuver because it's kind of just coming straight up mouth open, which is also spectacular. Yeah. And happens there are a lot. I mean, we get a lot of, there's a lot of other deep water places even further down south north of Hood Bay where we were talking about, Pat's come to Jesus moment with the bears.

There are deep spots in there where they can come up vertically. But in this particular instance, they kind of come up on the side and it just looks so spectacular because his mouth comes in and it's like a it kind of looks like a ship tipping over. Yeah. Well, we've seen

there was a viral video that came out showing how the humpback whale feeds when it comes straight up and it was just like, I mean, insane, just like wide open jaws, boom, you know?

I could imagine that like on the side, you know? Right. And in this particular instance, um, so this is on the edge of Chatham straight on the instance. on the inside passage in Alaska.

And it's a great place to see mothers and calves, but also just not all the time. I mean, you never have a day where you don't see a while, at least in my experience, I'd be going there for six years. Yeah. I've never been there and not seen a whale on any given day. But that particular time, and I don't know why, I've never seen so many.

Well, one day we had seven, the day we had 13, all the same general proximity, whereas it's more common. that I would see a mother in a calf some distance, you know. And at some point, at some point there was so many of them, you know, with a spume coming out of their blowholes in the distance, looking through the haze above the water, I wasn't sure if I was looking at the plume of mist from a whale

or a small waterfall coming down a rock face on one of the cliffs. It was so many. I'm like, it can't be true. It can't be true. There can't be this many whales. It's ridiculous. That's heaven on earth. Absolutely incredible.

If you love nature and you love it big, then you've got to go to that one of the last. It's like something you'd see on like Planet Earth or something like that, you know, but seeing it with your own two eyes, you know? Or one of the shows that we just made on that region, yes. Yeah. So a friend of the podcast, Mark Romanov, who is the DP on a lot of Extincter Alive,

he and I are working on a project, and I can't say too much about what it is, but he just went on a 34-foot sale. boat, thanks global warming, almost all the way to the North Pole. Wow. He did it. He did. He went up by a round of up of Greenland, huh?

Yeah, it's absolutely, the footage is just beyond stunning. He was just here last week showing me some stuff. But there's a moment where they're in this very small sail. I mean, it's not a big, huge boat, right? No, that's small. He, I mean, fucking nailed every second of filming this. But a blue- whale comes up to the surface and just starts paralleling the boat.

And you can see it on the drone and it's just just incredible. I mean, this little 34 foot boat looks like a fucking tinker toy next to this blue whale. Yeah. All of a sudden, kind of flanking in from the side is another blue whale. Wow. And I mean, these are full-sized adult blue whales. And they just move in unison, the boat and a blue whale on the left and the right. And they just cruised in unison for like, I think he said it was like 35,

minutes. He cut it down to like five minutes of footage. It is the coolest animal interaction I've ever seen just because of the size of the blue whales in comparison to the boat. But being on Elvin's, you know, what was it, a 14 foot or a 16 foot little whaler with the humpbacks all around kind of felt like that where you're just like, I don't even like, I don't care if this whale knocks the boat over. Like this is, I can die happy. This is so cool. But I're cool. But I'm wondering what that was about. I mean, was he almost caught in the, in the middle of an intimate moment? Was he caught blocking those whales? Well, he wasn't sailing it. No, because for a while, it's just one whale. So it's just the whale on the left of the boat. I'm picturing the drone shot, basically. And then just sort of coming in, just flanking in, you see this other whale kind of coming up and coming towards them. And they're just, they're about, you know, 10 feet on either side of the boat. I think they're just checking it out. It was fucking cool as shit. And of course, Mark, being, you know, a world-class underwater photographer,

his holy grail is to capture blue whale mating because it's never been filmed. Wow. Right. And so he's like, you know, he's like, I had the drone up. It's like the best thing I've ever filmed. But in my head, I'm like, how quickly could I get the camera in the housing, get a dry suit on and get in the water,

just in case they quickly sneak in a little cheeky fuck. I mean, the problem is something that big, even though they move relatively slowly. it's still faster than you can swim, right? Yeah. Oh, God, yes. How do you, do you sort of hang off the side of the boat and how do you do it? I don't know.

It's got to be perfectly timed. I'm sure it's assumed that they, you know, they dive down really, really far, and that's why it's never been filmed. And there's so few of them. Yeah, but. Yeah, I mean, all those things. I mean, we've seen enough well quite this to know how it generally works. but it's still, you know, it's still something, you know,

the fascinating thing is so often when there's competition, it involves the female avoiding being drowned, particularly when there's no size disparity in her favor, like there is, for example, with birds of prey and sharks, you know, the females are always much bigger. But in this instance, you know, they don't have that advantage, and they've got to breathe air, and you hear the opportunities of, you know, non-consensual threesomes

when someone's on the top and particularly right whales, you know, and there's this great fleshy, you know, boat mask comes over, and the next thing you know, it's Cetacean DPP. I'm getting horny. I'm just saying it's a fascinating,

and it's so common in some instances that early biologists actually thought that threesomes, two males and one female, was how males reaped. reduced. That's how common. Interesting.

Yeah, because they're on the surface. They're inverted. The females vulva was presented to the sky. Oh, boy. The penises are obviously prehensal, like a kangaroo penis. Can you say penis one more time? Penis. He did it.

And they're huge, you know, anywhere from four to 12 feet, depending on the species of whale. You know, and just one basketball hoop length. But yeah. So you've got these, you got these two, actually, one is already in full coitus, and the other one is trying to get in there. And it's not easy for the pair already, you know, mid-mate to break away. So it's kind of a sneaky threesome. You know, it's better than said.

It's quite extraordinary how often it happened. It was reserved and it was believed to me that's how they could do it. It's interesting. I have a fun fact. I don't know if I've mentioned this on the podcast before, but whenever I have a relevant animal fact, I like to just throw it out, even if it's not directly on topic.

Did you guys know that when a dog, a male dog mounts the female and the penis inserts in, it actually, the tip of the penis, it turns into like a ball so that the penis can't come out. And they're stuck in there so the female can't pull away.

I always thought that was pretty interesting. I didn't know that. I mean, I knew that, like, ducks have their corkscrew mechanism and cats have the sort of barbs that come out. Yikes! There's a lot more. It has a massive set of wings.

Which does? Somatron rhino. Oh, okay. It's got to be the most remarkable mammal penis. I know. It's huge. A beautiful curved S. Okay.

Oh, an S. That's shit. So what? So what happens is that you probably know this, but rhino penises generally point backwards. Of course I didn't know this. They're folded because they, particularly the forest rhinos, so the Java and the Sumatran and the Indian. So what happens is their penises are obviously huge. They're a huge animal.

But they actually fold up. And so they're doubled over in the flaccid state and the penis tip itself is pointing backwards. So when they urinate and it is enormous like a broken. and fire hydrant. Yeah. When they urinate, they urinate backwards, which is how you would see a female mammal pee. Right, right. Behind a horse or whatever.

Sure. So you think, oh, that's a female. And then you go, well, hang on. Why is she so well endowed? And it's a male. And I know that because I was pissed on by a Samatraan rhino. Of course, I was in a safe place. Yeah.

Yeah. You always want to stand right behind the rhino. Yeah. I was in a safe distance. It's quite a famous. a rhino called Harapan, who is part of the project was here in the States and has gone back to

Indonesia. But the point was don't stand behind any rhino, more directly in front of it. But what happens is the penis is tucked up like that, so it's charging through the spik undergrowth. He doesn't drag his shlum all over. There you go. Yeah, and damage himself. Doesn't drag his tender phallic

stamen on the on the, on the, on the, on the aggressive. That's your new nickname. Tender felix stamen. TFS, baby. But at the moment arrives and he mouths as female of course, you know, and enters

a turgid state, this great sweeping pink ass and these giant wings. You know, like, you know, about a couple inches across and a few inches long come out either side. And the key is for him like a velociraptor from Jurassic Park.

In many ways as inspiring and as elegant as Chikoski is Swan Lake, but of course it's just a big dick. But here's the thing. It's incredibly important that he achieves penetration before the wings are fully inflated. The wings, like many aspects of the most penis structure, are designed to remove the sperm of his competitors and also to ensure the female is prevented from rushing away before he's...

Is that why humans have a head on their penis? It's to remove other sperm? I've never known this. Yeah, a lot of sperm scrapers. That's gross. That's actually gross. I respect myself less now. Don't be so jealous, man.

I was planning on Coitus later tonight, and now I'm thinking about bailing. Nah, you're going to be too drunk, mate. I've had one in an eighth cocktail. I spilled the other seven-eighths. So promiscuity and sperm competition, all these things, and social dynamics, they all affect penis shape and length. and one of the reasons we don't have like the aforementioned whales and various other animals don't have a penis bone is that we are capable of a proper intellectual courtship that would allow for foreplay and arousal and successful reproduction whereas when any time you turn you back on the jungle something's going to come and rip your neck out yeah you've got to get it on so you have that's why you have the bone so it's instantly erect and uh And a whole of it.

But all the different shapes, all are a reflection of those dynamics. Do you guys think that the new show, the naked and afraid in love or whatever, which we talked about in the last podcast, they might evolve a bone in their penis since they're just going to have to get to get out? I mean, based on the study that Bradley was referring to earlier, it sounds like they will quickly and instantly grow a penis bone. So I like to extrapolate things out. Wait, so we need to have a winner for this game. So here's the last question. Yeah, we're tied. Still, that was that was yesterday.

Whoever gets this right wins the game. Will it be the biologist, the professional, or the idiot? An insect is responsible, responsible, I said, for the first form of flight on Earth, the way that it flies, its wing structure, et cetera, et cetera. It's the first flying thing on Earth. What insect am I referring to? Let's let the idiot go first since we're tied What insect are you referring to?

Try and get this right. Don't say bird. I'm not. Fuck off. I know a bird is an archinid. Frisbee. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to go with a, gosh, damn it.

I'm going with a moth because there's so many of them. They're a caterpillar first. So they were not, they're not, they just don't fly automatically. They had to. Maybe it's wrong. I'm going mom.

Okay. No. It's a perfectly reasonable guess. Bradley. I'm not going to go moth. I'm going to say that time. It's had to be something that was hatched in the water. I'm going to say dragonfly.

We have a winner, BTG. You are correct. It is the dragonfly. Damn it. You should have known. They look like dinosaur-era birds. Well, I know that... I know that...

Yeah. I know at one point... point in time, they reached a wingspan of almost three feet. Oh my God. I don't like that at all. During the oxygen, I think it's a pre-Cambrian explosion. It was just unbelievable. But I'll tell you something else

about dragonflies. You probably know this. But they have the highest success rate of any predator on the planet by virtue of their extraordinary visual acuity. Wow. And they have a much, they have a greater hunt success rate of any carnivore. So they deserve a little bit more respect. I love dragonflies.

Honestly, I had no idea that they were the first, they were the first flying creature on Earth. That's correct. As far as we know, and as far as the good people at the Smithsonian are concerned, yes. Bradley might disprove that on his next book. Who the fuck knows? But as of

right now, it was dragonflies. Fascinating. Shit. I mean, they kind of designed helicopters a little bit based on how the dragonfly moves, right? Because they can hover. They can go side to side, thinking forward back. More complex, though.

More complex, yeah. For sure. We couldn't engineer any material to perform the way those double wings perform. And so we had to go with a spinning option because we just don't have the technology and the material strong enough to handle those kind of stresses. Sure. Dude. They're so fascinating. Incredible, man.

I was just so, I'm doing a project right now, which we'll be definitely excited to let the Brosners know about once we get closer. It's going to come out next year. But doing a lot of stuff up. Yellowstone, and so I've just been wormholing on out the mammals, the predators, you know, the insects, everything, been just heavy into the salmon fly nymph.

I don't know if you guys know about this, but the life cycle of the salmon fly is so, it kind of made me sad a little bit. Because they're, the super, you know, the eggs go into the water, they're basically, you know, typically in Yellowstone Lake or River

there, and they're this really cool larvae that has this whole life underwater, and then they come out, they basically ditch their exos, you know, they ditch this weird shell, and then they're, now they're a salmon fly, and they're around for about 48 hours, they fuck nonstop, and then, and then they die. So it's like this huge gestational period, and then they're finally their final form, and it's like a day to two days. Well, that's actually pretty generous, though.

There are a number of lace wings that are only alive and adult form for six. hours. Really? So, you know, but what's interesting is, and some of them, in adult form, don't have mouths or anuses.

So you have animals, the whole, you know, you eat your shit and you die. That's not necessarily true. There are a number of, even the whole excuses are like assholes.

No, not everybody has one. There are a number of animals. Atlas moths don't have them. These lace wings don't have them. Ant lions don't have them. which brings me to a more important topic, and that is a flatulence, as we discussed before, everything with a digestive tract can fart, right? It doesn't matter what it is.

Insect, brain animal, everything farts. The whole world, it's what brings us together, except from those few elite snooty animals who have a very short lifespan. But I was going to tell you this. In nature, I was making this point in an Instagram post about how everything that looks beautiful is ugly in some way, and everything that looks ugly is beautiful in some way. as one of things I love about nature. Never be put off by the initial appearance of something.

It's probably amazing and you'll love it if you give it the time of day. And often the gateway of horror and grossness brings you to something amazing. One of the most amazing things that ever happened to me was the result. Close. A result of the worst fart I've ever smelled. Oh, God. All right. Bros.

Pour yourself a cocktail. I have a feeling you're in for a good story. So I used to... So about, I don't know, seven knee surgeries passed this time, and I remember I getting in my parachute license and I haven't had it done yet. But I used to make a point, even if I had a really busy year, I hadn't gone skydiving. On my birthday, I would always go out and do some skydiving, just to keep the sense of being alive and how great it is. And also to connect me back to my roots. You know, I missed a time when that's what I used to do for a living, albeit covered in bombs. Anyway, the point was I went down to this drop zone and it was actually

to naval air station and it was right by the coast, which is great for naval air training, but terrible for skydiving because you get very changeable weather and lots of, lots of precipitation. So it wasn't a great place to have a skydiving drop zone. But we drove down there with my close friends who I served with. And the first day we get there, no good. Windy, cloudy, no jumping. We went out, got on the piss, as we would say. And the next day, came back, sat on the drop zone, sweating out the alcohol, didn't get up again, horrible. Comes the third day and the last day, and it's cold and dark and cloudy. And it's like, oh, no, this is going to be a disaster. And we have been drinking and eating crap food now for two days. Yeah. Finally,

there's a break in the cloud and they say if you get up now you can go and we just and we just ran in the plane was a small Cessna there was just five of us in there and up they go to 12,000 feet well the term we use in Australia is called a Lagerbaum

and that is a alcohol, yeast and meat infused and fleshyl and and I want to say look I don't blame any but I'm just going to say all of us were guilty of rectal crimes at that time.

Yeah. Small plane. And we get up there and they said, you're good to go. And then as we line up on our run-in, they say no drop, no drop, no drop. And the clouds have come up. And I was going to vomit. It was so bad. I was going to vomit.

Just because so many people were dropping logger bombs. Yeah, it was just, it wasn't a carpet bombing of lager bombs. It was like being in the movie. centipede but you know and it's just like this I can taste it you there was a texture to the air that's how rich oh god listen and I'm just gonna be sick and I just yeah sorry go ahead so we're just so clean and so clean hoping for the weather to break and now we're something for 30 minutes and I am just using every hardcore technique I can to distract myself from pain because it's reached a level that if I even give in to a

a picometer of surrender. I'm just going to project all vomit on the inside of the plane. And finally, it said, no, it's no good. No drop, no drop. Come down. And I just said, fuck that. Fuck that. Just jumped out of the plane.

And I said to the pilot, we're over the Naval Air Station. Can you get a beat on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, on the, and I knew where that roughly was. It's illegal to jump through a storm. and I just went, fuck it. Tell me when you're over the towel. He said he was, and I just went and I jumped out of it. So because of that disgusting experience, I managed to check off one of my ultimate bucket list,

which was to fall through a cloud. And now I know what it's like. And it's beautiful. Above the cloud, beautiful, white, fluffy stuff. Yeah, yeah. That must be intense, yeah. And when you drop through it, it gets dark almost instantly. It was a very dark gray.

not quite black. You have no sense of up or down, except for the moisture over your goggles, which is streaking like a windscreen in different directions, very easy to get disorientated. Incredible sensation. Lucky there was no lightning. And then I came out only about 500 feet

against minimum opening height. Oh my God. And just popped open. And then, of course, you hit the rain. Yeah. It's actually really painful. Jeez. But it was one of the most beautiful.

amazing experiences of my life. I was lucky out to do it another time just because I wanted to make sure I really did experience it correctly with the first time. It wasn't overwhelmed. But that, I wouldn't have had that opportunity for natural wonder had I not been about to die of my mate's farts inside that plane.

So you definitely wouldn't have, you definitely wouldn't have jumped if that plane wasn't filled with basically the most deadly, noxious, disgusting gas you've ever smelled? Yeah. No, I mean, if we'd all been happy and healthy in chat, he would have just been talking to your mates

from a joy rock. I mean, it would have been fine. Remember, this is pre-smart phones. Yeah. So you can't be, you know, words with friending, you know, that doesn't happen. But no, I've had countless times when we've gone to altitude and then something happens and you've got to get down. I remember up at Byron Bay, there's a great little,

used to be a great little grass airfield there called Tiagra. And I remember one time they had this plane that had just been refurbished, but it was just not flat shall, it was just belching black smoke. And skydivers and paratroopers and all that they tend to be a little bit superstitious. And they're like, oh, it's no good. The plane's no good. And the pilot's going, no, it's fine. We just had it.

You know, overall, it's great. And it'll get to the end of the day and the guys go, you know, okay, we're going to take the plane at the shop and have the engine twigs, see what's going on. Does anybody want to get to altitude and jump out on the way? And I'm like, yeah, I'll go. Free jump. Thank you. And my mates go, oh, no, that plane's going to crash.

I'm like, who gives a shit? We're wearing parachutes. Jumping out of it. It's like, that's literally someone else's problem. Because it gets a thousand feet, I'm done. I'm safe. So, yeah, it was funny. But my larger point is that's, that gross story is much of a,

nature, often the hardship and the suffering, you know, us bouncing around on puky and that boat, pat, and heavy seas getting out of the hood inlet, you know, the stink of the bears, all this stuff that's frightening and sometimes revolting, often a gateway to some of the best moments of your life. Zero question. Yeah, for sure. The average age of our Brosners is about 23, and that's because, like, my mom and stepdad listen, so they bring it up. But a good piece of advice from BTG, which is do things that are scary and gross and you'll have great stories when you're in your 40s like us. But don't be

stupid. Do it safely. Yeah, do it legally. Don't jump illegally through a fucking... That guy lost his pilot's license thanks to you. Yeah. Yeah, he's Navy. No one cares. Retef, let me get the jingle, because it's time. It's time. By the way, who won that game? Just...

Bradley Trevor Grieve, because he got fucking dragonfly and you said you said the Venezuelan poodle moth Oh, I was so close mate I think I know what time it is What time is it? Do you know what time it is?

For what? How long have you been doing that? Maybe about six weeks. One of the brosters made some drops for us. So this was Forrest's idea and then I saw a couple comments on the last YouTube of people asking for this. It's Forrest's fault

that he's not here. He's out fishing like an ass No, he's out on some adventure. But we're going to be in the studio a week from today doing a whole bunch of podcasts, bonus podcasts, all that. But here's the Battle Royale. Aquatic Battle Royale. Oh, shit. Whatever quality, you don't have to do head, body, nothing. Whatever three attributes of underwater animals, we are creating, creating them in a snake draft,

and they're going to fight. Okay, so we're picking three animals. Yeah, attributes of three different animals, whatever attributes you want, could be the size, could be the power, could be the bite force, whatever you want to do. Uh-huh.

Into one animal that's going to fight. Yes, that's what we've always done. Okay, I mean, this is number 75. I don't, listen, you're explaining it poorly. I just want everybody to know that. You've explained it poorly. I did have a pretty stiff cocktail.

Let's let our guests go first for the underwater, aquatic battle royale BTG okay that is something okay okay I this will make sense

later okay it's got a plan but I am going to start with the paradoxical angelfish specifically the female who as you know

absorbs the males into its body. So the males come to mate. The males are tiny, teeny, tiny things, and they bite onto the female. Their jaws fuse. Eventually blood vessels form through their mouths, and their body gets absorbed into the female

until it's just this special set of gonads that ejaculates milk on command when she's receptive. My point is, we have a large fish covered in about a hundred other fish, so it's a multi-being fish. I like where you're doing. It's scary. You're going for intimidation factor. It's freakish.

And it's, you know, yeah, I like where you started there. I'll go next to you. No, sorry, go ahead. But my point is, as I add other qualities to it, you will see that I now have 100, and you have one. Understood. Understood. Okay. I'm going to go next.

And this also will make sense later, because this is going to seem like very, very, very, low-hanging fruit. Much, much later. Yeah. When you're drunk, when you're micro-dosing shrooms later, Brozners, you'll get this. But I'm going to start with just the body, the pure mass, and I need this for a reason of a blue whale,

maxing out at 330,000 pounds, 90 feet in length. I'm going for pure size for my first quality. I'm taking the size and body. of a blue whale. Retep, you're up for two. So what does it say about someone who's always desperate to look bigger in someone? What does that mean again?

I don't remember. I'm not sure. They're compensating for something, but they're compensating. Okay. So, the first ability that my underwater sea monster will have

is going to be that of a cuttlefish because the cuttlefish will be able to rapidly blend their body in with its surroundings. Not only that, the cuddlyfish has the ability to communicate with other cuttlefish using a complex series of instructions that are communicated by the rapid changes and flashes of body color.

I will be controlling an army of cuddlfish, my friends. No, you only get one. No, no, I have one. I have one cuddlfish that will be intelligently. communicating with an army of cuttlefish that are just in the ocean hanging around commanding them to do my intelligent cuttlefish is fitting. Unfortunately, this battle is in a controlled environment that's fenced off. So anyway, what's your next pick?

That was not explained at the beginning. Okay, I'll give that to you that. My next pick is it needs to have some sort of offensive weapon. Yes, it certainly does. And we already talked about it. And blending in with its surroundings, you fool. It's very defensive and can communicate. No.

Okay. It's the wallpaper of the deep. I get it. Yeah, but now I got another pick. And now I got another pick, and it's going to fucking destroy both of your animals with the ability of a pistol shrimp. Ooh. That's right.

Yep. Yep. We all know what that ability is, right? We certainly talked about it for quite a while. The equivalent of my, and when it comes to the size, because now I can pick any size. So let's just say I had the blue whale. It's already taken out, which is ridiculous. We know what you're doing.

It's going to have a very powerful thing. It's basically like Thor, fucking, or Zeus throwing a lightning bolt at you, is all I'm saying. Sure, sure. Way to use something that I used a couple weeks ago. Camouflage. You won't even see it. Commanding an army of cuttlefish. So I have this creature that's got the, that's got the,

body of a blue whale. It is massive. The biggest animal that's ever lived on earth. It does have a 10 foot penis. What I'm going to do now is it has the ability to release a tremendous amount of slime. I'm taking the ability of a hagfish. So a hagfish, as we've talked about on the show many podcasts ago, releases this incredibly sticky, gooey slime.

It's impenetrable. It is disgusting. It entraps other things. But here's why I'm picking it. A single hagfish will release up to 400 times its own body volume in slime. The way it does that is it releases the chemical. It mixes with the water and it turns to slime. So with my 300,000-pound blue whale, it will, in a single fell swoop, be able to release

1.2 billion pounds of slime that will entrap Peter's tiny cuttlefish. No. And Bradley's paradoxical anglefish. No. It won't need to. How's it going to get out of its own? How's it going to get out of its own slime?

Now, you have a fatal flaw in your design. Thanks, Brousner's for voting for me. BTG, what are your last two? Again, it's a size compensation. And it's basically you come up with the substance akin to someone just jerking off in a bar. I don't know. A billion pounds.

A billion bucks. That's what you tell your friends. You still only have one kid. I'm just saying there can't be that much going on. I want size as well. Now we're going to have to ramp this up. I'll take the sperm whale, which gives me the largest of the tooth whales,

which is an advantage which comes to it. But really, it's about size. And possibly, as we believe, some of its weaponized soft tissue for its echolocation, which can also be painful and distracting. So we have a very deep diving marine animal. It's tooth. Plus it's got a billion heads and the laydown Mazeera will happen on my next pick.

And you're up. What is your next pick? You go for two now, BTG. That's right. The snake draft. I keep forgetting. Good. It's size appropriate bobbot worms coming out of the mouth of every single one of my many hundreds of male paradoxical danglefish

the size of a fucking sperm whale. So now I have a disco ball of height just cruising through a many-headed submarine with pinking shears that can slice through your jizz blob and rip the guts out of whatever it is. So this is probably the most extraordinary

omnirectional, weaponized marine creature in the history of the world. I mean, like, the bovet worms are quite... Wow, wow, wow. That's creepy, it's gross. A billion pounds of jizz is going to be tough to get through. But in case my animal hasn't already won, I'm going to also give it the special ability of a nudie brink.

And what this ability is is it's going to go around. It's going to consume chemicals from other animals that it eats, take those chemicals and weaponize them as stinging output that's going to sting and hurt their animals after they're trapped. I actually don't know how the nudie brink delivers its poison. But it's the ability. Go ahead, go ahead. Explain. Help me out, BTG. Okay, first of all, it's a nudie brink.

Secondly, it's actually a fascinating setup that's, you're referring specifically to the blue angel, right? With the little wings on it. And yeah. So what happens is it's actually more than one animal put together, just in the same way a Portuguese man of war is actually multiple animals. So the stinging aspect of it, I think they call Hydroids. I could be wrong about that.

But that's actually a separate animal that's working together with the marine animal itself. But yeah, they do. They repurpose the toxins into a venomous barb, which can be injected into it and when agitated. And you should never pick them up when you see them on the beach. Imagine that and a blue whale. Peter, what's your last quality here? Well, my animal is a killing machine. already with the ability of the pistol shrimp,

the defensive capability of blending in with its surrounding of a cuddlefish, as well as communicating intelligently with an entire army of cuttlefish to destroy your ridiculous... What was your last... I don't know what your last thing was. What was your last pick? Pistol shrimp and a cuddlfish. So basically, he's swimming through the dead snapping his fingers

like the cast of West Side Story. That's what I'm... Well, I mean, but once the side... of my next animal comes in. Okay, can you say what is? If you shut your fucking mouth, I will, Pat, because your hagfish, all it does is sit there and be a piece of meat with a barb in its butt.

My final animal is, to go along with the predatory nature of my already fucking vicious animal. A great white shark. Very fast, large. So now you have basically an animal that has been engineered by God since the beginning of time

to be one of the most efficient killers, not only in the sea, but in the entire world, mixed with the camo ability of the cuddled fish and ability, yes. And finally, the ability to shoot you in the face with a lightning bolt the size of Thor's penis.

Okay, I don't know how big footh's penis is like that to you, but so what I'm hearing is, basically it's shocktipus who likes jazz. It's snapping. It keeps a good rhythm. Brosner's let us know. And listen, you guys love BTG, and I feel like he gets a lot of votes because he's like the new shiny toy. But, you know, come on.

Think about a billion pounds of slime. But who do you vote for? Do you vote for BTG's paradoxical angle fish and its ability to swallow up hundreds of other fish? It's the size of a sperm whale and has weaponized soft tissue. and bobbit worms coming out of the mouth? Or do you want my... Giant bobbit worms. Would you like my blue whale

that's spitting out one billion pounds of slime and has the ability to consume stinging animals and use their chemicals? Or Peters, it looks like a white shark. It's got the size and jaws. It's got the clasping pincers of a pistol shrimp and it can change color and it's got about 200 cuddlefish swimming behind it.

You're ridiculous. Changing color means that you know, thousands of cuddlfish. And it doesn't just change color. It changes texture as well. Really quickly, BTG, could a cuddlfish ever keep pace with a white shark swimming in the ocean? No. Okay.

So that's, okay. So that's used to. It's just a combined animal. The shark and the cuddlfish are one creature. That's not. We weren't having one. This is a one-on-one-on-one, right? This is an anomaly.

Of course it is. No, of course it is. That is the one-on-one. It's the size of a great white, the ability of the fun. fucking cuttlefish and the fucking the pistol shrimp. You, the way that you just try my animal is disappointing. I'm disappointed in you. You have been so rude on this podcast that I'm never doing it again.

I'm sorry. I mean, you know. Well, I just want to say this to the pros is before you vote, I'm not even going to mention the Retepean choice because it is Retepean. It's awful. But before you, before you vote for Pat's winner, jiz blob, just have a look, go online. There's a video of, I'm not sure if it's a Great White or Tiger Shark, just picking off a hagfish and eating it. They don't always fire off.

They're actually threads, these giant chemical threads, which absorb enormous amounts of water. They don't actually work every single time. So I'm thinking the jizz blob is going to be less impressive than Pat Imagine, who would have thought? No question. Whereas these giant bobbot worms coming out of 100 heads, the size of a sperm whale? I mean, the pistol. shrimp is going to knock you all unconscious immediately. Also,

hagfish. You'll keep the bait for us while we're killing each other. Hagfish is eaten by many a mammal and even fish that can expel its slime. It's not it's terrible. Can I just make one point to you, Retepe? No. Good night, everyone. I want to

point out that all the pistol shrimp, they kill animals smaller than themselves and you pick the smallest of all the animals. But it's the size of a great white with the same speed and ferocity. Ferociety. Fuck, I don't know.

Anyway, guys, Retef's drunk. Bradley, Bradley, thank you for doing it. We want to have you back. Thank you, Bradley. Yes. When your Netflix show drops in about a month. Also, Bradley is a great, one of my favorite follows on Instagram.

He is, your handle is Tasmanian underscore Grizzly with two Zs. It really is a fun follow. You learn a lot, see lots of cool picks. Yeah. I highly recommend it. Come and give me some love. I'm late to social media. I'm largely incompetent at it.

But unlike my same colleagues, my statements are factually correct. That is true. You're an author. You research it. Peter, where can people find extra wild-time stuff? I've seen much worse Instagram play than Bradley does. You're good at social media, but you should change your name to Mr. Grumpy. Go find this podcast on YouTube.

And anywhere audio podcasts or listen to, you can find those links. The Wild Times Podcast.com forward slash info. You want to check out the Patreon bonus pods. There's going to be many, a dozen, a baker's dozen out soon, with many more to come. Check that out at patreon.com forward slash wild times pod. That's patreon.com forward slash wild times pod. Love you guys. I won battle royale.

Eat my dick. Bidip-D-B-D-P-D-P-B-D-B-B-B. What you say that to? Is that to the brook-de-P? Yeah, I don't know. Is that like a request or a demand or an order? I feel like, yeah. I'm confused and...

I'm sorry, Bradford. I'll never, I'll never bother you again. You know what's funny? There's a lot of neuterbranks in those old fat-worm group also have double penises, so I'm pretty happy with that. It fits in with the theme of this episode. It feels like something that you're always looking for. Yeah, exactly. Good night, everybody.

Wild times.