Forrest Galante On Gay Dolphins, Deadliest Animals, & Cannibal Tribes

YERRR we are joined by the legendary Forrest Galante to talk all things nature: - Growing up in Zimbabwe - Becoming a refugee - Tropical surviving - Close calls with death - Australia's wildlife & Wallace Line - Psychedelics - Gayest animals - Why Dogs are Man's Best Friend and much, much, much more - CACAAAAW! Timestamps: 0:00 UCSB crazy dorms 1:52 Weird being in the city 2:50 Hard to find rats 3:41 Growing up in Zimbabwe + Tracking techniques 8:56 Humans hunters weren't good 10:22 Mugabe, Fleeing Zimbabwe + Oakland childhood 16:35 The norm + self-enforced segregation 19:16 Getting in trouble + Exploring nature 21:12 Mom waitressing + Being African American 23:01 Losing language skills, Xhosa + Fake Mandarin 29:58 Bricked up on Naked and Afraid 37:44 Finding food immediately + Tropical Surviving 43:07 Practising, Surviving + Find water 49:48 Extreme climates 51:59 Wildlife is incredible + Connection to nature 53:39 Closest to dying + Snake venom effects 1:01:08 Sucking "venom", Snake bites + Burmese pythons in FL 1:04:18 Inteferring w/ nature + Throw off balance 1:11:06 US Open predictions 1:13:27 Another close call + Breaking back in Thailand 1:20:23 Close calls with predators + YT people ish? 1:23:11 Logistics for conservation + Wildlife Board 1:25:18 Cone snails, Unassuming killers + Wallace Line 1:32:06 Conditioning lions + Wild animals are still wild 1:39:40 The Amazon, Jungle hunting = hard + Farming 1:48:21 Natural psychedelics + Toad venom 1:54:34 Spending times with tribes + Uncontacted 1:56:48 Cargo Cults, Colossal's work + Filling ecosystem holes 2:02:06 Anant Ambani's Conservation 2:04:48 Animals mourning, Elephants' EQ + Relationship wtih humans 2:10:36 Searching deep connection, AI + Assassinated spy whale 2:13:37 Cattle mutilations, Misconceptions + No Black Panthers 2:18:14 Would you hunt a Big Foot? 2:19:17 Animal Deathmatch 2:20:11 Smartest animals, Best mother + Praying Mantis! 2:24:10 Gayest animals + Dolphins pulling out 2:25:37 Loving Steve Irwin + Influences 2:27:50 Rescue animals + Mans' best friend = dog #wildlife #austraila #snakes This episode is sponsored by Kalshi. This episode is sponsored by Sesh. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's up everybody? Welcome to the show. Today on the couch, we have indoors, a rare sighting. A rare sighting for this species. We have Forrest Galante in the building. Wildlife biologist, as he calls himself, explorer extraordinaire. I mean, there's a lot of other things that we're gonna label you. Survivor of UC Santa Barbara.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  Isle of Vista.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  With you apparently.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Del Playa Drive.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  There was a year of crossover.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Where we were, we were at school together. You were a youngin', though.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  I was, yeah. Just a wee rat.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  You were probably in the dorms, though.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Uh, in Anacapa.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  You were in Anacapa?

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:33Speaker 00

  I was Santa Rosa.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  There you go. Boom, look at that.

• 0:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  You guys feel real left out right now.

• 0:38Speaker 00

  The swastika shaped dorms.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  That's right, dude. Yeah, it's bad. It's really bad.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  All the dorms in UCSB are in the shape of swastikas.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  No way. Yeah, if you get an aerial view, it's a mess, yeah.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  Dude, it's crazy.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Who designed it?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Good question.

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Oh, we've got an idea or two.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  I mean, that must've been tough for you. You know what I mean?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, being a Jew at UCSB. Well, I wasn't the only one, though, so we were okay, yeah. Yeah, look at that.

• 1:05Speaker 00

  Oh. No, that's not it.

• 1:07Speaker 01

  No, that's not real.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  It wasn't that crazy.

• 1:08Speaker 02

  Stop.

• 1:11Speaker 00

  Stop, Mark. What are you looking at, you guys?

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Alright, hold on. It doesn't show me the aerial view, dude.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  No, Anacapa, the dorm I was in, was bad.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Anacapa, Santa Rosa, and then there was one other that they're just...

• 1:24Speaker 01

  They renamed them recently, too.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, they had to.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Gerbils.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, they don't even have the aerial view.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, they know. They know better. They wiped it, wiped it from the internet. I'll go grab it. Oh, there it is, kind of on the top left.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  This one?

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, there you go.

• 1:42Speaker 00

  That's, that's what they all look like.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  That's real.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  I know, they put a little, little, little bridge in the middle. Does that really help?

• 1:49Speaker 00

  Anyway, dude, thank you so much for being here, man. We appreciate you.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  Is it weird to be in the city?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  I love it. It's a whole different animal. I feel way more uncomfortable here.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Like, like, I've just got a smoothie down the road right here, and there was some guy screaming at the curb when I walked through. And I was like, that's something you don't see in the jungle.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  But do you go up to them like a wild animal, like, whoa?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I often see them down.

• 2:11Speaker 01

  No, I like coming to the city. I mean, I get to come to New York, like, once a year or so, and I always enjoy it. I do the old touristy things, go to Times Square.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  You gotta do it.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's great, but it's very far and... You know what's weird is I, like, when I navigate through any wild environment, it's very observation based.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  It's like, oh, that tree looks unusual, and oh, that, you know, I'll notice that pile of rocks, and then I can find my way back.

• 2:32Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Even in a grid like New York, that's literally squares, I can't navigate.

• 2:35Speaker 00

  You get lost.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  It's too overstimulating. There's too much. There's too many billboards and signs and noises, like, you can't navigate that way.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  There's wildlife here you probably don't see in the jungle, right? Like, rats?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  New York City Rat Tour.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  You never see a rat, like, out in the wild.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Not often.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  You only see them here.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 00

  Is that true?

• 2:50Speaker 02

  I've never seen a rat in the woods.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  It's hard to find rats outside of city, like, urban environments.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Why is that?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  They're, they're just cryptic underground animals, you know? But you get into a city and they're everywhere. They're on every dumpster.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  That's a great point.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  So you need a subway system for rats?

• 3:07Speaker 01

  To thrive, I guess.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  You wanna hear another great point?

• 3:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  I was talking to my buddy Ben Uyeda, he goes, "Do you think termite mounds are natural? Like, are they a part of nature?"

• 3:16Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  If the answer's yes, then New York City is also part of nature.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Why? Because the termites built it up?

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Humans just built buildings out of nature. So this is basically just nature.

• 3:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  So you're in just a different jungle, right?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  This is an ant colony.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Okay, we gotta get into your backstory, and I know you may have talked about this on pods before, but it is kind of wild.

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  That you are studying, you know, extinct species and chasing them around the world, where you were almost made extinct, living in Zimbabwe. Like, you were the first version of that, right?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  In a sense, yeah.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  So you grew up in Zimbabwe?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Okay, where?

• 3:51Speaker 01

  So, we lived in Shamba, which is just outside of Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe. And my family were farmers and safari business owners.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  Your mom was a guide?

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Yep, she was the first female bush pilot in Southern Africa. So she used to fly people into a remote bush and then take them on safari.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  A joke there, I'm not gonna say.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. Out of my job there. Appreciate that.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Mr. Galante might have been a bush pilot.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  First time that one's been cracked.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  Okay, so, and then what the hell is going on with her, where she's like, "I'm gonna be the tour guide for just groups." I'm getting, I'm running out of the house. I have, how many brothers do you have?

• 4:34Speaker 01

  I have one little sister.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  One little sister. And she's like, "I'm just gonna go," 'cause when you're a tour guide, you're not going for the day.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  No, yeah, you're going for weeks at a time.

• 4:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I think, much like myself, and probably where I got it from, my mom just sort of didn't like the traditional mold of jobs and careers and things you could do, and was quite a free spirit, I guess. And she wanted to be a pilot, and then she became a pilot, and then she wanted to be in the bush, so she became PH or a safari guide. And then she would just take people out, and yeah, that's how I grew up. I grew up in little tiny plains and all over Africa, and living on our farm, and it was awesome.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  And would you go out with her on some of the expeditions?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, at 14 years old, I guided my first safari, a canoe safari.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Okay. At what age? I wanna go get into Mugabe trying to, like, kill your whole family.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Sure, it's great fun.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  Take your farm, we're gonna get there. Shout out, Robert. But, but at what age do you think? What age did you feel comfortable going out in the woods and be like, "I'm gonna be good no matter what," or the bush, or whatever you call it?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  It's funny, because I probably felt that way when I was seven or eight. But I was not that way until I was much older, if that makes sense.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  14?

• 5:45Speaker 01

  When I was seven or eight years old, 10 years old, 12 years old, I'd go to camp with my family. And the second they'd go off on a walk or something, or a game drive, I'd sneak out and go and try and catch stuff and find stuff, and sneak up behind termite mounds to stare at lions, and all of these things that I can't necessarily say, like, nearly got me killed, but there were things that I definitely shouldn't have been doing. No six-year-old should be running around the bush of Africa by themselves, right? And so I felt very confident. If I get caught, I'd get a lashing and I'd be in big trouble. But I felt comfortable doing it very young, but I didn't really realize until probably like my late teens, maybe even early twenties, like, here are the things I actually need to know in order to not just, like, push the limits every day. Do you know what I mean?

• 6:27Speaker 01

  So, honestly, probably not until, realistically, long after I'd left Africa and gone back and learnt a bunch more in my twenties, was I really comfortable.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Wow. Did you learn any, like, bushmen hunting or tracking techniques?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Tracking, yeah, yeah. So part of being a guide or safari guide is tracking, right? Like, you read the sand, and you look at the footprints, and you look at the poop, the spore, and you put a, put a picture together, and...

• 6:48Speaker 02

  I've seen, like, videos of these bushmen that are like, it, it almost looks like they're like mystics. 'Cause like, they're looking at, like, the tiniest little stick, and they're like, "Oh, this means there was a gazelle here."

• 6:57Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  And it's like, how do you know? And they're like, "Well, the wind is coming this way, the stick is this way, so it's pointing at a gazelle." And then they go, and there's a gazelle.

• 7:03Speaker 00

  I think, I think movies do a horrible job of explaining how they do this.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's hard to, because it's like watching, you know, Zach Galifianakis read cards in The Hangover. You know, when they do that, that depiction on screen of all the little numbers going through his idiot brain? It's like, it's like one of those, really. Because you, you look at the sand, and you see, okay, there's two impala tracks here, and there's a weird turn to this one, to the right here, and then all of a sudden, from this side, there's a lion track. So that means the impala was walking this way.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Saw the lion.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Saw the lion, turned, and then the lion came in pursuit. And based on the way the lion's print is, it had this much weight going into it, it actually made the impala run faster. You know, but all of this is just something that sort of happens in your mind. You don't, you can't really...

• 7:49Speaker 00

  Fuck, shit.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  And, and you're not always right either. And anybody who pretends they are is, is lying to you. And I'm 10% as good as the people that do this every day. But still, like, you paint a picture based on what you're seeing in the sand, you know?

• 8:00Speaker 00

  That's, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, are you looking, are you looking at, like, branches on trees that have recently been broken? Are you looking at, like, feeding areas?

• 8:09Speaker 01

  A little bit of everything.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Because whenever you see it in a movie, it's a guy, like, picks up some sand, and he, like, looks at the wind, and he looks up at the sky, he goes, "Oh, there's the elk," or something like that.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  But it's not that. There's, like, guessing, and you're wrong, and having to recalculate.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you, you think about, the most successful hunters ever have about a 30% success rate, right? African wild dogs, things like that. I mean, there's exceptions, like, literally dragonflies are the most successful hunters ever, but if you look...

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Oh, we're including animals in the hunters here?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, hunters.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  So if you look at the most successful hunters ever, call it Africa, pack of African wild dogs, they have about a 30% success rate of making a kill. So basically, one in three times, they make a kill.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Oh. So it's like a great baseball player.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  You're betting 300, you're like, huh?

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you think of that from a human standpoint, even with our advantage, which is intellect, right? Of reading these scenes and putting it all together, we're still not nearly as good of a hunter as a lion.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  What are our percentages?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Uh, well, hard to say with guns and bows and all these things.

• 9:11Speaker 00

  Take us back, like...

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Oh, probably less than 10%, you know? If you think about traditional human beings, like, running around the bush, or the Ice Age, or whatever you wanna call it, trying to make a kill, they, they go out and hunt every day. They'd maybe come back with a kill once every 10 days.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Whoa!

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Wasn't our advantage long-distance running?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  In some cultures, yes. And that's, again, really interestingly, it comes down to the type of prey. Like, the Native Americans, the, the Indian Americans that used to live in North America.

• 9:40Speaker 00

  What happened?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  They used to pursue...

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Nope!

• 9:49Speaker 01

  They pursued deer to the point of exhaustion, which was incredible, 'cause they could literally run deer down, because deer were not, um, long-distance runners, right? They're sprint athletes.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  So if they could track a deer using this various methodology we just discussed for long enough, they could run it to the point of it collapsing from exhaustion, and a human can actually keep up for that many hours.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  Because the, whatever their prey was before, or whatever hunted them prior, didn't have the cardiovascular ability that we do.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're not endurance athletes, they're sprint athletes.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh, wow, wow, wow, wow. Okay, okay, so you, tell me when, tell me what happens when you guys are about to get killed.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  In what regard?

• 10:27Speaker 00

  In Zimbabwe.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Oh, gotcha, okay.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Which time?

• 10:30Speaker 00

  No, not when you tried to get yourself killed.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  I mean, so...

• 10:36Speaker 00

  When Robert Mugabe found out.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  So, for those that don't know what happened is...

• 10:40Speaker 00

  There was women flying planes in his...

• 10:41Speaker 01

  It was unacceptable. Yeah, he needed to get in that bush.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Sorry, mom. So yeah, during the ZANU PF political party regime, which was Robert Mugabe's political party, he was basically slipping from power, right? And so he needed a methodology to retain power because he declared himself president for life. So he turned a lot of negativity and focus on the white farmers, which were just a minority. We've seen this, Idi Amin's done it, Hitler did it. You know, lots of people have done that. Like, I'm losing power, I'm losing control. I need to target hate towards a minority. I need to scapegoat. And so that's, you know, there are all kinds of racial contexts, all kinds of things you can talk about as to why. But regardless, he turned the focus on the white African farmers. Primarily, they were English, some were Dutch, you know, but, but white farmers in Zimbabwe.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  And so my family owned a tiny little farm, 200 acres, which sounds big, but it was tiny for our region, in amongst a bunch of really big, really wealthy, successful farms. Huge tobacco farms, cattle ranches, and things like that. And so basically, all the farms around us were slowly seized by, quote, "war veterans" who'd never seen a war because it was part of this whole political play. And closed in on our farm until we were the last man standing. I could go into as much detail or as little as you want, but basically, one night, so we got shot at a few times. Like, they'd followed us to our gate. There were shootouts. Where my mom would pull the revolver out and be shooting out the window. My mom was a single mother, too.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Where was your dad?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  My, my parents split when I was eight and my dad moved away. So it was just my mom and the two kids on a farm in a country where culturally, the Shauna culture, women are valued the same as cows. So it's a very, very difficult place to be a single woman running a farm, right?

• 12:28Speaker 00

  Holy.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  So at 14 years old, I could command more attention and respect than my mother could as an adult woman. So she would give me the orders for the day to give to the farm workers because they'd listen if I made the orders. And I didn't even know what I was talking about, but I'd say it like I did. Do you know what I mean? And so it was a whole weird dynamic. But basically, again, my mom was a single mother. We lived on the farm by ourselves. All of the farms around us got taken. A lot of our neighbors went through punguis, which was indoctrination through torture by the ZANU political party. So all kinds of things, like burning their feet and dancing, all crazy, crazy stuff.

• 13:04Speaker 00

  Dancing?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  So they'd make them dance on like hot iron as a torture method.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Holy.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  All kinds of horrible things.

• 13:10Speaker 00

  Is that where the jumping comes from?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  No, that's a whole cultural thing. Thank you, Allison. That's good tension, Brady. The story's getting long, but basically, one night after going through, everybody dug their heels in. It was like, this will pass because things have yo-yoed through the country of Rhodesia and then Zimbabwe since its, its induction. And everybody's like, dig our heels in. These things will blow over and things will come right again. Anyway, they didn't for Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe's gone down the hole politically. But it's starting to bounce back a little now, actually. But one night, our farm was surrounded. Our security guard had actually been killed. We had a security guard, he'd been killed. And they basically just said, you, you have to leave. If you don't leave, we're gonna kill you.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  And because it was just my mom and two kids, you know, they didn't just come in and murder us like they had done in other places.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  If there were men in the household, they might just come in.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  I think it would have been a different story.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  So the sexism actually helped in that regard?

• 14:07Speaker 01

  I think so. I have nothing to support that theory, but I think so.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  You was a child, you're not an adult.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  There's two little kids, you know, 14-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl and a, and a single blonde lady in the middle of an African farm, right? So I think they said, instead of kill or murder or rape, or, and there, there was not all that. Some other people left without conflict, but there was a lot of that. They, they basically gave us a choice. So they came, our security guard had been killed. Our, some of our farm workers had been through these punguis, this indoctrination. And they just said, you have 24 hours before you're, you're gone, you're dead.

• 14:40Speaker 00

  You pack everything up.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  And so I run into my room and I grab my bow off the wall and I grab my little Maasai sword that I had. And I said, bring it on. And my mom fucking smacked me. Go back to suitcase. Because I was a little shithead, you know? I was 14, I thought I was ruling the world. And so, you know, we packed up our suitcases and left.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Do you have a passport?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had passports. I had Zimbabwean passport, I had American passport. My dad was American.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:02Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Where'd you go after?

• 15:05Speaker 01

  We bounced around a lot. So we went from living on a 200-acre farm in Zimbabwe to living on welfare in Oakland, California in the early 2000s. And Oakland in the early 2000s was not like hipster cool Oakland now. It was pretty rough.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Have you ever not lived in a predominantly black area?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  I live in Santa Barbara now. I don't even think we have it anymore.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  It's funny that your mom's like, how can I make sure that my kids will feel acclimated?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's like, the new jungle, baby.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  There need to be black people all around.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  There need to be black people around. Yeah, they'll be, they'll be weird enough if they see too many white people. We cannot possibly take them to Connecticut.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  What's so funny, what's so funny is I got to Oakland and most of, not most, but a lot of my friends growing up were black, right? And I got to Oakland, I was just a kid, you know? 14 years old. I had safari shorts that were above the knee and, you know, torn up t-shirt. I like ran into, I, I still remember this so distinctly. You know, we went through a whole bunch of yo-yo and emotional, this blah, blah, blah. But I, I remember we like finally settled in our government housing in Oakland. We're in a one-bedroom place. Like, my mom and my two, my sister and I. And, and I run out, I see this basketball court where all these, these African-American kids are playing basketball. And I run out, fuck yeah, like some friends to hang out with. I like grab the ball and I'm trying to play and stuff. This kid pulls out and I'm like, what the fuck are you doing? I was like, oh God, this is different. I've never experienced anything like this, yeah. And they're like, get out of here, white boy.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  I was like, where are you from? They're like, I'm from Africa. It did not land.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Now, you were aware, though, that like being white from Africa was a rare thing?

• 16:38Speaker 01

  No, I wasn't.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Not at all?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Not at all.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  So do you learn that when you come to America? That the perception of Africa is there are not that many white people there?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  Very much so, yeah, very much so. Because where I live, or where I'd lived in Zimbabwe, it was just like, everybody knows, there's still white people there today, you know? And in every country in Africa, there's a white population. And I had just thought that was known, I guess, you know? Because our vacations were to Mozambique, where there are other small white communities. Or South Africa, where there's a large white community. Like, I just sort of assumed.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  It was the norm for you.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  It was the norm, you don't think about it.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Also, the kid's idea of race is so different, right?

• 17:10Speaker 01

  It didn't exist.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Like, when you're eight years old, you're like, yeah, we're all just Zimbabwean.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  I distinctly remember when I was still in school, a school called Saint John's in Harare in Zimbabwe. And this was during the height of all the political turmoil. And I was, I was an equivalent of a freshman. And one of the prefects, you know what prefects are? Prefects are like school heads that are boys. They're in Harry Potter. They're like, they're like the oldest kids, like the seniors.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Sure, sure.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  That is the best chess player, the best rugby player, the best mathematician. They get, they get called their colors and they're prefect. They're kind of in charge of the little kids. It's a very antiquated system. But I remember I was the equivalent of a freshman in my new high school. And my best friend since I was five years old was Malusi Zwango Boni, black guy, in case you couldn't tell. And Malusi was like my best friend since I was like five years old. And we were sitting together at lunch. And one of the prefects came up. I don't remember who it was, but he just came up and he's like, you go sit over there and you go sit over there. And this was during all the, the conflict. And I was like, what's happening? And he's like, you're not sitting with Malusi anymore. And I was like, I've sat with Malusi every day since I was six years old for lunch. You know what I mean? Like, this is bizarre. And they were trying to, because it was coming from the governor, from the president, they were like trying to create.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  Instill.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Instill this like racial separation. And obviously, there's more black people and white people in Zimbabwe. It had never even crossed my mind. It was just one of my best friends, you know? And then there was this thing coming from an 18-year-old to a 14-year-old being like, you guys don't sit together. Like, you guys aren't friends anymore. I'm like, why, why, why am I not friends with, you know? Like, it just, you're talking about you're like a kid's perception of race. Like, it just, it blew my mind because I just didn't understand it.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  What'd your friend say?

• 18:50Speaker 01

  Same thing, like, we were just so confused, you know? And he went over with all the black kids and I went over with a tiny little group of white kids. And it was, it was almost like prison, you know? Yeah, but it was like, at least my perception of prison. And it was just like, and then school ended and I was like, you good? He's like, yeah, you good? I was like, yeah, that was weird. You know, but those things just sort of like kept happening and it just got worse and worse. And it just showed how ingrained it was throughout the culture at the time, yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Okay, so you come to America, you're 14 at this time? Do your survival skills start to wane?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Became a very different sort of survival skill.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  I mean, I mean, I mean like bush survival. I mean, being out in nature. Like, do you have opportunities to go do that? It's not like you're camping, I imagine. Like, you're trying to survive on welfare in America.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  So we, we came to Oakland. We had all this, like I said, I was like getting in fights in the streets and like trying to make friends. And I was just this weird kid in safari shorts who like nobody understood and I just had a funny accent. And I ended up getting in trouble a lot. Like, a lot, a lot. Like knife point and problems with older kids and all kinds of things. So my mom realized that there was an issue and I, I think it was because of me. So she got us out of Oakland as fast as possible. So we spent about six months in Oakland. And then we ended up in a tiny little town called Cayucus, California. Which is its own story, but 2,000 people, surf town in California, tiny little central coast town. And I think she did that intentionally because she could see the trajectory things were going in a big city like Oakland. And the reason I tell you that is because

• 20:19Speaker 01

  here I was, a kid who'd always grown up in the bush, you know? It wasn't like Tarzan, like I still, you know, was a normal kid, but like I had all these passions for wildlife and the outdoors. And then we moved to this tiny little central coast town that's surrounded by mountains on one side and ocean on the other. And I would just take off for days and trespass onto farms and up into the mountains and go, go diving and go up to Big Sur, which you probably know Big Sur, camp up there. And so I just sort of had, I just channeled it into a new thing. And the main thing I found then was the ocean. Because I'd never had ocean growing up. And all of a sudden, I lived on the ocean in California. And I was just so into diving and fishing and spearfishing and learning about nudibranchs and sea stars and all these weird ocean animals that I'd never been exposed to. So I just channeled it into a different thing.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So to answer your question, I don't think it went away. I just changed my interests.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, by going to Cayucus, you could continue to.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Explore this passion.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  What does your mom do when she comes over? Like, does she take up new work?

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, she was a waitress.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Went from running a huge safari business and 200 farm workers to being a waitress.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Was that difficult for her?

• 21:23Speaker 00

  Oh my God.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Like, that transition, like, she's so committed to freedom and doing what she wants and like being on her own accord to now just like serve coffee.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Serving drinks. Because, you know, what else, you know, we were refugees, right? Like, what else can you do?

• 21:35Speaker 00

  Did you talk to her about that at all as an adult?

• 21:38Speaker 01

  You know, Africans are funny. They don't like to talk about it. Like, I'm a hybrid, right? I'm an African-American, whatever, hybrid. She, if I try to have this, you're laughing at me. Shut up, bro. You see where you are.

• 21:53Speaker 00

  He's so much more African. I know, it's just so funny hearing.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, the whole bro back. Come on, dude. Stand up for me. But my point is like.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  Nah, it's crazy. You're white mom African.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  Like, I couldn't talk to my mom about it. She would just brush it aside. Like, it's not.

• 22:12Speaker 00

  Why is it? That is so funny. It's like, cause like, if I was born in China, there's no way you guys refer to me as Chinese. Right? Like, there's no way.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Well, maybe they bust out a little Mandarin.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  You would think I was being racist until someone told you I was actually Mandarin.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's probably true. That's probably true.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay, all right, all right. So you're saying she's a little bit reserved. She's not talking about her emotions and what she was dealing with and the difficulties surrounding it. She's just like, listen, I had to do what I had to do to survive.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  You know that like memory bias thing? Like, we all put the bad memories aside and, and focus on the good ones. Otherwise, we'd all be miserable and depressed all the time. I don't know if you've heard of that. But like, I feel like she has that more than anybody. Like, her memory bias. Like, she knows it happened, but she doesn't want to talk about it. She doesn't want to bring it up, doesn't want to address it. You know what I mean? She'd rather talk about how great breakfast was, you know?

• 23:00Speaker 00

  I love that, dude.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Did you pick up any like Zulu or Kosa?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  No, I used to speak relatively fluent. I wouldn't say perfect Shauna, which was the native language of where I lived. Which was decent, you know, like more than survival Shauna. But you realize, cause I was just back in Zimbabwe earlier this year, it goes away quickly.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  You know, like, I, I can still understand 25% of it, but I can speak like 2% of it. You know, it just goes away. And you have those few words that are like ingrained, but otherwise, like, the ability to communicate is pretty much gone.

• 23:31Mark Gagnon?

  Can you say a few words? Cause he thinks all they do is click.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Who? Why would you say me?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  No, I'm just kidding.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  Why would you say me?

• 23:44Speaker 00

  You're more racist than me.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  No, so like in Shauna, like if I said to you like, "Good morning, how are you?", the greeting is "Manguanani, mamukase."

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Manguanani, mamukase.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  So that's like, "Good morning, how are you?" Yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Manguanani.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Mamukase.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  Mamukase.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  And then the traditional response would be "Mamuka ndemuka'o." So it's like, "I'm good, how are you?"

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Mamuka?

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Ndemuka'o.

• 24:11Speaker 00

  Mamuka ndemuka'o.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  See?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  And you speak Shauna, just like that.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:16Mark Gagnon?

  Stop.

• 24:18Mark Gagnon?

  Still can't say it.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  I tried learning how to say like a few words in Kosa. Because there's a, a DJ from Zim. That's what the locals call Zimbabwe.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  And I talked to him and he tried like teaching me some of the words. It was like with the clicks.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  That's rad. Here?

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  In New York?

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  No way?

• 24:36Speaker 02

  And it's a wild thing because I didn't realize the clicks are a part of like the word.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  In some of the, yeah.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Like, it's not just like a bunch of clicks on their own.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Kind of how we're told in America.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah.

• 24:45Speaker 02

  But like, Kosa would be like, "Kosa."

• 24:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  And like you say like in your throat.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  And so it's like embedded in the like sentence itself.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:53Speaker 02

  It's unbelievably hard to do.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Like, I don't know if you can just tell someone how to do it. It's like you're born knowing how to do it.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  You have to grow up. It's like, same thing they say with like learning Mandarin, right? As like an adult, it's nearly impossible.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  I feel like I could do it, dude.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Learn Mandarin?

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Cause my fake Mandarin is good. Like, sometimes I'll do my fake and I'll listen to real Mandarin and I'm like, I'm there.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Like, there's a guy I follow that just speaks to people in their language, but he fakes it.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Oh, nice.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  He's like, he just walks up to them in the street.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  And he'll just, and he'll just speak fake.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Whenever they're looking at him like bewildered.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  No, they're like, they, they're trying to. The reason I know it's close is because they're like trying to sound it out.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  Cause he's a white guy, so they're like, "Oh, he's trying."

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  You know? But he's close.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think that's the key. Like, when I go to Mexico, my Spanish is terrible. It's like survival Spanish, but my confidence is through the roof.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Bro.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  So if you sit down and just spit, you know?

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Go to Japan, I swear to God. Have you been to Japan?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love Japan.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Okay, you know how like all the taxi cabs, they got like white gloves? It's like beautiful.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  It's awesome.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Spotless, yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 00

  But they're not gonna speak any English.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  And, but if you say where you're going in English, but with a very strong Japanese accent, 100% of the time, they know exactly where you're going.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  They're respected. Yeah, they're like.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  I don't know if they're respected.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  But in their brain, that's how it sounds in English.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  It's the accent in it.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  I know, and it sounds crazy.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  But if you say it, it works. It's Starbucks.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  And they'll take you to the Starbucks. And listen, you could judge me, but when you're there and you need to go somewhere, you're gonna try it.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  That's how you say Starbucks.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Ice creama.

• 26:29Speaker 00

  Ice creama.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  Ice creama.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  That's literally how you say ice cream in Japanese.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. I, it's almost like, is there a language Japanese?

• 26:37Speaker 01

  It's just an accent.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  I think it's an accent. I really do. Okay, what do we got right here, Mark?

• 26:43Speaker 02

  This is a Kosa. I've never seen this video, but apparently it's good.

• 26:45Speaker 04

  Our P, it sound like. Tegelia. Wow. Tegelia. Canada. Coca-Cola. Dark.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  Oh. You just said Canada and Coca-Cola. You get that?

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Coca-Cola.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  Our X, it sound like.

• 26:59Mark Gagnon?

  Coca-Cola.

• 27:02Speaker 04

  Like the name.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  He makes it look cool, too.

• 27:04Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  You know what I'm saying?

• 27:05Speaker 04

  Uta. Oma. Kosa. Our Q, it sound like. Ala. Eda. Iku. De. Ika. La. La. Ika. La.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  How fire is that?

• 27:14Speaker 00

  It's incredible.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  Like, this guy rapping?

• 27:17Speaker 00

  It's also not, it's not so different than like, you know, Arabic where you have like a. Or like these other sounds.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  It's just another sort of mouth sound, right?

• 27:25Speaker 00

  Exactly. Like, we make it seem like there's this like obscure, it's this obscure sound and no other language has it.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  It's like us saying like the hard letter R. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's a lot of Asian cultures and things that can't do. Jesus, I'm really digging myself into a hole over here. You know what I'm saying? Come on! I'm looking at you, bro. I'm fucking killing myself. I'm drowning over here.

• 27:48Speaker 00

  Do you want to know how to pronounce it?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  I'm not sure what you're gonna say next.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  Holy still go dante.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  See, no, no, I'm not gonna say it again. No hard R though, right?

• 27:56Speaker 00

  No, there's no, definitely. You're not allowed to say a hard R.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  You might be.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  I'm drowning over here, bro.

• 28:03Speaker 00

  You might be allowed to say the A, I don't know. We gotta go to the.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  We gotta go to the booth.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  We gotta go to the booth on down. We gotta see. What does the prefix say?

• 28:12Speaker 00

  But, okay, all right, all right.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  It gets mystified in America. People are like, "Yeah, they speak like an alien language where they click all the time." It's like, no, they just have tones that are different than ours.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, everybody has their weird shit. I'm trying to think what ours is in English specifically.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Well, it depends on what region you're comparing to. Like, if you come from like an Asian dialect, doing L is difficult in English.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  Bro, if saying the, the letter R after a consonant is nearly impossible for anybody outside.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  That's what I'm trying to articulate without being racist.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  I mean, to Europeans that don't speak English.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Andrew.

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Is an impossible.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  That's right. It's.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  I'm the do, I'm the do.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, squirrel is like, have you seen Europeans trying to pronounce the word squirrel?

• 28:51Speaker 00

  Have you seen Japanese people do it?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  That's the most fun.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Get that video up immediately, right now. All right, guys, new dates announced. We're getting ready for the hour this fall. I'm coming to Stress Factory, the 11th and 12th. Thank you guys for selling that out. I'll update you guys on added more shows. Houston, September 18th and 19th. West Nyack, New York, 25th and 26th of September. Helium in Indianapolis, Indiana, the 23rd and 24th of October. Alabama, Stardome, November 6th and 7th. Hilarities in Cleveland, the 13th and 14th of November. Good Nights in Raleigh, December 4th and 5th. Funny Bone in Columbus, December 11th and 12th. Those are all the shows for the fall while we get this hour together, man. I can't wait to see you guys out there and see the new stuff.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  TheAndrewSchultz.com for tickets.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  I'm also doing a bunch of shows. I'm gonna be with my good pal Andrew Schulz for many of these dates, as well as some of my own headlining shows. I'll be in Plano, Texas, Chandler, Arizona, Pasadena, San Diego, Detroit, and Salt Lake City, all through the fall and winter. If you live in any of those places, go to MarkAgnonLive.com. You can check out tickets and dates right there.

• 29:58Speaker 05

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' healthcare to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  You go on a show that is very popular that we all knew, Naked and Afraid.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Now, have you already started your career before that? Or is this your first like foray into entertainment?

• 30:36Speaker 01

  No, so I went to UCSB for biology.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  And I, I loved doing biology and that's all I wanted to do. And I, I knew nothing about entertainment. I thought Discovery made shows for Discovery Channel. Like, that's how TV works. Like, I just knew nothing, nothing about it.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  And then I went on Naked and Afraid, literally, because we were super poor and I was a biologist making 12 bucks an hour.

• 30:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  And I just wanted a cool vacation.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  And did it, and did really well on the show and all of that. But it was really, there was sort of a, a lightbulb moment for me, which is when I looked at the, the ratings that the Naked and Afraid show got. This is back when TV was huge, you know, right? Like cable. And that got 4 million live viewers. And I looked at, I looked at like a public, a published paper that I'd worked on with a lead scientist. And that got 400 reads.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  And I looked at the two and I'm like, "All I really want to do is communicate how amazing wildlife is to people." Cause that's what I love. That's where I grew up, in the bush of Africa, tracking, like we were talking about. I love wildlife. That's what I want to communicate. Now, look at these two things. Here's saying that the lead biologist worked on for two and a half years, I worked on for about a year.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  That got 400 reads by like-minded scientists who already knew the subject matter.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Here's me jiggling my junk naked in the jungle, got 4 million views. I'm like, I know which one of these two can make a bigger impact. So that was like my lightbulb moment.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Was after Naked and Afraid, when I was like, "Now I can make shows."

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Okay, so Naked and Afraid, so for the people who don't know, it was a show where you would basically have to go survive in like some remote area. I think you went to Panama.

• 31:57Speaker 01

  Panama, that's right, yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  But is that where all the episodes are filmed?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  No, all over the world.

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Got it. And like, for whatever reason, you're naked, it didn't need to be. And it's you and a chick.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Right?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  And she's also naked.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  That's right. Very awkward.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, in the morning when you're bricked, what is that like?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  It's only morning one, I'll tell you that. I don't know, man. Something biological happens out there where you're after morning one, you're like, "That's not gonna happen anymore. I got other stuff to worry about."

• 32:26Speaker 00

  But like, okay, do they start getting funky? Like, is it like?

• 32:29Speaker 01

  I believe some of them have.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  No, not like, like there must be, you're in the most primal setting.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  You're just hearing a laugh in the backcourt.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  You're not thinking about that? You're not thinking about that? This guy is right out of UC Santa Barbara, okay? It's a wild party, it's insane. Okay, so he's coming there, all sorts of venereal diseases.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  This is a fact, yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Okay, uh, we went to the same school, by the way. We lived right across from each other randomly and, uh, okay, so you're there, you meet the girl. She's naked immediately.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 00

  And you have to present yourself for TV like.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  But you also have to worry about like warmth and mosquitoes and stuff. Does she kept well or?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  She, my partner was kept immaculately.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  Really?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  She was very attractive.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Do you have a girlfriend at the time?

• 33:23Speaker 01

  I did have a girlfriend at the time.

• 33:24Speaker 00

  I'm gonna be with this naked chick who shaved up.

• 33:26Speaker 01

  Worse than that, it was my girlfriend's idea that I go on the show. Swear to God.

• 33:30Speaker 00

  She was into that.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Who knows what was going on, you know, when I took off.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  And how did it introduce to a stranger just on soft is crazy.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Were you on soft or did you fluff for like a second?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  I wish I had done a little tug. It would have been a little more impressive, but.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Were you fully, fully soft?

• 33:45Speaker 01

  I was fully, I was completely naked. There was nerves going on, which means I was probably about, you know, hung like a raisin. Like it was, yeah, it probably wasn't a good vibe at all. I was overweight because I was like, oh, I'm going to survival. I need to eat more. I got bulk up. So I was fatter than ever. It was, it was not hindsight being 2020. I would have trimmed up a little, maybe just done a little rub to go in, you know, just get a little something going on.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  And not been so fat, you know, like it would have been a little better.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  But did she start vibing as you started being like her protector and provider?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Oh no, she hated me.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  Really?

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Oh, she hated me. Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 00

  Oh, I told you.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  So that's her. She's quite pretty. I shaved, which was a mistake. I was chubby, which was a mistake. Um, and yeah, no, it wasn't good, bro.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, you got a little.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  I know, right? I know. Keep in mind, I was like 30 pounds heavier, dude. Give me a little slack there.

• 34:31Speaker 00

  Go back to that first one.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  That was bad. That was towards the end of the whole thing.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  Go back to the first one.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  No, it looks not.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  You look like a Pixar villain.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  I know, dude. It's bad. It's really bad.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  But she's a piece. She's beautiful, girl.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  That's what I'm saying, dude. I blew it. Um, but yeah, and she was pretty, but so I think.

• 34:50Speaker 00

  Okay. So today when you show up, you're butt naked.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Butt naked.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  Dick and balls out. Do you catch her peeping? Do you catch her like looking down?

• 34:58Speaker 01

  If anything, she caught me peeping.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  You were definitely peeping.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  You had to.

• 35:01Speaker 00

  You had to do it.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  I mean, what are you gonna do? You gotta get it out of the way. You gotta get a good look up and down.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  So you go up and down, get a good look.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Get a good look, hug it out.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  Did you hug?

• 35:09Speaker 01

  You have to.

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  And you felt them? You felt the nips?

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:15Speaker 00

  I'm just saying what I was saying.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  This is colleague. This is work colleague.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  I know it's his work colleague. I understand, but they're in a survival situation and part of survival is reproduction.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  No, that's not a good point. Not usually in 21 days though.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  That's true. That's true. But did she throw any rhythm? Like when you came back and you had, like, I remember you were shucking clams or whatever. You had an oyster. What was that? When you brought her that aphrodisiac and I know you were searching for it for that reason.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Dude, I was trying. Yeah. I was fishing, but I wasn't catching.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  No rhythm. She was giving you no rhythm.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Nothing, dude. I got no love out there. No, she, she was like, I think they did this on purpose. The producers of that show are really clever, by the way. They, they looked at me and were like, here's a chubby white boy who's got like a lot of good skills. And here's like a hot idiot who's got no skills. And they're like, we're gonna put these two together and see what happens. She's gonna hear this and it's not gonna go well. But you know, I think, I think they just were like, we're gonna put these two together.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  Was she bad at surviving?

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Terrible.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  Really?

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Terrible. Like admittedly at this point.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  When it got cold, would you guys have to, you know, body heat?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Night one, we cuddled the whole night, dead serious. We, we got there like.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Poking her in the back a little bit?

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  I had to roll over in the morning. She's like, are you okay? I was like, yeah, yeah, just a little uncomfortable. Had to roll over, go to the other side. Yeah. Cause night one, we got there, it was the producer's fault. They got us on the beach like late. So we only got started like 4:00 PM.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  So you don't have time between 4:00 PM and sundown to build everything.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  So we started to build a really crappy little shelter and it got dark and then it rained and it was cold. And we're both lying under a banana leaf shaking and I forget if it was her or me, but one of us, probably me, was like, hey, we gotta just, you know, scoot together and share some body warmth for, for the first night. And that was the only night we had to like cuddle basically.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  And it did help. Um, and then, yeah, and then I had to roll over in the morning and that was it. Then we built the proper shelter.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  The camera guys are just there like drinking smoothies the whole time?

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Dude, no, they, um, I'll tell you a story I've never told on the pod if you want.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Um, I've never told publicly at all. They were not there. So they leave, set up cameras overnight, like security cameras, basically, like just GoPros with battery packs and IR cams and stuff like that. But, um, they have a strict rule. I've never told this story publicly to anybody. They have a strict rule that the camera guys cannot have food on them. They kind of have smoothies, a kind of anything, right? Because you know, these people are more or less starving.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Must've been like day 15 or 16 or whatever. And I see the audio guy has got a cliff bar in his audio kit on the front. And I just see the corner of the wrapper, you know, a little like blue and black, like outline or whatever. And, uh, I don't remember his name. Let's say it was John. I walk over and I'm like, hey, John, what's going on, buddy? Boom. And I just grab it. I start peeling it and eating it. He's like, whoa, give me that back, give me that back, give me that back. I'm like, nope, not going to. And he's like, dude, you're gonna get me fired. I was like, I'm not, I'm not gonna tell anybody if you don't. And I give him back the wrapper and I smashed the whole bar.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  You didn't even share it.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  I scoffed that thing on the spot.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Dude, he's a bushman. He can tell when there's audio guys nearby. He can get tracks. Like there's a cliff bar near.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  Okay. Is it, is it true? I heard a rumor that you found food unbelievably fast.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 00

  And then they kind of made you hide the food.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Multiple times.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  Really?

• 38:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:24Speaker 00

  Okay. Can you tell us about that event?

• 38:25Speaker 01

  So the funniest part of that whole thing was, um, you know, they, they want you to suffer, right? Cause that's good TV. Right? They want you to struggle and have to find food and fight and help each other and all these things. So unlike day four, five or whatever, we're walking through the jungle and keep in mind, I'm a biologist, so I, I recognize the botany, the plants and things. And I look and I'm like, wait a minute, that's yucca, which is, you know, it's like a jungle potato, basically. And you can see that in this area of secondary forest, not primary, that had all been, you know, regrown, there's a whole patch, like almost perfectly square patch of yucca, which is a potato. And so I like stop and take out my machete and start digging and dig up the, the root, the potato. And then I'm like, holy shit. And I realized this is like a grove of it. And it's like a five minute walk from where we're camped.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  And so I dig up 30 pounds of these potatoes. Like I'm talking like, you know, mountain of potatoes. Take them back, build a little hammock so they don't get, sit in the water next to my camp. And I'm like.

• 39:21Speaker 00

  We're good.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  I'm done.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  Three weeks.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  You could live off that.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  Eat potatoes, eat some oysters in the morning. Like I got protein, I got carbs, I'm good. And the producers just pulling their hair out, you know, they're like, this fucking guy, like, he doesn't want to fight with anybody. Like he's, he's not being argumentative. He doesn't have to work very hard. He's got 30 pounds of fucking potatoes in his camp.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  And then they come over and they're like, look, we, we gotta take the potatoes away. I'm like, go for it. I'm just gonna go get more. And they're like, like, you can't do this. I was like, yes, I can. Like this is a simulated survival situation. I'm gonna get as many potatoes as I can get. So they took them away the first time. And that night, as soon as the camera guys left and set up the cameras, I walked five minutes up the hill. I brought back another 20 or so pounds, put them in the sling. And they came back in the morning and there was a pile of things. And the producer was like, off the record, like, okay, if you just keep them hidden and off camera, you can keep your potatoes. And I was like, I don't care how many times you take them away. I'm gonna go and get more.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  And so they let me like keep them off camera.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  So would you have to cook them like at off camera hours or did they just edit you cooking?

• 40:20Speaker 01

  They just edit it around it. Yeah. Yeah.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  You're the only person to go on the show and gain weight.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Thankfully not. Look at that photo, but thankfully not. But yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  So then what happens? And you and the girl are eating good? Are you sharing the potatoes?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  We shared, we shared everything. Yeah. I caught some fish. I caught some lobster. I got oysters. I killed an anteater. We got potatoes. Like we weren't struggling. Yeah.

• 40:44Speaker 00

  So it was easy for you?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  I mean, it goes back to what we were talking about before we came in here. If you're in the tropics and you have a good understanding of how to do these things, you can live indefinitely.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  I asked, I asked Forrest before we were on the pod, I was like, okay, let's just say like, could, could you just walk out anywhere and then just survive? Like what, what is the scenario? And you said, if you put me on an island, where, what, what did you say?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  I said Fiji or Vanuatu or one of those tropical places.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  You'd be fine for 30 years.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Easy, man.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Easy.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Because there's so much life, you know, and everything grows in the tropics, right? Like whether coconuts obviously grow naturally, but you plant potatoes or you get mangoes or whatever, everything just grows and it fruits. And then you have so much stuff in the ocean, right? In those places, you can eat all the shellfish we've just been talking about. You can spear, you can do these things. Some tools would help, right? Like some fire making tools and some spears and stuff, but like, that's why tropical living is so good, right? It's because you don't, evolution is a derivative of necessity, right? We change and evolve and develop things when we have to. And if you look at, it's actually really interesting. If you look at the planet and you look at cultures and civilizations, the most advanced ones,

• 41:54Speaker 01

  meaning the cultures and civilizations that built the biggest cities and had boats and sailing ships and all these things are, they're not so extreme in the North Poles that you can't survive. And they're not so comfortable in the equator where it's life so easy. They're somewhere in between. Where it's just life's easy a little bit, but it's hard a lot.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  The Mediterranean.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  To build things.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  They can just live out there untouched for.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Forever.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Thousands of years and just like be chilling.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. Cause life's good. They've got everything they need.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  There's no need for the innovation.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  That's it. You don't, you're not forced to innovate.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Whereas you're in England in the wintertime and you're like, we gotta get some goats in here. We gotta plant some corn.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. And you've got this short window, right? The summer window of two, three, four months, whatever it is, to make things happen. And so you use that time to develop and build and grow and store for a long winter ahead.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  But explain then Egypt, explain Sudan, explain these places that had like these immense, you know, technological outbursts.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, nobody can explain Egypt, right? That's one of the phenomenal things about it, but, um, I think those things are, are like Egypt, for example, are less about global expansion, right? They had amazing technologies and incredible architecture and pyramids and things like that within their, their system. I can't explain. I'm not an anthropologist, but you know, they built these things because they had the resources to build them locally. And we're now learning that there were civilizations in the Amazon similar to that, right?

• 43:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Um, but again, that wasn't about like England or the Vikings or places like that. The Romans who are like, we have to go places to get resources. We have to innovate and travel and move and conquer.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  And make a trade route and get a disease and all.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  All those things. Yeah.

• 43:37Mark Gagnon?

  Wow, you go to school for biology and I know you were in Zimbabwe like out in the bush till like 14.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:44Mark Gagnon?

  But then you go on this show, how old were you when you went on the show?

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Uh, 26, I think, something like that.

• 43:51Mark Gagnon?

  So like you're out of like the jungle wild for a long time. Like, how did the survival skills just come back?

• 43:57Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so I mean, I always really just cared about wildlife and conservation and survival for me was never a passion and still not. I would practice survival or wilderness craft or whatever you want to call it as a means to stay out in the wilderness longer and see animals. So even between, I guess ages, you know, 18 or so, whatever, 20, 14, whatever you want to call it, 14 when I came to the US and 25 or 6 or whatever I was in this, I was still constantly, I was working on the California Channel Islands as a biologist. I was going into the back country. I was traveling as much as I could. I, it's all I really do.

• 44:32Mark Gagnon?

  So it's not like you're just going out, exploring and then coming home for the day?

• 44:35Speaker 01

  No.

• 44:36Mark Gagnon?

  Like you would just be out there?

• 44:36Speaker 01

  I was out all the time. Yeah. I mean, I used to have a 15 foot center console boat, like a tiny little boat that I would spend four or five nights at a time on. Doesn't have a cabin. It's like the boat's, you know, about as big as these two chairs. You know, and I would just sleep on the deck of the boat and just be out in the ocean, exploring the Channel Islands, you know, in Santa Barbara.

• 44:55Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and, and then same thing in the back country. I'd just take a backpack with a tarp, you know, and a bag of salt and a pocket knife and a lighter and just be like, I'm gonna head out and figure it out.

• 45:04Mark Gagnon?

  Why bag of salt?

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Oh, you can, you can save anything with salt. You can preserve it. You can cure it. Salt, salt's like an essential survival food, right? If I, if I catch a trout this big and I'm out there for three days, if I just leave the trout, it goes rotten.

• 45:18Mark Gagnon?

  Yeah.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  But if I eat half the trout and pack the other half in salt, it's totally fine.

• 45:22Mark Gagnon?

  He would survive a day.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  So this is, this is, I'm, I'm kind of obsessed with this stuff. Like all the videos I watch from, you know, you know, I'm sure you know the Outdoor Boys channel.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 00

  All these, I've seen so many of your videos, but like, I think it's because I've never gone camping.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Ever?

• 45:37Speaker 00

  No, I'm like, I would love to do it.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:40Speaker 00

  I'm a real like city boy.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:42Speaker 00

  But there is something that I, I don't know if it's a primal connection. I don't know if it's the idea of like, when you're stressed with things in your life, watching somebody complete a task, execute a task and like, create homeostasis for them in like a really difficult environment. Maybe there's something that is like stress relieving to that. I gotta do more like psychological research as to why I'm so interested about it. But there is a part of me and now that I have you here, I really want to know.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  The four of us are put in an area, you choose. Just put us somewhere in the world.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  Right now.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Right now.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Okay, let's, let's say Costa Rica.

• 46:15Speaker 00

  Okay. I love Costa Rica.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  Jungly.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Very.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  What, what we're, it is 10 AM.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  We have to survive. Nobody's coming to get us for a week, two weeks.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:28Speaker 00

  What is number one thing that we do?

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Drinkable water, potable water.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  How are we finding it?

• 46:32Speaker 01

  So luckily in Costa Rica, high rainfall, almost everywhere.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Right? So what I would do, you don't want to drink the, the, the groundwater anywhere in the jungle, period, because of pathogens and bacteria.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  Groundwater could be rivers as well.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Streams and water and rivers and things like that. Yeah. So you can either purify that or you can collect rainwater, which you know is safe. So you got two options.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  So let's say there's, it's not raining.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Hedge our bets. You do both, right? So you cut some bamboo and you make some cups and things to catch rain just in case.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  The second thing we do is figure out how are we making or starting a fire and I, like, yes, you can rub sticks together. I don't like doing that. I just bring a lighter, right? Like, I don't like survival for the sake of it. I just like doing it. So I would create a fire and whether we had pots, believe it or not, you can boil water in a plastic cup. There are many ways you can purify water, but your safest way to do it is to boil it. So figure out how to boil water. That can be in rocks. That can be in leaves, believe it or not. That can be in a plastic. There's a million ways to do it. So you get your water, you purify your water. Once you know you have a sustainable method of safe drinking water, everything else is secondary.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  Interesting, because whenever you see these shows, the first thing they do is shelter.

• 47:36Mark Gagnon?

  Shelter, yeah.

• 47:37Speaker 00

  But I'm watching a lot of like cold weather shows.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  That's exposure related.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, that makes more sense. When you don't have to worry about the elements as much in terms of freezing to death.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:45Speaker 00

  Water is crucial. That's number one.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Also because in those cold environments.

• 47:49Speaker 00

  There's snow everywhere. There's water.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  There's water everywhere.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  Great point. Okay. So, okay, we get some water. We have this mechanism for maintaining water.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  Okay. Next is shelter.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah. Next would be exposure.

• 48:00Speaker 00

  What are we building?

• 48:02Speaker 01

  Well, in the jungle, it's, yeah, that's what I was talking about with boiling with a leaf. See that? It's really cool. So, uh, next thing would be, uh, your shelter. In a place like Costa Rica, you can get large leaves like banana leaves or those elephant ears, you know, those big ficus plants that kind of look like these. And so you'd use those to create a shelter. So you'd cut down sticks. Luckily in jungles, the wood is soft generally, right? So you can very easily cut down, like even in that, that picture.

• 48:30Speaker 00

  What if we didn't have anything to cut?

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can make, you can make stone tools. You can break it. It doesn't have to be, that's the other thing too, is like, you see like something like that, right? That's beautiful. That looks amazing. Doesn't have to be like that.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Don't get me wrong, that's probably that, we, you and I can make that right now with this one. The other one that's all perfect and meticulous, that's hard to make.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Like shelter does not have to be perfect. Do you know what I mean? You, the best thing you can do, if you're in it for the long term, you build a temporary shelter that's quick. It gets you out of the elements. So in the midday heat or whatever, you can rest, you can sleep. You have fire to get rid of mosquitoes. Then you focus on building something that's more, like more long-term comfortable.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  I was talking to, do you know Donnie Dust?

• 49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do know Donnie.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  He's the man.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Good dude.

• 49:12Speaker 02

  He was explaining to me, he was like, you can basically just make like a sleeping bag.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  So like in a pinch, it's just like one stick that's like two feet tall.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  Covered with banana leaves. It's not something you can like sit in. You literally just like shimmy into it and lay there and sleep.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Called a lean to, because it's leaning to one side, right?

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then you can get out that way.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  And that's enough. And the main thing there is almost mental sanity, because if you're sleeping in the rain, you're not sleeping. If you're exposed to the elements, you're, you're miserable. So if you just give yourself that little bit of mental reprieve so that at night you can rest and you can recharge, then you have all the time in the world to find food and build shelter and these kind of things. But if you're not sleeping, you're not resting, you're not recovering, you go downhill quickly.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  You think we would be living comfortably within a week?

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. When you say comfortably, not what you and I think of as comfortably.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Not AC, etc. But like, we're not worried about food. We're not worried if it's raining. We can get under something.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Within a week.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  Waking up with the sun.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  It's quiet. You're not on your phone.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  But that's not the case for, you know, these guys that go on a loan in the Arctic Circle.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  Very different situation.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Very different situation.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Now, can I ask you that? Like kind of as a detour question? If you were to get dropped right now, either into Alaska in the wintertime.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Or like the Mojave Desert in the summer.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Oof.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Two extreme climates.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Which one would you rather take to survive for a week?

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Well, just because of my knowledge base, and this is, it's all personal. Like, it's one of the reasons I make fun of Naked and Afraid, the show that I did myself. And I will get back to your question, is the guys that live in those environments, like I'm talking about the local people that actually live there, the native tribes, the, the local Panamanians and stuff, they do the stuff that we're crying and whinging and misery about as part of their daily life.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. Tasha's a joke about this. He's like, we do a show called Survivor in a place where people already live.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they're just like, this is just life to them. And for us, it's like, oh my God, it's so hard. I can't find food. And they're like, yeah, welcome to the fucking jungle, bitch. You know, like, um, and so, you know, to answer your question, it's all about where your skillset is. If you took that same incredible survivalist from Panama and put him in the Arctic, he'd be dead in a day.

• 51:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  For sure. He doesn't know it. He's not a trained survival expert. He just lives in the jungle in Panama.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  So my skillset, I do better in the Mojave than I would in Alaska.

• 51:25Speaker 00

  The fuck do you do in the Mojave?

• 51:26Speaker 01

  You find water. You find moisture and that comes from cactuses. And it's awful and it's bitter and there's ways to refine it, but you have to get the moisture first.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  First thing you're doing is looking for a giant cactus.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  That's it. Yep.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  And then you what? Cut it open?

• 51:38Speaker 01

  You tap it. Yeah.

• 51:39Speaker 00

  Oh, like a rubber tree or something?

• 51:41Speaker 01

  Basically, yeah, basically. And then you can get a slow drip out of it and that's, liquid is absolutely horrible, but it can keep you hydrated.

• 51:48Speaker 00

  Better than nothing. And then how do you create a shelter in the Mojave?

• 51:51Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's not easy. The best thing out there is to get under rocks, because there's a lot of rocks and natural jagged areas and then you need to move with the sun. And the biggest thing in, in a desert environment is never work during the heat of the day. So you are, you are down from say 10 AM to 4 PM every day. You're just resting.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  Because there's just too much caloric expenditure.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just the, your likelihood of exposure, death, like overheating, exhaustion, dehydration, just skyrockets. Yeah. And Alaska in the winter, I, I'm, there are people who are very skilled at that. I'm not one of them. Like, I would not do well. I do Alaska in the summer. Sounds lovely. But yeah, Alaska in the winter, no way. Yeah, for me.

• 52:29Mark Gagnon?

  Let's get to the animals. Why are you not afraid of animals? I'm a city boy. I don't touch them. I don't like a dog, a cat. I'm cool with that. Anything more than that, it's nah.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  I just think wildlife is the most incredible thing that we have, right? I think a lot of people forget that if we destroy any group of animals, like if we kill all the fish in the ocean, we all die. Everybody, every human on this planet goes away if we destroy the oceans, right? If we, if we get rid of all the snakes, we probably all die. Like, and I know not everybody in this room probably loves snakes, but snakes control the rodents that control the diseases. Do you know what I mean? Like the rodent outbreak means disease outbreak. So all these things, the world is like a giant game of Jenga, you know, and every piece needs to fit in that game. And animals to me are the most important piece of that. I'm not really answering your question directly, but the point is like,

• 53:23Speaker 01

  they're all fantastic and amazing. And I've had really close calls with some animals. I've been scared by animals plenty. It's not like I'm so stupid that I think no animal can hurt me or anything like that. It's just, these are the risks that I'm more than willing to take in order to have these amazing intimate interactions. And I also believe that we are hardwired as human beings, whether you're from the city or not, to have a connection to nature and animals. Like it is in our DNA. I'm telling you, man, to get you out of the city, I'm not saying you would be in your comfort zone, but you would find some like inner peace if you spent time out there and you got connected to animals. You don't need all the stimulation and all this technology and stuff. You find a sense of calm when you spend time around animals.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  What's the closest you've been to dying on the job?

• 54:12Speaker 01

  The one that I thought was the closest is actually a pretty crazy story. I was, you know what a sea snake is?

• 54:17Speaker 00

  No.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Snakes that live in the ocean.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Right?

• 54:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it looks like an eel?

• 54:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of them, yeah. So if you look up like an elegant sea snake, this is the one, the species we were working on. So I was in Western Australia and we were milking sea snakes, which means taking the venom out of them. And you do that by taking a tiny little pipette, like a little syringe, and you put it over the fang and you pipette it and you pump it and the venom comes out.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  I've milked a snake before and I don't mean that as a euphemism. I've actually done it and the way that the guy did it was the snake bites onto a jar with some like kind of silicone.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Rubber cup.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. Why not do it like that?

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Because the sea snakes don't have big fangs, like whatever you milked, a rattlesnake or something.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  So those types of snakes, viperids, snakes with big fangs, have a venom delivery system from two giant fangs. So it bites into the cup, the plastic sheath holds the fangs in place and the venom drips out. Sea snakes have tons of tiny little teeth.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  And each one of them has?

• 55:11Speaker 01

  And each one of them, yeah. Now, they still have fangs, you can get into the minutia of it, but basically they're tiny, tiny little teeth. Like to the point you can barely see them. So in order to milk a sea snake, you have to actually pipette it, like I was explaining. So I was milking venom from a sea snake, barehanded, I didn't have gloves on, and one drop of sea snake venom can easily kill you, right? It's very, very potent. But they don't usually bite people, they're not aggressive and they're, they're pretty limp on land, they're adapted for the sea. And so the time I thought I was the closest to death was I was milking a sea snake and I noticed that I had pushed the pipette the wrong way a little bit and the venom was running down over my fingers, right? And I was like, ah shit, and I adjusted and I kept pipetting and got all the venom, put it in the vials and all of that.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  And then I was arguing with my cameraman, because I was doing this for a Discovery Channel show, and he goes, you gotta do this drone shot. I go, come on, man, just stop it. And I did this with my fingers in my, in my eye ducts. And then I was sitting there and I, I just, I remember this distinctly, I went, fuck. And he goes, what? And I go, I think I just killed myself. And he goes, what'd you say? I was like, ah, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. I just whispered it under my breath. And so the problem with the sea snake venom from an hellion sea snake is you have almost no symptoms for five or six hours. Then you feel very fatigued, then your heart stops and that's it.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  And it just coagulates your blood?

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. So here I was, thinking, and I was like, was it my left hand, was it my right hand? Did I rinse my hand, did I not rinse my hand? And I just couldn't remember because it was all happening, you know, you've been on set, like it's all happening and stuff going on. So I thought for six hours that I had rubbed sea snake venom into my eye ducts.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  You were waiting to die.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  And I was waiting to die, so much so that, you know, we finished out the shoot, like, I was going on its own mental battle, but I didn't want to take it to my, my crew, my team, because I was like, there's nothing can be done. It's too late, you know, we're too remote, there's nothing that can be done. So I had this inner monologue with myself, I was like, right, just don't say anything, don't know for sure, just, just get on with the day and just keep your head down. So we finished up, we were all right at the end of our day anyway, okay, I got the venom, everything's good, let's go home. And I've started a timer, because I was like, I have between six and eight hours if I've done it. We got back to the town we were staying in, which is a tiny little town called Coral Bay in Western Australia, where we had a rental house. And I wrote a note to my wife and my kid at the time, I only have one, I have two kids now. I wrote a note to them, put it down next to the bed, just in case I never woke up.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  And of course, it was a super long day, so I was feeling incredibly fatigued. I'd been out in the sun all day, so I didn't know if that was sea snake venom or just exhaustion.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  Why not tell someone, why not try to get some sort of cure?

• 57:40Speaker 01

  There's nothing I could do.

• 57:41Speaker 00

  There's no cure for it?

• 57:42Speaker 01

  One, there's no anti-venom for this, because it's incredibly rare to get bitten by one, because they're not aggressive. And two, we were 12 hours from Perth, which is the only city that you could get treatment.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  Oh my god.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  There was just no way, there was no time, amount of time, there was just no way. Do you know what I mean? And we were out on the boat, two hours from where the dock was, like, I did all that calculation in my head, like, is there anything that could actually be done? And the answer was no.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  So what are you thinking in those last moments?

• 58:07Speaker 01

  I just was really thinking about like my family and like, fuck, like eh, and I even wrote at the bottom of the note, PS to the crew, sorry you have to deal with my body.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Oh, Jesus.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  So I was like, this is gonna be a pain in the ass for everybody.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Is there like an acceptance of death that you have based on these?

• 58:25Speaker 01

  I don't think so, I don't want to die. I'm not, I'm not looking for it, I don't want something bad to happen. I understand the risks that I take, but I also understand that it's something stupid like that. It's not the charging elephant that's gonna kill me, it's me putting my fingers in my eyes with potential venom on it, you know? And those things are hard to, people that die from wildlife, and it does happen, like, you know, influencers that get bitten or, or, you know, Steve Irwin's or whatever, it's usually from complacency. It's because you get so comfortable with the venomous snake or, or the tigers in the Siegfried and Roy case, or whatever it happens to be, that you become complacent around them. I try and remind myself of that all the time, don't become complacent.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  And then it's the small mistakes, like rubbing your fingers in your eyes. So I didn't, I wasn't like, I've accepted this, I'm going to die, I was like, fuck, I, I really, really hope this doesn't happen and this is a contingency, like here's a letter and like, I don't want to make a big deal out of this.

• 59:24Speaker 02

  How do you feel when you wake up and you look at the letter?

• 59:25Speaker 01

  So good. So I, here's what's so stupid, I was so dramatic, I was like a movie in my own mind, I went to bed like this.

• 59:32Speaker 00

  Like the undertaker?

• 59:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I woke up on my side with my hair messed up, like, I was just being so dramatic, you know? And then I looked and I was like, woo hoo, I'm good, crumpled up the letter, you know, chucked it in the trash, I was like, let's get on with our day.

• 59:43Speaker 00

  Oh, you gotta frame that letter, yeah, you gotta keep that letter.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  I should have, you're right, I should have. I was so happy that it didn't kick in.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  Tell your team the next day?

• 59:50Speaker 01

  I told them all the next day, yeah. But, you know, I intentionally went to bed early because I didn't want to be awake if the process happened.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  But yeah, and anyway, nothing happened.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  What was the purpose of working with that snake? Like, why milk the venom?

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  At that point in time, there was mysterious strandings of tiger sharks on the beaches in that part of the world. And I had a hypothesis that the reason that the tiger sharks were dying was because they were trying to eat sea snakes. And sea snakes can't bite a tiger shark because their skin's too thick. But my hypothesis was that there was soft tissue in the mouth, yeah. And so the only way we could test that was to get sea snake venom and get tiger shark tissue and run tests. So I went to collect the sea snake venom, yeah.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Wow, what did you?

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  We found out that tiger sharks are fully susceptible to venom, they do not have an immunity, some fish do. Some fish actually do have an immunity to snake venom, some mammals have immunity to cobra venom, blah, blah, blah. Tiger sharks do not, it kills the tissue in the cells just the same as any other fish.

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  So it may be why those tiger sharks, which they had plenty of autopsies on, but they could never find any harm. I think that's what was happening.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  Have you seen what snake venom does to blood?

• 1:00:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  Like, this video, I saw it years ago, but it's like, literally just a jar of blood and then they drop like some snake venom into it.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

  Play, play.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  And it coagulates, like it's just a regular little cup of blood.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Turns into jello.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  Turns into jello, yeah.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Within like a couple of minutes.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's bad. And there are multiple types of snake venom?

• 1:01:13Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Isn't that gross? How the sound effects they've added, yeah?

• 1:01:19Speaker 02

  And that's just happening in your, in your veins?

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  In your body, yeah. And that's, you know, there's hemotoxic, cytotoxic and neurotoxic venom. And then various snakes have various cocktails of those three. So, you know, some will rot tissue at the site, some will shut down your organs, some will do this to your blood, it's, it's crazy.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  Snakes are terrifying.

• 1:01:37Speaker 00

  The, the sucking the venom out thing that you see in movies, where like you got bitten and then somebody like sucks it out, is that?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Not true, at all.

• 1:01:45Speaker 00

  Complete waste.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  Complete waste, yeah. Because, you know, your blood pumps around your body.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  What, you sucked it for no reason?

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude.

• 1:01:53Speaker 00

  My mom was like, yo, my balls got bit by this snake. I gotta save you, dude.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  Okay, so that's complete bullshit.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  It is, yeah.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Apparently it's like the number one nightmare around the world.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Is this?

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  Is snakes? Yeah, like, like there's like dream studies, like across cultures and like, in America, it's like your teeth falling out, and then like through all of Asia and Africa, it's just snakes.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Well, it makes sense, I mean, you know, in India, there's 60,000 snake bite deaths a year.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  That's a huge, huge, 60,000? That's, I mean.

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  And so you're not worried about that if when you're sleeping outside, even though you have shelter, a snake can easily come in while you're sleeping, just like, that doesn't cross your mind?

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  They don't, you know what I mean? Like, you don't, the snakes aren't coming into your tent, they don't want anything to do with you.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  They bite 60,000 people, so they clearly do sometimes.

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, because they're doing a flurry in the street with them, it's like, they're harassing them, making them dance for no reason.

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  No, but don't they defang them?

• 1:02:48Speaker 01

  For those, yeah, for those snake shows and things, but a lot of those snake bites are usually, you know, collecting wood or working in tea farms or stuff like that. These things do happen, you know, could I stand on a snake and it bite me? Absolutely.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  That's what I, that's what I think would be most likely.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  That's more scary.

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  Accidentally take a step, you stand on it, and then they reactively.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  Try to bite you, because they're not going to hunt, right?

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  It's defensive, it's not aggressive.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  Have you seen any of the, what is it, anacondas in the Everglades?

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  The Burmese pythons.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  The Burmese pythons.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's crazy what's going on down there. I mean, those Burmese pythons have led to a, I believe it's 80 or maybe 90 now percent reduction in the mammals in the Everglades.

• 1:03:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Like, they've taken 80 to 90% of the mammals out of the Everglades.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  Is it an invasive species?

• 1:03:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  They're just released by like private collectors, right?

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Hurricane Andrews in, I want to say 94, but you'd have to fact check me, hit South Florida.

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  And there was a, there was a facility that had a bunch of these snakes, these Burmese pythons from Myanmar, from Burma. And they got out into the Everglades. And now they're just, they're rampant.

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Is there any way to control that?

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  And so the state of Florida has a bounty on their head where, I'm making up the number, but you get 20 bucks a snake or something like that if you turn them in. So there are these guys, like there's a guy named the Python Cowboy and stuff on Instagram, and they go out and they, they collect these snakes and they turn them in for 20 bucks apiece or whatever.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  That worked out horribly in India.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, with the cobra collections.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  Have you heard about this?

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  No, tell me.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  So I think it was, like, was it the Dutch East India Trading Company or something like that? Like, they basically were trying to solve a cobra problem.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  It was the English, I think.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  It was the English, right? And they were trying to solve a cobra problem in England. So what they started doing is putting a bounty on the cobras.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:04:25Speaker 00

  And Indians are smart, shrewd people, so they started breeding cobras.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go. There you go.

• 1:04:30Speaker 00

  So it is this weird thing where it's like, okay, we can make 120, whatever it is, per snake.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Speaker 00

  Why don't we just start a farm of snakes?

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  And then they stopped the bounty system, then all these farms were like, well.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  Well, now what? Yeah, and then they probably just released all their snakes.

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  And they like even made the snake problem way worse.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  There you go. That's people for you. Um, every time we interfere with nature, whether that's introducing invasive, introducing species to control other species, trying to eradicate something, we throw the thing off balance.

• 1:04:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  There's no, we've never once been like, okay, let's add this animal or remove this animal, and it hasn't had a big trickle down.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  But I've heard some good things about like introducing beavers to certain areas, and they've like revitalized river systems.

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  A hundred percent, because that's, that's not an introduction, that's a rewilding.

• 1:05:16Speaker 00

  Oh, that's right, that's right. It's like the beavers weren't there because they had been like, uh,

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Expatriated, yeah.

• 1:05:21Speaker 00

  Is that the term they use? Yeah, basically hunted out. And then they reintroduce them, and then they like, it's not just the river, it's also the plains.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  It's like this, there's amazing video I saw, I'm not doing a good job describing, maybe you could do better.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  It's so cool, because like, if you think of a beaver, what a beaver does, right? It makes dams. And if you go to, say, the Dakotas, right, South Dakota, and you see this creek, and you look at the creek, and from the outside perspective looking in, you're like, okay, look at this, we've got mountains on either side, this beautiful grassy valley, and this little creek going down the middle. It's perfect. It looks amazing. But then you add a beaver into the equation, the beaver comes along and he builds a dam in that creek. Now all of a sudden, that grassy plain that you're looking at is flooded with water. So now you've got a whole wetland. Within a wetland, you get baby frogs, which lead to baby snakes, which lead to more birds, which leads to blank, to blank, to blank, to blank. So you build a whole ecosystem. And a beaver is what we call an ecosystem engineer, a keystone species.

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  And so by adding a beaver into that, it affects the entire environment, including all of the animals that live in it, and brings those numbers up. Without it, to the naked eye, you go, it's perfect here. But you realize it's actually not perfect. The system that you're looking at is broken.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  It's based on that animal in a lot of ways.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  So what happens when they were hunting these beavers? Because, what, they were making like, um, they were using their skin, right?

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, fur.

• 1:06:37Speaker 00

  For, yeah, and this was like popular in Canada, North America.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  All over.

• 1:06:41Speaker 00

  All over.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Because beaver's, beaver fur is the highest, uh, fur density. Because you know, the, so beaver skin never gets wet, because their fur is so dense.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  That you can put it underwater, and the water doesn't penetrate through the hairs.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  So it's one of those.

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  That's incredibly valuable. You think about it, the time before raincoats, you're like.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  That's right. I need a beaver skin coat.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting. Okay, so they start, uh, what'd you say, expatriating them?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Yep, expatriating, yeah.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  Okay. And then what happens to these different areas at that time? We're talking about this like 1600s, this is happening, 1700s.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  What ends up happening is, at first, nothing. Because you're like, everything's still the same, because beavers build dams.

• 1:07:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Those dams last for a year, or five years, or 10 years, or 15 years.

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  But then slowly, the dams begin to break down. And as the dams break down, all that water recedes. As that water recedes, an area that was a wetland now becomes dry.

• 1:07:30Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  All the things that use that for seasonal reproduction die off. So it's like a slow burn.

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  And now you don't know what the catalyst was, because it was 15 years ago.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:07:39Speaker 00

  And so who came up with this idea to reintroduce them? That's brilliant.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  I don't know, but do you know how they first did it?

• 1:07:45Speaker 00

  How?

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Parachutes. You gotta look this up. Parachuting beavers.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  No fucking way.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  You think I'm joking, and I am not.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  Hey, why would they use parachutes? Why not just like simply place them in there?

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Because a lot of the systems they'd hunted them out were very remote. So in order to put a lot of beavers back into the environment quickly, they put parachutes on beavers, I'm not joking, in these little boxes, and dropped them out of airplanes all throughout the area. This is not a gag. This is the real deal. Dude, biology used to be wild. I wish I'd been a biologist 40 years ago. I'd be like, you know what we're gonna do this week? We're gonna parachute some beavers. And nobody would have looked at you funny. They would have been like, let's do it. Let's build some parachutes for some beavers.

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  1948, Ohio Department of Fish and Game programmed to relocate beavers from Northwest Idaho to the Chamberlain Basin in central Idaho.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  76 beavers, just by, by paratrooping.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  By paratrooping.

• 1:08:33Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Isn't that cool?

• 1:08:35Speaker 00

  And it worked.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  And it worked. Yeah. They said a lot of the beavers died, go figure. But, um, but it, yeah, it 100% worked and kept some of them in the environment. Yeah.

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  Crazy.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

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• 1:10:13Speaker 00

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  At ZipRecruiter, they have a new feature that shows you the most interested qualified candidates first. So you meet the right people faster, okay? ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology finds qualified candidates quickly. Candidates can tell you in their own words why they're interested in your job. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Try ZipRecruiter and meet great candidates who will go the extra step for your job. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try for free today, ziprecruiter.com/flagrant. That's ziprecruiter.com/flagrant. ZipRecruiter, meet your match on ZipRecruiter. All right, before we get back into the show, Alex, our resident tennis expert, I know this is a big week for you.

• 1:11:39Speaker 00

  I know you're coming over off of injuries and all this other stuff, but this is the US Open that takes place in New York City. New York City.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  I'm excited.

• 1:11:48Speaker 00

  Your boy Carlos is back.

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, four months off.

• 1:11:53Speaker 00

  So you don't think you got a shot? So you're not putting your money on Carlos?

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  I'm not putting my money on Carlos.

• 1:11:57Speaker 00

  You're not putting your money on the best player in the world?

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  I think an American's gonna take it. I'm going Ben Shelton.

• 1:12:04Speaker 00

  Give me, give me, what does Kelsey have in American?

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  Kelsey's got Alcaraz at 29%, they got Ben Shelton at 8%. The highest ranked American on Kelsey. I'm telling you.

• 1:12:15Speaker 00

  What about the other guy? What's his name? Medvedev or whatever?

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  Taylor Fritz is at 4%.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  Nah.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  And then Medvedev is at 3%.

• 1:12:23Speaker 00

  Who is the, who's the?

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  Sinner, you're thinking of.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  Sinner, sinner, sinner, yeah, yeah. Oh, he's out?

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  Injured, yeah.

• 1:12:28Speaker 00

  Oh, so, oh, this is, it's wide open.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  It's open for anybody.

• 1:12:31Speaker 00

  Alcaraz coming off injury.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:12:33Speaker 00

  We might have an American take it.

• 1:12:35Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  The last American to take it was?

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  I think, probably Roderick.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  Andy?

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  Oh, three.

• 1:12:41Speaker 00

  Wow, okay.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  That's wild. It's been some time. But imagine if Nathan Ovechek did it. I mean, all time legends.

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  Rumor has it.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  You got enough. The fact that he's this old and still cooking motherfuckers is awesome.

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  Because he's nasty, and also tennis isn't a real sport. You can play until your 40s. It's not a real sport, you can play until your 40s. Federer's gonna do a little exhibition, I saw, at 45.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  And I saw he was, said he's nervous, he hasn't played singles in like months or even years.

• 1:13:06Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:13:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that'd be fun. US Open is fun. I'm not gonna lie.

• 1:13:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:13:09Speaker 00

  Are you gonna go?

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Yes, but goddamn, these ticket prices are crazy.

• 1:13:13Speaker 00

  It is? Are they gouging?

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  They're gouging?

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. You think it's World Cup? Like, on the edge of the World Cup, like people are paying crazy money for tickets, so they just bump it? Yep.

• 1:13:21Speaker 00

  It's data centers, bro.

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  It's the data center.

• 1:13:23Speaker 00

  Fucking data centers, it's billionaires, it's capitalism, it's AI.

• 1:13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Speaker 00

  That's really what it is. Private equity.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  They're increasing the payout, though. Zeron's gotta bump it down.

• 1:13:34Speaker 00

  Yo, man.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  Zeron's gotta go in there and be like, yo, let's, let's cut these down. Yo, freeze the tennis prices.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  Shout out data centers giving Jews a break.

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  Jews were blamed for absolutely everything until data centers came around.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're gonna figure out a way to tie it down.

• 1:13:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, who owns the data center? Guys, guys, stop it. Let's get back to the show. Let's get back. Okay, I need another death story.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  Another death story, okay.

• 1:14:01Speaker 00

  Cause I've seen a few and I'm sure you've probably told them before, but.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  That's okay. I mean, they're all fun. I was thinking of one that I don't think I've told, which is, uh, it's not me, it's my cameraman, but it's a good story.

• 1:14:10Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  We conducted a huge elephant translocation. So we captured conflict elephants and moved them to a national park.

• 1:14:18Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  So in southern Mozambique, there was an area where there are 24 elephants that were killing people. The elephants were being killed, the whole thing, like bad conflict, right? The elephants would come into a village to raid a cornfield. The villagers would throw sticks and rocks at them. The elephants would get enraged, run through the village, flatten a hut, kill a person, that kind of thing.

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  Oh shit.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was gnarly. Um, so we performed this big elephant capture and translocation, huge ordeal. Three helicopters, five semi trucks, 65 ground personnel, you know, darting, capturing. It's crazy, big, big production.

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  And you're coordinating all this with the local government?

• 1:14:49Speaker 01

  Everything, yup.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  This is beneficial to everybody?

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. Um, and it's, it's a big effect, takes a lot of people. I was just one of the players, not, not the whole, not the whole picture, but, um. Anyway, so we went to capture these elephants and we caught all the elephants except for the bull, like the big, main male, right? Huge tusks, big head, like huge, huge animal. And, uh, the very end of the second day and we catch him finally, right? We dart him from the helicopter, he goes down, we, we land the helicopter, run in, pull his trunk out so he can breathe, cut the road in, lift him up with the crane onto the semi truck. It's this huge ordeal. And long story short, we get him onto that flatbed. And then what you have to do is once you crane them onto the flatbed, you then move them to a transport truck, which is basically like you have a conveyor belt that moves them into,

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  um, a transport crate and then you wake them up, you know, with, uh, with the reversal, drug reversal and they stand up. And then you, you ship them out, cause you can't keep them asleep. It was like a 16 hour drive. You can't keep them asleep that whole time. So, uh, we finally get this big bull, he's huge, like so big that the, you know, if he moves, it's gonna rock the whole truck around, the whole kind of thing. And we put him on the conveyor belt and he moves into the wake up box. We hit him with the drug reversal, so he starts to pop up. But the back of the semi truck, so think of a semi truck with a big container on the back, has these two doors that come together like this. And those doors are held from not falling out the backs by a little chain with a latch. Somebody had forgotten to latch one of the chains.

• 1:16:15Speaker 00

  Oh no.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  And my cameraman's sitting here, like, shooting up at the elephant as he's waking up, you know, and we're about to close the doors and the elephant gets up, but he's so big, like I mentioned, he rocks the semi truck and the door goes shooting open and the chain's not there to catch it. And these doors are 15 feet tall, six inches thick steel, you know, they weigh as much as a car, each door. And this door comes crashing down and my cameraman's standing right underneath it. And as the door falls, literally something miraculous, the, the cable that, as I mentioned, was not latched, hooked on to the little latch, but just, just out of pure luck that it caught it for just a half second. Well, my cameraman saw it, went shit and moved out the way.

• 1:16:58Speaker 00

  Boom.

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  And then this thing hit and it hit like this far from his foot. Like literally as he jumped out of the way, this whole door and this elephant's rocking around in the truck. This door's coming down, there's people everywhere, we're scrambling because the elephant's about to come out of the thing. And my cameraman missed getting flattened by an inch.

• 1:17:15Speaker 00

  Dead guaranteed.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Guaranteed. Yeah, it's like dropping a Honda SUV on top of you, you know what I mean? Like these doors, 20 people kind of left one of these doors, you know, it's like that.

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  And where were you?

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Mozambique.

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  That was crazy because we've had other stuff where animals have charged and stuff like that. But that was one of those instances where literally if anything had gone differently, if that, if that little corner latch had not hooked just the way it happened to as it fell, just for that half second to slow it down, my cameraman right in front of me, who's one of my best friends, I literally spoke at his wedding, would have been flattened right there.

• 1:17:49Speaker 00

  Fuck.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  In the field, in the middle of the bush, inside of a road in Mozambique.

• 1:17:52Speaker 00

  What about when you were jumping through the waterfall?

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sucked a lot. Um, that was, uh, we were in Thailand and I was showing off for a bunch of girls. And so I decided to climb up inside of a waterfall and jump through like a veil curtain of water instead of jump off the top of it. And, uh, yeah, it turns out the, uh, the physics of jumping through 10,000 pounds of water.

• 1:18:13Speaker 00

  Real dumb.

• 1:18:14Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not, not the way you see it in a Marvel movie, I'll tell you that, yeah. So pushed me down onto the rocks and I broke my back.

• 1:18:21Speaker 00

  Oh shit.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  I landed right here on my spine. I went paralyzed from the neck down. Um, and I was like this.

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  Concussed?

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  No, I wasn't concussed. I broke a little piece of my spine.

• 1:18:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Right here, right below my, uh, I forget the, the T number, the vertebrae.

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Um, and, uh, I was actually drowning because I hit the rocks and then the water pushed me off the rocks and I was sinking. But I couldn't move my hands and legs because of the, the, the little break in my spine.

• 1:18:45Speaker 00

  Fucking terrifying. So you're aware of it?

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  I'm totally aware.

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  Anything?

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  I felt it, like I was like, oh, that hurt, you know, when I hit it.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  And then I'm just like sinking into the water and the water was clear because it was in this beautiful river in Thailand. And I'm like, swim, swim, swim and I'm underwater. And it's like, not rapids, but you know, like, like flowing water. And all of a sudden I saw my girlfriend's hand, who's my wife now, my hair, hand come down and grabbed me and she pulled me out because she saw the whole thing happen and then never saw me surface. But the water was clear, so she could see me. So she pulled me out.

• 1:19:18Speaker 00

  Leash.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  And I, I was, at that point in time, I was ready to die because I was like, I'm paralyzed from the neck down.

• 1:19:24Speaker 00

  It's over.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  And, uh, they, they built a stretcher out of bamboo because we were in the jungle, carried me out. Um, there was, somebody had a sat phone, I think, because they had a pickup truck waiting for me and they put me in the bed of the pickup truck and it was a three or four hour drive, I forget. And somewhere along the drive, um, I started to be able to wiggle a toe again. And I was like, it was like a sigh of relief, but still panic, but like, I wasn't completely paralyzed. It had just pinched a nerve or something like that and shut everything down. And it took a few days for everything to come back. Yeah.

• 1:19:51Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  But that feeling of like.

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  Slowly slipping into the water with no ability.

• 1:19:58Speaker 01

  I couldn't move. And I'm telling, it's the weirdest thing because like I can swim, you know? And I'm like, swim, like swim. And my body's just like completely non-responsive. Yeah. Yeah, that sucks.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  And how are those days recovering? Like you go to a hospital, I presume, and you're just laying there like, am I ever gonna move again?

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I went to the hospital in Chiang Mai in Thailand, which is actually a really nice hospital. And, you know, I got x-rays and all that stuff. And I was in the hospital bed for three days, I want to say. And by the end of the second day, I was back to fully moving, you know, it just, it, I don't really understand it, but basically the, the ability to move kind of came back from my feet up.

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  And even by like the next day, I could move my hands and eat and drink, but they wanted to keep me very still with the little fracture in my spine and just make sure everything was okay. And then they basically released me and were like, here are your painkillers, good luck. But I just spent three days in a very boring hospital in Thailand, wishing I hadn't jumped off that stupid waterfall.

• 1:20:52Speaker 00

  Whoa. Anything close with one of the major predators that we'd be familiar with?

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  I mean, I did this thing with crocodiles in a cage recently that was nuts. In fact, actually, this was kind of wild. If you check out my Instagram real quick, Mark, you'll see a thing I did with lions. So I've been working on this show for the last about year and a half for Discovery Channel, that I'm not really supposed to talk about, but.

• 1:21:15Speaker 00

  We're gonna talk about it.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, it's, it's, so the show is about, yeah, that one, that little like ATV thing, one over. Yeah, if you pull that up. So the show is about putting yourself in the perspective of predators. So we were building these contraptions.

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  This looks like you're in the perspective of prey.

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  That's the plan. Yeah, that's the plan.

• 1:21:34Speaker 02

  Looks like jackass.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's like a scientific jackass. Yeah. Um, but yeah, we built these various contraptions like this. And so this is obviously with an African lion and hung meadle over it and made it look like a zebra. And then I was running this ATV with lions. I did one with crocodiles. Um, we, I got in a chainmail suit with piranhas and giant squid. That was wild, two different locations, um, not the same place. So yeah, this, this, this last year has been pretty nuts doing some of these experiments.

• 1:22:04Speaker 00

  Why?

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Well, for ratings, obviously.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, look, it's a Discovery show, so it has to be loud.

• 1:22:11Speaker 02

  The height of what we call white people shit.

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  It really is. And I think there's about eight comments on that that say that.

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  All from my life friends, by the way. You're an idiot, bro. But, uh, yeah, no, it really is. It's, I, I think this is my version of a midlife crisis, but.

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  It's a, you know, it's, it is a Discovery show, so it has to be loud and get attention and all those things. But the idea is, human beings that are usually in the perspective of prey don't get to survive. And it's not just about being a human being, it's about what would it be like to be the zebra in the Serengeti? What would it be like to be, you know, a wildebeest getting attacked by crocodiles? So we, we try to build all these contraptions, which on paper, when we put the show together, was like, this will be sick. This will be awesome. And then when you're sitting there in the ATV with the lion trying to eat you, you're like, this, this was not a good idea.

• 1:23:00Speaker 02

  It also isn't just white people shit. There's this guy, Caveman Wildlife.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Oh, I love this guy. I know him. He's great. He's the best.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's awesome. But he's, he's a, he's fixing the stereotype, dude. He's going out there and just full on, just like catching just wild crocodiles.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  He's also super knowledgeable. He always tells you the Latin name of the animal, which I appreciate. You know, he knows the natural history. He's just great. He's just a great dude.

• 1:23:25Speaker 02

  Nah, that's great.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  He's like the Jackie Robinson of snakes.

• 1:23:30Speaker 01

  No, he's awesome.

• 1:23:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I could have that.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  No, that kid's, that kid's awesome.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  These are gonna, these are gonna be your kids, Alex, I'm telling you.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  Dude, go for it, man.

• 1:23:42Mark Gagnon?

  I'm curious, when you were saving the elephants, like, what is the organization? Like, who's sponsoring these trips? Like, who calls the group of people that came to rescue these elephants?

• 1:23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's a good question. So basically what happened was, we knew these elephants were conflict elephants. And I sit on a board of a wildlife trust in Africa that gets calls when there's a lot of different conflict things. And that board called me and said, hey Forrest, like, there's this herd of elephants that are going to be euthanized, going to be killed. If we don't step in, we need X dollars in order to save them. Cost of a bullet's 60 cents. Cost of moving an elephant's 100 grand, right? It's a huge difference, right? And the Mozambique government goes, we don't have, you know, 2.4 million dollars to move elephants, right? And that wasn't what it cost, but that I'm giving you generals. And so I actually, and this is one of the reasons I do this, to answer your question, what you're seeing on screen.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  I use, and my company, uses our production money to fund conservation work.

• 1:24:42Speaker 00

  Get the fuck out of here.

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so instead of taking a salary, I mean, we still pay ourselves, but instead of taking a big salary out of my productions, I take the money that I get from Discovery Channel, or Netflix, or Animal Planet, or whoever it happens to be, and put it into conservation work. So we funded 60% of the elephant move, I believe it was, and then another 40 came from various other sources. And then there was Mozambique government, there was the board that I sit on, it's because I have an Ivan Carter Wildlife Foundation. There's about 10 other organizations that all came together to put this work together.

• 1:25:12Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, thanks. And I love it. And that's the point of doing this stuff, right? It's not just for me to get a thrill, which I do, but to fund conservation work and bring awareness to the animals, and talk about elephant conservation, and talk about lions, and, you know, even when you watch these shows, you go, oh my God, Forrest is doing jackass stuff with animals. But if you learn, if you listen, we're actually telling a story of the conservation throughout each show.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  You know about cone snails?

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  These are the most terrifying things to me, because predators, like we're talking about, are scary because they look scary.

• 1:25:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:44Speaker 02

  But you also know to stay away from like a bull shark, because you're like, this is the most terrifying thing.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:25:48Speaker 02

  Cone snails.

• 1:25:49Speaker 01

  Very nondescript.

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  Are so scary to me because they don't look like any, it looks like a shell.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  That'll kill you in a couple of seconds.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  So what other animals, and you can even talk about cone snails for a little, but what other animals are unassuming? That you, like, an average person would be like, oh, this is cool, that could kill you in a day.

• 1:26:05Speaker 00

  Great question.

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  It is a good question. I mean, so cone snails are a good example, which they've got a little venomous barb that they use for defense, that they can put venom into you and kill you very quickly. There's probably the blue ringed octopus you've probably heard of. Tiny little octopus, beautiful. If you look it up, got little blue spots on it. One bite, you're dead in 10 minutes, I want to say. I mean, don't quote me on that, but it's.

• 1:26:26Speaker 00

  I'd almost rather not know about these. That's what I'm saying. Like, ignorance is bliss, because now I'm gonna be looking for an octopus anytime I go.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  Luckily, that little thing can kill you in a few minutes.

• 1:26:35Speaker 00

  But where does that live?

• 1:26:36Speaker 01

  Only in Australia. So as long as you're not picking up.

• 1:26:39Speaker 00

  Everything in Australia, bro.

• 1:26:40Speaker 01

  They develop venom there. So as long as you're not picking up tiny little blue spotted octopus in Australia, you're good.

• 1:26:44Speaker 00

  Wait, why do they develop venom there?

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  Something about Australia as a continent doesn't have a lot of big predators. There's no tigers, there's no lions, there's no... So instead, they're all at biological warfare with each other. So that's why their snakes are more venomous. Their, their octopus are more venomous, their jellyfish are more venomous. Instead of having standard defense mechanisms like we think of, like, I'm faster and you're stronger, they have biological warfare.

• 1:27:10Speaker 00

  Wow, so instead of a big bad guy that they all have to worry about, they have to worry about each other.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:27:16Speaker 00

  So they have to, oh, that's interesting.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  And then the geography makes it weird in Australia too, because that's why there's so many marsupials, right?

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  And like, why kangaroos exist there and only there.

• 1:27:25Speaker 01

  Yes, so there's this amazing thing called the Wallace Line.

• 1:27:27Speaker 00

  I was gonna ask you about that. Okay, go, go, go, go, go.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have a YouTube video coming out on it either this week or next week on my YouTube channel, by the way, because I find this so fascinating. So the Wallace Line is this invisible line that nobody understands.

• 1:27:40Speaker 00

  Get the map up with the Wallace Line.

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so it's this invisible line that nobody, we sort of understand it, but you don't really understand. Because in some plot places, two islands are only six or 10 or 12 miles apart, and yet there's this line. And animals have never crossed this line, in the sense of, if you're looking at this map, on the left side, where you see Southeast Asia and Borneo and Sumatra, you have all the animals that we think of as animals. And when I say that, I mean, we have tigers, and we have bears, and we have deer, and we have all these normal things.

• 1:28:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  And on the right side of the line, where you see New Guinea and the Sundar Islands and Timor, you have all these marsupials, and there's no tigers, and there's no canines, and there's no cats, and there's... There are birds that exist on that left side of the line, where you see Java by Lesser Timor, and that don't exist six miles away on the other side. And we've never really understood why until very, very recently, when we understand that basically the land masses moved like this. If that makes sense? So instead of the land mass splitting like this, and being like, oh, all these animals just split, they moved like this and came all the way around.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  So they're ecologically distinct.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  So they're so diverse.

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  So they couldn't be further apart.

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:28:53Speaker 00

  And over millions of years.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:28:55Speaker 00

  They were brought back together.

• 1:28:56Speaker 01

  Even though they're only six miles apart.

• 1:28:57Speaker 00

  Oh, what an unbelievable, because that is crazy, especially if you look down by Java and Lesser Sun.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  It's like six or 12 miles of one of those islands.

• 1:29:04Speaker 00

  Completely distinct biology.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:29:06Speaker 00

  In those areas. And do they still not cross to this day, or is, are they now crossing because of proximity?

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  So fascinatingly, they're still not crossing, outside of a few birds and things, because the, where the Wallace Line is, there's incredibly deep sea trench, and you can see it right there. And you see, this is a very good map, because you see rhinos and elephants on one side, and dingoes and kangaroos and koalas on the other. And it's literally just like that. And so there's a very deep trench that runs through there, and the currents absolutely rip through there. So usually when animals go to colonize a new area, whether they're drifting across on some bamboo, or they're swimming that gap, because tigers can swim six miles, they, they just swim across, and then they colonize a new area. But because of this deep, deep water environment and these massive currents, nothing can make it across without drowning. So, so they're still not mixing.

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  Holy shit.

• 1:29:56Speaker 01

  And it's because of the geography and because of the way things split and they came together, that it's created this sort of perfect storm, where, where to us, an imaginary line exists. Imagine being an explorer or a sailor who's come all the way from England, and gone all through Asia, through Southeast Asia and India and everything, and you've seen rhinos and elephants the whole way, and you get to the edge of that, and you're like, rhinos and elephants, then you just paddle your little boat across.

• 1:30:20Speaker 02

  Star Wars.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  Six miles, and you're like, yes. You're like, new planet.

• 1:30:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  What are these things, you know? Yeah. It's amazing. The Wallace Line is so interesting.

• 1:30:29Speaker 00

  And when did they figure this out about how the plates moved?

• 1:30:31Speaker 01

  I don't know. It's a good question. It's probably in my video that I don't remember stating. But I know the scientist who did it was, I believe it was David Wallace, who's the one who, who wrote, who came, figured it out. I just don't remember the, the date. Yeah.

• 1:30:43Speaker 00

  Unbelievable.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really cool.

• 1:30:46Speaker 02

  Okay, wait, any other little animals that you wouldn't suspect that can kill you? Blue ringed octopus is, is fire.

• 1:30:50Speaker 01

  It's cool, right?

• 1:30:51Speaker 02

  I mean, box jellyfish, low key.

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  Box jelly, stonefish, do you know what they are?

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  What's that, Alex?

• 1:30:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, look up a stonefish. So it's a fish that looks like a rock, so it's perfect for stepping on. And highly, yeah, that guy right there, highly, highly toxic venom in their spines.

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  And they love to sit in tide pools in shallow areas where people like to play.

• 1:31:09Speaker 02

  What a creepy looking thing.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  Look at that guy. Yeah.

• 1:31:12Speaker 00

  I'm not going in the water.

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  So you, you step on one of these spines?

• 1:31:15Speaker 00

  This is why we don't swim.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  I mean, there's treatments and things, but yeah, they have highly toxic, highly venomous spines. Yeah, high, really painful.

• 1:31:24Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  I mean, growing up in Florida, we were always scared of amoebas.

• 1:31:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  Amoebas are like the worst.

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  Like, it's like crawl up your nose and eat your brain.

• 1:31:32Speaker 02

  As a kid, it's like, my mom would tell me about the amoebas. Like, it'd be a hot day, and she'd be like.

• 1:31:36Speaker 00

  Fucking with me?

• 1:31:37Speaker 02

  No, no, he's for real. I don't really know all the science behind it. I'm sure you could explain better, but like, the way that the lore works is like, it's a tiny little, like, basically, single cell organism you can think of, and if you jump into like still water, like a pond in the heat of summer, they can go up your nose and kill you in like three days, and you have no symptoms, you just die.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  And, and there's no cure for it either.

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  And every year, there's like one kid in Florida that dies of an amoeba.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  So that's, that's an important point, though. It's very, very rare. It doesn't happen often. But in certain stagnant bodies of water, where there's not enough water flow and stuff, you get these rare brain eating amoebas, and there's no cure for it. So if you happen to snort that water by mistake, you know, because your, your nasal passages are connected to your brain, if you happen to get water in your nose by mistake, these brain eating amoebas that look like that little splat of nothing there, can get into your brain, and, and there's nothing you can do about it. But it's incredibly rare, to be clear. I, I think it's good that parents are telling their kids to be careful and not go in disgusting water, but it is very, very rare. Yeah.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:36Speaker 00

  There was a guy I saw in one of your videos, I think it was with the, in, at the Ambani Reserve or whatever, what is it called again?

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  Dude, Ventara.

• 1:32:46Speaker 00

  It's unreal. I want to talk about that for sure. But he's a guy that I've, I've seen with a pack of lions, if I'm not mistaken.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dean.

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  I think he's, yeah, Dean. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Could someone with that type of expertise with lions introduce himself to a new pride? And develop that relationship? Or is that something you can only develop with like little, little, little ones? And then?

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  So there's two guys that do that. Dean Schneider is the one that you're thinking of. And, um, and he's hand raised these lions and they have accepted him very much so as a member of the pride.

• 1:33:20Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Um, and Dean, who's a very close friend, so I don't want this to come off the wrong way. I don't care who you are, I don't care if you're Dean, I don't care who you are. You cannot just go make friends with a new pride of lions.

• 1:33:31Speaker 00

  Not possible.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  Doesn't happen, you know, uh, because you're, you're, you're a prey species. And they're a predator, you know? And what Dean has done is he's made himself a member of their pride by never presenting himself as a prey species. And these are not wild lions. They live in a semi-wild environment, a big open enclosure, but he's never been seen as prey. He's the guy who brings them food, but he's not on the menu item.

• 1:33:53Speaker 00

  But he is distinct, like their relationship with him is distinct from other humans.

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. If I tried to walk in there, they'd kill me in two seconds.

• 1:34:01Speaker 00

  So they become wild lions once you're there?

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 1:34:06Speaker 00

  So regardless of the environment they're in, they still see you as prey, but they don't see him as prey?

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:34:11Speaker 00

  And what is that? Is that smell? Is that visual familiarity? Is that?

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  It, it is psychological conditioning. He has taught them over time and, and he's done that by like, here he is, they're eating a zebra in this video, right? Or a second ago they were. And he's still taught them, you cannot hurt me. And he's done that by probably positive and negative reinforcement. Meaning he'll smack one on the nose, not gonna hurt it, but like be like, no, like, you know? Prey doesn't do that. Prey doesn't stand up to you. Prey doesn't present themselves as, don't come at me or I'm gonna come back at you. That's not what prey does. Prey goes, don't hurt me. Right? So he's, he's used his body language and his ability to understand their body language to assimilate.

• 1:34:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:34:50Speaker 01

  He couldn't go walk up to a wild pride of lions and try this, they'd kill him. And I couldn't go to his lions and try this, even if I did that body language, they'd probably still kill him.

• 1:34:58Speaker 00

  But I've seen you with like Panthers at that reserve where like you felt very comfortable holding them, touching them. Are these domestic, can you domesticate a fucking panther?

• 1:35:08Speaker 01

  No, so that video of me swimming with the Jaguars and?

• 1:35:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, Jaguar, same thing, right?

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it depends on the vernacular, but yeah, it's, it's all fine. But, um, what you don't see and what I've never told anybody is five minutes after that video, the black one turned on us and charged me. And if I had, if I had turned and run instead of going, ah, it would have killed me for sure, like that. Five minutes after that video was done. It just snapped, like it just changed its entire modality. It didn't know me, so those were young Jaguars, to be clear. My friend Tiago hand raised them, so they were used to people similar to Dean, but they were much younger. And younger animals don't have that disposition as much. They were only two-year-old Jaguars. And he said, let's try this. If the Jaguars give us biological cues, they don't want it, they don't wanna come in the water, they don't like you, we're not doing it.

• 1:35:56Speaker 01

  I said, of course, like I'm not gonna force anything to do anything. So we jumped in the water, Jaguars came to Tiago, my buddy in the video, who hand raised them. Then said, oh, we like this guy and came over to me. We swam with them for 10 minutes. It was amazing experience, it's a really good place, not a Tiger King place, world's leading biologist in Jaguars, really, really tremendous place. And, um, and then we're like, okay, the Jaguars are starting to be a little standoffish, let's get out.

• 1:36:20Speaker 00

  What are the cues for that?

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  Just the ears are starting to pin back a little bit, you know?

• 1:36:23Speaker 00

  So he's, he's clocking these things?

• 1:36:25Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. Everything's watching, the whisker movement, the tail flicks, the ears.

• 1:36:29Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 1:36:30Speaker 01

  The full body language, just like you have a dog and you're like?

• 1:36:32Speaker 00

  One hundred percent.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  You know, that dog's hungry, that dog's sleepy, that dog doesn't wanna be pet right now. You know your dog. I don't know your dog, but you know your dog. And so, um, yeah, he goes, look, these Jaguars are starting to have enough. And I was like, let's get out of here. We get out of the water, I'm on the river bank about to pick up my shoes. I wasn't even gonna tie my shoelace and make myself spoil nothing, just about to pick up my shoes and leave. Cause I still have more knowledge than your average person about their body language. So I know not to turn my back on them, not to crouch down, tie my shoelaces, nothing. I'm just about to pick up my shoes, this one just goes, and I heard it coming, so I turn and went, ah! You know, and the Jaguar stopped in its tracks and turned and ran around. If I had just jumped like that or, or ran out of instinct, it would have nailed me for sure.

• 1:37:15Speaker 00

  Bro. I mean?

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  Why?

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  And that's not a wild cat.

• 1:37:18Speaker 00

  Oh, here's an image of it, right?

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the last video I posted on Instagram is, is a video of us swimming with them.

• 1:37:25Speaker 00

  I mean, but that knee jerk instinct, most human beings will not have.

• 1:37:29Speaker 01

  That they will have.

• 1:37:31Speaker 00

  No, most, I think your instinct to turn around, get big and yell at this Jaguar as it's approaching you ferociously.

• 1:37:39Speaker 01

  Is a learned instinct.

• 1:37:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  Yes, and you have to practice it.

• 1:37:43Speaker 00

  And in that moment, were you cognizant of the decision? Or was it so reflexive for you that that's just how you operate with the animals?

• 1:37:51Speaker 01

  It was reflexive because the whole time going into it, I told myself, don't act like prey. Don't ever, no matter what happens, like in this frame, if he had just dug my claws in, if I had gone, stop, stop, stop, he would have gone worse. If I'd gone, hey, you know, he probably would have stopped. So I'm telling myself this, the whole time, if I'm having fun, I'm thinking about how, how am I, how am I conducting myself?

• 1:38:11Speaker 02

  This is crazy, bro.

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  But that's, that's what animal people do. You learn to speak animals to the best of your ability.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  Some animals understand human better than others, you know? Like we, we swam with the gator boy Chris.

• 1:38:24Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, shout out Gator Boy Chris.

• 1:38:25Speaker 01

  I love Chris Gillette. Yeah, he's one of my close friends, I love Chris.

• 1:38:28Speaker 00

  He was great.

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, we went down to South Florida, we swam around with some gators.

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:33Speaker 02

  Unsettling.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  And he speaks alligator.

• 1:38:35Speaker 00

  He does.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  Chris speaks alligator.

• 1:38:36Speaker 02

  But I don't trust that alligators are, are the same. Like, like Jaguar, I can be like, yeah, that's like my cat, like I can understand when their whiskers, like a gator, that's a dinosaur.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is, and their brains are wired differently.

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  So it's like, I don't really trust a gator to be cool.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  But the same thing, I agree with you, by the way. It's Steve Irwin who said, you know, crocodiles are easy, they always wanna kill you. People are harder because they pretend to be your friend first, you know what I mean? And that's it, dude, because every animal and every individual animal of that species is different. You can't trust people, you know what I mean? Like you can't go to a bar and be like, I trust every guy in here. Doesn't mean one guy isn't gonna stab you and take your wallet when you leave the bar. That's an individual. These Jaguars are the same. That, that golden colored one, I felt like, and I'm probably wrong, I could have stuck my finger in its butt and it wouldn't have done anything. That black one there? This is gonna come out wrong, here we go again. But that black Jaguar?

• 1:39:31Speaker 00

  Violent, right?

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it had dad issues.

• 1:39:37Speaker 01

  No, it, it had?

• 1:39:38Speaker 02

  Jaguar with the hard R.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  It had some kind of a like a, you could see it, switch could flip, you know? Yeah, and so it just, it's individuals and they're the same species raised the, the same way, you know? And so it just, that one had like a tick to it and the other one didn't, you know? So not just the species, cause I agree with you on the gators, the gators will eat you at the first chance they get, no matter what. But the individuals of that species.

• 1:40:05Speaker 00

  Can you, can you talk to?

• 1:40:07Speaker 01

  Can you? Sorry, bro.

• 1:40:09Speaker 00

  Can you take us into the Amazon for a second?

• 1:40:12Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:40:13Speaker 00

  Okay. Can you first explain why the Amazon is so sensational? Like there's a lot of talk about the Amazon rainforest and it's so big, whatever. But I don't think, at least definitely I don't, but I think many people don't understand why it's distinct from other forests, other places. Like, like what is so special about the Amazon?

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  Well, the main thing is it's the lungs of our entire planet. The Amazon jungle is the largest next to the ocean CO2 sequestering body on earth. So it takes in carbon dioxide and spits out oxygen, which makes it the lungs of the entire planet of earth. So that huge mass of trees that we just think of as wild place is the reason we're sitting here breathing comfortably right now. Or at least one of the top reasons. And so that's the most important thing about that, right? And then if you understand that the Amazon is shrinking at a very vast rate, even though we still look at it like this and go, wow, there's a lot of Amazon. It's getting shrunk from the outside in. You might be able to find like a map of the Amazon over the last 20 years or something.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  You see how the roads are cutting through and the developments shrinking and stuff. So the most important message I wanna say is that the Amazon is incredibly important. Outside of that, from a exciting and discovery and entertainment and all those other things standpoint, it's just incredible. It's hugely diverse. People like to think of the Amazon or the Arctic or the Sahara as one thing. The difference between the Ecuadorian Amazon, the Brazilian Amazon, or Suriname, or Guyana, or Venezuela, any of these places, completely different.

• 1:41:43Speaker 00

  Well, we're talking about the Amazon and we're talking about the untouched parts of the Amazon. Now, I'm not saying there aren't like some, maybe some roads, but like really untouched. The size of it is equivalent to the entire United States?

• 1:41:53Speaker 01

  I believe so, I believe that's about right.

• 1:41:55Speaker 00

  So you're telling me there's an untouched forest that exists on planet earth, the size of the United States, more or less?

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  No, and that's, it's good that you bring that up because the Amazon is the size of the United States. There are cities in the Amazon, like there's Manaus, which is a big, big city in Brazil that has four or five million people in it. At one point in time, it was the richest city in the world, it's the rubber trade, yeah. But there are chunks of the Amazon that are probably the size of New England, you know, not the size of the United States, I'm making this up. But there are chunks of the Amazon that are the size of US states that are untouched.

• 1:42:27Speaker 00

  Completely untouched.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. As far as we know, there's probably native tribes and, and uncontacted people and stuff. And then there are probably chunks that people themselves have never been at.

• 1:42:37Speaker 00

  Holy shit. What do you think is the most misunderstood part about the Amazon?

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  I think it's that this, it's this sort of wild, expansive, impenetrable thing. You know, we think of the Amazon like that.

• 1:42:52Speaker 00

  That's kind of what I think about it, yeah.

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  But it's not, and that's what's sad is like, we could cut down the Amazon if we wanted to. We could build highways through the Amazon if we wanted to. We could get to every corner of the Amazon if we wanted to. We haven't, cause we haven't needed to, because it's the size of the United States and we can go from the outside in. We haven't had to go to the center of it. But it's by no means this, this thing that we can never get through or never destroy or, or never explore. It's very obtainable to humans with our technology if we want to.

• 1:43:23Speaker 00

  My perspective on the Amazon is that it's incredibly difficult to live and survive and thrive in. Is that completely wrong?

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, there are better people to answer this question than me, but it is more difficult than some of the tropical places we talked about, beach type places. But certainly not easy, but and mostly because of the parasitic load, you know, there's a lot of parasites there. There's a lot of water amoebas, not the kind that eat your brain, but stomach ones and things like that. And then in a lot of places in the Amazon, food is scarce. You think food is abundant in the jungle. It's not. And a lot of places in the Amazon, food is quite scarce. If you can't kill a river turtle, you're not going to eat, you know? Yeah, it's not like there's fruit trees growing everywhere, you know, like there are a lot of places in the Amazon where you, if you're living in as an uncontacted

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  tribe, you have to hunt to survive and you have to be successful. And hunting in a jungle is much harder than hunting in certain other ecosystems.

• 1:44:20Speaker 00

  Why is that?

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  Uh, the, anywhere where you have high species diversity, meaning a lot of different types of animals, you have lower abundance of each animal. So here in North America, you go out shoot a deer, we got tons of deer.

• 1:44:31Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  We don't have a million different kinds of deer. We have four kinds of deer, right? Not really, but basically. Um, so it's, there's a lot of those four kinds. When you have 10,000 species or 10 million, like in the Amazon, there's only small populations of each of those because there's so many different kinds. So anytime species diversity goes way up, abundance goes down. So that makes hunting harder because in the Amazon, you don't have 100 kinds of deer. You have five, I'm making it, you don't actually, but you have, say, 50 kinds of things that you can eat, but each kind of thing that you can eat has small populations instead of four kinds of things that you can eat that have huge populations.

• 1:45:11Speaker 02

  So you learn like tracking patterns and all of a sudden it's gone and then you have to find another way to hunt or another.

• 1:45:17Speaker 01

  Or it's just hard to find because there's not that many of them naturally, not because of humans interfering. People often think like all wildlife is the same, right? Like it is a sense of like, there's 10,000 lions, there's 10,000 tigers, there's 10,000 deer. It's not like that at all, you know? The predator prey equation balances and moves populations. And in the Amazon, you have a lot of different kinds of things. So you have smaller amounts regardless of human imprint of those things. And there's only so many of those things you can eat, right? You can't, the Amazon's probably home to the highest bug diversity in the world. Well, every ecological niche that a bug takes, meaning every leaf cutter bug, means there's no rabbit that takes that place. And a rabbit's a great human food source. Does that make sense?

• 1:45:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  So like you, you can't eat the bug, but you can eat the rabbit. You go to England, there's rabbits everywhere. They don't have bugs. You go to the Amazon, there's bugs everywhere. They don't have rabbits. So when you have that kind of makeup of species, there's not a lot that we can eat.

• 1:46:11Speaker 00

  So then how was it so that there were these flourishing societies that existed throughout the Amazon? And now they've all gone away to disease or to whatever hell, you know, else happened. But like at one point in time, I think I was reading that like there were millions and millions of people living throughout the Amazon with like sophisticated roadway structures and pyramids and they've done those LiDAR scans to show these things.

• 1:46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Speaker 00

  So if there isn't the diverse, well, there is tons of diversity of the things that you can consume, but not much of it, how could they thrive in that environment?

• 1:46:43Speaker 01

  Well, what we have been learning, I believe, is that a lot of the Amazon and a lot of the Amazonian people and societies that you just mentioned were actually horticulturists. They were growing things.

• 1:46:54Speaker 00

  Oh, so interesting.

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  Yes, they were farming. And there's even a theory out there, I forget his name, the guy went on Joe Rogan. I think, I think he's a member of the Explorers Club right here in New York, by the way, um, which is great if you guys haven't been.

• 1:47:04Speaker 00

  Are you a member?

• 1:47:05Speaker 01

  I am, yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. If you guys ever want to go, definitely go check it out. But um, there's a theory of one of these pretty famous scientists in the Amazon, I'm blanking on his name right now, does the LiDAR scans and everything, that a lot of the Amazon was planted. He actually believes that a large chunk of the Amazon, whether it was inadvertently or inadvertently was, was cultivated to have more food. Like they, they found fruit trees, you know, not fruit like you or I are thinking, not a plum tree, but like, oh, here's this weird little seed nut thing that we can eat.

• 1:47:33Speaker 00

  That's not indigenous to the Amazon at all.

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  Or it was from one part of the Amazon, but they spread it as much as possible. So there was more food availability.

• 1:47:40Speaker 02

  Is it Charles Clement?

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  That sounds right. Yeah, that sounds right. Um, but yeah, so there are, there are now, and there's more, you know, we used to think that there were no, no longstanding societies or cultures in the Amazon. There was no food availability really. And that's why there was no population. And now we're starting to learn there was a decent population and there's actually a lot more food availability, potentially because people made it that way.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  Wow. Yeah. He's associated with the strong version of the idea that much of the Amazon rainforest we see is not pristine wilderness, but a landscape heavily engineered by indigenous people.

• 1:48:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:11Speaker 02

  And argues that pre-Columbian Amazonians deliberately encouraged and planted useful trees, fruit, nut and palm species.

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Isn't that interesting?

• 1:48:18Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  There's a really interesting kid, um, and I, I definitely won't remember his name, who's a member of the Explorers Club, that's where I met him, who is trying to bring all of these various fruits, nuts and seeds from the Amazon into like mainstream fruit markets and things. Cause if you ever go to the Amazon, they'll hand you this orange thing like this that you've never seen or heard of before. And it's got some crazy name and you eat it and you're like, this is better. This is like a mango meets an apple, you know? Or this is a kiwi mixed with a grape, or I'm just making it up. But you know, these fruits that you've never heard of or seen of, and they're so delicious, but they only exist in the Amazon. So there's this guy who's trying to bring these fruits and like make them more mainstream and bring them into the US.

• 1:48:58Speaker 02

  That's kind of the story with psychedelic mushrooms.

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  Is it?

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

  Like, like there was, like, it was kind of unknown to Americans for like, basically up until like the 50s. Like there were stories of like Jesuit priests that talked about these like psychedelic things, da, da, da, but they didn't really know exactly what it was. And it was kind of contained to like certain parts of Mexico. And then Maria Sabina was a woman that like Harvard researchers and like potentially the US government like found and got in touch with to preserve like the historical like mushroom psilocybin culture.

• 1:49:27Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  And then introduced it to like the academic world in America that then populated throughout like the hippie movement.

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  But it was, the mushrooms themselves were still growing and just nobody was aware of the compound.

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. It was like specific, like kind of shaman sort of medicine women in, in Central America that were aware of like what they were, where they grew and like how to actually cultivate them, to my understanding.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  Dude, I just saw this thing, uh, on my podcast recently, one of the guys brought it up of this guy taking toad venom. Have you ever seen this? I'm not sure what it's called.

• 1:49:59Speaker 00

  Oh, as a drug.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  As a drug. He's down by a creek, he's down by a river and he ingests this toad venom. And he just, he rolls into the river and he's screaming and it's, this is a thing that exists in nature that's coming off of frogs in the Sonoran Desert. It's unbelievable. Yeah. Some of these things are so potent.

• 1:50:17Speaker 02

  Cambo toad venom.

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  That sounds right.

• 1:50:19Speaker 02

  I think it's like an initiation rite for like some tribes. Yeah, this is Mike Corey right here, the legend. Do you know him, Fearless and Far?

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  I don't.

• 1:50:26Speaker 02

  He's awesome.

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  What does he do? He tries all these things?

• 1:50:28Speaker 02

  He basically is just an explorer adventurer that like documents his travels like around the world. He's awesome.

• 1:50:34Speaker 01

  Oh, cool. But uh, I need to get more like wired into those people. I'm so like focused, singularly focused on the wildlife stuff that I can't, I'll look into that guy's lips. Uh, I'm so like singularly focused on the wildlife stuff. I, I miss out on meeting a lot of these really interesting people.

• 1:50:48Speaker 02

  But like, I'm pretty sure it's the poison dart that like they would make weapons out of, that in the right amounts, it basically puts you into like a near death state where you hallucinate like crazy.

• 1:50:58Speaker 00

  And release DMT?

• 1:50:59Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah. And I think like West African, there's some specific West African tribes that do it as like an initiation rite. I think. If someone could fact check that, if only someone had a computer.

• 1:51:08Speaker 01

  I've seen, when I've been in the Amazon where they, they catch the poison dart frogs and they rub their arrows on them. And then they shoot things out of the trees and the animals drop dead.

• 1:51:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  So it's more about darting the animal with the poison than it's about killing it with the arrow.

• 1:51:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:51:21Speaker 00

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• 1:53:54Speaker 02

  The FDA?

• 1:53:55Speaker 00

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• 1:54:05Speaker 02

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• 1:54:07Speaker 00

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• 1:55:31Speaker 00

  Have you ever met any of the, I mean, I guess they're not uncontacted tribes, but any of these tribes? Have you ever spent time with them?

• 1:55:36Speaker 01

  I've spent time with some very interesting tribes, including some that have never seen white people before, but not like totally uncontacted. Like even, you know, we went to a place called Ramri Island in Myanmar that I don't think there've been any Europeans there since World War II. And all the kids, when I say kids, I mean like 16 and down, would run out and like touch our hair and touch our skin and stuff, because they'd never seen a European person. And then, uh, yeah, I guess that's part of the most remote. But, you know, it's interesting, even like, I went to a village in Colombia that had never seen European people, in the Amazon in Colombia, and they still had cellphones, you know?

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  They didn't have service, but they, somebody had brought them cellphones and things and they were playing snake or whatever on them, but they'd never seen a European person in person. So, I've never been with those tribes that are so remote that they like didn't know we existed, kind of thing. But, yeah, that's, that's the modern world, though, isn't it?

• 1:56:34Speaker 02

  Are there any that are really uncontacted? Like, people talk about like the North Sentineales, but like, are there any that we don't, have no idea about?

• 1:56:41Speaker 01

  Uh, in the Amazon, yeah. And I, I think also in like deep New Guinea and Papua New Guinea, there are small tribal communities that are just completely isolated from the rest of the world.

• 1:56:51Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:56:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, if you think New Guinea's a good example, there's 800 languages spoken in New Guinea. Why would you have 800 languages? Because you don't get along. Do you know what I mean? You formulate your own language and you keep it to yourselves because you're a tribal culture that goes to war with all the other cultures.

• 1:57:08Speaker 00

  Can you bring up New Guinea on a map?

• 1:57:09Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:57:10Speaker 00

  Like, how big can New Guinea be?

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  Oh, it's huge.

• 1:57:12Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 1:57:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Type in Papua New Guinea on the, I mean, it's that whole giant island above Australia there, where those red dots are.

• 1:57:19Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:57:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's a really big landmass.

• 1:57:22Speaker 00

  800?

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  800 languages spoken there, yeah.

• 1:57:25Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  That's a lot of languages.

• 1:57:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  But that's because the environment is very difficult to navigate, and they're culturally are a very warring society and people. So, you keep to yourself, you speak your own language, and if you encounter another tribe, you kill them.

• 1:57:40Speaker 00

  Immediately.

• 1:57:41Speaker 01

  You know, more or less. I mean, that's a oversimplification, but yeah.

• 1:57:44Speaker 02

  Have you, have you looked into cargo cults?

• 1:57:46Speaker 01

  Cargo cults?

• 1:57:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:48Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 1:57:49Speaker 02

  It's like a weird, like, post-World War II, like, it's a very specific thing that happened in one place. I don't remember the exact island, but it was, uh, it was a rose in Melanesia during the 19th and 20th centuries, where basically, World War II, like, ships would come by and they like docked. So like, American soldiers like came, or maybe it was British soldiers, they came to, like, around Oceana.

• 1:58:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:58:13Speaker 02

  And there were these sort of like uncontacted tribes that had never really seen ships or planes or anything. And they just kind of showed up, they're like, hey, we're gonna use this as like a landing strip to like, bring in, import, export, and we'll give you guys like some food, and we'll just call it even, right? And they kind of brokered this deal, and these people were like, okay, we don't know what's going on. And then, they left. And then, the people sort of natively built like a religion around these people coming over, being like, okay, they, they showed up.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  And there was like a prophecy that existed on the island from like their own indigenous religion. And then this kind of like fit the religion, so like different priests were like, no, this is because we were doing things. And so then, as a result, they developed like a lore around it.

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  I, uh, and so I like a TikTok video on this. And they, they now sort of pray to those people, right?

• 1:58:58Speaker 00

  Are they making pretend satellites?

• 1:59:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they were like, they're sort of reenacting the technology that they saw as a way to try to bring back.

• 1:59:07Speaker 00

  Look at that fake plane.

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  That grass plane.

• 1:59:10Speaker 00

  Top right?

• 1:59:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:59:13Speaker 02

  And so like, they would kind of make this stuff based off the technology that they saw, trying to understand. And they sort of created like this cult of like John Fromm. And they think the name comes from this guy being like, yeah, I'm John from England.

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26Speaker 02

  Like, oh, it's John Fromm.

• 1:59:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:28Speaker 02

  And so they built like sort of this like ideology. It's not as simple as like indigenous people see planes and they're like, wow, it's God. Like, that's an oversimplification.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:38Speaker 02

  But they developed this philosophy like, okay, if we do certain marching rituals, they're gonna come back with another ship and bring us more technology.

• 1:59:44Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's South Pacific Islands, is that right?

• 1:59:48Speaker 02

  I'd have to double-check exactly where, but yeah.

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  It's really interesting.

• 1:59:52Speaker 02

  It's wild. And if you get from their perspective, you're like, yeah, it makes complete sense.

• 1:59:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, these people come in with all these things, they leave them here and you never see them again, you're like, please come back.

• 1:59:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  Like, we're gonna, it fits our lore, like, we're gonna pay tribute to it.

• 2:00:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:00:04Speaker 01

  Especially with all these cool things, right? Like, they've probably never seen metal before.

• 2:00:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:08Speaker 01

  And metal's useful for so many things.

• 2:00:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:00:10Speaker 00

  I, uh, I met a guy named Ben Lam that you know.

• 2:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, Colossal.

• 2:00:14Speaker 00

  Yes. And, uh, and you work with them, if I'm not mistaken?

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm on their board.

• 2:00:18Speaker 00

  You're on their board, yeah, yeah. And I met with this conference, we were talking and about what Colossal's doing, and he actually showed us at the conference, the woolly mammoth mice.

• 2:00:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, the woolly mice.

• 2:00:30Speaker 00

  Which was crazy.

• 2:00:31Speaker 01

  Pretty wild, right? Big furry mice, yeah.

• 2:00:33Speaker 00

  And it is like a very interesting concept, which is, and there's more to the, the business that exists for this, but like, is it easier to maintain the 12 white rhinos that we have? Or is it easier to breed thousands more into existence? And they're, they actually have this technology, they're developing this technology.

• 2:00:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:00:54Speaker 00

  And I'm sure that there's gonna be conversations around like, well, is it actually a white rhino, or is it just a genetically modified, regular rhino to be that?

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:02Speaker 00

  Which, well, one, I'm curious what, or maybe you could describe better what exactly Colossal does.

• 2:01:06Speaker 01

  No, I think you summed it up pretty well, but, you know, so Colossal tries to re-engineer extinct animals to fill holes in the ecosystem. Because as we talked about with the beavers, once you remove something, the system changes. And, um, you know, I think the argument that you see, and even I get this as somebody who sits on their advisors' boards, like, how can you support this thing? You know, they're making genetic freaks, and they're, they're, these resources should be going back into other conservation. Why not do both? Do you know what I mean? Like, why not? Like, that's not what they do. Colossal does do some conservation work, some very nice conservation work that I'm, I'm proud to say I've, I've had a light, light hand in. But they also do this amazing genetic engineering thing.

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  And, and the point is, if it looks like a mammoth, walks like a mammoth, talks like a mammoth, is it a mammoth?

• 2:01:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  I don't really know the answer, I'm not a geneticist, but if it fills the same roles as a mammoth, meaning it engineers the ecosystem like our beaver we were talking about, then it is a mammoth. Because that's the important thing, is keeping the, the, the system healthy.

• 2:02:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  Right? And that's what they're trying to do.

• 2:02:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:02:12Speaker 01

  They've had some success with the dire wolf and building woolly mice, and they've announced all these various animals that they're working on. I think it's great. Is it gonna come without flaws? Of course not. There's gonna be problems, there's gonna be missteps, there's gonna be everything, but so does every technology.

• 2:02:26Speaker 00

  I mean, I think, I think it's brilliant.

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:29Speaker 00

  I mean, the woolly, the woolly mammoth mouse thing, I think is, maybe is a, a bad example of what they're trying to do. Like, it's a fun pop example of, look, what we could do. But in terms of, of reintroducing an existing species, like, if it costs $100 million a year to conserve, you know, 14 animals or whatever, I'm using round numbers.

• 2:02:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:02:48Speaker 00

  But for $20 million, they can make 1,000 more of them. Isn't that a better act of conservation for those animals?

• 2:02:54Speaker 01

  And also, like I said before, do both.

• 2:02:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:57Speaker 01

  On the flip side of that coin, we briefly touched on it, is Ventara.

• 2:03:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  Right? Anat Abhani.

• 2:03:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Abhani is the Indian billionaire family.

• 2:03:06Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:03:07Speaker 00

  And they built, I don't even wanna call it a zoo, man.

• 2:03:10Speaker 01

  It's not. It's not. There's nothing like it in the world.

• 2:03:13Speaker 00

  Describe the scale of this thing.

• 2:03:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, uh, so first of all, Anat Abhani himself, which is one of the sons, who's my very close friend, has built this thing himself.

• 2:03:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:22Speaker 01

  And it's, we've only become friends over our mutual dork-out nerdness over animals, because we both just love animals. And this is a guy who's got unlimited resources financially, and he said, I wanna commit to trying to save the world's animals. And the reason I bring it up, when you talk about Colossal, is it's the other side of that coin.

• 2:03:38Speaker 00

  Right.

• 2:03:39Speaker 01

  He said, I don't care if it costs $100 million a year to save those four rhinos, I will.

• 2:03:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:03:44Speaker 01

  And it's amazing to see both at play, right? And so, he has built in Jamnagar, India, which is where this, these aerial photos are, this place called Ventara, that is this unbelievable wildlife rescue facility.

• 2:03:57Speaker 00

  You gotta describe the scale of this thing.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  It, uh, the, the stat is it's something like 13 times the size of Central Park or something like that. I mean, it's unbelievable. They've rescued over a million animals in total, not just in Ventara, but they do stuff outside, all around the planet now. And he's such a humble guy, he like doesn't really make a big thing out of it. You know, this is me making a big thing out of it. But the facility itself is unlike anything you've ever seen. I mean, they give, they give elephants oil massages, and they have Barack, oh, this is a true story, Barack Obama's personal chef is now their head elephant chef. He's just there mixing fruit salads for these elephants, changing it up so that they don't get bored, and making new concoctions. And, and the list goes on and on and on.

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  They build the world's only hydrotherapy chambers for elephants, they have saunas, they have spas. This guy, like, Anat, he'll get a call that, and this is a true story, because I was there for it, he'll get a call, hey, this elephant, this is actually really powerful stuff, these elephants saw these chains, because they come from a life of abuse, logging elephants and circus performers and stuff, and I took them out for a walk in the forest, threw the chains down, and the elephants stopped, and you see that, you see their body language change, see how they get nervous?

• 2:05:09Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 2:05:10Speaker 01

  And they're weird, and then they start picking them up and throwing them and trumpeting, because they're, they never wanna be in those chains ever again. Powerful stuff, man.

• 2:05:18Speaker 01

  But this guy with his resources, care for animals, he'll get a call. Hey, this elephant has a kidney stone and we don't have a probe long enough to get there. It'll cost us $2 million to build one, but we can get it done in a week and he'll go build it. To save an elephant, not an endangered one, nothing, just like they have a never say no policy. Whatever they can do to rescue it because the guy's got unlimited resource. It's a beautiful thing.

• 2:05:41Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:05:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:42Speaker 02

  On the elephant thing, not to divert too much.

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  No, no, you're good.

• 2:05:44Speaker 02

  But are you familiar with elephant funerals?

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, where they all come together and they mourn, yeah.

• 2:05:50Speaker 02

  Have you seen this?

• 2:05:50Speaker 01

  I've seen it, yeah.

• 2:05:51Speaker 02

  Can you tell me?

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  So many more animals do it than you think too. Yeah, so basically an elephant funeral, so elephants are a matriarchal society. They're run by a big female, right? Like she's the boss of the group. Different for different species, but we'll generalize here.

• 2:06:05Speaker 00

  Define boss?

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  Like she is the head of the household. So she's the one who all the other elephants listen to and respect, all the other females. Do what the matriarch says. If she says it's time to leave this watering hole and go look for food, they all leave and go look for food. If she says, everybody wait here, you know, the babies are, the babies, there's some danger. All the elephants stand in a circle and guard the babies.

• 2:06:28Speaker 00

  And the big like bull males are paying attention as well?

• 2:06:31Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:06:32Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  They'll come and go sometimes. Again, depends on the elephants, but they'll come and go. But the matriarch, the big female, she's the boss. Yeah, and the bulls will come in and out of the herd and things like that. She runs, she's, she's the CEO. And so an elephant funeral, I often say this and I have nothing to support this because it's really just a theory. I believe based on their brain size and what I've witnessed myself, that elephants have an EQ, an emotional intelligence way greater than anything you or I or any human has. I believe they feel much greater. Their highs, their, their happies are much happier and their sads are much sadder than we feel. They can die of a broken heart, you can't. If your wife dies, you don't die of a broken heart. You can get sick, whatever, but they can literally die of a broken heart.

• 2:07:14Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 2:07:15Speaker 01

  And so that's from their emotional intelligence. So elephants, and I was saying, many other animals do this than we, we give credit for. They will have a funeral. So here you've seen an elephant die and these other elephants through the matriarch most likely have come in to mourn this elephant. They'll stop eating for several days. They'll spend four or five days sleeping around the carcass of the dead one to sort of pay tribute to it as it, as it leaves. We don't understand what they're doing societally, but there is some sort of elephant society where they're giving it a funeral. That's amazing.

• 2:07:51Speaker 02

  It's really tragic to like see videos like the mom basically carrying like her dead calf.

• 2:07:56Speaker 00

  Oh, my God.

• 2:07:57Speaker 02

  Around like a savanna for days at a time. Just kind of like holding on to it like.

• 2:08:02Speaker 01

  Come back.

• 2:08:02Speaker 02

  Like in pain, it seems like. And it is one heartbreaking to see like sort of the natural progression of death. But then when you put like the poaching element on top of it.

• 2:08:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:11Speaker 02

  You're like, I mean, what the fuck are we doing?

• 2:08:13Speaker 01

  It's hard. Really heavy stuff.

• 2:08:15Speaker 00

  Our ability, our ability to communicate with elephants, would you say it's like on the level of a dog?

• 2:08:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say it's about right.

• 2:08:24Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 2:08:25Speaker 01

  Just like you can have a dog at home and you can tell when he's hungry, you can tell when he's sad, you can tell when he's depressed. You can see when he gets sick. There are people that spend their lives with elephants in India, it's called a mahout, blah, blah, blah, that can read those same body cues and languages from an elephant.

• 2:08:41Speaker 00

  And will they take commands?

• 2:08:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. You can make an elephant sit, you can make it stay, you can make it stand.

• 2:08:47Speaker 00

  Will they communicate things to the mahout? Will they say, not say, but they will show that they're hungry? Will they show that they want something?

• 2:08:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. In a different way to your dog, you know, my dog jumps up on my leg when it wants breakfast. The elephant will shake his head a certain way or move his trunk and put on his shoulder or whatever it happens to be.

• 2:09:05Speaker 00

  There's that video, I'm sure you've seen it of like, there was an elephant, I think cub, are they called cubs?

• 2:09:09Speaker 01

  Calf.

• 2:09:10Speaker 00

  Calf. Of a calf that's like stuck in like a ravine or something. I forgot exactly what it was. And the video makes it look like the mom comes and grabs some humans.

• 2:09:21Speaker 01

  To get the baby out.

• 2:09:22Speaker 00

  Get the baby out. Now, how realistic is that scenario?

• 2:09:25Speaker 01

  I think in like a semi captive environment where like in India where they use the elephants as, as vehicles and things like that, absolutely. Could easily go and get a human. If it was a wild elephant, it would never just come into town and get people to help.

• 2:09:39Speaker 00

  Obviously, yeah. But a semi captive one would be like, hey, you guys are the helpers.

• 2:09:43Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 2:09:43Speaker 00

  Can you do this?

• 2:09:45Speaker 01

  Totally. And if, if this is the one you're talking about where the mom's trapped and the baby goes.

• 2:09:49Speaker 00

  Oh, maybe that's it.

• 2:09:50Speaker 01

  Okay, so two things, just pause it for one second if you don't mind. So that is an Indian elephant or Asian elephant.

• 2:09:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:09:56Speaker 01

  So Asian elephants and humans have a very different relationship to African elephants and humans. Asian elephants and humans live side by side, they work side by side. People ride these elephants, they use them for logging, they use them for begging, all kinds of things. They use them for agriculture. So these elephants in the daytime are probably kept and looked after by people. When I say kept, they might have a chain on them, it might be terrible, it might be somewhat free roaming. That's a gray area, but they're kept by people and fed by people. And then they'll go out and roam and go into the jungle, walk around the village and come back, kind of like a village dog.

• 2:10:30Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 2:10:30Speaker 01

  Not you or my dog that lives in our house and never does anything on its own, but like a village dog. Sleeps in the hut at night and then it goes out into the village during the day. The elephants do something very similar in these situations. So here with the mom being trapped in mud or whatever the scenario is, it's completely believable to me that that mom gave birth to that calf that we saw in the video in this community. The community knows the calf, the calf knows the people, the mom gets stuck, the baby goes wandering and people go, there's something wrong with that baby, it's distressed. Didn't go and say, hey, come with me. It's just a distressed, lost looking baby that runs back to mom and then the people go, we gotta get the mom out.

• 2:11:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's so hard to believe these videos sometimes though, because I've gotten got by people hodgepodgeing videos of animals. Have you seen these?

• 2:11:14Speaker 01

  I, I'm an expert quote unquote and I get got all the time. I'll look at AI ones and go, that's real. Dude, it's crazy.

• 2:11:20Speaker 02

  But it's like, look at this little like baby cat that we found and then like it actually wasn't a cat, it was a.

• 2:11:26Speaker 00

  Panther.

• 2:11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, panther. And then like, but it's like five different animals that like they put into like one narrative.

• 2:11:30Speaker 01

  And then it's playing drums at the end. And you're like, something's not right here.

• 2:11:33Speaker 00

  But we do have this obsession with communicating with animals, right? Like obviously you've dedicated a portion of your life to this, but we love these videos where, I don't know if you saw that one where, what's the name of the, it's like a white small whale that exists in the Arctic.

• 2:11:46Speaker 02

  Beluga?

• 2:11:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, the beluga is like, somebody's throwing a rugby ball off a boat.

• 2:11:51Speaker 01

  I've seen that one.

• 2:11:51Speaker 00

  And is that real or is that?

• 2:11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's real, that's real.

• 2:11:53Speaker 00

  And like, I think for whatever reason, we deeply wish that we could connect with these animals.

• 2:11:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:11:58Speaker 00

  Somewhere on our course. So when we see it look like this beluga is seemingly playing catch with these fishermen, I don't know what they are.

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I think this is totally real. Belugas are amazing, they're super playful. You know, I, I think a lot of people hate AI, right? And, and for the most part, I tend to dislike it a lot too. This is one where AI can become so useful as a tool to us. Pattern recognition, that's what AI is. If you upload 10 billion whale songs, it's going to start to decode whale language. If you upload 10 billion elephant sounds, it's going to start to decode elephant patterns.

• 2:12:32Speaker 02

  Have you seen the, starting to use this for like bait, like bird chirps?

• 2:12:36Speaker 01

  I, I believe it.

• 2:12:36Speaker 02

  I was reading a thing, I don't know, again, I don't know how accurate this is, but they were able to upload different bird chirps to a language model and it was able to discern that mother birds are talking to their chicks in a baby speak.

• 2:12:50Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 2:12:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, like in the way the humans were.

• 2:12:53Speaker 00

  Hey buddy!

• 2:12:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like, it just, I don't know, I hear it and I kind of, I kind of get a little sad.

• 2:12:58Speaker 00

  Why?

• 2:12:58Speaker 02

  I'm like, that's so cute.

• 2:13:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:13:00Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 2:13:01Speaker 00

  You ready for some throw up?

• 2:13:05Speaker 01

  Have you seen Valdemir, the spy whale?

• 2:13:08Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:13:09Speaker 01

  So one of these beluga whales appeared in, in Norway or one of those countries, covered in Russian spy gear. True story. It was a trained whale, yeah, you can find this. It was a trained whale that the Russian Navy had brought in, put spy gear all over and it had escaped or got lost or something like that. And the plot thickens because he was, they took his spy gear off or whatever it happened to be. The whale was lost and following people around and there became a whole like movement to protect Valdemir, this whale with his spy gear, and all of a sudden he washed up with a bullet in his head. He was assassinated.

• 2:13:46Speaker 00

  No way, bro.

• 2:13:48Speaker 02

  You've heard, you've heard of Acoustic Kitty?

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  Acoustic, oh, is that the operation where they put cats in to listen?

• 2:13:54Speaker 06

  In the 60s, the CIA put listening devices inside of cats in Russia and we tried to send them into like Russian embassies and stuff to handle it.

• 2:14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:03Speaker 06

  And the first cat went in the building, got sort of distracted, came back out, got hit by a car.

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:14:09Speaker 02

  Damn. But why'd they have to take the whale out? Like the whale didn't do anything, like he didn't.

• 2:14:13Speaker 00

  He knows things, Mark.

• 2:14:14Speaker 01

  He knows.

• 2:14:15Speaker 02

  He doesn't have trained secrets, where are we talking?

• 2:14:17Speaker 01

  That's what you think. Something's going on. We're gonna, we're gonna torture the whale to get it to speak? Something's going on. And I like, I'm not a huge conspiracy nut, but that's pretty bizarre.

• 2:14:26Speaker 02

  Damn.

• 2:14:27Speaker 01

  Who iced that whale?

• 2:14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they already have blowholes. That's two holes, dude.

• 2:14:32Speaker 00

  Give me some fun, like, I saw you and Joe talking about the pandas, like, what are some other, this is feelings, no facts, which is a section we do on the show.

• 2:14:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:14:40Speaker 00

  We're not talking a fact right now.

• 2:14:41Speaker 01

  Totally fine.

• 2:14:42Speaker 00

  This is completely feelings, but what are the fun, like, animal conspiracies that exist in your world?

• 2:14:47Speaker 01

  Fun animal conspiracies?

• 2:14:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, they don't even have to be fun.

• 2:14:49Speaker 01

  Oh, man, I gotta think about this.

• 2:14:51Speaker 00

  Again, this is not rooted in anything.

• 2:14:53Speaker 02

  I can think of a couple. I mean, you know about like cattle mutilations?

• 2:14:56Speaker 01

  No, what's a cattle mutilation?

• 2:14:57Speaker 02

  Brother.

• 2:14:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I get what it sounds like.

• 2:14:59Speaker 02

  Welcome. Cattle mutilations is weird sort of high strangeness phenomena where a farmer will walk out to his farm and see like one of his like goats or maybe his cow or something, and they have bizarre predation marks. So it'll be like, all the blood will be drained out.

• 2:15:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, like the chupacabra came and got him or something.

• 2:15:17Speaker 02

  Or like, they'll just find it where like, the jaw's missing, but no other part of it is taken, or like,

• 2:15:22Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 2:15:22Speaker 02

  It's like, brain will be taken out, and people are like, what's going on? I mean, I can find you more specific cases.

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:15:27Speaker 02

  But they're like, what kind of animals coming in here, just like, only taking these parts? Like, are they like, are they rabid, like predators that are coming in doing this, like coyotes and stuff? And there's all this speculation, of course, people are like, maybe aliens?

• 2:15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yep, yep.

• 2:15:40Speaker 02

  It's some type of weird predation where like, they're taking like, elements of these animals that are not typical.

• 2:15:45Speaker 01

  Interesting. Yeah, okay, I get what you're saying. I mean, there's a few really interesting one, like, they're mostly based in like, a lore that doesn't exist, right? So like, the idea that coyotes will come and attack people. Coyotes don't attack people. We all think like, oh, a coyote's dangerous, right? So it's a wild dog. Coyotes don't attack people. But even people who work with animals think, well, not people who work with animals, like ranchers and stuff like that, think the coyotes are gonna come in and eat their kids, or take their cows, or whatever. Doesn't happen.

• 2:16:13Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 2:16:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:15Speaker 00

  Same thing with killer whales, right?

• 2:16:16Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 2:16:17Speaker 00

  Like, they don't attack human beings outside of the sea world.

• 2:16:20Speaker 01

  Never been a single recorded death in the wild, ever. There've been sea world deaths and stuff, but in the wild, a killer whale, orca's never killed a person that we're aware of.

• 2:16:28Speaker 00

  Oh, wow. What are some other animals that aren't actually dangerous to human beings that we are afraid of?

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  Hmm, well, rattlesnakes.

• 2:16:36Speaker 00

  Really?

• 2:16:36Speaker 01

  Rattlesnakes are not dangerous to human beings. If you get bitten by a rattlesnake, absolutely. But rattlesnakes are not trying to bite people, ever. They're sitting in a coil, they're sitting in predation mode. If you step on it, yes, it's going to bite you.

• 2:16:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:16:50Speaker 01

  But I promise you, if you've hiked around LA, or Santa Barbara, or San Diego, or anywhere out west, you've hiked within 20 feet of a rattlesnake, and you have no idea. They are not a danger to people. It's only when they're cor- if you look up where do most people get bitten by the rattlesnake, guess where they get bitten, what part of their body?

• 2:17:08Speaker 00

  Leg.

• 2:17:09Speaker 01

  Their hand.

• 2:17:10Speaker 00

  Because they're trying to fucking grab a rattlesnake.

• 2:17:12Speaker 01

  They're trying to pick it up.

• 2:17:12Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. But almost nobody just gets bitten by a rattlesnake. Yeah.

• 2:17:17Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 2:17:17Speaker 01

  So that's one where, you know, and it's funny, like, you watch Yellowstone, and Costner or somebody throws a rattlesnake on a guy, and he dies immediately and stuff, like, it just doesn't work that way, you know? Man, what are some other funny, there's just so many interesting ones. There's, there's legends of black cats all over the world. Here's, here's the perfect one, black panthers. Heard of them?

• 2:17:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:38Speaker 01

  Seen the, seen the movie, been to Wakanda, you know what I'm talking about?

• 2:17:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:41Speaker 01

  They don't exist. There's no such thing as a black panther in North America. There are black jaguars, like the one I showed you.

• 2:17:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  There are black leopards, a panther, which is a mountain lion, cat we have here in North America. There has never once been a recorded case of a melanistic, AKA, black panther. High school mascots, NFL mascots, movies, no such thing. Tattoos.

• 2:18:05Speaker 02

  That is funny, because these are Florida Panthers, but they're sort of like gray or golden.

• 2:18:08Speaker 01

  They're not black.

• 2:18:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I got buddies who I trust, who swear up and down they've seen them. Never been one single confirmed documented case with a black panther.

• 2:18:17Speaker 00

  So where does it come from?

• 2:18:19Speaker 01

  I mean, like I said, there are black other cats, but there's never been a panther that's been black. So I don't know if it's just started in movies, I don't know if it started in the Marvel comics.

• 2:18:28Speaker 00

  Black Panther organization, of course.

• 2:18:30Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, right. I don't know if that was the foundation. I have no idea where it came from.

• 2:18:34Speaker 02

  Weird.

• 2:18:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:35Speaker 02

  What about the John Lil- John Lilly dolphin experiments? Have you heard of these?

• 2:18:40Speaker 01

  Is that the guy trying to talk to dolphins that had him in his house?

• 2:18:42Speaker 02

  With LSD?

• 2:18:43Speaker 01

  Uh, oh, yeah, with the LSD, yeah. Tried to unlock it with the LSD, yeah.

• 2:18:47Speaker 02

  He's a neuroscientist, psychonaut, philosopher, and he combined work that he was doing with like, isolation tanks to communicate with dolphins. He studied how bottlenose dolphins vocalize, and he later began experimenting with psychedelics, including LSD, while floating in isolation, trying to talk to dolphins.

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:06Speaker 02

  I don't think it worked.

• 2:19:07Speaker 01

  No, but I bet he had a good time trying it.

• 2:19:08Speaker 00

  Question, you might have been asked this before. You see a, um, the Bigfoot.

• 2:19:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:19:15Speaker 00

  You have a weapon on you.

• 2:19:17Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 2:19:18Speaker 00

  Do you shoot it to prove that they exist?

• 2:19:23Speaker 01

  Why do you, why do you think I've been asked that before?

• 2:19:25Speaker 00

  I don't know, it's like something that like, an explorer would be asked.

• 2:19:29Speaker 02

  You think bullets work against a Bigfoot?

• 2:19:31Speaker 01

  Uh. I mean.

• 2:19:34Speaker 00

  Because you're never, if, you can't take a picture of it.

• 2:19:37Speaker 01

  Right, I don't have my phone on me, whatever.

• 2:19:38Speaker 00

  Even if you do take a picture, people are gonna say it's AI.

• 2:19:40Speaker 01

  You, you have to do it. You have to shoot it.

• 2:19:43Speaker 00

  And then what happens if it's just a guy in a costume?

• 2:19:46Speaker 01

  Then you bury it and you get the hell out of there.

• 2:19:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, real quick, real quick, yeah. Okay, more feelings, no facts.

• 2:19:51Speaker 01

  You have to do it, though. You gotta do it. You gotta prove it.

• 2:19:53Speaker 00

  It's right there. You have to prove it, otherwise you're crazy.

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  Otherwise, you're crazy, and believe it or not, for the good of the species.

• 2:19:58Speaker 00

  Because?

• 2:19:59Speaker 01

  Once you've shown the dead body, you've proven they exist, you can then actually put something into preserving them. Whatever's left, even if there's only two others out there.

• 2:20:07Speaker 00

  All right, ready?

• 2:20:08Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:20:08Speaker 00

  This is feelings, no facts. You don't have to back this up with anything.

• 2:20:11Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 2:20:11Speaker 00

  Okay?

• 2:20:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:20:14Speaker 00

  Gorilla versus grizzly.

• 2:20:16Speaker 01

  Grizzly. Every day.

• 2:20:18Speaker 00

  Every day?

• 2:20:19Speaker 01

  Every day, not even close.

• 2:20:20Speaker 00

  Even the big silverback?

• 2:20:22Speaker 01

  Dude, you're talking about 300 pounds versus 1,000 pounds. One of them has fucking wolverine claws, has a way stronger bite force, not even close.

• 2:20:29Speaker 00

  Hippo versus rhino?

• 2:20:31Speaker 01

  Uh, rhino. It's a, it's a hippo with a tusk, with a, with a horn. Yeah. I know people think hippo.

• 2:20:38Speaker 00

  But?

• 2:20:38Speaker 01

  But they're softer, their skin is softer.

• 2:20:40Speaker 00

  So once that tusk goes, it's over.

• 2:20:42Speaker 01

  It's over, yeah.

• 2:20:43Speaker 00

  Uh, saltwater croc, is that the most dangerous croc?

• 2:20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:48Speaker 00

  Versus great white?

• 2:20:50Speaker 01

  Uh, the great white. Every day.

• 2:20:53Speaker 00

  It's just too agile.

• 2:20:54Speaker 01

  It's too maneuverable, it's too agile. Saltwater crocodiles are an ambush predator, they just lunge and nail you, and then you're fucked. But.

• 2:21:02Speaker 00

  Hand-to-hand combat, they're not doing it.

• 2:21:04Speaker 01

  Not even close.

• 2:21:05Speaker 00

  Okay, um, the smartest animal outside of human beings?

• 2:21:09Speaker 01

  In the world?

• 2:21:10Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 2:21:10Speaker 01

  Orcas.

• 2:21:12Speaker 00

  Really?

• 2:21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. They speak their own languages, they have their own diets, just like we do. They can travel wherever they want, they have their own social dynamics, they're just trapped in a whale body. They can perform surgery, true story, yeah.

• 2:21:25Speaker 00

  What do you mean they can perform?

• 2:21:26Speaker 01

  When an orca makes a, a kill during a time of abundance, meaning it wants to, like, it has tons of food and it doesn't really care, it will kill a great white shark just to take the liver out, which will surgically remove with its teeth. Just to eat the liver and leave the whole white shark.

• 2:21:41Speaker 00

  And why, what is so special about the liver?

• 2:21:43Speaker 01

  High nutrients, delicious.

• 2:21:44Speaker 00

  So it's like, I already have enough food, this is good nutrients, I don't need to eat all this thing?

• 2:21:49Speaker 01

  It might even be as simple as, I want a cupcake, and that's the cupcake.

• 2:21:52Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 2:21:53Speaker 01

  A treat.

• 2:21:53Speaker 00

  So killer whale takes out great white every single time?

• 2:21:55Speaker 01

  Every time.

• 2:21:56Speaker 00

  No, nothing close?

• 2:21:58Speaker 01

  Nothing close. Not even like, is there gonna be combat? Like, like, it kills.

• 2:22:02Speaker 00

  Great white sees a killer whale and dips.

• 2:22:04Speaker 01

  Out of there. So much so that the entire area of Cape Town lost its ecotourism trade around it, because the orcas moved in, two orcas moved in, Port and Starboard, a pair, moved all the great whites out. Killed a few, and the rest left.

• 2:22:15Speaker 00

  That's right, great white shark sightings in South Africa were huge, specifically Cape Town. Wow, I remember that.

• 2:22:22Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:22:23Speaker 02

  And the killer whale thing is a misnomer, right?

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  With the name?

• 2:22:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:22:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:28Speaker 00

  It was whale killer in Spanish.

• 2:22:30Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right.

• 2:22:31Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 2:22:32Speaker 02

  Are orcas teaching each other how to sink boats? Remember that story?

• 2:22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the Gibraltar Strait.

• 2:22:36Speaker 02

  Is that true?

• 2:22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, 100%. But still never kill anybody? Taking some boats down, still never killed anybody?

• 2:22:41Speaker 02

  Good point.

• 2:22:42Speaker 01

  They're doing it for fun. That's my theory.

• 2:22:44Speaker 00

  Best mother in the animal kingdom.

• 2:22:46Speaker 01

  Best mother in the animal kingdom has to be a gorilla, or a chimpanzee, or an orangutan, one of the great apes. Uh, because they'll take care of their baby for two years, sometimes more. They'll feed it day and night, they'll cradle it, they'll never let it touch the ground, they'll teach it to be a gorilla, or a chimp, or, or an orangutan, by teaching it how to climb, teaching it how to feel, they'll protect it in a social fight. They will be fiercely loyal to that baby, so much so that they won't mate during a lot of that time. They're just, they're basically a human, you know? And we're very good parents.

• 2:23:25Speaker 00

  And is there a relationship that exists after that two-year-old becomes like a fully grown chimp? Like, do they still have a love and protection for their mom?

• 2:23:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:23:34Speaker 00

  Really?

• 2:23:34Speaker 01

  Until a certain point, you know, kind of like, a kid hitting maturity or something, and being like, I'm going out to find my own girlfriend, and then the bond starts to separate, but they will always, always have a maternal relationship.

• 2:23:46Speaker 00

  So even when they're fully grown, they have their own family, they still recognize that ape is their mother and their affection?

• 2:23:53Speaker 01

  And they'll never, they'll never mate with their mother or anything else, which a lot of animals, your dog will, you know? Like, a lot of animals will, but they never will, yeah.

• 2:23:59Speaker 00

  Which animal would terrify the most if it suddenly developed human-level intelligence?

• 2:24:04Speaker 01

  Uh, praying mantis.

• 2:24:07Speaker 01

  Take over the world. Bro, you think I'm joking? Not even. Octopus, maybe, but praying mantis. Have you ever seen, um, Starship Troopers?

• 2:24:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:24:15Speaker 01

  Remember that movie? Great movie, by the way.

• 2:24:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:24:17Speaker 01

  Um, that's what it would be like. Like, if a praying mantis got human-level intelligence, you know, even though they're this big, I, I'm assuming they scale with this intelligence, which you didn't say, but I did in my brain.

• 2:24:31Speaker 01

  They would take over the world. They're massively opportunistic killers. They can kill anything, like, for their size. There's nothing like them. They're vicious. I mean, they're just, they're just, like, look at them, they're just super gnarly. They have these crazy spikes, these claws, these unbelievable mandibles, like, looking at that one eating the lizard there, I mean, if you had a praying mantis with society, we'd be in big trouble.

• 2:24:55Speaker 00

  Just because they're devastating killers.

• 2:24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, again, I sort of, in my brain, I scaled it to them being the size of a human, which I, wasn't the question, but I think, yeah, if they were, if they were bigger, like, they would just be so ruthless.

• 2:25:07Speaker 00

  What's the gayest animal?

• 2:25:10Speaker 01

  Dolphins.

• 2:25:11Speaker 00

  Really?

• 2:25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, because only chicks like them, for one. No, but they have a lot of gay sex. Every cute girl thinks they're amazing. Gay guys like them. They have a lot of gay sex, again. Yeah, they're just the gayest animal.

• 2:25:26Speaker 00

  So wait, dolphins have gay sex?

• 2:25:27Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 2:25:28Speaker 00

  How common is gay sex in the animal kingdom?

• 2:25:30Speaker 01

  Not very. I mean, there are instances of, like, these two male lions will hump or practice or whatever.

• 2:25:36Speaker 00

  Practice?

• 2:25:37Speaker 01

  But yeah, but then there are dolphins that will literally just male on male, female on female sex a lot. And dolphins are one of like four or five animals that have sex for fun. Most animals don't have sex for pleasure at all. They only set, they only.

• 2:25:50Speaker 00

  How do we know they're doing it just for fun?

• 2:25:52Speaker 01

  Because there's no outcome. They're not getting pregnant, they're, they're not, they're not fertilizing the female.

• 2:25:57Speaker 00

  Dolphins are pulling out?

• 2:25:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:00Speaker 00

  Get out of here.

• 2:26:00Speaker 01

  Swear to God.

• 2:26:02Speaker 00

  There's no way a dolphin is pulling out before it busts.

• 2:26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a true story, man. They're doing it just for fun. They're doing it to not reproduce. Yep.

• 2:26:12Speaker 00

  Really?

• 2:26:13Speaker 01

  Really.

• 2:26:13Speaker 00

  And it's just pleasure for pleasure's sake. If it's a dude there, it's a dude. If it's a girl, it's a girl, it doesn't matter.

• 2:26:18Speaker 01

  That's it. Yep. Which is pretty gay.

• 2:26:25Speaker 02

  Pulling out is kind of gay, actually.

• 2:26:28Speaker 01

  Low key.

• 2:26:30Speaker 00

  Oh, God. All right, any other questions before Forrest gets out here? Yes, Miles?

• 2:26:34Speaker 06

  I have two quick ones. You come, you're obviously with Discovery and all those things. You're similarly aged to me. Did you watch any of the Discovery Survival Shows growing up? And did they influence you in what you do now? So like Survivor Man or Man vs. Wild?

• 2:26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I watched a few of them, Miles. I mean, I loved Steve Irwin growing up, go figure.

• 2:26:55Speaker 06

  That was my second question.

• 2:26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I loved Steve Irwin growing up. I thought he was amazing.

• 2:26:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:27:00Speaker 01

  You know, what's funny is I don't think he'd fly in today's world. He's gone down in history as the greatest, like, animal presenter guy ever. You couldn't do it, you couldn't be Steve Irwin today.

• 2:27:08Speaker 00

  Wait, why?

• 2:27:09Speaker 01

  Steve Irwin just fiddled with animals for the sake of fiddling with them. Do you know what I mean?

• 2:27:12Speaker 00

  Oh, you think that there would be like animal rights people saying, hey, he's not treating this animal properly?

• 2:27:17Speaker 01

  Could you imagine if you just grabbed a crocodile for the sake of grabbing it and were like, check it out? You know, or you couldn't do it in today's world. And it's, it's great that in that time and place, he set the gold standard.

• 2:27:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:27:28Speaker 01

  You know? And so he, he was definitely my number one. I watched some Bear Grylls and some Wes Stroud. I enjoyed all those guys, but to me, Steve Irwin and Jeremy Wade and David Attenborough, of course, right? Like, those are, those are the goats.

• 2:27:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27:42Speaker 06

  And do you remember a guy named something Corbin? Do you remember him at all?

• 2:27:45Speaker 01

  Jeff Corwin?

• 2:27:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know Jeff Corwin. Yeah.

• 2:27:48Speaker 06

  Oh, cool.

• 2:27:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, not very well, but yeah, he's, he's cool. He's kind of like an American Steve Irwin, like that, that era.

• 2:27:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, Steve was number one for you.

• 2:27:56Speaker 01

  To me, yeah, but David Attenborough was number one for me. But that, that, those guys, I, I thought were all awesome. Yeah.

• 2:28:02Speaker 06

  Cool.

• 2:28:03Speaker 01

  Anybody, I don't care who you are. I don't care if you're on Instagram or TikTok or Discovery Channel or anywhere else. If you're influencing people to care about wildlife in an ethical way, you're not just, you know, putting them in chokeholds for the sake of it. If you're doing it and making people be like, man, that thing's awesome, that snake's cool, that kid you pulled up, right? The, what was his name?

• 2:28:25Speaker 06

  Caveman Wildlife.

• 2:28:26Speaker 01

  Caveman Wildlife. The kid's awesome. He's awesome, dude. Because he's making people care about snakes that don't otherwise care about him. You know, like, it's great. And like, I don't care who these guys are, I don't care if they have a name or don't have a name. Anybody that's doing it the right way is great.

• 2:28:39Speaker 02

  Do you bring your love of animals back home? Like, do you have a ton of different species of animals?

• 2:28:44Speaker 01

  Bro, I wish I didn't.

• 2:28:47Speaker 01

  So we have 91 rescued animals on my, on my property. Most of them are like turtles and fish and shenanigans things. I have no pets except for my one fish tank in my office that are pets.

• 2:28:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:28:59Speaker 01

  Except for a dog as well. But the rest are all things that somebody calls me and goes, we need a home for this tortoise, like, you know, we found this, this raccoon, or I don't have any raccoons, but whatever it happens to be. And so, yeah, we've ended up with, at one point in time, it's way down now, 91 rescued animals.

• 2:29:14Speaker 00

  Last question. Can you explain the importance of the relationship between humans and dogs?

• 2:29:21Speaker 01

  I don't think anybody can explain that. But I think that throughout human evolution, since humans first came around, there's only been one creature that has truly become a companion to people. And that's the wolf that turned into the domestic dog. Going back hundreds of thousands of years, we started feeding these, these furry pack animals that we thought were a foe, and they became a friend. And over generational time, we turned them into these weird, short-faced, stumpy-legged, overweight, whatever they happen to be. And they are truly, more than anything, a companion to the human species. That is incredibly important.

• 2:30:01Speaker 00

  And were they responsible for our evolution in any way? Maybe not our evolution, but like, is responsible for innovation, protection?

• 2:30:11Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:30:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, like.

• 2:30:12Speaker 01

  We had dogs, we had dogs during times of war, we still do. We have dogs for security, we have dogs for hunting, we have dogs for farming, we have dogs for pest control. I mean, the plague probably would have been 100 times worse if it wasn't for Yorkshire terriers, those funny little fluffy Paris Hilton dogs.

• 2:30:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:30:29Speaker 01

  Taking out rats. You know what I mean?

• 2:30:31Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 2:30:31Speaker 01

  Cute. Canines, dogs have influenced human civilization and society since their inception.

• 2:30:39Speaker 00

  I read something, I forget where it was, and it was about, like, they created a layer of protection, and you need an amount of security and downtime in order to innovate. If you're constantly worried about, this is like one of the issues with chimps and why it's harder for them to innovate in the way that human beings can. And it's like, they're always worried about the lead dude in the tribe fucking, right? So there isn't that downtime where you can just think about, all right, how do we make a TV? And before it's TV, it's like, how do we make fire a little bit better? How do we make shelter a little bit better? And this idea that there are these pack animals that were protecting us because it was easier for them to get food from us and was get, get food out there.

• 2:31:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:15Speaker 00

  But now, all of a sudden, you had a layer of protection where you had the downtime where you could think of ideas and actually execute on them.

• 2:31:21Speaker 01

  It makes perfect sense. When your brain is not on edge thinking about how to, how to survive, you have time to innovate.

• 2:31:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:31:27Speaker 01

  Makes, I've never heard that theory, and it's, makes perfect sense.

• 2:31:30Speaker 00

  Because it does seem we have a special relationship. Horses too.

• 2:31:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:34Speaker 00

  But with dogs, it seems more unique.

• 2:31:35Speaker 01

  Horses are utilitarian. We use a horse as a, as a tool.

• 2:31:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:31:40Speaker 01

  Whereas a dog, we have as a companion.

• 2:31:42Speaker 00

  Truly as a companion.

• 2:31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:43Speaker 00

  They offer nothing, especially now, like, most dogs are not doing security in the United States of America.

• 2:31:49Speaker 01

  My dog is useless.

• 2:31:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:31:51Speaker 01

  I love him to death, but he could not guard the house, he can barely swim, he can't even go outside and poop by himself. He is useless. And I love him to death.

• 2:32:00Speaker 00

  But is this maybe like the karma that they get?

• 2:32:04Speaker 01

  What, for, for attaching to us?

• 2:32:05Speaker 00

  For like billions of years of like supporting human existence and like protecting us. And now they do nothing for us, and we're like, all right, we got you for a few million.

• 2:32:14Speaker 01

  That's a free ride.

• 2:32:15Speaker 00

  Like, you earned it.

• 2:32:16Speaker 01

  But that's still such a tiny minority of dogs globally.

• 2:32:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:32:19Speaker 01

  You know, the way dogs are treated in other places in the world is crazy.

• 2:32:23Speaker 00

  Really?

• 2:32:24Speaker 01

  I mean, you go to the, some of the meat markets in Indonesia and you can buy, they will torture the dog in front of you to increase the amount of, uh, what's the, what's the chemical response?

• 2:32:36Speaker 00

  Oh, with the baby, baby blood.

• 2:32:38Speaker 02

  Like adrenaline?

• 2:32:38Speaker 01

  Adrenaline.

• 2:32:39Speaker 00

  Adrenaline.

• 2:32:40Speaker 01

  Yes, adrenochrome adrenaline, yeah. They will torture a dog in front of you in order to increase the amount of adrenaline in the meat to change the flavor and then kill it and serve it to you.

• 2:32:48Speaker 02

  No, I'm good on that.

• 2:32:49Speaker 01

  I did a whole show on that on Vice, or an episode of a show on that on Vice, and it's the most gut-wrenching, heartbreaking thing you can ever see.

• 2:32:56Speaker 00

  Why do we have such a visceral reaction? I imagine you have a strong reaction to when any animal is treated poorly, but the average human being in the West, when they see a dog being treated poorly, has a visceral reaction to it.

• 2:33:07Speaker 01

  I think, again, it's because for generational time, our great, great, great grandparents had dogs. You know, it's, they're like our children, in a sense, they're our companions. It's the same as if I saw you get hurt or you get hurt. Like, you're my companion, you're my species, not, you're my species, the dog isn't, but you're my companion, I don't want to see you get hurt. You know, and I think it's the same for dogs.

• 2:33:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's like, we'll watch a horse race, and then the guy riding the horse is just smacking the ass of the horse with a whip, and we're just like.

• 2:33:32Speaker 01

  Don't even think about it.

• 2:33:32Speaker 00

  I got money on that.

• 2:33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:34Speaker 00

  But with a dog, no way.

• 2:33:36Speaker 01

  The dog, don't you dare. Yeah.

• 2:33:38Speaker 00

  But yeah, people call the police on people for mistreating their dogs.

• 2:33:40Speaker 01

  My wife, I live in Santa Barbara, which, as you know, it's 72 degrees every single day.

• 2:33:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:33:46Speaker 01

  My dog could spend six weeks in the car and it wouldn't overheat.

• 2:33:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:33:48Speaker 01

  She won't leave the dog in the car for five minutes. Because she's like, somebody's going to call the cops on us, they're going to smash our window. I'm like, it's 68 degrees outside, what do you think's going to happen? The dog's going to take a nap. She'll leave my kid in the car, she won't.

• 2:34:02Speaker 02

  I like when people leave notes. Like, you ever see that, they'll be like, hey, I'm going inside for five minutes, just don't call the cops.

• 2:34:08Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah, yeah. Or my Tesla's on dog mode, don't worry about it. Yeah.

• 2:34:12Speaker 00

  There's like a donkey that's just like carrying shit up a fucking mountain all day long, nobody leaves a note.

• 2:34:17Speaker 01

  Nope. No notes.

• 2:34:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, we do have a special relationship with dogs.

• 2:34:22Speaker 02

  I mean, in New York City, you're more likely, if you see someone pushing a stroller, more likely not.

• 2:34:26Speaker 01

  Than a kid.

• 2:34:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, 100%.

• 2:34:28Speaker 01

  Honkers. Now we've gone, the pendulum swung too far, man.

• 2:34:30Speaker 00

  But you do feel like the relationship is justified.

• 2:34:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:34:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:34:34Speaker 01

  I think all animal, you know, you see these weird nuts that want to have all these snakes, I have two snakes at home, but like, they want to have all these snakes and want to have all these things.

• 2:34:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:34:41Speaker 01

  You can have a companion with any animal. They might not love you back the way your dog does, but I think it's totally justified.

• 2:34:46Speaker 00

  So is that the difference? Is the difference really they'll love you back more consistently?

• 2:34:51Speaker 01

  I think so. And I think that's a really interesting difference between dog and cat people too.

• 2:34:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:34:55Speaker 01

  Because your cat can love you but still be a total asshole to you.

• 2:34:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:34:58Speaker 01

  If your dog loves you, he loves you, and you know it. You know what I mean? You're like, he's all up in my business, like, this dog loves me.

• 2:35:04Speaker 02

  Dogs also evolved to have facial mimicry.

• 2:35:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:07Speaker 02

  So like, they're able to mimic our facial features.

• 2:35:10Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:35:10Speaker 02

  And so like, dogs will look confused, and you're like, oh, you're confused.

• 2:35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:14Speaker 02

  And I've heard it said that like, cats haven't developed the same mimicry.

• 2:35:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:35:17Speaker 02

  So your cat might also feel happy when you're there.

• 2:35:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:35:21Speaker 02

  But they're not panting, they're not licking your face, they're not raising their eyebrows.

• 2:35:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:35:24Speaker 02

  And so as a result, it's harder for us to connect, whereas like with a dog, you kind of know what it's feeling just by looking at it.

• 2:35:28Speaker 00

  I mean, once you have kids, you really, you really get a sense of how loyal dogs are.

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:36Speaker 00

  Because you don't have the same time for that dog.

• 2:35:38Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:35:39Speaker 00

  And they don't stop dogging.

• 2:35:40Speaker 01

  Nope. They stay by your side.

• 2:35:42Speaker 00

  They are excited every single, I feel guilty.

• 2:35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:46Speaker 00

  You know, I got two kids, I want to give them both time, and that dog is like, if there is three minutes to throw a ball.

• 2:35:51Speaker 01

  Thrill.

• 2:35:51Speaker 00

  Same exact energy.

• 2:35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:54Speaker 00

  When they were getting all the attention when I had no kids at all.

• 2:35:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:35:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really amazing species. We did a good job curating that one.

• 2:36:01Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 2:36:04Speaker 00

  Ben Lamb, get on it.

• 2:36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, make us some more, would you?

• 2:36:06Speaker 00

  We need a rhino that does that.

• 2:36:07Speaker 01

  That's right. I want a tiny woolly rhino that does that, yeah.

• 2:36:10Speaker 00

  Dude, Forrest, thank you so much for being here.

• 2:36:12Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 2:36:12Speaker 00

  This is awesome.

• 2:36:13Speaker 01

  What a pleasure.

• 2:36:14Speaker 00

  Appreciate you guys.

• 2:36:14Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 2:36:15Speaker 00

  This is awesome.

• 2:36:15Speaker 01

  Thank you, guys. Thank you so much.