304. Forrest Galante: Why Comfort Is What Actually Ages You

Wildlife biologist Forrest Galante has spent his life around animals that have constant access to food and never eat themselves into obesity or liver disease, and he argues that what humans do traces back to the one thing we have spent a century engineering out of our lives. Gary and Forrest get into why the aggressive pursuit of comfort may be what is aging you fastest. CLICK HERE TO BECOME GARY’S VIP!: https://bit.ly/4ai0Xwg Get Forrest Galante’s book, “Still Alive”: https://bit.ly/468EVep Listen to “Forrest Galante” on all your favorite platforms! YouTube: https://bit.ly/4AhvZRMSpotify: https://bit.ly/3SOTC3e Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/4gIpEa9 Connect with Forrest Galante Website: https://bit.ly/4xVy4ks YouTube: https://bit.ly/4xiLc1X Instagram: https://bit.ly/4iSgWYi Facebook: https://bit.ly/4iY2e1Q TikTok: https://bit.ly/4A8itQq X: https://bit.ly/4zXjLxz Thank you to our partners A-GAME: “ULTIMATE15” FOR 15% OFF: http://bit.ly/4kek1ij AION: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4h6KHAD AIRES: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: https://bit.ly/4a3Duze BAJA GOLD: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/3WSBqUa BODYHEALTH: “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF: http://bit.ly/4e5IjsV COLD LIFE: THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE: https://bit.ly/4eULUKp CYMBIOTIKA: “BRECKACYM30” FOR 30% OFF: https://bit.ly/4tjyluP GENETIC METHYLATION TEST (UK ONLY): https://bit.ly/48QJJrk GENETIC TEST (USA ONLY): https://bit.ly/3Yg1Uk9 GOPUFF: GET YOUR FAVORITE SNACK!: https://bit.ly/4obIFDC H2TABS: “ULTIMATE10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4hMNdgg HEALF: 10% OFF YOUR ORDER: https://bit.ly/41HJg6S PEPTUAL: “TUH10” FOR 10% OFF: https://bit.ly/4mKxgcn SNOOZE: LET’S GET TO SLEEP!: https://bit.ly/4pt1T6V WHOOP: JOIN & GET 1 FREE MONTH!: https://bit.ly/3VQ0nzW Watch the “Ultimate Human Podcast” every Tuesday & Thursday at 9AM EST: YouTube: https://bit.ly/3RPQYX8 Podcasts: https://bit.ly/3RQftU0 Connect with Gary Brecka Instagram: https://bit.ly/3RPpnFs TikTok: https://bit.ly/4coJ8fo X: https://bit.ly/3Opc8tf Facebook: https://bit.ly/464VA1H LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/4hH7Ri2 Website: https://bit.ly/4eLDbdU Merch: https://bit.ly/4aBpOM1 Newsletter: https://bit.ly/47ejrws Ask Gary: https://bit.ly/3PEAJuG Timestamps 00:00 - Intro of Show 05:09 - Hardwired for indulgence 19:24 - Nature disconnection and chronic illness 21:10 - Artificial light, screens, and filtered air 21:36 - Grounding and red blood cell clumping 23:40 - How much nature you actually need 27:50 - Seed oils reaching remote tribes 29:29 - Sedentary living and the pursuit of comfort 31:38 - Why we now simulate discomfort 32:28 - Grass-fed, pasture-raised and free-range 47:01 - Diving with the squid in chainmail 01:07:00 - Conditioned to fear the natural world 01:10:41 - What it means to be an ultimate human Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not provide medical advice. It is not intended for diagnosing or treating any health condition. Always consult a licensed healthcare professional before making health or wellness decisions. Gary Brecka is the owner of Ultimate Human, LLC which operates The Ultimate Human podcast and promotes certain third-party products used by Gary Brecka in his personal health and wellness protocols and daily life and for which Ultimate Human LLC and / or Gary Brecka directly or indirectly holds an economic interest or receives compensation. Accordingly, statements made by Gary Brecka and others (including on The Ultimate Human podcast) may be considered promotional in nature. 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

  I think the modern human, their biggest reality for mental health issues, for physical health issues is a disconnection from nature.

• 0:06Gary Brecka?

  Sedentary lifestyles, the leading cause of all-cause mortality, the lack of movement. You know, we've got escalators, we've got moving walkways, we've got elevators, we've got cars. I have a saying that aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. The more aggressively you pursue comfort, the faster you age.

• 0:19Speaker 00

  You realize that in the natural world, anything that lives a very slow lifestyle has to live a very long lifestyle. So whether you're looking at Galapagos giant tortoises, or Greenland sharks, they have very extended lives because everything they do is at fraction of the speed that we do things.

• 0:37Gary Brecka?

  They're doing what they were designed to do. And human beings, we have pursued comfort to such an aggressive extent that in the United States, we're now the sickest, fattest, most disease-ridden nation in the world.

• 0:47Speaker 00

  I think we get caught up in this rat race, and we forget that we are just something, another organism that is designed to be in nature. We've taken away something that is programmed inside of us that we are supposed to be connected to.

• 0:59Gary Brecka?

  How does getting back in tune with Mother Nature, in your opinion, impact our health?

• 1:04Speaker 00

  I believe strongly that

• 1:19Gary Brecka?

  Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything, anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything between. This is like one of those really cool in-between podcasts. I'm so excited to run this with today's guest. Fascinating upbringing in Zimbabwe and fascinating career. He's really brought Animal Planet right into your living room. His care for animals, his perspective on how Mother Nature can actually impact your health, how disconnected we are from the wild, is so philosophically aligned with what I talk about every day. I am super pumped to run this podcast with you.

• 1:59Speaker 00

  Gary, give me goosebumps, man. That was such a lovely intro. Thank you.

• 2:03Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, not if he does, but no, I really mean it, man. I am fired up for this podcast because, so I have a younger daughter, Alina, 18-year-old. And ever since she was a little, little girl, this is a girl that was like snatching frogs out of ponds and picking up lizards and chasing the boys with spiders.

• 2:20Speaker 00

  Love that.

• 2:21Gary Brecka?

  Daddy long legs. And she's got, you know, wildlife refuge in her, in her room, all of which she completely like suckered me on. We actually have a dog, we have a staffy now, because we were supposed to foster it. And then, nobody wanted the dog, so we had to keep the dog. I actually don't think she tried to sell the dog.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  No, I'm sure, I'm sure she didn't.

• 2:44Gary Brecka?

  But we got lizards stuck to tanks, we got a python in there, we got fish. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff going on in that room. But dude, you have had a fascinating life, fascinating career. And what I find really interesting is the crossover that you and I have about human beings and human physiology, how disconnected we are from Mother Nature.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:04Gary Brecka?

  And how getting back very often to the basics is, is so empowering for, and so healing for human beings. But I want to start with, assuming that my audience doesn't know who you are, I mean, most people have heard of you, have probably seen your videos. They're like, "Oh, I recognize that dude. He was crawling in a cage across a pond with the alligators."

• 3:23Speaker 00

  That's me.

• 3:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, and then he's like, "I want to invite you to this place in India, to this animal refuge." I'm like, "Dude..."

• 3:29Speaker 00

  You're like, "Not with you."

• 3:30Gary Brecka?

  "I don't want to be bitten by something weird." And, uh, because you've been bitten by all kinds of weird shit. But I'd love to start with your, your upbringing in Zimbabwe. Sure. It had to have something to do with how you shaped the rest of your career.

• 3:45Speaker 00

  I think it did, but I also think that it was hardwired into me because, you know, my sister had the same upbringing, and she works in fashion. So, you know, yeah, I think, I think there was something hardwired into me, but I did, I grew up in Zimbabwe, in Southern Africa. Beautiful country, idyllic childhood, you know, we never locked a door. I lived on 200 acres, big farm, a small farm by African standards, but a lot of land. And my family ran safari businesses.

• 4:10Gary Brecka?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  So, yeah, if I wasn't in school, I was in the bush, barefoot, in the bush, chasing animals around.

• 4:16Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:17Gary Brecka?

  And, you know, I talk about grounding, sunlight, breath work, you know, the foundation of health and wellness is found in just the basics, like those easy things. And it's, it's interesting because when you, when you look at Mother Nature, you don't see chronic disease.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:35Gary Brecka?

  You don't see obesity.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:37Gary Brecka?

  You see big whales, but you don't see like obese cats, and you don't see obese deer.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, never, doesn't exist.

• 4:47Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, because they're, they're just, they're doing what they were designed to do, and human beings, because of the way that we chase comfort, and we, we change our lighting, our air, you know, we, we have pursued comfort to such an aggressive extent.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 5:03Gary Brecka?

  That in the United States, we're now the sickest, fattest, most disease-ridden nation in the world. And I think we could learn a lot from animals.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. We're also hardwired for indulgence.

• 5:11Gary Brecka?

  That is true.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  You know what I mean? As a, as a, as a physical organism, human beings are hardwired for indulgence, and animals are not. You do not see an animal that wants to overindulge and eat itself sick, and, and literally eat itself sick to the point of obesity and liver disease and cancer and all the things that we're talking about.

• 5:28Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  You do not see that in the animal kingdom. However, us, who are also part of the animal kingdom, are wired for indulgence.

• 5:34Gary Brecka?

  Wow, I never really thought about that. You know, we have a place in Colorado, right, right outside of Gunnison, 10,500 feet, and every morning and every night, the meadow is full of deer.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Love that.

• 5:45Gary Brecka?

  Like, like just dozens and dozens and dozens of deer. It never really dawned on me, there's this giant meadow that they feed in, and they could, if they wanted to, just stay out there and eat.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:57Gary Brecka?

  But they don't.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  They don't.

• 5:58Gary Brecka?

  They...

• 5:59Speaker 00

  And there's a couple of factors there, right? One is understanding predator-prey relationships, and risk versus reward, and everything else. But at the end of the day, well, to our point, they don't just sit there and eat and eat and eat until they're sick.

• 6:10Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  And we do that.

• 6:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, we absolutely do. And you talk about predator-prey, you have a new series coming out where you're actually reframing the way that most wildlife documentaries and docu-series are done, and not filming from the predator's aspect, but filming from the prey's aspect.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  That's right, that's right.

• 6:29Gary Brecka?

  That sounds like a horror movie.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  It's a crazy show, man.

• 6:32Gary Brecka?

  That's already like freaking me out.

• 6:33Speaker 00

  I got myself in way over my head with that one, Gary, I gotta tell you.

• 6:36Gary Brecka?

  It's a lot harder than you thought, right?

• 6:38Speaker 00

  It's so much harder, and it sounded so good on paper. You know, I was sitting in there in the room at Discovery Channel going, "You guys, nobody's ever seen it like this before. We'll do it all from the perspective of prey. We'll put ourselves in their shoes." And they're like, "We love this, we love this, and go do it." And then when it came down to rescue, I was like, "Oh crap, this is really hard."

• 6:53Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. Because you gotta find something that maybe nothing is chasing right now.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 6:58Gary Brecka?

  Wait for something to chase it.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  That's right, yeah.

• 7:00Gary Brecka?

  So what is this going to do? Why is it going to be such an amazing reframe of traditional docu-series in the wild?

• 7:07Speaker 00

  I think, for one, it's loud and splashy. You know, the title is "To Be Determined," but it's probably going to be something like "I Am Prey," you know? And so it's loud, and it gets your attention, but more importantly, it allows you to see, not from a fear-mongering standpoint, but from a standpoint of wow, and awe, and shock of how incredible these predators are. I read a stat recently, Gary, that said something like, I'm making the number up, but 65% of people think that they could beat a wolf in a fight. Wait till you see my show, where the wolf attacks. Do you know what I mean?

• 7:36Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 7:37Speaker 00

  You cannot, I don't care who you are, I don't care if you're the best MMA fighter in the world.

• 7:42Gary Brecka?

  Black belt in jiu-jitsu, a nice rear naked choke.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  No chance, not even...

• 7:46Gary Brecka?

  Ankle lock.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  Zero percent chance, yeah. And that's, that's the mentality, I think, that a lot of people have now, is like, "Oh, you know, I'm tough, I go to the gym, I work out, I can fight, whatever it is. I could take on a wolf, I could take on a bear, you know, I could beat a lion." You have no idea how wrong you are. Yeah. And I will show that to you in this new series, yeah.

• 8:05Gary Brecka?

  They, I mean, they kill for a living.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  That's right. Things much bigger and stronger than us, too.

• 8:10Gary Brecka?

  And faster.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  And faster, that's right, yeah.

• 8:12Gary Brecka?

  I think, you know, that's super well documented, and most of us have grown up on National Geographic. There actually used to be this show that I used to love. Who, who's the guy from Star Trek with the pointy ears?

• 8:22Speaker 00

  Oh, Spock, yeah.

• 8:24Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, Spock. Leonard Nimoy?

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Leonard Nimoy, yeah, that's right.

• 8:26Gary Brecka?

  He had this show called "In Search Of."

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 8:29Gary Brecka?

  And it was like, uh, Easter Island, and Stonehenge, and was my early, like, fascination with animals. It was sort of a hybrid between National Geographic and all of the just wild, the pyramids, and the Great Wall of China, all these fascinating structures around the world. But he had, did a series on, filmed from the predator's perspective.

• 8:52Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 8:52Gary Brecka?

  On, you know, just these lions that would, you know, hunt, and hyenas, how they're intelligent they are to like hunt in packs, and like, and it reframed the way that I just thought about the animal kingdom just being so random.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm, it's not.

• 9:09Gary Brecka?

  It's not.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  No.

• 9:10Gary Brecka?

  There's like a very much a hierarchy of intelligence. You know, I've read recently about whales, and how the level that they communicate with sonar, I'm going to really bastardize this.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  That's okay.

• 9:21Gary Brecka?

  But finding prey, locating prey, even taking turns eating.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 9:28Gary Brecka?

  Like, "Okay, you go, and I'm gonna..." Bring, you know, the food to you, then I'm gonna go.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 9:34Gary Brecka?

  And you're gonna bring the food to me.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  Strategy, implementation, communication, EQ, not just IQ, their emotional intelligence. Orcas have been documented carrying their dead around. When a mother orca loses its baby, sometimes they've been seen carrying that dead baby around for two weeks. That is a state of mourning. That's all that is. That is the orca crying and mourning and begging its baby to come back to life. It knows it's dead, but that is it showing EQ, emotional intelligence.

• 10:01Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:02Gary Brecka?

  It just makes you realize the beauty of nature.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:05Gary Brecka?

  And orcas are fascinating too, because they're the ones we call killer whales.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah.

• 10:09Gary Brecka?

  But they.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  Do you know how they got that name? Fun little fact for you.

• 10:12Gary Brecka?

  Sea world?

• 10:13Speaker 00

  Good, good guess.

• 10:14Gary Brecka?

  Cause they don't kill in the wild.

• 10:15Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 10:16Gary Brecka?

  Human beings, right?

• 10:16Speaker 00

  That's right. Despite their name killer whales, they've never documented killing a human being in history in the wild. In captivity, they've had a few accidents, but the name killer. I'm their best PR rep, by the way. But their name killer whale comes from the Spanish word, which they were actually named whale killer because they hunt for whales. And when we translated it to English, we called them the Spanish word because you know how in Spanish it goes the other way around, killer whale. Yeah.

• 10:43Gary Brecka?

  Wow. I had no idea. You, not so long ago, jumped off a boat into a school of.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've dove with orcas several times. Yeah, they're amazing.

• 10:54Gary Brecka?

  Which has got to be scary because knowing the stats, you're like, okay, I'm gonna go with the, with the stats, they've never killed a human, but being in the water with an animal like that must have been, you have to respect their size, you're in their territory, their capacity, if he chose to, to just take you out in a second.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  It's the only time in my entire life, I dive a lot, right? I'm in the water probably on average 150, 250 days a year, right? Between those two.

• 11:19Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  I dive a lot. And it's the only animal I've ever been in the water with where I had no say. I was not on my terms. And what I mean by that is I've been in the water with crocodiles, right? If a crocodile approaches you, you can kind of approach it. You take a broomstick, you bop it on the nose and it gives you like a posturing. It goes, all right, this predator is looking at me. I'm looking at it. This is not to be messed with.

• 11:41Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  If you're in the water with a great white shark or a makor or a bull shark, you give yourself an assertive presence, you make yourself big, you swim right at it, you maintain eye contact.

• 11:49Gary Brecka?

  Swim right at it?

• 11:50Speaker 00

  You have to, you have to. And the shark goes, whoa, okay, this is not a prey animal. When you're in the water with an orca, doesn't matter what you do, they're so intelligent and so big and so powerful and so fast. Not that they want to hurt you, but it wouldn't matter what body language I put out, what ideas I had, it wouldn't matter if I had the biggest spear gun in the world. If those orcas wanted to do something, there is nothing I could do.

• 12:12Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  I've never had that feeling before, except with them.

• 12:14Gary Brecka?

  That's so wild. You know, I was watching an episode that you were on with Joe Rogan. It was a while ago and, and he put up this video, I want to say it was an orca, exploding a fish.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, the ocean sunfish.

• 12:26Gary Brecka?

  Never even heard of that, but the speed that they have, is that, that's a real thing.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  That's real. Yeah, it's newly documented behavior. Yeah.

• 12:34Gary Brecka?

  Wow. And they just, they don't, they could obviously just open their mouth and eat it. But they ram into it and the fish literally explodes.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, disintegrates. Yeah.

• 12:45Gary Brecka?

  The amount of force it must take, because I've caught tarpon and, you know, tuna. These are tough, like gristly.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:54Gary Brecka?

  Well held together.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  You couldn't explode it. Not with a baseball bat, nothing. You couldn't do it. No way. Yeah.

• 13:00Gary Brecka?

  They just swim right at it and take their nose and.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, just they had, they can go, I mean, I have to fact check this, but it's 40 miles an hour, 45 miles an hour. And then there's this huge mass, you know, plus they have the ability to punch with that nose and you just put all that together and they know they can do it and they vaporize these ocean sunfish.

• 13:17Gary Brecka?

  That is, that is so wild. And they do it almost for sport because then they don't, and then eat the sunfish.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's fun.

• 13:23Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 13:25Gary Brecka?

  That is wild, man. So I've been working out with my son lately, trying to keep up with him and his high rocks competitive athletes, and I've been starting to use this perfect amino pre-workout. I really like it. It's got BH4, it improves nitric oxide output, but it actually seems to stay after the workout and not crash. There's no stimulants, so no caffeine, no Ma Long, nothing that gives you that kind of amped feeling. You just feel like you're maybe better able to move during the workout, like you have better blood flow. So if you're in the market for a pre-workout, check out the perfect amino pre-workout. It's my favorite now. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. You know, in all of your journeys, there's so much I want to talk to you about, but if you were to sort of step back and reframe your, your life as it is today, you know, having so much exposure to

• 14:08Gary Brecka?

  wild animals, what was one of those Perry Mason, like to da, mind blowing moments that you had

• 14:17Gary Brecka?

  about the intelligence of animals? What fascinated you about how they communicate?

• 14:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:24Gary Brecka?

  What would have been some of those eureka moments for you?

• 14:26Speaker 00

  There's one that comes to mind right away when you asked me that question and it was really interesting. I was probably about eight years old. I grew up in Zimbabwe in Southern Africa and we went to the Zambezi River, which is a big, beautiful river on the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, where my family ran safari businesses. And I, my grandpa, old guy, he was a store clerk. He wasn't exactly, you know, the, he was a great bushman, but he was not, not a safari guide or anything. He said, come on Forrest, let's go fishing. And I love fishing, right? So I was like, yes, I'll sneak off with my granddad and go fishing. And so my grandpa and I, we run, we run up from camp up the river, just on foot and take our fishing rods and we go to fish. And in order to get down to the water, you have to take one of these gullies that goes down to the river.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Okay. So we go down to the, down through the gully. And as you get to the bottom of the gully, there's like one little flat spot about the size of where you and I are sitting here, where you can fish without being 20 feet above the riverbank, you know, and you don't want to be 20 feet above because you can't fish as well. You can't pull the fish up, blah, blah, blah. And so we're standing there fishing and there's actually a photo of this, believe it or not, but we're standing there fishing and all of a sudden my grandpa puts his hand on my shoulder, he goes, Forrest, don't move. And I was like, you know, I was like eight or 10 years old and I look over my shoulder and this bull elephant, and bull elephants are the worst, by the way, like they're the ones most likely to hurt you and everything else. A lone rogue bull elephant has walked down the same gully. Now we're completely trapped. It's steep cliff on both sides, a river filled with crocodiles here and a

• 15:51Speaker 00

  bull elephant behind us. And we're completely trapped. And so this elephant could have decided at any single moment that it just wanted to flatten us, get rid of us and go on with its day. He'd come down to drink, you see. And we stood there and my grandpa just kind of put his hand on me and he just sort of moved me into the corner. Again, probably from me to that post right there. I'm talking about a 10 foot area that we had. He moved me into the corner of the gully and the bull elephant stopped and looked at us because he got a bit of a fright, just like we did. He wasn't expecting two humans to be there. And he looked at us and he smelled the air and he could smell what we were. And he looked and there was a moment of freeze where nothing happened and it was just tense. You could cut the air with a knife. It was so tense. And he looked at us and

• 16:33Speaker 00

  we looked at him and there was a moment, and this was such an impactful moment in my entire life, where I looked into this elephant's eye from me to your camera lens right there. And it was about the size of that camera lens.

• 16:42Gary Brecka?

  Hold on, he's that far away?

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, right there.

• 16:45Gary Brecka?

  The bull elephant?

• 16:46Speaker 00

  I could feel the heat of his breath on me.

• 16:47Gary Brecka?

  Like three steps?

• 16:48Speaker 00

  There was nowhere to go. We were trapped and, and I'll tell you why there's a photo in a moment, but there's actually a photo I can share with you of this. That's incredible.

• 16:56Gary Brecka?

  That's cool. We're gonna get it and put it up here.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and I'm standing there and there's this moment where I'm holding my little fishing rod and I'm standing next to my grandpa who's got his hand on me and he's like shaking a little bit. I look in this elephant's eye, just like I'm looking in that camera lens, and I see something that you can't describe in words. I can see this animal take a moment to assess the situation, to look at me, look at my grandfather and look at the scenario. And this animal who can't communicate in English, doesn't speak to me, tells me through its own way, just by understanding, and maybe this is my gift, I don't know, you're not a threat and I'm not going to treat you like a threat, but don't push me. And I could learn this and I could see this just by looking into its eye.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  And right after it looked at me like that, it turned its head to the water, began drinking, took a nice big drink. And just then my mom came out of our tent, which was just three, maybe 600 yards away. She walked along the river and saw us and went, oh shit, my son's gonna die and took a photo, believe it or not. True story.

• 17:56Gary Brecka?

  Good mother would do.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that's why I have the photo, but the elephant finished drinking, looked at us again, turned around and walked back up the gully. And we spent from me to, me to that camera, the whole time away from it. And there's a photo, like I said, to prove it.

• 18:09Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  And that was such an impactful moment to me because even at eight or 10 or whatever years old I was at this point in time, I realized right then and there, that even the biggest animal in the entire world, the African elephant, a young testosterone fueled bull, who wants to just fight something or mate with something, can look and have the reason and the rationale to understand when something is not a threat to them, it's not there to hurt them, can, I believe, look into our souls more or less and say, this is not a bad person. There's no angry energy. There's no nervous energy, nothing like that. And say, we can live together in peace.

• 18:44Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  That was impactful to me.

• 18:47Gary Brecka?

  Wow. That is such a reframing. You know, you, you often talk about the similarities between, you know, the wild and what we can get from getting back to the wild.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:59Gary Brecka?

  And how health and wellness is really not found maybe in the, these exotic things that we're trying to do, but more, you know, in the basics. What do you, what do you mean by that? Like, how does, how does mother nature and getting back in tune with mother nature, how does that, in your opinion, impact our health?

• 19:21Speaker 00

  Gary, we sit here.

• 19:22Gary Brecka?

  And why, and why has that disconnection been so problematic?

• 19:24Speaker 00

  Well, I'll start with the disconnection point. We sit here in your beautiful studio, in your beautiful home, with the most incredible technology I've ever seen in the wellness space. And you, you tend to, myself included, not just you, everybody, forget that we are just part of this ecosystem. We're part of this blue marble that we're living on here, cold earth. And we are just one of the pieces of the puzzle. We're not that special. We're not that different from that elephant that I just mentioned, or that deer in the park by your field, in the field by your house. And you forget that through millions of years of evolution, through the hundreds of thousands of years that human beings have been human beings, we are programmed to be a part of that system.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  And we have done everything in our power to remove ourselves from that system. And we've done that, as we talked about already, to chase comforts and overindulge and feed ourselves. And I completely understand why. I live in a nice house too, you know? Like, I don't wanna, I don't wanna live in a tent. Like, I get it. But at the same time, we have done everything as a species to remove ourselves from that system. Now, in doing that, we've created a plethora of comforts. Credible medicine, beautiful cars, nice houses, the list goes on and on. But we've taken away something that is programmed inside of us that we are supposed to be connected to. Now, I don't think this is one of those things, like eating food. You can easily go a week without eating food, you know?

• 20:51Speaker 00

  You can easily go a week without being in nature. But if you're never, if you never go in nature, if you're completely disconnected from it, something, I don't know what, I don't know what it is on a cellular level, or a mental or physical level, something inside of you is broken. And I believe strongly that a lot of the physical ailments that we see, a lot of the mental health ailments that we see, come from a disconnection with nature. When you're programmed to stare at a screen, look at a phone, live in artificial light, never be exposed to the elements, never be too hot, never be too cold, always breathe air, conditioned air, and I can go on for another 30 minutes. You do not get connected to nature that is so damn important. And this new movement of, go ground yourself, go, go get sun on your skin. Yeah, no kidding. That's what I'm talking about.

• 21:36Gary Brecka?

  That seems so novel. I've been talking about this for 12 years, and, and I used to get so much grief online for talking about grounding.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Really?

• 21:45Gary Brecka?

  Oh yeah, sunlight, all kinds of stuff. It's becoming a lot more mainstream now, but like, you know, 11, 12 years ago, when I started my first clinic and I was reading, what was the book, Sun Dial? I read, I read a book on grounding and, and sunlight. And I, and I did this little experiment where I actually held this one end of a pole of a volt, volt meter, and I plugged the other one into the ground. And I stood with my bare feet on top of my tennis shoes, and the, the meter was resting on the, on the left side. And then I stepped off on the ground and pegged all the way to the right.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 22:21Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And, and so I started going down the rabbit hole of grounding, and, and then I started doing finger picks. In fact, I took my, my guy right here, Max, who's my cameraman, who's right off camera right now. I used to make him the guinea pig, and I would prick his finger, and I'd put it on a microscope, and look at it under a microscope, see all his blood cells all stacked together. And then we'd either go ground, or, or lay on a PMF mat for 20, 30 minutes, and then check the blood again. It was all free flowing, and it was just beautiful. Like, the red blood cells weren't touching, they weren't clumped up. And as I found out what that was from, what's called a rulo and repolarization, I realized that, you know, that's why I always feel so good when I'm out in Colorado with my wife.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:06Gary Brecka?

  We have a log cabin out there.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:08Gary Brecka?

  I will tell you, to this day, I say this all the time, and nothing makes me feel better than putting on a rucksack and going for this three and a half mile loop that I have in the woods.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  Love it.

• 23:17Gary Brecka?

  And I come back, and I'm like, man.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Recharged.

• 23:20Gary Brecka?

  Dude, the lights are on. We've been forest bathing in ancient, in, in eastern medicine for centuries.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 23:27Gary Brecka?

  And like we were talking about before we got here, if something's around for 5,000 years, it's probably because it works.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  You're not gonna be like, yeah, look, it didn't work the first 5,000, but maybe next year, you know? Like, yeah.

• 23:38Gary Brecka?

  Do you feel disconnected now when you're not in nature?

• 23:40Speaker 00

  Not really, because I am a modern person. And I, it's not like I, like I said, I don't want to sleep on the ground and live in a tent, and, you know, like, I don't wanna do that. I want to have nice things and have creature comforts, but I also understand the value. And what I do see, and this has taken a lot of sort of self-awareness, if I'm home for too long, and if I'm too consumed with work, and this could be the case for anybody, I don't care what your profession is or anything else, if I'm too consumed with work, and I'm waking up, and I'm going to the office, and my only reprieve from work is going to the gym, which I'm still in artificial lighting, you know, and I'm still wearing sneakers, on a rubber mat, that's my only reprieve from my work. My, my physical well, even though I may get fitter because I'm working harder and I'm

• 24:23Speaker 00

  on a consistent diet, my physical and mental well-being is not as good. And I have realized, and this is maybe just about me and not everybody, but I need to get into nature minimum, minimum, once every other day. And it can be as easy as just going for a half an hour walk in my garden, you know? I have a nice garden, I can just take my shoes off, walk around the dirt trail in my garden, sit there, look at the bees pollinating the flowers, just leave my phone alone. Doesn't have to be for six hours, it can be 30 minutes. But if I don't do that, and it's very easy to slip into not doing that, and people listening at home are thinking, I do that every day. Do you though? Do you know what I mean? Think about it for a second, do you?

• 24:59Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  If you don't do that, at least if I don't, for seven, eight days, that compounding starts to really wear on me. And I don't do all the amazing things that I'm learning from you, all the biohacking and things like that. I think there are ways to combat it. And there's a whole nother side of this, it's like, well, why aren't all the people in the middle of the Amazon jungle the healthiest in the world? And we can talk about that as well, because there's a flip side to this coin. But the point is, I think the modern human, living in North America, in the Western world, their biggest reality for, for mental health issues, for physical health issues, is a disconnection from nature.

• 25:32Gary Brecka?

  Wow. That is an bold statement, but I can't say that I would disagree with that at all. Based on my own human experience, number one, I, I mean, I, I grew up on a 300 acre tobacco farm.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:43Gary Brecka?

  And I spent my entire childhood outside. In fact, my, my rule with my father, who was a disciplinarian, who was a Navy captain, was you have to be home by sundown.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 25:51Gary Brecka?

  So I loved it when I got that extra hour of daylight. Because sometimes it wouldn't get dark until nine o'clock.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:58Gary Brecka?

  But as that sun was going down, I could feel my dad's like, rrrr.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  You're like, I better get home.

• 26:03Gary Brecka?

  So I was more scared of my dad than I was of anything. And, and, you know, and I didn't realize how valuable that was.

• 26:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:13Gary Brecka?

  Until very recently.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:15Gary Brecka?

  Right? The, the uniqueness of growing up like that. And I was actually fine to take a BB gun and just walk the stream and try to find a frog to shoot, or.

• 26:23Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 26:24Gary Brecka?

  You know, I built so many tree forts that fell out of trees. And, and now I just, I really wanna get back there, you know? I think I wanna ride out my final days on a regenerative farm.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that. And I think that's part of the cycle, right? We all do it. It's, it's no different to the guy who grows up in Kansas and then moves to New York City to make his nut, you know, and then wants to retire back on his farm in Kansas, right? It's the same story, but I think we get caught up in this rat race. We get caught up on our phones, in social media, staring at a computer screen on our nine to five, and we forget that we're just a part of the program here. We are just something, another organism that is designed to be in nature. Don't wanna be there 24/7. I don't, you don't, nobody should.

• 27:02Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  But you, you need it.

• 27:04Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. So why is it then, just to get back to what you were saying earlier, that some of these tribes in remote areas that are in nature all the time?

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:13Gary Brecka?

  Why is their health and life expectancy going the other?

• 27:16Speaker 00

  Well, so, great question. And again, I'm not an anthropologist, I can't really, or a doctor, but this is just my opinion and my observations.

• 27:24Gary Brecka?

  Sure.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  First of all, we do need to live in a modern reality. Medicine is great, both eastern and western, in my opinion. Doctors, hospitals, creature comforts, it is a balance. If you spend your entire life living in the Amazon jungle, you're going to get a parasite. And if you don't have medicine to treat that parasite, you are probably going to die a little bit younger than if you did, you know? And so on and so forth. So it is a balance. It's not like this black and white thing where it's like, oh, you should live off-grid 24/7 and be completely disconnected from the modern world. And it's also not, in my opinion, okay, you should live nothing but wired into the modern world. I think we should take the best of both worlds. Be, don't be an extreme side either way, you know?

• 28:08Speaker 00

  I think, take modern medicine for what it is, use prescription drugs if you need them, don't overdo it, you know? Use your phone, I'm on my phone all the time, I'm probably on my phone four hours a day. But it doesn't mean that I'm so on it all the time that I never put it down, you know? It's like, everything is a system of checks and balances. And so to answer your question, I think the reason that we see some, and not all, unhealthy tribal people and things like that is, one, now we're seeing obesity be rampant globally.

• 28:33Gary Brecka?

  Oh my god.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Because of seed oils, fast foods, you know much more about this than I do. So they're getting this injection of Western culture by getting the bad, the worst, the baddest and the cheapest, including bad clothing, polyester clothing, bad foods, stuff that's cannibal, tenable, preservative, riddled, you know, all these things. And now that's being injected into their way of living. So you're actually seeing more increase in bad health, because we're giving them the worst of our society.

• 28:59Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  And then, they're also not having the benefits of having the most up-to-date medicines, super clean things, sterilized things, you know? It's a balance, like, you, you have to have that balance.

• 29:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  I don't know if that explained it very well, but that's how I feel.

• 29:12Gary Brecka?

  No, it, it does. I mean, some, some evolution has, has got to occur.

• 29:17Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 29:18Gary Brecka?

  But yeah, I, I know exactly what you mean. I mean, look, sedentary lifestyle, we were talking about this on a previous podcast this morning.

• 29:24Gary Brecka?

  Sedentary lifestyle is the leading cause of all cause mortality.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:26Gary Brecka?

  Sitting is the new smoking.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:28Gary Brecka?

  Totally.

• 29:29Speaker 00

  It's just, it's what we all do.

• 29:30Gary Brecka?

  It's all because we want to be comfort.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 29:33Gary Brecka?

  You want to be comfortable.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:34Gary Brecka?

  The air, like you said, to be, I want it a little bit cool inside in the summer. I want the lighting to be perfect.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 29:39Gary Brecka?

  I've tried to modify my interior of my home because I spend so much time here to be more in tune with nature, with circadian lighting and those kinds of things. But it is absolutely true. I am most at peace, happy, zen, focused, clear, cognizant, awake, like feel the least stressed when I'm spending time in nature, no question.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  But I think I interrupted you there briefly. You were saying that, or right, correct me if I'm wrong, we were talking about how sedentary is the worst.

• 30:07Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, I mean, sedentary lifestyle is the, the leading cause of all cause mortality. So the, the lack of movement, you know, we've got escalators, we've got moving walkways, we've got elevators, we've got cars, we've got everything to do what we were actually designed to do.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:20Gary Brecka?

  For us, for convenience.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:23Gary Brecka?

  You know, we, I have a saying that aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. The more aggressively you pursue comfort, the faster you age.

• 30:31Speaker 00

  I believe that.

• 30:31Gary Brecka?

  Full stop.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:32Gary Brecka?

  And so challenging our bodies, hormetic stress, you know, it's okay to be hot, it's okay to be cold.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 30:38Gary Brecka?

  The sun, the sun is not going to kill you. In fact, it's the opposite. It's a life source. You know, it's, it, most of us are not getting enough sun. It's not that we get too much sun.

• 30:46Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 30:47Gary Brecka?

  That's right. And, you know, vitamin D3 is a pandemic deficiency in the world. African Americans are 85% of them are clinically deficient in vitamin D3. And in the rest of the population, it's about 50%.

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Crazy.

• 30:59Gary Brecka?

  And, and this is, when you think about the fact that it's the only vitamin that human beings make on our own, just think how important that much be, must be to human.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 31:09Gary Brecka?

  Survival and function. You don't even need to eat or drink.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  And you know what's crazy to me?

• 31:13Gary Brecka?

  Or breathe.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Too, Gary, is, and, and I'd love to actually get your take on this because you are the master of this craft. We now, by the way, I have a sauna and a cold plunge. I love it. I love my sauna and cold plunge. Love it. Love it to death. Would not give it up. But how silly is that? Imagine taking a sauna or a cold plunge to a guy in Africa. Imagine taking a treadmill to a, to a guy in Africa and be like, just get on here for exercise. He's like, well, what am I chasing? You're like, no, nothing. Just run on this machine.

• 31:38Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you're going to go nowhere.

• 31:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. He would look at you like you're an absolute lunatic. Same thing if you took a cold plunge to an Eskimo, right? Or, or a sauna to a guy who lived in the Panamanian jungle. He'd look at you like you're an absolute lunatic.

• 31:50Gary Brecka?

  A mile and a half to get water any day of the week.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  Any day of the week. But we have now, we've created so much pursuit of comfort, to your point, that we have to now simulate discomfort.

• 31:59Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. I never thought about how oxymoronic it is, but you're right.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  It's crazy.

• 32:05Gary Brecka?

  We now have to simulate discomfort as a tool to be healthy.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  That's it. Because we're not doing it naturally. We're not sleeping out in the cold and walking in the heat, which these people all around the world are, but not us. We have to, myself included, I have to go sit in my cold plunge and get in my sauna.

• 32:21Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  And that's just a microcosm of how absurd we have created our culture, like how, how backwards we're going in a sense.

• 32:29Gary Brecka?

  It seems so, so crazy to talk about farm raised, um, you know, like, uh, grass fed meats and pasture raised eggs and free range chicken and.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  There shouldn't be no other kind.

• 32:38Gary Brecka?

  I know.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  There shouldn't be another kind, Gary.

• 32:42Gary Brecka?

  I was in Colombia one time. I went down there for a stem cell treatment. I was in Colombia and I'm in, I was in this restaurant and we're having this broken English conversation. And I'm trying to ask the waiter, um, if the, if the meat was grass fed.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:55Gary Brecka?

  And the reason why he was so confused was because he didn't know any other way that meat was raised.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  What else would it be eating?

• 33:00Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. He's like, this is the dumbest question.

• 33:02Speaker 00

  I bet. He must've looked at you.

• 33:04Gary Brecka?

  Does fish swim?

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:05Gary Brecka?

  Water?

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 33:06Gary Brecka?

  You know?

• 33:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:07Gary Brecka?

  You're like, what?

• 33:08Speaker 00

  Idiot. Totally. I thought you were a lunatic.

• 33:10Gary Brecka?

  Swimming fish or dry fish, like, you know? So me asking him if this was grass fed, just threw his whole day for a loop. And I thought it was a language barrier.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:21Gary Brecka?

  But it was a, it was a, what the hell else would a cow eat?

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Exactly. There's nothing else out there.

• 33:27Gary Brecka?

  You know what? Good point.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:29Gary Brecka?

  We do have to ask these questions in, in the US.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:32Gary Brecka?

  Just, you know?

• 33:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:33Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. But we don't have to ask them here.

• 33:34Speaker 00

  No.

• 33:35Gary Brecka?

  People ask me health questions every single day about their labs, their sleep, their supplements, their genetics. I want to help every single one of them. And that's why I built Just Ask Gary. It's an AI trained on everything I know, including my protocols, my research and my methodology. You ask the question, you get my answer, any time of the day. Go to theultimatehuman.com/ai and check it out. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. So you extended me an invitation, which I may, I may actually accept right here on this podcast. Because it's, I'm profoundly curious about this. There is a, uh, an animal refuge in India.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:14Gary Brecka?

  Ventura?

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Ventara.

• 34:15Gary Brecka?

  Ventara. And it's, it's run and operated and funded by a very wealthy family.

• 34:21Speaker 00

  Anadibani, the individual, yeah, the son.

• 34:23Gary Brecka?

  The individual, the son.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  He's a good friend of mine, a wonderful person.

• 34:25Gary Brecka?

  Oh, really?

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:26Gary Brecka?

  Who must just have an absolute love for animals.

• 34:29Speaker 00

  Hugely so. Huge passion, huge heart. Yeah. Amazing guy. Yeah. He's just so obsessed with caring about animals.

• 34:34Gary Brecka?

  Really? I love that. And, um, but there's a health and wellness component to it.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:40Gary Brecka?

  I'm a little freaked out because I don't want to get bit by anything weird.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  I'm not going to let that happen. And I know I'm a hard guy to trust.

• 34:45Gary Brecka?

  The dude in a cage in a river with the crocodiles, swim with the shark and then, you know, eyeballing an elephant.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  I'm not going to let it happen. I promise, Gary. I promise, I promise. Yeah.

• 34:56Gary Brecka?

  Okay. So we're going to go here.

• 34:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:00Gary Brecka?

  And I'm, uh, going to bring the best of modern biohacking.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:05Gary Brecka?

  To these elephants, which we'll talk about in a second. But first I want to talk about what this place is like.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 35:11Gary Brecka?

  And what is your, you know, attraction and, and connection to this place? What, what can I expect when I get there?

• 35:17Speaker 00

  So my adoration for this place is, is, I was very skeptical when I first went there, to be clear. You know, I heard about this very secretive zoo, quote unquote, in India that was owned by an individual who was a billionaire, sounded like something out of a James Bond movie, right? And I was like, I don't know. I was super skeptical. And then I went and I spent two days walking around it. And then Anadibani, the owner asked me like, well, what do you think? And I told him the goods and the bads, in my opinion. And I'll, I'll be honest with you, most of it was very good because it's, it's unbelievable. It makes any other wildlife facility look like a roadside attraction. I mean, it's, it's, you've never seen anything like it. You really haven't. If you see my videos, you'll understand what I mean, the way they care about the animals.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  But the point is, the reason I lost my skepticism and why I'm so enamored with it is this place has fully dedicated itself to the animals. The animals don't serve the people, the people serve the animals. If you go to a zoo, the animals serve the people. You go there to be entertained by an animal, to see an animal on display. At Ventara, every single enclosure, every single animal, every single, anything is designed with the animal's welfare in mind, which is why when you and I started talking about it, I said, Gary, bring your, your, your hydrogen cellular machine, or whatever it's called, please correct me here, and let's work on these arthritic elephants. Because elephants get some of the worst arthritis of any animal in India. Yeah, man, because in India, they use elephants in a lot of places, but I'm using India as an example.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  They use elephants as, as utilitarian tools. They're logging with them, they're riding them, they're walking them on concrete all day long, burning their feet, and their joints give out. These are the heaviest animals in the world. They're not made to carry 5,000 pounds of logs up and down mountains on concrete. And so they, some of these animals get such terrible arthritis that they have to spend their lives in water just to relieve the stress on their joints.

• 37:06Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 37:06Speaker 00

  And you're telling me, you're saying Forrest, I've got this machine and please, please tell me the name of it.

• 37:10Gary Brecka?

  Hydrogen Nano Bath.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  The Hydrogen Nano Bath that penetrates through the skin.

• 37:15Gary Brecka?

  Yes.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  And fixes, people will come out of that machine skipping that have terrible arthritis.

• 37:20Gary Brecka?

  That's right.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  I want to do that for elephants because I care about animals more than people because I'm a bad person.

• 37:24Gary Brecka?

  So going to do this and document it. And I'm going to bring these, it's called a Hydrogen Nano Bath.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:30Gary Brecka?

  And I use it with all my clients and athletes. And it's an absolute game changer. My, my wife actually has an L5 S1 Fusion.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 37:38Gary Brecka?

  From a really bad car accident she had years ago. And if you know anything about spinal surgeries, they never really fix anything. They kind of just kick the can down the road. They might stop some ridiculous pain, but then you just bought yourself another problem. And when it acts up, I mean, she just cannot sleep.

• 37:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:53Gary Brecka?

  And so I'll put her in this bath for 25 minutes and she's good to go for seven or eight hours.

• 37:58Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 37:59Gary Brecka?

  I put Sean Ryan in there. A big podcast.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know.

• 38:03Gary Brecka?

  Former Navy SEAL. And, um, so many, so many folks, but hydrogen's the smallest, slightest element in the universe. I truly believe that the discovery of the role of hydrogen gas in the human body is the greatest discovery of our millennia.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Really? That's a bold statement too.

• 38:20Gary Brecka?

  Hydrogen.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:22Gary Brecka?

  But its role in the human body is a selective antioxidants, capacity to reduce inflammation. But even more fascinating, its capacity to reach areas of the body that are not reachable by other classic anti-inflammatories.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:34Gary Brecka?

  So, and if I think about it, uh, I won't say that I'm intimately familiar with an elephant's anatomy, but skin is thick, it's tough.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 38:42Gary Brecka?

  It's coarse.

• 38:44Speaker 00

  Very porous, though.

• 38:45Gary Brecka?

  It is.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:46Gary Brecka?

  Okay. So that hydrogen doesn't care. It will go right through that skin, right into the joints, into, into the capsule of the joint, through the ligaments, through the tendons, through the muscles, uh, even into the bone.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:59Gary Brecka?

  It is the smallest element that we know of. And when it arrives there. It will have a dramatic, inflammatory effect.

• 39:08Speaker 00

  Amazing.

• 39:09Gary Brecka?

  Pain modulation, any inflammation. So what a cool story. I'll donate these machines. He does not need to buy them. We'll fly them over there and we'll go save some elephants.

• 39:20Speaker 00

  Let's do this, dude. Let's go.

• 39:22Gary Brecka?

  I'm jacked for this.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  We're gonna bring the world's best biohacker to the world's most advanced wildlife hospital, marry the two things, and hopefully relieve pain for hundreds and hundreds of elephants.

• 39:33Gary Brecka?

  That's so awesome.

• 39:34Speaker 00

  That's, that's what it's all about, man.

• 39:36Gary Brecka?

  I'm really excited to do that. So what else, what else is there on this refuge? And how did he get into this? He's a billionaire. He loves animals. And is it a rescue?

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have a never say no policy. So it doesn't matter if it's a giraffe in Namibia, or a dog on the street of Mumbai. If it needs a home, if it needs rescue, if it needs medical care at all, regardless of the cost, they say yes.

• 39:59Gary Brecka?

  God bless him.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  It's incredible. They have helped over a million animals, both on the facility.

• 40:04Gary Brecka?

  A million?

• 40:05Speaker 00

  One million. They have helped over a million animals, both in the walls at Ventara and abroad, because they do conservation all over the world. And they have 200 plus elephants, 200 plus conflict leopards, thousands and thousands of animals of all kinds of shapes and sizes, different species. I mean, I unboxed a shipment that came in from a meat market in the Congo, where he sent his people and they said, shut down this whole market. We'll employ everybody here for the rest of their lives, as long as you don't start this market. They put everybody, they gave everybody employment in conservation, and they brought every animal and took them to Ventara. We took 2,000 animals out of boxes. Animals with holes punched in them, animals with hooks in their stomachs, animals with ropes around their necks, everything.

• 40:43Gary Brecka?

  No way. What were they doing with the animals?

• 40:45Speaker 00

  Just meat market. They're gonna eat them.

• 40:47Gary Brecka?

  Ah, but just a very cruel way to treat them before that.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, you treat it like an apple. You grab it, you pluck it out of the water, drill a hole in its shelf. It's a turtle, tie it to a stick, you know, whatever it is. Yeah. And these are living sentient creatures, right?

• 40:59Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 41:00Speaker 00

  And like, I'm not a tree hugger. Like, I go fishing and, you know, I'll spearfish all the time and love stuff like that. But there's a difference between going to get your, your meat and basically torturing an animal. And anyway, regardless, the point is, I think that with your amazing skillset, coming to this place would be incredible.

• 41:18Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, no. We are 100% gonna do that when we, when we're done with the podcast today. We're gonna get our teams together. We're gonna plan this. And we'll, we'll document the whole thing. It would be, that would be the greatest, like, gift to me, too, to take some biohacking knowledge and bring it into, to a species that, you know, is just standing in pain because they've lived a life that wasn't the way that they were genetically designed to live.

• 41:43Speaker 00

  And what's so cool is a not, as a friend, he trusts me. So if I say to him, hey, I'm gonna bring Gary over and we're gonna work on these elephants, like, obviously, we'll meet with the vet staff there and do it all properly.

• 41:52Gary Brecka?

  I'll give him all the science.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 41:54Gary Brecka?

  Send him the data ahead of time and all that.

• 41:55Speaker 00

  He's gonna be like, whatever helps the elephants, you know? And that's so cool.

• 41:59Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, that's awesome. Or did they have, like, fish? Did they have, I mean, is there?

• 42:04Speaker 00

  Everything.

• 42:05Gary Brecka?

  Everything.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Everything.

• 42:06Gary Brecka?

  I'm so excited. So excited to go to this place. So is, have you, as you've done, like, all of these docu-series and, and YouTube videos and traveled the world and know of the world, do you have a favorite place? You spend so much time in the water. So do you find that it's more fascinating what's beneath the surface than what's above the surface? Or you just kinda like it all?

• 42:29Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm such a dork. I think an earthworm is just...

• 42:31Gary Brecka?

  I'm such a dork.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  I find an earthworm just as fascinating as a panda bear. You know what I mean? Like, they're all, everything has its own place. And what is the best place? I can't answer that. It's, I can tell you my best place for diving, and my best place for seeing reptiles, and my best place for big mammals. And it's just, it's all different, you know? And we're so lucky, because right here in North America, we have some of the greatest wildlife on the planet. And I think people think that you have to travel to the Serengeti of Africa in order to see cool animals. You, you don't. We have incre... Dude, right here, I could probably see a ledge from your window right here, that has 5,000 sharks on it right now. And you could have one of the best shark dives in the entire world, 20 minutes from where we are sitting right now.

• 43:12Gary Brecka?

  That's so awesome. My wife's been trying to get me to go, you know, um...

• 43:15Speaker 00

  I'll set you up, dude.

• 43:16Gary Brecka?

  Andy Casa Grande?

• 43:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know Andy really well.

• 43:18Gary Brecka?

  Oh, you do? Okay, so he, he's from Naples, and he knows my wife's family very well. And he has been inviting me on shark dives. And so I might even have to take him up on a shark dive, too.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  You should. You should. ABC's the man.

• 43:33Gary Brecka?

  His shark dive videos are gnarly.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Crazy. He's the best. Yeah, he's, he sits in a, in a gold standard, ABC.

• 43:39Gary Brecka?

  Have you dove with him before?

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Never dove with him. I've sat with him plenty of times and shared a drink with him and shared a meal with him. He's a great dude.

• 43:45Gary Brecka?

  What's the gnarliest thing you've ever done under the surface of the ocean? Cave diving? Is it...

• 43:52Speaker 00

  No.

• 43:52Gary Brecka?

  Manarays? Is it sharks?

• 43:54Speaker 00

  Probably what I did earlier this year. So, do you know what a Humboldt squid is?

• 43:58Gary Brecka?

  I know what a squid is, just in general.

• 44:00Speaker 00

  So a Humboldt squid is a hive-minded cyclical animal. So, meaning, they, they boom and bust in these amazing swarms, think like a bee swarm. And they will, in the Sea of Cortez, which is in Baja Mexico, they will appear and disappear once every 15 to 20 years, usually timed with the El Nino. Well, I don't know if you know this, but we have an El Nino year this year, Gary.

• 44:20Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  So, I got a call from a Mexican buddy, who said, hey Forrest, the Humboldt squid are here. They haven't been here in 17 years. Get down here. So I grabbed my whole crew, my Discovery Channel crew, don't let Discovery hear this, with zero plan in place, zero pre-production, zero thought, anything. Loaded my truck up with toys. I put literally, like, all my scuba gear in there, spearfishing gear in there, deep drop gear in there, brubs in there, ROVs in there, all my toys, and just bombed down to Mexico. And I tell you all this, because, long story made short, maybe the gnarliest thing I've ever done in the water, was we're drifting about 15 miles out into the Sea of Cortez, 2,000 foot deep bottom. So there's no, no seafloor.

• 45:00Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 45:00Speaker 00

  And we have a swarm of squid around the boat. Now, these squid, you may not know...

• 45:05Gary Brecka?

  How do you find them? Is it like, you know, when you look for birds and...

• 45:07Speaker 00

  No, so, so...

• 45:09Gary Brecka?

  Sonar?

• 45:09Speaker 00

  It's way gnarlier than that. So, they don't show up on sonar, because they have no swim bladder. So a swim bladder is an air pocket in a fish that gets read by sonar. So you can't tell they're on sonar. So you have to go out at night, because they perform a vertical migration. They come up from the depths. They're a deep water creature, that only comes to the surface during a certain full moon event, in order to eat the small fishing things. So you're out there, in the middle of the night, in a tiny little ponga, a tiny little fishing, Mexican fishing boat, on the Sea of Cortez, throwing lights over the boat to simulate moonlight, to bring up the krill and the small things, to then bring up a swarm of seven foot long squid.

• 45:45Gary Brecka?

  They're seven feet long?

• 45:46Speaker 00

  I can show you some pictures. Seven foot long.

• 45:49Gary Brecka?

  We gotta throw that up on the...

• 45:50Speaker 00

  Look at mine. Don't show them that one. Show, look Forrest Galante Humboldt squid. I'll show you some stuff. It'll blow your mind.

• 45:55Gary Brecka?

  Dude, yeah, I wanna see that.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  And then...

• 45:57Gary Brecka?

  We're gonna throw this up on the pod, too.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  They have a beak, like a parrot beak, that's this big, that there's only two people that have ever been, well, no, there've been more, but two, two relatively recent documented attacks, they'll slice you to pieces. And they're cannibalistic, and they're swarming. So like a swarm of bees, or a swarm of piranhas, once they get feeding, they will rip each other into shreds. They're fully cannibalistic, or anything in their way, including sharks, including anything. So, so here we are.

• 46:23Gary Brecka?

  I've never even heard of this.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  It's crazy, dude. I'll show you pictures. In fact, there might not be any when you're searching. I don't know. I might not have posted it yet. I'll give you, I'll give them to you first. You can have them. They're all yours.

• 46:32Gary Brecka?

  We are throwing this up. Can I see the picture of the squid? I'm at least gonna hold it up.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  You have my phone right there? Can you hand me my phone? I'll show you right now.

• 46:38Gary Brecka?

  This is...

• 46:39Speaker 00

  And so here we are, Gary. Now, in order to not die, I did two things. So I get the squid up to the surface. I'm way out in the deep, pitch black, I'm talking 1:00 AM, middle of the night, simulated moonlight, vertical migration, swarming Humboldt squid. And I get these squid to come up. Now, I don't wanna be ripped to shred by these squids. So I put on chain mail, literally night-style chain mail.

• 47:01Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, that shark, that's right.

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Neptuneik shark suit, exactly. But, the problem with the chain mail, Gary, is that it weighs 50 pounds. So if, that's me with one in chain mail.

• 47:11Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  So if these sharks attack, they can't, sorry, these squid attack, they can't get through the chain mail, the shark chain mail. So now I'm on a rope system, hanging off the boat, in the pitch black, middle of the night, with swarming seven foot long squid trying to attack me.

• 47:28Gary Brecka?

  These things are huge.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Huge, yeah. I got plenty more to show you. That's just one I have on my phone.

• 47:35Gary Brecka?

  Like, they have all these tentacles. They could just hold you and just kinda gnaw into you.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  Each one of those tentacles has about 100 suction cups with razor-sharp teeth on it, plus the beak in the center.

• 47:44Gary Brecka?

  Hold on, there's teeth inside that tentacle, too?

• 47:47Speaker 00

  Every single tentacle.

• 47:49Gary Brecka?

  That sounds like something out of a horror.

• 47:51Speaker 00

  It is. And guess what? They're gone already. They've disappeared again for the next 20 years. They were there for about three weeks and they're gone again.

• 47:58Gary Brecka?

  Dude.

• 47:58Speaker 00

  So I managed to get them, document it, go scuba dive in chain mail in 3,000 feet deep water with a rope holding me to the boat while these squid were all over me.

• 48:07Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, cuz I imagine the chain mail is like a lead anchor that would just take, take you right down.

• 48:12Speaker 00

  Bye bye.

• 48:12Gary Brecka?

  And they were just going by everywhere. And dude, the crazy thing is I've, I've dove a number of times in my life. Nothing even close to what you're talking about. And I did two night dives. Night diving was so gnarly for me because, because when you talk about zero visibility.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:29Gary Brecka?

  There's zero visibility and, and you're holding a light and all you can see is like the sediment, you know, coming through the light. And as soon as you move the light, your brain plays a trick on you and it's like something big just went right there.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 48:42Gary Brecka?

  Like you see things, you know, that, that are not there.

• 48:46Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 48:47Gary Brecka?

  Um, and, and as you're like moving this light around, we did a, um, it was part of my dive certification. We were all in like 30 feet of water.

• 48:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:54Gary Brecka?

  Um, and we all had the little glow things on the back of our, our tanks. And I, I just remember being super petrified because if you shut the light off.

• 49:06Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 49:06Gary Brecka?

  It's a very special kind of black.

• 49:08Speaker 00

  It really is. It's a kind of black where you don't know if your eyes are open or closed.

• 49:11Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 49:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:12Gary Brecka?

  And then when you're neutrally buoyant, which means you're not going up or down, you're neutrally buoyant. Other than the pressure in your ears, you can't even tell whether you're swimming down or you're swimming up or you're swimming level. You think you can.

• 49:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can.

• 49:25Gary Brecka?

  You can't.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  No. Three dimensionality of space.

• 49:28Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And people that were on the night dive with us were banging into the reefs and swimming into the, swimming right into the bottom. And they warned us about all this, but it is really, uh, I think a humbling feeling and it's, it makes you realize how small we are.

• 49:43Speaker 00

  Yes. And that's an important thing, by the way. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier in the pod. It is an important thing to realize how small we are.

• 49:51Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  I think we as human beings, I don't care if you're the most humble person in the world, have huge egos because we think we sit on top of the food chain like no other creature. We, we control our environment. We manipulate it to build high rises and cities and, and roads and cars and blah, blah, blah. We, we can protect ourselves from anything because we have guns and clothing and, and, and can build tanks. We're not. We're very small. We're just little ants on this planet, you know?

• 50:17Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  And it's important to get that bit of reality check.

• 50:19Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  I think.

• 50:21Gary Brecka?

  I'll tell you what, one way to get is to go night diving.

• 50:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:24Gary Brecka?

  If you've never done it, you, you don't know what I'm talking about. And if you have, you know exactly what I'm saying.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 50:29Gary Brecka?

  Um, so I mean, have you done a lot of night diving?

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Tons.

• 50:32Gary Brecka?

  Really?

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Hundreds and hundreds of nights.

• 50:34Gary Brecka?

  What's the whole purpose of, of that? Because are there just things that you only see at night?

• 50:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. And like these squid. You would never see the squid during the day.

• 50:43Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Speaker 00

  One in a billion chance. And I mostly night dive lobster hunting because lobster come out at night. So I mostly go night diving to hunt lobster. We eat a ton of lobster.

• 50:51Gary Brecka?

  Right here in the Keys, they have lobster.

• 50:52Speaker 00

  I know, I know. And they just grab, I know. It looks so much easier than where I have to do.

• 50:56Gary Brecka?

  Ninety of them in a day. That's like.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  I know. It's way better over here than where I live. But, um, yeah, I've done a lot of night diving, night diving for sharks because you see shark behavior different at night. There, a lot of sharks are nocturnal.

• 51:07Gary Brecka?

  That's gnarly too, because then you, once they're out of your beam of light, you don't know where they are.

• 51:12Speaker 00

  Nope. And sometimes you only find them when they bump into your tank. Yeah.

• 51:16Gary Brecka?

  I swear. Do they bump you?

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Oh yeah. Cause they'll feel with their noses. So sometimes you're shining your light in the dark and all of a sudden you go dunk and you look and there's a tiger shark that's bumped your tank.

• 51:25Gary Brecka?

  Aren't, um, I remember, uh, we, we studied sharks in human biology, something about like the ampulla of water or something.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Ampule of Lorenzini.

• 51:33Gary Brecka?

  The ampule of Lorenzini. That's it. Ampule, I really slaughtered that.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  That's okay.

• 51:38Gary Brecka?

  I, I did take some marine biology, but, um, and, and this is a sensory organ that's in the nose of the shark. I'm going to bastardize this and you'll, you'll clean it up. But these animals have so many different ways of communicating. They don't have stereoscopic vision because their eyes are on opposite sides of their head.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 51:56Gary Brecka?

  But they can see better in the water than we can. I remember learning about how in a school of fish, and you tell me if this is true or not, in a school of fish, like a dolphin or a shark can be on the outskirts of this school and knows which fish is in trouble.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 52:12Gary Brecka?

  And can go right in and hit that.

• 52:13Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah. And yeah. And that's mostly about reading body language cues. So if you look at a school of 500 fish, you can't pick a fish because that's the whole reason fish school, safety in numbers. But if you look at the school of 500 fish and one of them has a fin that's wobbling a bit funny or is swimming a bit different. And there's, there's a pattern recognition element. You're looking at the pattern and you're looking for the disruptor of the pattern. And whoever this disruptor of the pattern is, there's something off about that and that's who you target.

• 52:41Gary Brecka?

  Wow.

• 52:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:42Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. I remember reading about that. I was just so fascinating, fascinated by it. Um, it has been decades ago that, that we learned about this in marine biology as part of my, uh, human biology, uh, schooling. And, and I was just so fascinated about it. It's like being able to like stand at the side of a crowd, if you're a police officer and be like, that's the dude that's committing the crime.

• 53:04Speaker 00

  That's right. It's the same, same thing. Yeah.

• 53:06Gary Brecka?

  And do that. And then, um, you know, the, the way that they sonar communicate too. Um, and it's a lot more intelligent than we think it is.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 53:16Gary Brecka?

  It's not just locating. It's like a language.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  That's correct. Yeah. And, and in, we're learning more and more in so many more, uh, mediums than we think. For instance, going back to elephants briefly, and then we'll come back to marine, marine mammals. Elephants, we now know communicate through vibrations in their feet. So now we have recently learned in the last 20 years or so, maybe 15, that an elephant five miles away can trumpet. And it's not just the sound and the acoustics, but the vibration from that trumpeting through the ground and up through the, the petrodactyl feet of an elephant that is sending a message. And they're speaking a language that way. In addition to that, we're starting to see and understand and not fully understand, but, but recognize that there is actual telepathic communication that we don't really understand outside of the sound communication in marine mammals.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  Things like orcas, gray whales, blue whales can actually telepathically communicate, not through body movements, not through sound, actual mental connection that we do not understand. But what we do understand is that the medium of saltwater travels messages better than, than we really know. But we don't really understand what's happening. But we're starting to realize that two whales can be swimming together and one can tell the other something without any physical cues, without any sound cues, nothing else.

• 54:31Gary Brecka?

  No.

• 54:32Speaker 00

  Isn't that amazing?

• 54:33Gary Brecka?

  Wow. And so they could call each other over. They can.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:37Gary Brecka?

  You know, it's, I, I had an argument with a friend of mine, uh, a while ago that said, uh, try to convince me that dogs don't feel emotion.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  Well, he's wrong.

• 54:47Gary Brecka?

  That's what I said. I go, first of all, you don't have a dog.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:50Gary Brecka?

  So let's just start there. But, you know, I grew up with black labs and I'm like, listen, this dog feels guilt.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:57Gary Brecka?

  Shame, happiness, like he literally wants to come out of his own fur.

• 55:01Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:02Gary Brecka?

  When he sees me, um, anger, the whole, he's like, no, no, no, it's all instinct. They don't, don't feel any emotion. They're in the same mood all the time. They're just reacting based on, uh, uh, instinct. And I'm like, you're wrong. Like if I walk in the house and my dog had ate a bag of candy, the bag of candy is nowhere in the room that I'm in. Dude, the shame.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  Oh, the embarrassment, the look at you. Yeah.

• 55:24Gary Brecka?

  Look at you in the face. It's just kind of turn their head away. If you know me, you know, I don't recommend anything I haven't personally tested. That's not a marketing line. That's just how I operate. I've been on the road my entire career, different time zones, brutal schedules, no margin for days off. And so I'm constantly testing what actually works in my own body. NAD was something I keep coming back to. It's the molecule your cells use to produce energy and repair, and it declines faster than most people realize. When I found symbiotica's liposomal NAD, the absorption technology is what got my attention. I tested it. I felt it. And it's been in my bag ever since. I'm always evolving what I put in my body and this one has stayed on the list. I'm genuinely excited for you to experience it. This is the standard we hold every product to before it even reaches you.

• 56:09Gary Brecka?

  Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. Are we starting to understand like that animals have the same level and awareness of emotion that humans do and, and maybe able to communicate that?

• 56:23Speaker 00

  I, I think in many cases, greater emotional intelligence than we have. Um, but you know, it's interesting. You know, we're talking about, forest bathing and the fact that if it, it's been happening for 5,000 years and if it's not broken, don't fix it. Same thing with animals. We have known, if you read old biology books, you talk to old trackers or, or old shaman or, or, you know, people that have worked with animals, hundreds of generations ago, dozens of generations ago, they talk about animals understanding and animals knowing what you're thinking and why a certain animal is so hard to hunt. Gustav's a perfect example. If you know, he is the, the crocodile.

• 57:00Gary Brecka?

  Is he a crocodile hunter?

• 57:01Speaker 00

  No, sorry. Gustav was a very, uh, infamous crocodile that killed like 130 people. But every single, don't fact check me on that number. He killed a ton of people, but every single time the hunters would show up, he'd disappear. And the second he would, the second, the day, I'm talking within hours, the hunters would leave, he'd be back to basking on the bank, sunning himself, relaxing like he's the king of the jungle. It took like seven years for them to shoot Gustav because he was so mentally aware that there was a change, probably an energy of predation, that he went to hiding. And then he'd come back out as soon as the hunters left. And nobody was calling him and being like, hey Gustav, there's a hunter here this week. Yeah, yeah. But it took like seven years for them to kill Gustav, the man eating crocodile.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  He knew and he could just sense it, feel it. We don't know why, but the point is for 5,000 plus years, we've been saying animals have a certain intelligence, they have a certain awareness, they know certain things. And then in our modern society, we went, nah, animals are all just dumb animals, you know?

• 58:00Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, yeah, it's all instinctual.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  It's all instinctual. And now we're starting to come back around again and go, well, actually, there's a lot of things that we're learning scientifically that align with our beliefs from 5,000 years ago.

• 58:12Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And we look at the age of some of these marine mammals. And I read the other day about sharks living over 500 years.

• 58:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, Greenland sharks.

• 58:20Gary Brecka?

  Greenland sharks. And what, what do we attribute that to? I mean, they're, they're down at the depths, so they're under a lot of pressure, right? They're slow.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 58:30Gary Brecka?

  Right? Their metabolism is very slow.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 58:33Gary Brecka?

  They don't, I guess, have any, can't have a lot of natural predators if you're around for

• 58:38Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 58:38Gary Brecka?

  500 years.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:40Gary Brecka?

  And I wonder what we could borrow from that for human physiology. Maybe we should just slow down.

• 58:47Speaker 00

  Maybe, yeah, maybe.

• 58:49Gary Brecka?

  They don't, they, they must not be very stressed out.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  You realize that in the natural world, anything that lives a very slow lifestyle has to live a very long lifestyle. So whether you're looking at Galapagos giant tortoises or Greenland sharks or sloths, they have very extended lives because everything they do is at a fraction of the speed that we do things. They eat once a week, they, they barely swim, they barely sleep, whatever it happens to be. You know, they, they do things slowly. And when you do everything slowly, it extends your lifetime. Now, whether that's the case for human beings or not.

• 59:25Gary Brecka?

  I don't know if it fits with the sedentary lifestyle thing.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  It doesn't. But that's different because none of them are sedentary. They can be slow, but they're not sedentary.

• 59:33Gary Brecka?

  Okay.

• 59:33Speaker 00

  A shark's always moving. If a shark's sedentary, it dies. Yeah. So they just do things slowly. Now, some of these animals, like Greenland sharks, for instance, they don't reach sexual maturity, the ability to reproduce until they're 50 years old or 100 years old.

• 59:47Gary Brecka?

  That's what I read too. It was over 100, some of them 150 years, they estimated before they made it.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  Right, exactly.

• 59:53Gary Brecka?

  Dude, that's a long time to get laid.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  It's a long time to wait. Yeah.

• 59:57Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, not in college.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Most of us kind of wait till we're 16, you know?

• 1:00:02Gary Brecka?

  My great grandfather wouldn't have lined it up yet.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:00:05Gary Brecka?

  That is so wild. I mean, all these parallels in the animal kingdom. And, and you know, I think what else is fascinating is how little we actually know about the depths of the ocean.

• 1:00:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Gary Brecka?

  Um, yeah, you know, I, I think we, we've got a pretty good handle on what's going on above sea level. But there's so much landmass and so many miles and miles of uncharted waters in, in, in the ocean that there's, it seems like every year or two, there's some new like wild discovery about something that's living down, deep down there. Like in your journeys, like doing all these docu-series and everything, is there anything, I mean, aside from this, this squid episode that, which is, that's, that is just riveting, man.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  It's bongers.

• 1:00:53Gary Brecka?

  That is wild. Like, that's reframed the way that you think about our connection with nature or, or what you think about the way that human beings live or there's a way that animals live. I mean, you, you've had, you've been connected to so many different species in so many different environments, you know, I, it's fascinating to me.

• 1:01:14Speaker 00

  I don't, I can't think of one specific example to answer that question. I think it's just a compounding amount of information, you know? The more time I spend exploring and learning and seeing new animals and learning about different ecosystems and different environments, the more I realize that we as humans are just a piece of it. And my greatest awakening or awareness is, maybe it's that elephant thing, story I shared, or maybe it's seeing these pilot whales get slaughtered. I don't know what it's been. There are very impactful moments, but I think it's just a big picture that is formulated for me. And it's not necessarily the right picture.

• 1:01:49Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  I'm not an expert in this field, but I've started to paint a picture. And I think part of it is getting older, growing up, having kids, having a wife, having a family. It's not just about like, oh, I'm going to beat my chest and catch a snake or I'm going to travel somewhere nobody else has traveled before. But it's about what is exploration? What is the human species' role on this planet? Is it to be a docent of the planet? As the smartest and most intelligent creature on this planet, should we not use that to our advantage?

• 1:02:18Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  To take care of everything? Do we not have this massive responsibility as human beings, as the smartest, most sentient being on this, on this planet to then take care of it? I think we do.

• 1:02:29Gary Brecka?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  And my best version of doing that, because I don't have billions of dollars and I don't have incredible technology and I'm not as smart as a lot of other much smarter people, is to share a passion.

• 1:02:40Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Speaker 00

  Because I think if I can share that passion, then more people can feel that responsibility.

• 1:02:44Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, you talk about, um, the, the closer you get to nature, the more you want to protect it.

• 1:02:50Speaker 00

  That's it. Yeah, 100%.

• 1:02:51Gary Brecka?

  And you're trying to bring people at scale closer to nature.

• 1:02:54Speaker 00

  If I can, yeah.

• 1:02:55Gary Brecka?

  You know, I, I had a really wild experience with my family. I took the whole family on what they called an extreme vacation to Costa Rica.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  Oh, cool.

• 1:03:04Gary Brecka?

  And we hired a, a guide that was also an adventure series racer, but had lived in Costa Rica's entire life. And we did whitewater rafting and rappelling and canyoneering and zip lining and all the stuff.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  So much fun.

• 1:03:19Gary Brecka?

  One of my favorite vacations. My daughter hated it. They strapped her on a, you know, like a zip line from the top of one of these waterfalls down into the, down into this valley. But what really fascinated me was the comfort level that this guide had in nature. It's seeming, so he talked about, what was the most poisonous snake? It was a

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  Fertilons.

• 1:03:44Gary Brecka?

  It was a, no, it was, I think it was a viper. Or it had a, the head was shaped like a starfish. It had a point on the top of its head.

• 1:03:53Speaker 00

  So all vipers have that. So, okay. In, in Central America, I think it would probably be a fertileon or a pit, a type of pit viper.

• 1:03:59Gary Brecka?

  Pit viper.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:00Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, that's what he called it. And this thing was stuck to a tree. It was bright colored. I wouldn't say it was like yellow, but it was stuck to a tree. He had been talking

• 1:04:07Speaker 00

  That would be an eyelash viper.

• 1:04:08Gary Brecka?

  Okay, so we found an eyelash viper. We weren't super excited about it.

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  Okay, small, right?

• 1:04:13Gary Brecka?

  Very small.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, eyelash viper.

• 1:04:15Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And he was like, if this snake bites you, you will not make it out of the jungle. And, um, and then he would, um, open these flowers and down in the flower would be these tarantula-sized spiders. But he would slide his hand in there and let it walk onto his hand and he would just lift it out.

• 1:04:36Speaker 00

  Love it.

• 1:04:37Gary Brecka?

  Um, you love it?

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love it. I love it. Count me in. Yeah.

• 1:04:40Gary Brecka?

  We didn't love it, man. And then we, we stopped at this place called the Pecory Lodge on the Pecory River. You raft in, you stay overnight and you raft out. And, and he would go out and find these bullet ants.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 1:04:53Gary Brecka?

  They were the biggest damn ants I'd ever seen. Same thing. He was like, this is one of the most either poisonous or venomous creatures.

• 1:05:01Speaker 00

  The most painful bite in the animal kingdom on the Schmidt Pain Index.

• 1:05:04Gary Brecka?

  On the Schmidt Pain Index.

• 1:05:07Speaker 00

  It's a real thing. Yeah.

• 1:05:08Gary Brecka?

  Same thing. He put it on a wooden spoon.

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:05:11Gary Brecka?

  And it walked up this wooden spoon and it walked on his arm. And he's describing to us, and then he would just take the spoon and he would, and flick it off. And I was like, how do you know that that's not going to bite you?

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:27Gary Brecka?

  So there's this, I don't even really know the point I'm trying to make, but this oneness that he had with nature that I found so fascinating.

• 1:05:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Gary Brecka?

  And I was really fascinated by this guy because he wasn't doing it to brag or show to us.

• 1:05:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Gary Brecka?

  He was really interested in us understanding what this animal or this insect was and how beautiful it was. And obviously he could have stepped on it.

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:53Gary Brecka?

  Um, but he didn't want to, like, he thought it was a beautiful creature. To me, There was something in the way he felt about that environment, or that insect, or that animal, that they felt back at him. Like, when you talk about the lack of threat

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Gary Brecka?

  from the elephant.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Gary Brecka?

  He was able to exude this sense of not being a... Spider could have bit him. He didn't grab the viper.

• 1:06:18Speaker 00

  Smart. Very smart. Yeah.

• 1:06:20Gary Brecka?

  He did not grab the viper. But the bullet ants walking up the arm, the, you know, this big spider crawling down. He grabbed a bunch of other snakes.

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  I bet.

• 1:06:30Gary Brecka?

  He was snatching, I mean, big, big snakes out of trees.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  Out of the trees.

• 1:06:34Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. And were they pythons?

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  boa constrictors.

• 1:06:40Gary Brecka?

  Boa constrictors that would crush you. And it would wrap a little bit on his arm, and he would just hold it. And then he would unwrap and kind of let it go, and snake would just kind of slither off.

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:49Gary Brecka?

  But just in the time that we spent with him, we got to know him for a week. He was just so comfortable in, in that environment with all of this shit around that could really kill you.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  You forget that we've been conditioned now in our world to fear all these things.

• 1:07:06Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  But our ancestors and people around the world live just like that guy.

• 1:07:10Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:10Speaker 00

  You know, they, they have enough exposure to those environments to understand what can kill you and what can't kill you. There's a reason he didn't grab the eyelash viper, right?

• 1:07:19Gary Brecka?

  Yeah, he didn't grab it.

• 1:07:20Speaker 00

  He knew that, that, that one's a no-go.

• 1:07:23Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  But he also knew that if you let the bullet ant walk up his arm, it wasn't going to do anything unless he tried to pinch it.

• 1:07:28Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:07:28Speaker 00

  He had tried to pick up the bullet ant, it would have bitten the hell out of him, you know? So it, that, that level of comfort and that level of adoration comes from a respect, and the respect comes from understanding.

• 1:07:38Gary Brecka?

  But his level of calm, while he was explaining, he didn't say the Schmidt scale of pain, but he was like, it was the most painful bite.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Gary Brecka?

  So he's like, if this bites me, it is the most painful bite known to man.

• 1:07:50Speaker 00

  Known to man. Yeah.

• 1:07:51Gary Brecka?

  And, and if this viper bites me, I won't make it out of the jungle. And this, you know,

• 1:07:59Gary Brecka?

  spider bites me, I immediately am going to the hospital.

• 1:08:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, 100%.

• 1:08:04Gary Brecka?

  But he just, in all these venomous and poisonous, you know, insects and everything around, he was calm. He had a pair of Tevas on.

• 1:08:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Gary Brecka?

  Teva sandals with, with a little, little strap.

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  The straps, yeah.

• 1:08:15Gary Brecka?

  Boots up to here.

• 1:08:16Speaker 00

  I'm more of a boots guy, but yeah.

• 1:08:18Gary Brecka?

  And the leg pants and everything. But, you know, I just found that so fascinating, his, his level of comfort and the complete absence of fear, but also his absolute non-desire to cause them any harm.

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Gary Brecka?

  And, you know, what triggered my memory of this is when you talk about like these animals that are communicating without sound, like somehow even an insect knew this wasn't a threat.

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:08:44Gary Brecka?

  It just got picked up out of a flower, just walked on his arm, and it got put back where it belonged.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  There's a lot of things that we forget we understand without, without hearing cues, right? If you walk into a bar and you look at the bar and you look at the room of people, you can see the guy that's going to be a problem.

• 1:09:03Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Speaker 00

  You know what I mean? He's me, he's looking at you, he's looking, he's furling his brow, he's clinching his fist. You're like, wait, that guy's going to be a problem.

• 1:09:09Gary Brecka?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Speaker 00

  You know what I mean? We know that. The same way we know to turn over our shoulder and be like, oh, there's Jimmy. You know, I know Jimmy.

• 1:09:17Gary Brecka?

  Right.

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  Why did I, what, what happened in my brain to make me look over my shoulder and see the guy I know walking across the street? We can't really answer that. But there's something there that we forget. We, there are other things, and I'm not the most philosophical person in the entire world, but there are other things that we don't understand why we understand them. Do you know what I mean? And those are good examples of that.

• 1:09:37Gary Brecka?

  The quantum, it's that everything is connected.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  That's it.

• 1:09:40Gary Brecka?

  Forrest, this is fascinating, man. I'm totally going to take you up on the offer to come to India. I would love to bring my team there. I would love to help some elephants.

• 1:09:47Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 1:09:48Gary Brecka?

  I would be absolutely humbled to bring the best of what biohacking has to offer for human beings to an injured animal.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  We have to do it.

• 1:09:57Gary Brecka?

  And, and then watch this have a positive impact on them. So I'm super excited about that. We'll document it. We'll, maybe we'll get it on the calendar before the end of the year.

• 1:10:06Speaker 00

  100% Gary.

• 1:10:07Gary Brecka?

  So for my audience that's not familiar with you, how do they find you? Where can they see your docu-series? And please tell us what you're working on now.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah. I have shows on all the various networks. Well, not really. I have shows, not all of them. I have shows on HBO and Discovery Channel. You know, my favorite place that I've been working on for the last couple of years is YouTube. Just launched a YouTube nearly three years ago now. Love doing YouTube. Get to tell the stories I want to tell, go to the places I want to play. And then all the various social media channels, just, just my name. Yeah.

• 1:10:41Gary Brecka?

  Yeah. No, this is awesome. So we're going to head into my VIP room because my VIPs have a whole bunch of great questions for you. But before we do, I wind down all my podcasts by asking my guests the same question. What does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  To me, being an ultimate human means giving back to the thing that makes you human. My passion is what makes me human, right? I have a passion for wildlife, and I, I believe that we have a responsibility to care about it and protect it. And I give as much of myself as I can to that, and that makes me the most ultimate human that I can be. And I think anybody that does that around their passion, you do the same thing with biohacking, and many other people that we both know, mutual friends of ours, do the same thing about their passion. If you can do that with your passion and give everything to that passion, I think that makes you the ultimate human.

• 1:11:31Gary Brecka?

  That is amazing. That may be one of the best answers. My podcast manager is back there going, that was a good one.

• 1:11:40Gary Brecka?

  Forrest, thank you so much for coming on the Ultimate Human Podcast, brother. We're going to follow your journey. I hope you'll come back again.

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  I would love to.

• 1:11:46Gary Brecka?

  Especially after you released this new series, Flipping the Script on Prey vs. Predator. And guys, until next time, that's just science.