In this episode of the Shark Talk podcast, host Jeff Perla chats with a man who travels the world in search of sharks, and discovers that sharks are not as scary as we think they are. In this episode, Jeff and Adam talk about shark attacks, and why we should all be scared of them. The opinions and views expressed in this episode do not represent those of National Geographic, or anybody else, and even we're not committed to these statements. We're not even sure if these statements even make sense, but they are our opinions, and we're going to try to make sense of it anyway. Thanks for listening to Shark Talk with Jack, and thanks for sharing it with the rest of the world! Enjoy, and spread the word to your friends and family about this episode to let them know that it's a good one! -Jeff Perla and Adam Thanks for having me, Jack! Enjoy! -Jon and Jack - Jon and Adam, Jeff and Jack - Adam, thank you so much for coming on the pod, and thank you for sharing this episode with the world, we really appreciate it. -Jon & Adam, we are so excited to have you on the show. Jon & Jack, we love you! Jack, you're a rockstar! Adam: Jack: . . . Jake: , . , Jeff: ? & and , Jack: . Jack : ( ) : (Jon: (Jack: ) & Adam: ) , . (Jaws: :) Thank you, Jack, , Jaws: ) , , and (HAPPY Jaws Podcast, (SURPRISE, ) & (AJ: ), Jaws, ? (JAWS, JAWS! , & , etc., etc. ( ) . & (JUY, Jaws! ) - Jaws ( ) , (JOS, . , ) , JAWs, -Jaws, etc. ( ) & Jaws & ) ? , ( ) -JAWNS, & JAWNS ; ... I hope you like this one? , AND
00:00:29.000I was so excited when you contacted me and I went to your Instagram page and saw all the photos and saw all the places you've been and looked you up.
00:02:20.000Nine times out of ten, mistaken identity.
00:02:22.000And the only way they can figure out what you are is by coming up and taking a little bike and going, ugh, that's surfboard and wetsuit, ugh.
00:02:28.000But that one little bike can sometimes kill you.
00:03:31.000I think it's like 5. Yeah, it depends where you get your statistics from and what you're counting because, I mean, most fatalities when it comes to shark attacks are actually the Zambezi, the bull shark.
00:04:18.000They had no idea that sharks at the time would even exist in freshwater, but it was in New Jersey and these people were in a river and I think two people were killed inside of a short period of time by bull sharks that had swum, swum?
00:04:54.000And you think it's because they don't see well, so it's a mistaken identity thing.
00:04:57.000Well, once again, they see you using the electrical receptors, so they can see your heart beating, basically.
00:05:04.000But it doesn't know what you are, and it's got really bad vision, so the only way it can figure out what you are and whether you're edible is to come and take a little bite.
00:05:12.000And, you know, that little bite sometimes can be fatal.
00:06:06.000Well, all fish have a lateral line that's going down, and that detects electrical impulses.
00:06:13.000But sharks have on their nose, it's a really hard word to pronounce, I'm not going to try, but they have this electrical receptor on the front of their nose.
00:06:21.000And so when a shark sees you, it can actually see your heart beating.
00:06:58.000Have you ever seen people that just freak out around dogs and dogs start barking at them and then another person come up with that dog, hey buddy, what's going on?
00:08:01.000I guess there's that aspect of that too.
00:08:03.000To tell you the truth, I think it was just good TV. Okay, so it was just, let's go shoot some shit and put it on television and here's sharks and everyone's...
00:08:11.000Everyone's so scared of them, you know.
00:08:14.000It was quite a natural thing back then to go, you know, you're scared of something, go kill it.
00:08:19.000And so your dad, while you were young, became a conservationist and then started taking you all around the world.
00:08:25.000Yeah, so we made these kind of one-hour nature documentaries.
00:08:29.000They were shown in Australia on Channel 7 over here, Disney Channel.
00:08:36.000And mainly underwater kind of adventure.
00:08:38.000I look back now and actually think it's kind of reality TV, to tell you the truth, because it's a documentary of a family going on an adventure and learning some stuff and seeing some cool stuff on the way.
00:08:48.000Wow, so this has been your life all along.
00:10:36.000There's a difference between expedition and cruising.
00:10:38.000Okay, so a cruise ship goes to port to port.
00:10:41.000You know, you stop in at some town, you go off, you explore the town for the day, you come back, you jump on the ship, it goes to the next destination.
00:17:39.000So I had long hair, so I kind of fooled him, basically, that he thought I was female.
00:17:44.000So he was all real casual with me, and then he would grab your leg, basically, on your wetsuit, and he'd clean his mouth on it and stuff like that.
00:17:54.000It was very tactile, definitely grabbing you all the time.
00:19:56.000I mean, you could speculate and just go, well, he's just recognizing, you know, there's all the long-haired people and non-long-haired people.
00:20:46.000I definitely didn't expect to have a near-death experience with a dugong.
00:20:50.000Because you can barely get near these creatures normally.
00:20:53.000You know, a fleeting glimpse in the far distance is all you ever see of these animals.
00:20:59.000So is it when they're around resorts or something like that, where they become accustomed to humans or around where there's large populations of people, villages?
00:21:05.000I'm trying to think of another tame dugong.
00:21:07.000This one, he died or left or something went wrong a few years back.
00:21:12.000And I can't recall any other tame dugongs around the world, except in captivity.
00:21:17.000I spent a bit of time with two in captivity at SeaWorld on the Gold Coast in Australia.
00:21:23.000And yeah, they were a bit messed up actually, like most animals in captivity.
00:21:27.000Well, it's like that lion whisperer cat.
00:21:55.00099 times out of 100. Well, apparently, this is from what I understand.
00:22:02.000Like lions and big cats, like tigers and lions, when you have them as pets and you raise them as pets and you get used to them, accustomed to them, they're so not intimidated by you, as long as they're well fed, you're pretty safe.
00:22:17.000They're most likely not going to fuck you up.
00:22:19.000But they might fuck up other people who are around you and panic and don't know how to deal and they're like, why'd you bring this asshole here?
00:22:26.000I like hanging out with you and then they just whack them, you know?
00:22:30.000I don't think we give enough respect for animals.
00:25:48.000Tiny little thin lycra suit or pantyhose, whatever.
00:25:51.000As long as there's something in between your skin and the box jellyfish, it'll never sting you.
00:25:56.000But if it touches something biological, then these little poisonous darts fire, and they fire into your skin, and they inject a neurotoxin.
00:26:03.000And it makes for an incredible amount of pain.
00:26:13.000My dad came over and he got the bottle of vinegar, a two-liter bottle of vinegar, and he just put one little splash on there and then put the lid back up.
00:28:29.000The real thing was when I was a kid and I was in high school, it was always we were worried about the Russians nuking us.
00:28:35.000We were worried about, you know, we'd heard about The Cuban Missile Crisis, the standoff, and everybody's always terrified that one day...
00:28:42.000There was always the stories that, you know, there was one time where we almost went to war with Russia.
00:28:47.000There was almost a mistake, and they thought missiles were in the air, and they almost sent missiles of their own, mutually assured destruction.
00:28:53.000I think you find that actually happened quite a few times.
00:31:02.000Because Donald Trump put out this ridiculous video about our toughest opponents, and he showed Putin doing judo throws, and then he showed...
00:32:44.000But it became that with special interest groups, with corporate donations being completely unrestricted now, where corporations can kind of act as an individual and they have the freedom to- It's insane.
00:32:58.000And so it's become a money grab and a real strange one.
00:33:02.000So what interests me is these guys like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump for two different reasons.
00:33:08.000Bernie Sanders because he's a socialist and he doesn't want anyone's money and he wants to take down corporations and he wants everybody to pay more money to their workers and he wants free healthcare and free education and he's an extreme lefty, you know?
00:33:53.000I agree with a lot of his social stuff.
00:33:56.000I agree with the minimum wage thing, and that's the one thing that I need to talk to a real economist who's a centrist, someone who has a real objective perspective on it, because a lot of people are just trying to protect money, and they definitely don't want to pay more to workers.
00:34:10.000They don't want a minimum wage to be $15 an hour, or what you would call a living minimum wage.
00:34:15.000I agree with a lot of his stuff as far as people.
00:34:24.000His issues when it comes to the legalization of recreational drugs.
00:34:28.000His issues when it comes to a lot of things like education being far too expensive and students being saddled down with ridiculous amounts of debt before they get out.
00:34:38.000Why can't we engineer a system where reasonable health care is taken care of for people?
00:34:45.000There's no reason why you can't, because the rest of the world is doing it.
00:34:48.000It's true, but I have friends that live in Canada and their healthcare is atrocious.
00:34:53.000The way they describe it, this is from me personally, from them, and there's more than one person, they've had issues with needing surgery and they have to wait a year, like hip replacements and knee surgeries and things along those lines, where they're just limping around for a year waiting to get in.
00:35:09.000I can't speak of Canada, but I can speak of Australia, because we have obviously very similar systems.
00:35:14.000Australia is fucking fantastic, by the way.
00:35:39.000And then also, that's the public system.
00:35:40.000We also have a private system as well.
00:35:42.000So I pay $600 a year, which most Americans find amazing.
00:35:47.000But $600 a year, and that means I have a choice where I can go to the public or the private hospital.
00:35:51.000And so if I get told, oh, you've got to wait three months, I can go, well, I'll use the private health insurance, and you're on on Tuesday.
00:38:01.000Well, we've got an ocean, so we use that.
00:38:05.000So when people come across on boats, refugee boats, you know, jam-packed full of people coming across, we meet them with Coast Guard, and then we turn them around, and then if they don't turn around, then we get all the people on Coast Guard military boats,
00:38:21.000and then we take them to another country to a detention camp, and then we put them in there.
00:38:27.000And then if you're a reporter or maybe you're with Red Cross or something and you go visit these detention camps, you can be put in jail for about, oh God, 10 years or something for reporting on anything that's going on there.
00:42:02.000I'm like, no, you went to a nice city.
00:42:04.000The real Australia is where I'm from, Cairns, up the northeast corner, where you've got rainforests and you've got Great Barrier Reef and you've got the outback and that sort of stuff.
00:42:17.000They think there's the oldest evidence of life ever that is on Earth in Australia.
00:42:42.000There's some sort of enormous reef that they found in Australia that was just fucking billions of years old.
00:42:49.000I mean, I do these tours where I first started with Lindblad National Geographic was in the Kimberley region of Australia, which is the kind of northwest corner.
00:42:56.000Incredibly remote, you know, 100 kilometers to the nearest road, wherever you go.
00:43:00.000You can only access it via these kind of ships.
00:43:40.000Well, Aboriginal people, the native people, they came into Australia, once again, lots of people vary their numbers on this, but about 60,000, 70,000 years ago.
00:43:50.000So that's when they entered into Australia.
00:43:52.000So they've been there for a long time, very, very long time, and their artwork there just will blow you away.
00:43:58.000Right, but obviously people were, they existed in Africa earlier than that, right?
00:44:04.000Yeah, I mean, Homo sapiens sapiens, you're talking about 200,000 years ago.
00:44:08.000The species, our species, kind of evolved out of Africa, probably around Kenya, somewhere around there.
00:44:23.000And so you go around basically Middle East, all the way down into Indonesia, and then across a short canoe ride, probably the first ocean crossing, into Australia.
00:44:35.000And that's about, yeah, I think 70,000, 60,000 years ago.
00:45:44.000The most technologically advanced society thinks when it finds some sort of a native society that's living in a way that they used to live a long time ago, like, oh, you fuckers, you don't even know what you're doing yet.
00:45:56.000Like, you've got to figure out this whole wheel-gun thing.
00:45:59.000So this whole, you know, they were living sustainably in an environment for 70,000 years and not doing anything basically wrong or harming that environment at any stage, and then, you know, we know better.
00:47:44.000And he's basically taken his entire life studying...
00:47:51.000Both climate change, prehistoric climate change, climate change within the last ice age until now, and connecting some of the climate change, some of it, with impacts, with astroidal impacts at the end of the ice age, which is 10 plus thousand years ago.
00:48:43.000Everyone, I mean, the layman always goes, oh, the last big impact 65 million years ago, you know, the KT boundary with dinosaurs and stuff like that.
00:48:51.000There has been impacts constantly since then.
00:48:54.000And we just need more evidence, basically, to fill in the gaps.
00:49:34.000We're probably the first species on this planet to ever get to the point where we have the technology to defend the planet from these cataclysmic events.
00:49:43.000We're the first people to have that ability, but we're not using it.
00:49:46.000Well, we're the first people to come close to having that ability.
00:49:50.000I think they have some inkling as to how to do that right now, like coding them with some sort of a silicone or something like that, which is going to change.
00:50:36.000That was one of the things that Randall concentrated on.
00:50:38.000He showed these slides last time he was here, maybe the time before that, where he showed these massive tsunami erosion marks all over this one area of Australia, which indicate there was something that landed in the ocean off the coast and just caused massive,
00:51:48.000Middle of the night, go to the toilet, which a toilet on a boat is basically go over to the side, hang over the railing.
00:51:54.000And so you look at these stars, and there you see satellites, you see the most...
00:52:01.000Most people, I don't think, even have ever seen the amount of stars you can get when you get to a very remote location, to the point where you see individual satellites going over and stuff like that.
00:52:09.000And so that's what I grew up doing most nights.
00:52:12.000You know, I would be sitting there and looking at this.
00:52:15.000And once or twice, I did see some stuff that you go, hang on.
00:52:18.000And being a bit of a, I'm a bit of an aviation buff, I love sort of space and aviation, go, hang on, that's not quite right.
00:52:24.000That doesn't make sense of how that object went that way and then turned around and went the other way.
00:53:45.000From the time I was a child, and I think many people share that romantic notion of how amazing it would be if we were visited by some intelligent life or another planet.
00:53:54.000If there's not aliens, then it's a big waste of space, man.
00:53:56.000Well, the most likely is something alive out there.
00:54:00.000The question is whether or not it's visiting us.
00:54:05.000It would have to be so far removed from what we think is possible as far as like technology, but we also, I think part of like what's going on with our own minds when we consider the future is we know that technology keeps improving,
00:54:23.000we keep innovating, we keep coming up with new methods for all sorts of different things, and one day we're most likely going to be able to regularly journey to other parts of the universe.
00:54:33.000If we raise NASA's budget slightly, nothing?
00:54:36.000Well, I think private sector is probably the best option.
00:54:39.000I mean, when people start finding profit in visiting, I mean, if they can figure out how to mine for diamonds, isn't there like one of Jupiter's moons or something like that that's made out of fucking diamonds?
00:54:50.000Or not Jupiter's moons, it's actually another planet they found out in one of the newly discovered planets.
00:55:56.000Yeah, where they talk about folding space-time and punching a hole through the two points so you would surmount, you would, rather, you would traverse insurmountable distances.
00:56:45.000The concept is, if there's some life form out there, we've been alive, or this planet, rather, has been around for 4 point something billion years.
00:56:54.000So if something just had a different combination of elements and maybe perhaps lives in a protected area where they don't have a gigantic asteroid field just outside of the distance between Mars and Jupiter, you know, like we do.
00:57:34.000It is possible, though, that there is a solar system out there that doesn't have this issue.
00:57:39.000That, for whatever reason, doesn't have nearly as many asteroids, and so some life form has been innovating for millions of years more than us.
00:57:50.000But, I mean, we could do that right now.
00:57:53.000We have the technology right now to stop these cataclysmic impacts.
00:57:58.000I think you're being a little generous.
00:58:02.000I think they miss a lot of them, a good percentage of them, because of the gravity and the way the sun is.
00:58:09.000The sun is so fucking massive, a million times larger than Earth, that I think when things are coming behind the sun, oftentimes we don't even see them until it's too late.
00:59:06.000But war has existed as long as humans have existed.
00:59:09.000So you would say, if you were studying human beings objectively, not idealistically, not looking at things through rose-colored glasses, you would say, well, this is what humans do.
00:59:20.000You know, if you were studying us as an animal, if you were some species from another planet, you'd say, well, they do shoot each other a lot.
01:00:05.000The vast majority of interactions you have, especially in America, where there's plenty of food, there's plenty of space, and people are well taken care of, yeah, most of the time, everything's going to be great.
01:00:15.000But when you tally up the numbers for seven billion people and then the battle for natural resources and then religious ideologies come into play and there's a lot of fucking killing going on constantly, you know?
01:00:30.000I mean, you could certainly make the argument that we can do better, but if you just wanted to look at us right now, just no ideology attached, just look at what a human being is, Human beings kill.
01:01:05.000Any evolved alien that we ever encountered, I would say very unlikely that they would do warfare because it's just such a waste of resources.
01:01:13.000How do you get to interstellar travel if you're spending all your money working out new ways to kill each other?
01:01:25.000It's all like whatever group gets to dominate the resources, whatever group gets to You know, maybe their genetics pass on Genghis Khan style, whereas the people that were dominated, they don't get to.
01:01:37.000I mean, it's all very primitive in a lot of ways.
01:02:29.000He's a guy who was a biblical scholar and a linguist, and he knew a lot about ancient languages, and he had a very controversial...
01:02:44.000What he did is he went over the Sumerian text, the cuneiform, you know, those clay tablets with the weird lines, and what he came up with, and really, he's like the only one out of all the other Sumerian scholars.
01:03:00.000He believes that the Anunnaki, which are depicted in these ancient Sumerian texts, he believed it was an ancient...
01:08:20.000But the Graham Hancock stuff combined with the Randall Carlson stuff is to me where it all sort of comes together because Randall Carlson offers an explanation for these civilizations being so advanced but yet essentially wiped out.
01:08:34.000Just rising sea levels can explain that.
01:09:12.000They're just going to find stilettos, Ferraris underwater.
01:09:17.000I like that as a thought experiment of go forward 10,000 years and be a geologist looking back at our little time frame here, the Anthropocene or whatever you want to call it, where humans have been impacting the planet.
01:09:28.000Like that layer of rock, what are you going to find in there?
01:10:25.000If you're not constantly pulling out all those grass seeds and making sure stuff isn't growing around concrete, all our infrastructure will be crumbled and very little left just by plants.
01:10:51.000They use like a snake that has a camera on it, and they find that there was a crack in the pipe and that roots had gone through this small crack in the pipe, gotten inside the toilet pipe, and filled the entire pipe with a root system.
01:11:19.000Yeah, but it doesn't surprise me at all.
01:11:21.000It doesn't surprise me either now, but back then I was like, what the fuck?
01:11:26.000There will be, I mean, that Life After People you watch, I think they get to a hundred years and you barely recognize a city a hundred years later.
01:11:33.000Yeah, there's some cool photos in Detroit.
01:11:35.000Look at that photo of these houses that are just being taken over by trees.
01:12:02.000It's very beneficial to find ancient structures.
01:12:05.000So there's a few ancient structures throughout the world that are extremely controversial because people look at them and they go, well, no, that's a yardang.
01:12:13.000Essentially, it's a structure that is just a natural structure that you're trying to attribute to a civilization.
01:12:19.000Well, there's enough ancient structures out there to be amazed.
01:14:27.000I'm willing to listen to people, but yeah, show me the evidence.
01:14:30.000There's a way that you can get when you party too much where your grasp on reality is like holding onto a dolphin with olive oil on your hands.
01:14:50.000Because of my reputation within the quote-unquote psychedelic community and my connections to marijuana and psychedelic drugs and all that stuff.
01:15:14.000But I've also met some people that they've lost their ability to discern...
01:15:20.000What might be possible versus what you're adding to all this stuff to make it more fantastic than it really is.
01:15:29.000And by doing so, you've entered into this sort of fantasy land and you've sort of negated all potential realistic interpretations of reality.
01:15:39.000When I meet people like that, and I do too, I always push them towards them saying, okay, so you've read these books now, now go read a physics textbook.
01:15:47.000And just, you know, get all your information, then make your own opinions.
01:15:50.000Well, you're dealing with more high-level people.
01:16:05.000I'm very lucky that in my job, and I guess the brand, National Geographic as well, it brings in people who are progressive nature lovers, generally rather intelligent.
01:16:14.000I have dinner with these people, and that's probably one of the biggest perks for me, is you meet people who are just fascinating.
01:16:20.000Because they always attack you with questions, so you spend half the meal just answering questions like we're doing now, kind of thing.
01:17:19.000I've worked on other ships that don't have the National Geographic brand, and yeah, you still get 50% really cool, interesting people, but then you get a group of people who also aren't that interested in what's going on.
01:17:31.000And that's kind of our selling point, is that we have all these experts on there.
01:17:34.000I mean, I wouldn't go so far as to call myself an expert, but we went to Easter Island a couple months ago, and we had the world expert on Easter Island on board the ship.
01:17:43.000That was the guy that was living next door to me.
01:17:46.000That's the guy from your Instagram page?
01:19:50.000It's from the UCLA. But there is ones, what I was describing, where the one picture I have of Claudio, he's got a whole heap that got knocked over by a tsunami, and he's put them back up.
01:19:58.000And they're full ones with, they're basically standing up with their hands over their belly.
01:20:28.000Is it hard when you go to these communities because you want to respect their cultures and their way, but you also want to kind of get to the bottom of these things as much as you can in a brief amount of time?
01:20:42.000I suppose when you get the expert on board, you know, and then you get to hear about all these sort of stuff, but I guess most people going through here wouldn't hear half the stuff that we learn about because you don't have that world expert sitting there.
01:20:54.000You've got, you know, just some random tour guide or something like that.
01:20:58.000And I know with Claudio, he had epic battles with the government because he just wanted to restore.
01:21:03.000It was just a big pile of them piled up and he wanted to come in here with a crane, put them all back to how they were.
01:21:07.000And yeah, the amount of flack and backlash and trouble that he went through over, I think it was more than five years of something to do it.
01:21:15.000It's so unfortunate, but that happens in so many of these places where they want to sort of preserve the narrative.
01:21:20.000Like they have a narrative and they've been...
01:21:23.000You know, giving these speeches and they have this idea of a timeline, how everything was done, and when new evidence comes along, they're very, very reluctant to accept it.
01:21:35.000Well, I mean, here's a guy that wrote 20 papers about that particular narrative and you've just come over and said, actually, that's all wrong.
01:21:55.000So you've got this culture with the statues and stuff, and then that culture actually kind of not died out, but it definitely went out of favor.
01:22:02.000And then you had the Birdman culture come into it, and that was the last one to be there when Western civilization kind of turned up.
01:22:11.000It was a competition every year where they would all run, swim out to another island, down a steep cliff, Hollyham would die in the process, and try and get the first egg, basically, the first egg from the turns there, and then have to bring it all the way back.
01:22:25.000And the first one back with this egg was then the, I guess, some sort of...
01:22:31.000The analogy would be Jesus, basically.
01:24:04.000It's essentially a culture of child molestation where they take children from the time they're very young and they move them away from their mother and they move into these bachelor groups.
01:24:17.000And they have these older men and these younger boys.
01:24:21.000And they essentially tell these younger boys that the only way for them to grow up and be strong...
01:24:26.000And we're talking about a culture that has thousands and thousands of members.
01:24:30.000The only way for them to grow up and be strong is to ingest semen.
01:24:33.000So they have to ingest it orally and anally.
01:24:36.000And it is an ancient tradition of these semen warriors in New Guinea.
01:26:20.000And the most disgusting thing I saw is that they've always gone down to the market and they've bought some food and it's wrapped in a banana leaf.
01:26:28.000They eat the food and they throw the banana leaf off the boardwalk into the water.
01:26:32.000Now, the mercantile empire is now in there.
01:26:34.000There's lots of other people, Chinese, Javanese, coming in and being merchants, and they sell everything in plastic, single-use packets.
01:27:09.000You go there and you're like, I need like 50 dump trucks to even get a start on this.
01:27:15.000The plastic problem in the ocean is huge and it's not until you kind of go through Indonesia, even the Maldives, Seychelles, so much plastic everywhere and it's like meter high in places.
01:27:27.000I heard the Maldives is one of the primary groups of islands that are at risk of global warming of being eradicated.
01:27:35.000The highest point on the capital in the Maldives is two meters high.
01:28:37.000We'd go there on these tours and we would actually spend the first hour before the guests come over just cleaning up plastic.
01:28:43.000And then the first guests to come over would generally help us clean plastics as well and we would take back 10, 20 bags of garbage just so you could walk along a little bit of the beach and not have plastic everywhere.
01:30:53.000It seems like one of the worst engineered civilizations ever.
01:31:00.000We're looking at, folks, for the people that are just listening to this, which is most of the people, we're looking at a small island, not very big, because you can see the entire thing, and it's filled with buildings.
01:34:01.000I mean, again, the different styles of culture that we find, the different styles of the way human beings exist and coexist on this planet.
01:34:12.000It's one of the weirder aspects of traveling.
01:34:15.000You see what's normal to these people.
01:34:23.000What I like about China is that when it makes a decision on something, it's looking 40 years in the future, because it's by committee, you know?
01:34:34.000When we in Australia or the States, we make a decision, it's based on the election cycle.
01:34:38.000It's based on what can we get in four years' time.
01:34:41.000And that's where I think China will actually leapfrog a lot of Western society, because what they're doing now is thinking about in 40 years' time.
01:34:48.000So they're building big infrastructure before it's even required, where we in the Western world seem to just have crumbling infrastructure.
01:35:37.000They start fucking with your finances.
01:35:39.000They start interviewing people you went to high school with and trying to chip away at any one possible moral issue you may or may not have had that they can blow up and stick in your face.
01:36:02.000And then you get Hillary Clinton, who is essentially a lifelong politician who has been so deeply embedded into the system that she has a massively low trust rate.
01:37:08.000But she doesn't really dictate policy.
01:37:10.000And I think the real president should be the internet.
01:37:13.000I really believe firmly that with education and with access to information that we're all enjoying right now, that maybe not now because we're in this sort of...
01:37:26.000I think we're going to be able to read each other's minds.
01:37:37.000We're going to be able to tap into Instantaneous information directly to our mind and we're going to realize that The only way this is all gonna work out is if we don't allow anyone to abuse the environment for the sake of profit that we don't allow anyone to take life for the sake of profit that we don't allow anyone to lie to us about their motives for invading countries or for for dictating certain policy and and especially For
01:38:07.000influencing other countries for the reason of profit.
01:38:21.000And I think that's going to happen in a natural way because I think it's going to be unavoidable.
01:38:26.000I think in the future, like what you're seeing now, I think one of the reasons why you're seeing this poor group of people running for president is because the really rich and influential people that maybe would have run for president 20 or 30 years ago are like, fuck that job!
01:38:56.000You want it just because it's like this thing to achieve and then but you if you look at it on paper like what what is it's not like you're independently wealthy once you get in you really make you make very good money for the average person you make like I think it's like four hundred fifty or five hundred thousand dollars a year you know you certainly a good living but that's that's not like it's not worth it it's not worth it But they make money in the speeches.
01:40:28.000I got in a bit of trouble for saying this about a year ago, but I honestly think the whole Trump candidacy is a conspiracy theory to make Hillary win.
01:40:39.000Because you have someone so crazy on that side that people go, alright, we've had our fun, but time to get serious.
01:40:45.000And they go for Hillary because it's the better option of the two.
01:40:57.000On that trip to Easter Island, so we went from Tahiti to Easter Island, okay, over about two weeks or so.
01:41:03.000And we had a gentleman on board who was kind of my political hero.
01:41:07.000His name was Bob Brown, Australian senator, leader of the Green Party.
01:41:13.000And so when I was growing up, you would have your talking heads, some topic coming on, and you'd have basically the Republican and the Democrat.
01:41:19.000We call them liberals and Labor, whatever.
01:41:21.000And it would be stupid comment, stupid comment.
01:41:24.000And then you'd have this third one, the Greens guy.
01:41:27.000He would come on and then just say something that actually made sense.
01:41:30.000And so the whole time growing up, he was a bit of a political hero of mine.
01:41:33.000Nothing worship or anything like that.
01:41:35.000But I went, you know, out of all the politicians, this guy's at least got his head screwed on and is environmentally and progressive and stuff like that.
01:42:09.000We need younger people like you to do this.
01:42:12.000And I must admit, I thought about it because I want to not change the world, but I want to do something to make this earth slightly better than what I arrived.
01:42:34.000I haven't watched much C-SPAN of Congress and stuff over here, but our parliament, they just sit there bitching at each other continuously.
01:42:44.000Where they're just abusing each other, basically, and yelling, calling each other names all the time.
01:42:48.000When they have a vote and they know the vote's not going to go their way, then you have to have, like, 60% of the people there to make the vote count.
01:42:55.000They all run for the doors and try and get out before they lock the doors so that there's not enough people there to actually make it pass.
01:43:02.000They just act like little schoolchildren.
01:43:05.000Our prime minister, there's a video of it, Sprinting, because I go, the doors are going to be locked in two minutes.
01:43:09.000And he's sprinting out of his seat to get out that door, because if he gets out that door, then he doesn't vote, and there's not enough votes, and then it doesn't go through.
01:43:15.000It's just, like, we're paying these people to represent us, and they're just acting like little children.
01:43:21.000Why would you want to surround yourself?
01:43:23.000Imagine waking up every day and surrounding yourself with that.
01:43:26.000I think we'd be way better off if individual human beings across the board, like the giant mass of us, if we all, everyone adult, had a say instead of an elected government, a representative government,
01:44:11.000And where I think they went wrong, because this is something I've thought about quite considerably, is where they went wrong is they're trying to change the whole system.
01:44:19.000So they're going, we're going to come in, we're going to change the whole system.
01:44:23.000So I thought, hang on, is there a way to achieve the same goal...
01:44:28.000But through the non-profit angle, you know, instead of trying to change the whole thing.
01:44:31.000And so it's something I started on, I started working on, and it's been put to the sidelines because I travel the world and I'm busy, you know.
01:44:38.000But earthvote.network, where you had a place where you could go and vote, like a petition, but it's that one question that you answer stays on forever.
01:44:46.000And so then, because in Australia all the time, you pick up a Murdoch newspaper.
01:44:50.000And it'll say, 94% of Australians think this.
01:44:52.000And then you read down the bottom, out of a survey of 500 people ringing landlines in one suburb in Sydney, I'm like, that's not a representation of what's going on.
01:45:02.000Imagine if I could turn around and go, here's half a million people, and here's the percentage of what they think.
01:45:07.000Then you're getting a more accurate representation of what's going on.
01:45:10.000I think there's room for a website like that.
01:45:12.000And obviously I've kind of given up on doing it myself, hence why I'm mentioning it right now.
01:45:19.000There's huge potential in taking clicktivism, which we currently see on Facebook and everything.
01:45:23.000Everyone's happy to click on a link and spread the good word about some environmental concern but actually do something they're not so willing to do.
01:45:32.000If you collate all that clicktivism into one spot and then you have data coming out of it, it actually becomes useful.
01:45:39.000It actually can be used where you can go to a politician and say, 80% of your electorate think this, so you'll represent them.
01:45:48.000And then the other aspect to it is to then actually do a kind of vote – not voting – keep a system of the politicians.
01:45:57.000So say 80% of Australia thinks this, thinks A, and then the politician – The votes for a bill that's against that, then you give them a minus one point.
01:46:06.000They vote for it, you give them a plus one point.
01:46:09.000And so eventually you would work out basically which politicians are accurately representing their constituents and which ones are not.
01:46:33.000I think the future, you know, as we're saying, as we get more access to, you know, the way people are influenced and we understand where the money is actually coming from, which is way more today than has ever been in the past.
01:46:45.000You know, 30, 40 years ago, it was really difficult to find out what was motivating certain presidents or people that were candidates.
01:46:52.000And you only got to see what they were projecting in front of the television.
01:47:25.000But yeah, if you could get someone to talk for long periods of time, uncensored like that, without commercial breaks, without moderators, then you're going to get to see them.
01:47:32.000These debates that they have are so ridiculous.
01:47:35.000One person says something ridiculous to see Bernie Sanders raising his hand when he disagrees, waiting to have his turn.
01:47:40.000And then she's talking over, and then he talks over, and you're running out of time, but let me finish my point!
01:47:46.000And he goes, oh, it's like the method of distributing information is archaic.
01:47:53.000You know, they should have some sort of a freeform...
01:47:57.000Freeform conversation that's available online where people can watch it and, you know, you have someone who is entertaining, that understands politics, run them through it, and just give some sort of a real detailed view to the American people of who these people are and what they're about.
01:48:16.000But I think the people that are today, even Bernie Sanders, who's, you know, really revolutionary in a lot of ways and very progressive in a lot of ways, he's still a politician.
01:48:27.000You know, he's still wearing a tie and a suit and all that nonsense, and he's still a part of this weird system, and he always has been, even though he's a rebel in a lot of ways.
01:48:35.000But I think they're going to be like those people that are wearing powdered wigs in those ancient pictures.
01:49:20.000So if you get in trouble, if you did something, if you got accused of something, and you hired a lawyer, your lawyer would have to wear a wacky wig like that?
01:52:30.000Do you think that's the same sort of momentum that's behind getting rid of the immigrants and shipping them off to new places and putting people in jail for reporting on it?
01:52:40.000We have stuff like your Patriot Act, where they bring in a law that does all this sort of stuff, and they don't debate it.
01:52:54.000You could see it was staged where they had...
01:52:55.000We've arrested 20 terrorists in Sydney.
01:52:58.000Now, they actually had to let them all go because they didn't have anything on any of them.
01:53:02.000But they filmed it, and it was on national news of them raiding all these places, and then immediately brought in, a week later, new laws that no one debated.
01:53:32.000And now, to this day, whenever I travel, my bags, if I have a short transit, my bags won't make it because they get searched at every single airport I go along on the list.
01:53:43.000I just spent three weeks in Antarctica with no luggage.
01:54:45.000I drove down from San Francisco yesterday, and it was ludicrous how fast people were driving, like above the speed limit.
01:54:51.000Because the speed that they were driving, like 40 k's over the speed limit or something, that in Australia is you lose your license instantly.
01:54:57.000You don't have a license for the next year.
01:58:36.000Because those contrails that are created, the artificial clouds that are created by jet engines naturally stirring up the humidity in the atmosphere.
01:58:44.000Maybe they're reflecting back solar radiation.
01:58:47.000Well, that's where all the chemtrail craziness comes from.
01:58:51.000The geoengineering people, they believe that that is actually done on purpose.
01:58:55.000And then what we're doing is we're making artificial clouds, try to control the environment.
01:59:11.000I always try and point that one out to people.
01:59:14.000There's a guy named Mick West who runs this website called Metabunk and just sort of debunks a lot of really commonly held ideas that conspiracy theorists tend to grab onto.
01:59:24.000But he calls it the training wheels of conspiracy theories because it's like in the sky above your head.
01:59:30.000You're like, we gotta get to the bottom of this!
01:59:31.000And that's sort of where, instead of researching what actually happens with jet engines and condensation, and people say, well, how come one day there'll be no contrails and another day there'll be a lot?
01:59:44.000Well, how come one day it rains and another day it doesn't rain?
02:02:49.000So what's going on in my body is lots of little tiny bubbles, basically, are all in my nerves, bloodstream, everywhere, and they cause inflammation and they kill stuff.
02:06:36.000We had Chris Bell and Mark Bell from the documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster, and the new one, Prescription Thugs, where they go over the effect of the prescription drug industry and what massive influence it has on people and the amount of people that are hooked on pain pills and whatnot.
02:06:52.000Those ads are banned in Australia, by the way.
02:06:54.000And they were talking in the documentary about during the Reagan administration when they became legal and they started advertising for all these drugs and how much different the landscape changed when all of a sudden there was an ad that showed you all these things that maybe you have an issue and maybe you should talk to your doctor about this stuff.
02:07:14.000And then the sales go through the roof.
02:07:16.000They get addicted to that money that comes from those sales.
02:07:19.000It's a really disturbing aspect of our society that you can advertise for drugs, like prescription pharmaceuticals.
02:07:26.000How many different drugs an average American is on at any one point?
02:07:31.000When I was in the dive industry as a dive supervisor, I would get...
02:07:35.000Lists of everyone on board and their medical conditions and what drugs they were currently taking.
02:07:42.000American, they'd have five or six things listed there, and then I would have to actually go do the research on each drug and see if they conflicted with diving and stuff like that.
02:07:51.000It was a lot of work, and you're kind of like, oh, this is an upper, and this is a downer, and this is a kind of leveler, and this is a...
02:07:58.000Well, people have antidepressants and they have an extra, a bilify that they add to an antidepressant if that antidepressant isn't doing the job.
02:08:06.000But it could cause society to collapse and your asshole explodes and you bleed out.
02:09:50.000I would have to go pay for it myself, basically.
02:09:53.000I'd have to pay thousands of dollars to go get oxygen therapy, like what footballers do.
02:09:58.000Footballers go do it so they heal quicker.
02:10:00.000If you actually talk to a doctor, they would say it probably wouldn't do much because You do it after the event, but now, we're talking four years later, they're like, eh, probably wouldn't do much.
02:10:10.000But the problem with decompression sickness is there's not a lot of evidence.
02:11:17.000I mean, the names weren't kind of mixed over here sort of thing.
02:11:21.000The first thing they did is they chuck you on antipresents, Cymbalta, that sort of stuff.
02:11:26.000Because they're like, well, he's just having trouble adjusting to the fact that he's in pain all the time, so let's give him an antidepressant so he's happy.
02:11:33.000Which, it does take the edge off, but it's, A, I'm kind of half against it, but B, you just had to keep upping the dose.
02:11:41.000You start off on 10 milligrams, and then in a month's time, it wouldn't do anything anymore.
02:11:44.000You go to 20, and you just keep upping the dose.
02:11:47.000So you just become accustomed to the dosage?
02:11:49.000Yeah, because it's not taking the pain away, it's just taking the edge off, making you not think about it so much.
02:11:54.000One of the reasons why a friend of mine got off of them, he said he realized you're going to get adapted to whatever dose they give you, and then you're going to come up with some, well, this isn't working anymore because your body's accustomed to it.
02:12:06.000You built up a tolerance, so we're going to try a new SSRI on you.
02:14:37.000We did through, you know, sort of, not past Somalia, but Tanzania, Maldives, Seychelles, around that whole area.
02:14:44.000So a lot of people want to talk about piracy.
02:14:45.000So I have a little presentation that I kind of did on piracy in there.
02:14:50.000But what I quite like to show people is actually, I like bringing new technology into the equation.
02:14:55.000So there's a website called Live Piracy Map, and you can actually see a map of the world and all the current pirate attacks around the world.
02:15:25.000Pirates attack cargo ships, something with very little crew, 10 crew or something like that.
02:15:29.000They attack something that's a big prize with very little people protecting it.
02:15:33.000Occasionally they'll go for yachts, little tiny yachts.
02:15:39.000But cruise ships, I think the last sort of cruise ship or big ship that they tried to attack, as they came up alongside it, all the guests on board grabbed all the outdoor furniture, all the sun lounges and stuff like that, and threw it at the people coming up in the little boats and killed some of them.
02:16:38.000Most of the piracy is where the largest shipping channels are, basically.
02:16:41.000Well, the Somali story we've talked about on the podcast many times, unfortunately, and I want to reiterate it, but those people were forced into it.
02:16:50.000Because of people dumping toxic waste.
02:17:17.000Well, the battle for resources and the inequality of the, you know, of the resources and what you can get in the world, it just leads people to desperation.
02:17:26.000And that's what, you know, going back to the alien thing, that's what we would hope one day we would get past.
02:17:32.000We'd get past this, I mean, we'd understand that, like, if we just looked at the world and I mean, if somehow or another we realize that there's a way to be completely altruistic, right?
02:17:42.000There's a way to be completely even and fair, and we would look at the globe and say, well, look, there's plenty of resources.
02:17:48.000We have boats and ships, and let's just evenly distribute all this stuff and figure out a way we could all live in harmony and everybody contribute.
02:17:57.000But it's difficult with the way things are right now.
02:18:00.000It's very difficult to move into that place.
02:18:02.000We'd have to have some sort of a massive transcendence.
02:18:05.000I'd like to go more into the whole climate change thing normally before I bring this up.
02:18:09.000But at the same time, I started off very optimistic.
02:18:12.000I started doing climate change talks in 2007. I was very, very optimistic.
02:18:15.000I was like, we can do this, we can do this, we can do this.
02:18:17.000Now, fast forward almost 10 years later, and I'm apocalyptomistic.
02:18:22.000Yeah, I think really if we want to change what's going on now, like any problem, when adults come to you with a problem, have you tried turning it on and off?
02:18:34.000I really think we're getting to the point now where we've really got to turn it all off and then start it back up again in a carbon neutral kind of way.
02:18:43.000That's what we're getting to right now because what we're seeing now, this is something that eludes most people, The effects we're seeing now, which is 2 degrees Celsius above industrial, right?
02:18:55.000The Arctic at the moment is 12 to 16 degrees Celsius above the average pre-industrial time.
02:19:01.000All this sort of stuff going on, there's a 40-year lag between what we pump out in pollution and CO2 to what the actual temperature rises.
02:19:10.000So what we're seeing now is from the mid-70s.
02:19:15.000We haven't even got up to the 80s yet.
02:19:52.000The Arctic at the moment is, in some areas, about 12 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial levels.
02:19:58.000So, God, I could never go to Fahrenheit, but I would say, yeah, 24, almost 30. It is very annoying that we have different ways of telling the temperature.
02:20:39.000When I was in high school, before high school, I believe, I believe junior high school, there was an attempt to indoctrinate the American people on soccer and the metric system.
02:23:49.000But if you were to specify a specific expedition, I can tell you my highlights of it.
02:23:52.000So probably one of my favorite places in the world at the moment is South Georgia, which is, you know, the Falkland Islands are.
02:23:58.000It's just over a little bit further into the ocean there, east.
02:24:04.000And so you've got this little tiny rock in the middle of a big ocean, and all the animals have to go somewhere, so they all go to this little tiny rock.
02:24:09.000So you go on this beach, St Andrews Bay, and you've got 400,000 king penguins on this one little beach.
02:24:19.000And it had a lot of sealing, but now the fur seals are coming back.
02:24:23.000And so you literally get to these beaches, and you've kind of got to try and make your way through the penguins and the seals to actually get ashore.
02:24:30.000And one of my favourite things to do there...
02:24:32.000I just lay down on the beach and all the little tiny baby fur seal pups, little tiny things with bobbly heads, they all come up and they pile on top of you.
02:24:42.000It's just an amazing, amazing experience to be in amongst so many animals that are just as inquisitive about you as they are.
02:24:50.000Yeah, there's some crazy, crazy shots there.
02:24:57.000I've got some images somewhere as well.
02:25:00.000The perspective that you gain from visiting all these amazing places, and then when you come and you talk to people that sort of live in one city and never leave, do you feel bad for those people?
02:26:14.000There's a lot of cow patties around there.
02:26:19.000But I think about that when I think of traveling to different cultures and experiencing these really incredibly varied ways of living that people have.
02:26:29.000I always think, when you look at all the different varieties of life, like I posted this Instagram video last night of this jellyfish that I saw in an aquarium.
02:26:39.000And I remember thinking, when I was looking at that jellyfish, like, if that thing was on another planet, we would think it would be the most fascinating discovery that man has had.
02:28:01.000Yeah, or the octopus is in the cephalopod family as well.
02:28:03.000So this one's got a cuttlefish bone, so it's neutrally buoyant.
02:28:06.000It's kind of just floating off the surface.
02:28:07.000But it looks like whatever's behind it.
02:28:09.000It's very, very good at camouflage and also communicates via color as well.
02:28:14.000But what we couldn't work out for many years was you put them in a dark box and they will still mimic.
02:28:20.000So you put it in a box with no light whatsoever, they will still mimic whatever's behind them, even though there's no light there to actually use.
02:29:15.000And pulls out a sack of sperm and then goes up to the female and then sticks that arm with a sack of sperm on it up her nostril, her left nostril.
02:30:04.000So they do that, they reproduce, they die.
02:30:06.000My friend Remy Warren has this show called Apex Predator where he travels to all these different environments and tries to figure out how these various apex predators hunt their food and how they do it and he said without a doubt that the most fascinating one that he Oh,
02:31:41.000But again, it's entirely cultural because if you're an Indian person who's a Hindu and you see what we do to cows, that would be equally if not more disturbing because their cows are holy.
02:31:53.000What I love, I haven't done much India, but I've done Nepal, is that, no, we don't eat this cow.
02:40:31.000But Shermer is a much more reasonable and intelligent man.
02:40:33.000He was talking about this documentary.
02:40:37.000I actually brought it up and I forgot that he was in it.
02:40:40.000It was a documentary where it showed that the same people that were spreading misinformation, that were actually paid to spread misinformation about cigarettes, about cigarettes being addictive, were the very same people that were spreading misinformation about climate change.
02:42:14.000Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to make observations of the skies as closely as we do.
02:42:18.000So people always go, yes, it's solar, but if you look at solar since 1960, 70, it's been going down.
02:42:25.000The amount of solar radiation, the amount of energy the sun's putting out that hits planet Earth has been going down, and yet temperature has been going up big time.
02:42:33.000So right there, you kind of can get away from the whole, it's just natural cycle.
02:42:37.000Something's really going on that's not meant to be there.
02:42:40.000And so, as of last year, we crossed 400 parts per million with CO2 in the atmosphere, and actually between...
02:43:30.000Do you remember when an Inconvenient Truth came out and so many people were attacking Al Gore immediately afterwards?
02:43:35.000Boy, those conservatives, they fucking piled on.
02:43:38.000It's almost like they were just trying to avoid the information getting out, just trying to keep business as usual for as long as possible.
02:43:44.000I often wonder what sort of world we'd currently live in if Al Gore became president.
02:44:32.000And it was all about how these Diebold machines that were created, these election counting machines, where they were huge contributors to the Republican Party, the Diebold Corporation, which changed their name afterwards.
02:44:47.000But they also engineered some sort of a backdoor into the system, like clearly that could be hacked.
02:44:53.000And they showed it, like, without doubt on the show, in the documentary, that you can hack these machines and alter the results.
02:47:27.000Well, we're pumping out 9 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year.
02:47:31.000What I like about this graph is that you can see that about three and a half A billion tons is actually coming from coal and about three and a half from petroleum.
02:47:40.000So actually just removing coal from the equation is like a third, more than a third.
02:47:45.000And that's China, is a big one, right?
02:47:47.000No, Australia's got heaps of coal-fired power plants.
02:47:50.000Australia, well, America has some as well, right?
02:47:53.000But China, they have a huge problem with it, right?
02:50:54.000That's one of the more disturbing aspects.
02:50:56.000Not just ocean acidification, but less oxygen and more dead zones.
02:51:02.000Well, the last time this happened, which is, it's happening, and it's only a couple decades away, 96% of the marine species on this earth perished.
02:51:45.000I saw something online about, there was a solution that they were proposing where they would put scrap iron all throughout the ocean, and that would somehow or another attract algae, and that would...
02:51:59.000Basically, you're seeding a whole heap of life to bloom.
02:52:24.000The ocean's doing a damn good job at the moment of absorbing a lot of CO2. And that's why we have this kind of 40-year lag thing going on, because the ocean absorbs a lot of heat.
02:56:32.000But that's the last one I'd like to end on, because I know we're running out of time, is Buckminster Fuller.
02:56:37.000And I think he put it best, which is, It is now highly feasible to take care of everyone on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known.
02:57:30.000In 2015, at least 13 toddlers have inadvertently killed themselves with firearms, 18 more injured themselves, 10 injured other people, and 2 killed other people.
02:58:04.000It did for you guys, but again, you have the population of Los Angeles and a giant hunk of land.
02:58:11.000Yeah, there's something like a certain...
02:58:14.000I think there's hundreds of millions of guns in America.
02:58:18.000I think there's as many guns as there are people, and there are trillions of rounds of ammunition.
02:58:24.000And the gun people say, if there was really a gun problem, you'd know it.
02:58:30.000Would all our guns and all our ammo, if there was really a gun problem?
02:58:34.000I fucking just reasonably suggested, reasonably suggested, that people that are mentally unbalanced maybe shouldn't have guns.
02:58:43.000And the fucking hate I got from the far right, like, the people that really believe in the Second Amendment says, the right, it's a right to keep and bear, not but,
03:00:52.000I like the example of India and Pakistan.
03:00:54.000India and Pakistan keep raising their military budgets every year to compete with each other because they want to make sure they're spending the same amount as the other guy because they're scared of the other guy.
03:01:02.000You go to these two countries and you go, hey, here's a treaty, just like all the trade agreements, whatever, that you sign and you reduce your military budget by 50% and the other guy promises to do it as well.
03:01:12.000Suddenly, you're reducing war, which I'm all for, and you're also helping, relieving a whole heap of money available for climate change abatement.
03:01:20.000So, I think it's a win-win situation, but oh my lord, I get in trouble when I talk about it.
03:02:29.000A perfect idea is that can solve a lot of problems at the time frame that we need to solve them.
03:02:34.000Because everything else, if you look at the climate, Paris talks, right?
03:02:37.000COP21. So the 21st time they got together to talk about climate change, they eventually went, OK, 194 countries, we agree something's going wrong, and we need to prevent the Earth from warming to 2 degrees Celsius.
03:02:49.000Well, six months later, we're already there.
03:02:52.000And they're not agreeing to do anything for five years as well.
03:02:56.000So they don't even start to do anything for five years.
03:02:58.000If we wait for politicians to do something about this, we are just so screwed.