This Past Weekend with Theo Von - #613

00:00:00.180 Today's guest is an outdoorsman. He's a master of animalia, or animals, means animals.

00:00:07.280 He's known for his focus on animals close to extinction. He's a host on Discovery.

00:00:12.900 He's been to some of the most insane parts of the world. I'm grateful to get to know him

00:00:17.520 and learn about his life. Today's guest is Mr. Forrest Galante.

00:00:30.000 Yeah, that's the best, dude. Forrest Galante, thanks for coming in, man.

00:00:41.680 Yeah, dude. Thanks for having me. I'm glad we made it work.

00:00:44.740 Yeah, bro. I really appreciate it. I'm excited, dude. I'm excited to talk about animalia

00:00:49.560 and a little bit about your life so our listeners know who you are.

00:00:53.420 Sure.

00:00:54.260 Yeah, I was complimenting those shoes, dude. Those things are nice.

00:00:56.960 Dude, the GORUCKS. Is this a company that's all about putting heavy weight on your back and training?

00:01:01.360 And, you know, I spend a lot of time in a backpack, so I'm a big fan.

00:01:04.440 Yeah, they look pretty springy, dude. I went with the boots today.

00:01:06.640 How do you like the cowboy boots? Is that your go-to? Are you a cowboy boots guy?

00:01:09.440 About two days a week now.

00:01:10.760 Two days a week?

00:01:11.560 Yeah.

00:01:12.180 Trying to quit, though?

00:01:13.020 Yeah.

00:01:14.920 You have none of these six milligrams.

00:01:16.660 Yeah, there you go. That's a heavy dose of boot right there.

00:01:21.360 Dude, what if they do come out with boots? Like, what if Zen or Alp comes out with a boot

00:01:25.440 that has, like, nicotine in the rim of it, so it, like, soaks into your body?

00:01:29.240 Leeching into the feet.

00:01:30.140 Through your calves.

00:01:30.620 Yeah, getting that little head buzz.

00:01:32.160 I'd buy them.

00:01:33.980 Dude, I would put them on if I had to do one of those field sobriety tests, for sure.

00:01:37.860 There you go. There you go. Yeah, you're like, I'm good from the knees up.

00:01:42.800 Good to see you today. You grew up in, I mean, you were kind of born into Animalia there

00:01:48.660 in, like, on the edge of Africa in Zimbabwe. That's where you grew up?

00:01:54.020 Yeah, exactly right. So, son of safari business owners. If I wasn't in school, we either lived

00:01:58.720 on a farm or my family ran safaris, so I was out in the bush. So, I've just been around

00:02:02.660 wildlife my entire childhood.

00:02:04.660 Oh, wow. That's you right there.

00:02:05.960 Yeah. Look at them teeth right there.

00:02:08.180 Oh, yeah. I wouldn't want to get bit by that.

00:02:10.240 No. Yeah. I was part beaver growing up. Yeah.

00:02:13.620 Take me into some of that, like, what it's like growing up on, in, like, a safari land.

00:02:18.220 Does it give you a different appreciation of animals? Does it make you more fearful of animals?

00:02:22.700 It's a good question. I mean, I think anything you grow up with, you become used to, right? It's

00:02:27.360 like, this is the norm when you're a kid. You just expect that that's the norm. So, I grew up,

00:02:31.520 you know, I'd come home from school, kick my shoes off, run out on the farm, try and catch snakes,

00:02:36.380 or be looking for jackals, or all these, you know, just like a coyote, all these kind of things that

00:02:40.580 sort of is parallel to if you grew up on a farm here, right? If you're a farm kid here, you go out and,

00:02:45.240 you know, you're from Louisiana, maybe you see a cottonmouth or coyote in the bush or whatever,

00:02:48.820 right? Yeah, just tickle a chicken or something? Tickle a chicken, you know? Yeah, that meant

00:02:51.880 something else when I got to high school. But, you know, I grew up thinking that was the norm,

00:02:56.580 and then I'd go out into the bush on safari with my family, and it would be like, don't leave the

00:03:02.220 tent after dark and stay here. And, you know, there were rules, but as long as you didn't break the

00:03:06.060 rules, you were pretty safe. And what I saw throughout my childhood was like a decline in

00:03:11.340 animals. You know, the same camps we'd go to where there used to be huge herds of elephants,

00:03:15.680 there's now two or three elephants, or big wild spaces, there's now farm fields.

00:03:19.640 So I didn't really realize it as a kid, but as I got older, I was like, I don't like that. Like,

00:03:24.220 I don't want all that wild stuff to go away. And so I didn't really realize it when I was young, but

00:03:29.180 over time, even as a child, I was like, this is something that I would like to dedicate my life

00:03:35.100 to, is making sure that all this wild stuff, spaces, animals, all of it doesn't go away.

00:03:39.920 So I'm guessing you're thinking then along the lines of like conservation,

00:03:42.420 like that, did you come out of your youth just feeling inspired towards that?

00:03:46.360 That's a very nice way to put it. It starts by breaking a lot of rules,

00:03:50.360 bending the laws a lot, and just being, you know, you, you know, those kids, right? You're the

00:03:55.060 yoink kid on Instagram. He's catching all the snakes and stuff. You're one of those kids.

00:03:59.700 Got it.

00:03:59.840 You know what I mean? And so in the U S there's a lot of laws against, you know, don't harass this

00:04:04.240 and don't do that. In Zimbabwe, there's fuck all for laws, right? So, um, it's just kind of do

00:04:10.020 whatever. So I think that love and that appreciation came from fiddling with everything,

00:04:14.480 catching it, trapping it, working with it. But ultimately, as you grow, as you fall in love

00:04:19.160 with something, you want to protect it and that's conservation.

00:04:22.040 And so what, what was, what was thinning the herds there?

00:04:26.100 People just mostly encroachment, a little bit of poaching, you know, ivory poaching and stuff,

00:04:30.060 hunting elephants, but more like habitat encroachment, you know, villages popping up,

00:04:34.360 big trees getting cut down for farm field, goats and things getting moved in, you know,

00:04:39.480 stuff like that, like grazing. And so pushing the animals out.

00:04:42.900 And was it affecting, like, were you guys on a bigger piece of like nature reserve or?

00:04:48.320 The safari camps were, they were all out in the bush, but it would still, you know,

00:04:52.400 you still would just see a general impact, like, like a thinning of animals.

00:04:57.000 Okay.

00:04:57.420 Yeah.

00:04:57.680 So did your family continue the safari business in Zimbabwe or how do you get from there sort of to

00:05:06.000 here into the U.S.?

00:05:07.680 Yeah. So we tried to, but during the early 2000s, Zimbabwe was under something called the land

00:05:13.500 reform campaign, which was President Robert Mugabe at the time who declared himself supreme

00:05:19.000 leader for life. He did this thing where-

00:05:21.880 Oh, like a boss, huh? Like Birdman.

00:05:23.700 Yeah. He came in hard. Yeah. And, uh, he, uh, he made it, this land reform made it so that it was

00:05:30.040 very, very hard. Like my family's six generations Zimbabwe, but basically it was a, it was a race

00:05:34.580 war. And if you were white, you weren't supposed, you, there was a, a land reform campaign passed

00:05:40.460 that meant that, that if you were black and you had heritage, you could come and take that land

00:05:44.380 away because, you know, of colonial settlement and things like that. Obviously I grew up long after

00:05:48.860 any colonial settlement took place, but yeah, we had gunfights and we had, you know, uh, neighbors

00:05:54.640 murdered and, uh, Pungwe's, which is indoctrination through torture into the political party, the

00:05:59.700 ZANU-PF political party. There was some crazy political turmoil.

00:06:03.060 Zimbabwe's land reform refers to a controversial program that began in 1980 and escalated in 2000,

00:06:08.540 redistributing farmland from white commercial farmers to black Zimbabweans. So your family was-

00:06:14.860 We were farmers. So you were farmers and this happened as you guys were there.

00:06:18.980 So when I was a kid, I mean, it says here in 1980 is when it started, which it may have,

00:06:22.960 but when I was a kid, we never locked our doors. There was no, we didn't have barbed wire fences,

00:06:27.800 nothing. It was very safe, very peaceful country. But in like two, the 99, 2000, and then 2001,

00:06:34.880 when we left, it got really bad really quickly. And it was sort of an attempt by Robert Mugabe to,

00:06:39.880 to retain power for his party, the ZANU-PF political party.

00:06:43.480 Oh, I see. So his party would feel like maybe they were going to be pushed out. And so he's

00:06:46.360 like, I need to do something drastic right now in order to stay in. And so I'm going to return

00:06:50.920 this, uh, uh, colonialized land to the people from whites, to the black, uh, to the black people.

00:06:58.320 Exactly. Got it. Yeah. And so we're, but you saw that like in neighbors, you saw people's lands

00:07:03.540 being taken over stuff. Oh, I saw a kid get shot in the head. We saw everything. It was crazy.

00:07:07.540 Yeah. I mean, there were gunfights there. We had these war veterans settling on the fence lines.

00:07:11.860 We were the smallest farm in the Shamva district. That was where I grew up.

00:07:15.520 And so we were the last ones to get taken because we had the lowest political incentive or financial

00:07:20.280 incentive. Right. So you look at the area where we live, there were all these huge farms, right?

00:07:25.500 Million dollar a year plus tobacco farms and things. We were a tiny little Ulstrom area,

00:07:29.640 which is an exotic flower farm. And so we were the last ones to get grabbed because why bother with

00:07:34.540 us? Right. We'll get them at the end. Exactly. So we saw neighbors get murdered. These Pungwees,

00:07:39.540 like I said, which is indoctrination through torture, crazy war chants, shootouts, everything.

00:07:45.060 It was nuts for a little while. And would these groups just kind of come like in just trucks,

00:07:49.460 like, and sort of, or would they come in like force? Was it the government coming or was it just

00:07:55.600 like citizens, black citizens? It was pretty much just citizens,

00:07:59.280 like unemployed citizens basically. And for the majority, it was kids with guns. Wow. You know,

00:08:04.260 you're 14, 15 years old. You grew up maybe on the streets of Harare and all of a sudden you have

00:08:09.140 this dictator like president going, Hey, those rich white guys over there, go get them. Right. You

00:08:13.640 know? And they're like, okay, you know, you know, they call it war veterans that survived the war.

00:08:18.340 There were no war veterans. It was just kids with guns, like 14 to 20 year old kids. Wow. And that's,

00:08:23.760 that's what, you know, shootouts and all this, but all that being said, I don't want to paint a bad

00:08:27.820 light on it. It was incredible childhood. There was just a couple of rough years there. Yeah. Well,

00:08:31.880 one thing that's fascinating about Africa, even like places that I've been there is you see the

00:08:35.880 race, like the racial colonial, you see that it's very evident in a lot of places. You also see a

00:08:43.000 lot of like, um, like black leadership that comes into power and gets very desperate and will try to,

00:08:49.900 uh, own everything themselves as well. It's a, it's a tribal mentality, right? It's like, I,

00:08:55.840 I come from this culture, whether it's Shauna, Zulu, whatever it happens to be. And that tribe is like

00:09:00.720 the way that I've been a dominant tribe is I dominate another tribe. Right. And this is not

00:09:05.480 a racial thing. It's just, it's a cultural thing. And they're, you know, they, they get leadership,

00:09:10.360 whether that's being a president or being a minister or whatever it is. And then how am I

00:09:14.060 going to retain it? I'm going to dominate another tribe. It doesn't matter if they're white, black,

00:09:17.700 Zulu, Shauna, whatever, you know, it's just, I'm going to dominate. And that's, it's a, it's a crazy

00:09:22.500 thing. I'll tell you a crazy story. I don't think I've ever told anybody this publicly. I grew up

00:09:26.420 on a farm with 200, 200 employees that worked on our farm, right? Like 200 people that pick

00:09:30.780 flowers, blah, blah, blah. My best friends were all black Shauna kids, Zimbabwean kids. And I

00:09:35.640 remember one day going to school, I was 14. So I didn't really understand what was going on other

00:09:39.060 than it was stuff was going bad. And my best friend who had been my best friend since we were

00:09:44.420 like seven years old, we went to lunch that day, like a random Tuesday. And the prefects, which is

00:09:49.400 like the older, like the seniors, right? They come out and they're like, you two come over here.

00:09:53.620 They're like, Forrest, go on that side. And I'm like, okay, at school, like proper school,

00:09:58.040 you know, like button down, like, you know, very formal school, like Forrest, go over here.

00:10:02.000 And Malusi, go over here. Malusi was my friend. Malusi's black. And they're like, go on this

00:10:06.220 side. And I was like, why are we getting split up? And they're like, we're having a fight

00:10:09.260 black versus white at school. And my best friend who was felt as shocked as I would, he got like

00:10:15.100 moved by the seniors to the other side of the rugby field to have a fist fight with us. And I was just

00:10:19.920 like, why are we doing this? You know, I was like so confused because we didn't understand it. We

00:10:24.380 were just little kids, but this racial tension got insane. And yeah, it just, it, it boiled over.

00:10:30.500 And you've seen like Donald Trump, you know, just called out the South African president around it,

00:10:34.680 but that's similar sort of thing is taking place in South Africa now.

00:10:38.800 With the same type of energy, like let's take the land back from the white owners.

00:10:43.180 Exactly.

00:10:43.460 Well, I think it's the same thing sometimes when you look at Hamas in Gaza, it's like a lot of

00:10:49.520 people believe that Hamas was elected because they felt no other way to try and stop Israeli

00:10:58.320 people from coming and just taking over their homes. That's a lot of what I hear from friends

00:11:02.800 on both sides of it, that like they just, they needed to do something drastic, right? So they

00:11:09.120 elected the most drastic element that they could.

00:11:11.180 And I think that's a sign of desperation, right? Regardless of the situation, it's like,

00:11:15.300 if you're desperate, you do something drastic. It's a Hail Mary.

00:11:17.740 Yeah.

00:11:17.960 Right. Yeah.

00:11:18.700 Yeah. Yeah. And I think some of that's even, it's human nature.

00:11:21.660 Totally.

00:11:22.340 I do it myself, right? You're like, shit, what do I do? Let's just send it, you know?

00:11:26.520 Oh, definitely. When it's getting late at night and your wife left you or whatever,

00:11:30.300 and you just text some girl that you knew from a couple of years.

00:11:32.620 Still up?

00:11:33.180 Yeah.

00:11:33.460 Let's go.

00:11:35.400 Yeah, dude. So I think that happens a lot. You saw someone get shot?

00:11:41.180 Yeah. One of the neighbors, we were riding our motorbikes and he got shot. Yeah.

00:11:45.660 Wow.

00:11:46.120 Yeah.

00:11:46.560 I mean, so these groups, they come and then would they kind of kick people out of their

00:11:50.400 homes? I mean, was that sort of how it was happening? And then how did you guys end up

00:11:54.140 eventually leaving?

00:11:55.120 Yes. So basically they'd come, they'd surround the property or the farm, but white Zimbabweans,

00:12:00.580 similar to like white South Africans or whatever, they're pretty hard people. Grew up farming

00:12:04.120 culture, you know? So they dig their heels in and say, bring it on. And there'd ultimately end up

00:12:08.320 being a shootout or something like that. And so what happened to us, and I can't speak

00:12:12.420 for every farm, but a lot of our friends, like a lot of our dads got murdered and all

00:12:17.420 this other stuff. But what happened to us is my mom was a single mother with my sister

00:12:20.980 and I on the farm at the time. And they came, they surrounded our farm and they came and

00:12:25.500 they said to my mom, they're like, we'll give you 24 hours to leave or we're going to

00:12:29.620 kill you and take everything. And so my mom and I remember I was 14, I ran upstairs and I

00:12:33.760 grabbed my gun and I grabbed a knife and I was like, bring it on. And my mom like hit me.

00:12:37.500 And she's like, go get in the car, pack your shit and get in the car. And I was

00:12:39.880 like, yes, mom, you know? And so we left. So nothing bad happened to us physically,

00:12:45.500 but it was, it was just a very like ripped from everything overnight kind of

00:12:49.860 situation. Wow. So mama Galante had the sense, huh? Yeah. Thank God. Cause I

00:12:54.640 didn't still don't. Yeah. What happened to your dad? He wasn't there. No, they split

00:12:58.440 up when I was pretty young and he moved into town and remarried and all of that. And

00:13:01.720 he just didn't want to have much to do with it. And your mother ran a botanical farm

00:13:05.320 out there. Yeah. Yeah. Ran the, ran the flower farm, flowers and oranges. Was it

00:13:09.160 pretty beautiful out there with the flowers? So beautiful. So we had these big

00:13:11.900 Masasa trees. We lived on a copy, which like a granite mountain with the house on

00:13:15.500 top. Masasa tree it's called? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I want to see it. It's real, really.

00:13:19.600 Yeah. I like your iconic African tree. Yeah. Dude, there's something so amazing about

00:13:25.640 being in Africa. Where'd you go when you went to Africa? We've been to, um, Kenya, um, to,

00:13:31.320 um, to, oh, Mombasa. Oh, Mombasa. Yeah. On the coast there. Mombasa. Oh, I'll tell you,

00:13:36.120 this is just a funny story. It's different. But so we went to some bar there. It was called

00:13:39.840 Florida. It was like, they give it like an American name cause they know that like Americans

00:13:43.560 are going to come in and get off of a cruise ships and stuff. And I was there, I was on a

00:13:47.640 thing called semester at sea. It's like a floating university. Oh, you went as a kid. Yeah.

00:13:51.060 That's cool. Yeah. And so it was pretty impressive. I worked in the bookstore on the ship and

00:13:55.440 you got to, and, and that worked as my tuition. So I got to go on this crazy adventure,

00:13:59.900 but we're there. And one of my buddies, this little Jewish guy, he like got a B, he got

00:14:05.040 a blowjob from a local, possibly a prostitute or just a like gray area. Yeah. Yeah. From

00:14:12.720 a nice gray area woman, cute girl. And, um, he said that while he was taking his wiener out

00:14:19.140 of his pants that it cut on his zipper. And so now he's scared the whole time. He's like,

00:14:22.640 we're in Africa. He's like, what if I catch something? He's getting AIDS. He's getting AIDS.

00:14:26.180 He totally, he's like, dude, I'm getting AIDS. He's like asking people, he's like trying

00:14:30.720 to nonchalantly ask people about AIDS at the bar and stuff. So dude, he was so, uh, he

00:14:37.820 was so neurotic. He ended up ordering a glass of vodka and it was like three hours till our

00:14:43.080 ride was coming. And he literally stood over in the distance and put his wiener just into

00:14:47.740 a glass of vodka and held it in there. I like the resourcefulness though. I feel like that

00:14:52.540 would work. That might be the cure. Shout out to my buddy, Michael from South Florida,

00:14:56.060 dude. He was a, and he was an awesome guy. Um, but anyway, that was one place that we

00:15:00.320 went. Africa is a great place, man. It's, it's, it's wild. There's no political stability

00:15:05.140 anywhere on the continent, in my opinion, but it's a great, it's just such a great continent.

00:15:09.740 There's so much wildlife. There's so much freedom. There's nothing you can't do there. You know

00:15:13.800 what I mean? If you can dream it, you can do it. It's, which isn't always a good thing.

00:15:17.340 Cause if you can dream of taking over people's houses, you can do it, but it's, it's,

00:15:21.060 it's a crazy cool place. Yeah. Um, so you grow up in this wildlife. I mean, everything about

00:15:27.220 Africa, it's so per like, even I remember being there and like, we would sleep at night

00:15:32.340 with the mosquito nets, like nature was just right there. Like it was like, you know, so

00:15:38.000 much so that, you know, I mean, I grew up in Louisiana, we have mosquitoes, but we didn't

00:15:41.400 have the nets. Like you had to keep these things, you know, you, I mean, if someone were

00:15:45.320 big, you almost needed the Brooklyn nets standing there to block them off. You know what I'm

00:15:48.540 saying? Like, Oh yeah. But just the fact that nature's right there, you can feel it

00:15:52.460 breathing in the distance. It always feels like there. Um, so you grew up in that like

00:15:57.120 dedicated, uh, like, like immersed in wildlife. When did you kind of feel like you wanted to

00:16:02.600 have it as a career? Uh, not until I'll tell you, can I tell you a quick funny story about

00:16:07.060 mosquito nets? Yeah. So I grew up in this farmhouse, right? Like all open windows, no air conditioning

00:16:11.420 or anything like that. Uh, big open verandas and balconies and stuff. And we were plowing a

00:16:15.980 field when I was probably nine or 10 years old, found a baby monkey in the field, a little

00:16:20.020 vervet monkey. Vervet? Vervet monkey. Yeah. They call them vermin monkeys. Cause they're

00:16:23.980 like pest monkeys. And I scooped him up. I was like, what's wrong here? That little guy

00:16:28.020 right there. Oh yeah. Black face too. First of all. Yeah. Yeah. He's got to do something

00:16:32.800 about that. Well, he may, he may just be lashing back at Drewski who just did white face.

00:16:37.600 Dude, I saw that 200 million views or something. It was funny though. I don't know if it's bad

00:16:43.240 or good, but it was funny. I think it's great. Yeah. Dude. When he's driving around,

00:16:46.960 he rolls down his window. He's like, you lost boy. And the guy's like, no, sir. It was so

00:16:52.100 bad. Uh, we rescued him. And the funny thing is he has that big hat on. So he has to like

00:16:57.780 kind of moves his head out the window, dude. It's too, it's too much. I literally saw it

00:17:02.880 this morning. I couldn't believe it. But take me through your story. I'm sorry, man. No,

00:17:06.180 you're good. Uh, mosquito nets. Long story short, I rescued this baby monkey turns out, uh,

00:17:11.180 and monkeys do this. Her mother, his mother abandoned him because he had a heart murmur,

00:17:15.520 like a bad heart condition. So he got dumped in the field, right? Cause they do that to then

00:17:19.400 they can have another baby and it takes a long time to raise the baby, blah, blah, blah. So I

00:17:22.740 scoop up this little monkey named Chippy and bottle feed him until his eyes open the whole

00:17:27.000 thing. And he ends up growing up and he's my bunk bed mate. So he'd sleep on top of my mosquito

00:17:32.300 net. You know, there's like a round coil and it comes down on a mosquito net. He'd sleep

00:17:36.380 up there. And every morning as I get out of bed, he jumped down off of that onto my shoulder.

00:17:40.320 We'd go down to breakfast and then he'd scamper off into the trees. And like, you know, that's

00:17:44.420 a good depiction of like how I grew up wild wise. Like I had a monkey sleeping in my mosquito net

00:17:49.100 with me, you know, like it was, it was awesome, awesome childhood. Yeah. Yeah. There's just

00:17:54.600 something about being there, especially when you're in a safari house, like, like one of, you know,

00:17:59.260 you get out into the bush and then sometimes you'll, you'll stay at kind of like a, it's kind

00:18:03.440 of a hotel in a way. It was like kind of a lodge. A lodge. Yeah. And some of them would be nice

00:18:08.440 and some of them would be very bare bones, but it was like, um, you know, you'd have

00:18:12.640 the animal skin rugs and you'd have the nets and you just have a, a silence that was loud,

00:18:17.940 but it's completely, it was like, God, it was like the thickest silence that ever was

00:18:24.180 made. That's such a good way to put it. It was so fascinating. And your story reminds

00:18:28.220 me of this guy. They had this guy, I want to say his name was Marco. Oh, I'm thinking

00:18:33.620 of a guy, Dr. Wiggins. There was a guy, Dr. Wiggins, maybe John Wiggum. He, he had his

00:18:40.100 child, he raised his child with a monkey. Oh, whoa. That's cool. Oh, this is it. Sorry.

00:18:45.560 Winthrop Kellogg. Oh boy. Winthrop Kellogg's experiment, commonly known as the ape and the

00:18:50.220 child involved raising a baby chimpanzee named Gua alongside his own son, Donald under identical

00:18:55.820 conditions to study the effects of environment versus hereditary on development. That's crazy.

00:19:00.620 Crazy. Yeah. In 1931, Kellogg and his wife bought Gua, then seven and a half months old

00:19:05.200 into their Florida. It's always Florida. It's always Florida. There's nowhere else. Where

00:19:10.520 else are you raising a monkey and an ape and a kid together? It's gotta be Florida. It's

00:19:15.260 not like this happening in London. You know what I mean? It's always Florida. It's our, that's

00:19:19.520 our Africa. Yeah. It's our Africa. He ended their Florida home to grow up with Donald, their

00:19:25.280 10 month old son. Both children were given the same care and subjected to daily scientific observations.

00:19:30.620 Can we see a video of it? There's no way this kid grew up normal. Oh no. Look at the little

00:19:43.680 shoes on them. They put shoes on the chimp. Are you kidding me? Do you ever just think

00:19:47.760 I was born in the wrong era? Like if I was born in the thirties, I'd do this. Oh, I'd have

00:19:51.860 nine kids and five chimps. No problem. And I live in Florida. Oh, it was a different time.

00:19:56.860 Look at them right here. They're trying different stuff with them. That's crazy. Trying to put

00:20:01.520 a hat on each of their head and then teach the monkey to keep it on its head. And he

00:20:05.120 just keeps pulling it off the kid's head. Do some tickling. Oh man, that's nuts. And

00:20:08.920 they're just tickling both of them. Yeah. If you guys get to watch on the YouTube, I mean,

00:20:12.500 this is absolutely ridiculous. It's bonkers. I've never heard of this. That's crazy. What

00:20:16.320 were some of the findings? Can you go back? Oh, here we go. Uh, Gua learned many human

00:20:21.740 behaviors. She dressed in clothes, walked upright. Oh, used a spoon. That's crazy. Drank

00:20:27.920 from a glass, opened doors and imitated gestures of affection, sometimes outperforming Donald

00:20:32.000 in motor skills and tasks. Um, the Kellogg's concluded that there are definite limits to

00:20:37.360 how much non-human species can be humanized. Um, towards the end, Donald began imitating Gua's

00:20:43.000 chimpanzee vocalizations, raising concerns about potential language delays for the human child.

00:20:48.900 Wow. So the human also ended up becoming more, more like the chimpanzee. Why did they end

00:20:55.480 it? Did they say why? It's the chimp ate the kid's face. I mean, that's what, it's how these

00:21:03.520 things always end. It really is, dude. It's like, there's no good coming of this. Look, it's

00:21:08.560 the same reason why we ended the, uh, pit bull circus that we were doing in our backyard. Yeah,

00:21:14.400 right. Yeah. Ends one way. Winthrop Kellogg concluded that while Gua behaved like a human

00:21:19.480 child in many ways, her physical and brain structure limited how human she could become,

00:21:23.560 confirming the experiment's demonstration of hereditary limits. After the experiment,

00:21:27.460 Gua was returned to a primate center and sadly died less than a year later. Donald's later life

00:21:32.680 was marked by tragedy as well, dying by suicide at 43. God. That's not good. In short, the experiment

00:21:39.080 ended due to concerns about Donald's language development. Gua's increasing strength and

00:21:43.400 behavior. Yup. And the practical and ethical difficulty. I mean, it's just, there's a whole

00:21:48.360 argument for nurture over nature, but at the end of the day, chimpanzee is incredibly strong. They

00:21:52.980 get violent there. The best way I think to describe it is when a chimpanzee sexually matures, it doesn't

00:21:59.280 mentally mature past that of like a toddler. So when a three-year-old throws a temper tantrum,

00:22:04.180 it's like, be quiet, you know, and you restrain them or whatever. When a full-grown chimpanzee throws a

00:22:09.340 temper tantrum, it rips you to shreds. Right. And it might not hate you or anything else.

00:22:13.360 It's just a temper tantrum. Right. The same as a two or three-year-old does. Right. Oh,

00:22:16.620 that's fascinating. Yeah. Um, yeah, I kind of interrupted you though. You were going to,

00:22:20.200 you were talking about, we were going into. Oh, well, you know what you were saying? Sorry,

00:22:25.080 I don't want to interrupt you, but you were talking about that thick silence that you get in Africa

00:22:28.760 when you and I were texting last week and you were like, dude, I'm, I'm overwhelmed at the moment.

00:22:33.040 To me, that is the most like ground, that silence that you're talking about. That's what like brings me

00:22:38.360 back, you know, like, cause I'm on my phone all day too. I'm sure you are working and texting and emails and blah,

00:22:43.120 blah, blah. That feeling though, that you just described that thick silence at being out in

00:22:47.700 the bush, you don't have to be in a tent in the middle of nowhere. You can be in a lodge or

00:22:50.540 whatever, but being a little bit disconnected from modern civilization and more connect,

00:22:56.200 more plugged into the bush and the wildlife. I think that's the most grounding thing, man.

00:23:00.400 Yeah. And I think Africa, I do believe it feels like makes like the purest form of it. I can't

00:23:06.360 explain it. I've tried to, yeah. I mean, you know, it just, I mean, they say it's the birthplace

00:23:10.920 of civilization. I'm sure for a reason right now. I'm going to look you straight there and

00:23:15.600 your two eye holes right there. And I'm going to tell you, honestly, I've been taking arm

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00:25:33.700 at netsuite.com slash T-H-E-O. Netsuite.com slash Theo. So when did you know that it was kind of a career

00:25:44.300 calling for you to work with animals and to work with nature so closely?

00:25:48.360 I don't know if there was an exact moment, but, you know, we came over to the States.

00:25:53.460 We got kicked out of Zimbabwe, like I mentioned, came over here, went on welfare, bounced around.

00:25:57.720 I got in trouble a whole bunch. Like, I felt very confined coming to the U.S.

00:26:01.240 I bet.

00:26:01.740 Because I'd grown up on a farm, 200 acres, barefoot, guns, motorbikes, freedom. And then I came to Central California,

00:26:09.160 or I'll actually start in Oakland, California, which is the poll, went into government housing, you know.

00:26:13.560 And long story short, I felt very, like, trapped, I guess. Got in trouble a bunch. My mom moved us

00:26:20.800 out of Oakland before I got in really bad trouble. Went to a little town in Central California called

00:26:25.000 Cayucas. And it was great. Like, surfer town, 2,000 people. And I used to go diving and fishing all the

00:26:31.340 time because that felt like the wildest place to be. Like, kind of connected me sort of a little bit

00:26:35.100 back to Africa. And I think, long story short, I met a girl. I went to college, blah, blah, blah. But at

00:26:40.540 some point, wildlife, I'm one-track mind. It's the only thing, wildlife and rugby are the only two

00:26:46.220 things I've ever really, really cared about. So I was, like, so passionate about it. And then I was

00:26:50.800 like, well, I'm not going to be a safari guide in Cayucas, California. So I'll go to school to be a

00:26:55.600 biologist. And that was sort of the next best thing is, like, I'll become a scientific animal guy

00:27:00.720 instead of a physical animal guy. And then ended up coming back to being a physical animal guy.

00:27:04.800 Yeah. Well, I'm glad you did, man. You have a new show that definitely, like, sparked me up. It's

00:27:12.540 Animals on Drugs. That's right. We were texting when I was in Columbia. That's right. Yeah. Yeah,

00:27:17.440 it's on HBO Max as of, like, yesterday, I think. Oh, yeah, dude. I was just like, dude, send me a

00:27:22.640 gift from Columbia so I can snort. But take me through this show, Animals on Drugs. Because, you know,

00:27:29.500 they had, like, the Cocaine Bear. Uh-huh. Cocaine Bear, the movie. Cocaine Bear. And then they have,

00:27:34.900 I was trying to think of some, oh, Crackoons would be good. Crackoons. How did I not think

00:27:39.480 of that as a title? Come on. Crackoons. Bro, what is, bro, what's in my- That's a no-brainer.

00:27:45.320 What's that in your recycling bin? Yeah. You see a little bit of smoke coming up from the recycling bin?

00:27:50.740 Yeah, the bin's vibrating. Yeah. Poof. Crackoons. He's like,

00:27:54.620 smiling. Crackoons. Crackoons. So, yeah, I was thinking of Crackoons. I'm trying to think of

00:28:00.680 what else. Oh, that's actually a movie. I didn't even know that. That's hilarious.

00:28:03.360 Crackoon is a movie or lying? 2024 official trailer, Crackoons. Oh, my God. I mean, look,

00:28:09.120 so for that show, we capitalized on this, this hilarious thing that we're talking about. But

00:28:13.680 the show is legit. It's, the reality is animals are getting into, like, human substances across the

00:28:19.740 world, right? Whether that's bears breaking in to get on booze and getting hit by trains and stuff

00:28:24.100 because they're licking up booze off train tracks. Just a whole story I can tell you.

00:28:27.620 The cocaine hippos in Colombia, like Pablo Escobar, brought hippos over. They escaped. Now

00:28:32.680 there's 200 of them. They're going crazy because hippos are not native there. In Florida, we found

00:28:38.040 an alligator that actually tested positive for having meth in its system because it was living

00:28:41.580 in the cesspool behind a meth house. So that's what the show is about. It's about, it's really at its

00:28:46.400 core, it's a show about human-wildlife conflict. But you don't get people to watch a show called

00:28:50.900 Human-Wildlife Conflict, but you do get them to watch a show called Meth Gator, you know? So

00:28:54.680 that, that was kind of what it was.

00:28:56.260 Oh yeah. Or Ketamice. That's what I was thinking.

00:28:58.440 Ketamice. There we go. Man, we need, we need like four. You're like the chat GPT of drug animals

00:29:02.720 over here.

00:29:03.320 You're like, oh, you see a mice go in a hole. What about a K-hole?

00:29:06.360 A K-hole. He's just old.

00:29:09.320 He's surrounded by cheese, but he can't even swallow.

00:29:11.720 No, well, take me through some of that. Like, so, so take me through the Escobar one. Is that

00:29:17.560 when I was texting you in Columbia?

00:29:18.700 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:29:19.380 Yeah. What was that trip like down there?

00:29:20.860 Sure. So, I mean, I had this idea to do that show a long time ago and really originally I just

00:29:26.100 wanted to go work on the hippo problem in Columbia. So for context, Pablo Escobar brought

00:29:31.300 hippos to his personal zoo called Hacienda Napolis in the nineties.

00:29:35.360 Cause he just wanted nice, he just wanted big animals?

00:29:37.280 Yeah. He, he built this insane place down there. Um, and so he brought in giraffes and

00:29:41.820 elephants and lions and all this stuff. When he died in 99, 93, when he died in 93, um,

00:29:49.700 the Colombian government came in and they're, you know, they had a shootout. He died, whatever.

00:29:53.040 Then they came in there like, we'll take the lions. We'll take the, the giraffes. We'll

00:29:55.960 take whatever. Oh, we can't do anything about these hippos. Like hippos are gnarly. People

00:29:59.780 think of hippos like Fantasia, happy, whatever. Hippos are gnarly animals. And so the hippos,

00:30:04.860 they let angry, super, super hungry.

00:30:07.820 No angry, I said, no, uh, they are. They're just very territorial, very defensive. I think

00:30:13.620 on my Instagram, there's clips of them charging me at the fence and stuff. But, um, anyway,

00:30:18.500 these hippos got out four of them. Now there's over 200. There's no predators cause it's Columbia,

00:30:23.560 not Africa. There's no lions to eat them. There's no crocodiles to eat them. There's

00:30:26.640 unlimited food and they're killing people and injuring people. And, um, and so, and, but

00:30:31.640 some of them have also ingested cocaine.

00:30:33.240 Well, there was a rumor that Pablo Escobar used to feed them coca leaves to make them

00:30:37.400 more aggressive, to kill his, uh, his enemies. Um, which is a really cool legend, whether it's

00:30:42.680 true or not, I have no idea. But anyway, the Colombian government and I have been, so, you

00:30:46.920 know, I work on these kind of large scale animal projects. So I, I started speaking with the

00:30:51.300 Colombian government about this when there was like a hundred hippos, like four or five,

00:30:54.860 six years ago. And they're like, please help. We're underfunded. We're understaffed. We need

00:30:59.680 whatever help we can get to help mitigate this problem. So people of Columbia don't want to kill

00:31:03.400 the hippos. They like them. They've created a tourist, uh, like a tourism industry around them.

00:31:07.880 There's like kind of cute, the whole town there, um, where Hacienda Annapolis is, I'm blanking on

00:31:12.300 the name of it now. It's like hippo theme. There's like hippo statues everywhere. They've created

00:31:16.080 like a thing around them.

00:31:17.320 But so they're dangerous, but also it's part of the culture now.

00:31:19.780 Yeah, exactly. So it's a weird thing where it's like, okay, there's this huge invasive

00:31:23.860 species that's super dangerous, but the average people love them. Like the people from Medellin

00:31:28.580 will take weekend trips to go see them and they don't want to kill them, but they don't

00:31:32.120 want them to get worse because they'll hurt people. So what do you do? So we went down

00:31:36.120 there and worked with the Colombian government with Coronare, which is the organization down

00:31:40.000 there. And we came up with this sort of threefold approach, which doesn't kill them. So

00:31:43.600 it's castrating them, chemically castrating them, sterilizing them and relocating them.

00:31:48.140 So I went down there with the Trank rifles and chemicals and vets and all these things

00:31:52.240 and cotton, cotton, snip nuts off of hippos.

00:31:54.980 Yeah.

00:31:55.500 So chemically castrating. So take me on that. Are you finding them in the wild?

00:31:59.320 Yeah. Yeah. So we build BOMAs, which are like giant, like funnel traps basically. And

00:32:04.080 then we bait them in with giant bags of carrots and beets and things like that.

00:32:07.800 BOMA it's called?

00:32:08.600 Yeah. There might be one on my Instagram. You might be able to find it.

00:32:11.700 Do y'all sneak up on them?

00:32:13.100 Yeah. Yeah. So you, you, you sneak up on them, you find, yeah, that's like a BOMA, that second

00:32:17.120 picture there. So a BOMA trap, it's kind of like a kennel.

00:32:19.960 Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

00:32:21.080 And you put a lot of good snacks in there.

00:32:22.820 You put all the goodies in there and you make a trip wire so that when they go in, the door

00:32:26.020 closes and then they go nuts, you know, and they start banging against the fence and blah,

00:32:30.060 blah, blah. So we're catching these hippos. It was super fun. And the little ones you can

00:32:34.460 chemically castrate with a chemical called gonicon, meaning basically you shoot them with this

00:32:39.000 dart and the chemical goes in and it stops them from ever sexually maturing. So they grow up,

00:32:43.800 but they don't, if you go to that one on the far right there down, Oh, there's me doing surgery

00:32:48.260 in the middle of the night. Yeah. Is this a castration surgery?

00:32:52.080 Yeah. Castration surgery. So this is a surgery right here. So you guys have a hippo here that's

00:32:55.220 been sedated. Yep. So this was a large female. She had four offspring with her. We chemically

00:33:00.180 castrated all the four offspring with the gonicon, that chemical. Okay. So gonicon, you inject it.

00:33:05.900 So now, sorry. Are those asleep as well?

00:33:08.340 No. So them you can do awake, but the gonicon only works if you're pre-sexually mature. Once

00:33:13.780 you hit adolescence, it's too late. It just, the effects would just wear off. So that's me

00:33:17.440 darting them right there. I kind of saw it for a split second. Okay. So you, so you can dart them

00:33:21.640 with the gonicon and it doesn't hurt them? No, it's just like, it's just like getting a shot

00:33:25.320 and then they can't have children. They can never have children. Do they care or they're okay with it?

00:33:29.040 They, I don't think they know. Yeah. To be honest, I think they still get all the fun. Um,

00:33:33.020 okay. Yeah. And, uh, and then, but then the adults that doesn't work on. So we have to go

00:33:38.040 into the bush and catch the adults and then actually perform surgery on them, which is what

00:33:42.060 that video was, which is much harder to do. What do you have here? Pause it for me.

00:33:46.880 So that's the mouth of a hippo held open with a piece of like metal pipe between the tusks and then

00:33:53.580 a breathing tube going into its diaphragm. So can you smell their breath while they're breathing?

00:33:57.620 Oh yeah. Is it pretty intense or is it okay? And they mostly eat veg. Well,

00:34:01.120 they primarily eat vegetation, so it's not too bad, but it's kind of like horse breath.

00:34:05.320 Like being at a salad bar or something? Yeah. You know, they got some stuff in their teeth.

00:34:08.120 It's hot. Like you get, you get your head up in there and it's like with this big,

00:34:11.800 hot, sticky breath coming out. Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. And so you have their mouth

00:34:17.280 probably open. They're asleep. Yep. And so what do you do then in order to, because you can,

00:34:23.140 you have to castrate them a different way. Yeah. So the males are easy. You just grab the nuts,

00:34:28.800 slop them off, sew it up, right? Takes a few minutes from when they go to sleep.

00:34:32.020 And you reach in through their mouth to do it?

00:34:33.460 No. You just go down, downstairs. Yeah.

00:34:35.460 Why are y'all doing this then? That's just to keep them breathing and alive. So see,

00:34:38.760 there's a pipe in the bottom, bottom right there, bottom left. That's a breathing tube.

00:34:43.080 So that's just keeping them breathing. But this is a female. So females are way harder. You have to

00:34:47.180 make an incision that's like this long, reach in there, feel for the gonads, snip them,

00:34:52.120 cauterize them, pull them out and then close her back up. And if you don't close her up perfectly,

00:34:56.240 one stitch breaks, water floods in there, get an infection and die. So it's got, it's a,

00:35:00.500 it's like a 12 hour process per animal. Really?

00:35:03.100 Yeah. It's a big, and you have to do it at night because it's so hot. If you do it during the day,

00:35:06.900 they overheat in the sun because it's Columbia. So like you catch them, keep them as calm as you

00:35:12.260 can until like 9 PM. Then you start putting them to sleep and work all night and release them at like

00:35:16.700 four or five in the morning. Wow. And so how many people does it take to really pull this off?

00:35:21.120 Honestly, honestly, we probably had a team of 30. Yeah. It's a big to do.

00:35:25.480 So, is it exciting? So exciting. I mean, I get goosebumps talking about it because it's just

00:35:29.880 like, it's high adrenaline. The hippo is trying to kill you. You're, you're racing the clock before

00:35:34.480 the sun comes up. You can't over anesthetize the hippo because then it dies. And if we kill one,

00:35:39.060 the freaking Colombians are going to kill us. You know what I mean? Not really, but they'll be so

00:35:42.540 upset. My career is over. Yes. If I kill a hippo giving certain, my career is over, right? I'm

00:35:46.920 canceled across everything. So it's like, it's like all this action and adrenaline. It doesn't sound

00:35:51.200 exciting because you're spending 12 hours like with your elbows deep in a hippo, but it's,

00:35:54.520 it's really exciting. Yeah. I think it's, it certainly seems high energy, especially since

00:35:58.860 there's other people there and you guys are all locked in with this one mission. Oh yeah. It

00:36:02.700 seems like that game, remember that game operation you played as a kid? Yeah. It seems like that,

00:36:07.420 but like the highest level. That's right. Yeah, exactly right. It's fun, man. It's cool.

00:36:12.180 Wow, dude, that's incredible. So, uh, so that was the experience of going down there and, uh,

00:36:17.640 and those animals, the drug relationship was that Escobar brought them over. And so that's why

00:36:22.500 they're there. And so that gets you into that whole universe of hippos in Columbia. Exactly.

00:36:26.880 It's not that the hippos are doing lines, you know, it's just that they got brought here through

00:36:31.180 the drug trade and it's like a vessel to tell that story. Yeah. Yeah. And that's network TV.

00:36:35.420 That's, that's cable, right? I'm on discovery. That's how you do it on discovery. Oh, it's exciting.

00:36:39.200 Yeah. And it's, you know, it's cool. It's cool, man. Nobody else is doing that stuff on TV,

00:36:43.640 you know, like get to catch hippos and show the world how you cut their nuts off. And

00:36:47.320 like this whole like backstory on Pablo Escobar. And I mean, it's like, it's like a rodeo,

00:36:52.120 you know, it's cool. Yeah. I like it anyway. Oh, dude, it's fascinating to me. And do you get

00:36:56.580 to keep any of the, um, animals nuts or not? Dude, I wanted to, but in order to travel with

00:37:02.220 animal parts, you have to have CITES permits, which is this international conservation thing.

00:37:07.200 Oh yeah. I wanted a jar of hippo nuts on my shelf so bad, so bad, but I left them all in Columbia.

00:37:11.960 Oh yeah. Dude, you can't even fly out of Hawaii with an avocado. Nope. Nope. Same thing. Yeah.

00:37:18.160 So imagine trying to explain, especially in Columbia, you know, I got them like wrapped

00:37:21.660 up in a little bit of paper towel, it's tucked under my dirty underwear. They're like, what's

00:37:25.160 that? It's like, yeah, that's going to be hard to explain. But Hey, I think they'll be glad that

00:37:31.020 it's not cocaine. They'll be like, Oh dude. Yeah. He said there's a couple of kilos of fucking

00:37:34.960 hippo nuts. It's bam, bam, but a different kind. Yeah. Dude. I remember we went on a, um,

00:37:41.600 I remember in South Africa, we had, we met, I was there doing performing one time with

00:37:46.820 something really great. I bet you're huge in South Africa.

00:37:49.000 Dude, we actually did really good there. I haven't been there in forever. I need to go

00:37:52.040 back. Cause that's, that's being very familiar with that culture. Your style of comedy is

00:37:56.460 so on brand for that South Africa like audience, I think, but sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt

00:38:01.180 you. No, I need to go. I, and it's, I think it's been my favorite country that I've ever

00:38:05.020 been to. Let's go, man. I'll take you around. I'll show you the Bush side of it. Dude. Let's

00:38:09.640 go. You do it. You do a show and then we'll go out into the bush, catch some animals, work

00:38:14.380 with some creatures. It'd be rad. That'd be really cool. Yeah, man. Do one of my goals.

00:38:19.120 I was even going to say, I was thinking about this yesterday is I want to get more involved

00:38:22.260 with nature. Um, like fishing, hunting, just learning how to, uh, be able to survive myself

00:38:27.620 out in the woods over the next two years. It's such a grounding thing, Theo. I'm telling,

00:38:32.540 I don't want to be all ethereal, but it, it makes you so connected to the planet. It's such

00:38:36.920 a good feeling when you feel self-sufficient out in nature. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I want

00:38:41.520 that. I think it would just allow me a different level of peace, you know, and a different level

00:38:46.060 of like, I don't have to be so attached to like, um, these more worldly things because

00:38:51.200 I know that I would be okay. You know, like a, a level of like, um, confidence, you, you

00:38:56.240 get confidence, you get such natural confidence and you, the outside, I don't know if you're

00:39:01.200 like this, but you know, I'm also not to your degree, but I'm in the public light as well.

00:39:04.620 I read these like negative comments on YouTube or whatever. And I like get in my own head

00:39:09.920 and I'm like, fuck that sucks. Like, why do these people not like this or whatever you

00:39:12.940 got in nature? There's no time for that. Yeah. You know, you're there, you're, you're

00:39:16.820 working on the fish you're trying to catch or the bird you're trying to hunt or the animal

00:39:20.140 you're trying to save. And that's what you're on. You're not checking your phone. You're

00:39:23.600 not looking at tweets or YouTube comments. You're just there. Yeah. Yeah. There's not

00:39:27.280 like some little, like a, like a bear cub in the distance on his phone. This loser's

00:39:32.200 trying to hunt me. He don't know. Yeah. You're like, I'm trying really hard.

00:39:37.520 Now that would be cool. Actually. If animals were like, please look at these bitches trying

00:39:41.480 to hunt us. And you're like sitting in the blind. He's behind you taking a photo. He's

00:39:45.320 like, look at this loser. That would actually be awesome, dude. Um, but no, I do. I just,

00:39:50.860 yeah, I think I'm missing out on a piece of existence and I can kind of start to feel that

00:39:55.680 I didn't realize it for a long time, but I can start to feel it more and more. I like that.

00:39:59.300 Um, but that would be great, dude. I'd love to put a show up over there and then we go

00:40:02.440 do something cool. Let me know, man. I'm, I'm going to be in Zimbabwe at the end of

00:40:06.000 October doing a big animal rescue. I don't know what your schedule's like. I'm sure that's

00:40:09.700 pretty soon, but you know, let me know what I could try to put a show up. Uh, cause I

00:40:14.180 wanted to go to like London anyway to interview this. Um, there's a guy, there's a professor

00:40:18.960 who specializes in, um, genocides. Okay. That's, that's deep. Yeah. Yeah. And it's kind of

00:40:27.380 just interesting, you know? So I just wanted to learn about why that happens over time.

00:40:31.280 Sure. And cause you would think that after a while in existence, we would get past that,

00:40:36.900 you know? Yeah. Right. The modern brain is like, we can't wipe out a group of people.

00:40:41.480 Yeah. Apparently not. Yeah. Yeah. Like every article is always like, you can never do this

00:40:46.040 again. And then it's like, Hey, but we can do something. We're working on it. Yeah.

00:40:49.360 I don't, but then it's like, you know, in the end you come back to some sort of survival and

00:40:57.140 sometimes survival is a sickness, I think in people too, in a way, you know? Um, what do you

00:41:02.300 mean? Like, how is it a sickness in people? Well, just the fact that you would, you would

00:41:06.720 throughout history, there's been a genocides and the people have annihilated other cultures. I mean,

00:41:11.280 it used to be of like a flat, a badge of honor. Totally. Like look what I did. Right. Like

00:41:18.800 conquering and stuff like that. And that's kind of who's to say that that's right or wrong. I'm

00:41:24.000 judging it through my perspective today, but at the time it was probably the most regal thing,

00:41:30.120 you know? But doesn't it go back to, and I, this is not my area of expertise. I'm not an

00:41:35.120 anthropologist, but didn't, we're homo sapiens, right? Didn't hope homo sapiens wipe out like the two

00:41:40.360 other hominids. You know what I mean? If, I don't know if you can fact check that, but I,

00:41:44.160 I think there was homo sapiens, homo florentius and homo something else. And homo sapiens were

00:41:49.880 like, nah, we, we got to get rid of these other guys. Um, you know, and that's like what we stemmed

00:41:55.200 from if I'm not, you know, yeah. What is it with Neanderthals? And I don't know. Um, let me see what

00:42:00.480 it says. Oh, the didn't, Oh, we were just talking about this the other day. The Denisovans were out

00:42:04.600 competed by homo sapiens, but proof of a direct wipe out is absent. Oh, okay. There you go.

00:42:10.060 Instead, limited resources and climate changes played significant roles. Um, but who knows?

00:42:15.260 I'm sure people got super tribal back then. One person could have had fire and they're like,

00:42:20.940 we got, we got to kill these people before they come and burn them. They're going to take our fire.

00:42:24.580 Right. We, we cannot let them take our fire. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I, but there you go. I'm wrong.

00:42:29.800 So I, I, I didn't know that, but I thought there was that competition at play. At least you were

00:42:33.900 wrong. I don't even have a shot at that information. So at least you're firing off. Um,

00:42:40.120 you've had, uh, you've had some, thanks so much for coming, dude. This is awesome, bro.

00:42:44.980 Yeah. So much fun. Yeah. It's great. Um, I want to get you out there or at least see you go out

00:42:48.800 there into nature and get connected with it. I would love to. I think the South Africa thing is

00:42:52.400 the thing because I think it's big and I love South Africa and I would love to go over there for a show

00:42:58.360 and just get to have a new experience there. And then just thinking what type of, um, thing would I

00:43:03.600 want to do? I did get to swim with sharks there once, which was pretty cool.

00:43:06.380 Hines Bay of like Seal Island. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. That's rad. Yeah. It's a good

00:43:10.700 experience, bro. It was super scary. It almost felt, it was just unbelievable. We laid out there

00:43:17.780 in that sun, dude. I got the craziest sunburn. Got crisped. Yeah. I mean like colors of like

00:43:24.640 fluid were just like purples and yeah, I know what you're talking about, man. What lagoon has been

00:43:31.280 launched by the sun on my face because we went out with like some dude who I think he was just

00:43:35.920 a mechanic who had like a couple hours on his lunch break. Yeah. He's like, yeah, we'll make

00:43:39.020 it work. That's South Africa for you. Yeah. He's like, I got a boat. Yeah. We'll figure it out.

00:43:44.280 Yeah. Dude. I mean, there was no cut. We're just lay, I mean, in the boiling heat, but we got in those

00:43:51.200 cages in the round circular cage and we got in and some sharks came. One of them got stuck between

00:43:55.820 two cages. Oh, no way. In the boat. Oh, cool. That's rad, dude. It was hairy. I got to reach

00:44:01.260 through and touch one of my head. I can see you getting fired up on it. That's the best thing

00:44:04.740 about like an adult reconnecting with nature. Not to say you're totally disconnected, but you get

00:44:09.040 this kid like enthusiasm and sense of wonder that's been gone since you were like seven years old looking

00:44:14.820 at earthworms. You remember when your kid, you flip over a log, you're like, whoa, dad, look at this

00:44:18.620 earthworm, you know, that goes away because you become an adult and then you get back into it and you're

00:44:23.060 like, oh, that never really went away. I just like went a different direction.

00:44:26.960 Oh. Yeah. I don't know. Sorry. What were you saying?

00:44:29.320 No, dude. No, that's such an important thing to say. That never went away. I just went a different

00:44:32.840 direction. Yeah. Because yeah, sometimes I think I even romanticize it like so much of like childhood

00:44:38.700 stuff is gone, but it's, but there's ways that it's still there. It's just like, yeah, you went a

00:44:44.280 different direction and that's okay. Yeah. But you can always go right back. That's the best thing.

00:44:48.100 That's what I think. That's what I think. Yeah. Soon we'll get you cutting off hippo nuts. Yeah.

00:44:51.760 Dude. Oh, the thing I was going to tell you was we went on a safari one day. This, there

00:44:56.160 was like some diamond miner, right? Like some very rich guy, like some guy who was just fucking

00:45:01.540 being rich or whatever. Like I tapped him on the shoulder. I was like, are you doing, what

00:45:05.600 are you doing? And he's like being rich. He couldn't even fucking, you know, you don't

00:45:11.900 even know. I saw him yawn once and he had $40 right after he yawned, he had $40. It just

00:45:18.300 fell out of his mouth. He's like, oh, that's where I put that. He had just that kind of

00:45:22.360 wealth. But he took us to, he had his own animal sanctuary somewhere. Oh, interesting.

00:45:28.900 And they took us there and we got to just go see, um, a lot of endangered species, like

00:45:33.380 the big five. Um, Oh, sick. And a lot of endangered species. We just got to go look

00:45:37.260 at them. Um, and then, uh, six weeks later in my inbox, in my email, I get an email from

00:45:43.280 him. He goes, oh, that's it. Oh, that's brutal. Oh, the rhino. Yeah. And this, I

00:45:48.520 cannot believe you just found this. And, uh, and this, and he sent me this picture

00:45:54.000 and he goes, the rhinos that we, that you guys went and saw to, uh, a few weeks

00:45:58.300 ago, poachers came in night and cut their horns off. It's so brutal, man. It's, it's

00:46:02.880 an ongoing war over there for the rhino ivory thing. Yeah, it's brutal. But things

00:46:08.300 like this are important. You posting it, you know, to an audience that's not tuning in

00:46:11.560 for animals that goes, holy shit, that's bad. That that's really cool. It's really

00:46:14.960 important that people realize that it's shock. I got, cause you hear about it. Yeah. But

00:46:18.840 then I was like, oh my God, the ones that we were looking at that we were so like enthralled

00:46:22.720 by and they were, their whole body is left there in this one piece of them. Cut their

00:46:27.460 face off. That's crazy. Yeah. Um, yeah, that's a bummer, man. Good for you for sharing it

00:46:31.960 though. I really think that's great. Well, yeah, if you hadn't been here today, I don't

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00:48:12.440 What are some close encounters that you've had with animals out there, man, that almost sometimes you're

00:48:17.200 like, oh, you know, man, that gets that childhood engine, like, you know, just really revs it into

00:48:22.340 the red area. I'm not an adrenaline junkie, or at least I like to pretend I'm not, right? But I get

00:48:28.400 that rush when something like that happens. Literally the hippo thing, I had a hippo charge me out of the

00:48:33.360 water there that was crazy and everybody scrambled. I had an instance where a cease, one of the craziest

00:48:39.820 ones I never forget, the one that always comes to the top of my mind. We were in Australia and we were

00:48:43.980 interviewing people in this aboriginal village, like way up north in far north Queensland. And

00:48:48.660 as we're talking to people, I hear people screaming, shouting, ah! And I look over and there's this guy

00:48:53.540 holding a cinder block over his head like this, and he's about to throw it. I'm like, wait, wait,

00:48:57.100 and I run over and there's a coastal taipan, which is one of the most venomous snakes in the world,

00:49:01.140 big brown snake. And he's about to smash it with this rock. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait,

00:49:04.920 I'll catch it and move it for you. This thing right here. It's a big one. It was like five,

00:49:09.160 six feet long. And, um, and so, uh, the guy, this aboriginal guy's about to smash it. I'm like,

00:49:14.660 wait, wait, like I'll catch it and move it for you. And he's like, okay, whatever. And the snake

00:49:18.140 disappears under the house, right? This is like a house on like, like kind of like Louisiana where

00:49:22.400 they elevate the houses a little bit, you know, down south there. Satan's right under him. Yeah,

00:49:26.380 exactly. And so there's, you know, they're up on like cinder blocks or posts or whatever. Dude,

00:49:31.040 that makes me so scared, a snake under the house. So the snake disappears under the house and the guy's

00:49:35.760 like kind of mad at me. He's like, what the fuck, man? I could have killed the snake. Now it's in the

00:49:38.700 neighborhood, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, let me handle it. Like I'll take care of

00:49:41.540 it. I'm sorry. And it all happened really quick. So I grabbed my flashlight and I grabbed, grab my

00:49:45.880 snake hook or whatever. And I go looking for the snake and my camera guys are filming. We're filming

00:49:50.280 a show of extinct or alive. It's a show I did on animal planet a while ago. Yeah. We're going to

00:49:53.900 get into that in a minute. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, and my camera guys are filming. I look from one side

00:49:59.160 of the house. Not yet, but I'm looking, I'm like crouched down looking and I see the snake in like the far

00:50:03.400 back corner and I'm like, Oh, he's right there by the stairs. Come with me. Like we'll go get him. So I grabbed my

00:50:08.060 light and I jog around the side of the house and I stick my head through the like slats in the

00:50:12.340 stairs. They're like this far apart. Right. So I can just kind of wiggle my head and shoulders in.

00:50:15.920 And I know the snakes over here. Cause I've just seen him from the other side of under the house.

00:50:19.940 I'm like, he's right over here. So I wiggling, I turn my light on my headlamp, whatever it was.

00:50:23.140 And I turned to the side and I'm like, fuck, where's that snake? I can't see him. And all of a

00:50:26.540 sudden I just feel like this on the back of my neck. The snake has gone around to the other side.

00:50:32.120 He's moving around. These snakes are fast and he's literally licks the side of my neck. You know,

00:50:36.280 snakes stick their tongue out like that. And then he starts crawling over my neck and I just freeze

00:50:40.220 and like, you see the hair on my arms right now. Like it rattled me. Cause one bite, I was like 14

00:50:45.540 hours from a hospital from one of the most venomous snakes in the world, a relatively aggressive snake.

00:50:50.520 And I just freeze. I just stopped moving one bite. Everybody knows the rules. That's right. That's

00:50:54.820 right. Thanks Dave. Um, and uh, yeah, so I just, I freeze while the snake fully slithers up over my neck

00:51:02.140 and then comes and coils up like three feet from my head over here. And then I like slowly back out.

00:51:08.820 We ended up catching him 10, 15 minutes later, moving it, blah, blah, blah. But that moment

00:51:12.520 where the snake like licked my neck right behind my ear there. And then I started to feel like the

00:51:17.620 underside of his mouth go on my neck. I was like, that's it. Like I can't move. I can't do anything.

00:51:22.660 I'm dead. Like it's going to realize it's sitting on top of a warm human and that it's been chasing him

00:51:27.600 and just go and that's it. I'm finished. I was, I was the most rattled. I think I've ever been

00:51:32.720 coming out of that. Yeah. I was just so like on edge while that snake was crawling over me.

00:51:38.280 As you're saying that, I can feel my glands almost like just like tighten up. Yeah. Dude,

00:51:44.420 it was a horrible, horrible feeling. And that that's my fault. You know what it is. And it's so

00:51:48.420 the fact that it's something so subtle, it's almost like a Dracula just being right there.

00:51:54.260 And the hardest part was my stomach dropped and your instinct is like pull out, you know,

00:51:59.000 like panic immediately, get away. And if I had done that, if I had even jolted, I think it would

00:52:03.600 have just been, you know? And so I just had to try, like, it felt like, like 10 minutes and it was

00:52:09.060 probably 10 seconds that it went over my neck for, but I was just sitting there like, please,

00:52:13.060 please, please, please. And then it went over. It was crazy, man. It was a terrible, terrible feeling.

00:52:18.080 And it was very like novel, naive of me to go in and just stick my head in and like, be like,

00:52:23.780 I'll be your hero. I'll help. It was stupid. You know, it was just stupid. And I learned from

00:52:28.100 that experience so much so that I've done it again a dozen times, but like, I try not to be

00:52:32.440 that stupid anymore, you know? Yeah. It's funny how sometimes ego and even knowledge can become

00:52:37.760 a little bit of ego. Like enough knowledge makes you think confident, you know, confidence can just

00:52:44.220 teeter over the edge of, um, of, uh, wisdom in a way. Totally. You know, the fulcrum of that is so

00:52:52.440 fine-tuned that yes, it's like, it's almost like when you're like, I know what I'm doing and then

00:52:56.940 immediately you get checked by just by existence. Well, confidence is complacency, right? So you're

00:53:02.960 like, I got this step aside. That means I'm complacent. If I even have that attitude going

00:53:07.940 into it, it means I'm not fully focused, right? Like, and, and that, uh, time and time again,

00:53:13.000 every narrow miss I've ever had, which is not that many, but there's been a few is because I've been,

00:53:18.620 first of all, I've put myself in that scenario. It's not the animal's fault, right? This wasn't

00:53:21.780 the snake's fault that I stuck my head under the, the, the house, but it's always cause I'm overly

00:53:27.300 confident to the point of being complacent. Like, yeah, I can stick my head in here. I'll find the

00:53:30.880 snake. You know, it's, it's, it's stupid. Right. Yeah. Like, let me show, like, it's not even like,

00:53:35.520 let me show off. There's a part of you that gets so comfortable that it, it almost just shows off

00:53:40.540 because it's, well, can I show you something? Yeah. Do you mind? Sorry to ask you to do this.

00:53:44.640 Do you mind pulling up the last YouTube video I just posted, um, on my YouTube channel? I don't

00:53:50.120 want to dogleg us too long, but I'll show you where the snake almost got me recently. And again,

00:53:53.680 it's a, it's a result of, uh, sorry. It's the one with the, that silly crocodile thing. Yeah. Right

00:53:59.200 near the end, maybe the last two or three minutes there. Yeah. Right here. So look,

00:54:03.120 so I'm holding this snake. This is a Fertilance, the deadliest snake in, in the Americas killed,

00:54:07.280 responsible for more deaths than any other snake. Now, where did you find this at brother? Costa

00:54:10.700 Rica. Ooh. Yeah. And so I'm holding this snake. And this is the deadliest snake in South America?

00:54:14.960 In the Americas total across all Canada, United States, South America, Central America. It's a

00:54:19.320 big snake too. Huge one. Biggest one I've ever seen. And for no reason at all, because it's a stupid

00:54:23.580 YouTube video, he's peeing on me. I'm like, I'm going to pin it and hold it behind the head. Now watch here.

00:54:28.200 I'm holding it and I'm, I'm showing off like we just talked about telling the camera all about,

00:54:33.100 you know, this is this deadly snake and don't this many people a year die from it. And you got to be

00:54:37.400 careful because of how they hide, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I start to loosen my grip here. See,

00:54:41.880 I'm looking to the side and I'm jabbering to the camera. So my grip starting to loosen. Now watch

00:54:45.900 what the snake does when he feels my grip loosen, uh, coming in the next few seconds. I don't want to

00:54:50.340 bore you, but you can almost see him. He's, he's a side eye on me right now. And this is complacency

00:54:55.720 because I'm busy presenting to a camera, like an idiot talking about how deadly the snake is

00:55:00.160 and I'm adjusting my grip. I'm not, not paying attention. Here it comes any second here. Look

00:55:05.560 at that. So he starts to open his mouth. Oh, see how close that is. That was me. Boots are up.

00:55:12.740 Dude, I'm ready for the call. Look at that. Look at that. Oh, that is so close to my hand with that

00:55:17.640 fang. Those fangs are two and a half inches long. So he was maybe a quarter of an inch from getting me.

00:55:22.920 And that would have been my hand gone. Play that one more time. Play that strike. There's

00:55:25.980 that slow-mo strike just a few seconds back here. Look at this. Boom. And what, what method did he

00:55:32.940 use to be able to make himself have the, uh, torque to do that? But it's, so if I had been

00:55:39.100 holding the snake perfectly, he couldn't have done that. Right. But I'd been holding him for two or

00:55:43.580 three minutes, talking to the camera, showing off cause it's stupid YouTube. Right. And I had loosened my

00:55:49.360 grip and slowly slipped down so much so that he had leverage in his neck. So that was the problem.

00:55:54.500 It's not, it's, it's my fault. His ground game, his ground game. His ground game was strong. He

00:55:57.860 would have whooped me. Yeah. And it was close, man. If I hadn't dropped him right there, I'm talking

00:56:02.520 another half second. And that would have been just one nick, one fang into the hand. That's,

00:56:06.680 that's definitely the finger gone. Maybe my hand, you know, when a sneak bite happens, what is like,

00:56:11.560 and especially when it's one that's as venomous as this, when you're saying, yeah, highly venomous,

00:56:15.880 how quickly can someone really lose like an appendage or something from that or potentially

00:56:20.440 die? Like how, how real is that? But it all depends, right? It's, it's, it's like saying

00:56:24.820 what happens if I get stung by a bee? Well, are you allergic to a bee? How much venom did the bee

00:56:28.900 put in you? Got it. If you and I get stung by a bee, we're going to react completely differently,

00:56:32.400 right? My hand might swell up like a balloon. You might have a tiny little mosquito bite itch.

00:56:36.440 So every human body responds differently to venom. And then there are multiple types of venom. And then

00:56:41.860 there are cocktails of venom. So there's, there's cytotoxic, hemotoxic, and neurotoxic,

00:56:46.940 like brain location, organ failure, different. And then there's cocktails. So some snakes have a

00:56:51.780 cocktail of like location venom and organ venom, and some have a respiratory venom. And so it's,

00:56:58.940 it's just crazy. That's why anti-venom is such a difficult thing because there's so many different

00:57:02.880 kinds of snakes, so many different cocktails of venom. People all react differently to it. An allergy

00:57:07.300 to venom means you're going to die almost no matter what. Like it's just, it's a crazy like

00:57:11.940 variable of things. Yeah. Wow. But in that case, I would have been in big trouble. Yeah.

00:57:17.900 God, dude. So don't do that. When we go back to the cool animal stuff, don't do that stuff. Yeah.

00:57:23.160 Are there moments where you feel like some animals are of God and some animals are of

00:57:27.960 Satan? Do you ever feel like that? Hippos are of Satan. Really? They're such angry freaking animals.

00:57:33.960 And there's a few animals like that, like cassowaries, if you know what they are, big

00:57:37.100 vulture, uh, velociraptor looking birds. It's a few animals that just, you know, I'm not very

00:57:42.660 religious. So I'm using that term as jokingly, but there, there are some animals that just have

00:57:47.900 terrible attitudes. Scroll down real quick. Check out that one where he's kicking. I saw it a second

00:57:52.500 ago. He's kicking the guy's board. Like, look at that. You know, these things just come at you.

00:57:57.120 They've got, they've got these talons, this head. Hippos are the same. If a hippo sees you,

00:58:02.760 it's going to charge a Cape Buffalo, like in Africa, the, they call them the black death

00:58:08.220 because when they smell you or see you, they don't think about running. They just think about

00:58:12.860 charging. And it's just, some animals just have this attitude. And I don't think it's,

00:58:17.220 I don't think it's an ethereal thing. I think it's that hippos and Cape Buffalo and cassowaries,

00:58:21.800 they've grown up with tons of predators. Historically, they've been hunted. So they're

00:58:25.220 defensive instead of their fight or flight is just a fight response. Got it. Do you know what I

00:58:29.640 mean? Like that's the way to explain. Yeah. And that is, that is just scary to work with those

00:58:35.600 animals because at any given time, they're going to turn on you versus run away from you. Yeah.

00:58:41.380 Have you encountered, like, I'm sure whenever you get out into these worlds of animalia and some of

00:58:45.420 these worlds where you probably don't even speak the language, have you encountered people that

00:58:49.580 are as dangerous as the animals? Way worse. People are always, every close call we've ever, I mean,

00:58:56.100 you know, not including those snake things or whatever, but every time that I've really felt

00:59:01.340 threatened, which isn't like an instant spur of the moment when you feel threatened from an animal,

00:59:04.780 it's like, okay, it nearly bit me. That's over. When you feel threatened on a whole, it's because

00:59:09.520 humans are so unpredictable. A good example is you're working in a country that has political unrest

00:59:15.940 and they know that you've got money because you've got cameras or whatever. And now the government's

00:59:21.100 got to get you. The mafia is going to get you. They've sent, you know, we had this instance in

00:59:24.680 Myanmar where the government wanted to get us for having a drone and we had to flee. And like,

00:59:28.860 those are the scariest things is the human element. And of all the places I've ever been,

00:59:32.740 and I know this is an anomaly, but of all the places I've ever been, Papua New Guinea,

00:59:36.820 the last time I went to Papua, I've only been once, but the time I went to Papua New Guinea,

00:59:40.220 in 14 days, I saw two people get hacked by machetes. I was only there for two weeks.

00:59:45.820 I mean, that's how like violent that society is. And it's a very tribal culture and things. One was in

00:59:51.260 the capital of Port Moresby. The other was actually near to this place.

00:59:54.320 This is a real picture here? Yeah, real picture. And what's the place called? I'm sorry,

00:59:57.660 I stepped on you. This was near to Tufi, an area called Tufi. Yeah. So how do you know when you're

01:00:02.020 meeting? I mean, this is a tribe, right? And they were lovely. A little bit scary at first,

01:00:06.600 but it was the town people that were, that were the problems that were high on beetle nut and been

01:00:11.520 drinking and fighting and those kinds of things. But this was a, a tribe. You see the guy on the left

01:00:16.860 of me that has the, the shark mask on. So this was a tribe that had a very special,

01:00:21.680 that's shark jaws on his face. Wow. It looks like Otis Nixon a little bit.

01:00:27.300 A good athlete too, but this was great. Yeah. Uh, so this tribe had a special relationship with

01:00:32.880 shark fishing. So we went to seek them out to try and find these sharks. And we went and like got in

01:00:38.900 this burial cave where they kept human skulls, the whole thing. But then they took us to the village

01:00:43.560 and we sat with this guy. The craziest part is these guys' names are like John Thomas and,

01:00:49.940 and Thomas Johnson. And because the missionaries have all been through there. Like Collier Anthony.

01:00:54.960 Yes. It's insane, dude. They're all have these, these like British. Dear William. Yeah. It's so,

01:01:00.840 you like meet this guy and he's like, looks all intimidating and stuff. And then he introduces

01:01:04.660 himself as like Paul Johnson. And you're like, okay. Yeah. Yeah. His name is a Philip Banks.

01:01:11.260 Yeah. It's so strange. Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. You're like, that's a crazy name.

01:01:17.400 Yeah. Oh, there you go. There he goes. Yeah. What a happy looking dude though.

01:01:20.500 Oh, he was man. He definitely was a happy, that guy was a great character. He passed away a few

01:01:24.640 years back. Oh, shame. Yeah. I, um, wow, dude. Yeah. So that would just be the scariest thing.

01:01:32.180 Like have you ever, have you, have you gotten into a situation where you had to pay to get out of it?

01:01:36.260 Yeah. Many. I try not to like advertise that because it's truly bribes. It really is. Like

01:01:41.480 there's no other way to put it. And it's so funny, dude. I've never shared this. When you get back from

01:01:46.520 a shoot, right. Usually my, my expeditions are funded by like discovery channel or, or animal

01:01:50.860 plan or something. And then you, you submit like a cost or an expense report. And they're like,

01:01:55.100 what's this $4,000 for? And you're like groceries. Yeah. You know, because you like handed somebody a

01:02:00.660 stack of 4,000 bucks cash to not, you know, take your car tires or something. And you're like,

01:02:06.160 yeah, I just got to lie about that. You know, like there's, you can't write bribe money on the

01:02:10.560 invoice. Yeah. Well, it just goes to show that at every level of existence, right. Whether it's like,

01:02:17.880 uh, first world, third world, 50th world, there's this, there's a checks and balances system of

01:02:24.600 capitalism so often for sure. And it's, and that doesn't even change. You can be in the shittiest

01:02:30.400 place in the world. You pull up, you park your car. There's a guy that's going to walk up and he's

01:02:34.900 like for $4, I'll make sure your car is there when you get back. And it's just, that's the cost of

01:02:39.880 doing business. And if you don't pay the $4, you better believe your windows are getting smashed,

01:02:44.380 you know? And you, you, you, it's funny cause you talk to these guys in these offices at the

01:02:48.700 networks or whatever, and they don't get what you just said. And you're like, no, no, I had to do that.

01:02:53.580 Otherwise there'd be no, like they would have smashed the windows, taken all the cameras,

01:02:57.020 you know? And it's like, Oh, well, why did you have to bribe them? It's like,

01:03:00.320 how do you not understand this? Like it's, it's commerce, you know, like this is how the world

01:03:04.400 works outside of LA. That's perfect, man. Um, you mentioned a little bit ago, one of your shows

01:03:11.980 extinct or alive or alive. Yeah. What, what was one of your most surprising discoveries while shooting

01:03:18.680 extinct or alive? Yeah. Um, the tortoise in that cover image from season two, that was probably

01:03:24.600 the biggest one. Uh, it was crazy. We went to this Island in the Galapagos that basically nobody goes

01:03:30.180 to called Fernandina. That species of tortoise hadn't been seen in 114 years and only one specimen

01:03:37.280 in history had ever been recorded 114 years prior by the California Academy of Sciences. So to date,

01:03:43.020 that animal that I'm holding in that picture, which has been doctored for the, the like trailer

01:03:48.380 poster thing is the rarest animal in the world. There's only one known individual of that species

01:03:53.540 and that's her right there. Damn. And it's a woman, huh? It's a girl. Yeah. Her name's Fern.

01:03:59.500 Some, yeah. Women though, they, they, they, they're survivors. Yeah. Yeah. They, dude, chicks are like,

01:04:05.140 we're talking about survival and stuff. Girls are so much better at it than guys. It's not even close.

01:04:09.740 Is that in animal kingdom as well? I mean, I was talking about humans, but yeah, probably in the

01:04:13.860 animal kingdom too. I mean, like, I feel like females, girls, women, whatever, they have more

01:04:18.860 to fight for because they have kids to protect, you know, whereas a male, I'll just make more kids.

01:04:23.920 You know what I mean? Like I'm not investing all of my body energy into raising this one young. Like

01:04:28.460 I'll just go find another mate. I'm talking on like a very base evolutionary level. Like it's, it's just

01:04:34.000 like, I'm going to spread my seed. Whereas I, it's incredible how like tenacious and hearty

01:04:38.620 female animals, women, everything are. It's crazy. Oh, dude. I think, and also, and also men have

01:04:45.640 that, uh, they have testosterone in them that like, you know, it's that I'm going to put my

01:04:50.560 hand in the fire. Exactly. Right there. You're going to lose 30% of dudes right there because

01:04:55.520 they're trying to taste a fucking car that's going by. Let's stick my tongue out. Yeah. Let me look

01:05:01.500 right here in the animal kingdom. Our female is generally better at survival than males. Um, and we looked

01:05:06.600 that on perplexity. That's what we like to use. Uh, females in the animal kingdom are generally

01:05:10.780 better at survival than males in a large scale study of 101 wild mammal species. Females lived

01:05:17.200 an average of 18% longer than males and more than 60% of those species. Um, for most mammals,

01:05:23.720 including species like elephants, lions, and seals, females surpass males in longevity. Uh,

01:05:28.860 the difference in lifespan between the sexes is often more pronounced in the animal kingdom

01:05:32.500 than in humans where women live about 7.8% longer than men. We're expendable. Yeah. Like

01:05:38.800 think if there's, if there's one guy and a hundred girls, you're repopulating the planet. Right. If

01:05:44.440 there's a hundred guys and one woman, you're not, you know what I mean? Like we are expendable

01:05:49.160 males across all species for the most part are expendable. Sorry, bro. I just, I felt something

01:05:57.420 was, I knew something was off. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Damn it. Should have been

01:06:01.580 a check. I know. I just gotta, I gotta wander around with a, uh, I'm gonna get some new

01:06:06.440 knee pads. I'm gonna have to get some protective armor. I get some new knee pads. I gotta get

01:06:12.860 some protective armor, dude. That's for sure. Um, the idea that you're going to find like

01:06:18.800 extinct species is such like, it's a, it's a cool sport, right? Because it's like, it's,

01:06:23.360 um, chasing this, uh, Atlantis in a way kind of, it's the most ultimate hunting form of

01:06:30.200 hunting. You're looking for the rarest thing in the world. So much so that the whole world

01:06:34.200 thinks it doesn't exist anymore. Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking about just thinking about

01:06:38.200 extinction and stuff. It's like, where's that last day where people are just standing

01:06:42.520 there with the clipboards and they're just waiting for the last, like one of a species

01:06:47.380 to die off. And then they're like, Oh, there it goes. Yeah. Yeah. Like, yeah. What classifies

01:06:52.080 something as extinct? That's a great question. And that's part of the premise of like why we

01:06:56.140 made that original show extinct or live is like, it's some, for the most part, and I'm oversimplifying,

01:07:01.280 but it's some stuffy dude, British dude in a smoking jacket going, no, yes, I believe this is

01:07:07.080 gone, you know? And then he like checks a box. And the problem with that is, is from a conservation

01:07:11.680 model, the second you check that extinction box, that's it. There's no funding. There's no effort.

01:07:16.660 It's gone. Extinct doesn't mean hiding or around the corner or there's a few left. Extinct means

01:07:20.760 give up and move on. We're out 86, the dodo bird. That's it. Yeah. And so I think it's super

01:07:26.320 arrogant for humans to come in and go, that's extinct. I mean, not to, I don't want to belittle

01:07:31.020 extinction. It's a very severe thing, but oftentimes we give up too quickly. We go, it's extinct. It's

01:07:36.760 not here. Or now it's sort of been reclassified as like lost to science. But for a long time,

01:07:41.060 it was just like, Oh, it's extinct. Science hasn't seen it in 20 years, 30 years, a hundred years

01:07:44.720 used to be 30 years was the benchmark. And, um, it's just sort of an arrogant thing to come

01:07:49.780 in and say like, you know, Oh, I went to Borneo for 10 days. I promise you it's not there. It's

01:07:54.580 like, shut up, dude. You know what I mean? What the fuck are you talking about? It's not a game of

01:07:58.340 clue. You idiot. Yeah, exactly. And I'm oversimplifying it, but I think that's what ended

01:08:03.260 up happening a lot is all this information. You know, there's millions and millions of species

01:08:07.100 of animal out there, tons and thousands of scientists and things. And they're like, Oh,

01:08:10.980 that one's gone. Move on. You know? And what I like to do is be like, well, hold on,

01:08:15.100 let's give the little guy a second shot here, you know? And I think why we were successful,

01:08:19.460 why we found eight animals that were previously lost to science was because we didn't give up

01:08:23.520 after 10 days. Like some of those expeditions were two months long, you know, living in tents,

01:08:28.100 filming every day, like setting camera traps, going out, baiting stuff. You know, it's, they were,

01:08:32.980 they were hard work. I love the work, but they were hard work. And then it's like, Oh, there it is.

01:08:37.420 We found it, you know? And the first time was like utterly shocking, but then we did it seven more

01:08:41.640 times. And it was like, Oh, wow, there is a pattern here. And I don't want to say it's just

01:08:46.560 like our show and the work I did, but between that and some of the conservation organizations

01:08:50.300 and stuff, there was a little bit of a mentality shift of, Oh, wait a minute. It's not extinct.

01:08:54.740 It's like a lost species. It's been lost to Western scientists studying it or finding it.

01:08:59.740 So now we'll put in campaigns to find lost animals as opposed to just decide they're extinct

01:09:04.780 and move on. And that's sort of changed things a bit. It's kind of like cold case files of animals.

01:09:08.920 Yeah, totally. It's like, go back in, you know, check, check the records. Yeah.

01:09:12.640 Yeah. It's like, ah, I don't think we had a, let's see if we have a better DNA sample now.

01:09:16.420 Yeah, exactly. And the technology has come so far.

01:09:18.880 Dude, this sounds just like cold case files.

01:09:20.740 It is. It is, man. It's the same thing. It's forensics. It's animal forensics.

01:09:24.280 Yeah.

01:09:24.600 Yeah.

01:09:25.060 Wow.

01:09:25.500 It's cool.

01:09:26.180 Are there animals out there who are, that are almost extinct? Like, do you believe, are we

01:09:30.940 get like, does extinction happen every week on the planet and we just don't realize it? How common

01:09:36.420 is it?

01:09:36.800 3,000 species per year.

01:09:38.940 Nuh-uh. You're lying. You're lying.

01:09:40.800 That's the estimated number. Yeah. And a lot of things, a lot crazy, right?

01:09:44.740 The fucking what?

01:09:45.880 Bro, a lot of things are going extinct before we've even described what they are. Like in

01:09:50.000 the Amazon where there's all this clear cutting and stuff.

01:09:52.260 Yeah.

01:09:52.700 There are little species of, and I'm not saying they're, I'm not talking about a buffalo.

01:09:56.280 You know, I'm talking about a bug this big or a little orchid or something. But before

01:09:59.700 we've even described what it is or looked into the medicinal properties of it or try to conserve

01:10:04.660 it, it's gone because we wipe out that chunk of habitat. There you go.

01:10:09.720 The estimated number of species that go extinct every year ranges from about 2,000 over 100,000,

01:10:13.540 depending on which scientific estimates and total species counts are used.

01:10:17.220 Yeah. We, we, we, I know this is the chat GPT answer or whatever perplexity answer, but we dug

01:10:22.720 into this pretty heavily across a bunch of organizations and we estimated it was close to about 3,000.

01:10:26.980 Now, most of that as in like 2,500 are plants, but the other five to 700 or so are, are animals

01:10:34.660 that are going extinct every year.

01:10:35.980 But to think that we're losing plants, which are, I mean, unbelievable. Just the things that

01:10:42.040 they're, the medicine and stuff that they're finding in plants, the possibilities.

01:10:45.680 And it's, it's again, going back to the technology standpoint, the more that we advance our technology,

01:10:52.320 the more we use that technology to realize that old ancient ways of medicine and herbal

01:10:57.840 medicine and stuff actually is really effective. Look at the sups game now, right? Like you go on,

01:11:02.720 it's like supplements, you know, every supplement's like, Oh, this is, I'm making all this up,

01:11:07.500 but like berberine, which is a derivative of an almond shell or whatever, you know? And it's like

01:11:11.460 beetroot, beetroot. You're like, that's medicine. You know, we, it's so crazy. Cause I think medicine

01:11:16.580 swung, swung so far away in the pendulum where it's like, it has to be fully synthetic. And it's

01:11:21.620 like, Oh wait, half the shit isn't working, giving you terrible side effects. Well, look over here.

01:11:25.020 Beetroot actually is a great detoxifier. Why don't we just do that? You know, it's like, it's like the

01:11:29.040 pendulum swung too far and now it's swung back a little bit where it's like, yeah, all these,

01:11:32.980 all these natural things actually help us. And when you're losing 1500 species or so of those a year,

01:11:38.760 I'm not saying any of them are going to cure cancer, but they might, you know, who knows?

01:11:43.260 Like we haven't tested it. Yeah. It's fascinating. It's crazy to think that that's, that, um,

01:11:49.760 that that's where we are and, and, and how much of that is just evolution and how much of that is

01:11:56.020 man-made do you think are man like, uh, involved that, uh, that's, that we, that species become

01:12:05.180 extinct. It's a little bit of both. And I think the pro one of the things that we see a lot

01:12:08.740 is people are like, Oh, it's all humans fault. That's why everything's going. Extinction's been

01:12:12.480 around forever. You know, like extinction's not like, we're not going to get rid of extinction

01:12:17.040 and we shouldn't, but what we shouldn't do is accelerate it. And that's the problem.

01:12:20.880 Yeah. You know, extinction been around it. I've been getting rid of these hoes forever. You feel me?

01:12:25.480 That's it. I'm just joking. Sorry, hoes. I'm very respectful. Um, yeah, but it's, it's, uh,

01:12:34.540 it's interesting because I think man-made extinction. So they say that we're in the

01:12:38.640 sixth great mass extinction event right now. So there've been five others throughout history,

01:12:42.300 like when the dinosaurs went extinct, when, uh, when the earth froze over the grape freezing or

01:12:46.320 whatever it's called. Um, I don't, I'm not an anthropologist, paleontologist. I don't really

01:12:50.580 understand that as well, but they say right now we're in the sixth great mass extinction event.

01:12:55.420 And that is, that is directly caused by human beings. So my thing is like, we shouldn't end

01:13:01.740 extinction. We shouldn't stop extinction. We just shouldn't be like racing towards it as much as we

01:13:06.740 can. And when you're killing like, you know, a million, 8 million sharks a year or whatever it

01:13:10.860 is we're fishing and cutting down a thousand acres of rainfall. I'm making all these numbers up a

01:13:14.920 thousand rain acres of rainforest a day. We're like racing towards extinction. We're like, how fast can

01:13:20.340 we get rid of these things? You know? And that's the problem. Like that's where we need to just

01:13:23.780 reassess. I'm all for human growth and development and everything else. We need it. Like we need to

01:13:28.600 make the planet sustainable, but we got to do it in a way that's also fair to all the species.

01:13:33.740 You know what I mean? So that we don't collapse. Kind of on this topic, I have a question about

01:13:37.660 extinction. Like, um, and the, the, the, the idea that I know those companies now that are bringing

01:13:42.560 back or attempting to bring back extinct species, right. That's been something that I know you're

01:13:46.980 kind of close to the extinction. Um, but first I was wondering, do you think that after a lot of

01:13:53.460 your time being in nature and spending time around nature and animals, do you feel like humans are

01:14:01.600 supposed to be here? Or do you feel like, do you feel like we are an additive or a deterrent?

01:14:10.360 Where it's, it's really interesting question. What we should be as humans is docents of this planet.

01:14:17.280 We're the smartest creature on this planet, bar none.

01:14:19.460 Docent. What does it mean? Uh, the guardian of the planet. We should be the ones cultivating this

01:14:24.860 garden that is planet earth and taking care of it instead. And I don't know when this happened or

01:14:30.100 how this happened. And this may be a weird take on it. It almost feels like we're like a, like an

01:14:35.600 ant colony, like a parasite on the planet where we're, we're just like overexpanding and just sort

01:14:40.180 of taking over this whole thing. And I don't think we intend to do that. And I don't think there's a

01:14:45.440 single human being on this planet. That's like, we should wipe out everything we should take

01:14:49.300 over. But everybody like running on their hamster wheel of survival and needing to eat and needing

01:14:54.460 clean water and needing new shoes and blah, blah, blah. It ends up being this sort of almost like

01:14:58.220 parasitic thing on the planet. And instead, what, what I think we need, and this is such a weird

01:15:03.860 answer, but is this sort of mentality shift of like, okay, there's a lot of us. There's 8 billion

01:15:08.700 people here or 10 billion, whatever we're up to now. How do we take care of the planet? So the planet

01:15:13.620 takes care of us instead of how do we industrialize as much as possible and take from the planet? And

01:15:19.260 I don't think people want to take from the planet. I don't think generally they do. It's just, I

01:15:24.780 believe we should be here. We're supposed to be here, but I think we've lost sight of the fact that

01:15:29.440 as the most, what's the Peter Parker quote with great power comes great responsibility. We have that

01:15:35.600 power. We need to be responsible for that planet. Yeah. Yeah. I almost wish there was like a

01:15:41.000 breathalyzer for people that were in power. Interesting. So you could just see if they're

01:15:45.940 fucking like, do like, all right, just blow in here. Make sure you give a fuck about it. You good?

01:15:50.160 You good? Here, blow. Yeah. Yeah. Have you watered your plants at home today? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You

01:15:54.960 good to drive this planet or not? Yeah. Yeah, dude. Hey, I'm going to need you to pull this planet

01:16:00.640 over to the side of the road for a second. Yeah. Let's take it. Let's take a quick look at you. Yeah.

01:16:04.060 Dude, that's hilarious, bro. Thank you, bro. That's, that's so funny. But yeah, I don't

01:16:10.700 understand why if we can tell if somebody's drunk, we can't tell if they have a moral compass when it

01:16:16.720 comes to, um, trying to be ethical or, you know, trying to, yeah, try, I guess trying to care about

01:16:23.780 things outside of themselves, you know, but maybe that's coming. I think it's coming. And I also don't

01:16:29.060 think like, I hate the idea of me sitting here and going, Theo, don't, don't use a plastic bag at the

01:16:34.900 grocery store. Come on, man. And like guilt tripping you. I use plastic bags at the grocery

01:16:40.380 store, but you know what I mean? It's like that. What's the bigger offset? It's like, okay, you know,

01:16:45.360 like fine. We shouldn't be using as many plastic bags, but also like, let's just choose, make smaller

01:16:52.200 choices that add up that don't impact us. You know what I mean? It's like, don't be preachy. Just care a

01:16:57.040 little bit. Yeah. It's it. It's not that hard. You know what I mean? Yeah. And I think also that I

01:17:01.880 think some, uh, you know, we're all at such the whims and responsibilities of so many bigger

01:17:08.540 corporations, not to put it onto them because we all play a part in our own governance as humans

01:17:14.000 and just governing ourselves. But the fact that, you know, that we live in societies that have dirty

01:17:22.160 water, just the things where you're like, what are we doing? Right? Like we could be doing so much

01:17:26.580 better than this. I think so many of these things are becoming cool and mainstream though. I just

01:17:30.340 saw a thing from Mr. Beast a couple of days ago where he got like, I don't know the number,

01:17:34.560 like a million people clean water. That's as mainstream as it gets, man. He's the biggest

01:17:38.640 YouTuber on the planet and YouTube's the biggest medium on the planet. Like I think that's awesome.

01:17:43.140 Yeah. You know, like if you're making clean water for people that don't have clean water

01:17:47.180 mainstream, how cool is that? Hell yeah, dude. Yeah. I've been hearing about this initiative for a while.

01:17:52.620 Let me see. Mr. Beast launched his team water campaign in August, 2025 to provide 2 million

01:17:57.340 people with clean water. Heck yeah. That's so cool. Like how much cooler is that than like,

01:18:02.780 you know, like watch me drive my Lambo or whatever, you know, it's like, this is mainstream now,

01:18:07.680 bro. A hundred percent, especially the fact that everything's becoming privatized. The fact that

01:18:13.100 the government of Michigan couldn't do this for their people, but here he, you know,

01:18:17.860 right. And individuals doing it as opposed to a nation or a government. That's, that's bad-ass.

01:18:23.060 And I think I really, I mean, I'm always an optimist, but I think the world is going to like

01:18:27.220 follow suit. Like I feel like people, when people like Mr. Beast are leading the charge,

01:18:31.500 everybody else can be like, yeah, this is rad. This is awesome. Well, it's funny that somebody

01:18:35.460 who had to come along to take care of like healthy environment was, had beast in their name,

01:18:39.300 you know, it's kind of bad-ass. Yeah. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Especially for a vanilla white guy,

01:18:44.140 like, like Jimmy. The campaign's core promise is that every dollar donated provides one year of

01:18:50.420 clean water for someone in need. That's awesome. That's so cool. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know,

01:18:54.240 like not that I'm anywhere near a Mr. Beast level, but like, this is what I hope to do one day is to

01:19:00.200 make wildlife conservation and science mainstream and cool. Yeah. You know, it's like, if it's cool,

01:19:05.920 people will do it. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I agree, man. I think, I think you're right. I think

01:19:11.860 having the attitude that that's where we're headed, that let's take some of this stuff out

01:19:16.680 of the government's hands. Let's put it into people's hands because a lot of government has

01:19:20.400 gotten so corrupted and can be so corrupted. Even going back to like what you're talking about in

01:19:24.000 different countries and where you grew up and how like the influence of government can get so,

01:19:29.100 it can get so desperate. Definitely. Whereas hopefully the heart of an individual human and,

01:19:35.140 and individual humans overall can, um, can hopefully remain, uh, can, can remain more

01:19:43.060 hopeful and uncompromised. Um, you would hope. No, in no organization, government body, NGO is going

01:19:50.280 to have the passion and the drive of an individual. Obviously Mr. Beast thing is clean water for people,

01:19:54.800 right? Nobody, I don't care if you're the government in the United States, you don't have

01:19:59.520 that same passion that that individual has, you know what I mean? And that's where impact comes from.

01:20:03.680 It comes from that, that passion. It's so true. And you start to realize that sometimes too,

01:20:08.080 like you're like, Oh shit, I see how some, somebody cared and they just kept caring and

01:20:14.200 they just kept doing it. They just kept hammering it until we all cared and it started to figure

01:20:18.040 things out. Yeah. It's rad. Um, I want to talk about the de-extinction, right? Sure. So take me

01:20:25.120 into some of that world. There was a company, there's a company, Colossal, Colossal Biosciences,

01:20:29.620 Colossal Biosciences, who recently they were in the press with, uh, recreating,

01:20:33.680 the dire wolf. That's right. Yeah. It was, it actually recreated. Yeah. So there's some

01:20:39.000 interesting stuff here. So I, you know, our buddy, Joe Rogan, I, I connected him with Ben

01:20:44.000 Lam, the CEO of Colossal and they went and spoke about it. And I'm a, I'm a conservation advisor

01:20:49.460 to Colossal. So I don't, can't tell you much about genetics because I don't know much about

01:20:53.520 it, but I know a lot about conservation. So I help say, here's where we should put the dire

01:20:57.700 wolf. If we release them, that kind of thing, you know, the conservation side of it, not going

01:21:01.460 to release dire wolves, by the way, but that's, that's the role that I fill there. So I'm

01:21:05.480 luckily on the inside of this de-extinction thing. The dire wolf's interesting. Uh, there's

01:21:10.640 a woman named Beth Shapiro who's in charge of it and she can explain the genetics wholeheartedly.

01:21:15.720 What my understanding of is it, or isn't it a dire wolf, which is your main question

01:21:19.380 is Colossal found through, they did more genetic sampling than anyone else has ever done. And they

01:21:25.120 found that the dire wolf was actually closely related to a gray wolf, which is what they built

01:21:30.280 their dire wolf after, or they bought, they built it from rather, uh, versus the people

01:21:36.240 who got upset and said, this isn't a dire wolf is because they thought the dire wolves were

01:21:39.920 originally more closely related to jackals, which is a different kind of Canada. Um, so

01:21:43.920 my understanding, which is very limited because I'm not a geneticist is that they did make basically

01:21:48.940 a giant white gray wolf, which is what a dire wolf was according to the most very genetic

01:21:54.720 sampling that's ever taken place. Not an expert, but I think the thing to think about is not

01:22:00.060 the minutiae, at least for me of, is it a dire wolf? Isn't it what genes does it have? It's like

01:22:04.600 saying, are, are you a human? Am I a human? Well, but Theo's got long brown hair and Forrest

01:22:09.320 has short brown hair. This guy has a beard and that guy's a goatee. It's like, wow, they're not

01:22:12.380 the same. It's like, right. But we walk the same, we talk the same, we eat the same, you know, we fill

01:22:16.860 the same ecological niche. And I think that's the point of what the science is. Okay. Putting

01:22:22.220 dodos back in Mauritius is going to help the forest. Putting thylacine back in Tasmania is going to help

01:22:27.980 with the overabundance of all these macropods, which are like marsupials. And that's what

01:22:33.220 Colossal is trying to do with the de-extinction, at least as I understand it. And I think that's

01:22:36.460 awesome. Okay. So, so do you think that they, so they're kind of creating something as close as

01:22:42.220 possible? That's right. Yeah. Okay. And by creating something as close as possible and putting them

01:22:46.760 back into animal society, basically, it will help fulfill a space that could help nature be more

01:22:55.360 robust. Exactly. That's, that's a perfect way to put it. A good example is like, imagine aliens

01:23:00.200 came to earth and they found a tribe in the middle of the jungle and the tribe had jaundice and they're

01:23:05.000 like, oh, all humans are yellow, right? Now the aliens think humans are yellow. That's how humans

01:23:09.140 are. That's how we look at say Tasmania. We go, oh, Tasmania is an island nation that just has a

01:23:14.440 tons of roadkill and a bazillion macropods. Well, it actually shouldn't. It's very unhealthy,

01:23:18.720 just like our, our tribe with jaundice, right? Like it's a very unhealthy population because it's lost that,

01:23:24.740 that little niche, that thing. And in this case, we're talking about a thylacine,

01:23:28.360 which is like a Tasmanian tiger. So if they bring that back or something very, very close and

01:23:33.180 similar, it looks like it, walks like it, talks like that, acts like that. And it's not like

01:23:37.360 they're just gonna be like, all right, we brought them back, chuck them out there. You know, it's

01:23:39.500 gonna be a slow thing. And that's the part that I like to help with. But if they're able to put that

01:23:43.420 back into the ecosystem, they're going to balance out that ecosystem. And that balance creates health.

01:23:48.200 Got it. Gets rid of diseases, gets rid of over, overpopulation,

01:23:52.060 all the things that throw a system off balance, which I think is cool. And that's why I love it.

01:23:59.420 Like, I love the idea that we can right humanity's wrongs, like where we've to, the stuff with like

01:24:04.500 dire wolves and mammoths are less for me, but the stuff where they're like, here's where humans took

01:24:09.260 an animal, killed it till it was completely gone. And here's where we can come in and go,

01:24:13.400 we can fix it. Then I'm like, let's go.

01:24:15.620 Let's go. Do you know if you, if we would ever be able to create, like, you know, create the woolly

01:24:25.020 mammoth, create, uh, uh, um, dinosaurs, you know, do you know that if that, if that's possible?

01:24:33.920 What I know is that if you take something that has really healthy, intact DNA and has a close living

01:24:40.500 relative, for instance, you take the mammoth because mammoths only died out 10,000 years ago.

01:24:44.900 And so there's lots of fresh DNA frozen in ice and tusks. And you know, that guy, John Reeves up in

01:24:50.760 Alaska, you know, that is this guy's got this crazy place where he gets all these tusks and mammoth

01:24:55.840 chunks stuff. He's even eaten mammoth crazy dude. He's super cool. Really? Yeah. This guy. Um, uh,

01:25:01.480 so he's constantly getting mammoth parts, right? So there's really good DNA. Now you take, you take that

01:25:07.140 and you take an Asian elephant, an Indian elephant, and they're 99.6% related to a mammoth. Okay. So

01:25:13.620 now you've got really good DNA. You've got an animal that's 99.6% related. All you've got to do is

01:25:18.820 combine those to get that 0.4% and you've made a mammoth essentially. Dude. And then you've made a

01:25:24.560 movie called Mammoths. Mammoths. Meth mammoth. Math, math, math, math, math, math, math. I don't know.

01:25:30.580 The mathmoths. The mathmoths. That's hard to say. And they all have lists. And I'll, yeah, that's right.

01:25:35.620 That's right. Yeah. Dude, being on meth and having a list would be the worst. Boy, that'd be hard to

01:25:42.080 follow. Wow. So, so that's what you're saying. So it's like, we're going to get, so you're getting

01:25:49.040 as close as you can get. Yeah. Do you think we could get into like actually increasing the scale

01:25:53.900 then over time? I mean, do you think some of those things are possible? I do. Yeah. I think with

01:25:57.160 technology will be, and that's why I don't think a dinosaur is possible. Dinosaurs died out millions of

01:26:01.880 years ago. It's too far. That DNA is just shattered. You know, it's like the, the puzzle's

01:26:05.820 too hard to put back to, you take an egg, you crack it. It's like, Oh, these cracks goes back

01:26:09.800 together. You smash it. You're like, Oh, I can never get that egg back together. You know, it's

01:26:13.380 like that. That's how I see it. Yeah. Now, how interesting would it be then though, that

01:26:17.800 if certain companies own the DNA or own this genetic mapping, it's able to put these things back

01:26:25.460 together, then now animals would in some way become kind of privatized in a weird way.

01:26:31.340 I think it could. I really do. Like, you know, I don't know what, how that would work, but imagine

01:26:37.500 you're this crazy billionaire and you're like, all right, the technology's there. I know it's going

01:26:43.600 to cost $500 million to bring back a, I'm making this up, Titanoboa. I don't know if you know what

01:26:49.300 that is. Giant 50 foot long anaconda, right? So there's probably no such thing as healthy

01:26:55.280 Titanoboa DNA, but what we could probably do, I'm making all this up as we go with the technology

01:27:01.160 is take a regular anaconda, take out its growth restrictor through genetic engineering and make

01:27:06.180 it 50 feet. And this guy's like, I want, I want the Titanoboas and I have 500 million. Now he's just

01:27:12.460 privatized this mutant creature. Probably Nicolas Cage would do it. Yeah. You think? I think

01:27:18.420 it seems like a Nick Cage kind of thing to do. Yeah. I think it would just be cool. You know,

01:27:22.220 you teach a Titanoboa to just bring you some, bring you in your date, some almonds or something

01:27:26.920 while you're watching Shane Gillis's tires on Netflix or something. That'd be crazy.

01:27:33.720 That's just the weirdest image I just painted in my head as you said that.

01:27:38.980 Let me bring up the information on the Titanoboa. Let me just rattle it off so we know what it is.

01:27:43.800 That's pretty, pretty. It's just watching Shane Gillis's tires.

01:27:47.180 Titanoboa is an extinct genus of, uh, of giant boid, the family that includes all boas and

01:27:54.640 anaconda snake that lived during the middle and late paleocene. Uh, it was first discovered in

01:27:59.600 the early two thousands by a tropical research Institute. Um, is the largest snake ever found

01:28:05.640 at the time. Titanoboa could grow up to 42 feet long, perhaps even, uh, to 47 feet long and weigh

01:28:12.920 around 1600 to 2,500 pounds. Wow. That's crazy, man. Like imagine, imagine a snake that was

01:28:20.880 eating full grown horses. Yeah. You know what I mean? That is so crazy to think about. Yeah.

01:28:28.160 But I don't know. Yeah. To, to your point, I think they could privatize these things. I certainly know

01:28:33.260 that that's not what Colossal's goal is. They're just trying to fix the ecosystem and get carbon

01:28:37.060 credits and whatnot, but, um, it, it, it's a crazy thought. It's a crazy thought. Nick Cage, don't do

01:28:43.320 it. Yeah, dude, it would probably be like some of the richest people ever would be doing it. Probably

01:28:50.560 Nick Cage, uh, Sam Altman would probably have some, you know, like a beautiful parakeet or something

01:28:57.540 that's never, that makes a sound that only he can hear. What would you have? Ooh. Oh, I'd have

01:29:03.440 probably one of the most famous. Probably, probably I would have a hamster or a gerbil.

01:29:10.240 Okay. A giant one or just a standard? Pretty big. Pretty big. Yeah. I like that. Like you

01:29:14.780 ride it to town. I mean, I would at least break it out to show the ladies at night. Yeah. That's

01:29:19.120 smart. Yeah. Pick up gerbil. Yeah. They're like, what is that? Yeah. Trying to pick up Richard

01:29:23.880 Gere or what are you doing over there? They're like, oh, is that a French bull gerbil? French

01:29:28.900 bull gerbil. No, I just breeze funny. Yeah.

01:29:33.440 Dude, that'd be so great. If you had a French bull gerbil, you would get all of the girls.

01:29:38.160 Yeah. Yeah. Nothing gets pussed like a French bull gerbil. That's a fact.

01:29:43.380 Oh, it would be wet. Watching a French bull gerbil get out of the pool and then shake itself

01:29:47.560 off after? Yeah. Yeah. The girls are just like, oh, Theo, I'm yours. Braziers are just landing

01:29:53.980 on it. It's like a, it's like a rock concert.

01:29:56.260 Yeah. Um, are there any species that you think should go extinct?

01:30:03.520 I don't think, I mean, there's invasive species that need to go locally extinct. Like we shouldn't

01:30:08.260 have Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades, right? I don't know if you know about that. The

01:30:11.420 big snakes in the Everglades. Yeah. They're a problem. Like that's localized extinction that

01:30:15.860 should happen. But that's again, cause we've caused a problem. There are other animals and

01:30:19.980 this is a very unpopular opinion. They're trying to make themselves extinct. Panda bears. Panda. If

01:30:26.320 you, Theo, if you're at a zoo and you go to a mama panda bear and you offer her an apple, she will

01:30:32.300 hand you her baby for that apple. True story. You can literally find a video of what I just said.

01:30:37.180 I mean, these things are trying to go extinct. I don't want them to go extinct. They're incredibly

01:30:41.160 cool, but they are so dumb. Like, look at this, give mama an apple and you can just take her baby

01:30:46.240 away. I mean, that should not be, you know what I mean? Cause they're just so, they're just addicted

01:30:51.280 to the food. They're food motivated. They're bad parents. They're, they're sort of a creature that,

01:30:56.880 and I, again, I don't want to see them go extinct. I think they're super cool, but they're sort of a

01:31:00.420 creature that naturally was probably edging towards extinction before humans intervened. Another good

01:31:06.500 example is the great auk. So this is a bird that once had colonies of millions and millions. The great

01:31:11.920 auk. Great auk. It's like basically, so penguins are from Antarctica, the South. This was kind of

01:31:17.020 our version, the Northern version of a penguin. Yeah. Yeah. Northern penguin. Let's go. And, uh,

01:31:22.740 they had these huge colonies of millions of birds, but during the, when, when down feathers became a

01:31:27.860 thing, we drove them to extinction. Humans did. But had we not done that, had humans not done that,

01:31:34.500 they probably were on their way towards extinction anyway, cause their numbers had shrunk and shrunk and

01:31:38.920 shrunk. Their colonies had shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. There was only 10 or 12 or whatever

01:31:43.280 colonies of these birds left. So they were like on the road to extinction anyway. And then humans came

01:31:49.720 in and put the nail in the coffin. Got it. So naturalized extinction does happen and it's a

01:31:54.340 normal thing, but it's probably not good when industrial consumption, like I'm going to take

01:32:01.040 every feather from every auk I can comes in and speeds up that process. And the reason I say it's not

01:32:06.800 good is because nothing else can adapt. All the animals that would eat great auk that relied on

01:32:10.880 great auk, all of a sudden they're gone overnight. Whereas if they slowly die out over time,

01:32:16.720 nature is such a complete system that something else comes in to take its place. The animals find

01:32:22.020 a new food source, a different bird comes in and starts nesting there. You know what I mean? Like

01:32:26.000 it, it adapts. Whereas if we just come in and drop the knife, it's like, oh shit, like the whole

01:32:31.660 thing's broken. What's the greatest example of that where humans have come in and affected

01:32:36.460 an ecosystem so much with kind of like leading to the extinction or loss of an animal that you

01:32:43.140 believe has had the largest effect? Probably a combination of things in Australia. Like

01:32:48.140 in Australia, we came in, we brought cane toads, which is a big frog from South America that we

01:32:55.360 brought them in because we started farming sugar cane in Australia. And then they got cane beetle,

01:32:59.440 which is a parasite. So they're like, Hey, let's get cane toads in to eat the cane beetle.

01:33:03.300 Well, the problem is these giant ass toads that you're seeing here, they came in, they have these

01:33:07.360 venom sacks. See those big bulbous things behind its eyes. That's full of venom. Yeah. And nothing

01:33:12.940 in Australia has ever been adapted to, to tolerate that venom. So they brought these cane toads in

01:33:18.460 cane toads, everything would try and eat them. All the goannas and the snakes and stuff,

01:33:22.420 and they'd be dropping dead. And so this single frog, this act of bringing in these frogs to help

01:33:29.180 combat the cane beetle has probably had one of the greatest ecological disasters in history.

01:33:34.360 And like the country of Australia is at something like a 70% reduction in animals because of these

01:33:39.300 things. Wow. Yeah. It's crazy. And that's a huge straight human fumble. Like we're going to put,

01:33:44.620 we're going to bring, it wasn't a removal. It was bringing something in, but it same, same effect.

01:33:48.940 Who brought them there? Sugar cane farmers. I don't know who specifically. Yeah.

01:33:53.540 God, that's wild, dude. We were, we were, we were doing a tour. We were doing some shows up in,

01:33:59.460 uh, I want to say it was Maine or New Hampshire, right along the coast. And we went down, but it's

01:34:05.860 by the docks because it was beautiful down there to see in the boat. It was like a kind of like all

01:34:10.600 of like an hour before sunset. And we had a show nearby and we just stopped in this little town.

01:34:16.440 And some of the guys who were, they were bringing in lobster traps and they all, they had all these

01:34:23.780 things on them called sea squirts. Okay. It was a plant. See if you could bring it up. It's like a,

01:34:28.420 like a sponge, right? Yeah. It was like a thing that it got, it looked hollow. It almost looked

01:34:33.140 plastic. Sea squirts also known as ascidians or tunicates are marine filter feeders with a sack

01:34:39.200 like body covered by a tough cellulose based tunic. Yeah. They almost look like it was a candy or

01:34:44.780 something. It was just full of like kind of water. Um, they filter bacteria and plankton from water

01:34:50.160 drawn through their siphons and their larvae possess a primitive backbone, making them a part

01:34:55.120 of the cordophilum. Um, what does it say that they, how did they get to America? Are they invasive?

01:35:03.620 This, this, these, these guys were saying these were all invasive. They all came from Asia.

01:35:08.160 Oh really? Oh, that's interesting. Oh yeah. They're invading Long Island Sound,

01:35:13.300 attaching the hulls of commercial recreational ships, being transported in their ballast water,

01:35:18.320 a process known as hull fouling. They also could have been introduced via aquaculture shipments,

01:35:24.520 such as oyster seed or by hitchhiking or fishing equipment. There's another huge example of that

01:35:28.780 called a zebra mussel or zebra mussel, which is in all the lakes across the U S and they get so bad.

01:35:34.380 See how they grow on everything that like your boat engine and stuff gets filled with them. And it's

01:35:39.120 crazy. Cause all you have to do is run your live well, you know, to go bass fishing or whatever.

01:35:42.480 And the fry is microscopic. So then you have one drop of water with a little bit of fry in it and

01:35:48.860 you take your boat to another lake. They're all over the lake. What does fry mean? Uh, like the

01:35:53.280 larval stage, the baby. Yeah. God, I know. And that's man, that's man doing that probably most of

01:36:01.280 the time. And oftentimes like the cane toad was an intentional, this is completely unintentional.

01:36:05.960 And we've done that over and over, like taking rats to New Zealand and Hawaii and blah, blah. And

01:36:10.620 it's just humans doing what humans do, you know, just traveling and learning crazy thing. You know,

01:36:15.260 dingoes, we brought dingoes to Australia. Humans brought dingoes to Australia 4,000 years ago when

01:36:21.340 Aboriginal people came across from, from Indonesia, uh, New Guinea into Australia, they brought dogs with

01:36:27.560 them. And those dogs were dingoes. They're like the OG invasive species. And they're like a national

01:36:32.580 treasure in Australia, but they've been there 4,000 years, but humans actually brought them

01:36:36.420 there. Yeah. They weren't even supposed to be. No. Dude, that's the kind of shit that happens.

01:36:40.120 Dude, my step-grandmother, she brings her fucking cat over to Thanksgiving and everybody's fucking

01:36:44.180 pissed. That thing is a piece of shit. Most cats are. I hate cats, but yeah, I feel you.

01:36:51.900 Peeing everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. Um, what is one of your biggest like sleeper creatures? Like a creature

01:36:59.300 that we are all kind of sleeping on, that people don't know how awesome it is, or that just doesn't

01:37:03.940 get the acclaim, uh, that it should, do you think? Uh, you know what I think's a good one? Soft shell

01:37:09.680 turtle. A turtle with a soft shell. Why? Brave. It's so crazy. Very brave. Dude, it's brave. It's nuts.

01:37:16.180 These things evolved away from having a hard shell. It's like a gay dude in the military, kind of.

01:37:21.900 You know? No, I don't. Please explain. I don't know how to explain. I'm just guessing. Fair enough.

01:37:26.880 Yeah. Fair enough. It's just brave. It's just brave. Yeah. Yeah. Nevermind. Thank you for your

01:37:32.800 service. Don't ask. Don't shell. Uh, don't ask. Don't shell. I don't know. I think these things

01:37:39.900 don't get enough credit. You see them on highways in Florida and stuff. So they're really, the shell

01:37:44.080 is soft, soft. It's like, feels like leather. No. And it's just such a weird, like, if you think

01:37:49.300 about a turtle, you think about this, this like living rock, it's flippers, it's head, it's feet,

01:37:54.520 whatever. Then you got this guy. Like, what the hell is this guy doing? He's got this

01:37:58.000 leathery shell. They get like this big. There's certain species they get. If you look up the

01:38:01.840 raffidus, they get massive. Like, I'm talking about the size of a car. Wow. A soft shell

01:38:06.500 turtle. Talk about an animal that just doesn't get enough credit. A turtle is just crazy, isn't

01:38:12.500 it? Yeah. They're insane. They're weird. Look at these guys. Look at these penis-headed things.

01:38:16.560 It's nice to have, like, you're kind of to go home on your back or whatever, but it's

01:38:20.620 just crazy. Yeah. They're insane. They're such weird, cool animals and don't get enough

01:38:26.600 credit. Hmm. I think because they feel so, I wonder, are they nervous? That's why they

01:38:32.400 pop back in their shell or are they? Oh, it's cold out, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Um, uh, yeah.

01:38:40.300 I mean, their, their defensive mechanism is to go into their shell unless you're a soft

01:38:44.600 shell. Then it's being fast. Hmm. Yeah. They've, they've evolved to be faster instead

01:38:48.800 of retreat. Oh, that's a large one you showed right there? Yeah. The raffidus. Yeah. And

01:38:53.600 they get huge. So they're, this is an animal that there's currently believed to be, uh,

01:38:59.560 three left, one male with a broken penis and two females. Nuh-uh. Mm-hmm. So. So they

01:39:05.260 got to fix that wiener on him. So yeah, it's, uh, it's pretty sad. So we went and did a show

01:39:09.820 on these guys. It's crazy. It's a whole political turmoil, everything. So the male, there were

01:39:13.780 two males and two females and one of the males died because a kid dropped a brick on its head

01:39:18.700 from the enclosure in a, in a zoo in China, in Shuzhou, China, I believe. So now there's

01:39:23.420 one male and two females. That's a knot. Then, uh, yeah. Then the male, they tried to, tried

01:39:29.080 to breed it or something. Broken dick. Legit broken dick. Yeah. So now they've got two females

01:39:34.620 in this lake in Dongmo in Vietnam and one male in China. I believe that's where the current

01:39:40.520 numbers are. And neither country is willing to give the other their turtles, but it wouldn't

01:39:44.640 really matter anyway. Cause it's got a broken dick. So the whole thing's kind of, kind of

01:39:48.380 fucked. Somebody. So Trump needs to arrange a meeting between all of these people. I think,

01:39:52.700 you know, I think he should sit down and be like, all right, how are we fixing this dick? You know,

01:39:56.980 I know we got some other stuff going on, but how are we working on this? Wow. The most widely

01:40:02.020 cited figure is two confirmed individuals, both male, one in Shuzhou, China, and one in Dongmo

01:40:08.360 Lake, Vietnam. Dang. I thought one of those males died. Like I was talking about, I'm not sure,

01:40:12.620 but oh yeah. Last known female died. Uh, I don't, it's yeah. It's hard to track. I think it's one

01:40:18.080 male and two females that we know of. The, the future of the species now depends on last ditch

01:40:22.440 conservation and breeding efforts, as well as the possibility of verifying additional, uh,

01:40:27.700 individual turtles. Wow. So we went out to Dongmo Lake and we ran eDNA and got samples and even

01:40:33.400 filmed one of these animals. Um, and this is where like colossal biosciences, right? Like if they

01:40:38.880 could get an X and a Y chromosome, a male and a female, they could make those turtles. And that

01:40:44.220 would be awesome. That's where like that technology to me, there's no ethical concern. There's no moral

01:40:49.640 concern. It's like, hell yeah. Like we went and got these samples, male and female chromosomes, tissue,

01:40:55.260 built new turtles, ground up, good to go. Are they out there? Are they searching for these

01:41:00.580 things? And how are they doing it? How are they trying to get, um, DNA or genetic material so that

01:41:06.700 they can, uh, create or recreate or reestablish species? Well, I don't think, oh, you mean how's

01:41:12.020 colossal doing it? Yeah. They're, they're, they're going all over the world. They're digging up stuff

01:41:15.880 like that guy, John Reeves, that place in Alaska they're getting samples from, uh, they've been on

01:41:20.760 multiple digs in Mauritius getting Dodo samples. Yeah. They're, they're collecting all that kind of stuff.

01:41:26.380 How much more animals existed at one time? Do you think like, what percentage are we down to

01:41:30.320 right now? Oh, that's a good question. Um, we have a lot of diversity in this era more so than

01:41:35.360 like when there were dinosaurs and stuff like that. That's really that that's, I mean, fact check me

01:41:39.600 on that, but yeah, it's mammalian diversity is higher than when like reptiles were at their peak

01:41:45.160 and yeah, there's a lot of mammals. It's really good. Yeah. But you know, we have eliminated a lot

01:41:50.840 like we talked about, but we're still, and I don't believe in this whole, like we're fucked thing.

01:41:54.580 Like we're still in a, the planet's incredible wildlife's resilient. Like we're not down that

01:41:59.520 much. Yes. We've knocked huge populations down, meaning we've knocked down, you know,

01:42:04.600 shark species to 10% of what there were. We've not our populations. We've knocked down certain

01:42:09.220 mammal species to five or 10% of what they were. That's all it takes to bring it back.

01:42:13.500 You know what I mean? Like you just back off a little bit. They'll, they'll bounce right back.

01:42:17.400 There's a study that got put out a few years ago. I'd be curious if anybody's done a study since

01:42:20.840 that said, if you didn't, if we as human beings didn't fish the ocean for seven years,

01:42:25.100 it would be back to 99% fullness of what it's at now. That's it. Seven years is all it would take

01:42:30.860 allegedly. That's not very long. We can't do that because 99% of the world's protein comes from the

01:42:35.720 ocean or something like that. But that's all it takes for nature to like build, fight its way back

01:42:40.640 up. You know, do you think there's a certain country or certain part of the world that, uh, they,

01:42:46.680 you find that they have it right when it comes to nature and to animalia?

01:42:51.820 No, I think there's lots of places that are trying, you know, the Galapagos has done a really

01:42:56.540 good job of like really taking care of their islands. Like you go through quarantine when you

01:43:01.660 go there and blah, blah, blah. Um, and there are other places like, uh, Palau, which is a tiny little

01:43:07.320 island nation. I think it is either the only or definitely the first country in the world that

01:43:11.520 said no commercial fishing. It's like, go out and kill your own fish all you like and eat them,

01:43:15.200 but we're not doing any commercial fishing. Yeah. That's awesome. You know, it's like,

01:43:18.720 you want to go out and shoot a fish, go shoot a fish, but you know, you're not buying it from

01:43:22.360 a purse saner who's killing dolphins and wiping out coral reefs. Like that kind of thing's awesome.

01:43:26.920 But you know, we wouldn't be having Nobu in, in Tennessee if, uh, if that existed. So it's,

01:43:31.700 you know, it's a trade-off. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And whoever fucking brought Nobu to Tennessee is

01:43:35.640 out of their fucking mind. I don't know if there is one, but I think there is. I don't know.

01:43:40.460 Every time I see somebody going to something where it's like, they're trying to put it in Nashville,

01:43:43.640 I'm like, what are you doing? You know, dude, Nashville's Nashville's wild. I got to walk

01:43:47.620 around today. It's fine. It's cool, man. It's busy. I'm going to go out this evening,

01:43:51.200 check out, uh, Broadway, right? Yeah. You have some other friends here or no?

01:43:54.300 Uh, I got a friend here. Yeah. He's going to meet me. I mean, you're welcome to join,

01:43:57.540 but we're going to check it out. Yeah. I try to come say, Hey,

01:43:59.480 or go get a snack with you or something. Um, anything else you want to chat about for us?

01:44:03.760 I think this has been a good first episode so far. Do you think? Dude, I think it's great, man.

01:44:07.340 I'm just like, if you're, if you're interested, I'm interested. My thing is like,

01:44:10.820 I want to make that. People love it. I'm into it. I want to go to South. I want to do that South

01:44:14.080 Africa thing. Let's do it, man. I'm happy. And if, if, you know, October may be too soon. Sure.

01:44:20.480 But I could always do it in the spring or something. If you're planning on going, let me know and I'll

01:44:26.160 try link with you. And then we'll go do some really cool, like a safari thing for a few days,

01:44:29.920 but I'm talking not like, Hey, let's go on safari. I mean like, Hey Theo, let's go catch giraffes and put

01:44:36.140 radio colors on them. No way. Like something that people don't get to do that we'll do through the

01:44:40.720 conservation groups that I work that house arrest bracelet on your neck. Yeah. Take that boy.

01:44:44.780 Yeah. He's just showing up to his, uh, to his PO. Dude, the ladies are like, that's a bad giraffe

01:44:51.640 right there. That's a bad giraffe right there. Is there an animal that you wish could speak up for

01:44:58.580 itself ever better? Uh, man, that's a good question. Uh, an animal that could speak up for itself.

01:45:05.680 Yeah. You know what the vaquita is? The vaquita? Yeah. Ever heard of that? No,

01:45:09.220 but I'd damn, I'd put some damn cheese on one of them. It sounds pretty good. Doesn't it? Yeah.

01:45:13.940 Well, it's Mexican. So that makes sense. Oh, it does. Yeah. I'll take it with the verde sauce.

01:45:18.420 Yeah, no, that makes sense. But these little guys, smallest porpoise in the world. There's now

01:45:23.280 estimate estimate between nine and 11 of them left on the planet,

01:45:27.420 which is the worst to have nine 11 of them left sound fucking like bad luck. That's a bad sign. Yeah.

01:45:34.020 I wish these guys could speak up for themselves because they're, they're just these crazy cute

01:45:38.840 little dolphins. They're driving towards extinction. There's not a lot that can be done based on how

01:45:44.700 things are going. They, they need to, they need to flip her up to somebody and just be like,

01:45:48.760 help. And we'd be good. Vaquita. Yeah. Oh, they look like the quokkas of the sea. Yeah. Nice. Good pull.

01:45:56.560 Where their smile is kind of built on. Uh-huh. It's funny how some animals got kind of put a smile on

01:46:01.540 them. So you would just see that they're okay. You know, I mean, you look at a quokka and you're

01:46:05.220 like, right, well, we're never letting that thing go anywhere. It's too cute. You know,

01:46:09.200 if everything was cute, we'd be good. Yeah. Why are some animals only in one spot? Cause

01:46:14.640 aren't the quokkas only native to an Island off the coast of Australia? Yeah. Near to Perth. Yeah.

01:46:19.440 Um, I mean, that's crazy to think on a whole planet that they're that specific of a place. I mean,

01:46:24.860 that's wild, isn't it? It's crazy. Yeah. So they get there as something else,

01:46:29.100 like as a small wallaby or whatever. And then like with a quokka, for instance, they're like,

01:46:33.600 Oh wait, having tails doesn't help us. So year after year, shorter tails, shorter tails, shorter

01:46:38.800 tails. Hey, wait, having this big goofy smile on these big fat cheeks, that's actually good.

01:46:43.100 Cause we store food. I'm making the stuff up, but you know, and then they breed more and more and

01:46:46.540 more. And then before you know it, you've got its own species that's stuck here. That's completely

01:46:49.920 different from these guys because their environment dictates that these characteristics

01:46:54.100 make it useful for this place only. Yeah. I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. Well,

01:47:00.100 I think it shows also why humans have adapted and become different ways because they needed to become

01:47:06.420 fit for their territory. Exactly. Yeah. You look at what is it? Uh, the Sudanese, South Sudanese,

01:47:10.860 the tallest people in the world. Like, why are those guys so tall? You know what I mean? And it's

01:47:15.360 obviously genetic and cultural and everything else, but these guys are all over seven feet. Like

01:47:19.280 that's incredible that that only takes place in that one area. Why, why did they need to be so

01:47:23.920 tall? Do you know? I don't know. I, I would like to know. Let's look it up right now and see if we

01:47:28.320 can get a little bit more information. I'd like to go there. Wouldn't you like to stand around with

01:47:31.320 seven foot tall people? It sounds so interesting. Yeah. Until you fricking, you know, till you hit

01:47:36.380 your head on something and realize that it's like, Oh God. Wipes you across the face. Oh boy,

01:47:41.120 that's not what I wanted. Yeah. Then you and your buddy from Florida high school are sharing the same

01:47:45.820 problem. Yeah. It's like, like when you see that person that's blindfolded and the pinata hits

01:47:50.920 them when it's swinging around. Yeah. Danglers getcha. Um, South Sudanese people, particularly the

01:47:57.560 Nili, Niliotic groups like the Dinka and the Nuer are among the tallest in the world, largely

01:48:03.440 due to a mix of genetics, natural selection and nutritional factors. Um, the tall lean bodies of

01:48:09.620 the South Sudanese Nilotis help with thermoregulation in a hot, dry climate. Yeah.

01:48:15.320 Longer limbs facilitate heat dissipation, supporting survival and tropical conditions,

01:48:20.120 a phenomenon aligned with the Bergman's and Allen's rules and biology. How crazy is that?

01:48:25.280 It's so damn hot here that we're going to make you taller so that you can off gas more and stay

01:48:31.440 cooler. And by the way, you're all going to be seven feet tall. Like that's so cool.

01:48:36.360 That's fascinating. Isn't that wild? Well, yeah, it's just fascinating how, I mean,

01:48:40.840 I mean, it's all just fascinating to exist as fascinating to me.

01:48:45.480 Yeah. And we're lucky we live on this planet, man. I mean, not, not that I know where else

01:48:49.440 we'd live, but there's just so much cool stuff here.

01:48:52.380 Yeah. Yeah.

01:48:53.260 And I think that's one thing that's just nice to even get to talk today, man. It's just a

01:48:56.000 reminder of that, you know, just a reminder of it.

01:48:58.420 Yeah. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, man. I it's, it's, it's really cool.

01:49:02.900 Oftentimes when I talk to podcasts or whatever, I talk to guys that, you know, we have similar

01:49:07.440 interests. We talk a lot about, you know, I know they know a lot of like even Joe, right?

01:49:10.940 Like when I do Joe's show, he knows a lot about animals. He's an animal nut, but to talk to you

01:49:16.620 who no offense, but maybe knows less or has less connection. You see that, like I was saying earlier,

01:49:21.500 that child sense of wonderment be like, no way, you know, like that's so cool that you can bring

01:49:26.460 that back. Yeah. Thanks dude. Well, I just, yeah, I feel lucky to get to talk to people. I feel lucky to

01:49:31.240 get to learn. I mean, I feel like, you know, like even just to be inspired today that I want to go

01:49:34.680 back to South Africa, you know? Yeah. Um, and that it would be neat to go do something there.

01:49:39.160 You know, one of my friends said yesterday, I was talking to him. I don't know if I was talking to

01:49:44.680 him on the phone. Let me think about who it was really quick. Oh, damn. I can't remember, but he

01:49:50.580 goes, man, you know, what's crazy to think. He goes, if you think about your life, think about how

01:49:56.040 many summers you have left. Yeah. It's not that many. And you're like, Whoa. Yeah. What we got 20,

01:50:02.720 30 summers left, you know, it just starts to put the perspective of your life. You know,

01:50:07.820 if even, you know, if you're 25 and say you have, uh, you know, until you're 65, you can kind of do

01:50:14.300 whatever you want. You have 40 summers left, right? That's a lot of summers, but that's not that,

01:50:19.200 but it's not that many summers, dude. And if you think like, I think of my, this past summer,

01:50:23.780 like I basically worked all summer. I was on the road. I barely had a time to hang out with my kids or go,

01:50:28.720 go to the lake or do any of the summer things. That's it. I lost one of those. Never getting that

01:50:32.700 back. That summer's gone. It's gonna be cold when I get home now, you know, like that sucks.

01:50:37.940 It's cool. Yeah. But it's nice today to be able to be reminded of that and just be reminded that

01:50:42.560 nature's out there waiting for us, that there's a lot of things that are happening out there and

01:50:46.820 that we're lucky to exist and be a part of them, man. So Boris Galante, thanks so much for coming in.

01:50:51.800 People can check out drug animals and drugs, animals on drugs, animals on drugs right now.

01:50:57.000 And I challenge you guys in the comments of this episode, if you can think of any good names for

01:51:02.000 drug, animal crossovers, we need them. We need more Krakoons. Yeah.

01:51:08.900 We need more Krakoons. Thanks, Forrest.

01:51:11.200 Now I'm just floating on the breeze and I feel I'm falling like these leaves. I must be

01:51:18.200 cornerstone. Oh, but when I reach that ground, I'll share this peace of mind I found. I can feel it

01:51:29.160 in my bones, but it's gonna take...

This Past Weekend with Theo Von - September 27, 2025

#613 - Forrest Galante

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