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

>> What's up everybody, welcome to the show today on The Couch. We have indoors, a rare sighting, a rare sighting for this species. We have four is Galante and a building wildlife biologist as he calls himself Explore, Extraordinaire. I mean, there's a lot of other things that we're going to label you survivor of UC Santa Barbara. >> That's right, that's right. >> I was with you there. >> Delphaya Dry. >> Yep. >> There was a year of crossover where we were at school together, you were a young enough. >> I was. >> Yeah, just a wee wrap. >> We were probably in the dorms though. >> In Anacapa. >> You were in Acapa. >> Yeah. >> You was Santa Rosa. >> There you go. >> Yeah. >> Look at that. >> Yeah. >> The swastika shaped dorms. >> That's right. >> That's right, dude. >> Yeah, it's bad. >> It was really bad. >> All the dorms at UCSB are in the shape of swastika. >> No way. >> Yeah. >> If you get an aerial view, it's a mess. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> It's crazy. >> Who designed? >> Good question. >> Oh, got an idea too. >> Yeah. >> I mean, that must have been tough for you. You know what I mean? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Being a Jew at UCSB. >> I wasn't the only one though, so we were okay. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, look at that. >> Oh. >> No, that's not it. >> No, that wasn't that crazy. >> Stop. >> Stop. >> Stop. >> He's cool. >> He's cool. >> He's cool. >> All right. >> All right. >> It doesn't show me the aerial view, dude. >> No, Anacapa. The dorm I was in was bad. >> Anacapa. >> For Santa Rosa and then there was one other that they're just-- >> They renamed them recently, too. >> Yeah, they had too. >> Yeah. >> Gerbils. >> Yeah. >> They don't even have the aerial view. >> Yeah, they know better. >> They know better. >> They wiped it for the internet. >> I'll go grab it. >> Other it is kind of on the top left. >> This one? >> Oh. >> Yeah. >> There you go. >> That's what they all look like. >> That's real. >> I know. They put a little bridge in the middle. >> Yeah, really? >> Yeah, really good. >> Anyway, dude. Thank you so much for being here, man. >> Of course. >> I appreciate you. >> Yeah. >> Is it weird to be in the city? >> I love it. >> I feel way more uncomfortable here. >> Yeah. >> Like, I've just got a smoothie down the road right here. >> Yeah. >> There's some guy screaming at the curb when I walk through. >> Yeah. >> And I was like, "That's something you don't see in the jungle." >> But you go up to them like a wild animal. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> No, I like coming to the city. I mean, I get to come to New York once a year or so, and I always enjoy it. I do the old literacy things. Go to Times Square. >> You got to do it. >> Yeah. >> You got to do it. >> Yeah. >> I think it's great. through any wild environment. It's very observation based. Okay. It's like, oh, that tree looks unusual. And oh, that, you know, I'll notice that pile of rocks. And then I can find my way back, even in a grid, like New York, that's literally squares. I can't navigate. It's too overstimulating. There's too much. There's too many billboards and signs and noises. Like, you can't navigate that. Well, my theory probably don't see in the jungle, right? Like rats. You never see a rat door. You never see a rat like out in the wild. Not often. You only see them here. Yeah. That's true. I've never seen a rat in the woods. It's hard to find rats outside of city, like urban environments. Why is that? They're, they're just cryptic underground animals, you know? But you get into a city and they're everywhere. They're on every dumpster. That's a great point. Yeah. Also you need a subway system. To thrive. I get to hear another great point. Yeah. I was talking about buddy Ben Uyeda. He goes, do you think termite mounds are natural? Like, are they a part of nature? Yes. If the answer is yes, then New York City is also part of nature. Why? Because the German built it up? Humans just built buildings out of nature. So this is basically just nature. Yeah. So you're in just a different jungle right? This is an ant colony. Yeah. Okay. We got to get into your backstory. And I know you may have talked about this on pause before, but it is kind of wild. Sure. That you are studying, you know, extinct species and chasing them around the world where you were almost made extinct living in Zimbabwe. That's true. That's true. You were the first version of that, right? In a sense, yeah. So you grew up in Zimbabwe. Yep. Okay. Where? So we lived in Shamba, which is just outside of Harari, the capital city of Zimbabwe. And my family were farmers in Safari business owners. Your mom was a guide? Yep. She was the first female bush pilot in Southern Africa. So she used to fly people into remote bush and then take them on safari. So joke there, I'm not going to say. Yeah. That's true. Out of my time. I appreciate that. I'm going to go on and say, come on. Mr. Goon, they might have been a bush pilot. Okay. First time that one's big. Okay. So and then what the hell is going on with her? Where she's like, I'm going to be the tour guide for just groups. I'm getting, I'm running out of the house. I have how many brothers do you have? I have one little sister. One little sister. She's like, I'm just going to go because when you're tour guide, you're not going for the day. No, yeah. She's going for weeks at a time. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah. You know, I think much like myself, I'm probably where I got it from. My mom just sort of didn't like the traditional mold of jobs and careers and things you could do and was quite a free spirit, I guess. And she wanted to be a pilot and then she became a pilot and then she wanted to be in the bush. So she became pH or Safari guide. And then she would just take people out and yeah, that's how I grew up. I grew up in little tiny plains and all over Africa and living on our farm and it was awesome. And would you go out with her on some of the expeditions? Yeah. At 14 years old, I guided my first safari, a canoe safari. Yeah. Okay. And what age, I want to go get into Mugabe trying to like kill your whole family. Sure. It's great. We're going to get there. Shout out Robert. But at what age do you think, what age do you feel comfortable going out in the woods and be like, I'm going to be good no matter what? Well, the rest or whatever you call it. It's fine because I probably felt that way when I was seven or eight, but I was not that way until I was much older if that makes sense. 14. When I was seven or eight years old, 10 years old, 12 years old, I'd go to camp with my family. And the second they'd go off on a walk or something or a game drive, I'd sneak out and go and try and catch stuff and find stuff and sneak up behind termite mounds to stare at lions and all these things that I kind of necessarily say like nearly got me killed, but there were things that I definitely shouldn't have been doing. No six-year-olds should be running around the bush of Africa by themselves, right? And so I felt very confident. If I get caught, I'd get a lashing and I'd be in big trouble. But I felt comfortable doing it very young, but I didn't really realize until probably like my late teens, maybe even early 20s, like here are the things I actually need to know in order to not just like push the limits every day. So honestly, probably not until realistically long after I'd left Africa and gone back and learned a bunch more in my 20s was I really comfortable. Wow. Could you learn any like, bushman hunting or tracking techniques? Tracking, yeah. Yeah. So part of being a guide or so far a guide is tracking, right? Like you read the sand and you look at the footprints and you look at the poop, the spore, and you put a picture together. I just feel like videos of these bushmen that are like, it almost looks like they're like mystics because like they're looking at like the tiniest little stick and they're like, oh, this means there was a gazelle here. That's right. And it's like, how do you know? Well, the wind is coming this way. The stick is this way. So it's pointing at a gazelle. Exactly. There's a gazelle. I think movies do a horrible job of explaining how they do this. Well, it's it's hard to because it's like watching, you know, Zach Alphanakis read cards in the hangover. You know, when you do that, that depiction on screen of all the numbers going through his idiot brain, it's like, it's like, it's like one of those really because you look at the sand and you see, okay, there's two Impala tracks here and there's a weird turn to this one to the right here and then all of a sudden from this side, there's a lion track. So that means the Impala was walking this way, saw the lion turned and then the lion came and pursued. And based on the way the lion's print is, it had this much weight going into it, it actually made the Impala run faster, you know, but all of this is just something that sort of happens in your mind. You don't you can't really. And you're not always right either. And anybody who pretends they are is lying to you. And I'm 10% as good as the people that do this every day. But still, like, you paint a picture based on what you're seeing in the sand, you know? That's whoa, whoa, okay. Are you looking like branches on trees that have recently been broken? Are you looking at like feeding areas? A little bit of everything. You see it in a movie. It's a guy like picks up some sand and he like looks at the wind, he looks up at the sky. Oh, there's the elk or something like that. But it's not that. There's like guessing in your wrong and that's where we calculate. That's right. Okay. Yeah, you think about the most successful hunters ever have about a 30% success rate, right? African wild dogs, things like that. I mean, there's exceptions like literally dragonflies and the most successful hunters ever. But if you look at, we're including animals in the hunter. Yes. Yes. Okay. Hunter. Wow. So if you look at the most successful hunters ever call it African pack of African wild dogs, they have about a 30% success rate of making a kill. So basically one in three times they make a kill. Oh, right. It's like a great baseball player. Sure. You're getting 300. Yeah. Yeah. So if you think of that from a human standpoint, even with our advantage, which is intellect, right, of reading these scenes and putting it all together, we're still not nearly as good of a hunter as a lion. What do we ask in law? Well, hard to say with guns and bows and all these things. Take us back. Oh, probably less than 10%. You know, if you think about traditional human beings like running around the bush or the ice age or whatever you want to call it, trying to make a kill, they they gone hunt every day. They'd maybe come back with a kill once every 10 days. Wow. Well, wasn't our advantage longest since running in some cultures? Yes. And that's a really interestingly. It comes down to the type of prey. Like the Native Americans, the Indian Americans that used to live in North America. What happened? They used to pursue. Nope. They pursued deer to the point of exhaustion, which was incredible, because they could literally run deer down because deer were not long distance runners, right? They're sprint athletes. Yeah. So if they could track a deer using this various methodology we just discussed for long enough, they could run it to the point of it collapsing from exhaustion and a human can actually keep up for that many hours. Because whatever their prey was before, or whatever hunted them prior, didn't have the cardiovascular ability that we do. Yeah, they're not endurance athletes. Yeah. Oh, wow, wow, wow. Okay. Okay. So you tell me when, tell me what happens when you guys are about to get killed. In what regards? In Zimbabwe. Oh, got you. That's fun. No, not when you tried to get yourself killed. I mean, so when Robert Mugabe found out, so for those that don't know what happened, there was women flying planes. It was an unacceptable. Yeah. You need to get in that bush. Sorry, mom. So yeah, during the Zanu-PF political party regime, which was Robert Mugabe's political party, he was basically slipping from power, right? And so he needed a methodology to retain power because he declared himself president for life. So he turned a lot of negativity and focus on the white farmers, which were just the minority. We've seen this. Idiomines done it, Hitler did it, you know, lots of people have done that. Like I'm losing power, I'm losing control. I need to target hate towards the minority, and he's a scapegoat. And so that's, you know, there are all kinds of racial contexts, all kinds of things you can talk about as to why, but regardless, he turned the focus on the white African farmers. Primarily they were English, some were Dutch, you know, but white farmers in Zimbabwe. And so my family owned a tiny little farm, 200 acres, which sounds big, but it was tiny for our region, amongst a bunch of really big, really wealthy, successful farms, huge tobacco farms, cattle ranches and things like that. And so basically all the farms around us were slowly seized by quote war veterans who'd never seen a war because it was part of this whole political play. And closed in on our farm until we were the last man standing. I could go into, as much detail as little as you want, but basically one night, so we got shot out a few times, like they'd followed us to our gate, there were shootouts where our mom would pull the revolver out and be shooting out the window. My mom was a single mother, too, so it was just for good. My parents split when I was eight and my dad moved away. So it was just my mom and the two kids on the farm in a country where culturally, the Shana culture, women are valued the same as cows. So it's a very, very difficult place to be a single woman running a farm. Right. So at 14 years old, I could command more attention and respect than my mother could as an adult woman. So she would give me the orders for the day to give to the farm workers because they'd listen if I made the orders. Wow. And I didn't even know what I was talking about, but I'd say it like I did, do you know what I mean? And so it was a whole weird dynamic, but basically, again, my mom was a single mother, we lived on the farm by ourselves. All of the farms around us got taken. A lot of our neighbors went through Punguis, which was indoctrination through torture, bides on a political party. So all kinds of things like burning their feet and dancing, all crazy, crazy stuff. Dancing? So they'd make them dance on like hot iron as a torture method, like the all kinds of horrible things. Is that where the jumping comes from? No, that's a whole different story. Thank you. That's a good tension, right? The story's getting long, but basically one night after going through, everybody dug their heels in and it was like, this will pass because things have yo-yoed through the country of Rhodesia and then Zimbabwe since its induction. And everybody's like, dig our heels in, these things will blow over and things will come right again. Anyway, they didn't, for Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe's gone down the whole politically, but starting bounce back a little now actually, but one night our farm was surrounded, our security guard had actually been killed. We had a security guard. He'd been killed. And they basically just said, you have to leave, and if you don't leave, we're going to kill you. Because it was just my mom and two kids, you know, they didn't just come in and murder us. Like they had done in other places. If they were men in the household, they might just come in, I think it would have been a different story. So your sexism actually helped in that work? I think so. I have nothing to support that theory, but I think it was a child. You're not in that old. There's two little kids, you know, 14-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl and a single blonde lady in the middle of an African farm, right? So I think they said instead of kill or murder or rape and there was not all that, some other people left without conflict, but there was a lot of that. They basically gave us a choice. So they came, our security guard had been killed, our some of our farm workers had been through these pungwis. It's a indoctrination and they just said, you have 24 hours before you're gone. You're dead. You pack everything up. So I run into my room and I grab my bow off the wall and I grab my little mass I soared that I had and I said, bring it on, I'm fucking smart. Go back to the suitcase. Because I was a little shit at, you know, I was 14. I thought I was ruling the world and so we packed up our suitcases and left. Two of the passport? Yeah, we had passports. I had Zimbabwean passport. I had American passport. My dad was American. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So you left it. We bounced around a lot. So we went from living on a 200-acre farm in Zimbabwe to living on welfare in Oakland, California in the early 2000s and Oakland in the early 2000s but not like hipster cool Oakland now. It was pretty rough. Have you ever not lived in a predominantly black area? You think you guys. I live in town of Barbara now. Yeah. You went in the apartment. Yeah. We got anywhere. That's funny that your mom is like, how can I make sure that kids will feel acclimated to their feet? Yeah. She's like the new generation. You need to be black people all around. That's right. You need to be black people around. Yeah, they'll be weirded out if they see too many white people. We can't possibly take them. That's so funny. Connecticut. What's so funny is I got to Oakland, and most of not most, but a lot of my friends growing up were black, correct? And I got to Oakland. I was just a kid. You know, 14 years old. I had so far he shorts that were above the knee and you know, it's been torn up T-shirt. And I like ran into, I still remember this so distinctly. You know, we went through a whole bunch of yo-yo and emotional this blah, blah, blah. But I remember we like finally settled in our government housing in Oakland. We're in a one bedroom place, like my mom, my sister and I, and I run out. I see this basketball court where all these African-American kids are playing basketball and I run out and fuck yeah. Like some friends hanging out with, I like grab the ball and I'm trying to play and stuff. This kid pulls out and I was like, what the fuck are you doing? I was like, Oh God, this is different. I got there very seriously, and you're like, that is the app, and they're like, get out of here, white boy. I was like, where are you from? I'm from Africa. I'm from Africa. I'm from Africa. They did not land. No, you were aware though that like being white from Africa was a rare thing. No, I wasn't. Not at all. You learned that when you come to America to the perception of Africa, is there not that many ways? Very much so. Yeah, very much so. Because where I lived, or where I lived in Zimbabwe, it was just like, everybody knows there's still white people there today, you know? And in every country in Africa, there's a white population. And I had just thought that was known, I guess, you know, because our vacations were to Mozambique where there are other small white communities. There was South Africa where there's a large white community. Yeah. Like, I just sort of assumed it was the norm for you. It was the norm. You don't think about it. People like kids idea of race is so different, right? It didn't exist. Like when you're eight years old, you're like, yeah, we're all just Zimbabwe. I distinctly remember when I was still in school, a school called St. John's, in Harari, in Zimbabwe, and this was during the height of all the political turmoil. And I was, I was a equivalent of a freshman. And well, one of the prefects, you know what prefects are? Like, school heads that are boys. They're in Harri Potter. They're like, they're like the oldest kids, like the seniors, sure, sure, that are the best chess player, the best rugby player, the best mathematician they get, they get, call their colors and their prefect. They're kind of in charge of the little kids. It's a very antiquated system. But I remember I was the equivalent of a freshman in my new high school. And my best friend, since I was five years old, was Malucis Wangobani, black eye in case you couldn't tell. And Malucis was like, my best friend's, and I was like five years old. And we were sitting together at lunch. And one of the prefects came up, and I don't remember who it was, but he just came up. And he's like, you go sit over there and you go sit over there. And this was during all the conflict. And I was like, what's happening? And he's like, you're not sitting with Malucis anymore. And I was like, I sat with Malucis every day, so I was six years old for lunch. Like, this is bizarre. And they were trying to, because it was coming from the governor, from the president. They were like trying to create in still, in still this like racial separation. And obviously there's more black people in the white balance in the body. They had never even crossed my mind. It was just one of my best friends, you know? And then there was this thing coming from an 18-year-old to a 14-year-old being like, you guys don't sit together. Like you guys aren't friends anymore. And I'm like, why am I not friends with, you know, like it just, you're talking about you're like a kid's perception of race, like it just blew my mind, because I just didn't understand it. What did your friends say? Same thing. Like we were just so confused, you know? And he went over with all the black kids, and I went over with the tiny little group of white kids. And it was almost like prison, you know? Yeah, it was like, yeah, at least my perception of prison. And it was just like, and then school ended, and I was like, you good? He's like, yeah, you good. I was like, yeah, that was weird. You know, but those things just sort of like kept happening, and it just got worse and worse. And it just showed how ingrained it was throughout the culture at the time. Yeah. Okay, so you come to America, you're 14 at this time? Do your survival skills start to wane? Became a very different sort of survival skill. I mean, I mean, like bush survival, I mean, being out in nature, like do you have opportunities to go do that? It's not like you're camping, I imagine, like you're trying to survive on welfare in America. So we came to Oakland. We had all this, like I said, I was like getting in fights in the streets and like, trying to make friends. And I was just this weird kid in Safari shorts who like, nobody understood and I just had a funny accent. And I ended up getting in trouble a lot, like a lot, a lot, like nice point and problems with older kids and all kinds of things. So my mom realized that there was an issue and I think it was because of me. So she got us out of Oakland as fast as possible. So we spend about six months. in Oakland. And then we ended up in a tiny little town called Kayukas, California, which is its own story, but 2,000 people surfed town in California, tiny little central coast town. And I think she did that intentionally because she could see the trajectory things were going in a big city like Oakland. And the reason I tell you that is because here I was a kid who'd always grown up in the bush, you know, it wasn't like Tarzan, like I still, you know, was a normal kid, but like I had all these passions for wildlife and the outdoors. And then we moved to this tiny little central coast town that's surrounded by mountains on one side and ocean on the other. And I would just take off for days and trespass onto farms and up into the mountains and go diving and go up to Big Sur, which you're probably having a big surf camp up there. And so I just sort of had, I just channeled it into a new things. And the main thing I found then was the ocean because I had never had ocean growing up. And all of a sudden I lived on the ocean in California. And I was just so into diving and fishing and spearfishing and learning about new to ranks and sea stars and all these weird ocean animals that I'd never been exposed to. So I just channeled it into a different thing. Yeah. Yeah. So to answer your question, I don't think it went away. I just changed my interests. Yeah. By going to Caiucas, you could continue to explore this passion. Yeah. What does your mom do when she comes over? Like just she'd take up new work? Yes, she was a waitress. Well, you know, went from running a huge safari business and 200 farm workers to being a waitress. Oh my god. That transition, like she's so committed to freedom in doing what she wants and like being on her own accord to now just like serving coffee. Yeah, serving drinks because you know, what else, you know, we were refugees, right? Like what else can you do? Did you talk to her about that at all as an adult? You know, Africans are funny. They don't like to talk about it. Like I'm a hybrid, right? I'm an African-American, whatever hybrid. Yeah. She, if I try to have this, you're laughing at me. What do you want? Yeah, he's so much more happy. I know. He's so funny here. You have to go back here. He wants something. Yeah. He's dead out for me. But my point is, like, nah, he's crazy. He's like, oh, you're white mom African. Yeah, yeah. I couldn't talk my mom about it. She would just brush it aside. Like it's not. How can you just talk about those things? That is so funny. It's like, because if I was born in China, there's no way you guys would refer to me as Chinese. Right? Like, there's no way. Well, I mean, if I was a little Mandarin, you would think I was being racist until someone told you was actually Mandarin. Yeah, that's probably true. That's probably true. Yeah. Okay. All right. So you're saying she's a little bit reserved. She's not talking about her emotions and what she was dealing with and the difficulties surrounding it. She's just like, listen, I had to do what I had to do with her life. You know that, like, memory bias thing? Like we all put the bad memories aside and folks on the good ones, otherwise, we'd all be miserable and depressed all the time, if you've heard of that. But like, I feel like she has that more than anybody, like her memory bias. Like she knows it happened, but she doesn't want to talk about it. She doesn't want to bring it up. Doesn't want to address it. She'd rather talk about how great breakfast was, you know? I love that. Yeah. Did you pick up any like a Zulu or Kosa? No, I used to speak relatively fluent. I wouldn't say perfect Shana, which was the native language of where I lived, which was decent, you know, like more than survival Shana. But you realize, because I was just back in Zubabwe earlier this year, it goes away quickly, you know, like I can still understand 25% of it, but I can speak like 2% of it, you know, it just goes away. And you have those few words that are like ingrained, but otherwise, like, the ability to communicate pretty much. Can you say a few words? Because he thinks all they do is click. Who? Why would you say me? No, I'm just kidding. No, so like in Shana, like if I said to you, like, good morning, how are you? The greeting is "Manguana ni mamuka se." "Manguana ni mamuka se." So that's like, good morning. How are you? Yeah. Yeah. "Manguana ni mamuka se." "Mamuka se." And then the traditional response would be "Mamuka de mukao." So it's like, I'm good, how are you? "Mamuka de mukao." There you go. See? And you speak Shana, just like that. Yeah. Yeah. Stop. You still can't say it. I tried learning how to say like a few words in Kosa, because there's a DJ from Zim. That's what the locals call Zimbabwe. Oh, yeah. And I talked to him and he tried to like teach me some of the words, like with the clicks. That's rad here in New York. Yeah. No way. And it's a wild thing because I didn't realize the clicks are a part of like the word. Yeah. Like it's not just like a bunch of clicks on the road. That's kind of how we're told in America. That's right. Yeah. But like Kosa'd be like, "Kosa." That's right. And like you say like in your throat. Yeah. And so it's like embedded in the like sentence itself. Yeah. It's unbelievably hard to do. Yeah. Like I don't know if you can just tell someone how to do it. It's like you're born knowing how to do it. You have to grow. It's like the same thing they say with like learning Mandarin, right? It's like an adult. It's like you're really possible. Yeah. I feel like I could do it. Learn Mandarin. That's not straight Mandarin is good. Like sometimes I'll do my fake and I'll listen to real Mandarin and I'm like, I'm there. Yeah. Like there's a guy I follow that just speaks to people in their language but he fakes it. Oh nice. He's like he just walks up to him in the street. Yeah. And he'll just speak fake whenever the language. I'm like bewildered. Now they're like they they're trying and the reason I know is close is because they're like trying to sound it out. Yeah. Because he's a white guy so they're like, oh, he's trying. Yeah. You know, but he's close. Yeah. I think that's the key. Like when I go to Mexico, my Spanish is terrible. Yeah. It's like survival Spanish, but my confidence is through the roof. So if you sit down and just spit, go to Japan. I swear, have you been to Japan? Yeah. I love Japan. Okay. You know how like all the taxi cabs they got like white gloves. It's like beautiful. It's amazing. It's awesome. Spotless. Yeah. But they're not going to speak any English. No. And but if you say where you're going in English, but with a very strong Japanese accent, 100% out of the time, they know exactly where you're going. They're respected. Yeah. They're like, I know they're respected. Okay. But in their brain, that's how it sounds in English accent in it. I know. It sounds crazy. Yeah. But if you say it, it works. It's thought of books. Thank you to the Starbucks. And listen, you can judge me, but when you're there and you need to go somewhere, you're going to try it. That's how you say Starbucks. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream. Ice cream. That's literally ice cream. Yeah. Exactly. It's almost like, is there a language Japanese? It's just an accent. I think it's an accent. I really do. Okay. What do we got right here? This is, of course, I've never seen this video, but apparently it's good. Our pee. It sound like. The Eglia. Wow. It's Eglia. You just said Canada and go. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like. It sounds like. Like the name. It makes it look cool. Yeah. Yeah. That's fine. Yeah. Our cue. It sounds like. How far is that? It's. It's also not. It's not so different than, like, you know, Arabic, where you have like a. Yeah. It's just another sort of mouth sound. Exactly. We make it seem like there's this like a skewer. It's this obscure sound and no other language has it. It's like us saying, like the hard letter R. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's a lot of Asian cultures and things that can't do. I'm really taking myself to do. I'm not sure what you're going to say. No, I'm not going to say it again. No hard though. There's definitely not a lot to say hard. Yeah. I'm. Might be a lot to say. I don't know. We got to go. We got to go. We got to go. What is the prefix? But okay. All right. So mystified in America. People are like, yeah, they speak like an alien language where they click all the time. It's like, no, they just have tones that are different than ours. Yeah. Everybody has their weird chin. I'm trying to think what ours is in English specifically. Well, it depends on what region you're comparing to. Like, if you come from like an Asian dialect, doing L is difficult in English. Bro, if saying the letter R after a consonant is nearly impossible for anybody outside. That's what I'm trying to imagine without being able to say it. I mean, to Europeans, it don't speak English. Yeah, Andrew. Yeah. Is it impossible? That's right. It's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Squirrel is like, have you seen Europeans try to pronounce the word squirrel? Have you seen Japanese people do it? Yeah. That's the most fun. Yeah. Yeah. That video. I'll have a video right now. All right, guys. New dates announced. We're getting ready for the hour. This fall. I'm coming to stress factory. The 11th and 12th. Thank you guys for selling that out. I'll update you guys on that and more shows Houston September 18th and 19th West New York, 25th and 26th of September. Helium in Indianapolis, Indiana, the 23rd and 24th of October. Alabama star don't November 6th and 7th. Hilarities in Cleveland, the 13th and 14th of November. Good nights in Raleigh, December 4th and 5th. Funny bone and Columbus, December 11th and 12th. Those are all the shows for the fall while we get this hour together. Man, I can't wait to see you guys out there and see the new stuff. The Andrew Shulls dot com for tickets. I'm also doing a bunch of shows. I'm going to be with my good pal, Andrew Shulls for many of these dates as well as some of my own headlining shows. I'll be in Plano, Texas, Chandler, Arizona, Pasadena, San Diego, Detroit, and Salt Lake City all through the fall and winter. If you live in any of those places, go to markagnanlive.com. You can check out tickets and dates right there. You go on a show that is very popular that we all knew naked and afraid. - Yes, yes. - Now, have you already started your career before that or is this your first, like, four-antend entertainment? - No, so I went to UCSB for biology. - Yes. - And I loved doing biology and that's all I wanted to do. And I knew nothing about entertainment. I thought discovery made shows for Discovery Channel. Like, that's how TV works. Like, I just knew nothing, nothing about it. - Yeah. - And then I went on naked and afraid, literally, because we were super poor and I was a biologist, making 12 bucks an hour. And I just wanted a cool vacation. - Yeah. - And did it, and did really well on the show and all of that. But it was really, there was sort of a light bulb moment for me, which was when I looked at the ratings that the naked and afraid show got. This is back when TV was huge, just all right, like, cable. And that got four million live viewers. And I looked at, I looked at, like, a publish paper that I'd worked on with elite scientists. And that got 400 reads. And I looked at the two and I'm like, all I really want to do is communicate how amazing wildlife is to people. 'Cause that's what I love. That's where I grew up in the bush of Africa, tracking like we were talking about. I love wildlife. That's where I went communicate. I look at these two things. Here's saying that the lead biologist worked on for two and a half years, I worked on for about a year that got 400 reads by like-minded scientists who were writing me the subject matter. Here's me jiggling my junk naked in the jungle, got four million views. I'm like, I know which one of these two can make a bigger impact. So that was like my light bulb moment. Was after naked and afraid. When I was like, now I can get, okay, so naked and afraid. So for the people who don't know, it was a show where you would basically have to go survive in like some remote area. I think you went to Panama. Panama, that's right. But is that where all the episodes are from all over the world? No, all over the world. And like for whatever reason you're naked, it didn't need to be. It didn't need to be. And it's you and a chick. That's right, right? And she's also naked. That's right. Very awkward. Well, I mean, in the morning when you're bricked, what is that like? It's only morning one. I'll tell you that. I don't know, man. Something biological happens out there where you're after morning one. You're like, that's not gonna happen anymore. I got other stuff to worry about. But like, okay, do they start getting funky? Like, is it like, I believe some of them out? No, not like, like, if there must be, you're in the most parental life in the back of the room. You're not thinking about stuff. You're not thinking about that? This guy who's right out of UC Santa Barbara, okay? It's, it's a wild party. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's insane, okay? So he's coming there. All sorts of venereal diseases. This is a fact, yeah. Okay, we went to the same school by the way. We live right across from each other randomly. And okay, so you're there. You meet the girl. She's naked immediately. Yeah. And you have to present yourself for TV. Like, yeah. But you also have to work out, like, warmth and mosquitoes and stuff. Does she kept well or what? She, my partner was kept immaculately. Really? She was very crowded. (laughing) Do you have a girlfriend at the time? I did have a girlfriend at the time. I'm gonna be with this naked chick who shaved her. Worse than that, it was my girlfriend's idea that I go on the show. Oh, my God. She was into that. Who knows what was going on, you know, when I took off? We know him. And how it would be introduced to a stranger, just on soft as crazy? Were you on softer? Did you fluff for like a second and break up? Dude, I wish I had done a little tug. It would have been a little more impressive. But were you fully, fully soft? I was fully soft. I was completely naked. There was nerves going on, which means I was probably about, you know, like a raisin, like, it was, yeah, I probably wasn't a good vibe at all. I was overweight because I was like, oh, I'm going to survive. I don't need to eat more. I got a bulk up. So I was fatter than ever. It was not hindsight being 2020. I would have trimmed up a little. Yeah, maybe just done a little rub to go in, you know, just get a little something going on. And nothing so fat, you know? Yeah, she would have been a little better. But she started vibing as you started being like, her protector and provider. Oh, no, she hated me. Oh, she hated me, yeah. Oh, actually that's her. She's quite pretty. I shaved, which is a mistake. I was chubby, which was a mistake. And yeah, no, it wasn't good, bro. Yeah, you got me over here. I know. Keep my eyes, like, 30 times heavier. Keep giving me a little slack here. Go back to the first one. That's not bad. That was towards the end of the whole thing. No, let's not. Right here. You only make a Pixar villain. I know what you do, it's bad. It's really bad. But she's a piece. She's a beautiful girl. I'm saying, dude, I'm bored. So, but yeah, and she was pretty, but so I think. Okay, so I'll introduce you. I'll show up your butt naked. Butt naked. Dick and balls out. Do you catch her peeping? Do you catch her, like, looking down? If anything, she caught me peeping. And you were definitely peeping. You had to. You had to do it. I mean, what are you going to do? You got to get it out of the way. You got to get a good look up and down. So you go up and down. Get a good look. Get a good look. Hug it out. Did you hug? You have to. And you felt them. You felt the nips? Yeah. Yeah. I was just saying what I was saying. This is a colleague. This is a colleague. I understand, but they're in a survival situation, and part of survival is reproduction. That's not a part of it. It's not a part of it. Not usually in 21 days. That's true. Yeah. But did she throw any rhythm? Like, when you came back and you had, like, I remember you were shucking clams or whatever. You had a oyster. What was that? Yeah. When you brought her that aphrodisiac, and I know you were searching for it for that reason. I was trying. Yeah. I was trying. I was fishing, but I wasn't packing. No rhythm. She was giving you no rhythm. Nothing, dude. I got no love out there. No. She was like, I think they did this on purpose. They used to show a really clever, by the way. They looked at me and we're like, here's a Chevy white boy who's got a lot of good skills. And here's a hot idiot who's got no skills. And we're going to put these two together and see what happens. She's going to hear this, and it's not going to go well. But I think they just were like, we're going to put these two together and surviving. Terrible. Terrible. Like you're carried. Like you're carried at this point. When it got cold, would you guys have to, you know, body heat? Night one. We cuddled all night. Dead serious. We got there, like, poking her in the bag. Yeah. Yeah. I had a roll over in the morning. She's like, are you okay? I was like, yeah, yep. Just stop. A little uncomfortable. I had a roll over. Yeah. We go to the other side. Yeah. Because night one, we got there. It was a producer's fault. They got us on the beach like late. So we only got started like 4 p.m. Oh. So you don't have time between 4 p.m. and sundown to build everything. Yeah. So we started to build a really crappy little shelter and it got dark. And then it rained and it was cold. And we're both lying under a banana leaf shaking. And I forget if it's her or me, but one of us, probably me, was like, hey, we got to just, you know, scoot together and share some body warmth for the first night. And that was the only night we had to, like, cuddle basically. Yeah. And it did help. And then, yeah. And then I had a roll over in the morning and that was it. And built a proper shelter. The camera guys are just there, like, drinking smoothies all the time. Dude, no. They, um, oh, I'll tell you a story. I've never told them. I thought if you want to. Yes. I've never told publicly at all. They were not there. So they leave set up cameras overnight. Like, security cameras, basically. Just go pros of battery packs and IR cams and stuff like that. But, um, they have a strict rule. I've never told the story publicly in any way. They have a strict rule that the camera guys cannot have food on them. They kind of have smoothies. They kind of anything, right? Because, you know, these people are more or less starving. Yeah. Must have been like day 15 or 16 or whatever. And I see the audio guy has got a cliff bar in his audio kit on the front. And I just see the corner of the wrapper. Like a little like blue and black and like outline or whatever. And I don't remember his name. Let's say it was John. I walk over and I'm like, hey, John, what's going on, buddy? Boom. And I just grab it. I start peeling it and eating it. He's like, whoa, give me that back. Give me that back. Give me that back. I'm like, nope, not going to. And he's like, dude, you're gonna get me fired. I was like, I'm not. I'm not gonna tell anybody if you don't. And I give him back the wrapper and I smash the whole bar. Wow. You can even share it. No. I have to. I scoff that thing on the spot. I keep the bush. He can tell when there's audio guys nearby. There's a cliff bar near. Is it true? I heard a rumor that you found food unbelievably fast. And then they kind of made you hide the food. Multiple times. Really? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Can you tell us about that? So the funniest part of that whole thing was, you know, they want you to suffer. Right? Because that's good to show. Right. They want you to struggle and have to find food and fight and help each other and all these things. So unlike day four, five or whatever, we're walking through the jungle and keep in mind, I'm a biologist. So I recognize the botany, the plants and things. And I look and I'm like, wait a minute, that's Yucca. Which is, you know, it's like a jungle potato basically. And you can see that in this area of secondary forest, not primary, that it all been, you know, regrown, there's a whole patch. Like almost perfectly square patch of Yucca, which is a potato. And so I like, stop and take out my machete and start digging and dig up the root with the potato. And then I'm like, holy shit. And I realize this is like a grove of it. And it's like a five minute walk from where we're camped. And so I dig up 30 pounds of these potatoes. Like I'm talking like, you know, mountain of potatoes. Take them back, build a little hammock so they don't get sitting the water next to my camp. And I'm like, we're good. I'm done. We're good. You can live off that. Eat potatoes, eat some oysters in the morning. Like I got protein, I got carbs. I'm good. And the producers just pulling their hair out. You know, they're like this fucking guy. He doesn't want to fight with anybody. Like he's not being argumentative. He doesn't have to work very hard. He's got 30 pounds of fucking potatoes in his camp. Yeah. And then they come over and they're like, look, we got to take the potatoes away. I'm like, go for it. I'm just going to go get more. And they're like, like, you can't do this. I was like, yes, I can. Like this is a simulated survival situation. I'm going to get as many potatoes as I can get. Yeah. So they took him away the first time. And that night as soon as the camera guys left and set up the cameras. I walked five minutes up the hill. I brought back another 20 or so pounds, put them in the sling. And they came back in the morning and there was a pile of things. And the producer was like off the record. Like, okay, if you just keep them hidden and off camera, you can keep your potatoes. And I was like, I don't care how many times you take them away. I'm going to go and get more. Yeah. And so they let me like keep them off camera. So would you have to cook them like at off camera hours? Or did they just edit you cooking? They just edit around it. Yeah. Yeah. But only person going to show and gain weight. Thankfully not. Look at that photo. - That photo, but thankfully not. But yeah. So then what happens that you and the girl are eating good, are you sharing the potatoes? We shared, we shared everything. Yeah, I caught some fish, I caught some lobster, I got oysters, I killed an anteater, we got potatoes, like we weren't struggling. Yeah. So it was easy for you. I mean, it goes back to what we were talking about before we came in here. If you're in the tropics and you have a good understanding of how to do these things, you can live indefinitely. I asked, I asked for us before we went to the pot. I was like, okay, let's just say, like, could, could you just walk out anywhere and then just survive? Like, what is the scenario? And you said, if you put me on an island, where, what, what did you just say? I said PG or Van Awatu or one of those tropical places. Yeah. You'd be fine for 30 years. Easy, man. Easy. Because there's so much life, you know, and everything grows in the tropics, right? Like, whether coconut's obviously grown naturally, but you plant potatoes or you get mangoes or whatever, everything just grows and it fruits. And then you have so much stuff in the ocean, right, in those places. You can eat all the shellfish we've just been talking about, you can spear, you can do these things. Some tools would help, right? Like, some fire making tools and some spears and stuff, but like, that's why tropical living is so good, right? Just because you don't know. Evolution is a derivative of necessity, right? We change and evolve and develop things when we have to. And if you look at, it's actually really interesting. If you look at the planet and you look at cultures and civilizations, the most advanced ones, meaning the cultures and civilizations that built the biggest cities and had boats and sailing ships and all these things are, they're not so extreme in the north poles that you can't survive and they're not so comfortable in the equator where it's life so easy. They're somewhere in between where it's just life's easy a little bit, but it's hard a lot to build things. Yeah, exactly. They can just live out there untouched for thousands of years and just like, be chilling. Exactly, because life's good. They've got everything they need. They don't need for the innovation. That's it. You're not forced to innovate. Where is your England in the winter time? You got to figure it out. You got to get some goats in here. We got to plant some corn. Exactly. And you've got this short window, right? The summer window of two, three, four months, whatever it is, to make things happen. And so you use that time to develop and build and grow and store for a long winter ahead. But explain then Egypt. Explain Sudan. Explain these places that had like these immense, you know, technological outbursts. Well, I mean, you know, nobody can explain Egypt, right? That's one of the phenomenal things about it. But I think those things are like Egypt, for example, are less about global expansion, right? They had amazing technologies and incredible architecture and pyramids and things like that within their system. I can't explain. I'm not anthropologist, but you know, they built these things because they had the resources to build them locally. Yeah. Now learning that there were civilizations in the Amazon similar to that, right? Yeah. But again, that wasn't about like England or the Vikings or places like that. The Romans were like, we have to go places to get resources. We have to innovate and travel and move and conquer and make a trade route and get a disease and all those things. Yeah. Wow. You go to school for biology. And I know you were in Zimbabwe, like out in the bush till like 14. Yeah. But then you go on this show. How old were you when you went on a show? 26. I think something like that? Sort of like, you're out of like the jungle wild for a long time. Like how do these survival skills just come back? Yeah. So, I mean, I always really just cared about wildlife and conservation. And survival for me was never a passion and still not. I would practice survival or wilderness craft or whatever you want to call it as a means to stay out in the wilderness longer and see animals. So even between, I guess age is, you know, 18 or so, whatever, 14, whatever you want to call it, 14 when I came to the U.S. and 25 or six or whatever I was going to do. I was still constantly, I was working on the California Channel Islands as a biologist. I was going into the backcountry, traveling as much as I could. It's all I really do. So, it's not like you're just going out exploring and then coming home for the day. No. Like you could just be out there. I was out all the time. Yeah. I mean, I used to have a 15 foot center console boat, like a tiny little boat that I would spend four or five nights at a time on. It doesn't have a cabin. It's like the boats, you know, about as big as these two chairs, you know, and I would just sleep on the deck of the boat and just be out in the ocean, exploring the Channel Islands, you know, in Santa Barbara. Yeah. Yeah. And then same thing in the backcountry, I just take a backpack with a tarp, you know, in a bag of salt and a pocket knife and a whiter and just be like, I'm going to head out and say, oh, you can, you can save anything with salt. You can preserve it. You can cure it. Salt. Salt's like an essential survival food, right? If I, if I catch a trout this big and I'm out there for three days, if I just leave the trout, it goes rotten. Yeah. But if I eat half the trout and pack the other half in salt, it's totally fine. He was a survivor. So this is, I'm, I'm kind of obsessed with this stuff. Like all the videos I watch from, you know, you know, I'm sure you know the outdoor boys channel. Yeah. I've seen so many of your videos, but like, I think it's because I've never gone camping. Ever? No. I'm like, we got to fix that. I would love to do it. Yeah. Okay. But there is something that I, I don't know if it's a primal connection. I don't know if it's the idea of like, when you're stressed with things in your life watching somebody complete a task, executed task and like create homeostasis for them in like a really difficult environment, maybe there's something that is like stress relieving to that. I got to do more like psychological research as to why I'm so interested about it. But there is a part of me and now that I have you here, I really want to know. Sure. One of us are put in an area you choose to put us somewhere in the world right now, right now. Okay. Let's, let's say Costa Rica. Okay. I love Costa Rica. There you go. jungly. Very. What is what we're, it is 10 a.m. Yep. We have to survive. Nobody's coming to get us for a week, two weeks. Yep. What is number one thing that we do? Drinkable water. Potable water. How are we finding it? So luckily in Costa Rica, high rainfall, almost everywhere, right? So what I would do, you don't want to drink the ground water anywhere in the jungle, period because of pathogens and bacteria. Ground water could be rivers as streams and rivers and things like that. Don't. Yeah. So you can either purify that or you can collect rain water, which you know is safe. So you got two options. So let's say there's, it's not raining. Head your bets. You do both, right? So you cut some bamboo and you make some cups and things to catch rain just in case. The second thing we do is figure out how are we making or starting a fire and I like, yes, you can rub sticks together. I don't like doing that. It's a lighter, right? I don't like survival for the sake of it, just like doing it. So I would create a fire and whether we had pots, believe it or not, you can boil water in a plastic cup. There are many ways you can purify water, but your safest way to do it is to boil it. Okay. So figure out how to boil water. That can be in rocks. That can be in leaves, believe it or not. That can be in a plastic. There's a million ways to do it. So you get your water, you purify your water. Once you know you have a sustainable method of safe drinking water, everything else is secondary. Interesting. Because the first thing they do is shelter, but I'm watching a lot of cold weather shows. That's exposure related. Yeah. Yeah, that makes more sense. Yeah. When you don't have to worry about the elements as much in terms of freezing to death, water is crucial. That's number one. Also because in those cold environments, there's snow everywhere. There's water everywhere. The great point. Okay. So okay. We get some water. We have this mechanism for maintaining water. Yep. Okay. Next is shelter. That's right. Yeah. Next would be exposure. What are we building? You know, boiling with a leaf. Oh, wow. It's really cool. So next thing would be your shelter. In place of Costa Rica, you can get large leaves like banana leaves or those elfin ears. You know, those big, big flies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it looked like these. And so you'd use those to create a shelter. So you'd cut down sticks, luckily in jungles, the wood is soft generally, right? So you can very easily cut down like even in that picture. What if we didn't have anything to cut? Yeah. You can make stone tools. Stones. You can break it. It doesn't have to be. That's the other thing too, is like you see like something like that, right? That's beautiful. That looks amazing. It doesn't have to be like that. Right. Don't get me wrong. That's probably that. You and I can make that right now with this one. The other one that's all perfect, but meticulous. Yeah. That's hard to make. Yeah. Like shelter does not have to be perfect. The best thing you can do, if you're in it for the long term, you build a temporary shelter. That's quick. It gets you out of the element. So in the midday heat or whatever, you can rest. You can sleep. You have fire to get rid of mosquitoes. Then you focus on building something that's more like more long term. Stand in a long term. I was talking to, do you know Donny Dust? Yeah. I do know Donny's the man. Good dude. He was explaining to me. He was like, you can basically just make like a sleeping bag. That's it. Yeah. So like in a pinch it's just like one stick that's like two feet tall, covered with an analyves. It's not something you can like sit in. You literally just like shim into it and lay there and sleep. Called a lean to. Because leaning to one side, right? Yeah. And then you can get out that way. Yep. Wow. And then going there is almost mental sanity. Because if you're sleeping in the rain, you're not sleeping. If you're exposed to the elements, you're miserable. Yeah. So if you just give yourself a little bit of mental reprieve so that at night you can rest and you can recharge, then you have all the time in the world to find food and build shelter and these kind of things. But if you're not sleeping, you're not resting, you're not recovering, you go down hill quick. Do you think we would be living comfortably within a week? Yeah. When you say comfortably, not what you and I think of as comfortably. We see et cetera. But we're not worried about food. We're not worried if it's raining. We'll get under something. Within a week. Waking up with the sun. Yeah. It's within a week. You're not on your phone. But that's not the case for, you know, these guys that go on alone in the arctic circle. Very different situation. Now, can I ask you that? Like kind of as a detour question. If you're ready to get dropped right now, either into Alaska in the winter time or like the Mojave desert in the summer. Ooh. Two extreme climates. Yeah. Which one would you rather take to survive for a week? Well, just because of my knowledge base and this is it's all personal like it's one of the reasons I make fun of naked and afraid the show that I did myself and I will get back to your question is The guys that live in those environments like I'm talking about the local people that actually live there the native tribes The local Panamanians and stuff. They do the stuff that we're crying and windy and misery about as part of their daily life Yeah, Tasha's a joke about this. He's like we do a show called Survivor in a place where people already live Yeah, and they're just like this is just life to them and for us it's like oh my god so hard I can't find food They're like, yeah, welcome to the fucking jungle bitch, you know, like and so you know To answer your question, it's all about where your skill set is if you took that same incredible survivalist from Panaman Put him in the Arctic he'd be dead in a day. Right for sure. He doesn't know he's not a trained survival expert He just lives in the jungle in Panama. Yeah, so my skill set I do better in the Mojave than I would in Alaska Fuck you doing the Mojave you find water you find moisture and that comes from cactuses and it's awful And it's bitter and there's ways to refine it, but you have to get the moisture first first thing you're doing is looking for a giant cactus That's it. Yep, and then you what cut it? It'll tap it. Yeah. Oh, yeah rubber tree or something. Yeah, basically And then you can get a slow drip out of it and that's liquid is absolutely horrible But it can keep you better than nothing. Yeah, then how do you create a shelter in the Mojave? I mean, it's it's not easy. The best thing out there is to get under rocks because there's a lot of rocks and natural Jagged areas and then you need to move with the sun and the biggest thing in a desert environment is never worked during the heat of the day So you are you are down from say 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day. You're just resting because there's just too much caloric Yeah, expenditure. Yeah, it's just the you're likelihood of exposure death like overheating exhaustion dehydration just skyrockets And Alaska in the winter I I'm there are people who are very skilled at that. I'm not one of them like I would not do well I do Alaska in the summer sounds lovely Yeah, I'm asking the winter in a way. Yeah, for me Listen to the animals. Why are you not afraid of animals? I'm a city boy I don't touch them. I don't like a dog a cat. I'm cool with that. Anything more than that. It's not I just think wildlife is the most incredible thing that we have Right, I think a lot of people forget that if we destroy any group of animals like we kill all the fish in the ocean We all die for everybody every human on this planet goes away if we destroy the oceans, right? If we if we get rid of all the snakes we probably all die like and I know not everybody in this room probably loves snakes But snakes control the rodents that control the diseases. Do you know I mean like the road and outbreak means disease outbreak So all these things the world is like a giant game of Jenga, you know, and every piece needs to fit in that game and Animals to me are the most important piece of that I'm not really answering your question directly, but the point is like they're all fantastic and amazing and I've had Really close calls with some animals. I've been scared by animals plenty It's not like I'm so stupid that I think no animal can hurt me or anything like that It's just these are the risks that I'm more than willing to take in order to have these amazing intimate interactions And I also believe that we are hardwired as human beings whether you're from the city or not to have a connection to nature and animals Like it is in our DNA I'm telling you man we get you out of the city I'm not saying you would be in your comfort zone But you would find some like inner peace if you spent time out there and you got connected to animals You don't need all the stimulation and all this technology and stuff. You find a sense of calm when you spend time around animals What's the closest you've been to dying on the job? The one that I thought was the closest is actually a pretty crazy story. I was you know what a sea snake is No snakes are living in the ocean. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, but it looks like a meal Yeah, a lot of them. Yeah, so if you look up like an elegant sea snake This is the what the species we were working on so I was in Western Australia and we were milking sea snakes Means taking the venom out of them and you do that by taking a tiny little pipette like a little syringe and you put it over the fang and you pipette it and you pump it and the venom comes out I've milked a snake before and I don't mean that as a euphemism I've actually done it and the way that the guy did it was the snake bites on to a jar with some like Kind of silicone rubber toe. Yeah, why not do it like that because the seasnecks don't have big fangs like whatever you milk To rattle snake or something interesting. So those types of snakes by parades snakes with big fangs have a venom delivery system from two giant fangs Yeah, so it bites into the cup the plastic sheath holds the fangs in place and the venom drips out Sea snakes have tons of tiny little and each one of them and each one of them Yeah, now they still have fangs that you can get into the minutia of it But basically they're tiny tiny little teeth like to the point you can barely see them So in order to milk a sea snake you have to actually pipette it like I was explaining So I was milking venom from a sea snake bare-handed. I didn't have gloves on and One drop of sea snake venom can easily kill you right? It's a very very potent But they don't usually bite people. They're not aggressive and they're they're pretty limp on land They're adapted for the sea and so the time I thought I was the closest to death was I was milking a sea snake And I noticed that I pushed the pipette the wrong way a little bit and the venom was running down over my fingers Right, and I was like ah shit, and I adjusted and I kept pipetting and got all the venom put it in the vials and all of that And then I was arguing with my camera man So I was doing this for a discovery channel show and he goes you got to get a stretch on it Come on man. Just stop it and I did this with my fingers in my in my eye ducts And then I was sitting there and I I I just I remember this distinctly I went fuck and he goes what I go I think I just killed myself And he goes what'd you say I was like ah nothing nothing nothing I just whispered under my breath and so The problem with the seasneak venom from an healthy and seasnake is you have almost no symptoms for five or six hours Then you feel very fatigued then your heart stops and that's it and it's just quiet. It's your blood. Yeah, exactly So here I was thinking and I was like was it my left hand was it my right hand? Did I rinse my hand did I not rinse my hand and I just couldn't remember because it was all happening You know you've been on set like it's all happening and stuff going on So I thought for six hours that I had rub seasneak venom into my eye ducts You're waiting to die and I was waiting to die so much so that you know, we finished out the shoot I like I was going on with so in mental battle, but I didn't want to take it to my my crew my team because I was like There's nothing can be done. It's too late. Yeah, you know, we're too remote. There's nothing that can be done So I had this inner monologue with myself. I was like right just don't say anything don't know for sure Just just get on with the day and just keep your head down So we finished up. We were all right at the end of our day anyway. Okay. I got the venom everything's good Let's go home and I've started a timer because I was like I have between six and eight hours if I've done it We got back to the town we're staying in which a tiny little town called Carl Bay in Western Australia where we had a rental house And I wrote a note to my wife and my kid at the time. I only have one of two kids now I wrote a note to them put it down next to the bed just in case I never woke up And of course it was a super long day. So I was feeling incredibly fatigued Like an hour of the sun all day so I didn't know if that was seasneak venom or just exhaust them Why not tell someone why not try to get some sort of cure? Nothing I could do There's no cure for one. There's no anti venom for this because it's a credibly rare to get bitten by one because they're not aggressive Yeah, and two we were 12 hours from Perth which is the only city that you could get treatment. Oh my god. There was just no way There was no time amount of time. There was just no way Do you know what I mean? And we're out on the boat two hours from where the dog was like I did all that Calculation in my head like is there anything that could actually be done and the answer was no so what are you thinking of those last moments? I just was really thinking about like my family and like fuck like I even wrote at the bottom of the note PS to the crew. Sorry. You have to deal with my body. Oh It's like it's gonna be a pain. You ask for everybody. Is there like an acceptance of death that you have based on these I Don't think so. I don't want to die Like I'm not I'm not looking for it. I don't want something bad to happen. I understand the risks that I take But I also understand that it's something stupid like that. It's not the charging elephant that's gonna kill me It's me putting my fingers in my eyes with potential venom on it, you know, and those things are hard to People that die from wildlife and it does happen like you know Influencers that get bitten or you know Steve Irwin's or whatever It's usually from complacency. It's because you get so comfortable with the venomous snake or or the tigers in the sink freedom Roy case or whatever It happens to be that you become complacent around I try and remind myself of that all the time Don't become complacent and then it's the small mistakes like rubbing your fingers in your eyes So I didn't I wasn't like I've accepted this. I'm going to die. I was like fuck I I really really hope this doesn't happen and this is like contingency like here's a letter and like I don't want to make a big deal out of this How do you feel when you wake up and you look at the letter so good? So I here's what says stupid. I'm so dramatic. I was like a movie in my own mind. I went to bed like this Like yeah, I woke up on my side of my hair I've been so dramatic, you know, and I looked and I was like I'm good crumpled at the letter You know chucked it in the trash is like let's get on with our day. Oh, you got to frame that letter You gotta keep that you're right. I should have I was so happy that it didn't you kick it tell your team the next day I told you the next day. Yeah, but you know I intentionally went to bed early because I didn't want to be awake if the process happened Oh, but yeah, and anyway nothing happened. What's the purpose of working with that stick? So why milk the venom at that point in time there was mysterious strandings of tiger sharks on the beaches in that part of the world And I had a hypothesis that the reason that the tiger sharks were dying was because they were trying to eat sea snakes Oh, and sea snakes come by the tiger shark because their skin's too thick Okay, but my hypothesis was that these soft tissue in the mouth Yeah, and so the only way we could test that was to get sea snake venom and get tiger shark tissue and run tests - So I went to collect the sea snake venom. - Yeah, what did you-- - We found out that tiger sharks are fully susceptible to venom, they do not have an immunity. Some fish do, some fish actually do have an immunity snake. Venom, some mammals have immunity to cobra venom, blah, blah, blah. Tiger sharks do not, it kills the tissue in the cells just the same as any other fish. So it may be why those tiger sharks, which they had plenty of autopsies on, but they could never find any harm. I think that's what was happening. - Have you seen what snake venom does to blood? - Yeah, like this video I saw it years ago, but it's like literally just a jar of blood and then they drop like some snake venom into it. - Blah, blah. - And it coagulates. Like it's just a regular little cup of blood. - Turns into jello. - Turns into jello, yeah. - Within like a couple of minutes. - Yeah, it's bad. - And there are multiple types of snake venom. - Wow. - And that grows how the sound effects they've had it, yeah. - And that's just happening in your veins. - In your body, yeah. And that's, you know, there's hemotoxic cytotoxic and neurotoxic venom. And then various snakes have various cocktails of those three. So, you know, some will rot tissue at the site, some will shut down your organs, some will do this to your blood. It's, it's phrase snakes are terrifying. - The sucking the venom out thing that you see in movies or like you got bitten and somebody like sucks it out. Is that not true? - Got it. - Complete waste. - Complete waste, yeah. - Got it. - Because, you know, your blood pumps around your body. Well, you sucked it for no reason? - Yeah, dude. - I was like, "Oh, my balls got bitten by the snake." - You got to save if you do. - Damn. Okay, so that's complete bullshit. - It is, yeah. - Apparently it's like the number one nightmare around the world. - Is this snake bite? - Yeah. Like, there's like dream studies like across cultures and like, in America, it's like your teeth falling out. - Yeah. - And then like through all of Asia and Africa, it's just snakes. - Well, it makes sense. I mean, you know, in India, there's 60,000 snake bite deaths a year. - Yeah. - That's a huge number. - 60,000? - That's what I mean. - And so, you're not worried about that when you're sleeping outside, even though you have shelter, a snake can easily come in while you're sleeping, just like, you're not going to cross your mind. - They don't. Like, you don't. The snakes aren't coming into your tent. They don't want anything to do with you. - They bite 60,000 people, so they clearly do so. - Yeah, because they're doing a flu room of street with them this way. - That is in some cases. - That makes them dance for no reason. - No, but don't they defang them? - For those, yeah, for those snake shows and things. But a lot of those snake bites are usually, you know, collecting wood or working in tea farms or stuff like that. These things do happen, you know. Could I stand on a snake and it bite me absolutely? - That's what I think would be most likely. - That's more scary. - That's more scary. - Take a step, you stand on it. And then they reactively try to bite you. - And they're not going to hunt, right? - It's defensive. It's not aggressive. - Yeah, God. - Have you seen any of the, what is it? Anacondas and the Everglades? - The Burmese pythons. - For the Burmese pythons, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, it's crazy what's going on down there. I mean, those Burmese pythons have led to, I believe it's 80 or maybe 90 now percent reduction in the mammals in the Everglades. - Yeah. - Like they've taken 80 to 90% of the mammals out of the Everglades. - Is it invasive species? - Yeah. - They're just released by like private collectors, right? - Yeah, so Hurricane Andrews in, I want to say 94, but you'd have to fact check me, hit South Florida. And there was a facility that had a bunch of these snakes, these Burmese pythons from Myanmar, from Burma. And they got out into the Everglades. And now they're just, they're ramped. - Is there any way to control that? - So the state of Florida has a bounty on their head where I'm making up the number, but you get 20 bucks a snake or something like that, if you turn them in. So there are these guys, like there's a guy named the Python cowboy and stuff on Instagram, and they go out and they collect these snakes, and they turn them in for 20 bucks a piece or whatever. - That worked out horribly in India. - Yeah, with the Coca-Cola, you heard about this? - No, tell me. - So I think it was, I was at a Dutch East India trading company or something like that, like they basically were trying to solve a Coca-Cola problem. - It was English, I think. - It was the English, right? And they were trying to solve a Coca-Cola problem in England, so what they start doing is putting a bounty on the cobras. - Oh, interesting. - And Indians are smart street people, so they started breeding cobras. - Yeah, there you go. - There you go. - So it is this weird thing where it's like, okay, we can make 120, whatever it is, per snake. - Yeah. - Well, aren't we just start a farm a snake and start animal in the game? - And then they stop the bounty system and then all these farms were like, well. - Well, now we got all these snakes. - Yeah. - And then they probably just released all their snakes, and then they even made snakes, probably worse. - Yeah, yeah. - That's people for you. - Every time we interfere with nature, whether that's introducing invasive species to control other species, trying to eradicate something, we throw the thing off balance. There's no, we've never once been like, okay, let's add this animal or remove this animal and it hasn't had a big trickle down it. - But I've heard some good things about like, introducing beavers to certain areas and they've like, revitalized river systems. - 100%, because that's not an introduction, that's a real way. - Well, it's right, it's like the beavers weren't there because they had been like-- - It's vatriated, it's not the time to use it, basically hunted out. - And then they reintroduced them and then they like, it's not just the river, it's also the plains. - Everything. - It's like, there's amazing video I saw, I'm not doing a good job describing, maybe you could do better. - It's so cool, because like, if you think of a beaver, what a beaver it does, right, it makes dams. And if you go to say the decotus, right, it's out of the codea, and you see this creek, and you look at the creek and from the outside perspective, looking in, you're like, okay, look at this, you've got mounds on either side, this beautiful grassy valley and this little creek going down the middle. It's perfect, it looks amazing. But then you add a beaver into the equation, the beaver comes along and he builds a dam in that creek. Now all of a sudden, that grassy plane that you're looking at is flooded with water. So now you've got a whole wetland. Within a wetland, you get baby frogs, which lead to baby snakes, which lead to more birds, which leads to blank, to blank, to blank, to blank. So you build a whole ecosystem. And a beaver is what we call an ecosystem engineer, our Keystone species. And so by adding a beaver into that, it affects the entire environment, including all of the animals that live in it and brings those numbers up. Without it, to the naked eye, you go, it's perfect here. But you realize it's actually not perfect. The system that you're looking at is broken. - It's based on that animal. - That's right. - Out of ways. So what happens when they were hunting these beavers, 'cause what they were making like, they were using their skin, right? - Yeah, for. - And this was like popular in Canada and North America. - All over. - All over. - Beaver fur is the highest fur density. 'Cause you know, so beaver skin never gets wet. 'Cause their fur is so dense. - Oh wow. - That you can put it under water and the water doesn't penetrate through the hair. - Oh wow. - So it's one of the-- - Incredibly valuable. You think about it at the time before raincoats. You're like, that's right. I need a beaver skin pro. - Oh, interesting. Okay. So they start, what'd you say, XPatriating? - Yep. - XPatriating, yeah. - XP, okay. And then what happens to these different areas at that time? We're talking about this like 1600s. This is happening. - So what happens? - Everything is happening is at first nothing. 'Cause you're like, everything's still the same. Because beavers build dams. Those dams last for a year, or five years, or 10 years, or 15 years. - Oh, interesting. - But then slowly the dams begin to break down. And as the dams break down, all that water recedes, as that water recedes, an area that was a wetland now becomes dry. All the things that use that for seasonal reproduction die off. So it's like a slow burn. - And now you don't know what the catalyst was because it was 15 years ago. - Exactly. - And who came up with this idea to reintroduce them? That's brilliant. - I don't know, but do you know how they first did it? - How? - Parachutes. - You go look this up. Parachuting beavers. - No, fuck it. - You think I'm joking and I am not. - Why would they use parachutes? Why not just like simply place them in there? - Because a lot of the systems they'd hunted them out were very remote. So in order to put a lot of beavers back into the environment quickly, they put parachutes on beavers. I'm not joking in these little boxes and dropped them out of airplanes all throughout the area. This is not a gag. This is the real deal. Dude, biology used to be wild. I wish I'd been a biologist 40 years ago. I'd be like, "Well, you know what we're gonna do this week? We're gonna parachute some beavers." And nobody would have looked at you funny. They would be like, "Let's do it. Let's build some parachutes for some beavers." - 1948 Ohio Department of Fish and Game program to relocate beavers from Northwest Idaho to the Chamberlain Basin in Central Idaho. - Yep. - 76 beavers just by paratroopers. - By paratroopers. - Wow. - Isn't that cool? - And it worked. - And it worked? - But they said a lot of the beavers died, go figure. - Yeah. - But yeah, it 100% worked and kept some of them in the environment. - Yeah. - Wow. - Crazy. - All right guys, take a break for a second. It's time to take control of your mental health. The world may feel uncertain and out of control at times, but one thing you do have control over is taking care of your mental health. Talk space makes it easy to start. Better mental health leads to better overall health. Just like your physical body needs exercise, your mental health needs maintenance and attention. The better your mental health, the better your physical health and vice versa. Talk space helps you build confidence and skills. 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I think an American's going to take it. What? I'm going Ben Shelton. Give me, give me, what does Kousey have? Well, an American. Kousey's got Alchra as a 29%, they got Ben Shelton at 8%. The highest rank to American on count. I'm telling you. What about the other guy? What's his name? Medvedev or whatever? Taylor Fritz is at 4% and then Medvedev at 3%. Who is the, who's the center? You think of center center center? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, he's out. Yeah. Oh, so this is it's wide open. Alchra is coming off of injury. Yep. We might have an American taking. I know. The last American to take it was they brought it. And Andy. Oh, three. Wow. Okay. That's wild. It's been some time. But imagine if, but if no, back to it, you know, all time legends, you got enough. You got enough. The fact that he's this old and still cooking motherfuckers is awesome. Because he's nasty and also tennis isn't a real sport. Yeah. Play it. It's not a real sport. You can play it to your 40s. Federer is going to do a little exhibition. I saw at 45. Yeah. And I saw he was sitting. He's nervous. He hasn't played singles in like months or even years. Oh, really? Yeah. So that'd be a fun. US Open is fun. I'm not going to lie. Yeah. Are you going to go? Yes. But God damn, he's taking prices up. Oh, crazy. It is. I mean, the gouging. Yeah. They're gouging. Yeah. Do you think it's World Cup? Like on the edge of the World Cup, like he would pay crazy money for tickets. So they did bump it. Yep. It's data centers, bro. It's a data center. It's billionaires. It's capitalism. It's AI. Yeah. That's where we would. It's private equity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why is it increasing the payout though? Everyone's got a bump it down. Yeah. Oh, man. Everyone's going to go in there and be like, yo, let's cut these down. Yo, freeze the tent as prices. Yeah. Shout out data centers, give it juice a break. We're blazing for absolutely everything until data centers cable. Yeah. They're going to figure out a way to tie it. Yeah. Well, who owns the data? Let's get back to the show. Let's get back. Okay. I need another death story. Another death story. Okay. Because I've seen a few and I'm sure you probably told them before, but that's okay. I mean, they're all fun. I was thinking of one that I don't think I've told, which is, uh, it's not me. It's my cameraman. It's good story. Okay. We conducted a huge elephant translocation. So we captured conflict elephants and moved them to a national park. Got it. So in Southern Mozambique, there was an area where there are 24 elephants that were killing people. The elephants were being killed. The whole thing, like bad conflict, right? The elephants would come into a village to raid a cornfield. The villagers would throw sticks and rocks at them. The elephants would get enraged, run through the village. They'd flatten a hot kill person. That kind of thing. Yeah. I was gnarly. So we performed this big elephant capture in translocation, huge ordeal, three helicopters, five semi trucks, 65 ground personnel, you know, darting, capturing. It's crazy. Big, big production. And you're coordinating all this with the local government. Everything. Yeah. This is a national park. It's everybody. Exactly. Yeah. Um, and it's, it's a big effect. Takes a lot of people. I was just one of the players, not the whole, not the whole picture. But, um, anyway, we went to capture these elephants, and we caught all the elephants except for the bull, like the big main male, right? Huge tusks, big head, like huge, huge animal. And, uh, the very end of the second day, and we catch him finally, right? We dart him from the helicopter. He goes down, we land the helicopter, run in, pull his trunk out so he can breathe, cut the road in, lift him up with the crane onto the semi truck. It's a huge ordeal. And long story short, we get him onto that flatbed. And then what you have to do is once you crane them onto the flatbed, you then move them to a transport truck, which is basically like, you have a conveyor belt that move them into a transport crate and then you wake them up, you know, with, uh, with the reversal, drug reversal, and they stand up. And then you, you ship them out because you can't keep them asleep. It was like a 16 hour drive. You can't keep them asleep that whole time. So, uh, we finally get this big boy huge, like so big that the, you know, if he moves, he's going to rock the whole truck around the whole kind of thing. And we put him on the conveyor belt and he moves into the wake-up box. We hit him with their drug reversal, so he starts to pop up. But the back of the semi truck, so think of the semi truck with a big container on the back. Has these two doors that come together like this? And those doors are held from not falling out the backs by a little chain with a latch. Somebody had forgotten to latch one of the chains. Oh no. And my cameraman sitting here, like, shooting up at the elephant as he's waking up, you know, and we're about to close the doors, and the elephant gets up. He's so big, like I mentioned, he rocks the semi truck and the door goes shooting open and the chain's not there to catch it. And these doors are 15 feet tall, six inches thick steel, you know, they weigh as much as a car, each door. And this door comes crashing down and my cameraman's sitting right underneath it. And as the door falls, literally something miraculous, the, the cable that, as I mentioned, was not latched, hooked on to the little latch. But just, just out of pure luck that had caught it for just a half second, well, my cameraman saw it went shit and moved out the way. And then this thing hit, and it hit like this far from his foot, like literally as he jumped out of the way, this whole door and this elephant's rocking around in the truck, this door's coming down. There's people everywhere. We're scrambling because the elephant's about to come out of the thing. And my cameraman miss getting flattened by an inch. Dead guarantee. Yeah, it's like dropping a Honda SUV on top of you, you know, I mean, like these doors, 20 people kind of left one of these doors, you know, it's like that. And where were you? Mozambique. Wow. That was crazy because we've got other stuff where animals have charged and stuff like that. But that was one of those instances where literally if anything had gone differently, if that, if that little corner latch had not hooked just the way it happened to as it fell, just for that half second to slow it down, my cameraman right in front of me, who's one of my best friends, I literally spoke of his wedding, would have been flattened right there. In the field, in the middle of the bush, inside of a road, Mozambique. What about when you were jumping through the waterfall? Yeah, that sucked a lot. That was a, we were in Thailand and I was showing off for a bunch of girls. And so I decided to climb up inside of a waterfall and jump through like a veil curtain of water instead of jump off the top of it. And yeah, it turns out the physics of jumping through 10,000 pounds of water. Real down. It's not, it's not the way you see it in a Marvel movie. I'll tell you that. Yeah, so push me down onto the rocks and I broke my back. Oh, I landed right here on my spine. I went paralyzed from the neck down and I was like, this can cost. No, I wasn't can cost. I broke a little piece of my spine right here, right below my, I forget the tea number, the vertebrae. And I was actually drowning because I hit the rocks and then the water pushed me off the rocks and I was sinking. But I couldn't move my hands and legs because of the little sprake in my spine. Fucking pinch of the line. So you were aware of it totally aware of anything. I felt it like I was like, oh, that hurt, you know, when I hit it. And then I'm just like sinking into the water. And the water was clear because it was in this beautiful river in Thailand. And I'm like, swim, swim, swim, and I'm underwater. And it's like not rapids, but you know, like, like flowing water. And all of a sudden, I saw my girlfriend's hand, it was my wife now. My hair hand come down and grabbed me and she pulled me out because she saw the whole thing happen and then never saw me surface. But the water was clear. So she could see me. So she pulled me out and I was at that point in time, I was ready to die. Because I was like, I'm paralyzed from the neck down. It's over. And they built a stretcher out of bamboo because we were in the jungle, carried me out. There was somebody had a sat phone, I think, because they had a pickup truck waiting for me. And they put me in the bed of a pickup truck. And it was a three or four hour drive, I forget. And somewhere along the drive, I started to be able to wiggle a toe again. And I was like, it was like a sigh of relief, but still panic, but like I wasn't completely paralyzed. It just pinched a nerve or something like that and shot everything down. And it took a few days for everything to come back. Yeah. Wow. But that feeling of like slowly slipping into the water with no ability. It couldn't move. And I'm telling it's the weirdest thing because like I can swim, you know, and I'm like, swim, like swim. And my body's just like completely non-responsive. Yeah. That sucks. And how are those days recovering? Like you go to a hospital, I presume, and you're just laying there, like am I ever going to move again? Yes, I went to the hospital in Chiang Mai in Thailand, which is actually a really nice hospital. And you know, I got X-rays and all that stuff. And I was in the hospital bed for three days, I want to say. And by the end of the second day, I was back to fully moving. You know, it just I don't really understand it, but basically the ability to move kind of came back from my feet up, and even by like the next day, I could move my hands and eat and drink, but they wanted to keep me very still with the little fracture in my spine and just make sure everything was okay. And then they basically released me and were like, "Here, your painkiller is good luck." I just spent three days in a very boring hospital in Thailand wishing I hadn't jumped off that stupid waterfall. - Whoa. Anything close with one of the major predators that we'd be familiar with? - I mean, I did this thing with crocodiles in a cage recently that was nuts. In fact, actually, this was kind of wild. If you check out my Instagram real quick, Mark, you'll see a thing I did with a lot. So I've been working on this show for the last about a year and a half for Discovery Channel that I'm not really supposed to talk about, but we're going to say a lot about it. - Yeah. - Yeah. So the show is about, yeah, that one, that little like ATV thing, one over. Yeah, if you pull that up. So the show is about putting yourself in the perspective of predators. So we were building these contraptions. - This looks like you're in the perspective of prey. - That's the plan. - Yeah, that's the plan. - It looks like jackass. - Yeah, exactly like that. - It's like a scientific jackass, yeah. But yeah, we built these various contraptions like this. And so this is obviously with an African lion and hung meadle over it and made it look like a zebra. And then I was running this ATV with the lions. I did one with crocodiles. I got in a chainmail suit with piranhas and giant squid. That was wild two different locations, not the same place. So yeah, this last year has been pretty nuts doing some of these experiments. - Why? - Well, for ratings, obviously. (laughing) You know, I mean, look, it's a discovery show. So it has to be loud. - This is like the height of what we call white people shit. - It really is. And I think there's about eight comments on that. Let's say that. - Oh, yeah. - All from my life friends. - Yeah. - You're an idiot, bro. - But yeah, no, it really is. It's, I think this is my version of a midlife crisis. (laughing) It's a, you know, it is a discovery show. So it has to be loud and get attention, all those things. But the idea is human beings that are usually in the perspective of prey don't get to survive. And it's not just about being a human being. It's about what would it be like to be the zebra in the Serengeti? What would it be like to be, you know, a will to be getting attacked by crocodiles? So we try to build all these contraptions, which on paper when we put the show together was like, this will be sick, this will be awesome. And then when you're sitting there in the ATV with the lion trying to eat you, you're like, this was not a good idea. (laughing) - It also isn't just white people shit. There's this guy, caveman wildlife. - Oh, I love this guy. I know him, he's great. He's the best. - Yeah, he's awesome. - But he's, he's a, he's fixing the stereotype, dude. He's going out there and just full on just like, catching just wild crocodiles. - He's also super knowledgeable. He always tells you the Latin name of the animal, which I appreciate. You know, he knows the natural history. He's just great. - He's just a great dude. - Nah, that's great. - That's awesome. - Bye bye. - Bye bye. - He's like the Jackie Robinson of snakes. - Nah, he's awesome. - That's awesome. - Yeah, I could have that. (laughing) - Nah, that kid's, that kid's awesome. - These are gonna, these are gonna be your kids out. So I'm telling you. - That's a good girl for it, man. - I'm curious, when you were saving the elephants, like what is the organization? Like who's sponsoring these trips? Like who calls the group of people that came to rescue these elephants? - Yeah, so it's a good question. So basically what happened was, we knew these elephants were conflicted elephants, and I sit on a board of a wildlife trust in Africa that gets calls when there's a lot of different conflict things, and that board called me and said, hey, for us, like, there's this herd of elephants that are going to be euthanized, going to be killed. If we don't step in, we need X dollars in order to save them. Cost of a bullet, 60 cents. Cost of moving an elephant's a hundred grand. It's a huge difference, right? And the Mozambique government goes, we don't have $2.4 million to move elephants, right? That wasn't what it cost, but that I'm giving you generals. And so I actually, and this is one of the reasons I do this to answer your question, what you're seeing on screen. I use, and my company uses our production money to fund conservation work. - So the fuck? - Yeah, so instead of taking a salary, I mean, we still pay ourselves, but instead of taking a big salary out of my productions, I take the money that I get from Discovery Channel or Netflix or Animal Planet or whatever it happens to be and put it into conservation work. So we funded 60% of the elephant move, I believe it was, and then another 40 came from various other sources. And then there was Mozambique government. There was the board that I sit on and it's because I have an Ivan Carter Wildlife Foundation. There's about 10 other organizations that all came together to put this work together. - That's great. - Yeah, great. - Oh, thanks. And I love it. And that's the point of doing this stuff, right? It's not just for me to get a thrill, which I do, but to fund conservation work and bring awareness to the animals and talk about elephant conservation and talk about lions. And you know, even when you watch these shows, you go, oh my God, forest is doing jackass stuff with animals. But if you learn, if you listen, we're actually telling a story of the conservation show. - Yeah. - Yeah. - You know about cone snails. - Yeah. These are the most terrifying things to me because predators, like we're talking about, are scary because they look scary. - Yeah. - But you also notice day away from like a bull shark. - That's right. - 'Cause you're the most terrifying thing out there. - That's right. - Very nondescript. - Or so scary to me because they don't look like any, it looks like a shell. - Yeah. - That'll kill you in a couple seconds. - Yeah. - So what other animals, and you can even-- - Told you so. - Talking about cone snails for a little bit. - But what other animals are unassuming that you, like an average person be like, oh, this is cool. That could kill you in a day. - Great question. - It is a good question. I mean, so cone snails are a good example, which they've got a little venomous bar that they use for defense. Then they can put venom into you and kill you very quickly. There's probably the bluering octopus you've probably heard of. Tiny little octopus, beautiful. If you look it up, you've got little blue spots on it. One bite, you're dead in 10 minutes, I want to say. I mean, don't quote me on that. But it's-- - I almost rather not know about these. - I'm gonna say. - And like, ignorance is bliss 'cause now I'm gonna be looking for an octopus any time I go-- - That little thing can kill you in a few minutes. - But where does that live? - Only in Australia. So as long as you're not picking up-- - As long as you're not picking up Australia, bro. - They'd develop venom there. So as long as you're not picking up tiny, little blue spotted octopus in Australia, you're good. - Wait, why do they develop venom there? Something about Australia as a continent doesn't have a lot of big predators. There's no tigers, there's no lions, there's no-- So instead, they're all at biological warfare with each other. So that's why their snakes are more venomous. They're octopus are more venomous. They're jellyfish are more venomous. Instead of having standard defense mechanisms like we think of, like I'm faster and you're stronger, they have biological warfare. - Wow, so instead of a big bad guy that they all have to worry about, they have to worry about each other. - That's right. - So they have to, oh, that's interesting. - And then the geography makes it weird not really too 'cause that's why there's so many marsupials, right? - Yeah. - And like, why kangaroos exist there and only there? - Yes, so there's this amazing thing called the Wallace Line. - I'm just gonna ask you about that. - There you go, go, go, go, go. - Yeah, we have a YouTube video coming out on it either. This week or next week on my YouTube channel, by the way, because I find this so fascinating. So the Wallace Line is this invisible line that nobody understands. - Get the map up with the Wallace Line. - Yeah, and so yeah, it's this invisible line that nobody, we sort of understand it, but you don't really understand because in some places, two islands are only six or 10 or 12 miles apart and yet there's this line. And animals have never crossed this line. In the sense of, if you're looking at this map, on the left side, where you see Southeast Asia and Borneo and Sumatra, you have all the animals that we think of as animals. And when I say that, I mean we have tigers and we have bears and we have deer and we have all these normal things. - Yeah, yeah. - And on the right side of the line, where you see New Guinea and the Sundar Islands and Timor, you have all these marsupials and there's no tigers and there's no canines and there's no cats. And there's, there are birds that exist on that left side of the line where you see Java by lesser Timor and that don't exist six miles away on the other side. And we've never really understood why until very, very recently, when we understand that basically the land masses moved like this, if that makes sense. So instead of the land masses splitting like this and being like, oh, all these animals just split. They moved like this and came all the way around. - So they're ecologically distinct. - So they're so diverse. - So they couldn't be further apart. - That's right. - And over millions of years. - That's right. - They were brought back together. - Even though they're only six miles apart. - Oh, what an unbelievable, because that is crazy. Especially you look down by Java and lazil studies. - It's like six or 12 miles at one of those islands. - So completely distinct biology. - That's right. - In those areas. - And do they still not cross to this day or are they now crossing because of proximity? - So fascinatingly, they still not crossing outside of a few birds and things because where the wall is lined is there's incredibly deep sea trench and you can see it right there. And you see this is a very good map because you see rhinos and elephants on one side and dingos and kangaroos and koalas on the other. And it's literally just like that. And so there's a very deep trench that runs through there and the currents absolutely rip through there. So usually when animals go to colonize a new area whether they're drifting across on some bamboo or they're swimming that gap 'cause tigers can swim six miles, they just swim across and they colonize a new area. But because of this deep, deep water environment and these massive currents, nothing can make it across without drowning. So they're still not mixing shit. - And it's because of the geography and because of the way things split and they came together that it's created this sort of perfect storm where to us an imaginary line exists. Imagine being explorer or a sailor who's come all the way from England and gone all through Asia, through Southeast Asia and India and everything. And you've seen rhinos and elephants the whole way and you get to the edge of that and you're like rhinos and elephants, then you just paddle your little boat across six miles and you're like, yeah, you're like, new planet. - Yeah. - What are these things, you know? - Yeah. - It's amazing. The law's line is so interesting. - And when did they find it? figured this out about how the plates moved. - I don't know, it's a good question. It's probably in my video that I don't remember stating, but I know the scientists who did it was, I believe it was David Wallace, who's the one who wrote, who can't figure it out. I just don't remember the date, yeah. - Unbelievable. - Yeah, it's really cool. Okay, wait, any other little animals that you wouldn't suspect that can kill you? - Blu-ray octopus is fire. - It's cool, right? Box jelly fish, look. - Box jelly, stonefish, do you know what they are? - What's that? - Yeah, look up a stonefish. So it's a fish that looks like a rock. So it's perfect for stepping on. And highly, yeah, that guy right there, highly, highly toxic venom in their spines. - Yeah. - And they love to sit in tight pools and shallow areas where people like to play. - What a creepy looking thing. - Look at that guy. - Yeah. - I'm not going in the water. - So you step on one of these spines. - This is why we don't swim. - I mean, there's treatments and things, but yeah, they have highly toxic, highly venomous spines. Yeah, really painful. - Whoa. - Yeah. - I'm growing up in Florida. We were always scared of amoebas. - Yeah. Well, those were like the worst. - Exactly. - Like crawl up your nose and that's so funny because as a kid, it's like, my mom would tell me about the amoebas. Like it'd be a hot day. She'd be like, - It's fucking with me. - No, no, she's the real thing. I don't really know all the sides, but I'm sure you could explain better. - She'd pull it up. - The way that the lore works is like, it's a tiny little like basically single cell organism you can think of. And if you jump into like still water like a pond in the heat of summer, they can go up your nose and kill you in like three days and you have no symptoms. You just die. - And there's no cure for it either. - Right, yeah. - And over here, there's like one kid in Florida that dies on amoeba. - So that's an important point though. It's very, very rare. It doesn't happen often. But in certain stagnant bodies of water, where there's not enough water flow and stuff, you get these rare brain eating amoebas and there's no cure for it. So if you happen to snort that water by mistake, 'cause your nasal pastors are connected to your brain. If you happen to get water in your nose by mistake, these brain eating amoebas that look like that little splat of nothing there. She's gonna get into your brain and there's nothing you can do about it. But it's incredibly rare to be clear. I think it's good the parents are telling their kids to be careful and not go in disgusting water, but it is very, very rare. - Yeah, yeah. - There was a guy I saw in one of your videos, I think it was with the, at the Ambani Reserve or whenever you're like, what is it called again, the Ambani? - Dude, Ventara. It's a fun role. - I want to talk about that for sure. But he's a guy that I've seen with a pack of lions if I'm not mistaken. - I think he's, yeah, Dean. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. Could someone with that type of expertise with lions introduce himself to a new pride and develop that relationship or is that something you can only develop with like little, little, little ones? And then-- - So there's two guys that do that. Dean Schneider is the one that you're thinking of. And he's hand raised these lions and they have accepted him very much so as a member of the pride. - Got it. - And Dean, who's a very close friend, so I don't want this to come off the wrong way. I don't care who you are, I don't care if you're Dean, I don't care who you are. You cannot just go make friends with a new pride of lions. - Not possible. - Doesn't happen, you know? Because you're a praise species. And they're a predator, you know? And what Dean has done is he's made himself a member of their pride by never presenting himself as a praise species and these are not wild lions. They live in a semi wild environment, got big open enclosure, but he's never been seen as prey. He's the guy who brings them food, but he's not on the menu item. - But he is distinct. Like their relationship with him is distinct from other humans. - 100%. - If I try to walk in there, they'd kill me in two seconds. - So they become wild lions once you're there. - Yes. - Absolutely. - So regardless of the environment they're in, they still see you as prey, but they don't see him as prey. - That's right. - And what is that? Is that smell, is that visual familiarity, is that it is psychological conditioning. He has taught them over time and he's done that by like here he is, they're eating a zebra in this video, right? Or a second ago they were. And he's still taught them you cannot hurt me. And he's done that by probably positive and negative reinforcement. Meaning he'll smack one on the nose, not gonna hurt it, but be like no, like you know, prey doesn't do that, prey doesn't stand up to you, prey doesn't present themselves as don't come at me or I'm gonna come back at you. That's not what prey does. Pray goes don't hurt me, right? So he's used his body language in his ability to understand their body language to assimilate. He couldn't go walk up to a wild pride of lions and try this, they'd kill him. And I couldn't go to his lions and try this. Even if I did that body language, they'd probably still kill him. - But I've seen you with like panthers at that reserve where like you felt very comfortable holding them, touching them. Are these domestic, can you domesticate a fucking panther? - No, so that video of me swimming with the Jaguars and Jaguars, that's okay, right? - Yeah, it depends on the vernacular, but yeah, it's all fine. But what you don't see and what I've never told anybody is five minutes after that video, the black one turned on us and charged me. And if I had turned and run instead of going, "Hey, hey, hey!" it would have killed me, for sure, like that. Five minutes after that video was done. It just snapped, like it just changed its entire modality. It didn't know me, so those were young Jaguars to be clear. My friend Tiago hand raised them, so they were used to people, similar to Dean, but they were much younger and younger animals don't have that disposition as much. They were only two-year-old Jaguars. And he said, "Let's try this." If the Jaguars give us biological cues, they don't want it, they don't want to come in the water, they don't like you, we're not doing it. That's of course, I'm not gonna force anything to do anything. So we jumped in the water, Jaguars came to Tiago, my buddy in the video, who hand raised them, then said, "Oh, we like this guy and came over to me." We swam with him for 10 minutes. It was an amazing experience, a really good place, not a Tiger King place, a world's leading biologist, and Jaguars really, really tremendous place. And then we're like, okay, the Jaguars are starting to be a little standoff-ish. Let's get out. - What are the cues for that? - Just the ears are starting to pin back a little bit. So he's clocking these things. - 100% everything's watching the whisker movement, the tail flicks, the ears. - Got it. - The full body line. Just like you have a dog and you're like 100%. - You know, that dog's hungry. That dog's sleepy, that dog doesn't want to be pet right now. You know your dog. I don't know your dog, but you know your dog. And so, yeah, he goes, look, these Jaguars are starting to have enough. And I was like, let's get out of here. We get out of the water. I'm on the riverbank about to pick up my shoes. I wasn't going to tie my shoelace to make myself fall nothing just about to pick up my shoes and leave, 'cause I still have more knowledge than your average person about their body language. So I know not to turn my back on them, not to crouch down time. My shoelace is nothing. I'm just about to pick up my shoes. This one just goes, and I heard it coming. So I turn and went, you know, and the Jaguar stopped in its tracks and turned and ran around. If I had just jumped like that or ran out of instinct, it would have nailed me, for sure. - Yeah. - I mean, why? - And that's a wild pass. - That's the image of it, right? - Yeah, I think the last video I posted on Instagram is a video of us swimming with them. - I mean, but that knee jerk instinct, most human beings will not have. - That they will have. - No, most, I think your instinct to turn around, get big and yell at this Jaguar as it's approaching you ferociously is a learned instinct. - Yeah. - Yes, and you have to practice it. And in that moment, were you cognizant of the decision or was it so reflexive for you that that's just how you operate with the animal? - It was reflexive because the whole time going into it, I told myself, don't act like Bray. Don't ever, no matter what happens. Like in this frame, if you had just dug my claws in, if I had gone, stop, stop, stop. He would have gone worse. If I had gone, hey, you know, he probably would have stopped. So I'm telling myself this, the whole time, if I'm having fun, I'm thinking about how am I conducting myself? - This is crazy rough. - But that's what animal people do. You learn to speak animal to the best of your ability. - Some animals understand human better than the others, you know? Like we swam with the Gator Boy Chris. - Oh yeah, shout out Gator Boy Chris. - I love Chris Salat. - Yeah, it's one of my close friends. - I love Chris. - He was great. - We went down to South Florida and we saw, we saw where I was some Gators. - Yeah. - Unsettling. - And he speaks alligator. - He does, but I don't trust the Alligators are the same. Like Jaguar, I can be like, yeah, that's like my cat. Like I can understand when there was a gator, that's the dinosaur. It is and their brains are wired differently. So it's like, I don't really trust a Gator to be cool. But the same thing, I agree with you by the way. It's Steve Irwin who said, Crocodiles are easy. They always want to kill you. People are harder because they pretend to be your friend first. And that's it, dude. Because every animal and every individual animal of that species is different. You can't trust people. You can't go to a bar and be like, I trust every guy in here. Doesn't mean one guy isn't going to stab you and take your wallet when you leave the bar. That's an individual. These Jaguars are the same. That golden colored one, I felt like and I'm probably wrong. I could have stuck my finger in its butt and I wouldn't have done anything. That black one there, this is going to come out wrong. Here we go again. But that black Jaguar, right? It was, yeah, yeah, yeah, it had dead issues. (all laughing) But no, it had Jaguar with the heart of it. (all laughing) It had some kind of like a, you could see it switch could flip, you know? Yeah, and so it's just, it's individuals and they're the same species raised the same way, you know? And so it just, that one had like a tick to it and the other one didn't, you know? So not just the species, 'cause I agree with you on the gators. The gators will eat you at the first chance they get, no matter what, but the individuals of that species. Can you talk to, can you, sorry bro. (all laughing) Can you take us into the Amazon for a second? Sure. Okay. Can you first explain why the Amazon is so sensational? Like there's a lot of talk about the Amazon, rainforests and it's so big, whatever. But I don't think at least definitely I don't, but I think maybe people don't understand why it's distinct from other forests, other places. Like what is so safe? special about the Amazon? - Well, the main thing is it's the lungs of our entire planet. The Amazon jungle is the largest next to the ocean, CO2 sequestering body on Earth. So it takes in carbon dioxide and spits out oxygen, which makes it the lungs of the entire planet of Earth. So that huge mass of trees that we just think of as wild place is the reason we're sitting here breathing comfortably right now, or at least one of the top reasons. And so that's the most important thing about that, right? And then if you understand that the Amazon is shrinking at a very vast rate, even though we still look at it like this and go, "Wow, there's a lot of Amazon." It's getting shrunk from the outside in. You might be able to find like a map of the Amazon over the last 20 years or something. You see how the roads are cutting through and the development's shrinking and stuff. So the most important message I want to say is that the Amazon is incredibly important. Outside of that from an exciting and discovery and entertainment and all those other things standpoint, it's just incredible. It's hugely diverse. People like to think of the Amazon or the Arctic or the Sahara as one thing. The difference between the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Brazilian Amazon or Suriname or Guyana or Venezuela, any of these places completely different. Well, we're talking about the Amazon and we're talking about the untouched parts of the Amazon. I'm not saying there aren't like some, maybe some roads, but like really untouched. The size of it is equivalent to the entire United States. I believe so, I believe that's all right. So, there's an untouched forest that exists on planet Earth, the size of the United States, more or less. No, and that's, it's good that you bring that up because the Amazon is the size of the United States. There are cities in the Amazon. Like there's Menal, which is a big city in Brazil that has four or five million people in it. One point in time is the richest city in the world 'cause the rubber trade, yeah. But there are chunks of the Amazon that are probably the size of New England, not the size of the United States. I'm making this up, but there are chunks of the Amazon that are the size of US states that are untouched. Completely untouched. Yeah. As far as we know, there's probably native tribes and uncontacted people and stuff. And then there are probably chunks that people themselves have never been at. Holy shit. What do you think it's the most misunderstood part about the Amazon? I think it's this sort of wild, expansive, impenetrable thing. You know, we think of the Amazon like that. It's kind of what I think about it, yeah. But it's not. And that's what's sad is like we could cut down the Amazon if we wanted to. We could build highways through the Amazon if we wanted to. We could get to every corner of the Amazon if we wanted to. We haven't 'cause we haven't needed to because it's the size of the United States and we can go from the outside in. We haven't had to go to the center of it. But it's by no means this thing that we can never get through or never destroy or never explore. It's very obtainable to humans with our technology. If we want to. My perspective on the Amazon is that it's incredibly difficult to live and survive and thrive in. Is that completely wrong? You know, there are better people to answer this question than me, but it is more difficult than some of the tropical places we talked about, beach type places, but certainly not easy. And mostly because of the parasitic load, you know, there's a lot of parasites there. There's a lot of water amoebas not trying to eat your brain, but stomach ones and things like that. And then in a lot of places in the Amazon, food is scarce. You think food is abundant in the jungle. It's not. In a lot of places in the Amazon, food is quite scarce. If you can't kill a river turtle, you're not gonna eat, you know? Yeah, it's not like there's fruit trees growing everywhere, you know? Like there are a lot of places in the Amazon where you, if you're living as an on-contact to tribe, you have to hunt to survive and you have to be successful. And hunting in a jungle is much harder than hunting in certain other ecosystems. Why is that? Anywhere where you have high species diversity, meaning a lot of different types of animals, you have lower abundance of each animal. So here in North America, you got shoot a deer. We got tons of deer. We don't have a million different kinds of deer. We have four kinds of deer, right? Not really, but basically. So there's a lot of those four kinds. When you have 10,000 species or 10 million like in the Amazon, there's only small populations of each of those because there's so many different kinds. So anytime species diversity goes way up, abundance goes down. So that makes hunting harder because in the Amazon, you don't have a hundred kinds of deer. You have five, I'm making it, you don't actually, but you have say 50 kinds of things that you can eat, but each kind of thing that you can eat has small populations. Instead of four kinds of things that you can eat that have huge populations. So you learn like tracking patterns and all of a sudden, it's gone. And then you have to find another way to hunt or another. Or it's just hard to find because there's not that many of them. Naturally, not because of humans interfering. People often think like, oh, wildlife is the same, right? Like, as a sense of like, there's 10,000 lions, there's 10,000 tigers, there's 10,000 deer. It's not like that at all, you know? The predator prey equation balances and moves populations. And in the Amazon, you have a lot of different kinds of things. So you have smaller amounts, regardless of human imprint of those things. And there's only so many of those things you can eat, right? You cut the Amazon's probably home to the highest bug diversity in the world. But every ecological niche that a bug takes, meaning every leaf cutter bug means there's no rabbit that takes that place. And a rabbit's a great human food source. Does that make sense to like, you can't eat the bug, but you can't eat the rabbit. You go to England, there's rabbits everywhere. They don't have bugs. You go to the Amazon, there's bugs everywhere. They don't have rabbits. So when you have that kind of makeup of species, there's not a lot that we can eat. So then how was it so that there were these flourishing societies that existed throughout the Amazon? And now they've all gone away to disease or to whatever else happened. But like at one point in time, I think I was reading that like, there were millions and millions of people living throughout the Amazon with like associated roadway structures and pyramids. And they've done those lidar scans. It's amazing. So these things, so if there isn't the diverse, well, the areas, tons of diversity of the things that you can consume, but not much of it, how could they thrive in that environment? Well, what we have been learning, I believe, is that a lot of the Amazon and a lot of the Amazonian people and societies that you just mentioned were actually horticulturists. They were growing things. Oh, so interesting. Yes, they were farming. And there's even a theory out there. I forget his name, the guy went on Joe Rogan. I think he's a member of the Explorer's Club right here in New York, by the way, which is great if you guys haven't been. Are you a member? I am, yeah. It's awesome. They don't want to go, definitely go check it out. There's a theory of one of these pretty famous scientists in the Amazon. I'm blanking on his name right now. It does the lidar scans and everything that a lot of the Amazon was planted. He actually believes that a large chunk of the Amazon, whether it was it inadvertently or inadvertently, was cultivated to have more food. Like they found fruit trees, not fruit like you or I are thinking, not a plum tree. But like, oh, here's this weird little seed, nothing that we can eat. It's not indigenous to the Amazon at all. Or it was from one part of the Amazon, but they spread it as much as possible. So there was more food availability. Is it Charles Clement? That sounds right. Yeah, that sounds right. But yeah, so there are now, and there's more-- we used to think that there were no longstanding societies or cultures in the Amazon. There was no food availability, really. And that's why there was no population. And now we're starting to learn there was a decent population. And there's actually a lot more food availability, potentially, because people made it that way. Wow. Yeah, he associated with the strong version of the idea that much of the Amazon rainforest we see is not pristine wilderness, but a landscape heavily engineered by indigenous people. Yeah. And argues that pre-columbian Amazonians deliberately encourage and plant a useful tree's fruit nut in palm species. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? Wow. There's a really interesting kid. And I definitely won't remember his name, who's a member of the Explorers Club. That's where I met him, who is trying to bring all of these various fruits, nuts, and seeds from the Amazon into mainstream fruit markets and things. Because if you ever go to the Amazon, they'll hand you this orange thing like this that you've never seen or heard of before. And it's got some crazy name, and you eat it, and you're like, this is better. This is like a mango meets an apple, you know? Or this is a kiwi mixed with a grape, or I'm just making it up. But you know, these fruits that you've never heard of or seen of, and they're so delicious, but they only exist in the Amazon. So there's this guy who's trying to bring these fruits and like make the more mainstream agreements to the US. Oh, that's kind of the story with psychedelic mushrooms. There's like, there was, like, it was kind of unknown to Americans for like a, basically up until like the '50s. Like there were stories of like Jesuit priests that talked about these like psychedelic things that I don't have. But they didn't really know exactly what it was. And it was kind of contained to like certain parts of Mexico. And then Maria Sabina was a woman that like a Harvard researchers and like potentially the US government like found and got in touch with the preserved like the historical like mushroom, psilocybin culture. Oh, wow. And then introduced it to like the academic world in America that then populated throughout like the hippie movement. But it was, the mushrooms themselves were still growing. And just nobody was aware of the compound. Yeah, exactly. It was like specific like kind of shaman sort of medicine women in Central America that were aware of like what they were, where they grew and like how to actually cultivate them to my understanding. Dude, I just saw this thing on my podcast recently. One of the guys brought it up of this guy taking toad venom. Oh, gumbo. Have you ever seen this? I'm not sure what it's called. Oh, as a drug. Yeah. He's down by a creek. He's down by a river and he ingests this toad venom. And he just, he rolls into the river and he's screaming. And it's, this is a thing that exists in nature that's coming off of frogs in the Sonoran desert. It's unbelievable. Yeah, some of these things are so potent. Cambo toad bit. That sounds right. I think it's like an initiation right for like some tribes. Yeah, this is my quarry right here. The legend. Do you know him fearless and far? I don't. He's awesome. What does he do? He tries all these things. He basically is. just explore adventure that like documents his travels like around the world. He's cool. But I need to get more like wired into those people. I'm so like focused, singularly focused on the wildlife stuff that I can look at that guy's lips. And so like singularly focused on the wildlife stuff, I miss out on meeting a lot of these really interesting people. But like I'm pretty sure it's the poison dart that like they would make weapons out of that in the right amounts. It basically puts you into like a near death state where you hallucinate like crazy. I think so. Yeah. And I think like West African, there's some specific West African tribes to do it as like an initiation right. I think I'm I'm someone with a fact check that if I'm someone out of computer. I've seen when I've been in the Amazon where they they catch the poison dart frogs and they rub their arrows on them. And then they shoot things out of the trees and the animals drop dead. So it's more about darting the animal with the poison than he's about killing it with the arrow. Right. All right, guys, take a break for a second. We're all trying to feel healthy, right? Drinking more water, getting steps in, taking our vitamins. But here's what most people miss. Your liver health. It affects everything, your energy, digestion, skin, even your metabolism. It's time we show it's some love. That's where dose comes in. It's a clinically backed liver supplement, but not a pill. It's a two ounce daily shot that tastes like fresh orange juice, zero sugar, zero junk, zero calories, your liver handles 500 plus functions a day. It's your body's filter. And when it's overworked, you feel sluggish tired off. Dose helps cleanse your liver, support daily function and can reduce midday crashes, boost metabolism and improve digestion. 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It's got something illegal in here. So shout out you. You guys are absolutely crushing it. I heard they got into Costco. Okay. So you're going to have all the moms hopped up on sour berry neuro. Okay. Costco. These are illegal. Okay. There's definitely something illegal in these. Okay. You're going to have a lot of moms walking around in Costco. And if you're giving these out with the ladies with aprons on their head, if you're giving out the free samples, you're going to have fist fights in a parking lot. Okay. These need to be illegal. There's all I'm going to say. All right. Congratulations, Neuro on finding a way around the system to put pure berry sour flavored cocaine in a pill that we can sell over the counter. God bless you all. I love you at Neuro. You guys are the best. Let's get back to show. Have you ever met any of the, I may guess, they're not uncontacted tribes, but any of these tribes have you ever spent time with them? I've spent time with some very interesting tribes, including some that have never seen white people before, but not like totally uncontacted. Like even, you know, we went to a place called Ramri Island in Myanmar that I don't think there've been any, any Europeans there since World War II. And all the kids, when I say kids, I mean, like 16 and down would run out and like touch our hair and touch our skin and stuff because they'd never seen a European person. And then, uh, yeah, I guess that's part of the most remote. But, you know, it's interesting, even like I went to a village in Columbia that had never seen European people in the Amazon and Columbia. And they still had cell phones, you know, like they didn't have service, but they somebody had brought them cell phones and things and they were playing snake or whatever on them, but they'd never seen a European person in person. So I've never been with those tribes that are so remote that they like didn't know we existed kind of thing. But yeah, that's that's the modern world though, isn't it? Like are there any that are really uncontacted? Like people talk about like the North Sentinelese, but like are there any that we don't have no idea about? In the Amazon, yeah. And I think also in like deep New Guinea and Papua New Guinea, there are small tribal communities that are just completely isolated from the rest of the world. Wow. Yeah. I mean, if you think New Guinea is a good example, there's 800 languages spoken in New Guinea. Why would you have 800 languages? Because you don't get along. You formulate your own language and you keep it to yourselves because you're a tribal culture and that goes to war with all the other cultures. Can you bring up New Guinea on a map? Like how big can New Guinea be? Oh, it's huge. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Type in Papua New Guinea on the, I mean, it's that whole giant island above Australia there where those red dots are. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's a really big landmass. 800. 800 languages spoken there. Yeah. Wow. Wow. That's a lot of languages. Yeah. But that's because the environment is very difficult to navigate and there culturally are a very warring society in people. So you keep to yourself. You speak your own language. And if you encounter another tribe, you kill them immediately. You know, yet more or less. I mean, that's a oversimplification. But yeah. Have you, have you looked at a cargo cults? Cario cults? Yeah. What's that? It's like a weird post-World War II. It's a very specific thing that happened in one place. I don't remember the exact island. But it was a, it was a of Rose and Melanesia during the 19th and 20th centuries where basically World War II like ships would come by and they like docked. So like American soldiers like came or maybe British soldiers. They came to like around Oceana. Okay. And there were these sort of like uncontacted tribes that had never really seen ships or planes or anything. And they just kind of showed up. They're like, hey, we're going to use this as a landing strip to like bring in import export. And we'll give you guys like some food. And we'll just call it even, right? And they kind of brokered this deal. And these people were like, okay, we don't know what's going on. And then they left. And then the people sort of natively built like a religion around these people coming over being like, okay, they showed up. Yeah. And there was like a prophecy that existed on the island from like their own indigenous religion. And then this kind of like fit the religion. So like different priests were like, no, this is because we were doing things. And so then as a result, they developed like a lore around it. And so I like a TikTok video on this. And they now sort of pray to those. Are they making pretend satellites? Yeah. And they were like, they're sort of reenacting the technology that they saw as a way to try to bring back fake plane. And so like they would kind of make this stuff based off the technology that they saw trying to understand. And they sort of created like this cult of like John from. And they think the name comes from this guy being like, yeah, I'm John from England. Yeah. Like, oh, it's John from. Yeah. And so they built like sort of this like ideology. It's not as simple as like indigenous people see planes. And they're like, wow, it's God. Yeah. That's an over simplification. Yeah. But they developed this philosophy. Like, okay, if we do certain marching rituals, they're going to come back with another ship and bring us more technology. Wow. Yeah. It's self-specific. I don't think I'd have to double check exactly where. But yeah, it's really interesting. It's wild. And if you get from there, perspective, you're like, yeah, it makes complete sense. Yeah. These people come in with all these things. They leave them here. And you never see them again. You're like, please come back. Yeah. I mean, we're going to the fits our lore. Like we're going to pay tribute to it. Yeah. Yeah. Especially with all these cool things, right? Like they probably never seen metal before. Yeah. And metal's useful for so many things. Yeah. Yeah. I met a guy named Ben Lamb. Yeah. Yeah. Colossal. Yeah. And you work with them the phone on the stick. Yeah. I'm on their board. Yeah. Yeah. And I met the advisor's board with this conference we were talking about what Colossal's doing. And he actually showed us at the conference the woolly mammoth mice. Yeah. The woolly mice, which was crazy. Pretty wild right? Big furry mice. Yeah. And it is like a very interesting concept, which is, and there's more to the business that exists for this. But like, is it easier to maintain the 12 white rhinos that we have, or is it easier to breed thousands more into existence? And they're, they actually have this technology. They're developing this technology. Right. And I'm sure that there's going to be conversations around like, well, is it actually a white runners, it's just a genetically modified regular rhinoplates would be that, which, well, one, I'm curious, what. Well, maybe you could describe better what exactly muscle does. I think you summed it up pretty well, but, you know, so colossal tries to re-engineer extinct animals to fill holes in the ecosystem, because as we talked about, with the beavers, once you revere something, the system changes. And, you know, I think the argument that you see, and even I get this, is somebody who sits on their advisor's board. It's like, how can you support this thing? You know, they're making genetic freaks, and these resources should be going back into other conservation. Why not do both? Like, why not? That's not what they do. Colossal does do some conservation works. I'm very nice conservation work that I'm proud to say I've had a light, light hand in, but they also do this amazing genetic engineering thing. And the point is, if it looks like a mammoth, walks like a mammoth, talks like a mammoth, is it a mammoth? Yeah. I don't really know the answer. I'm not a geneticist, but if it fills the same roles as a mammoth, meaning it engineers the ecosystem like our beaver we were talking about, then it is a mammoth. Because that's the important thing is keeping the system healthy, right? And that's what they're trying to do. Yeah. I they've had some success with the direwolf and building bully mice, and they've announced all these various animals that they're working on. I think it's great. Is it going to come without flaws? Of course not. There's going to be problems. There's going to be missteps. There's going to be everything. But so does every technology? I think it's brilliant. Yeah. I mean, the bully mammoth mouse thing I think is maybe is a bad example of what they're trying to do. Like it's a fun pop example of what we could do. But in terms of of reintroducing and existing species, like if it costs a hundred million dollars a year to conserve, you know, 14 animals or whatever. Right. I'm using round numbers. Yeah. But for 20 million dollars, they can make a thousand more of them. Isn't that a better act of conservation for those animals? And also, like I said before, do both. Yeah. Yeah. On the flip side of that coin, we briefly touched on it. It's Ventara. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Not a Bonnie. Yeah. A Bonnie is the Indian billionaire family. That's right. And they built I don't even want to call it a zoo, man. It's not like it's not. It's nothing like it in the world. So describe the scale of this thing. Yeah. So first of all, a not a Bonnie himself, which is one of the sons, who's my very close friend, has built this thing himself. Yeah. And it's, we've only become friends over our mutual dork out nerdness over animals, because we both just love animals. And this is a guy who's got unlimited resources financially. And he said, I want to commit to trying to save the world's animals. And the reason I bring it up when you talk about colossals, it's the other side of that coin. Right. He said, I don't care if it costs a hundred million dollars a year to save those four rhinos, I will. Yeah. And it's amazing to see both at play, right? And so he has built in Jamnagar, India, which is where these aerial photos are, this place called Ventara, that is this unbelievable wildlife rescue facility. You got to describe the scale of this thing. It, the status, it's something like 13 times the size of Central Park or something like that. I mean, it's unbelievable. They've rescued over a million animals in total, not just in Ventara, but they do stuff outside all around the planet now. And he's such a humble guy. He doesn't really make a big thing out of it. This is me making a big thing out of it. But the facility itself is unlike anything you've ever seen. I mean, they give elephants oil massages. And they have Barack, this is a true story. Barack Obama's personal chef is now their head elephant chef. He's just there mixing fruit salads for these elephants, changing it up so that they don't get bored and making new concoctions. And the list goes on and on and on. They build the world's only hydrotherapy chambers for elephants. They have saunas, they have spas. This guy, like a nut, he'll get a call that, and this is a true story because I was there for it. He'll get a call, hey, this elephant, this is actually really powerful stuff. These elephants saw these chains because they come from a life of abuse, logging elephants and circus performers and stuff. And I took them out for a walk in the forest through the chains down and the elephant stopped. And you see that you see their body language change? See how they get nervous. And they're weird. And then they start picking them up and throwing them and trumpeting because they never want to be in those chains ever again. It's powerful stuff, man. But this guy with his resources, care for animals, he'll get a call. Hey, this elephant has a kidney stone and we don't have a probe long enough to get there. It'll cost us $2 million to build one, but we can get it done in a week and he'll go build it to save an elephant, not an endangered one, nothing. Just like they have a never say no policy, whatever they can do to rescue it because the guy's got unlimited resources. It's a beautiful thing. Wow. Yeah. On the elephant thing, not to divert too much. No, no, you're good. But are you're familiar with elephant funerals? Yeah. Where they all come together and they mourn. Yeah. Have you seen it? Yeah. Can you tell me more? So many more animals do it than you think too. Yeah. So basically an elephant funeral. So elephants are a matriarchal society. They're run by a big female, right? Like she's the boss of the group. Different for different species, but we'll generalize here. The fine boss. Like she is the head of the household. So she's the one who all the other elephants listen to and respect all the other females. Do what the matriarch says. If she says it's time to leave this watering hole and go look for food, they all leave and go look for food. If she says everybody wait here, you know, the babies are the babies, there's some danger. The all the elephants stand in a circle and guard the babies. And the big like bull males are paying attention as well. Absolutely. They'll come and go sometimes. Again, it depends on the elephants, but they'll come and go. But the matriarch, the big female, she's the boss. Yeah. And the bulls will come in and out of the herd and things like that. She runs, she's the CEO. And so an elephant funeral, I often say this and I have nothing to support this because it's really just a theory. I believe based on their brain size and what I've witnessed myself that elephants have an EQ and emotional intelligence way greater than anything you or any human has, I believe they feel much greater. They're hot. They're they're happy. They're much happier and they're sad. They're much sadder than we feel. They can die of a broken heart. You can if your wife dies, you don't die of a broken heart. You can get sick, whatever, but they can literally die of a broken heart. And so that's from their emotional intelligence. So elephants and I was saying many other animals do this than we give credit for. They will have a funeral. So here you've seen an elephant die. And these other elephants through the matriarch most likely have come into mourn this elephant. They'll stop eating for several days. They'll spend four or five days sleeping around the carcass of the dead one to sort of pay tribute to it as it as it leaves. We don't understand what they're doing societally, but there is some sort of elephant society where they're giving it a funeral. That's amazing. It's really tragic to like see videos like the mom basically carrying like her dead calf around like a savanna for days at a time. Just kind of like holding on to it like come back like in pain, it seems like. And it is one heartbreaking to see like sort of the natural progression of death, but then when you put like the poaching element on top of it. Yeah, you're like, I mean, what the fuck are we doing? It's hard. Really heavy stuff. Our ability to communicate with elephants. Would you say it's like on the level of a dog? Yeah, I would say it's about right. Got it. Just like you can have a dog at home and you can tell when he's hungry, you can tell when he's sad, you can tell when he's depressed, you can see when he gets sick. There are people that spend their lives with elephants in India. It's called a Mahoot blah blah blah that can read those same body cues and languages from an elephant. And will they take commands? Yeah. Absolutely. You can make an elephant sit. You can make it stay. You can make it stand. Will they communicate things to the Mahoot? Will they say not say well, but they will show that they're hungry? Will they show that they want something? Absolutely. Absolutely. In a different way to your dog, my dog jumps up on my leg when it wants breakfast. Yeah. The elephant will shake his head a certain way or move his trunk and put on his shoulder or whatever it happens to be. There's that video I'm sure you've seen it of like there was an elephant, I think, cub. Are they called cubs? Calf. Calf. That's like stuck in like a ravine or something. I forgot exactly what it was. And the video makes it look like the mom comes and grabs some humans to get the baby out. Now, how realistic is that scenario? I think in like a semi captive environment where like in India where they use the elephants as vehicles and things like that, absolutely, could easily go and get a human. If it was a wild elephant, it would never just come into town and get people to help. Obviously. Yeah. But a semi captive one would be like, hey, you guys are the helpers. Totally. Can you do this? Totally. And if this is the one you're talking about where the mom's trapped and the baby goes. Oh, maybe that's it. Okay. So two things. Just pause it for one second if you don't mind. So that is an Indian elephant or Asian elephant. So Asian elephants and humans have a very different relationship to African elephants and humans. Asian elephants and humans live side by side. They work side by side. People ride these elephants. They use them for logging. They use them for begging. All kinds of things. They use them for agriculture. So these elephants in the daytime are probably kept and looked after by people. When I say kept, they might have a chain on them. It might be terrible. It might be somewhat free roaming. That's a gray area. But they're kept by people and fed by people. And then they'll go out and roam and go into the jungle, walk around the village and come back kind of like a village dog. Not you were my dog that lives in our house and never does anything on its own, but like a village dog. Yeah. Sleeps in the hut at night and then it goes out into the village during the day. The elephants do something very similar in these situations. So here with the mom being trapped in mud or whatever the scenario is, it's completely believable to me that that mom gave birth to that calf that we saw in the video in this community. The community knows the calf, the calf knows the people. The mom gets stuck. The baby goes wondering and people go, there's something wrong. with that baby, it's distressed. It didn't go and say, hey, come with me. It's just a distressed, lost-looking baby that runs back to mom and then the people go, we gotta get the mom out, right? - It's so hard to believe these videos, sometimes, 'cause I've gotten got by people Hodgpodging videos of animals. Have you seen these? I'm an expert, quote unquote, and I get got all the time. It's like, look at AI ones and go, that's how it feels, man, it's crazy. - But it's like, look at this little baby cat that we found. And then like, it actually wasn't a cat. It was a jitter. - Panther, yeah, Panther. But it's like five different animals that they put into one narrative. - And then it's playing drums at the end. - Like, something's not right here. - But we do have this obsession with communicating with animals, right? Like obviously, you've dedicated a portion of your life to this, but we love these videos where, I don't know if you saw that one where, what's the name of the, it's like a white, small whale that exists in the Arctic. - Beluga? - Yeah, the Beluga's like, somebody's throwing a rugby ball off a guy we've seen that one. - Is that real or is it? - Yeah, that's real, that's real. - And like, I think for whatever reason, we deeply wish that we could connect with these animals. - Absolutely, we're on our course. So when we see it, look like this Beluga is seemingly playing catch with these fishermen. I don't know what they are. - Yeah, no, I think this is totally real. Beluga's are amazing, they're super playful. You know, I think a lot of people hate AI, right? And for the most part, I tend to dislike it a lot too. This is one where AI can become so useful as a tool to us. Pattern recognition, that's what AI is. - If you upload 10 billion whale songs, it's gonna start to decode whale language. If you upload 10 billion elephant sounds, it's gonna start to decode elephant patterns. - You seem to use this for like bird chirps? - I believe it, I was reading a thing. I don't know, again, I don't know how accurate this is. But they were able to upload different bird chirps to a language model. And it was able to discern that mother birds are talking to their chicks in a baby speak. - There you go. Yeah, like in the way the humans were. - Yeah. - And like it just, I don't know, I hear it and I kinda get a little sad. - Why? - I'm like, oh, that's so cute. - Yeah. - Yeah, man. You ready for some throw-up? (laughing) - Have you seen a valdemir, the spy whale? - No. - So one of these beluga whales appeared in Norway or one of those countries covered in Russian spy gear. True story. It was a trained whale. Yeah, you can find this, it was a trained whale that the Russian navy had brought in, put spy gear all over and it had escaped or got lost or something like that. And the plot thickens because they took a spy gear off or whatever it happened to be. The whale was lost and following people around and there became a whole like movement to protect valdemir, this whale with his spy gear. And all of a sudden he washed up with a bullet in his head. (gasps) He was assassinated. - They killed a whale. - No way. - Bro. - So you've heard of Kusta Kitty? - Kusta, oh, is that the operation where they put cats into listen? - In the '60s, the CAA put listening devices inside of cats in Russia and we tried to send them into like Russian embassies and stuff to handle it. And the first cat went in the building, got sort of distracted, came back and I got hit by a car. - Yeah, that's right. - Damn. - But why did they have to take the whale out? Like the whale didn't do it. Like you didn't, right? - He knows things weren't done. - That's what you think. Something's going on. - We're gonna torture the whale to get to speak. - Sounds going on. - Yep. - And I'm not a huge conspiracy nut, but that's pretty bizarre. - Damn. - Give me some fun. - Who iced that whale? - Yeah. - They already have boholes, that's two holes, do you agree? - Give me some fun, like, I saw you and Joe talking about the pandas, like, what are some other, this is feelings and no facts, which is a section we do on the show. - Okay. - We're not talking in fact right now. - Totally this is. - Totally feelings. - Totally feelings. What are the fun like animal conspiracies that exist in your world? - Fun animal conspiracies? - Yeah. - They don't even have to be fun. - Oh man, I gotta think about this. - Like if this is not rooted in anything. - I'm gonna think of a couple. I mean, I get to know about cattle mutilations. - No, what's a cattle mutilation for other? - I mean, I get what it sounds like. - Welcome. - Cattle mutilations is weird sort of high-strange and sphenoma, where a farmer will walk out to his farm and see, like, one of his goats or maybe his cow or something. And they have bizarre predation marks. So it'll be like, all the blood will be drained out. - Oh yeah. - Or like, the Chupacabra came in. - Stuff like that. - They're like, don't just find it. Or like, the jaw's missing, but no other part of it is taken. Or like, it's like, brain will be taken out. And people are like, well, what's going on? I mean, I can find you in like specific cases. - Okay. - But they're like, what kind of animals coming in here just like only taking these parts? Like, are they like, are they rabid? Like, predators that are coming in doing this? Like, floaties and stuff. And there's all this speculation. Of course, people are like, maybe aliens. - Yeah. - But yeah, yeah. - It's some type of weird predation where like, they're taking like, elements of these animals that are not typical. - Interesting. - Yeah, okay. I get what you're saying. I mean, there's a few really interesting ones. Like, they're mostly based in like a war that doesn't exist, right? So like, the idea that coyotes will come and attack people. - Coyotes will attack people. We all think like, oh, coyotes dangerous, right? So it's a wild dog, coyotes don't attack people. But even people who work with animals think, or not people who work with animals. Like, ranchers and stuff like that, think that coyotes are gonna come in and eat their kids or take their cows or whatever. Doesn't happen. - Interesting. - Yeah. - Same thing with killer whales, right? - Totally. - Like, they don't attack human beings outside of the sea world. - Never been a single recorded death in the wild. - Ever. - There've been sea world deaths and stuff. But in the wild, a killer whale, orcans never killed a person that were aware of it. - What are some other animals that aren't actually dangerous to human beings that we are afraid of? - Well, rattlesnakes, really? - Rattlesnakes are not dangerous to human beings. If you get bitten by a rattlesnake, absolutely. But rattlesnakes are not trying to bite people ever. They're sitting in a coil, they're sitting in predation mode. If you step on it, yes, it's going to bite you. But I promise you, if you've hiked around LA or Santa Barbara or San Diego or anywhere out west, you've hiked within 20 feet of a rattlesnake and you have no idea. They are not a danger to people. That's only when they're caught. If you look up where do most people get bitten by the rattlesnake, guess where they get bitten and what part of their body? - Leg. - Their hand. - 'Cause they're trying to fucking grab around us. - They're trying to pick it up. - Oh. - Yeah. But almost nobody just gets bitten by a rattlesnake. - Interesting. - So that's one where, you know, and it's funny, like you watch Yellowstone and Costner or somebody throws a rattlesnake on a guy and he dies immediately and stuff like this. It doesn't work that way, you know. And what are some other funny ones? There's just so many interesting ones. There's legends of black cats all over the world. - Here's the perfect one. Black Panthers, heard of them. Seeing the movie, Binda Wakanda, you know what I'm talking about? - Yeah. - They don't exist. There is no such thing as a black panther in North America. There are black jaguars like the one I showed you. There are black leopards, a panther, which is a mountain lion cat we have here in North America. There is never once been a recorded case of a melanistic AKA black panther. High school mascots and a fell mascots movies. - Tattoos. - Tattoos. - That is funny, 'cause it's Florida panthers, but they're sort of like gray or golden. - They're not black. - Yeah. - I got buddies who I trust who swear up and down, they've seen them. Never been one single confirmed documented case. - So where does it come from? - I mean, like I said, there are black other cats, but there's never been a panther that's been black. So I don't know if it's just started in movies. I don't know if it's started in the Marvel comics. - Panther organization, of course. - Yeah, right. I don't know if that was the foundation. I have no idea where it came from. - Weird. - Yeah. What about the John Lilly dolphin experiments? Have you heard of these? Is that the guy trying to talk to dolphins? I had them in his house. - LSD. - Oh, yeah, with the LSD. Yeah, he tried to unlock it with the LSD, yeah. - He's a neuroscientist, psychonopphilosopher, and he combined work that he was doing with like isolation tanks. To communicate with dolphins, he studied how to bottle those dolphins vocalize, and he later began experimenting with his psychedelics, including LSD while floating in isolation, trying to talk to dolphins. - Yeah. I don't think it worked. - No, but I bet he had a good time trying. - Question, you might have been asked this before. You see a, the big foot. - Yeah. - You have a weapon on you. - Uh-huh. - Do you shoot it to prove that they exist? - Why do you think I've been asked that before? - I don't know. - It's like something that like an explorer would be asked it. - You think Bullets work against his big foot? - It's guy. - I mean, 'cause you're never good at, you can't take a picture of me. - Right, I don't have my phone on me, whatever. - I do take a picture of people who are gonna say it's AI. - You have to do it. - You have to shoot it. - And then what happens if it's just a guy in a costume? - Then you bury it and you get that real quick. - Yeah, real quick. - It's a real quick, yeah. - Yeah, yeah. - You have to do it though. You gotta do it. You gotta prove it. - It's right there. You have to prove it otherwise you're crazy. - Otherwise you're crazy and believe it or not for the good of the species. - Because once you've shown the dead body, you've proven they exist. You can then actually put something into - Concerning them. - Okay, ever's left. Even if there's only two others out there. - All right, ready? This is feelings, no facts. You don't have to back this up with anything. - Love it, okay? - Yep. - Gorilla versus Grizzly. - Grizzly. - Every day. - Every day. - Every day, not even close. - Even the big silver back. - Dude, you're talking about 300 pounds versus 1,000 pounds. One of them has fucking Wolverine claws, has a way stronger bite force, not even close. - Hippo versus Rhino. - Rhino. It's a Hippo with a tusk, with a horn. - Yeah, I know people think Hippo. - What? - But they're softer, their skin is softer. So once that tusk goes, it's over. - It's over. - Yep. Saltwater Crock. - Is that the most dangerous Crock? - Yeah. Versk great white. Great white. Every day. - It's just two agile. - It's two maneuverables, two agile. Solar crocodiles are an amp. British predator, they just lunge and nail you and then you're fucked, but they had to have combat. They're not doing it. Not even close. Okay. Um, the smartest animal outside of human beings in the world. Yep. Orcas. Really? Yeah. They speak their own languages. They have their own diets. Just like we do. Yeah. They can travel wherever they want. They have their own social dynamics. They're just trapped in a whale body. Yeah. They can perform surgery. True story. Yeah. Orcas makes a kill during a time of abundance, meaning it wants to, like it has tons of food and it doesn't really care. It will kill a great white shark just to take the liver out, which will surgically remove with its teeth. Just to eat the liver and leave the whole white shark. And why? What is so special about the liver? High nutrients. Delicious. So it's like, I already have enough food. This is good nutrients. I don't need to eat all this thing. It might even be as simple as I want a cupcake. And that's the cupcake. A treat. Wow. A treat. Very simple time. Every time. No, nothing close. Nothing close. Not even like, is there going to be combat? Like, it kills. Great white seas are killer whale and dips. Out of there. So much so that the entire area of Cape Town lost its ecotourism trade around it, because the orcas moved in. Two orcas moved in, port and starboard, a pair, moved all the great whites out. Killed a few in the rest left. That's right. Great white shark sightings in South Africa were huge specifically Cape Town. Wow. Remember that. Yep. Another whale thing is a misnomer, right? Like the name. Yeah. Yeah. It was whale killer in Spanish. That's right. That's right. Okay, okay. Orcas teaching each other how to sink boats. Remember that story? Yeah. And the Gibraltar straight. Is that true? Yeah. Oh, yeah. 100%. But still never kill anybody. Take its boats down. Still never killed anybody. Good point. They're doing it for fun. That's my theory. Best mother in the animal kingdom. Best mother in the animal kingdom has to be a gorilla or a chimpanzee. Or an orangutan, one of the great apes. Because they'll take care of their baby for two years. Sometimes more. They'll feed it day and night. They'll cradle it. They'll never let it touch the ground. They'll teach it to be a gorilla or a chimpanzee or an orangutan by teaching it how to climb, teaching it how to feel. They'll protect it in a social fight. They will be fiercely loyal to that baby so much so that they won't mate during a lot of that time. They're just, they're basically a human, you know? And we're very good parents. And is there a relationship that exists after that two-year-old becomes like a fully grown chim? Like do they still have a love and protection for their mom? Yes. Absolutely. Until a certain point, you know, kind of like a kid hitting maturity or something and being like, I'm going out to find my own girlfriend and then the bond starts to separate. But they will always, always have a maternal relationship. So even when they're fully grown, they have their own family. They still recognize that. Absolutely. And they'll never mate with their mother or anything else, which a lot of animals your dog will. You know, like a lot of animals will, but they never will. Yeah. Which animal would terrify the most if it's suddenly developed human level intelligence? Praying mantis. Take over the world. Bro, you think I'm joking, not even octopus maybe, but praying mantis. Have you ever seen Starship Troopers? Yeah. Remember that movie? Yeah. Right movie, by the way. That's what it would be like. One mantis got human level intelligence, you know, even though they're this big, I'm assuming they scale which intelligence, which you didn't say, but I didn't my brain. They would take over the world. They're massively opportunistic killers. They can kill anything like for their size. There's nothing like them. They're vicious. I mean, they're just, they're just like, look at them. They're just super gnarly. They have these crazy spikes, these claws, these unbelievable mandibles. Like looking at one eating the lizard there. I mean, if you had a praying mantis with a society, we'd be in big trouble. Just because they're devastating killers. Yeah, I mean, again, I sort of, in my brain, I scaled it to them being the size of a human, which I wasn't the question, but I think, yeah, if they were, if they were bigger, like, they would just be so ruthless. What's the gayest animal? Dolphins, really, because only chicks like him for one and for two, no, but they have a lot of gay sex. Every cute girl thinks they're amazing. Gay guys like them. They have a lot of gay sex, again, either just a gayest animal. So wait, dolphins have gay sex? A lot. How common is gay sex in the animal kingdom? Not very. I mean, there are instances of like these two male lions will hump or practice or whatever, practice. Yeah. But then there are dolphins that will literally just male on male, female on female sex a lot. And dolphins are one of like four or five animals that have sex for fun. Most animals don't have sex for pleasure, at all. They only set, they only come. How do we know they're doing it just for fun? Because there's no outcome. They're not getting pregnant, they're not, they're not fertilizing the female. Dolphins are pulling out. Yeah. Get out of here. Where to God? There's no way a dolphin is pulling out before a bus. Yeah. It's a true story, man. They're doing it just for fun. They're doing it to not reproduce. Yeah. Really? Really. And it's just pleasure for pleasure's sake. If it's for pleasure's sake. If it's for girls and girls and girls doesn't matter. That's it. Wow. Yep. Which is pretty gay. [Laughing] That's kinda gay actually. Yeah. Well, yeah. It's a low key. Yeah. Oh God. All right. Any other questions before Forest gets out here? Yes, Miles. Two quick ones. You're obviously, with discovery and all of those things, you're similarly aged to me. Did you watch any of the discovery survival shows growing up? And did they influence you in what you do now? So like Survivor Man or Man vs. Wild? Yeah. I watched a few of them, Miles. I mean, I love Steve Irwin growing up. Go figure. That's my second question. Yeah. I love Steve Irwin growing up. I thought he was amazing. Yeah. You know, what's funny is I don't think he'd fly in today's world. He's gone down in history as the greatest animal presenter I ever. You couldn't do it. You couldn't be Steve Irwin today. Wait, why? Steve Irwin just fiddled with animals for the sake of fiddling with him. Oh, you think that there would be animal rights people like going, "Hey, he's not treating this animal properly." Could you imagine if you just grabbed a crocodile for the sake of grabbing it, and we're like, "Check it out!" You know, we're here. You couldn't do it in today's world. It's great that in that time and place, he set the gold standard, you know? And so he's definitely my number one. I watched some Bear grills and some West Stroud. I enjoyed all those guys, but to me, Steve Irwin and Jeremy Wade and David Attenborough of course, right? Like, those are the goats. Yeah. Yeah. And do you remember any. Something Corbin? Do you remember him at all? Jeff Corwin? Yeah. Yeah. I know Jeff Corwin. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, not very well. But yeah, he's cool. He's kind of like an American Steve Irwin, like that era. Yeah. Steve was number one for him. To me, yeah. But David Attenborough was number one for me. Yeah. For those guys, I thought we're all awesome. Yeah. Cool. Anybody? Yeah. I don't care who you are. I don't care if you're on Instagram or TikTok or Discovery Channel or anywhere else. If you're influencing people to care about wildlife in an ethical way, you're not just, you know, putting them in chokeholds for the sake of it. If you're doing it and making people be like, man, that thing's awesome. That snake's cool. That kid you pulled up, right? The. What was his name? Caveman Wildlife. Caveman Wildlife. It's awesome. It's awesome, dude. Making people care about snakes that don't otherwise care about them, you know? Like it's great. And like, I don't care who these guys are. I don't care if they have a name or don't have a name. Anybody that's doing it the right way is great. He's right. Do you bring your love of animals back home? Like, do you have a ton of different species of animals I love? Bro, I wish I didn't. So we have 91 rescued animals on my property. Most of them are like turtles and fish and shenanigans things. I have no pets except for my one fish tank in my office that are pets. Okay. The dog as well. But the rest are all things that somebody calls me and goes, "We need a home for this tortoise." Like, you know, we found this raccoon or I don't have any raccoons, but whatever it happens to be. And so, yeah, we've ended up with at one point in time. It's way down now. 91 rescued animals. Yeah. Yeah. Last question. Can you explain the importance of the relationship between humans and dogs? I don't think anybody can explain that. But I think that throughout human evolution, since humans first came around, there's only been one creature that has truly become a companion to people. And that's the wolf that turned into the domestic dog. Going back hundreds of thousands of years, we started feeding these furry pack animals that we thought were a thaw and they became a friend. And over generational time, we turned them into these weird, short-faced, stumpy, legged, bear-weight, whatever they happen to be. And they are truly more than anything a companion to the human species. It is incredibly important. And were they responsible for our evolution in any way? Maybe not our evolution, but responsible for innovation, protection. Absolutely. Yeah, like, we had dogs and we had dogs during times of war. We still do. We have dogs for security. We have dogs for hunting. We have dogs for farming. We have dogs for pest control. I mean, the plague probably would have been 100 times worse if it wasn't for Yorkshire Terriers, those funny little fluffy Paris Hilton dogs taking out rats. Well, cute. Canines, dogs have influenced human civilization in society since their inception. I read something. I forget where it was. And it was about, like, they created a layer of protection and you need an amount of security and downtime in order to innovate. If you're constantly worried about, this is like one of the issues with chimps and why it's harder for them to innovate in the way that human beings can. And it's like, they're always worried about the lead dude in the tribe. - Makes sense. - Right? So there isn't that downtime where you can just think about, all right, how do we make a TV? And before it's TV, it's like, how do we make fire a little bit, Tony? How do we make shelter a little bit better? And this idea that there are these pack animals that were protecting us because it was easier for them to get food from us and we get food out there. But now, the sudden, you had a layer of protection where you had the downtime where I could think of ideas and actually execute on them. - It makes perfect sense. When your brain is not on edge thinking about how to survive you have time to innovate. - Yeah. - I've never heard that theory and it makes perfect sense because it does seem we have a special relationship. Horses too, but with dogs, it seems more unique. Horses are utilitarian. We use a horse as a tool, whereas a dog we have is a companion. - Truly is a companion. They offered nothing, especially now, like most dogs are not doing security in the United States of America. - My dog is useless. - Yeah, I love him the death. But he could not guard the house, he can barely swim. - He kind of got signed poop by himself. He is useless and I love the death. - But is this maybe the karma that they get? - Well, for attaching to us? - For millions of years of supporting human existence and protecting us and now they do nothing for us and we're like, "All right, we got you for a few million." - That's a free ride, a free ride. - Yeah, but that's still such a tiny minority of dogs, globally, the way dogs are treated in other places in the world is crazy. - Really? - I mean, you go to some of the meat markets in Indonesia and you can buy, they will torture the dog in front of you to increase the amount of, what's the chemical response? - Oh, with the baby blood. - Baby blood. - Like adrenaline? - Adrenaline. - Adrenaline. - A dream of chrome. - A dream of chrome and adrenaline. They will torture a dog in front of you in order to increase the amount of adrenaline in the meat to change the flavor and then kill it and serve it to you. - No, I'm good on that. - I did a whole show on that on Vice or an episode of a show on that on Vice and it's the most gut-wrenching heartbreaking thing you can ever see. - Why do we have such a visceral reaction? I imagine you have a strong reaction to when any animal is treated poorly but the average human being in the West, when they see a dog being treated poorly, has a visceral reaction to it. - I think, again, it's because for a generational time, our great, great, great grandparents had dogs. You know, it's there like our children in a sense. There are companions. So same as if I saw you get hurt or you get hurt. Like, you're my companion, you're my species. Not, you're my species, the dog isn't, but you're my companion. I don't wanna see you get hurt, you know? And I think it's the same for dogs. - Yeah, it's like, we'll watch a horse race and then the guy riding the horse is just smacking the ass of the horse with a whip and we're just like, I got money on that. - Yeah, that's right, yeah. - But with a dog, no way. - The dog, don't you dare. - Yeah, but yeah, people call it police on people for mistreating their dogs. - My wife, I live in Santa Barbara, which is you know that 72 degrees every single day. My dog had spent six weeks in the car and it wouldn't overheat. She won't leave the dog in the car for five minutes because she's like, somebody's gonna call the cops on us. They're gonna smash our window. - Like, it's 68 degrees outside of it. - But when you think it's gonna happen, the dog's gonna take a nap. She'll leave my kid in the car. She won't be dead. (laughing) - I think when people leave notes, like you see that, it'd be like, hey, I'm going inside for five minutes, just don't call the cops. - That's right, yeah. - Yeah, or my Tesla's on dog mode. Don't worry about it. - Yeah. - There's like a donkey that's just like carrying shit up a fucking mountain all day long. Nobody leaves a note. - Nope. - They know notes. - Yeah. - Yeah, we do have a special relationship with dogs. - I mean, in New York City, you're more likely, if you see someone pushing a stroller, you're more likely to know it. - Then a kid. - Yeah, yeah. - Hundred personas. - Now we've gotten the pendulum swung too far, man. - But you do feel like the relationship is justified. - Absolutely. - Yeah. - I think all animal, you know, you see these weird nuts that wanna have all these snakes. I have two snakes at home, but like, they wanna have all these snakes and wanna have all these things. You can have a companion with any animal. They might not love you back the way your dog does, but I think it's totally justice. - So is that the difference? Is the difference really their love you back? - More consistently. - I think so. And I think that's a really interesting difference between dog and cat people too. - Yeah. - 'Cause your cat can love you, but still be a total asshole to you. - Yeah. - If your dog loves you, he loves you. And you know it. - You know what I mean? You're like, he's all up in my business. Like, this dog loves me. - Dogs also evolved to have facial mimicry. - Yeah. - So like, they're able to mimic our facial features. - Oh, interesting. - And so like, dogs will look confused and you're like, oh, you're confused. - Yeah. - And I've heard it said that cats haven't developed the same mimicry. - Yeah. - And that might also feel happy when you're there. But they're not panting. They're not looking your face. They're not raising their eyebrows. - Yeah. - And so as a result, it's harder for us to connect to where it's like with a dog. You kind of know what it's feeling just by looking at it. - Interesting. - Once you have kids, you really, you really get a sense of how loyal dogs are. - Yeah. - Because you don't have the same time for that dog. - No. - And they don't stop dogging. - Nope. - It's dead by the side. - They are excited every single. I feel guilty. - Yeah. - And they're two kids and want to give them both time. And that dog is like, if there is three minutes, the thrill ball, same exact energy. - Yeah. - When they were getting all the attention when I had no kids at all. - Yeah. - Yeah, it's really amazing species. We did a good job curating that one. - I agree. (laughing) - I agree, dogs are the best. - Ben Lamb, get on it. - Yeah. - Make us some more. - We need a rhino that does that. - That's great. - I want a tiny wooly rhino that does that. - Yeah. - Dude, for us, thank you so much for being here. - Thank you. - This is awesome. - You're the best. - Yeah, this is awesome. - Thank you. - Thank you so much.