Forrest Galante and hosts recount spearfishing in Florida where they found a six-million-year-old megalodon tooth, contrasting this with the 80% global shark decline driven by fin trade. They detail Zimbabwe's economic collapse under Mugabe, unregulated poaching wars for rhino horns, and dangerous encounters with tiger sharks and lightning strikes. The discussion expands to Colossal Biosciences' de-extinction projects, remote Amazon expeditions near FARC rebels, Galapagos evolution, and the ethical complexities of wildlife interaction versus conservation. Ultimately, the episode argues that understanding environmental factors is crucial before romanticizing nature or engaging in dangerous activities. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Shark Work and Animal Con00:12:18
So, how are you doing?
I'm great, man.
What are you doing down here in Florida?
I've been in Florida for a week.
First few days, there's this convention every year put on by Brian Barchek called Animal Con.
And it's like all of the biggest animal people basically get together and do meetings and conventions.
And a couple days are open to the public, a couple days are industry only.
So, did that.
And then I just launched a YouTube channel, as preposterous as that sounds.
And so, we spent the last week filming for YouTube doing just fun Florida.
Dude, Florida is like.
It's a playground for animal people, you know?
So there's just so much stuff to do here.
So that's what we spent the week doing, just running around doing fun stuff.
Oh, that's cool, man.
Yeah.
I just, Manny was in here about a month ago telling us all kinds of his recent crazy escapades.
Have you ever done any fossil stuff in Florida?
I personally have never done any fossil stuff, but I know people who have.
Boom.
Those are for you.
Those are from yesterday.
What?
So yesterday on the South Florida River, we dove.
There was flood warnings in place, okay?
So there's rushing water.
And we're like, oh, should we do this?
Scuba dove 12 feet deep, not deep, black water.
So you got two inches of visibility, braille diving on the bottom, feeling for fossils.
You can't see anything.
Nothing.
We found 24 species yesterday.
We gave most of it to a museum, but that is a fossilized prehistoric horse tooth.
So that's a tooth from an ancient horse.
And what?
Yeah, that's a couple million years old.
How do you know?
So I don't.
I'm very novice at this.
Yesterday was my first day doing it.
But the guys I went out with are experts.
They run a thing called Dig Dive Discover.
Okay.
And that is the biggest.
Albeit not perfect, but the biggest megalodon tooth I found.
So I wanted to give it to you.
Dude, that thing is.
It's pretty dope.
It's not perfect.
I'm a novice.
I'm sure one day I'll get a good one.
So, how old do you think?
Like six million years.
Six million years old, bro.
Isn't that cool?
That's wild.
Yeah.
I'm not positive on the dating.
Like I said, I'm really novice.
Your listeners will probably be like, that's not six, it's 6.2.
But yeah, it's something like that.
And I was pretty stoked because I've done a lot of stuff in the animal space, especially in the extinct animal space.
But looking for actual fossils from some of these animals that I've studied for a long time was a pretty cool experience.
That's amazing.
How are you a big, uh, like freediver spear fisherman?
I used to be really big.
I mean, I still do a lot of it, but I used to be really big in the competitive circuits in freedive spear fishing.
Yeah.
Had a bunch of world records, a bunch of pole spear records.
Really?
Yeah.
Um, not competitive.
Like, I didn't go to competitions and stuff like that.
I just used to chase these trophies and go all over the world spear fishing and freediving and, uh, I still do it a lot.
I mean, I shot a beautiful white sea bass like a week ago before I came out here in California.
Is that on your Instagram?
I think so.
Yeah.
I think I saw that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Nice fish.
And, you know, I still do it a lot, but now I just do it for food.
I just, I love getting out there.
It's a good escape from the family, dive in the ocean, find a nice fish to feed us for a couple of weeks.
It's still great.
Yeah.
I grew up spearfishing and free diving around here.
Yeah.
But like doing that in California always scared the shit out of me.
I imagine that would be so goddamn spooky.
Well, it's different, right?
So we have kelp forests out there.
Right.
And the kelp forests are, It's like taking a hike in a redwood forest or in a cypress swamp, like big vertical structure all around you at all times, navigating your way through an underwater jungle, basically.
And super fun, man.
I mean, the colors in California, it's all these golds and greens and big white sea bass.
And then hopefully you don't run into the big tax man, the gray white shark.
And they're always kind of lurking on the outside.
So, yeah, it can be a little spine tingling at times.
Well, the great whites, I imagine, would be you'd rather see a great white spearfishing than a fucking bull shark.
Well, we don't get bulls in California, so I've seen them here.
Yeah, I've run into them here, like doing diving off the Jupiter ledge and stuff.
Have you ever done that dive?
No, so down in only mainly in the golf for me.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Down in Jupiter, Florida, we filmed a show down there a few years ago called Face the Beast for the History Channel.
And we had these crazy kids.
Good buddy of mine, he passed away.
Mike Dornellis was there with us.
He had all these bull sharks, like super revved up, shaking this bait crate.
These bull sharks are like coming in, they're swooping in between you and the crate.
You're pushing them off.
He's like blase.
He's just like, yeah, this is what you do.
He's like pushing bull sharks left and right.
And not me, dude.
I've been around bull sharks, but not like that.
And they're crazy.
They're just like, It's like a bulldog versus a great Dane.
You know, run into a white shark.
It's big.
It's more powerful.
An individual can probably do more damage.
But then you're with bull sharks like a pack of bulldogs, you know, you're just like, or pack of Rottweilers.
You're like, oh, these things can tear me to shreds.
They're way more aggressive.
I think they have way more testosterone than the great white sharks.
The highest testosterone of any shark in the world is those bull sharks.
Yeah, they're scary.
Manny was saying that he's more afraid of like lemon sharks than any other shark.
Well, him, Chris Gillette, my buddy Mike Dornellis, myself, I can list about 10 more people.
We've all been bitten by.
We all talk about the big scaries.
We've all been bitten by lemon sharks.
Really?
Yeah.
Have you been bitten by a lemon?
That's a scar from a lemon right there.
And then I have one on my foot as well, where both completely separate occasions, they just sort of sneak up on you and just bam.
They suck.
God damn, bro.
I think Manny's been bitten by like seven different species of sharks.
He's been bitten by everything.
He's insane.
Have you seen the videos of the guys?
I don't know.
I think they're on the east coast of Florida, like off the coast of Jupiter or like Sebastian, maybe.
They, um, They go out and they chum up all the bull sharks and then they go, they swoop down on them, they shoot the cobia that's so much off the backs of them.
I've done it.
It's crazy.
You've done that?
Yeah, it's wild.
And the bull sharks get so conditioned to what's going on that you pull the trigger and as the bands snap, the bull shark darts off, but then it just does a circle back to try and eat your cobia.
So if you don't stone the cobia or you don't get it in really quickly, the bull sharks just turn around and come straight back for the fish.
So you have this, like, from my limited experience, I've done it twice, you have this, like, 45 second tops window to land that fish, or it just gets ripped to shreds.
Dude, I heard now all you have to do is go out there and just pop your bands a couple times, and the bull sharks will just show up.
I think so.
I think they are that conditioned to free divers.
I mean, it's like ringing the dinner bell.
You know, you go out there, they're not typically eating these cobia because the cobia are smart enough to stay behind them and stay lateral to them.
And then somebody comes along and jabs a spear into it and sort of just leaves it wounded on a silver platter for them.
We should go.
I'll take you.
It'd be fun.
Dude, I'd be fucking terrified.
I don't know if I could do that.
It's worth it.
It's so much fun.
It's a rodeo.
You never gotten in any hairy situations with those bull sharks out there?
No.
Really?
Oh, that's not true.
I got one story.
Oh, man.
Should I throw my buddy under the bus?
I should.
So we're filming that show I was telling you about, Face the Beast, with this kid, Andrew Uchals, right?
And if you've never seen Andrew Uchals, he'd be a great guest for you.
But he's this wild Australian kid.
Like, he's an absolute maniac.
Like, he makes Manny look tame.
Like, he's not.
Really?
Yeah, I mean.
That's not a dig at Manny, but Andrew's nuts.
He's nuts.
And I love Andrew.
He's a crazy dude, but I just got to preface it by saying this.
He's not a waterman, right?
He's not like us.
He didn't grow up on the ocean.
He grew up in the bush, out back of Australia.
He's just not a waterman.
He could swim, whatever, but do our first show.
It's about catching these monster crocodiles in Myanmar.
He's unbelievable.
Builds this insane trap, catches this huge crocodile, wrestles at everything.
Second episode of the show is digging into shark behavior.
So I'm the producer of the show, and I'm like, all right, Andrew, we're going to go down to Jupiter.
We're going to do all this stuff with the pole sharks, blah, blah, blah.
He's like, yeah, no worries, chooch.
That'll be all right.
And I'm like, okay, great.
That's my best Australian, by the way.
And I'm like, all right, let's go do this thing.
So we jump in the ledge.
Mike, like I said, he's shaking up these bait crates and getting these bull sharks in.
And I'm like, I'm the producer of this show.
So I'm like, listen, Andrew, there's one thing you can't do, which is swim into the chum slick.
Okay.
You can swim all around.
You can push the bull sharks off, whatever, talk about their behavior.
But if you get, when Mike shakes that crate, if you get down current of that right in front of it, the bull sharks come shooting in to eat all the chum.
And if you're in the middle of it, they're going to bite you.
Yeah, no worries, choo choo.
I would never do that.
And I'm like, all right, sounds good, bud.
So we hit the water.
And literally, I would say 15 seconds in, Mike goes down, shakes the crate.
Andrew hits the water.
He dives straight in front of the bait crate.
I don't know if he was being dumb.
I don't know if he was being defiant.
I don't know if he was unaware.
I screamed at him like crazy.
And these bull sharks come shooting in.
And Mike, my cameraman, Johnny, and I, it's all on free dive.
We're all used to doing shark work.
We all zoom in and are like back to back, just pushing these sharks off Andrew.
And he like curls into a ball because he's like, what the fuck?
You know, because these sharks come shooting in at him.
And he like girls into a ball, and luckily nobody got bitten.
Mike got really, really close.
Like he pushed the shark, and the shark chomped like this, like bam, bam, bam, right by his forearm, trying to hold the shark off ukul's.
And we popped back up.
This all happened in 20 seconds, right?
Because it's a free dive.
Popped back up, and I'm like, get the fuck back to the fucking boat, Andrew.
You're like, you idiot.
You didn't listen to a word I said.
Like you're grounded.
I was furious.
I thought we were going to kill this guy.
And that was, it was just so hairy because the way these sharks just came in.
All like eyes rolled back in their head, mouth open, teeth exposed, chomping, trying to get to the bait, not trying to hurt Andrew or me or Mike or Johnny, which was thank God nobody got hurt, but they were trying to get to the bait and this kid just swam into the center of it.
And that was when I literally called it there.
I was like, all right, everybody back to the boat, rethinking the strategy.
Like, this is a bad play.
And that was the closest we ever came to a big problem.
Were they bulls?
Bulls, all bulls.
Oh my.
I have video of it.
I'll send it to you.
It's crazy.
That's fucking nuts, man.
It was like 12, 14 bulls all around at one time.
Yeah.
So, what do you do?
Like, how do you push them off without getting your fucking hand chomped off?
Well, I've learned over time just from doing this with tigers and hammerheads and everything else.
People think you just want to like push them on the nose, but you don't, you know, a shark will turn and snap and bite you a bunch of different places if you touch them.
But if you use like the bottom of your palm, like the lower part of your palm, and put it right on their nose and just sort of like twitch or rub a little bit to stimulate their ampullae of Lorenzini, that specialized organ they have on the front of their nose.
They slow down because it's like an overstimulation of their sensory organ.
So, no matter what, they slow down.
Now, when you do that, their eyes will roll back in their head and their mouths will most of the time open.
So, they are like, you know, kind of going for you.
But as long as you don't just hold it there and try and like sit and you just gently push it away, like not towards your body, but away, and then pull your hand back relatively quickly so that you pull your hand back before they come out of that overstimulation state.
It's surprisingly easy to actually deflect a shark that's coming at you.
Now, keep in mind, these aren't sharks that are trying to attack you.
These are sharks that are swimming towards you to get to the bait or right by you or to investigate.
If this is a great white going for you, like Seal Island style, it doesn't matter how hard you're pushing their noses.
If it's hungry, I think that's the big difference.
If they're really hungry, then you're fucked no matter what.
If they truly see you as food, I say this to everybody that I get in the water with, I say this to everybody that I work with big animals with on land, crocs, sharks.
Big cats, anything.
If you act like prey, they're going to treat you like prey.
If you act like a dominant predator, they're going to respect you, right?
So if you get scared, nervous, small, twitchy, fast motions, they're like, oh, this is a fish and it's scared of me, you know, or this is whatever, this is a piece of bait and it's going to act like prey and I'm going to treat it like prey.
If you can puff your chest up, act confident, swim right at the shark that's swimming at you, they backpedal.
It's like getting into a fight with a guy at a bar and then you're more aggressive.
You're like, wow, what are you going to do?
And the guy's like, whoa, sorry, man, sorry.
You know, it's that same thing.
Like if you back down, They're going to walk all over you.
If you can sort of puff up and present yourself as an equal, they'll more often than not back down.
Lightning Strike in the Water00:04:59
Right.
Right.
That's fucking nuts, dude.
I forgot to drink my.
Hold on.
I got to drink my secret sauce drink.
Dude, do it.
Get your greens in.
I should have drank this an hour ago.
I might be more awake.
Nah, you're good.
I had a five hour energy on the way here.
I'm wired.
Feels good.
Bro, you got to get these things.
They're so good.
What is it?
Let me see it.
It's called Magic Mind.
It's got like all these amazing herbs, or not herbs, but just like nutrients in them.
It's got matcha, adapted nootropics.
Oh, wow.
It's like.
Dude, it's like brain fuel.
Ooh, where do you get these?
It's clutch for the podcast, too, because when you're like sitting here talking to people for so long and you want to be like super focused and awake, but you don't want to be like super jittery, like you drink a five hour energy, that shit is clutch, man.
Yeah, you don't want it.
It's not all about the caffeine.
I'm going to get, I'll get, I'll email them and I'll have them send you.
They send me this shit for free.
Oh, thanks.
So they sponsor the podcast, but I'll have them send you a bunch, too.
It's so clutch for recording podcasts.
Looks great.
I'd love to try it.
Yeah, awesome.
Thanks.
Anyways, what was you talking?
Oh, Did you see the video in Egypt of that dude getting eaten by a tiger shark?
It is horrific.
That is the worst video of a tiger shark.
I'm getting like little goosebumps talking about it because it's just like playing that back in my mind.
And do you know the whole situation?
It was like a guy on vacation with his dad.
He was a Russian on vacation with his dad, I think.
And there was footage of him on a kayak previously.
And he was out there like videoing himself or whatever.
And somehow he ended, got off the kayak.
Yeah.
And he was just swimming.
But I kept it.
But I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, I think.
There was like signs to not swim in the area, like there was something known about not swimming there.
I believe, I think so.
I might be mixing up with that.
Well, they were right next to a like a dock where there was fishing boats that's what it was fish cleaning station.
There's a fish cleaning station right there.
And I think there was a known tiger shark that would hang out in the area.
And yeah, the like watching it actually grab the guy and like his arm flailing and stuff.
And he like comes up and in Russian screams like, Help, dad, or something like that.
Yeah, yeah, oh, dude, oh, I kind of it's the worst footage of a shark that I've ever seen of a shark.
Killing somebody.
It's horrific.
You want to see something pretty crazy?
Not to deflect from that, but you want to see what happened to me day before yesterday?
Yes.
Nobody has seen this, and this is all.
Click that video right there.
It's only eight seconds long.
Turn the volume on.
Ready for it.
I just got struck by lightning.
What?
Yeah, this was two days ago.
Watch.
See, it zapped me.
You see the lightning come down.
Dude, oh my.
And you're in the water?
In the water.
It hammered the shit out of me.
What?
My legs and butt were so sore because I was standing like waist deep or like thigh deep.
My legs and butt were so sore.
This was the day before yesterday, and I got hammered by that lightning.
And I still, to this moment, have this terrible metallic taste in my mouth.
When I walked in here, I had three pieces of gum in my mouth.
Can't get this metal taste out of my mouth.
That's fucking insane.
I've never seen a video of somebody getting hit by lightning before.
Where is that?
In the Southern Everglades, day before yesterday.
Oh my God.
Yeah, we're filming promos for Garmin because I have a thing with Garmin.
Oh, do you really?
Yeah, and I'm standing in the swamp.
I just got one of those.
Dude, isn't it great?
I love it.
Which one is that?
Do you know?
The Phoenix 7.
Fantastic watch.
I just swapped it out, my old watch, for this one, and it's amazing because it fucking lasts like 30 days on a charge.
Game changer.
Guys, all your metrics.
Like, for me, being out in the wilderness a lot, it's got all my tracking stuff.
I can connect it to my phone.
I can connect my phone to my inreach, which is like a communication device so I can talk to people.
I love my stuff from them.
Dude, this is the best watch I've ever had, for hands down.
Straight up.
The only thing I can't figure out is how to connect my Spotify to it.
I wish I could figure out how to, like, Connect my music to.
Oh, I don't know.
I've never tried that.
It's interesting.
Shout out to Garmin.
Hit the link in the description for 10% off.
There you go.
But yeah, so we're out there just filming these little promo pieces.
And yeah, sure enough, my producer, Mitch, he goes, dude, I think you should get out of the water.
He's from Florida.
I'm from California, so I think I know it all.
And he's from Florida.
And he's like, dude, just get out of the water.
Like, thunder and lightning's pretty bad.
I'm like, shut up.
Nothing's going to happen.
Literally, two minutes later, bam.
And I'm just like, got fully fried.
And Yeah, like you see it in the video there.
That's a video of the video, but my legs and butt failed.
I sort of started to drop and got zapped and then ran out of the water, but it was obviously way too late by that point.
How the fuck are you alive?
I don't know.
I feel great.
Oh my God, bro.
That is absolutely insane.
I've never seen a video like that before.
Yeah, we're going to.
Nobody's seen it before.
Where are you going to put that?
On your YouTube?
I don't know.
Probably everywhere, to be honest, because I've never seen a video like that.
We'll definitely throw it on YouTube, put it on.
Our podcast channel and TikTok and Instagram and all that crap because it's crazy.
Managing Shark Populations00:12:27
I mean, it's fucking wild.
Oh my God.
I was shocked to say the least.
You're probably going to live longer now.
It probably like lengthened the telomeres on your DNA.
Now you're going to like have like, I don't know, you're going to live long.
So that morning I woke up and chugged like a pretty good amount of cold brew and then had a five hour energy on the way there and then got shocked by lightning.
So I just kept hoping I'd like wake up with like sparkle fingers or something.
Yeah, you're going to have like superpowers like Spider Man.
Let's hope.
I'm just going to go get bitten by something right now.
Have you slept since that happened?
Yeah.
Really?
I feel fine.
I feel great.
Better than ever.
Like within two hours, my legs and butt were not sore anymore.
And the only lingering thing is this metal taste in my mouth.
Whoa.
Which I have no idea if that's normal, not normal.
Like I literally haven't even Googled it yet.
Like we've been so busy.
I'm just like, I'm fine.
Yeah.
That's nuts, dude.
So Florida's crazy.
Yeah.
All the places I go, Florida, you got the bull sharks, you got lightning storms, gators.
It's a crazy place.
It's a fucked up place, man.
But yeah, no.
Like that guy in Egypt getting eaten by the shark.
Like, You never like, I always thought before that I was like, sharks don't eat people.
I'm like, the only time people get bit, it's by accident.
They're trying to figure out what it is.
They're hungry.
I mean, sharks get there's more shark bites in New Summer in a beach, Florida, than like anywhere in the world, but they're little sharks, they're like little black tips or spinner sharks, right?
And they're not obviously trying to eat human, they're not eating people, biting whatever they see.
But like, when you see a shark devouring somebody, well, tiger sharks are their own kind of special, right?
And what I mean by that is a bull shark does not want to eat a person, that's a fish eater, right?
That's what bull sharks eat.
Uh, a great white shark will.
Make the mistake of eating a person thinking that it's a marine mammal like a seal or a sea lion or something like that.
And I would guess, I could be wrong, but I guess a great white's never actually fully eaten a person.
The problem is an investigative bite from a great white shark's lethal.
It's dead, yeah.
Yeah.
Now, a tiger shark's its own kind of special because tiger sharks will eat people.
They'll eat anything, right?
Tiger sharks have been cut open.
They've found car tires in their stomachs, license plates.
You know, they'll eat anything.
They'll eat any whale carcass, a human carcass, a sea turtle, like you name it.
If they find it and it's available food, they're going to eat it.
And that's why they have this nickname, the dumpster of the sea, right?
Because if they can fit it in their mouths and can catch it, they're going to eat it.
And that's the problem.
Like, when it comes to a tiger shark versus almost any other species, if they take a bite, they're like, oh, yeah, this is edible.
And then they're going to keep trying to eat it, which he clearly does in that video with that poor guy.
Plus, I think that shark was pregnant.
It was a pregnant female.
It was a pregnant female.
They killed her a few days later, right?
Didn't I read that?
I think the same day they caught her and killed her.
Yeah, and they cut her open.
They found his remains in there.
But if it's a pregnant female, I guess from what I heard, is they can't swim as fast.
Yeah.
So they can't catch fish.
So whatever they find that's slow, they're just going to fucking eat it.
Yeah, I mean, you know.
Tiger sharks, more often than not, are eating sea turtles and they're slow moving, floating on the surface.
You know, come up.
Anyone can catch a sea turtle.
You can jump in the ocean and catch a sea turtle.
Right.
You know, and it makes sense.
It's just, it's all the factors as well, right?
Like being pregnant means you want larger meals because you're eating for multiple, you know, just the same as when your wife's pregnant.
It's the same thing, right?
She's eating giant chicken sandwiches or whatever.
You're like, I've never seen you eat that before.
It's the same thing, you know?
So it all sort of adds up, but it is a gruesome, gruesome video.
Yeah, man.
Yeah.
Manny was telling me that the shark populations here are like exploding, like to an unhealthy level.
You know, I've heard that.
I don't think that's scientifically validated.
Really?
Yeah, because there's a whole thing.
I mean, Florida is such an interesting place, but there's a huge war between like the ecotourism, shark diver, scientific sort of, you know, like more conservation minded side and then like the consumptive hunting side.
Like those two groups are at odds.
It doesn't matter if it's about fish, sharks, Hunting invasive ducks or iguanas.
They're just at odds with each other.
I'm very neutral.
I think being a sportsman, I love spearfishing and diving and shooting fish.
I also know the scientific side of things and believing in the conservation of things.
Globally, shark populations are down 80%.
Really?
Yeah.
80% of the world's sharks are gone.
Whoa.
Yeah.
And that's not like this year, that's in totality.
But shark populations are hammered globally, right?
Compared to where sharks were, I think maybe 10 or 15 years ago, I think they've bounced back.
I'm talking about Florida specifically now.
I think they've bounced back.
Now, are they out of control and eating all the fish and blah, blah, blah?
Absolutely not.
Florida has such an incredibly abundant, healthy fishery.
It can support that many sharks.
You're never, ever going to have an ecosystem that has so many sharks and no fish to eat, right?
Like, that's clownish.
Like, we have this thing called the predator prey cycle, which when you have a lot, a ton of prey, then all of a sudden the predator population bounces up, predator population.
Gets over control, like overpopulated, hammers the prey concentration, right?
And it goes in these cycles.
It's just very natural.
If you can imagine predators going like this and prey doing the opposite, right?
That's a predator prey cycle.
You're never going to end up with, for any long period of time, too many sharks and no fish in the ocean because it just doesn't make sense.
You can't support that population of sharks if there's not enough food for them.
And I know there's arguments about, oh, well, the sharks are getting fed by fishermen, blah, blah.
It's nonsense because without Enough prey, you cannot have that many predators.
Okay.
Now, what people are actually seeing that is problematic, undeniably, is habituation of sharks.
Sharks are not dumb animals.
They're smart animals.
They've been on this planet longer than trees.
Okay.
They're millions of years old.
What's happening is the sharks all over Florida are going, Hey, that boat means the dinner bell.
That spear gun pop means the dinner bell.
Like, that's what that's happening.
So, sharks are now conditioned to be around people.
People are cutting fish, they're throwing it off the boat, they're chumming, they're baiting, they're shooting fish.
And so, People think, oh, sharks are overpopulated.
They're not overpopulated.
There might be slightly more now than there were 10 years ago, and that might fall in the next few years.
But what's more realistically happening is the sharks that are here are going, hey, there's people here and people mean food.
So let's be by the people, you know?
And so we feel like there's way overpopulated sharks because every time you take your boat out to a popular dive site, 15 sharks show up.
And you're like, there's way too many sharks in Florida.
Every time I dive here, I see 15, 30 sharks.
Right.
Right.
Because for the last 10 years, everybody has directly or indirectly fed those sharks.
So of course, there's way too many sharks in this spot.
Right.
But on a whole mass of the state, And the planet, more importantly, there is not too many sharks.
Right.
Do you think it makes sense for the sharks to be so protected like they are right now?
Or do you think it should be more.
I don't know the regulations.
I can't speak on that really.
I don't know.
I think it's species by species, right?
Maybe you can find that, Stephen, like what the regulations are on shark fishing in Florida.
I think, and I stand by this with almost anything, great white sharks, things like that are maybe an exception that are very, very top of the food chain.
The higher up you get in the food chain, the slower you reproduce, the lower your population density, right?
You're never going to see millions of tigers.
Right, because there's not enough prey to support all the tigers.
And I don't mean tiger sharks, I mean tigers.
Right, you're never going to see millions of great white sharks because there aren't billions of seals.
Do you know what I mean?
You need billions of seals to have millions of great white sharks.
Right, right.
And there aren't trillions of fish to support the billions of seals.
So you're never going to have the most at the top.
So, anyway, that's a long winded way of me explaining my personal take on this, which is you should never hunt stuff that's a very, very top of the food chain with any kind of intense pressure because you can collapse that keystone species.
Taking sharks, I don't have a problem with it.
If there is plenty, if there is a well conducted survey and study, and it's like, hey, we have a massively sustainable population of reef sharks, I'm just making that anecdotally, and we can do a quota of 500 reef sharks a year get taken, and that will not impact their overall population, that won't impact anything below them, great.
Take 500 reef sharks a year.
I don't want to kill a reef shark.
I don't think they taste good.
I don't want to personally hurt one.
I don't like it, but I have no problem with you doing it.
You know, like go for it because the population and the ecosystem.
Can sustain the removal of 500 sharks a year.
So, as long as it sort of stays in that family of not hurting the ecosystem, who cares?
Go for it.
The sharks will reproduce, they'll refill that niche.
Now, if the difference is 500 versus 700, where if we take 700 sharks a year, then, oh, actually over 10 years, we're going to see a population decline to the point of collapse.
No, don't take 700.
Go back to the 500 number.
You know what I mean?
Just like it has to be studied.
That's the only way you can monitor these things and apply.
Useful regulations.
Right, right.
The science of the fisheries kind of gets bastardized a little bit too, because especially when it comes to the quotas for these other fish, like snapper and grouper around here.
Yeah.
I did this documentary years ago about the commercial fishing industry around here specifically.
I guess because Madeira Beach is right up the road and it's the number one grouper port in the world.
There's more grouper caught in the Gulf of Mexico brought in through that pass, like two miles down the road than anywhere.
Mostly black grouper, everything gags.
Gags, black grouper, reds, a lot of reds, all kinds of grouper.
Wow.
But like the quota, the quotas was set up.
I forget.
I'm sort of like fuzzy on the dates.
But I remember like when they first enacted like that federal quota system, all the quota was given to these people originally.
So like all these fishermen are boat owners back in the day.
They were assigned this quota.
Now what happens is those guys who own those quota, they basically lease it out to other fishermen.
Yeah.
So they're just like capitalized.
It's like a monopoly system.
What is this?
Harvestable sharks, bag limit, one shark per person per day.
I mean, so to me, that seems reasonable.
And I don't know.
Like, they've got a list of species.
Dogfish are one of the most widely distributed sharks on the planet.
They're in every ocean in the world, I think, except Antarctica, right?
I don't know about some of these other.
Bonnethead's a type of hammerhead.
Two sharks, minimum size, blah, blah.
Oceanic white tip, that shouldn't be there, right?
Like, oceanic white tips are hammered.
Their population's fucked.
Is it really?
It is.
They're really rough.
I don't know.
There used to be a lot of oceanic white tips.
I do know.
I don't know why I said I didn't know.
It's because of the shark fin trade.
So, they're a scavenger shark in blue water.
Right.
And longliners throw out, you know, lines of bait and hooks, and they're like very, very quick to hit the long line.
And so, that species in particular has been really, really hammered.
I think, you know, you'd have to check my reading on that.
That's like being that, like a pelagic fish way out there in the open ocean is like living in the desert for a shark.
100%.
And then when you see a bite of food, you have to take it.
Right.
Because who knows when your next meal is coming.
That's why the shipwrecks, all the people get devoured by those sharks.
Right.
Exactly.
But, you know, to me, as long as this is well studied, and it goes back to what you were just saying about the quota limits.
You can't set a quota and maintain it.
That's not really science, right?
Science is like an ever evolving understanding of things.
So if you're just like, oh, bag limits one shark per person, and then we run that for 10 years and go, hey, there's way more sharks now than there were 10 years ago for whatever other factors, make the bag limit two sharks per person.
But if you go bag limits one shark per person, and after 10 years you're like, hey, there's not a lot of sharks left, like, okay, we shouldn't be killing sharks, right?
So as long as Florida Fish and Wildlife and NOAA and all these organizations are Keeping up to date on their studies and research, which I can't say whether they are or they aren't, I see no problem with it.
But it has to be managed.
That's the thing.
It just has to be managed.
People should enjoy resources.
We should have monetary value on animals because it protects them, it makes them safe.
If there are guys that are willing to pay $100,000 to go out and shoot a bull shark or whatever, and the bull shark population is fine, and that $100,000 somehow goes back into the conservation of the species, same thing as game hunting in Africa, that's great.
It just has to be managed correctly.
It just has to be done well.
That's all.
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Zimbabwe Safari and Reform00:14:35
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Now back to the show.
You're from Zimbabwe, right?
That's right, yeah.
How the hell did you end up in Zimbabwe, or how did your parents end up in Zimbabwe?
Yeah, so I'm sixth generation.
So my family has been there a long time, longer than California has been around.
So, yeah, where I live now.
So, you know, my family had been in Africa for a very long time.
My grandfather, my mother's side of the family, English settlers way back when.
And then my grandmother, my father's family is American.
So that's how I ended up back here.
And I actually have an American passport.
And my parents brought me over here to have birth here so that I was born in America.
I had a passport.
Yeah, which was clever.
Went back when I was a few months old.
And, you know, I have a lot of American ties, but I grew up in Zimbabwe, in the bush, on a farm, safari all the time, very prim and proper school, you know, ties and uniforms and prefects.
And yeah, very different childhood to your average American.
Did you go to the school that had the UFO encounter or the alien encounter?
I'm familiar with it, but no, I didn't.
My mom also didn't go to the school, but she remembers it vividly.
Not the alien encounter, but when it all happened.
That was like 94, I think.
Yeah, we were, we were, was it 94?
I don't remember, but yeah.
It was early 90s.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, maybe 97.
I don't know.
I don't know either.
I mean, I was there.
I was in Zimbabwe in school, but I was little and don't really remember it that well.
Right, right, right.
Whereas it was very well talked about.
Yeah, aerial school.
What year was it?
94.
94, yeah.
So my mom was like, we were all living there, and I've talked to my mother about it, and she's like, yeah, I remember it.
Like, it's, you know, she's not a believer in like aliens or anything like that, but she's like, yeah, everybody says the same thing, saw the same thing.
You know, it's pretty spine tingling.
Like, Yeah.
There's something there.
That's the first thing I thought of.
I was looking up your age.
Me and you are about the same age.
You would have been in school in that kind of school in 94.
I was like, what if he was at that aerial school?
I wish.
I wish.
I wish I had.
This dude's seen everything.
Dude, I wish.
Well, I have been struck by lightning.
Have you been struck by lightning?
No, I wish.
I wish.
That was amazing.
I mean, with all the new stuff coming out on aliens and UFOs and all that, it's like, I don't know.
To me, it's like this Rolodex of things is being checked.
We're getting closer and closer to just being like, yeah, here they are.
Right, right.
Yeah, they're slowly.
They're slowly letting the news out so we don't lose our minds when they actually admit there's aliens.
It does seem that way, doesn't it?
Yeah.
Or it's like all a smoke and mirror show.
Right.
That's a good chance.
To pull our attention off of the economic crisis and everything else.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Or war or whatever it might be.
Or whatever, yeah.
So, like, how did you, when you were a kid growing up in Zimbabwe, like, how old were you when you were just running around with wild lions and stuff and tigers when you were like a toddler?
Yeah.
More or less.
You know, it's like asking a Florida boy if he was running around in the swamps with gators.
Like, you can be if you want to be, right?
Just like, you've, like, If kids in Florida and they want to go play in the swamp, you can be, or you can go to the mall, right?
And so it's the same nobody gets a mall anymore.
But it's like the same sort of idea.
So my family ran safari businesses.
So when I wasn't in school, I was in the bush, I was barefoot, I was running around with wildlife.
You know, the difference being here, like you run around in your backyard and maybe you see a raccoon.
There, like it can be a cobra, it can be a leopard, it can be a hyena, you know, anything can happen.
So, um, I was spent a lot of time in the bush, but I think it was because I grew up with that one track mind.
I was always singularly focused on wildlife.
My sister grew up the same way, and she works in fashion.
Oh, wow.
So, like, it's just choices, you know, and things that you're, it's not all nature versus nurture, you know.
Like, I was just completely enamored with animals from a very young age and still am today.
So, how did that, I mean, when you went to California, you must have been bummed.
Dude, well, it was rough.
So, we got kicked out of Zimbabwe during the land reform era.
So, we had, yeah, yeah.
So, we had war veterans.
It wasn't real war veterans, but we won't go into the minutiae of it.
But we had, there was a land reform era in the late 90s, early 2000s in Zimbabwe where people could come and take your land with guns.
And so we had all of our neighbors killed, murdered, tortured.
What?
A lot of our staff went through Pungwis, which is indoctrination through torture, to be converted into the ZANU PF political party.
Like, it was crazy.
We got shot at a lot.
I was in a couple gunfights as a 14 year old.
Like, things were crazy.
And one day, to make a long story short, the war veterans had taken all the farms around us because they were all bigger than ours.
We had lived in the smallest farm in the area, and our farm was the last to go.
They were on all sides of the fence, basically, and they came in, and my dad was out of the picture.
So it was me as a 14 year old boy who was like sort of running the household, at least aesthetically, because in Zimbabwean culture and Shona culture, women can't run things, men have to.
And even a 14 year old boy had more say than my mother who actually ran things.
Do you know what I mean?
So it was all translated through me.
So it was just me, my mother, and my little sister living on this farm in rural Africa, and our staff and everything, farm workers and things.
And anyway, one day we'd lost all the neighbors, all the land was gone, all the land reform had ended.
They came and knocked on our door, they had guns.
And I think because it was a single mother with two kids, instead of just killing us on the spot, they were like, You have 24 hours to leave or we're taking it.
And I was 14, so I ran upstairs.
I got my.22 rifle, I got my knife and put it on my belt.
And I ran downstairs.
I was like, Let's fucking go.
And my mom slapped me across the face and she's like, Back your things and get in the car.
And so we left.
We fled Zimbabwe and came to America with a couple hundred bucks.
Whoa.
Yeah.
So were those those terror groups that were in North Africa?
No.
So we live in Southern Africa.
Zimbabwe's in Southern Africa.
But it is terror groups.
You can call it whatever you like.
If you look it up, it's called Boko Haram?
No, that's a whole different thing.
So this is the Robert Mugabe regime, who's dead now, but he was a dictator for life, self declared.
And he was the president of Zimbabwe.
And his political party, which was the ZANU PF party, their way of retaining power was to blame all of the white farmers.
For taking all of the money from all of the native black people.
But like I said, we'd been there six generations.
We felt as native as we could be.
And it was really like a methodology to get angry, poor street kids aggressive to think that they could be rich if they took things for themselves.
And it was very, very genius because it ended up in a lot of deaths.
And it's the same thing that's happening in South Africa right now.
And it was called land reform.
And so, yeah, so we lost everything, fled to America, went from living on a 200 acre farm with a giant lake and.
200 plus employees and a giant, not giant, but a big safari business and airplanes and everything to Zimbabwe currency was basically blacklisted on the world's trades embargo at that time.
So we had no money at all.
So we came to America with 200 bucks, three suitcases of clothes, and went into welfare.
So pretty quick flip flop in Oakland, California, which was a rough neighborhood back then.
It wasn't all gentrified and upscale like it is today.
I'll tell you that.
Not at all.
Yeah, I have a $100 trillion Zimbabwe bill somewhere in my house.
Yeah.
I remember right around when we left, if you wanted to buy a loaf of bread, you would take two plastic grocery bags of cash into the store to buy a loaf of bread.
And it would take them five to 10 minutes to count out the cash for a loaf of bread.
It was valueless.
The currency was not worth the paper that it was printed on.
God, dude.
That is so wild.
Yeah.
It was a crazy place.
It was crazy.
And it's funny because.
The childhood I had, I don't want to paint a bad picture of Zimbabwe because the childhood I had was idyllic.
Like, never locked a door, ran around barefoot.
All of my best friends were native kids, like Shauna kids that lived on the farm.
I'd sleep in their mud huts.
They'd come sleep in the house where we lived.
You know, we'd run around like best, best friends, run around just having so much fun catching jackals and snakes and fishing in the dam.
Just the most idyllic, like, country childhood you could ever imagine.
And then things just slowly, not even that slowly, they rapidly got worse.
But as Zimbabweans, like, Very different culture.
The culture there is like, dig your heels in and fight for what's yours because they've been through multiple wars and everything else.
And so that was what we did.
We're like, things will be fine.
We'll get out of this in the long run.
Run, things will switch, and it didn't.
There's basically no farms left, you know, so it just the country completely collapsed.
What's it like right now?
It's still, in my opinion, the most beautiful place in the world.
There's nowhere like Monopool Zimbabwe for a safari on planet Earth.
I mean, it's just stunning.
Victoria Falls, one of the greatest natural wonders in the world, but it's in economic disarray.
There's no real money still.
It's like all bullshit.
Like, I have a friend from Zimbabwe, his name's Stu, and I was like, oh man, like, how's it going, bro?
Like, how are things at home now?
And he's like, oh, no, it's not so bad now.
I was like, well, how does it work?
He's like, oh, yeah, so.
All you have to do is you buy an Apple gift card and you load that gift card with money, and then you pay people on Apple, iTunes, in order to buy things.
It's like, well, what about the banks?
It's like, oh, there's no banks anymore.
You know, it's just like there are banks, but they don't hold money.
They're not reliable.
Like, you can't get withdrawals.
There's no electricity.
Like, the water's now tainted.
Like, Zimbabwe went from this crown jewel of Africa.
Like, keep in mind, it was one to one with the British pound at one point, meaning it was richer than the United States, to the poorest country in the world in 10 years.
God damn.
Yeah.
I know poaching's a big issue over there.
Everywhere.
I had this dude, Ryan Tate, on here who works for this organization called Vetpa, where I guess it's like they have these war veterans that go over there and they volunteer to help fight the poachers out there.
I love that.
And they do shit.
They literally go out at night, clandestine, and rip people out of their bedrooms while they're sleeping.
Yeah.
A lot of people don't know this.
And it's funny because it's relatively widely talked about, but maybe your listeners have already heard this before.
It is an active, unregulated war that is taking place in certain parts of southern Africa, sub Saharan Africa.
In Zimbabwe specifically, like we're, I don't know if I should name the place or not, but there's a huge reserve in the southern part of Zimbabwe.
Huge, huge.
And they have their own trained military militia that are anti poaching.
And at the same time, and they fund that through running hunting camps on this property, which is one of the reasons I'm like supportive of hunting when it's done right, right?
They fund this by.
Selling big game hunts on this huge property.
Yeah, that's how they fund this military militia.
There's no rhino hunting, of course.
You know, you can't come in, it doesn't matter how much money you have, and shoot a rhino because they don't believe in that.
You can shoot almost anything else.
Do you shoot elephants?
I'm not sure if they allow elephants or not.
But yeah, I mean, for the most part, there's a lot of parks in Africa where elephants are overpopulated.
Oh, really?
You can go.
I'm not condoning elephant hunting.
I personally don't understand it.
I could never, never shoot an elephant.
It's so weird.
Look into those eyes.
They're so peaceful.
They're not scared of you either.
You just walk up to it and shoot it.
I think about it all the time when I see the pictures of those guys.
Posing next to the dead elephants.
I'm like, what do you, maybe I just didn't get that gene.
Same.
You know what I mean?
I don't see what you get from that.
I, and I want to finish the thing about poaching and the war, but I, two years ago, we moved 24 rogue elephants in Mozambique that were killing people.
And we moved them from an unregulated area into a national park.
And to make a long story short, I darted this one from this helicopter, landed, ran over to it, pulled its trunk out because they can't breathe when they're, they breathe through their trunks exclusively.
So if they land on their trunk, they asphyxiate.
Pulled his trunk out.
And I'm sitting there feeling this breath of this huge bull elephant, like a 75 pounder, meaning each tusk was like 75 pounds, which is a big elephant, big bull.
And I put my hand on him and I feel this warm skin.
I look at this big, doughy eye.
And I'm not the most emotional person in the world, but I had this lump in my throat.
Like I just wanted to cry.
I don't know why.
And it was just from looking at this magnificent animal.
It wasn't dead, he was just sleeping.
And we were saving his life.
And it was the most incredible emotional experience just to touch and being that.
Enormous and grand and majestic.
I can't even imagine wanting to put a bullet through something like that's head.
It's insane to me.
But anyway, back to the poaching.
There's these big, big parks, like the one I was mentioning, big, big privately held areas.
And there are these active wars going on.
You have a whole group of well funded poachers because a rhino horn is worth a fortune.
And they're super well funded with night vision and AR rifles.
And I don't even know all the terminology like all this crazy technology.
And then you have a whole anti poaching unit.
And because it's in a place like Zimbabwe, which I've just explained, like what the law is like and everything else, it is a physical war that nobody's involved in.
There's no police.
There's no.
Military, there's nothing.
It's just this group that protects the animals versus this group that's trying to kill the animals.
And whatever happens, happens.
If you run into a poacher, you shoot them.
If the poacher shoots you first, they shoot you.
If 10 people die that day, nobody knows.
If 1,000 people die in a gunfight that day, nobody knows.
It's just this is how things operate in this little world.
And it's so crazy living in America now where, like, if I let a firework off, I'm probably going to have cops visit me, right?
And there are full on gunfights every week, people being murdered over rhino horn and poaching and this amazing group of people, like you just mentioned.
Who will risk their lives to save the animals and this other awful group of people that are funding it to try and kill the animal?
Funding Poachers in China00:03:38
It's crazy.
And people don't even know about it.
Who's funding the poachers?
The Chinese, quite frankly.
And I'm not an anti China guy or anything else, but I shouldn't say the Chinese.
I should say Eastern medicine.
So China and Vietnam specifically have Eastern medicine beliefs in rhino horn, tiger whiskers, Vakita swim bladders, like all these stew, or not Vakita.
It's the big fish, tortuava swim bladders, all these stupid things that are all nothing.
Like, rhino horns, the same thing as our fingernails, it's keratin.
Right.
It's nothing, it's valueless.
But they have all these Eastern medicinal practices, specifically in China and Vietnam.
And I do think that the image is changing.
We can talk about that.
But they want it for those things.
And because it's so valuable, like one rhino horn like this is worth a couple hundred thousand dollars, right?
What?
Oh, yeah, it's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
To a Zimbabwean Shauna guy who's lived in a mud hut his whole life, who maybe when the economy was good 25 years ago, Would make a hundred thousand sorry, a hundred dollars per month.
US one horn that big changes your entire life, and so that's one thing that has always gotten wrong.
It's not necessarily the guy shooting the animal that's the bad guy, it's the people funding them.
You know, that guy's just trying to make a living, he's trying to feed his family.
I'm not saying he's a good person because he knows what he's doing, but at the same time, there's some guy behind the scenes from China or Vietnam that runs this totally mafioso thing that's feeding them all these guns, training, money.
Promises.
It's just like, you know, high level drug dealing over here.
That's the thing, man.
If you're poor and your kids are starving, are you willing to kill a rhino?
Of course.
Right.
Of course.
I would do anything.
It's funny because five years ago, I've two kids now.
Five years ago, before either of my boys were born, I would have been like, no, like my children could starve to death.
It's like, I don't care.
I would never kill a rhino.
That's my feeling.
Now, if my son was literally starving to death and a rhino was the only thing on the table, There's nothing I wouldn't do to protect my son.
Nothing.
Nothing.
You know, and I get that.
And that's what these people are going through.
And that's why I say they're victimized because they're hammered by this well funded group promising them a life of riches and retirement.
If they just do this one thing, it's just this one thing.
Just go out there, get one rhino.
That's what they're saying, right?
Take our guns, take this, take that.
Go out there.
You know where the rhino live.
You've grown up in the bush, you live beside the game park.
Get one rhino and your life has changed forever.
And that's the promise they're selling them on, right?
Your kids will never be starving again.
You'll have medicine.
You'll have running water and electricity.
That's why it's really not the people, the actual poachers that are the bad guys.
And people realize this.
This is well recognized in the poaching world.
And people are going after the mafioso guys.
And there was this big, I think he was Vietnamese, kingpin that was caught in South Africa about two years ago.
And I think catching him alone eliminated like 400 poachers.
Wow.
Because he was the kingpin, right?
He was funding everything and sending it out.
It was all going through him.
He was the exporter to China.
And they caught him after this amazing sting operation.
And executed him, and that wiped out 400 poachers like that.
It's amazing.
That is incredible.
Don't they also use those horns for creating little trinkets and statues, like those little mini statuettes that they carve, the little Chinese statuettes?
I don't really know.
I mean, they definitely do that with ivory, like elephant ivory.
That's what I'm thinking of.
Yeah, ivory.
Ecuadorian Tribe Expeditions00:10:29
But I think the thing now is so China's obviously had a massive economic boom, Vietnam as well, right?
And so now they have a huge middle class.
Economic middle class.
And the economic middle class wants to have all these luxuries that the super rich have.
Just like us, I want a Ferrari.
You don't want a Ferrari?
We both want Ferraris, right?
Who doesn't want a Ferrari?
But the only people who can afford Ferraris are truly, truly rich people, right?
And so when you have this larger economic middle class, they're all striving for these luxuries that the super wealthy had.
And Chinese and Vietnamese and other Southeast and other Asian cultures are like, oh, well, that luxury for us is rhino horn dick pills, it's ivory on the wall, it's whatever, right?
And so that's the problem this economic boom has created enough money for a larger population to be able to afford these luxuries.
Right.
That's insane, bro.
It's insane.
I got to take a leak real quick.
Now you're good.
Good dude, Paul.
Genuinely.
Paul, dude, he's the man.
Such a great guy.
I couldn't believe he had never been on a podcast before.
Well, he met my buddy Julian actually through Ryan Tate, the guy from Africa.
Okay.
So Julian had Ryan on his podcast, and Paul just came along with him.
And then I started talking to Paul, like, Off camera after the podcast, like, yo, what's your deal?
He's like, Oh, I live in the Amazon.
I live with a tribe in the Amazon, catch anacondas all day.
Yeah.
And then walk on floating forests.
Like, no, nothing new.
So, yeah, he was basically telling the story of how, like, he kind of got screwed by, I don't remember, I don't want to get it wrong, but it was either like Nat Geo or Discovery.
They produced a show.
No, Discovery.
Was it Discovery?
The Snake Show.
The Snake Show.
Yeah.
Where they tried to set him up getting eaten by an anaconda.
Eat me alive or eaten alive or something like that.
Yeah, dude, that was such a croc.
And then they put him on, they had to, like, stage the whole thing.
They fucking went to some Farm in Texas, I think it was, where some guy owned an anaconda and they had to like produce the whole thing.
The thing wasn't even hungry.
Did he tell all this?
Oh, yeah, he told everything.
No kidding, I didn't know that.
Yeah, he's like, the snake wasn't even hungry.
Like, they had to fake produce it to make it look real.
Then the thing actually did squeeze him and then they had to pull him out.
And then they put him on Good Morning America to try to promote the show.
And he's like, he's like, this is fucking fake.
Like, why am I going to do this?
This is so bad.
And they're like, if you don't fucking do it, you're not getting paid or something like that.
And it sucks too because, like, you know, I've been in the TV game for quite a long time now, so I know where and when to say no.
And I don't know if this is Discovery.
It was more likely the production company that was making it for Discovery, you know, but I don't really know.
But I work with Discovery.
They're a great business partner to me.
But, you know, I know when to say no immediately.
Like, I've been approached by not them, but production companies being like, hey, don't you want to do this dating show where a guy gets like rides a bear in?
And I'm like, nope, not doing that, you know?
But when you're early on in your career and you're probably in Paul's mentality where he's like, oh, this is my big break.
Like, I just have to do this thing.
And then I can communicate all this wildlife science, I can talk about.
Giant snakes.
I can teach people that they're not actually mindless killing machines.
I'll do what they say because they have my best interests in mind.
You just say yes.
You go on the show.
You let the snake try and eat you.
And it's so sad because I think he's remembered for that stunt.
Yeah.
And he's such a good guy.
He so genuinely cares about wildlife and animals and giant snakes and indigenous peoples and everything.
And he's been labeled, like, especially in the herpetological community, as, you know, like, oh, what a jerk.
Like, how could he do the stunty thing?
And it's so not his fault.
It's really unfortunate.
Not at all.
He got taken advantage of, man.
He did.
And he was young.
And that was his first time.
Yeah, I think he was like 24 or something, wasn't it?
Yeah, he was super young.
And he really got, you know, bullied into that, which is such bullshit.
Yeah, it's like, but he, dude, he is something else.
When he was describing to me how the Amazon basically, like, how when you go down there and you're down there for a certain amount of time, how all these suppressed sort of alarms and sensors that are in our bodies, they all of a sudden come to the surface and wake up.
Yeah.
Like when you're walking through the forest, all of a sudden, like, there's this something inside you that turns on that's like suppressed because of our technology.
And we live in this world where there's no threats, there's no existential threats.
You drive to Publix to go shopping.
And when you're out there, there's nothing but the birds and the fucking river and fucking jaguars.
Yeah.
It like, he's spot on.
It flips a switch that's buried in us.
You go back to what humans are supposed to be or evolutionarily became, which is alive, alert, observant, primal beings, you know, hunters, gatherers.
Whether you hunt or not, whether you're like, you know, Paul and live in the Amazon, you become aware of your surroundings.
So you're, oh, there's a bird there, there's a beetle there, there's a snake there, there's something moving in the bushes.
When you're walking around with AirPods in playing Pokemon Go, like, you know, like, forget about it.
Staring at your iPhone all day.
Are you kidding me?
I've almost been hit by a car staring at my iPhone crossing the street, but I know enough to, similarly to Paul, and not nearly to the extent he is, completely unplugged for weeks and months at a time when I go on expeditions.
And it's just like, every part of you feels better.
You feel more awake, more alive, more alert, more observant.
Your senses become heightened.
You can smell more and taste more.
You feel more.
You feel the ground under your feet.
Feet differently.
It's crazy how much you wake up and then we go back into this digital sedative that is our everyday life.
Right.
It's crazy.
I mean, I don't want to say the same things he did, but I know what he experiences and I respect it so much.
And I wish more people would try it.
Yeah.
He said that when he first got down there, he was like wearing these big boots and the natives were looking at his boots like, what the fuck are those?
Oh, yeah.
Take those off.
He's like, what?
Yeah.
For sure.
Because they're these big, heavy swamp things.
You know, in the Amazon, it's super wet.
Those things get wet.
They stay wet forever.
It's like, Put on some sandals like everybody else and get in the jungle.
The fact that he doesn't carry a gun with him is just crazy.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the way it is down there, you know.
You've been down there before, haven't you?
A lot of times.
Yeah.
Not to his place.
We've talked about it a lot.
I need to go visit him.
But yeah, I've been to Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Colombian Amazon, Brazilian Amazon as well.
Yeah.
Were you filming shows down there?
What were you specifically doing down there?
Yeah.
I mean, filming our shows are expeditions typically.
Oh, expeditions.
Yeah.
So it's one in the same for us.
Like we have a very tight knit crew, six guys.
We go on anywhere from a 10 day to a month long expedition to film a show.
And, you know, that's why our shows are what they are and are as popular as they have been because there's no faking it in a backyard in Texas.
Like, we just take a camera crew and instead of saving a bunch of money by faking it, we just go for a month and just say, fuck it, you know?
And we've had some epic, epic trips down there.
Did you guys ever run into any uncontacted tribes?
Not there, no.
Papua New Guinea, not uncontacted, but very, very remote.
Like, we went to a tribe in Papua New Guinea that hadn't, like, none of the children had ever seen a white person.
Like they came up, touched our skin, touched our hair, you know, stuff like that.
Some of the elder elders had, you know, like people that they seemed elder, elder, but they're probably like in their 50s.
But, you know, that's it's a harder life over there.
And they had, like, you know, met white people in their life before, but the kids, the children's generation never had.
You know, none of the teenagers ever had or young adults ever had.
But no, I've never had any truly like uncontacted tribe stuff.
We had a pretty interesting experience in the Ecuadorian.
No.
Yeah, Ecuadorian Amazon.
The very first time I went, this was 15 years ago now, so it's been a minute.
We went with this little guy named Fausto, a tiny little Ecuadorian Amazonian guy.
I'm not sure what tribe.
Flew into Cocos and went down this river for a few days.
And it was just me and two buddies.
It wasn't a show.
It was just my first trip to the Amazon.
We spent 10 days.
It was our spring break in college, actually.
It was our spring break.
And we spent 10 days going as deep into the Ecuadorian Amazon as we could get before turning around and running out there.
And on the fourth or fifth day, We parked our little motor canoe and we're just hiking the jungle, looking for snakes and taking photos and just doing fun wildlife stuff.
No real purpose to it, just exploring.
And our guide Faiso looks at the ground and he sees a footprint and he sees something else.
I forget what it was.
Maybe it was like a machete handle or something like that.
He's like, Hide, hide, hide.
We're like, What the fuck?
And dive into the bushes and not on the same trail we were on, but nearby.
We hear guys go by, like jabbering in their native language.
You know, like just going by.
He's like, And we're like sitting there quietly, like hiding in this bush.
There's four of us me, my buddy Mike, my buddy Nick, and this guy Fausto.
And we're like tucked in a ball under some like big leaves, hiding.
And we sit there, and like the voices have been gone for like 30 minutes.
I'm like, and he's like, and we wait.
So we spend like 30 minutes sitting tucked in this bush.
Not, we didn't even see the people, but close enough that we heard him.
And then it ends, and we're like, Fausto, why did we do that?
And he's like, oh, they're from the other tribe.
And we're like, okay.
And he's like, Oh, they would have killed me because I'm not from their tribe if I'm here.
He's like, they would have just, and they might have killed you guys too.
So we have to hide while we're here.
And I was like, Jesus Christ, dude.
Like, what are you talking about?
And he's like, yeah, it's just the way it is in this area.
Like, it's like, I don't usually come here, but if they're here and I'm here, it's bad.
And I was like, wow, that's crazy.
Yeah, man.
I mean, Paul was explaining the stories of how those guys kill any white people they find.
Like, they'll shoot, they'll shoot at you and kill you.
The uncontacted tribes?
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
We're scary to them.
I mean, Seminole Island, is that what it's called?
There's that island.
North Sentinel Island?
Sentinel.
Sentinel Island, yeah.
That has that same sort of thing.
Papua New Guinea, I saw two different people get hacked up by machetes while we were there.
You saw people get hacked up by them?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
What?
Yeah.
What happened?
So, two different times.
The first one was gnarly, so I'll probably just tell that story.
But basically, we're in Port Moresby.
Port Moresby is the capital of Papua New Guinea.
It's a melting pot, okay?
Papua New Guinea has 800 languages spoken.
The reason there's 800 languages spoken in one country is because these are tribes that don't like to intermix.
They're geographically isolated and they're like little cliques.
Port Moresby, the capital, is a melting pot for all of these tribes to come together, right?
It's like a Western city that was built.
And because of that, you have 800 ish groups of people that all hate each other.
Okay, I'm generalizing here, but they roll around in these little cliques.
It's like a middle school.
You have all these little cliques of people walking around.
It's because he's from this tribe and he's from that tribe and he's from this tribe.
Mammoths Back from Extinction00:15:41
It's all men that you see walking around the streets.
And they're all carrying machetes in a capital city.
And when we were there, day three, we went to this area where they're like, you shouldn't film here, you shouldn't film here, whatever.
And we're like, oh, I want to meet the children.
I want to talk to the fishermen.
It's like, fine.
And so we're filming there, and our giant Australian security guard named Clint, he's like six foot nine, like shoulders out, he looks like bigger than any NFL linebacker you've ever seen.
He's just a monster.
And he comes running over.
He's like, Get in the car, get in the car.
There's a problem.
So you get in the bus and he's like clearing traffic and moving us out.
And we pull up to like this market area.
And you just see basically two groups of people like screaming at each other.
And one guy like pulls his machete out like this.
And the other guy pulls the machete out like this.
And they just boom, clash like this.
There's a wall of people all around it, right?
It's like hundreds of people in this market.
And you just see like machetes flying, blah, blah, blah.
And then we're stuck in traffic.
It has nothing to do with us.
They don't want anything to do with us.
They don't want to hurt us, whatever.
This is a tribal thing, click thing in the city.
All these people around, whatever.
Cops come, people disperse.
We're stuck in traffic watching this for an hour.
People disperse, and there's just bodies laying on the ground.
And then it's just back to normal.
The police are there, they're kind of looking, talking to each other, writing on a notepad.
People are stepping over the bodies and going back to buying a leaf of lettuce.
And that's their culture.
It's just like that's the way things are there.
That's so wild.
It's crazy.
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Back to the show.
Another thing that shocked me that I didn't know about the Amazon was how all the trees are basically just sitting on the ground.
Their roots don't go deep into the ground because they're shallow.
I guess the earth that's directly underneath the topsoil is like super dense clay, like from the bottom of the Atlantic, from when the two continents split, from when Africa split from South America.
An extremely low nutrient value, as well.
Yeah, all the nutrients are in the very, very thin topsoil, is my understanding.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, the Amazon is known as a shallow forest.
Like it just doesn't penetrate deep.
And trees fall over, you know, you see it when you're down there.
Like huge, huge trees will just be toppled over with their root base 25, 30 feet over your head.
Because they don't go deep, they go flat.
They just spread way out.
Yeah, and then the tree tips over, windstorm, lightning, age, whatever, and you just see these massive down trees.
And they pull down like a bunch of trees with them.
Which is a good thing for the forest because it opens up a bunch of light, gives new photosynthesis to the area, rejuvenates that area.
The nutrients from that big dead tree go back into the system.
All that energy is returned to the system.
It's not good for that tree, it's not good for the population of birds that was living in the tree, but on a whole, it's very good for the jungle.
Right.
Have you heard the theory that Amazon was man made?
I have, and I talked about it on a podcast pretty recently.
I got torn to shreds.
Really?
Yeah.
I forget if it was Rogan or if it was my own podcast, something, but I read the comments and a bunch of people put a bunch of literature in there that I ended up reading about half of it saying that it's bullshit.
At the end of the day, it's theory.
It seems like the Amazon has giant pieces of cultivated jungle.
And this is my newer understanding, by the way, so people can rip me to shreds again and then I can learn more, which is a very useful way to do this.
Yes.
The commenters always know everything.
That's great.
That's great.
And nobody's mean on the internet.
My understanding is there are giant, very large sections of the jungle.
That are cultivated, meaning fruits and vegetables and things like that were planted in these areas because, as we're now learning, there were very large civilizations in the Amazon jungle that have since collapsed.
Now, I think I made the wrongful statement at some point on one of these shows going, hey, have you heard that the whole Amazon jungle is like a cultivated jungle?
It's like a planted jungle.
That's obviously not the case.
There's areas of cultivation, areas where humans have.
Inadvertently or directly planted and changed the ecosystem.
But it seems like there are large swaths of the jungle that look to the naked eye just like wild jungle that are very, very cultivated many generations ago.
And then other areas that are completely untouched, which is very logical if you think about it.
Big civilization used to plant things nearby.
Civilization collapsed.
All those things stayed there.
It all gets overgrown.
It all looks wild.
Other areas, no civilization, untouched.
Logical.
Yeah.
I guess one of Graham Hancock's biggest arguments for that was the Brazil nuts.
He said the Brazil nut tree was cultivated, I think was the word he used.
What was the word he used?
He said it was domesticated.
He said there were domesticated Brazil nut trees in the area, the areas of Terra Preta.
But the Brazil nut, what Paul was saying is the Brazil nut tree is not a domesticated species.
The Brazil nut tree is like a native, original species to the Amazon.
It's not like a golden retriever was domesticated from wolves or whatever they bred it with.
It's original, it's like a native plant there or the tree.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, it sounds, you know.
Paul was going off.
And he said the problem with that theory.
With the theory is that it's like, okay, if we made the Amazon, if it's our garden, then we can do whatever we please with it.
Well, that is the problem.
And that's the same problem that I face with what I do with animals on the edge of extinction.
You know, it's funny, similarly to Paul and that theory and his thing with the snake and everything else.
When I first set out to look for animals that were deemed to be extinct, which is what I became most notable for, I was like, this will be such a good thing.
If we find them, it'll save them.
And the one dark shadow to that that I've realized that I never anticipated is that exact mentality.
It's like you find an extinct animal, and then you have all these loons going, Well, extinction isn't really a problem.
Animals never go extinct, they're just hiding.
And I've tried so many times to quell that by saying, Hey, extinction is a major problem.
That's why we talk about it.
That's why it's on these shows.
That's why the shows are about the journey and not the destination.
Combat extinction.
You cannot fix extinction.
Extinction means gone, it means eradicated.
It doesn't mean hiding in a bush or under a tree.
This is about human errors.
And it's the same thing.
It's people being like, oh, if it's not really extinct, scientists don't know what they're talking about.
It's just hiding.
It's like, no, it's just a mistake here and there.
And that's the problem with any of these things.
But at the end of the day, you have to do what you think is right.
You have to do what you think is going to impact the most people, whether that's talking about Brazil nuts, whether that's talking about lost species.
You know, I think the good outweighs the bad.
So, like finding some of these closely endangered species or species that are believed to be extinct, what has been done to like, hasn't there been shit done in science to try to like use CRISPR and some of this gene editing technology to bring back some of these things like the woolly mammoth and the.
Yeah.
So, I work with that company, Colossal.
Colossal Biosciences is the tech company that is using gene editing to bring back extinct animals.
And they just had a great announcement.
Yeah, here you go.
This is them.
This is them.
They're awesome, dude.
It's such a cool company.
Ben Lamb, the CEO, has become a close personal friend, all because I reached out and researched what they were doing and believe in it.
It's radical conservation.
De extinction is a radical idea.
And yeah, I mean, so one big thing that they just announced you might see it on their Instagram or maybe on, I think it was posted by Nat Geo as well.
There's only two northern white rhinos left in the world, and they are functionally extinct, meaning they're not coming back.
There's no way to reproduce them, they're not there.
Until Colossal stepped in and went, hey, hold my beer, right?
And now Colossal is going to go and do the genomics work to save the northern white rhino.
That's pretty incredible, right?
To go and take samples from existing animals, build embryos, impregnate them, so on and so forth, and save a species that's down to two individuals.
That's pretty big.
So, what have they actually done?
Well, that's their big thing right now.
So, they just announced a few days ago.
Oh, okay.
I actually haven't been to the facility since that announcement, so I actually need to.
Talk to them and figure out what their methodology is.
I'm on their conservation advisory board.
Okay.
So I'm talking to them about how to manage the species because that's my background.
So, where are these animals going?
What impacts are they going to have?
How long are they going to be there for?
That's kind of the work that I'm doing with them conservation advising.
What Colossal's doing with the mammoths is they're taking Indian elephant DNA, which is like, I think it's like 99.6% related to a woolly mammoth.
And they are through their various processes of gene editing, which I'm Not going to try and explain or pretend to understand, turning that into a long haired, long tusked, cold adaptive.
Here's the process woolly mammoth.
And then, I mean, they have these crazy machines.
It's a huge company.
It's incredible what they're doing.
And the reason being, and this is why it's important, is by putting mammoths back in the Arctic tundra, and here are the genes they're editing for and everything else.
It's way beyond my comprehension.
They do a fantastic job of communicating it.
But by putting these mammoths back in the environment, It is going to slow down the melting of the permafrost and slow down the release of carbon emissions, which is a huge, huge thing.
And also, look at that.
That's a cartoon one.
Look at that thing.
It's adorable.
It's adorable.
No, they're doing amazing things and they're going to succeed.
So, they want to put them in Siberia and populate Siberia with the mammoths and that will somehow slow the melting of the permafrost?
Correct.
So, a couple things there.
So, it was going to be in Siberian Russia, but there's too much conflict in Russia at the moment.
So, I think now it's going to, it's all going to, this is not happening next week, right?
This is a long, slow process to do it properly.
And it's going to begin to take place in Alaska.
And they are going to be putting these mammoths back.
The mammoths do, there's basically four or five processes, but to try and sum it up as concisely as possible, the mammoths break through, you know, when snow falls, and well, you don't because you're from Florida, but you know, when snow falls, you get like a nice snowpack.
Like imagine an igloo, right?
Eskimos made igloos to stay warm, believe it or not.
So that's because it creates an insulating layer from the ground.
Once you crush that and break it, that insulating layer goes away.
That pulling out trees because there's too many trees in the Arctic now since mammoths went away.
The Arctic used to be more like grasslands and a few other processes lead to a substantially slower melting of the permafrost, which keeps all the carbon from dead grasses and trees that are trapped under that ice trapped under that ice.
So you have much less carbon emission offset or not offset, but much less carbon emission release.
So that offsets that and that slows down how much CO2 is going into the atmosphere, which of course slows down the warming.
Within the ozone.
So it's pretty cool.
Okay.
So basically, when it was lush and when there were big trees and stuff, that would heat it up.
Correct.
Yeah.
And so most people don't know this, but the Arctic used to be like sub Saharan Africa, big grasslands.
It used to be freezing cold grasslands that were filled with megafauna.
But as human beings came over here and settled it, these megafauna never seen humans before.
They weren't scared of them.
And most of that megafauna got driven to extinction.
So, when all that megafauna went away, and this is like big sweeping generalizations, but you can sort of anybody can do the reading and figure it out.
When all that megafauna went away, there was nothing to eat the baby trees and the baby this and that.
And so forests spread, like big, big groves of trees spread.
And now that makes big trees, lots of sunlight.
It made this like warming environment because the grasslands went away and made a forest.
Now, as those forests get knocked, when you have mammoths there, the mammoths knock down those trees and then everything else can graze them and everything else.
But with no mammoths, there's nothing to knock down the trees.
So when you put the mammoths back, it knocks down the trees, it crushes the insulating ice and snow layer, and it does a few other things that all collectively, and this is all studied, it's all on Colossal's website, it collectively will cool down the Arctic up to six degrees, which is a lot of degrees.
Do you know where they found these dead mammoths' remains?
All over the place, I think.
A lot in North America, right?
Oh, yeah.
We found yesterday when we were fossil hunting, we found a whole bunch of it.
Really?
So all of the elephant remains, all the pachyderm remains had to go to the museum.
So, we found 24 species yesterday here in Florida in a creek.
Okay.
And I grabbed you those two.
I kept a couple for myself.
But everything else went to the museum.
And part of what we found yesterday, I found a little piece of ivory, like fossilized tusk.
One of my buddies found like a skull cap from a mammoth.
We found mandibles from a mammoth.
We found teeth from a bunch of mammoth teeth, actually.
And all the pachyderm stuff went to the museum.
So, we're trying to give all the stuff we found away.
You're allowed to keep those things.
But, you know, Anything that we thought was scientifically valuable, we gave to the museum yesterday.
But anyway, that doesn't really answer your question, but it's pretty amazing.
Mammoths were all over the place.
Yeah, no, it's interesting because I just had a guy on here who was talking about some of the ancient cataclysms that basically ended the Pleistocene.
And he was saying how some of the biggest megafauna on Earth were in North America.
And the reason that they all died instantly was because of some sort of cosmic airburst from a comet impact.
I think there's, I mean, he knows more than I do, but there's a lot of theories on why that happened.
Resoundingly, humans had an impact on it.
And yeah, in North America during the Pleistocene, had more big animals than Africa does today.
That's fucking giant sloths, armadillos that you would live under their shell.
Like because they were so big, they'd make like an igloo.
Huge camels, wild horses, like you got there, mammoths, bears.
I mean, this thing called a hell pig.
Ever heard of a hell pig?
Wild Boar and Hell Pigs00:02:56
No.
Oh, that's the scariest thing you've ever seen.
Crazy animals.
Scarer than a terror bird?
Oh, yeah.
Look up a hell pig.
Like, take a look at this thing.
Yeah, look at these things.
Whoa, dude.
Yeah, and they were.
What the fuck?
That's a pig.
And it was a carnivorous pig, by the way.
Pull up that picture, the one next to the life size, the modern pig, like three up.
No, that's a cave bear.
So that's a wild boar.
And you know, wild boar today kill people.
Like, there can be problems with wild boar.
That's a wild boar size comparison to a hell pig.
Like, look at that.
Jesus.
Yeah, that's a scary animal.
I don't think one of those tridents is going to save you from one of those hell pigs.
No, sorry, Manny, but no way.
No, those things are crazy.
But yeah, there's incredible animals here.
And, you know, Colossal's not going Jurassic Park on it and just.
Bringing back anything nuts for the fun of it.
They're bringing back animals that have important conservation implications and will fix environmental damage.
That terror bird, man.
That thing freaked me out.
Crazy thing.
Running into a giant 16 foot chicken that eats meat.
No, thank you.
No.
God damn.
Have you seen the new Apple series, Prehistoric Planet?
No.
Dude, it's fantastic.
And I saw, I think Netflix or somebody's coming out with a competitor pretty soon too, but there's this new show called Prehistoric Planet.
It's like Blue Planet or Planet Earth, but all with the best CGI you've ever seen.
Like the natural history of dinosaurs and terror birds, and it's awesome.
It's really worth a watch.
Wow, that sounds amazing.
Yeah, because like going back to that, how like they got wiped out of North America, it's like you don't see any of these big animals in North America, but you see huge animals in Africa.
Right.
Like you guys still have lions and elephants and all that stuff.
None of that's in North America.
And the resounding theory behind that is Africa is the dawn of mankind, right?
Like humans crawled out, not metaphorically.
Crawled out of the primordial soup alongside these animals.
They evolved alongside these animals in Africa.
So, in Africa, big animals and all animals have always had a fear of human beings.
Okay, always.
So, when you see a lion, when you see an elephant, when you see an impala or a kudu or a giraffe, they run away from people for the most part.
You know, not an elephant, they're not scared of people.
But those animals co evolved with human beings.
Human beings, being as resourceful of a creature as they are, spread out around the planet.
And in doing so, when they got to North America, here were all these critters that weren't at all scared of them, right?
So now, if you wanted a mammoth, you walked up to a mammoth and chucked a spear in its head.
Or, you know, if you wanted a wild horse, you threw a rope around its neck.
Oh, wow.
And so the reason being, the animals in North America and the resources were so incredible in all these other places, too.
But the animals in all these other pockets in the world were not used to human pressure.
So when they got there, humans wiped them out really quickly because it was really easy to do so.
Going back to the guy who wants to feed his family a rhino, right?
Islands, Tortoises, and Cargo00:14:39
Like, This was survival.
This wasn't a pleasant thing to do.
Right.
And so they just wiped out a lot of this megafauna.
Some of it was dying out for other reasons, of course.
Whereas in Africa, all those animals were always like, no, no, stay away from people.
Like we've known these as long as we live.
So, you know, that's kind of the prevailing theory as to why that happened.
Right, right.
What is the craziest, most remote place you've ever traveled to and like stayed in for a while, like no technology?
Oh, that would be the Colombian Amazon.
The Colombian Amazon.
Yeah.
So the FARC rebels controlled the Colombian Amazon until like two years ago.
And then there was a peace agreement, which isn't very peaceful.
And we flew into Bogota and then drove three hours to some strip and then hired, get this, an airplane that was a cargo carrier from World War II.
And if you're asking why a cargo carrier would be charterable into the middle of a remote strip in the Amazon, You guessed it.
They were running Booger Sugar and got on this crazy, crazy World War II cargo plane.
Landed on this dirt strip in the middle of the Amazon that was controlled by FARC rebels, again, where white people hadn't been in 30 years.
And jumped out of that plane, hung out with a village there and a crazy shaman who made me snuff stuff and snort stuff.
And it wasn't cocaine, by the way, it was like crazy jungle stuff.
And I threw up everywhere, had this cleansing ceremony.
It was wild.
Then got in a canoe and went three days up a tributary from there and then set up camp for two weeks up there.
In FARC rebel control jungle, where literally the guy driving our canoe, we were talking to him through the translator.
And I was like, What's it like now that the FARC rebels are gone?
And Bob is like, Oh, it's fine.
Everything's pretty much the same.
I was like, Oh, did you have any encounters with them?
He's like, No, I was FARC.
And I was like, Oh, really?
And I was like, What does that mean?
He's like, Oh, it means if you had come like a couple, like two, two, two, three months ago, we would have killed you.
But now it's okay.
We're like, Cool.
It's crazy.
It was super, super wild.
But I think that was the most remote.
Like, there was.
Absolutely zero sign of human impact of any kind.
Like, just none.
Not a piece of plastic, not a cut down tree, nothing.
You know, just because the conflict that had happened in that area for so long had kept people out of it, you know, because of the guerrilla warfare that was taking place.
And because of it, the environment was pristine and it was fantastic.
And if you get like injured or like bit by a snake or anything, you're absolutely fucked, right?
Yeah, you're done.
I mean, we had a medic with us, you know, and he treated some stuff.
Like, I cut myself pretty badly.
We had some gnarly, gnarly stings from these parasitic wasps.
My one buddy went into anaphylactic shock.
My other buddy got stung literally up the cargo shorts.
So we had treatment because we had our medic with us, EpiPens and stuff like that.
But a bad injury, you're done.
We're hundreds of hours into this remote area, but we're days from a helicopter getting there.
There's no evacuation.
Yeah.
But did you guys have a sat phone or anything with you?
Yeah, I think so.
But.
It wouldn't have done anything.
There's no point in having one, right?
You could have it, and that way they can recover your dead body.
But, you know, like it would take them three days to get there.
Right, right.
Like you get an arrow through the belly.
What are you going to do with your sat phone?
Hey, mom, like exactly.
There's nothing.
There's no helicopters.
There's no hospitals.
There's no ambulance.
People seem to forget this.
Like you can call an airlift service or whatever, and they're like, where are you?
And then they look at their range in a helicopter fuel tank.
They're like, okay, you're five tanks of fuel away from where we can reach.
Like there's no way we can ever get there.
Right.
It's like, great.
You know, see you in three days.
Like we're way out there.
Yeah.
What about the Galapagos?
Been there, done that.
That's one thing I don't know a lot about.
I was hoping you could teach me a little bit about the Galapagos.
With pleasure.
I mean, it's the foundation of the theory of evolution, you know, due to Charles Darwin going there and learning about the finches and their different beaks and the tortoises and their different necks.
And we went there to find a really rare tortoise, which we succeeded in finding.
And it's phenomenal.
Another place similar to what we were just discussing animals have no fear of humans.
Wow.
In evolutionary time, humans have been there for such a short period of time.
And for the most part, other than the early days, protect, not harm the animals.
No fear of humans.
I mean, you can walk from me to you to a rock pile of marine iguanas, just sit there.
They look like old dinosaurs, like shooting salt water out their noses.
Big fur seals, Galapagos fur seals, the little pups will run up to you and like put their little flippers on your feet and be like, what are you?
It's amazing.
Yeah.
Animals don't have fear.
It's not very long to get there.
You can fly.
Boat or plane?
Plane, plane.
Yeah.
You could boat.
That would be brutal.
People do it.
How many miles offshore is it?
I want to say 300, but I'm not sure.
But it's out there.
Oh, holy fuck.
But once you get there, it's legit.
Like, it's a real, it's like going to Hawaii or something, right?
Like, there is some islands that are completely uninhabited.
Nobody goes on them, like Fernandina, where we went.
And then, like, where we had our big party and stuff when we found our tortoise in Isla Santa Cruz.
Great town, beautiful hotels, great food, great live music.
We went karaoke-ing until five in the morning.
Yeah.
You know, they had a parade the next day.
Like, it was wild.
So, it's all there.
But, yeah, from an evolutionary and biological standpoint, it's a pretty significant place.
I mean, it has all these islands.
All these animals that somehow spread out to the various islands.
Yeah, so there it is.
I forget how many miles offshore it is.
Oh, that's way out there.
It's way out there.
That's got to be more than 300 miles.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
I probably should know.
13 major islands, blah, blah, blah.
Six smaller islands.
Yeah, and so of all these islands, of these 13 major and six smaller islands, each island has its own endemic species, meaning.
Animals that exist on those islands and nowhere else, not even really.
Yeah, and this is where the theory of evolution comes from because you can literally see the next island two miles away.
But these tortoises, which kind of swim, kind of cross that barrier.
So, on one island, I'll simplify it on one island, there's a tortoise that always wants to eat cactus fruit that's the very highest part of the cactus.
So, over millions of years, every tortoise that has a long neck breeds with another tortoise that has a long neck, 600 miles west of the equator.
Okay, okay, every tortoise that has a long neck mates with every other tortoise that has a long neck.
And over evolutionary time, you have tortoises that have giraffe like necks.
Okay.
But on the very next island that's two miles away that you can see where those tortoises can never meet each other, they like to eat grass.
So the tortoises get shorter and shorter necks, lower and lower legs, and they get smaller and smaller.
And so just in a two mile span, you have two animals that are very, very similar, but are completely different because they have evolved over evolutionary time for different niches to do different things and they look completely different.
So there's your long neck guy.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
And then, you know, actually, right there in that next picture on the bottom right is a short neck guy.
So they can't reach the top of a cactus?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, some of these guys are monstrous.
Hey, there's my tortoise right there, bottom right.
Oh, no, it's not.
Sorry, that's not her.
But yeah, and it's amazing.
And the same thing with the finches that Charles Darwin discovered and these incredible animals blue footed boobies, those birds you see on the left.
Penguins, tropical penguins, Galapagos penguins are super cool.
It's an amazing place, man.
It's biologically rich.
And one thing they've done so well is they've protected the hell out of it.
Like, they are so.
And this is such a cool thing about Ecuador, and I don't know if they call themselves Ecuadorians or Galapagos or whatever, but the people that live in the Galapagos, they are so proud of their islands and they're so proud of their nature and their native resources.
And it's really annoying when you're trying to film a TV show or do a wildlife show, but you cannot step foot off a trail.
You cannot go pet the tortoise.
You cannot pick up the lizard.
Like, you can't do anything unless you have all these crazy permits and permissions from the government, which we had for our stuff there.
But most people, like, They're like, oh, that's not on your permit.
Don't even think about it.
It's just good.
That's how it should be.
And things are immaculate there because of it.
Are there any crazy species of fish or sharks or whales or anything out there?
Well, you get Galapagos shark there, which are pretty neat.
But they're pretty well distributed globally.
They're pretty crazy.
I have a video I promised him I wouldn't share.
My buddy getting bitten by one yesterday.
I'll show you.
By a Galapagos shark?
Yeah, but I can't show you on air.
He'll kill me.
He's like, please don't share this.
Really?
Why does he want to see it?
I don't know.
He just doesn't.
But I promised him I wouldn't.
But yeah, he got bit by a Galapagos shark yesterday in French Polynesia.
And yeah, there's cool stuff there.
There's big whale sharks.
There's major schooling hammerheads, thousands and thousands of hammerheads.
It's just, it's like, it acts like a fad.
You know what a fad is?
It's like a fish aggregating device.
So, like we were saying earlier, the ocean's a desert, right?
The big blue ocean's a desert.
Then all of a sudden you have this little group of islands 600 miles from the nearest landmass.
So, everything in that desert, it's like an oasis, gets pulled into it, you know?
So, it just, because you have these little beacons, they're incredible.
There's another place that I go called Socaro Island, which is 300, that one I know is 300 miles off the coast of Cabo.
In Baja, Mexico.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, and it's actually called the Revilla Hijeros Islands, but nobody can say that or pronounce it.
So, Socorro is the big island.
It's the same thing, man.
You dive in Cabo, it's like, it's pretty sick.
There's some sharks around.
It's pretty.
The fishing's good, whatever.
You go to Socorro and the revs, and it's like, dude, you're scuba diving in 70 feet of water, and a 300 pound yellowfin swims by you on the reef.
I'd show you pictures of that.
How deep?
Like 70 feet deep.
You don't even have to be deep.
It's just so full of life.
I've been there where you're standing on a boat and you're looking out.
And you're like, what are those things in the ocean?
What are those shadows?
Is there something in the sky?
And you're like, no, it's Wahoo.
It's like 700 Wahoo, like 50 to 100 pounds, just as far as you can see on the dead still ocean.
Oh my God.
Huge mantas coming up and hugging you, giant Kubera snappers.
It's crazy.
And you're not allowed to fish it, which is a good thing.
You're not allowed to.
But it's just like, as a spear fisherman, I'm frothing.
I'm sitting there in my bed.
Look at these yellow fins swimming right by me.
And I'm like, oh my God.
It's crazy.
And it's the same thing, it's because it's so remote.
Acts as an aggregation area.
It's amazing.
Wow, dude.
That is nuts.
Is there anywhere else like the Galapagos or like those islands off of Mexico?
Because there you're kind of in tropical water, right?
Yeah.
But is there any place like that in cold water, like in California or anywhere in like cold climates where you see like these crazy wild fucking fish?
I think something that's pretty similar in a subtropical, like a much colder environment is like the Guadalupe Islands off of Mexico where all the big white sharks are.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So you get a lot of like water mixing there.
You know, so you get cold water currents, warm water currents, huge white sharks, a ton of fish.
And it's a weird place because if you're not from California, it's kind of hard to picture this, but you can be swimming in a kelp forest, which is what we have in California, and then see like tropical butterfly fish swim through.
And you're like, how are these like tropical reef fish swimming through this cold, like green, like Northern California feeling water?
And it's got all this mixing.
You know, there's others like some of the Eastern Pacific in particular has the highest species diversity of.
Fish, I think, in the world.
So you get these little beacons of islands up in Alaska, out in the Atlantic.
You know, another place, what's that place that they get all those huge?
It belongs to Portugal.
I'm blanking on the name now.
There's Portuguese islands way, way offshore.
I'm blanking on the name of it now.
I don't know why.
But I think that's like one of those places in the Atlantic that's incredible.
Like there are these little isolated pockets that are just on another level for fish.
Have you ever swam with orcas?
Just recently.
Really?
Just recently, about six months ago now.
Where?
In Baja, Mexico, in the Bahia de los Angeles.
I was with, actually, you want to see it?
It's pretty cool.
I might have it on mine, but it's definitely on Mike Nulty's Instagram, Nutty Nulty.
And he's a good buddy, big whale photographer.
And he calls me up.
We have this little house down there in this dirt spot in the middle of nowhere, Baja, tiny little town.
And he calls me, he's like, dude, there's orcas in the bay.
I'm like, how do you know?
I think he's the only white guy that lives in this town.
I mean, it's a tiny little place.
And he's like, dude, there's orcas in the bay.
There's orcas in the bay.
I'm like, all right, Mike, what do we do?
He's like, get the boat ready.
So I'm like, getting the boat ready, launching as fast as possible.
Mike comes like tearing in down this dirt road, throws his stuff in, and we cruise out to this area where his fishing buddy calls him and says he's seen orcas.
And these are transient orcas, which means they're the tough guys.
Like, they're the ones that are eating seals and sea lions and mammals and stuff, not stingrays and fish.
Like, these are the scary ones, the true sea wolves.
So you seem confused.
I can explain this.
It's great.
Yeah, I've heard this, but I never understood how there's two types of orcas that have two different diets.
But there's not orcas that like try all the palates.
I mean, maybe, but it's not their like common thing and it hasn't been observed.
And they all speak different languages and they can all communicate, but they can't talk to each other.
It's as if you're speaking Spanish and I'm speaking English.
Like two groups of orcas, they might bump into each other, but they don't hang out for long.
They speak different languages, they have different dialects.
The way they mate is different, the way they travel is different.
Some will hang out in one area by the beach, others will be transient, like the ones I swam with, which means they're just constantly moving.
Searching and hunting new areas.
Crazy.
There's a book called Listening to Whales by Alexander Mortensen that explains it all way better than I ever will.
Yeah, dude, it's worth a read or worth chatting with her.
She's a fascinating woman.
I've never met her.
I just love her book.
And yeah, it's really, really interesting orca behavior.
But anyway, yeah, so my buddy Mike calls me.
We run out there.
We're cruising.
We spend like half an hour on the water.
We don't see anything.
It's like, oh man, we missed it.
Like, what are the odds of running into him anyway?
And then you look on the horizon and you just see this.
Giant black machete cutting through the horizon.
And it looks like something out of the Meg.
Orca Behavior and Captivity00:12:20
You know, it's just this huge, like seven foot tall dorsal fin of this bull orca.
And Mike's like, that's it.
And we like, fucking hit the gas or run.
We don't want to harass them.
We don't want to change their behavior.
So we run way up in front of them, power down the boat.
And I look at Mike.
He's done this like once or twice before, not a lot.
And I'm like, are we good?
He's like, we're good.
I'm like, fuck it, let's go.
And we're gearing up as fast as we can.
My son, snorkel's on, jump in the water.
And he's like, kick away from the boat.
I'm like, are you kidding me?
He's like, kick away from the boat.
I'm like, Fuck it.
So he's just like, it's just him and I, and the boat's like drifting off in the wind slowly, and we're just out in the middle of the sea of Cortez, and we just swim out like as fast as we can, and we get out, and you can still see the machete fin is now like getting closer and closer, like something out of the movie, The Meg.
And he's like, Wait here, don't move.
And I'm just like sitting there.
I don't even have a camera.
He has a camera to like block, and I'm just sitting here, and like minutes, like four or five minutes pass, and then all of a sudden you start hearing they're like, like all their sounds and stuff.
And you can't see them yet, and you look out on the horizon, you see this fin is coming closer and closer.
It's so big that it's casting a shadow on the water, this fin.
I mean, it's crazy.
And then all around us, dude, like eight orcas, a baby, a couple mothers, and this big bull just comes swimming through, checking us out.
And that first moment, that first moment when you're in the water with an orca and you feel completely helpless.
Like with a shark, we talked about acting like prey and them treating you like prey.
This is a whole different experience.
Every animal I've ever interacted with, no matter if it's an elephant, a lion, a bull shark, a tiger shark, you have some sense of control.
Like you can control the situation a little bit.
You can stand up to an elephant.
You can yell at a bear.
You can charge towards a shark in the water.
With an orca, it's like you're a doll.
You're just sitting there in the water, and if they want to play with you, they're going to mess you up.
And there's nothing you could do to slow them down.
I mean, they're so precise that they can chop the liver out of a shark with their teeth and just eat the liver.
I mean, they're crazy.
Anyway, these things come around, they swim with us, and my heart was in my throat, not knowing what to expect.
And then all of a sudden, it all got like chill.
They kind of just interacted with us.
And we did that like three or four more times that day.
And it was unreal.
They were just swimming around you?
Yeah, they come check us out.
The mom didn't want to bring her baby into us for understandable reasons.
And I think the bull kind of came in first.
We're like, what is this?
And then he was like, oh, these are just like big pink fleshy meat bags are useless.
And then the other ones would like come and check us out.
And they usually like come in, see us, and dive down.
And then you wouldn't see them again.
And then all of a sudden they'd turn around and come back and like check you out once or twice and then move again.
What was the water visibility?
Like 30 feet.
Oh, wow.
Not good.
That's wild.
30 feet's not terrible, though.
No, but you want to be in like 100 plus with orcas.
It's, you know, it was spooky.
Manny was saying when he was in Alaska when they were filming for Jackass that they did the same thing.
He's like, drive the boat out in front of him.
Drive the boat out in front of him.
Like, what?
Just do it.
And then he just jumped off by himself and got in front of the orcas.
And he said the visibility was like six inches.
Oh, geez.
Well, then he didn't see them then, did he?
He said he, well, he saw their dorsal fins coming.
And then, like, when they were like, Whatever, 50 yards in front of him, they kind of sounded.
And then they kind of like came up.
He didn't see the eye.
He saw the eye go right past him.
Like, oh, wild.
This far away from him.
Wild.
Yeah, I don't want to do that in six inches of visibility.
30 feet was wicked enough.
Like, it's crazy.
So, what kind of orca would be in Alaska versus what the kind of orcas that you saw that were the migrating ones?
Both.
Both.
So, Alaska, I believe, has the highest density of orcas in the world.
It might be Washington, Canada.
I don't know.
But there's a ton of orcas up there.
And there's, I believe, all different.
Varieties like there's some that specialize in eating salmon and fish and hang out by river mouths, there's transients that hang out offshore and hunt tuna and stuff, there's ones that come in and hunt seals and sea lions, I think maybe even walrus.
Like, there's just a lot of them up there.
So, but why are the ones the transient ones considered more dangerous?
Uh, because they're not predictable basically.
So, you can predict that the salmon eating orcas are going to hang out by the river mouth and eat salmon, ah, you can predict that the stingray eating orcas are going to go smack a stingray with their tail and eat the stingray.
The transients are.
They're like a more wild, they're like a biker gang compared to these other like home dwellers.
You know, they're just cruising the roads and you don't know what they're going to do.
And you don't know what their diet preference is.
You don't know what they're doing.
Like, it's just, you just don't know.
But, and I don't want to paint them in a scary light here an orca has never killed a human being in the wild ever that we're aware of.
There's no documents of an orca killing a human being in the wild.
So, when you think about that compared to, you know, how many bugs have killed people, how many deer have killed people, you know, how many little snakes have killed people.
Like they're really intelligent animals, like they're making that choice to not do that.
Yeah, they only kill people when they're in captivity, right?
Correct, they've drowned people.
Yeah, well, they're miserable, they're sitting in a pen, you know, swimming in circles their whole lives.
Probably incredibly cranky and angry.
You know, it's like you see that one in Miami just died like a week ago, two weeks ago.
Lolita, yeah, she's been in there for god knows how long.
What was it, like 50 years?
40, 50 years, insane amount of time.
Yeah, that's sad.
And they were, and apparently, they were gearing up for her release, too.
Like, I think her release was like a year away.
And that was going to be like the last orca in captivity for them.
And they were going to put her back where they caught her.
You know Richard O'Berry?
I don't know.
He's the guy who did the documentary, The Cove in Japan.
Oh, yeah.
I know the documentary.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
He's like this crazy fucking.
He goes all around the world and he like sneaks into aquariums and like steals the dolphins and the whales and like releases them into the wild.
He's in Indonesia right now.
Doing that?
Working on that.
Yeah.
So he basically, he like, he steals the dolphins and shit from the aquariums in the middle of the night.
And then he has his own little place on the beach that's kind of fenced off or netted off, where he kind of rehabilitates them and then gears them up to release back into the wild.
I have mixed feelings on that.
Really?
Well, I don't know how he does it.
I don't want to comment on him specifically.
He's like a vigilante.
But that's the thing.
And that's a form of eco terrorism, right?
Because you're breaking in.
But it's also really cool and very respectable when it's something like a dolphin or a whale that's sentient and intelligent.
It's another thing if you're just like, like the flip side of that coin is this is a real story.
The same exact thing with pita groups.
They break into like the red lobster or the grocery store that has a bunch of lobster in the tank.
And because they're do gooders who haven't done the appropriate research, they're breaking into the grocery store, stealing a bunch of Maine lobster and dumping it in a bay in California to set it free, to let it live.
And now they've just introduced an invasive species into Southern California.
By trying to do good, you know what I mean?
Who wins in that situation?
The people don't win because their label is eco terrorist.
Grocery stores and shit don't win because they're getting robbed and bad PR.
The lobster don't win because they're now an invasive problem.
Like maybe five lobster have a better life instead of ending up in a soup pot.
But now there's a whole giant problem, and this hasn't become a giant problem, but they have been caught in Southern California with Maine lobster being introduced.
Really?
Yeah, my buddy caught one in the Oceanside.
Yeah, dude.
I know.
I've never heard of people robbing grocery stores and trying to free the main lobster or red lobsters, even.
That's fucking bananas.
Isn't that crazy?
Yeah.
But the fucking dolphin, that's a different thing, man.
Of course.
What they do in Japan every year, I don't know if they're still doing it or not, but I imagine they still are.
Like how they go out there and they basically call all the dolphins into the cove and they net it off and they fucking spear them to death and they steal the bottlenose ones.
They'll sell them off for like 250 grand to an aquarium or the highest bidder.
It's awful.
Absolutely awful.
Yeah.
We filmed The Grind, which is where they do the same thing with pilot whales.
They don't save them for the pet trade, they just kill them.
And they killed, I think it was 85 pilot whales in front of us, and I was a mess.
Like, I couldn't.
Listening to the sounds of the pilot whales screaming, being tortured, the sea literally turned red with blood, like in the cove.
It's an insane, insane thing to see.
And yeah, I mean, it's barbaric.
I don't get it.
To me, that's the same thing as the elephant thing we were talking about earlier.
It's like, well, those guys aren't starving.
No, no, no.
I was talking about the choosing to kill a big elephant.
Oh, yeah, right.
Yeah, it's like, I don't get it.
They're not starving.
They don't need it.
I don't know how any human with a conscious can be like, yeah, I'm going to go out and murder a dolphin today or murder an elephant today.
I just, I personally cannot connect with it at all.
Yeah, man.
Yeah, it's fucking brutal.
But the orca thing is fucking crazy to me.
Like the fact that you guys jumped in the water, got off the boat, just let the boat flip, fucking drift away while you guys were getting surrounded by orcas.
It was pretty wild.
It was really cool.
I'd love to do it again.
Yeah.
And there are places like people go to Norway and New Zealand specifically to dive with orcas in clear water and stuff.
And those are specialized salmon or stingray eating orcas and stuff.
This is just like wild.
You know, this is like wild orcas, don't know what they're going to do, middle of nowhere, jump in, see what happens.
And it was, I live for those kind of moments.
Like, you know, I don't consider myself an adrenaline junkie, but the adrenaline I get out of that fuels me to do so much more of it.
Dude, there's no way to get that much adrenaline.
Other than that, I can't imagine.
No, it's amazing.
Have you seen the stories of the orcas out in the Atlantic ripping the motors off of boats or like ripping the props off of the boats?
Like in groups, orchestrated, premeditated.
And there's two trains of thought behind the research going into that.
One is that it's malicious and these orcas are actually attacking people, which I think is becoming less and less to be considered the reality.
And the other is that this is a game for them.
Like it's like a cat chasing a toy.
You know, it's like these orcas are teaching their offspring and everything else, hey, here's like a fun, silly thing to do to entertain ourselves.
And who knows, you know, the line could be somewhere in the middle.
But yeah, there's a.
There's a lot of research going into it because it's behavior that just sprung up three, four months ago for the first time ever.
It's never happened before, as far as we know.
And all of a sudden, two orcas are like, hey, let's fuck with this boat.
Is this a video of it?
Oh, yeah, it looks like it.
Yeah, look at that.
Now, I'll tell you what, I wouldn't get in with that orca.
No.
What was that?
He's the boat.
It's the rudder.
Oh, my God, dude.
He lost both rudders.
Look at that.
And see, that looks like he's playing with it.
That doesn't look like aggression to me.
Yeah, no, he doesn't look mean.
You know, like that's not something out of Jaws where then he's just like hammering the boat trying to rip it to shreds.
He's like, oh, this is a fun thing to play with.
But who knows?
So the orca population, that's not like threatened, is it?
I don't think so.
I'm not sure.
I know at one time their numbers were dropping because of places like SeaWorld and things like that for captivity, and they were being hunted for that.
And, um,.
When they're being hunted for that, one thing that's often not shared is that only like one in 10 would survive.
So they'd catch like 10 baby orcas, rip them away from their mothers, and like one in 10 would actually survive in the tank.
So they had to catch a lot more orcas than you saw in captivity.
And because these are such emotionally intelligent animals and they have so much thought and love and everything else, there was even an instance pretty recently where a mother orca lost her calf and went pretty much clinically insane and went and killed.
A mother, I want to say gray whale, might have been a humpback whale, and stole her baby to raise it.
Because she, imagine a mother that lost her own, like a human mother that lost her child and went insane over it and went and stole someone else's child, which we've all read about.
Burial Cave Discovery00:14:16
Those things actually happen.
Yeah.
This happened in the orca world and was documented not long ago, maybe a year ago.
But that just shows their level of emotional intelligence.
You know, you kill a rat's nest with all those babies, that mama rat might care, but she's back to having more rat babies six weeks later.
You know, you kill an orca baby, it drives the mother clinically insane.
And she has to, like, you know, cope with that.
So it's pretty crazy.
Dude, it really boggles my mind sometimes, like, when I'm at a holiday dinner with distant relatives and they're all like, hey guys, we should go to SeaWorld this weekend.
Like, I got season tickets.
We can go see the orcas.
I'm like, do you live under a fucking rock?
Yeah, dude.
I'm like, how the fuck do people not know about this shit?
It's changing, though.
Like, things like this, having conversations like this on your show and documentaries like The Cove, those things are changing.
You know, I think that's all changing and for the most part for the better.
What were you doing in, uh, was it called Myanmar?
Myanmar.
Yeah.
Where is that and what were you doing there?
Southeast Asia, formerly Burma.
Um, we, uh, we went there to do a show on the Ramri massacre.
Have you ever heard of that?
No.
The Ramri massacre is the largest killing of humans by animals in a single event in history.
Wow.
And yeah, it's pretty crazy.
What happened was, uh, the, the, um, Japanese held Ramri Island in Myanmar during World War II.
And they stayed there, killing all the deer, eating all the resources.
And around that island was a whole ton of big saltwater crocodiles, right?
And those crocodiles went dormant.
They went into a state called Torpa, which is where crocodiles basically shut everything off and hibernate because there's not enough food.
There's nothing to do.
So they kind of shut down their metabolism and sleep.
Wow.
Okay.
So now you've got an island with a thousand Japanese soldiers on it, surrounded by sleeping crocodiles that are starving because all the food's gone from it.
That's to paint the picture.
One night, World War II, Allies come in, the British hit the ground, there's tons of them, and the Japanese soldiers that held Ramri Island scatter into the swamp to get away from the Allies from certain death.
In that night, I think it was over the course of two days, a thousand Japanese soldiers were eaten by crocodiles.
So imagine running through the swamp as the Allies are shooting at you from behind, and you're just hearing these screams and cries and snaps of giant crocodile jaws as they're decimating a thousand Japanese soldiers running through the swamp.
So we went there to learn if that was like a real thing or not.
You know, it's like pretty well documented, but we went there to investigate it, try and find some of those crocodiles because World War II was not that long ago, and because of the life expectancy of crocodiles.
Many of those crocodiles would still be alive today.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
And so we went there to catch crocs, take DNA, like learn from them.
And it was pretty wild.
Like it was a couple days up a river, hanging out in a stilted camp at the island.
We saw a boy.
Well, we didn't see him, but we were in the village when a boy came in that had just been attacked by a crocodile, ripped to shreds.
Arm was broken in like 30 plus places, completely shredded.
We quickly built a stretcher out of bamboo and a hammock and stopped the bleeding.
He lost the arm, but the kid lived.
We sent him to the hospital in our speedboat.
Which was like a day away.
And yeah, so crazy.
And then caught this giant, giant crocodile that we called White Nose.
And the reason we called him White Nose, this was Andrew Uchals again, by the way.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
He caught the croc.
And the reason he caught White Nose, or the reason we called him White Nose, he had a giant scar on his nose that was very, very angular.
And it looked like it was from a Japanese bayonet because it was just too perfect to be like from another croc or anything.
And yeah, so it was crazy.
Crazy, like three weeks in the hottest, swampiest.
Worst jungle I've ever been in.
How many people were estimated to be killed by the crocodiles?
A thousand.
A thousand.
Yeah.
Did you guys find any remains or anything or bones lodged in these people?
Dude, you won't even believe this.
I've never told a story before.
So we're at this area of this massacre and we're like, how do we explain this?
And we had, you know, we were making a TV show for the History Channel and we had like an old artifact rifle that had been found there from before.
And we're like, let's put the rifle in the remains.
And have the other host, not Andrew Uchals, the other guy, like pick up the rifle and talk about it, you know, and be like, whoa, look at this rifle.
So we put it in.
So I've never told anybody this before, but this is how you make TV, right?
So we put this rifle up against the ruin of the fort.
And we're like, Brian was his name.
We're like, Brian, there's a rifle here.
Rummage around until you find it.
And so he, like, walks right by it, doesn't even see it.
And he steps into the mud in front of the fort.
It's low tide.
He sort of starts feeling around with his feet, reaches down with his hands.
And he pulls out a human skull, an intact human skull with a crack mark in it.
And he's like, Is this what you guys wanted me to find?
Is this real?
And we're like, The fuck, dude?
That's real.
He's like, No, Tell me what you want me to say or whatever.
We didn't put a human skull there.
That's a real skull.
And he drops it.
It was like, Oh, what the fuck?
And it was a real human skull that had been crunched from probably, I'm not sure if it had been shot by an allied soldier or crunched by a croc, but yeah, this guy literally reached into the mud and pulled out a human skull.
Right then and there in front of us when we were sort of staging him, supposed to go find a rifle.
Oh my God, bro.
Yeah.
That's crazy, dude.
Yeah, it was nuts.
And when we were in Papua last year, we walked into a Papuan burial site that had like several hundred human skulls in it.
Yeah, I could show you a picture of it.
It's pretty wild.
Where was this at?
Papua New Guinea.
Oh, okay.
Papua's crazy, dude.
Crazy place.
But yeah, no, so in Myanmar, we found that skull.
That was the only human remains we found.
But we've seen him a few places now.
Is that where that big cave is that you're talking about?
The cave that can fit New York skyscrapers inside of it?
No, that's in Vietnam, Song Dung Caves.
So it's close to there, though.
Very close to there.
There's some human skulls in a burial site in Papua New Guinea for you.
Those are all crystallized from being in there for a long time.
Oh, dude.
Pretty cool, huh?
That's insane.
Yeah.
We sort of stumbled on that, too.
So all these people are likely to have been killed by or eaten by animals?
No, this was like a burial site for the village.
I mean, you can see some of them have been bashed in.
Like, that's blunt force trauma.
Right, yeah.
The majority of them, I think, had died of other causes, you know, which in the jungle, a lot of that's by animals snake bite, malaria, you know, tribal warfare, or just random disease.
And then in that part of the world, their tradition, instead of burying it, is to put them in a cave.
So this was like a burial cave.
Oh, okay.
Those skulls were.
Yeah.
Oh, okay, cool.
Yeah.
What's the deal with that big cave, that big cave in Vietnam?
Song Dung Cave was only discovered in the 90s.
And it's a really interesting story.
The Vietnamese guy who first found it found it like 10 years prior.
And then came out and told everybody there's this enormous cave, this enormous cave.
And then they couldn't find it for like 10 more years again.
Then he finally found it.
That's called the wedding cake, that one that your mouse is hovering over right there.
But you can't even really see the scale.
You can kind of see it on the picture to the left of that.
Those are tents in the picture to the left.
Oh, just by the water?
By the water.
Those are tents.
And that's just the entrance to the cave.
But it's a six mile long cave.
And yeah, it's got a few.
Holes that where it's collapsed, but it's six miles long.
And in some of the caverns, you can fit the Empire State Building standing upright and it wouldn't touch the ceiling.
Like, you cannot get the scope of how big that hole is.
Like, that just looks like some beautiful little rock thing.
Like, that in itself is, you know, 100 plus stories tall.
That's fucking wild, bro.
It's incredible.
Yeah.
So, we spent about a week trekking through there.
You rappel down and then trek through it for about a week, multiple days.
That's how you like trek in there.
That's the way in.
Yeah.
We had 50 something porters just to carry all our gear.
It was a big, big, big to do.
How the fuck do you charge your camera batteries when you're out there?
We didn't.
We just had to bring them all.
That's why.
Yeah.
Or did we bring it?
No, I'm sorry.
We did.
On that one, we brought generators into the cave with us.
Oh, okay.
But yeah, no, it was rough.
I mean, the days where you don't see sunlight are really weird.
Like when you go a couple days where you go to bed and it's pitch black, you wake up and it's pitch black, you pack up and it's pitch black, you keep cruising and it's pitch black.
And this is what it looks like.
Like none of these are like manipulated images.
How many total days did you spend in the cave?
I think a week.
Oh, a week with no sunlight.
Yeah.
So you have these pockets where the ceilings have fallen in.
So I think the most we went was two or maybe three days without sunlight.
Is that?
That's not me.
No.
Because we definitely did that.
Arm wrestling is a big thing there.
What the fuck is that?
Those are called cave pearls.
So I think I remember this correctly.
Basically, a little bit of sediment will congregate in one of these pools.
And then, as the water trickles over that tiered thing, it rolls it like a tumbler and rolls it more and more and more.
And the sediment congregates in this ball, rolling in every direction.
And you get these pearls on the ground called cave pearls.
And I wanted one.
I got there.
I was like, whoa, these are cool.
And everybody was like, don't touch those, don't touch those.
First of all, you probably shouldn't because you can't just pick up amazing rocks like that.
You should leave them in place.
But secondly, the reason they're like, don't touch those, don't touch those is the Vietnamese guys were telling us, like, it's insanely bad luck.
To remove a cave pearl from the cave.
Oh, really?
So I put it right back down.
It looks like some sort of man made art on the floor.
That's right near the exit point right there.
That's towards the end of the six days.
In fact, I'm pretty sure those are the guys we went with right there.
But it's an amazing cave, man.
Dude, caves are the one thing that just freaked me out more than anything because I'm so claustrophobic.
We found some interesting stuff in there, too.
We found a blind fish that I don't think had ever been described the species of fish.
No eyes.
All the eyes are completely gone because its species had lived in that cave for hundreds of generations, maybe thousands.
And so, didn't even evolve eyes.
We found a snail that to this day has not been documented.
Like, nobody knows what the species is.
I just came out with the shell and handed it to some Vietnamese scientists.
They're like, we've never seen this before.
All new species of snail.
Like a lightless snail, which is crazy.
Yeah, found some interesting stuff in there.
I wonder if there's ever civilizations living down there, like human civilizations.
There have been.
Good question.
We didn't see any signs of humans that we saw, but who knows?
We were there thinking biologically.
How far underground did it go?
Well, like I said, far enough that a New York City skyscraper could be in there.
So that's below the level of the ground.
Correct.
Correct.
So our initial rappel in was 300 meters.
So I think that's 1,000 feet.
So we rappelled down 1,000 feet.
Like, look at that picture right there.
That's one of the punch through spots.
That was actually one of the forests we were looking for to try and get blood from leeches to see if this extinct animal called a sala could be in there, the whole thing.
Oh, okay.
But yeah, that's like one of the punch throughs.
It's like 1,000 feet to the ceiling there.
Wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's big.
It's an entire forest, for people that aren't looking at this, it's like an entire forest growing inside of this massive stone cave.
It's like, what is it, Land of the Lost?
Yes.
Yeah.
It's like Land of the Lost.
It's the real life version.
Oh, my God.
But parts of it collapsed?
Yeah, because, you know, it's six miles of underground tunnel.
And then along the way, when you say parts of it collapsed, what I mean is basically holes have fallen through in the ceiling.
So you go a day or two without light, and then in the distance, you just see a beam of light, and you think it's like a keyhole like that.
You think it's like a keyhole.
Right.
And when you get there, you realize that keyhole is like, it's like three miles wide.
Or no, it's like a mile wide.
It's huge because of the size of the cave.
And it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
And it's crazy because you'll be in pitch blackness and you'll see light in the distance and you'll think, oh, I'll be there in two minutes.
But because of the size of the cave, it takes you four hours to get to where that light is.
It's just like, it's that big.
Dude, that happened to me one time in the Cayman Islands free diving.
Uh-oh.
Me and my buddies were just doing swim throughs of these giant caverns.
Uh-huh.
And we were both dead.
Like, he went down into this opening at one, like 30 seconds before I did.
I went like 30 seconds after him.
And then I was swimming, like, the bottom of it was all sand, right?
And then you have like little tiny keyholes sporadically throughout of it.
Sure.
Some of them you can't fit through, some of them you can.
Sure.
And we were going through, and we got to the exit where I saw him, like, slowly ascending through it.
And, you know, we were wearing freediving fins.
So those fins were like poking all the way down, and like, he was taking forever.
And I was like almost out of breath, like, fuck, I can't wait.
I'm going to keep going.
Oh, no.
So I kept going, trying to find another exit, and I couldn't find another fucking exit.
Finally, I found like a little keyhole that I looked up and I'm like, I'm dead.
My life was flashing before my eyes.
I'm like, I'm going to have to fucking squeeze through this, whether I get shredded or not.
Right.
You just have to try to fit through it.
So I'm doing it.
I get my head through it.
I'm like pushing myself out, and it scraped my whole stomach.
My back was all ripped up, and I barely got myself through that thing, dude.
And then it was like another 20 feet to the surface.
And that was like the most terrifying thing I've ever been through, like closest to death I've ever been.
And ever since then, I don't fuck with caves.
You're lucky, man, because you could have got to your hips, you know, and got that's it.
Like, right.
You know, like stuck there or whatever.
But, oh.
That's rough.
Yeah, man.
That's scary.
And I know that feeling of looking up at the surface of the water or the light or whatever and being like, it's right there, and I'm sort of stuck here.
And there's, you know, it's like takes forever to get there.
And it's so deceiving, too, when you're in those caves and you see like a giant beam of light shaft coming through.
And you're like, oh, yeah, I can get through there, no problem.
But you have no idea how big it is.
And then you forget how deep you are, too.
Venomous Snake Encounters00:04:47
Right.
Oh, yeah.
No, that's terrifying.
And it's worse because you're stuck underwater, and I can't think of any worse way than to just like, in a big thing of water.
Yeah.
So bad.
Yeah.
What other sort of like crazy species have you found that haven't been discovered?
Um, got quite a pretty good list now.
I mean, we've we described a new species of blind worm recently or blind snake.
Sorry, not blind worm.
Do you know what a blind snake is?
No.
It's like imagine an earthworm that's actually a snake, like this tiny little thread like it looks like a worm, but when you look really closely, you can actually see like the head, the eyes, the mouth, everything.
And they're called blind snakes.
So we recently described a new species of those down in Peru.
Um, I actually just put that up, threw that up on my Instagram a couple days ago.
It's pretty cool.
You see the actual little snake in my hand.
Oh, is that the one with like a little red tip on it?
Exactly.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is a different species, of course, as an Australian species.
But we just discovered a new species of that.
Found some species of fish that have not been described.
That snail I mentioned.
Oh, it's got scales on it.
Yeah.
It's a full on snake.
Micro scales.
Yeah.
Dude, that's nuts.
And then, yeah, and then found a lot of stuff that, you know, has been lost for a long time, like that big tortoise we found in the Galapagos.
We found a Cayman.
We found four different species of shark that were lost to science that had been gone for a long time.
One that hadn't been seen in 70 years, which was pretty cool.
What else?
A monkey called a Miller's Grizzled Langyear.
That had been lost.
It had been lost for a while.
And then there were some photos from, I think, 2012, 2014.
And then we found it again recently.
So that was pretty cool.
We got some of the best footage.
Yeah, there you go.
Grizzled.
Good luck.
Yeah, there you go.
Oh, that's the monkey?
Yeah, I know that guy.
Yeah, there you are.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is us like finding them there.
And yeah, a big leopard species that we found that was just pretty cool.
That's not our photo, but that's one of the ones we went off of, I believe.
Yeah, so it's a bunch of fun stuff.
Dude, Luke was telling me when he was Luke Caverns, the dude who hooked us up.
Shout out to Luke.
Good to hear.
He was in here like last week and he was explaining to me that I guess he went to paramedic school and what they taught him was that.
There's basically no snake in the United States that can kill you unless you're allergic to the venom.
So, like, if you get bit by a Western Diamondback or an Eastern Diamondback and you're not actually allergic to the venom, you could just chill for a couple of days and you'll be fine.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that might be an oversimplification.
Everybody reacts differently to different venoms.
That's something that is not widely explained.
Right.
So, some people have.
Relatively minimal reactions to venom, and other people have bad reactions to venom.
But it's your allergy to venom that can oftentimes kill you.
And especially if you've been bitten by something once, then you develop an allergy almost without question.
But if you're bitten by a carl snake, you're going to die.
Like, there's no.
A coral snake?
Yeah.
The carl snakes you guys have here and stuff, like, they'll get you.
And it's funny because, like, you see things like I watched Yellowstone pretty recently.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
In one of the scenes, Rip, like, throws a snake on this, like, developer guy, and it's a Western diamondback, and it bites him, and he, like, drops dead in, like, six feet.
It's like, nah, that's not how it works.
Like,.
You'd get bitten, your hand would start to rot off, it would swell, all the tissue would be black.
You'd make it to the hospital, they'd probably have to chop off part of your limb, and then you'd be okay.
Like, you don't just drop dead after six feet.
Right.
But it's, yeah, no, I mean.
He said there was one snake specifically in the Amazon that you absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, you're dead within hours.
I forget what it was.
Do you remember what it was, Steve?
There's lots.
There's no, there's, it's, yeah, that's not, that's not, it's definitely not correct.
There's lots of snakes globally that you are going to die.
Mamba, you're going to die.
If you're left untreated, you will die.
There's no question.
Mamba, Taipan, coastal or inland, most of the sea snakes, there's a lot of species that if you're bitten by certain vipers, you're going to die if you're left untreated.
It doesn't matter who you are, you will die if left untreated.
Most of our snakes in the United States do not have potent enough venom, most of them, to kill a person.
But if it's still left untreated, you'll die.
Like, you'll die of sepsis, you'll die of infection.
Or your hand will, like, rot and you'll have to get it amputated, like Manny's finger.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Have you seen the video of him getting bit?
Manny?
Yeah.
No.
Oh, my God.
It's brutal.
Fungus on Animal Heads00:14:32
Well, you can see, like, the TV camera guys are everywhere and the producers are everywhere, and they got him doing it.
He actually grabbed it once and, like, oh, we didn't get a good enough shot.
We were a little bit out of it.
The focus was a little soft.
Let's do it again, Manny.
And then he, like, goes back again.
He grabs it, like, he puts his hand down on the head, you know?
Like that, like puts his finger down on the top of his head and grabs it, and the thing wraps around to the side and, like, gets one fang into his finger.
Oof.
And he's, Manny, like, looks up after he grabs it, like, smiles at the camera, like, hey, got me.
And they're like, they thought he was joking at first.
And he's like, he picks it up, then they finally put it down.
He's like, yeah, we probably have to go.
Jesus.
And then there was like a, I forget how long he said the ride was, at least a two hour drive.
Oh, wow.
Because they were in the middle of Texas somewhere.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
And that's what's so cool and calm about Manny.
Like, I don't know him that well, but I've met him a bunch of times.
He's just so like, got me.
You know, it's like he's doing his alligator stuff, or I don't know if you showed you the video where he catches a Mako shark by hand.
Oh, yeah.
We watched all that shit.
He's nuts, man.
He's a crazy, crazy.
He's like a, he's a, he's a, he's a gone era of person.
You know what I mean?
Like he's, he's, he's from another time.
He's such a cool guy.
And the videos of him levitating those alligators are absolutely insane.
Wild.
The fucking, the, what did he call it?
Called it the, like the river beast or something, or the canal monster.
That's what it was, a canal monster.
It was like a 20 foot alligator.
He swam down.
And the thing was like trying to get away from him for like 30 minutes.
And he was like chasing it all around.
The thing tried to go hide down in the mangroves and he kept pulling it out, pulling it out.
Oh, goodness.
Eventually, then he got like pissed off and swam away.
He's nuts.
That's a crazy thing to do.
He's a very rare type of human being.
He is, dude.
That's for sure.
He's so cool.
I mean, I have so much respect for those guys that just, you know, like times of change, you kind of just go harass alligators and stuff.
And rightfully so.
But those guys that like from Manny's era and stuff that just went and figured it out.
You know, they're just like, I don't believe this.
I don't believe that that swamp donkey is a mindless killing machine.
I'm going to get in there and fiddle with it and see what happens.
Like, so much respect for that.
I think it's amazing.
Yeah.
Well, it's his view on sharks specifically is like very real and unique because I mean, I don't know about you, but like when you go on Instagram, there's like all these people I follow that like they swim with the sharks, they go out with tiger sharks, they talk about like oh, yeah, so majestic.
Oh, yeah, so beautiful.
Lots.
Look at this beautiful girl swimming up to us.
Yeah.
She's so sweet and all this stuff.
And Manny's like, this is not good that these people have these Instagram videos.
He's like, this is a wrong portrayal of these beasts.
You cannot treat them like this.
Stay away from them.
He explains.
He goes, These ladies, these girls in Hawaii or wherever they are, are swimming with these tiger sharks.
What she does not explain to you is that they are very well fed tiger sharks.
They are not hungry.
If this shark was hungry and not well fed, you're dead meat.
Well, he's right.
But to play devil's advocate to that, I think it's pendulous, right?
Like the perception of this is pendulous.
And what I mean is 20 years ago, if you thought of, if you wanted to see a picture of a shark, You saw a guy killing a shark, like a guy standing with a fishing rod next to a big dead shark, right on the internet, whatever.
And you're like, oh, that was cool.
That was like the cool thing.
Okay.
Now the pendulum has swung probably too far the other way, where I kind of open up my phone without seeing a gorgeous gal in a skimpy bikini next to a giant tiger shark telling you it's her best friend.
Okay.
That's too far the other way.
That's a little too far.
Yeah.
You know, and both sides are probably wrong.
Like the reality, and the pendulum will probably swing back slowly, is that it needs to be somewhere in the middle where it's like, well, here are these animals.
They're cool.
We need to respect them.
We need to have a healthy understanding of them.
We don't need to go out and kill everyone.
We also don't need to get naked and swim next to them and pretend they're puppy dogs.
You know, it's like the reality is somewhere in the middle.
And I think I'd rather have the perception of like, don't kill these things.
They're cool, they're interesting, they're important than go out and hammer them.
But like I said, I think the reality, it just needs to kind of land somewhere in the middle, is my opinion of it.
Yeah.
I mean, it is fucking freaky, though.
Like going out there and swimming with these things with no cage or no, at least no spear gun with you just in case something goes wrong.
Like, yeah, that's fucking, that's scary, man.
Yeah.
It is.
But, you know, a lot of the places they do it, like you said, like the girls in Hawaii, Tiger Beach here in the Bahamas and stuff, the sharks are used to people.
They're fed every day.
They're very habituated animals.
They're very well fed.
Yeah.
And that's very different from, like, I've run into some tiger sharks, like, really remote places, Maldives and stuff like that, where they come in all fired up, arches locked, you know, back arched, pecs locked, and you're like, holy shit, this is scary.
And you're really glad you have a camera to push or a spear gun to hold in between you and get out of the water.
Right.
You know, it's like, It's just different situations.
I think there was a girl who got eaten alive at Pig Island in the Bahamas.
In the Bahamas.
Yeah.
I think it was near Staniel, Kay.
By a tiger shark?
By a tiger shark, right off the beach.
They were swimming with the pigs.
I didn't know that.
The boat was anchored in six feet of water right off the beach.
And they saw the tiger shark and they're like, oh, it's fluffy or whatever.
I think it just pulled up out of nowhere.
Really?
I don't know if they saw it beforehand, but this was like two years ago.
Oh, I didn't know about that.
Yeah.
And she got ripped apart, eaten alive, just like the guy in Egypt, man.
Yeah.
If I'm a tiger shark, there's nowhere better to be than at a pig island.
There you go.
That's the story right there.
A woman who was killed in a shark attack was following dreams.
Oh, this is not it.
The one I was talking about was the Bahamas.
Oh, interesting.
Pig Island of the Bahamas.
Yeah, that's it right there.
Snorkeling with pigs.
Oh, wow.
21 year old girl.
Shame.
It's a pity, especially when these people go because they want to have these interactions, you know, and they.
Again, like they see it on Instagram or whatever, and they're like, oh, I want to have this interaction.
I want to get this photo.
And then it results in something like that.
It is sad.
I think the biggest problem, and I believe this to be the case across everything, is like understanding.
You don't see somebody hunting a tiger shark with a fishing rod or swimming with one in a bikini and go, I'm going to do that without any understanding.
You couldn't go kill it with your rod and reel if you're a bass fisherman, right?
And you're probably not going to be the guy swimming or the gal swimming with it just because you swam in a pool once before.
You know what I mean?
Like, you've got to learn and take it slow and understand and get comfortable and then do these things.
And I think that's.
That's like what's happened in our digital age where you just see the snapshot on TikTok, Instagram, whatever.
You're like, I'm going to go do that.
And then you just try and do it because you've seen other people do it.
And it's like, that's not how these things work.
Not in the wildlife world, I can tell you that.
Right.
You have to take your time, understand the animal, understand all of the environmental conditions around it.
Is it hungry?
Is it full moon?
Is the water clear?
Is it dirty?
Like all these factors that go into making those choices.
It's not just like, oh, here's a shark.
Let's jump in.
Right.
Are there guys on a dock flaying fish like 20 feet away from you?
Exactly, dude.
Exactly.
Like, Anybody will get hurt doing that.
You know, it's just like you have to be smarter than that when you do these things.
I think one of the things I'm probably afraid of more so than sharks are giant barracudas.
Yeah.
I don't know why they crack me the fuck out, bro.
They're crazy when they're sitting there like dead still.
They're so creepy.
Yeah.
They're so creepy looking.
They have those big teeth.
And they fuck people up.
I had a buddy who got bitten on the foot in Belize.
He was hanging his foot over a dock in Belize and all of a sudden.
Not even in the water?
No, he was just sitting with his feet in the water next to his wife on the end of a dock in Belize and all of a sudden this thing, he just felt it on his.
Foot and he looked down, his foot was shredded like 20 something stitches.
God, he wasn't even like a dive guy, ocean guy, anything.
He was just sitting on a dock drinking a colic, which is their beer, yeah, And uh, and he got hammered on the foot and it was pretty gnarly, like he had a shit ton of stitches.
Um, have you ever eaten barracuda?
Not the one here, um, because don't they have sig or something here?
Yeah, I, from what I hear, is the ones that have sig are the ones that are up north in the colder climates, and the one down here in the warm climates don't have that.
I'm not sure, yeah.
My dad brought me some fish bread the other day and he was like, How was that?
How was that fish?
I'm like, The kingfish is great.
He's like, that's Barracuda.
No way.
I'm like, what?
Are you serious?
Smoked fish dip?
It's still good.
Yeah.
Smoked, smoked, smoked kuda.
Dude, you guys do so well with fish here.
It's like, man, my favorite part of Florida, like, it's probably the gators and the fish and stuff.
But outside of that is the food and the hangout.
Like, we went to this barbecue place last night.
We were there for like five hours.
We ate like nine pounds of smoked meat, a bunch of beers.
There's good live music.
It's like, it's such a vibe here.
Yeah, man.
I love it.
I love Florida too.
Like, I've been all over the place.
I'm not everywhere you've been, but I've been to a lot of places and there's no Place that I love more than this area of Florida, man.
It's so unique.
Are there barracudas in California?
We have Pacific barracuda, which are much smaller.
They're a schooling fish and they're pretty slimy and gross.
They're pretty good smoked.
Like you take it and smoke it, like butterfly it up and smoke it.
Teriyaki grill, it's good, but it's not like these things.
They're like a big barracuda where I'm from is like this big.
Oh, really?
Yeah, they're not these big, giant fish.
They get as big as this table here.
Oh, I've seen them.
Yeah, I've seen them out diving the Air Force Towers and stuff.
They're creepy.
And the way they sit there, it's like suspended animation, the way they just sit there staring at you.
Yes.
Like their tail barely moving.
They're crazy.
What I hate is that whenever we go diving, they're always fucking hanging out under the boat.
Yeah.
So it's like, I can't get back on the boat.
The fuck.
You're like looking, they're guarding your boat.
There's a 10 foot barracuda under the boat.
And then spearfishing, too.
Like, in my experience, spearfishing here, luckily, knock on wood, I've never had to deal with sharks fucking with me.
But I've been in many situations where I've been coming to the surface and I've had like four barracudas charging me.
Just hanging around, like looking for sharks.
Well, they're coming up out of the abyss trying to get my fish.
Oh, interesting.
That's crazy.
Yeah, they're weird fish.
And I don't know if you've ever seen like a.
Like a jaw mount of one.
I don't think so.
Like all the skin removed from the jaw.
Their teeth are so big in ratio to like their.
They're like razors.
Yeah, they're a crazy thing.
Which, like, look at these things, man.
Like the megalodon, like, look at the size of that tooth.
The great white shark tooth is like that big.
Like, that's a scary thing.
Yeah.
That's, I mean, and that's not even a big meg tooth.
Like, it's maybe, you know, a medium sized one, but the great white shark tooth is like a fifth that size.
Those are, that's insane to think those things were cruising around.
Yeah.
And the fact that, This thing could potentially be six million years old is really insane.
It's pretty wild.
I learned something interesting about it yesterday.
The dark coloration that you see on it is from the tannins in the water staining it as it gets exposed.
When it comes out, it would be ivory white, you know, or maybe not quite ivory, but like much, much lighter in color from being fossilized.
And it's actually just the tannins in the water that stain it that darker color.
What is it called?
Tannins.
Tannins?
It's like what you get in, like when you make a cup of tea or even coffee.
That's tannins.
It's the stuff that leaches out plants.
Yeah.
That's what stains it.
Have you ever seen the YouTube channel called Jug Squad?
No, Joke Squad?
Jug, J O O G.
No, what is that?
There's this kid, Jack, who lives right down the street, like five minutes away from here.
And he has this big YouTube channel with millions of subscribers.
And now he started out doing pranks and stuff, but then he recently started hunting for megalodon teeth.
So they go down to Sarasota.
Okay, that's where we were.
Okay, they go to the beach, and he's got a fucking, his bedroom is filled with megalodon teeth, like as big as this cup.
Oh, no way.
Yeah, dude.
Oh, so he crushes it.
Oh, dude, he's got so many.
And, like, there's so many people who are fascinated in watching those videos where they hunt for those teeth.
Yeah.
It's pretty wild how there's so many of them here.
And it's so easy to, like, not really hard to find them on the beach.
So he does the, like, beach combing thing.
Like, he walks along the beach.
Yeah, they walk along the beach and they, like, dig through the sand and they find them somehow.
Wow.
I don't know, like, what his specific tactics are in finding them, but.
This is a whole new world for me.
So I love this, like, finding rare stuff.
Obviously, I find a lot of rare animals.
I'm big into mushroom hunting.
I've done that for a lot of years.
Mushroom hunting?
Yeah.
Finding wild mushrooms to eat.
Yeah, like big porcini, chanterelles, black trumps, all the different species.
You guys don't have a lot of them here.
In California, we have a lot.
Right.
And so it's like adult Easter egg hunting.
You're walking through the woods looking for these special little prizes growing out of the dirt.
And that's the same rush that I got because yesterday was my first time I've done this kind of fossil hunting.
It's the same rush that I got from that.
It's really fun.
Aren't there like certain kinds of mushrooms that grow off of animals?
I forget what it's called.
There's like a certain type of mushroom, like fungus, that grows out of the heads of certain animals.
Oh, yeah.
The cordyceps.
They grow out of, like, if you look up cordycep mushrooms, they grow out of insects and take over their brains, zombify them, make them behave differently.
They're fascinating.
What the?
That is bizarre.
It's the whole, yeah, see these?
Yeah, see, you can see them in the, what is this, free shipping?
Oh, shit.
What is that?
An ant?
The second one over, I think it's growing out of insects, too.
Go scroll down.
Yeah, that's an ant.
Those are all mushrooms growing out of these fucking things.
Correct.
Yeah.
Look at the insect on the far right there, or that one even.
So, yeah, zombie fungus.
So it takes over their biology, the chemistry of their brain, actually controls them and tells them what to do.
What?
Yeah.
Then when it gets to a certain point, it erupts.
The TV show, the HBO show, The Last of Us, did a really good job sort of explaining it.
I mean, it's a fictional show, but like, it's the idea that these cordyceps mushrooms.
Transfer to humans, and then humans end up being zombies and melting like these bugs.
Has that ever happened?
No, not yet, thankfully.
But it might.
And that's the whole sort of idea of The Last of Us.
Yeah, here you go.
This is The Last of Us.
Oh, God.
That's the zombie fungus.
You know, it's a real thing.
And they do a great job in that TV show, by the way.
But, yeah, no, it's pretty wild.
Fungus are incredible.
Yeah, man, that's nuts.
Yeah, look at that.
Full mushrooms growing out of that bug's head.
Where do you find these kind of mushrooms that you're hunting for?
Is this in California?
I don't find these.
I don't look for zombie fungus, I look for yummy ones.
Okay.
No, we go in Northern California in the winter in the wet season up into like the redwood forests and areas like that.
Up near Santa Cruz, that area?
Even further north.
Oh, further north.
Yeah, like way north of San Francisco.
Invasive Chameleon Species00:03:46
Oh, wow.
Like near the Oregon border.
And, yeah, hiking.
The redwoods and stuff, and we find chanterelles, which are big golden ones, porcini, which are like giant phallic looking ones, a whole bunch of other species, and yeah, make these crazy wild meals.
I have friends who are chefs and stuff, and they come with make these crazy wild meals.
It's really fun.
You're getting psychedelic ones?
I found hundreds of them, thousands of them, but I've never, I've actually never done them myself.
Are they in the same area as the porcini mushrooms?
So, where we hunt, I probably shouldn't tell too many people this, but where we hunt, there aren't out in the wild.
Where they are is where people have intentionally, it's like, you know what chameleon ranching is here in Florida?
No.
Let's talk about that in a second.
But it's like people have actually intentionally spread the spores around.
My buddy knows them really well.
There'll be like a McDonald's parking lot in Berkeley, California.
And he's like, Oh, right in that parking lot in that mulch, there's a ton of the psychedelic mushrooms.
And you go over there, and there's these little mushrooms.
And there'll literally be people lined up for the drive through.
And my buddy will be picking them out of the mulch, and they're the psychedelic mushrooms.
Yeah.
That's fucking weird.
Yeah.
But people have like put the spores in certain areas.
And it's the same thing as this newfound thing that I'm sort of just.
Getting caught up on called chameleon ranching.
You haven't heard of this?
Never.
Literally, right around here, St. Pete, St. Pete, Tampa, a bunch of different near Orlando, a bunch of different spots.
People have taken chameleons, which are a high value pet.
People want to own chameleons.
Not you or I, but reptile people.
They want to own these panther chameleons and a bunch of other species, flapneck chameleons and stuff, veiled chameleons.
And they go and release them in their neighborhood.
And because Florida is Florida and everything survives here, they go gangbusters.
And now, my buddy Billy, that kid who dropped me off, he was telling me how, because he's a scientist, he's a local scientist here in Florida, and he does a lot of reptile work.
Oh, really?
Yeah, he's a super cool kid, but he does turtle stuff.
But he was telling me how the chameleon ranchers, like, it's becoming a bit mafioso because a chameleon can be worth like two, three grand, right?
So they'll buy two or three of these chameleons, go and release them in a neighborhood that has all the perfect vegetation and right habitat, and then they'll check up on them every few months.
And from two chameleons, there'll be 10 chameleons, there'll be 30 chameleons, there'll be 50 chameleons.
But then it becomes mafioso because these guys want to take these chameleons that they've ranched and sell them into the pet trade.
But kids like Billy will go and find them and be like, oh, cool, a panther chameleon and start keeping them.
Guys will come running out with shotguns because they'll do it on private property.
Guys will come running out with shotguns and they'll chase you off.
And they're being protective over their illegally ranched chameleons that are in like suburban neighborhoods.
Whoa.
And this is like a thing.
Right here.
Like, right here.
Can you pull up what they look like?
Type in panther chameleons.
They're my favorite.
And those are just running around in some of these neighborhoods around here?
I bet you within 10 to 15 minutes of where we're sitting right now, there's a wild population.
Really?
Check these guys out.
Yeah.
That thing.
That thing.
Type in panther chameleon.
Oh, you put ranching, but I was just going to say Florida.
But yeah, it's like a big thing.
And how much do they go for?
Two to three grand.
Like, yeah, there's a kid with a bunch of them on his head that he's probably, you know, on his YouTube channel.
I'm sure he's found these around Florida.
I've never seen one.
No, but because that's the thing, you got to know where to go.
Wild chameleons in Florida.
You know, it's like it's becoming a thing, and it's apparently becoming bigger and bigger.
And, you know, people are because all you have to do is let them go, and then you go collect them and sell them.
But that's terrible because it's an invasive species.
They go out of control, blah, blah, blah.
But then there's all these people that are protective over it.
What do they eat?
Insects.
Insects, okay.
Media Networks and TV Shows00:09:33
Yeah.
Chameleons shoot their tongues out and catch little insects and pull them back in.
Wow.
Yeah.
What's that one got a big horn on its face?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's called a Jackson's chameleon.
Okay.
They look like a little triceratops.
And then there's a, yeah, so there's a little panthers.
Yeah.
Pretty cool.
And they get that red color and everything.
They're crazy animals.
That's cool, man.
So now you're kind of like doing more stuff.
Like you're traveling and doing stuff on your own, creating your own kind of content for your YouTube stuff, not so much the television stuff.
I'm doing both.
We have three projects in the works for next year for a big TV show, TV networks.
And I own a production company that, So, for everything you see that I'm on camera, that's like maybe 50% of what I do.
The other 50%, I'm behind the camera, like that history show I told you about with Andrew Uchals.
Like, I just produce that.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So, you'll hold the camera and shit?
I don't hold the camera.
I produce.
So, like, I have camera guys and stuff.
You know what's going on.
You know how to make shit happen.
Yeah, yeah.
I make the whole show.
So, I actually own a company that makes high end wildlife productions, wildlife adventure TV shows, series for Discovery, Nat Geo, History Channel, Vice, a whole bunch of different places.
Really?
Yeah, yeah.
Um, So that's like my main thing that I do I make all these various shows and TV shows, and I'm on about half of them.
You would never even know I'm involved in the other half because I'm off camera producing them.
And then just recently, because of the state of affairs with television, I mean, do you have cable?
No.
Exactly.
I got YouTube TV.
Yeah, well, that's good.
But nobody has TV anymore.
Nobody has cable anymore.
So we just literally two months ago decided hey, like we're really good at making media, like we've been doing it, you know, high level professionally on major, major cable networks for a long time.
Let's start doing ourselves.
So, we're going to see.
We're going to start putting out like really good, high end, polished media on YouTube for free and see if we can build an audience that way so that it's self perpetuating and we don't have to be chasing TV networks for money.
Yeah.
That's a great idea, man.
But is it working well?
We're two months in and we just, I think, day before yesterday or maybe yesterday, we hit 250,000 subscribers on YouTube.
You're on fire.
So, it's going pretty well.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know much about it, you know, but we just do all these various things.
Like, we're having fun with the YouTube thing.
I have a podcast that's also on YouTube called The Wild Times.
That's doing pretty well.
Making these TV shows for all these networks, you know, standing in a swamp, making a watch commercial for Garmin.
Shocked by lightning.
Yeah, exactly.
So, you know, just sort of put it all together, but it's all in one vein.
It's all in the vein of adventure and wildlife and connecting with animals.
And it's fun.
I like what we do.
I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Yeah, that's cool.
I always wonder, like, what's going to happen with media.
I always wonder, like, the evolution of it and, like, what it's going to be like in the next 10 years.
All YouTube channels, people that are creating stuff, their own content on the internet, monetizing it?
Or are these big TV networks still going to be the gatekeepers?
Yeah.
Are they going to rebound?
Is it going to change?
Who knows?
And that's why we try to dip our hands with my company into a little bit of everything.
Just try all the various different things and just see how it's all going.
But it's fun, man.
You're crushing it.
Your podcast is amazing.
People love it.
It's growing crazy as well.
I mean, I think you're doing all the right things.
Yeah, I like having people like you on here, man, more than anything.
This is the most fascinating shit to talk about.
Oh, thank you.
I mean, the reason I ask about the media shit is like, because I kind of come from the same world, like shooting stuff for television and a lot of, especially like underwater stuff, like big into the underwater stuff.
And I've spent a lot of time, like, years developing.
I don't know if you, I don't know, like, it seems like you've just always been super successful, but like in my early experience, I spent years like developing, shooting, editing, and dealing with production companies and TV networks and going to pitch meetings and getting as far as green light meetings after like three years and finally being right there and then having some fucking executive at Viacom saying, nope, like, this does not fit with our current advertising package that we have going.
Change the mandate, new head of network, whatever.
Yeah.
No, I've been through all of that like many, many times.
It's incredible.
Incredibly frustrating.
You lose tons of money, tons of hours, tons of sleep.
I mean, but it's not all, it certainly hasn't always been successful.
I mean, I spent three years where we lived on my wife's part time teacher salary pitching stuff before the first thing got picked up.
Really?
You know, like that's a lot of top ramen.
Yeah.
And then the first thing took and, you know, did that for a few years and then started this tiny company, which is just my wife and I.
And she was doing the bookkeeping.
She doesn't know anything about TV.
And I was pitching and then hired our first employee, then our 10th employee, you know, and so just built it up over time.
But it's not easy.
And, With the state of media now, but I should say the state of TV, not the state of media, who knows where it's going?
You know, it's really like that's a whole nother world.
That's a whole nother business.
But like, who knows where media is going to go?
And I think the future, and I wish I jumped on this train 10 years ago when everybody else did, I think the future is YouTube.
I think that's what people want to consume.
I don't think they want these crazy TV shows anymore.
Nobody wants to sit through a commercial, that's for sure.
Right.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's hard to say.
I think people just have developed, I think especially young people have developed an incredible bullshit detector when it comes.
To television being overproduced.
I talk about this all the time with people that I come in here that talk about specifically the UFO stuff that are involved in the History Channel shows and Skinwalker Ranch type shows.
When I watch that, I'm just like, oh my God, are you serious?
This is so produced.
I think people want to see shit that's more raw, that's more just POV, run and gun type stuff that's not super edited or doesn't have crazy music to it, even though that's cool.
But when you start to add the dramatic shit to it, I think people start to.
Be like, you know, they don't want to see that as much.
They want to see the other stuff.
The faking stuff's so boring and it's so dull.
And I understand how it got there because over years, like a TV network would be like, hey, we need to be bigger.
We need to be crazier.
We need to be louder.
So the producers have no choice but to be like, okay, well, I don't know how to make this ghost hunting show where we're not finding anything louder.
I guess let's knock over a lamp and see the guy jump.
You know, it's like, okay, like, what else are we going to do?
So it's just this perpetual bullshit cycle, like you said.
And I think young people are just like, I know they just knocked over that lamp.
Like, I know a ghost didn't do that.
Like, who fucking cares?
This is dumb.
I'd rather watch a kid with a dip net in a pond in Florida trying to catch weird fish.
Right.
Because at least he's genuine and he cares and it's real and it's fun.
Right.
And so that's like what we're doing on our YouTube.
Like, I was fossil hunting with these great guys yesterday.
I did a turtle survey while I was here.
We went bow fishing for invasive species.
Like, we've done a lot of really fun stuff.
And I'm hoping that because those are the things I'm genuinely interested in, which is what I've always done, is just to do the things that I really like doing, that people will relate to it and enjoy it.
But if not, like, who cares?
You know, I came down to Florida for a week.
I'm Doing a few other projects like this, like I'm having a great time.
I think there's another element to it too is like the fact that they can interact directly with you andor support you directly, right?
Yeah, yeah, I mean, like it's different when you're on a TV show and it's like you know that that network has X amount of shows or whatever, there's no direct connection to you.
This is so much more intimate, yeah.
You're you're like three steps removed.
Whereas now I will respond to people on YouTube, I'll be like, yeah, man, thanks for watching that.
Like, what else should I do?
You know, people are like, no way, this guy like talked to me, I want to see him do this.
I'm like, cool, I'll try to do it, you know, which is fun too, by the way.
At this Animal Con thing I went to in Orlando, these guys were all talking about, like, how do you manage the hate and all that?
I get it too.
Everybody gets it now, which that part of it sucks.
And I still maybe let it get to me more than I should.
But like the other side of that, you know, for every one hateful comment, there's 200 positive ones.
And they're fun.
Like the people are like, I love this guy.
This is so cool.
Like I wish he would do this.
I wish I could learn about this.
And I'm like, stand by.
Like I'm trying to do it all.
Yeah.
It's fun.
That's cool, man.
I'm sure you're the same with the podcast.
Like people are asking you to have this person on and do this all the time, man.
Yeah.
And it's great.
Isn't that fun to have that like input from people?
Like it's great.
Yeah.
It is.
It's It definitely is.
And it's cool to see shit evolving that way, especially with the evolution of podcasts.
And I think it's changing.
Because remember, 10 years ago, people would be like, oh no, YouTube, people don't want to watch something more than three minutes long.
They're going to lose their attention span.
For sure.
The podcast is like the complete polar opposite of that.
Hours.
Yeah.
And it proves that completely wrong.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And I love it.
I think it's great.
It's so nice to sit down with a guy like you, have a real conversation, drink, take a leak, whatever.
It's like, let's just talk like people.
And I think that's what people want now.
They want that.
This is real.
You and I are having a real conversation as buddies.
You know, that's a real thing, and it's nice to share that with people.
Yeah, well, you got to catch a flight, bro.
I got to get back to California.
When are you going to move to Florida, dude?
I don't know.
Every time I come here, I swear to God, I'm moving here.
I swear it's the weather's not as good.
You guys got way better weather, and you guys got a beautiful fucking landscape there.
Like the yeah, in the ocean and the snow in the same day.
Like it's true, but you guys have all the swamp critters, and that is pretty fun for a guy like me.
Yeah, well, we'll get you.
Hopefully, you're coming back down in the near future.
We'll get you back on again, dude.
Thanks so much for having me.
It's been a blast.
Where can people find your YouTube channel?
Yeah, it's just my name, Forrest Galante, on YouTube.
You know, I have all the social media channels.
I always have shows on Discovery Channel that I'm on and a bunch of shows on other places.
And anybody that checks it out, I appreciate it, but no pressure.
Sweet.
I'll make sure I link it below so they can find it.