Feb. 6, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:09:40
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| All right, here we go. | ||
| Five, four, three, two, one. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| How are you, man? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Joe, I'm stoked, man. | ||
| I'm really good, really glad to be here. | ||
| I'm stoked, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nice to meet you. | ||
| You, too. | ||
| Dude, you were on Naked and Afraid. | ||
| Sure was. | ||
| How ridiculous is that? | ||
| Sure was. | ||
| Dude, it's so ridiculous. | ||
| Like, to say ridiculous is such an understatement. | ||
| See, because they oftentimes will have an actual survival expert or a wildlife expert or someone who knows how to live in the woods. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And that was the idea with you, to get a wildlife expert? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| I mean, I'm kind of a combo. | ||
| I've practiced primitive survival for many years in a means to get closer to wildlife. | ||
| I just got back from the Amazon, and we had to feed ourselves every day. | ||
| We had to build shelter, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And I don't do it for fun. | ||
| I do it as a means to be out further and stay longer kind of thing. | ||
| But it's got to be a little bit of a conscious effort, right? | ||
| Like, to have fun, like, fishing for your food and, you know, putting up shelter and stuff. | ||
| I mean, it's got to be, like, kind of cool to live like that for a little bit. | ||
| It's human nature, you know? | ||
| Like, we intrinsically want to hunt things and fish things and build a shelter and survive, and so it's totally fun. | ||
| I think it's, like, to your core, it's fun. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You just feel it. | ||
| Like, you know that you're doing something that's, like, primal human nature. | ||
| Yeah, the Amazon fishing clips that you have on your Instagram page, it's crazy. | ||
| You just throw a cast out there and you're catching a big fish instantly. | ||
| Bonkers. | ||
| Like, I've fished a lot of places. | ||
| I'm really into fishing and spearfishing. | ||
| And every... | ||
| Joe, I'm not kidding. | ||
| Every single cast was a fish. | ||
| A peacock, bass, or a piranha. | ||
| Every cast. | ||
| And where we were in the Amazon, super remote. | ||
| Like, not a lot of people go there. | ||
| I'm sure those fish have never, ever seen a lure, never seen a hook before. | ||
| And it wasn't like sport fishing. | ||
| It was like, okay, let's go catch 10 fish. | ||
| In other words, take 10 casts and we have enough food. | ||
| And that was it. | ||
| And it was amazing. | ||
| Does it make you think of what the ocean must have been like before people fucked it up? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I mean, of course. | ||
| As a biologist, that's all I can think about. | ||
| Because I was in Hawaii recently, and we did some snorkeling, and when you're swimming around with the goggles on, looking down at the ocean, one of the things that's kind of shocking is how few fish there are. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Like, do you think this should be, like, teeming with life? | ||
| You're over these reefs, and you see, like, three or four fish, or five fish, or something like that. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| I mean, there are these pockets left in the world that are completely untouched, and it's like as soon as you get into one, you can see it. | ||
| You're like, this is what it used to be like everywhere, and it's like humans haven't had an impact. | ||
| I don't want to disparage anyone in Hawaii, but I don't think there's anywhere in Hawaii like that, because it's all so accessible. | ||
| I've been fortunate enough to see a couple of these pockets, and they're just booming with stuff, and it's like, this is what it could be. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I guess that's like what it must be to just be in the Amazon itself as well, right? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| In the jungle, not just the rivers and the lakes or whatever's out there, but the actual jungle itself. | ||
| It was incredible. | ||
| The jungle there, so we were in Colombian Amazon, and like, talk about untouched by people, there's been this kind of ongoing conflict in Colombia for many, many years. | ||
| So we were the first Westerners to go there in over 60 years. | ||
| So the village we flew into, they'd literally never seen white people before. | ||
| And then we went 200 kilometers from that. | ||
| So like, middle of nowhere. | ||
| Did they want to touch you? | ||
| Yeah, hair. | ||
| Because their hair was very dark and very different. | ||
| And like, I'm not particularly fair, but just to touch like the hair and see the blue eyes and stuff, they were just loving it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Were they friendly? | |
| Super friendly. | ||
| Like... | ||
| The culture was very stoic. | ||
| There wasn't a lot of smiling or crying. | ||
| There wasn't a lot of emotional exchange. | ||
| But straight away they came and greeted us, shook hands, said hello. | ||
| It was really cool. | ||
| How do you set something like that up? | ||
| Do you have a liaison that acts as a go-between between you and the tribes? | ||
| Yeah, so we did in this case have one guy who communicated. | ||
| I speak Spanish, Spanglish, I guess, and they all speak Spanish from back in the day. | ||
| So we set it all up. | ||
| It's part of the wildlife stuff that I do. | ||
| We literally flew a DC-3, a World War II cargo plane, into this cocaine dealer's airstrip. | ||
| What? | ||
| That's how we got there. | ||
| I mean, like, mind-blowing stuff. | ||
| Current cocaine dealer or former? | ||
| Former. | ||
| Former, yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, TBD. It's still Columbia, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So yeah, that one was really cool. | ||
| Really remote. | ||
| How crazy is it that they learned Spanish from people who came over on boats from Spain and it just stuck? | ||
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| And took over the whole, like, region. | ||
| Yeah, the whole world. | ||
| And there's this tribe in the middle of the Amazon that has this language from another continent. | ||
| Well, and Brazil, right? | ||
| From Portugal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's really incredible when you stop and think about it. | ||
| I mean, it's incredible, but it's also part of it's a little sad. | ||
| Like, wouldn't you have loved to have heard what their original language was? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| Like, what it sounded like? | ||
| Well, they did. | ||
| So, it's funny, because when they didn't want us to understand what they were talking about, they would switch to their native Indian language. | ||
| So, they still had... | ||
| They were bilingual. | ||
| A community of 25 people that have never left, and they're bilingual. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| It's amazing. | ||
| Now... | ||
| Their native language is what? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| It's an Amazonian Indian dialect. | ||
| I honestly don't even... | ||
| They might have said the name, but I don't recall. | ||
| What is the name of their tribe? | ||
| Also, I'm not even sure. | ||
| They're so isolated, they're unaware of what country they live in. | ||
| They don't even know that they're in Colombia. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Really. | ||
| They're just like, to them, they're Amazonian. | ||
| They're not Colombian, Ecuadorian, Brazilian. | ||
| They're Amazonian. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they just stay. | ||
| Stay. | ||
| Like, where they are, they stay. | ||
| And the village we were in is literally, I think it's over 200 kilometers from the next village of 15 or so people, and they don't have fuel, they don't have motors, you know, they're just in this pocket, and they just substance live. | ||
| And they're all barefoot, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do they have those crazy splayed-out feet? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Big feet, you know, because they're not very big people. | ||
| They're like small Indian people, but really big, kind of useful feet. | ||
| And the way that, you know, they could run up and down trees and climb stuff, I mean, it was unbelievable. | ||
| Like, so much more athletic than you could imagine. | ||
| Imagine, right? | ||
| They've been doing that their whole life, right? | ||
| Their whole lives, yeah. | ||
| Now, when I say splayed-out feet, what I'm talking about is that people that walk barefoot in the jungle for long periods of time with their whole life, their toes spread out, and their feet almost look like a hand. | ||
| Oh, no way. | ||
| I did not, like, pay enough attention. | ||
| That might have been the case, but I didn't notice it. | ||
| You just look at their feet? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, it is kind of a weird thing to stare at dude's feet. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| But, yeah, Steve Rinella, who's a good friend of mine, told me about that. | ||
| He was in Guyana, and it was the same thing, and they actually got some pictures and videos of these people's feet, but look at these guys up there. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| Oh, no, I didn't notice anything like that. | ||
| Yeah, this is the, that's, how do you say that? | ||
| Horani? | ||
| Sounds right. | ||
| Horani, you think? | ||
| Horani. | ||
| Horani Indian splayed feet. | ||
| So, it's very strange. | ||
| It's kind of the opposite of what happens to women when they jam their feet into those little pointy shoes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Where they get the toes kind of smoosh onto each other. | ||
| The ballet feet. | ||
| Yeah, it's horrible. | ||
| Instead of that, they're all crazy spread out. | ||
| What in the fuck is going on there? | ||
| The toughest hands, I think. | ||
| Yeah, the top's hands. | ||
| But the bottom is like wood feet. | ||
| But that's got to be like what our feet are supposed to be. | ||
| Probably, right? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Thick ass toes that actually have muscles in them that move. | ||
| That you can use like a tool, like your hand. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So when these guys just can climb up trees with them, so they grip the side of the tree with their feet like a hand. | ||
| Oh, I mean, I didn't notice, like I say, the feet just like that specifically, but the way they could, like, everything's covered in mud down there, right? | ||
| It's all wet, it rains every day, and they could run up and down these tree trunks, like, to get up and down the village, and here's me and my crew with our awkward cameras and stuff, and we're slipping and sliding and falling over, and, like, they're literally like, what's wrong with these people? | ||
| Why can't they walk? | ||
| We must have looked like infants to them. | ||
| Right, and you guys probably have boots on and shit that get muddy and fucked up. | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| Yeah, we're wearing muck boots, and my one buddy's got waders on, and we think we're all hard and cool because we've got all this gear, and they're just running around in shorts barefoot. | ||
| It is so fascinating when you see people that don't have contact with the outside world, like... | ||
| I'm sure you're aware of that recent story, the missionary was killed by the people on North Sentinel Island. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Which is one of the weirdest places, because they've branched off from Africa 60,000 years ago or something like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When you're around these people, what do they do if they get injured? | ||
| So, funny you ask that, because we kind of had that same question, right? | ||
| And they don't leave. | ||
| They stay in the village. | ||
| They have a shaman at the village who blessed us with a crazy green powder, and that's a whole other story. | ||
| But they have a shaman, and he is their doctor. | ||
| However, he has no access to any Western medicine. | ||
| So, it's only his learned knowledge handed down through generations, plus jungle powders and whatnot. | ||
| And... | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| So we spent today, because we had a medic with us, doing village help, if you will. | ||
| Everybody had ringworm. | ||
| Everybody had respiratory infections. | ||
| There were a lot of lady problems in the village that our medic had to deal with. | ||
| I mean, there was a lot of health issues, and you don't even realize it. | ||
| I'm going to write something down before I forget. | ||
| I'm sorry, it's totally unrelated. | ||
| No, all good. | ||
| There's a doctor named Peter Hotez that's coming on the podcast, and I have to follow up on him. | ||
| When you start talking about the people in the jungle, he's an actual doctor who specializes in infectious diseases in jungle and tropical climates, and he's like, everyone's infected with something. | ||
| Everyone. | ||
| He'd have a heyday down there. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| It's probably been. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the... | ||
| So when these people have ringworm and all these different infections, do they treat it? | ||
| Do they have some naturopathic cure or some shit? | ||
| I think it's kind of a 50-50. | ||
| A lot of it they don't treat because it's just part of everyday life. | ||
| When I say everybody had ringworm, I meant... | ||
| Everybody had it. | ||
| So I don't think there was any kind of treatment or cure. | ||
| It was just kind of part of it, part of them. | ||
| But other things, you know, the witch doctor or the shaman was trying to treat. | ||
| And then we kind of went in and we had, like, medication for ringworms, so we dewormed everybody with the shaman's blessing. | ||
| And he was, like, super excited to have Western medicine in the village and... | ||
| Would you use, like, Lamisil or something like that? | ||
| I couldn't tell you. | ||
| I think it was... | ||
| It wasn't topical. | ||
| I think it was like a Vermox, like a pill that you take that kills the worms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| The weird thing about that is, like... | ||
| Don't you leave, and then they're going to get it again, right? | ||
| I mean, there's only so much you can do, right? | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| We were having the same dilemma, and it was like, do we interfere because we're from the outside world? | ||
| Do we help? | ||
| And we talked to the shaman through our translator, and he said, please help, please help. | ||
| So we gave, including him, everybody this dewormer, but, you know, they'll just come back. | ||
| Yeah, and also they probably don't understand the consequences of taking some antibiotic that's going to do some weird shit to your whole biome. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And these are all the good stuff, too. | ||
| It's such a moral dilemma. | ||
| You're there and you're like, I want to help. | ||
| Do I? Is it helpful? | ||
| Is it hindering? | ||
| Our medic was like, it's undeniably going to help. | ||
| You know, they need this. | ||
| And so we went for it. | ||
| And it was, you know, it seemed to help. | ||
| Everybody felt fine, but we were only there a couple more days before we left. | ||
| So, who knows? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
| You know, when you're talking about ringworm, are these guys covered in it? | ||
| They have big patches of it? | ||
| Like, what's it like? | ||
| Feet and legs had big patches of it. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this, if you don't know, that's the same shit that's athlete's foot. | ||
| Oh, I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, ringworm and athlete's foot are the same kind of funk. | ||
| Oh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's why people tell you to pee on your feet. | ||
| I thought that was just for fun. | ||
| It could be for fun. | ||
| Depends on what you're into. | ||
| But I think that's the idea behind it, is that you're, somehow or another, you're killing the bad bacteria when you piss on your feet and you have athlete's foot. | ||
| That might be horseshit. | ||
| Maybe, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With me, you always have to check. | ||
| Yeah, definitely give that a little look-see. | ||
| But it's a real common thing with jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| Just all the mats. | ||
| Yeah, it's real common. | ||
| Guys get it. | ||
| People really fuck up where they like, Put bleach on it and a bunch of different things to try to kill it and it winds up getting worse and also fucks up all the natural skin flora. | ||
| Jock itch, athlete's foot and ringworm are all types of fungal skin infections known collectively as tinea. | ||
| They're caused by fungi called dermatrophytes that live on the skin, hair, and nails and thrive in warm, moist areas. | ||
| The jungle. | ||
| So it seems like they're just going to get it. | ||
| That's just what it sounds like. | ||
| What do they do for it? | ||
| What do they do for it? | ||
| I didn't see them treating that at all. | ||
| And when we pointed it out, they were like, yeah, yeah, we know about it. | ||
| They were more concerned with things that were dire. | ||
| There was an infant, maybe not an infant, maybe three years old, and he was hacking up a lung. | ||
| And he was asthmatic, according to our medic. | ||
| So our medic gave them an asthma medication, and he just said, if he has an attack where he can't breathe, give him this. | ||
| And, like, you know, to be super real with you, when we walked away, our medic was like, I doubt he'll live to see adulthood. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And were you giving him inhalers? | ||
| Did you give him... | ||
| I'm not sure, to be honest, what it was that he left with him. | ||
| And what about, like, injuries? | ||
| What if they break a leg or something like that? | ||
| What do they do? | ||
| I don't think anything. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you've got to think, these people are climbing trees. | ||
| They must fall. | ||
| Constantly. | ||
| Fall, get bitten by stuff. | ||
| There's tons of venomous snakes out there. | ||
| It's wet, it's muddy, it's slippery. | ||
| They're building stuff out of very rudimentary tools. | ||
| I mean, it's nuts. | ||
| They have to get injured. | ||
| It's so interesting that we have this understanding of medicine and doctors and hospitals, but that's probably pretty fucking recent. | ||
| Oh, of course, yeah. | ||
| I'll tell you a story, Joe. | ||
| I was in Myanmar late last year, and we're down there filming this thing, and this kid, like 22-year-old crab fisherman, gets bitten by a crocodile. | ||
| Croc grabs him by the arm, grabs him by the thigh, and death rolls. | ||
| So it breaks the arm and, like... | ||
| I don't know, 15 places. | ||
| Compound fracture. | ||
| The real deal. | ||
| I can show you pictures of it. | ||
| It'll blow your mind. | ||
| And we hear about this, and we're minutes away. | ||
| It's kind of one of the similar situations where we're the first Westerners to be there in a long time. | ||
| We go bombing over at high speed, and we get there, and the mom is off mourning the death of her child, but her child is sitting there still alive. | ||
| They have written him off. | ||
| And mom is literally mourning the death of her child, and he's lying there, conscious, but like in total shock. | ||
| Fortunately, just because of the situation, we had a speedboat, everything else. | ||
| We bandaged him up, you know, tried to keep his arms stable and his legs stable, put him in our speedboat, and it was six hours by speedboat to a village that had a, or to a hospital, really. | ||
| And so he got there, and his life was saved. | ||
| But I asked, we asked the people in the village, what were you going to do? | ||
| And they're like, there's nothing we can do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So he was just going to bleed out or go septic, and that was the end of it. | ||
| Ooh, what a fucking rough way to go. | ||
| Right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh. | |
| How did he get away from the crocodile? | ||
| Uh, I don't know. | ||
| I think he was just hitting it or hammering on it. | ||
| He was crab fishing in the water, and it came up and grabbed him, rolled a few times, and at some point he escaped. | ||
| How he even got back in the boat and made it back to the village, I have no idea, because his leg was shattered, his arm was shattered. | ||
| It was brutal. | ||
| And it was a canoe, you know? | ||
| It wasn't like he had a little motor or a wheel to drive. | ||
| He canoed back. | ||
| One of the most disturbing stories I ever read was these guys were kayaking in an African river and the guy in front of them got grabbed by a crocodile and that it went under and it plunged like a bobber as the crocodile pulled him out of the bottom of the kayak. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm like, fuck. | ||
| That's awful. | ||
| Imagine being the guy behind him and watching that shit. | ||
| Just watching, yeah, and knowing that you're pretty much helpless. | ||
| Did you see any jaguars or anything? | ||
| I've never seen a jaguar. | ||
| I'm from Africa. | ||
| I don't know if you knew that. | ||
| So I've seen a lot of lions growing up. | ||
| My family did safaris. | ||
| And then I've seen mountain lions here in California, leopards, stuff like that. | ||
| I've never seen a wild jaguar. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Even when you were in the Amazon? | ||
| I think they're really elusive. | ||
| I know there's areas that are hot spots. | ||
| All of the locals were very nervous and kind of knew about them. | ||
| Like, you know, I went out for bushwalks at night and stuff, and I'd just go, me and one guy with a camera, and they were like, oh, be careful, like, peligroso, you know, very dangerous, don't do it. | ||
|
unidentified
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But... | |
| Peligroso means very dangerous? | ||
| Peligroso, like danger. | ||
| And so we just go and, you know, I'm not trying to act like we were tougher than them or anything. | ||
| We would love to have seen one, but they were very aware of them. | ||
| So they were there. | ||
| We just didn't happen to run into one. | ||
| Sort of like mountain lions. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, they say that mountain lions are, like, if you live in a place that has them, you know, Wyoming or Colorado or something like that, they know where you are. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They might be around you all the time, and you might rarely see them. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Maybe driving home, you see one skittering into the bush. | ||
| There was a nuts video, I think it was from the LA area, did you ever see it, where the security cams picked up this mountain lion that was walking through this very residential neighborhood, and you'd see people would walk by, and then 30 seconds later, he'd dip out of the shadows, and then dip back in, and then the next set of people would walk by, and nobody had any clue he was there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's crazy that a giant predator can move around like that. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, so when you're there, like, what would you have done if someone got bit by a venomous snake or a spider or something like that? | ||
| Did you guys have any antivenom? | ||
| Were you prepared for something like that? | ||
| I mean, that's my department, right? | ||
| Like, as the wildlife guy, that's kind of my department is make sure nobody gets bitten, make sure nothing like that happens. | ||
| And we handled very many venomous snakes and caught anacondas and all kinds of great stuff. | ||
| We did have, like... | ||
| My main camera guy's name's Mitch. | ||
| He got absolutely lit up by these wasps one night, and we all were. | ||
| We got like 12, 14 stings each. | ||
| But I look back in the canoe at one point, and his eyes are just super swollen. | ||
| He's bright red. | ||
| He's sweating. | ||
| I'm like, Mitch, you okay? | ||
| He's like, uh-uh. | ||
| His throat started to close up. | ||
| He was having an allergic reaction. | ||
| So we had to hit him with antihistamines, and I'm not actually sure if the medic administered the EpiPen or not, but he was like... | ||
| We're in the middle of the jungle. | ||
| We're six hours from a village that's then a full day's travel by a charter plane from a hospital. | ||
| I mean, middle of fucking nowhere. | ||
| And his throat's closing up. | ||
| And that's why we take a medic with us. | ||
| Thankfully, we had this emergency medic. | ||
| He administered the antihistamines and Mitch was okay. | ||
| But these things do happen. | ||
| Do you ever, like, while you're on these crazy adventures, do you ever out there going, this is the last one? | ||
| Nah. | ||
| No way. | ||
| No way, man. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I live for it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| How long have you been doing this? | ||
| I mean, like, for TV, for Animal Planet, three years, I guess. | ||
| But the reason I got into that and doing it for TV is because I've been doing it, like, my whole life. | ||
| I grew up in Zimbabwe. | ||
| My mom was a bush pilot. | ||
| So when we weren't on safari, she was, like, flying us to these remote places in the middle of the bush, and we were going out on safari. | ||
| And, like, as long as I can remember, this has been what I do. | ||
| Now, when you go on safari, are you in those open jeeps? | ||
| Walking safaris. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| We take a.458, an elephant gun, put it on your shoulder, and walking safari. | ||
| Goddamn, man. | ||
| Only during the day, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cannot move at night. | ||
| And what do you do when you're confronted? | ||
| I mean, I've had some pretty close calls. | ||
| My wife, Jess, is here with me. | ||
| I saved her from a hippo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh! | |
| Yeah, we've had some pretty close calls. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| One of the scariest pictures I ever saw was this guy, this African guy, running down the street and a hippo is chasing him. | ||
| And you look at the size of the hippo and you're like, good Christ, that thing is huge. | ||
| Joe, they are the scariest animals on earth. | ||
| Like, interacting with a hippopotamus, they're so erratic, they're so unpredictable. | ||
| If they feel threatened at all, I mean, they're just... | ||
| This video is fucking bananas. | ||
| This guy's on a motorboat, and the hippo is swimming after him like a torpedo. | ||
| So this is where I'm from. | ||
| This is Zimbabwe. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So is this common that they swim that fast? | ||
| They can move. | ||
| I mean, this is uncommon to have one chase the boat and come that close. | ||
| How fucking big it is, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you've had these close encounters, what do you do? | ||
| You shoot at the air? | ||
| You shoot at the ground? | ||
| Scare them away? | ||
| Fortunately, I've never had to put an animal down, but I know people that have. | ||
| That's the picture. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's the one. | ||
| What in the fuck? | ||
| How fast is that big bastard run? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| You'd have to look up the exact speed, but definitely at top speed, definitely faster than human. | ||
| But they don't have the maneuverability. | ||
| You know, you can kind of duck and dodge behind trees. | ||
| So just don't run a straight line. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| 19 miles an hour. | ||
| Yeah, what does a person run? | ||
| A rhino runs 31. Jesus Christ. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus. | |
| A fucking cheetah can run 75 miles an hour? | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| I thought it was like 50. Uh-uh. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 75? | ||
| A crocodile's almost as fast as the fucking hippo. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| They're quick. | ||
| 18 miles an hour for a croc. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| Top speed for a sprinter's around 21, 22 maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that's not sustained. | |
| Yeah, that's also a sprinter. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not saying a sprinter. | ||
| Not a doughy white guy like us. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Jesus Christ! | ||
| So if you're chased by a hippo, is there a move that you do? | ||
| Do you just have to go left and right? | ||
| Zig-zag, yeah. | ||
| Maneuverability. | ||
| So when we got chased, we got behind a termite mound, and then it kept going straight. | ||
| You're hiding behind termites! | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| Nothing says safety like termites. | ||
| Oh my god, dude. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| So that's the scariest thing in Africa, in terms of interacting with human beings? | ||
| You know what the scariest thing in Africa is? | ||
| Mosquitoes. | ||
| Oh, of course, right? | ||
| All stuff you can see, all the big wildlife, you can kind of feel it out and you put yourself in the bad situations. | ||
| Mosquitoes, there's nothing you can do about it. | ||
| Yeah, my buddy Justin Wren, he runs Fight for the Forgotten Charity. | ||
| They build wells for the pygmies. | ||
| And he's been bitten. | ||
| He's gotten malaria three times. | ||
| And one time he got it like he didn't even get bit again. | ||
| The malaria just returned. | ||
| So it must be in some way systemic. | ||
| I believe it is. | ||
| I never had it, knock on wood. | ||
| My grandfather had it, but I know that it wrecks you for life. | ||
| Like, it can come back, you can get it again, it stays with you. | ||
| I think that's his situation, and he's a professional athlete. | ||
| He's actually a fighter for Bellator. | ||
| He's one of their heavyweight contenders. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Has he said that it's affected his performance? | ||
| No, I don't think it has. | ||
| I think he's been okay with it. | ||
| He received treatment, but it's definitely wrecked him on three separate occasions where he was basically on death's door. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And one of them was when he was flying back. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| And he's just sweating and just rotting out on the inside. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oof. | |
| Awful. | ||
| So you want to ask what scares me? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, I'll take a hippo, a snake, a croc, a leopard, anything over that. | ||
| Yeah, malaria is terrifying. | ||
| They say malaria has killed more people than anything ever. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Malaria has killed half the people that have ever died. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Just make sure that's right. | ||
| That might be bullshit, too. | ||
| It sounds good. | ||
| I think it's real. | ||
| I think we actually have Googled this before, that malaria has literally killed 50% of all the people that have ever died. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Yeah, it's nuts. | ||
| I mean, people are worried about so many different things, and you should be worried about mosquitoes. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Apparently they're trying to genetically engineer mosquitoes to be devoid of malaria. | ||
| And they hybridize, right? | ||
| So my understanding is the way that it's done is they genetically engineer the males to reproduce with the females, which are the malaria carriers, and then the offspring of that generation can no longer carry malaria. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, malaria killed half the people who have ever lived. | ||
| That is bonkers. | ||
| Because it's a myth. | ||
| It's a myth? | ||
| Yeah, it would have had to kill, it says like, five and a half million people on average per year, every year for all of human history, and that's not... | ||
| I think it kills half a million a year. | ||
| I think the real number's like half a million. | ||
| Yeah, it says it would have to be five and a half million to kill everyone. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So it's just one of those things that people say. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| Well, I should probably shut the fuck up. | ||
| But what else is new? | ||
| So how many people have they killed? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We'll go with a lot. | ||
| So, are there other diseases? | ||
| I mean, there's not like typhoid and shit. | ||
| Isn't there like a fucking case of typhoid in California now? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, we've got some weird situations in this country with, you know, measles returning and polio returning. | ||
| Ebola came in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What the hell? | ||
| Typhus outbreaks expands in L.A. and Long Beach. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jesus! | |
| Cool, thanks for having me down here, Joe. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| Did you notice my hand was sweaty when we showed up? | ||
| They're different, but... | ||
| It's different? | ||
| It's similar, but different. | ||
| It's not typhoid, it's typhus. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| It's a flea-borne typhus. | ||
| I'm terrified of Lyme disease too. | ||
| Have you had Lyme? | ||
| No, but I have a gang of friends that have had it and it wrecks them. | ||
| Well, you spend a ton of time hiking around and stuff out here. | ||
| Well, California doesn't have much Lyme, but East Coast, it's horrific. | ||
| It's like everybody that spends time outdoors in the Northeast seems to get it. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't know what you can do about that. | ||
| There was a vaccine that they were doing for a while, but one of my friends, her dad actually got Lyme disease from the vaccine. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Like, he didn't have it, got vaccinated, and wound up catching it from the vaccine. | ||
| And I think they were like, okay, fuck this vaccine. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Because they had it for a while, I believe. | ||
| Jeez. | ||
| Yeah, that's no fun. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, when you were a kid, you were doing this. | ||
| Like, you've been involved. | ||
| So, this is like the family business? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Sort of. | ||
| My family business was my mom's business, actually, was safari businesses. | ||
| So, like you say, sit in a Land Rover, see the animals kind of thing. | ||
| And they did a little bit of tourist walking safaris, but then I grew up on a farm in the outskirts of Harare, Zimbabwe. | ||
| And then whenever I wasn't in school, I was on the farm, running around barefoot, catching snakes, fishing, yada yada. | ||
| And then when my mom wasn't booked up, she had this little bush plane that she used for safaris, and we'd just adventure all over Africa. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| So, it's a great childhood. | ||
| That sounds amazing, but fucking terrifying. | ||
| I mean, it's like one of those things where it's what you're used to, right? | ||
| I found moving to the States at age 14 and, like, trying to find my place in the world and being this weird little private school kid from Africa way more terrifying than going to meet a tribe in the middle of the bush. | ||
| Really? | ||
| For sure, yeah. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Why? | ||
| I'll give you examples. | ||
| I always carry a pocket knife on me, right? | ||
| My first day here in the States, I go to school, I'm sitting in my uniform, because I went to a very proper English boarding school, pull out my pocket knife, start cutting my apple. | ||
| 15 minutes later, I'm in handcuffs. | ||
| And I'm like, what did I do? | ||
| What did I do? | ||
| I literally had no idea what I had done wrong. | ||
| It was because I had a knife at school. | ||
| Everybody I had ever been to school with had a knife to cut their apple. | ||
| It was the standard thing. | ||
| So here I am with police and guns and badges and they're throwing me in handcuffs and taking me out of the school on day one in America. | ||
| And I'm like, this is the scariest thing I've ever seen. | ||
| And I didn't even learn until later that day that it was because I had a pocket knife. | ||
| And at no point did I think having a pocket knife was a bad thing. | ||
| So they didn't tell you? | ||
| No, they just grabbed me. | ||
| There was like this whole thing, like the knife went flying. | ||
| I was chained up and I was like, what's going on? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| And they're like, you're in big trouble. | ||
| And I was like, why? | ||
| And, you know, it was like little culture shock things like that, that to me were like something I'd done every day my whole life. | ||
| And now I'm like getting thrown in juvie for it kind of thing. | ||
| When you think back about that, do you think that's just the consequences of being in a large population? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, like we... | ||
| Like I say, I went to school every day with a knife. | ||
| There was no violence issues. | ||
| There was nothing like that. | ||
| But then you come here where, you know, there's stabbings and stuff like that. | ||
| And it's because, you know, we had a... | ||
| I lived in a tiny country with a tiny population. | ||
| Do you think that it's possible that... | ||
| I mean, it's stupid, but there's no way you could live like that over here. | ||
| I mean, there's no way you could have kids with a bunch of knives. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| Not with this culture. | ||
| I don't think so at all. | ||
| I think that would be terrible. | ||
| And I get it now as an adult. | ||
| Nobody talked to you about it before you left the house? | ||
| No. | ||
| My mom didn't know. | ||
| She's from Africa. | ||
| You know, she's like, here are your things. | ||
| Here's your knife, son. | ||
| I'll put it in my pocket. | ||
| Make sure you sharpen it before you go to school. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally, man. | |
| Wow. | ||
| So you were always doing these walking safaris? | ||
| You started out doing the driving ones, and then eventually you started doing the walking ones? | ||
| My family business did walking safaris. | ||
| They didn't do hunting. | ||
| It was all photographic. | ||
| And we were in the Zambezi Valley, so Zambezi River is one of the biggest rivers in the world. | ||
| So we'd do these walking safaris, and then we did canoe safaris as well, which is why I have so many hippo and croc stories, because we'd be canoeing down the Zambezi River and then taking photographs and seeing wildlife that way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| What a crazy way to grow up, man. | ||
| It was awesome. | ||
| Your relationship to wildlife is just so different than the average person in this country. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| It's very intimate. | ||
| Regardless of being a scientist by trade, I feel like I have a very intimate understanding of animals because I grew up completely surrounded by them. | ||
| Now, what other countries have you explored? | ||
| I'm over 60 countries now. | ||
| Damn. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, a lot. | ||
| All for wildlife work. | ||
| Whether it's for the show that I do, or for biology contracts before I did the show, or just because, like, for instance, when I got done with college, I was like, I had a tiny little business starting college, sold it, and was like, I'm going to travel the world and try and photograph these animals. | ||
| And I went to 28 countries looking for wildlife. | ||
| Did you have something to do with looking for the Tasmanian tiger? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I did. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| I think of all the extinct animals that have gone extinct at the hand of man, given the range, I don't know if you know this, but the Tasmanian tiger at one point ranged from Papua New Guinea all the way down to Tasmania. | ||
| So not just the island of Tasmania, but thousands, tens of thousands of miles. | ||
| I think given the range, the frequency of sightings... | ||
| The amount of untouched habitat in Australia and Tasmania and Papua New Guinea, where they just found a new dog species, by the way. | ||
| They did? | ||
| Yeah, the Highland dog in New Guinea, maybe a year ago now. | ||
| Incredible looking animal. | ||
| Like, absolutely. | ||
| Could there be a very small remnant population of thylacine, Tasmanian tiger, hiding out in an isolated pocket of habitat? | ||
| I totally think it's possible. | ||
| And these sightings, are they coming from credible sources? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, I did one expedition. | ||
| I've done two expeditions looking for thylacine, and one of them, I was literally talking to the man who is the head park ranger for, like, the entire North Queensland. | ||
| So, he's a scientist by trade, a biologist by degree, and he says, I saw four of them. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| You know, so this isn't like some crackpot drunk who's like, yeah, they're here. | ||
| You know, this is a guy who is, like myself, a scientist, a biologist, and spends his life in the bush. | ||
| He knows every animal in that area, and he goes, I saw four of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| So, like, how do you not... | ||
| Like, I get goosebumps talking about it, because how do you not, like, take that as credible? | ||
| No, that's about as credible as it gets. | ||
| Whoa, look at that cool-looking dog. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| What a freaky-looking... | ||
| The world's rarest and most ancient dog has been rediscovered in the wild. | ||
| So this New Guinea Highland dog was thought to be extinct? | ||
| Is that the idea? | ||
| That's right, yep. | ||
| So this thylacine, this area where they are, has there been a concerted effort to find these things? | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| I mean, it's one of those things where, like, I would say the thylacine is like the icon of animals coming back from extinction for Australia, right? | ||
| It's kind of like... | ||
| Everybody knows about it in Australia. | ||
| They all care about it. | ||
| But where these efforts are is like outside of Sydney or, you know what I mean? | ||
| It's close to home. | ||
| So there hasn't been a lot of expeditions really deep in to look for them. | ||
| And that's what I did. | ||
| So there's so much belief that the animal is still out there, that the... | ||
| Shoot, it's the university in Cannes. | ||
| I'm blanking on the name of it right now. | ||
| The university itself put money towards funding to find it. | ||
| So when you have a credible institution like a university going, here's money, go and find this thing, you've got to think, and I'm not a big conspiracy theorist, but you've got to think they have some intel that says, look, we're not wasting our money to look for something that's not there. | ||
| We've heard something, we've seen something, we caught something on a trail camera, let's prove it. | ||
| And so I actually teamed up with... | ||
| They caught something on a trail camera. | ||
| Hard to say. | ||
| But what they did do is fund this expedition. | ||
| So myself and the university, who's still ongoing with the research, went and looked in this area in North Queensland where I went. | ||
| And how far deep did you go in? | ||
| 1,200 miles. | ||
| 1,200 miles. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Took 14 hours driving and then hiking from there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| 14 hours on dirt roads. | ||
| Because this is the area where they've been sighted the most numerous? | ||
| This is where that sighting that I was talking about came from, from the biologist, as well as I think four other sightings. | ||
| The community up there is a place called Portland Roads. | ||
| You could look it up. | ||
| I think it's 12 people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And live totally, not like the Amazon off the grid, but off the grid. | ||
| You know, it's all like solar energy and build it yourself. | ||
| There's no power lines, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| So it's just this small group of kind of like people in the middle of nowhere and almost everybody in that community has seen them. | ||
| So that's where we based it out of and then went deep from there. | ||
| Almost everyone in the community. | ||
| And no one's taken a photograph that they have cameras? | ||
| Everybody's, you know, everybody's got a cell phone kind of thing, but it's like, it's always the same story where it's like, yeah, it was there, it was late at night, by the time I reached in my pocket, it had gone off. | ||
| Except for the biologist I was telling you about, who said it ran around with his dogs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's out camping and he's like, oh, there's this red eye shine and my dog goes nuts and runs over there. | ||
| And then there's four thylacine jumping around with my dog for like 15 minutes. | ||
| And he's like, I'm trying to get a picture and it's like 300 yards away. | ||
| It's in the dark and without the flashlight and the phone. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck! | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's basically 100% of this thing's alive. | ||
| I mean, as a scientist, you can never put that number, but to me, yes. | ||
| That's why I've done two expeditions and I plan on doing more. | ||
| I feel it's out there. | ||
| Like, it's a gut feeling that it's there. | ||
| Did you ever see that, um, there was a Willem Dafoe movie? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Hunter, that's right. | ||
| And he goes and shoots the last one. | ||
| Bastard. | ||
| It was a weird movie. | ||
| It was a weird movie. | ||
| It didn't really work, right? | ||
| The movie was off. | ||
| It was very strange. | ||
| And there was like a scientific reason he had to find it or kill it or... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| Someone was paying him, wasn't it? | ||
| Didn't someone hire him to do it? | ||
| But wasn't there a... | ||
| He was a bounty hunter for the animal because it had some weird genome or... | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I don't remember either. | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| Yeah, but that's how they died off, right? | ||
| People hunting them? | ||
| Put a bounty on them. | ||
| That's how bad it was. | ||
| Yeah, when settlers came to Tasmania, which was the last stronghold for them, they were killing sheep and sheep farmers' things, and the government was like, get rid of them. | ||
| You know, put a bounty on them. | ||
| And what year was this? | ||
| You'd have to cross-check. | ||
| It's been a while since I've read up on that. | ||
| But the last ones died off in the early 1900s, right? | ||
| That's right, in a zoo. | ||
| They're a little freaky-looking animal. | ||
| There is one set of footage from it ever, from the one in the Hobart Zoo, and you look at it, it's an insane-looking creature. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just nuts. | ||
| You got that? | ||
| I'm trying to play the video. | ||
| It's not playing. | ||
| Oh, it's not playing. | ||
| Yeah, it's a freaky animal. | ||
| It doesn't even look real. | ||
| It looks like a cross between a tiger and a dog or something. | ||
| And it's kangaroo by Phonetics. | ||
| It's a marsupial. | ||
| So it's got a pouch, and it's just so weird. | ||
| Stripes and... | ||
| That's a strange thing about Australia and that whole area. | ||
| What's this marsupial thing and why didn't that catch on anywhere else? | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| There's that freaky thing. | ||
| Wait till you see. | ||
| There's a shot where he kind of turns his face and does like a yawn. | ||
| And you'll see he can open his jaw the way like a snake does to almost 180 degrees. | ||
| I mean, it's bizarre. | ||
| Yeah, to swallow. | ||
| Well, coyotes are kind of like that, too. | ||
| Not quite so extreme, but when you see a coyote yawning, you're like, what the fuck? | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Oh, that's so crazy. | ||
| Isn't that insane? | ||
| Yeah, it's like a crocodile almost. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| What a strange animal, man. | ||
| I'm obsessed with him. | ||
| I'm totally fascinated by him. | ||
| Yeah, I hope you get a photo of these fuckers. | ||
| Me too, man. | ||
| So, in that area, did you guys set up trail cams? | ||
| We did 200 trail cameras. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, and then the university that we partnered with, who didn't go as remote as we did, but they're still doing a big area, I think they have 10,000. | ||
| 10,000 trail cameras. | ||
| Something crazy. | ||
| Maybe it's 1,000. | ||
| It's a huge number. | ||
| So what do you do with those? | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| So you do a grid pattern, right? | ||
| So you know how a trail camera works. | ||
| Motion's activated, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| So they literally, here's the mountains, here's whatever, and they set out all these undergrads, and they're like, place one every 300 meters, pointing in this direction, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And they just do a grid, and they do that for a month, Two months, whatever it is, collect them all and then move to the next grid and then move to the next grid and just blanket the area. | ||
| And I think, I could be wrong on this, but I think the search that they're doing, that university, is going to be the most comprehensive trail camera survey ever conducted. | ||
| And so, as far as you know, they don't have a photo of one yet. | ||
| As far as we know, but think of it this way. | ||
| Again, I'm not a big conspiracy guy, but if you're in a university... | ||
| This is probably as close as they have me. | ||
| There's a lot of these could be... | ||
| Did you see that? | ||
| There's a new one that just came out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| See, to me, that's a mangy fox. | ||
| That's not a thylacine. | ||
| No? | ||
| Look at the base of the tail. | ||
| It's very thin. | ||
| It's carrying in an upward curve instead of straight. | ||
| Like, if you look at a kangaroo's tail, it's very flat. | ||
| There's a lot of fox problems in Australia where they're introduced. | ||
| Could be wrong. | ||
| You know, as a scientist, I try not to get too excited when I see something that I'm like, this is it! | ||
| It's hard to tell because of the way the grass makes it look like he's got stripes on his back like a tiger. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| A trail cam has captured an image that has excited Tasmanian tiger hunters to the possibility the animal may roam freely across Australia. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| How big is that thing? | ||
| They're like coyote sized. | ||
| Very similar to a coyote in size. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So, don't you think, though, that if they had definitive footage that they would release it to try to get more funding? | ||
| Dude, the problem is footage isn't definitive anymore. | ||
| Like, two years, last year, I got a photo of a leopard in Zanzibar. | ||
| The first time in 25 years, the animal was declared extinct, and we caught a video, not even a photo, a video of a Zanzibar leopard, and took it up the chain, and they're like, unless we have genetic proof, the animal remains extinct. | ||
| So, I think, you know... | ||
| It's so hard to say. | ||
| And Willem Dafoe. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Come on, Will. | ||
| So yeah, I think if the university had something, they're trying to get enough data to really present a case as opposed to throwing up a flag over something, one individual thing. | ||
| Is there a concern that a bunch of amateur wildlife hunters would go there? | ||
| What is this, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is this? | |
| There it is. | ||
| That's my leopard. | ||
| Oh, that's the leopard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Have you seen that photo, or the footage, rather, of the jaguar that they found in Arizona? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's really interesting, too, right? | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| That they're starting to make their way up from Mexico. | ||
| It's such a weird region, that, because here's this huge Sonoran Desert that you think none of these tropical animals can make it across, and for whatever reason, southern Arizona gets jaguars and codamundi and peccary and all these tropical animals. | ||
| What the hell? | ||
| I don't know the answer. | ||
| What the hell's going on that all these rainforest creatures are making it through this thousand mile stretch of desert and into southern Arizona? | ||
| Probably bored. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Looking for cool places to visit. | ||
| You know, maybe they, I mean, maybe it's just like a natural instinct to roam and expand your territory. | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at that thing. | ||
|
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God, that's amazing. | |
| That's an incredible animal. | ||
| So beautiful. | ||
| And it's huge. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| They're 200 plus pounds, right? | ||
| It's a big, fucking aggressive cat. | ||
| What's bigger, a jaguar or a leopard? | ||
| Leopard, right? | ||
| Leopard, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and that's even bigger. | ||
| But it's such a beautiful animal, too. | ||
| And apparently they were all over North America. | ||
| Jaguars? | ||
| At one point in time. | ||
| Yeah, like that area, like Texas and Arizona. | ||
| During the Pleistocene? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| I didn't even know that. | ||
| When did they, I mean, they were pushed out of, I feel like, that might not be true, though. | ||
| I feel like they were more numerous in, like, Arizona and, like, the Southwest. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| I mean, we had so much megafauna here back in the day, there would have been a lot of prey for them. | ||
| Now, because of the fact that you spend so much time in the wild and, you know, and that you have this interest in these, what would you call, cryptozoology animals? | ||
| Well, I'm not a crypto guy, so just to be clear, and nothing against crypto guys, but I don't do Loch Ness or Bigfoot or anything. | ||
| I'm a true wildlife biologist, so I only focus on wildlife. | ||
| So, not to interrupt you, but I'm just very, very structured in the sense that I really only look for animals that we have an understanding of. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, yeah, the Bigfoot one is the most compelling, but also probably the most bullshit. | ||
| I think there's a mix there. | ||
| I think people believe that they've seen certain things. | ||
| Do I think that there could have been large primates that we attribute to Bigfoot? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Whether they're still here or not, whether people have ever seen them, I'm so not well-read on that. | ||
| Isn't it interesting, though, that... | ||
| If there was one, it would probably be the most spectacular find ever. | ||
| But meanwhile, we have chimps and bonobos. | ||
| We have all these things that are real. | ||
| Well, because there's so much lore and culture associated with it now. | ||
| And not just our Western culture, but cave paintings of big hairy creatures and everything. | ||
| It would be this mind-blowing discovery. | ||
| Have you ever went and looked for the Bondo ape? | ||
| No, I know what it is, but no, never gone and looked for it. | ||
| They're sure that's a real thing. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, they've got skulls and hair samples and photographs and video. | ||
| And for people who don't know what we're talking about, it's a gigantic chimpanzee. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like a six foot tall chimpanzee, which is just fucking nuts. | ||
| And it does walk erect, right? | ||
| Yeah, sometimes, yeah. | ||
| There's a camera trap photo. | ||
| There's a guy named Dr. Carl... | ||
| No, he's not a doctor. | ||
| I think his name is Carl Harmon. | ||
| Carl something? | ||
| Carl Harmon. | ||
| Harman, is that? | ||
| Amon. | ||
|
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Amon? | |
| Carl Amon. | ||
| And he's a Swiss wildlife photographer? | ||
| Anyway, he set up a bunch of camera traps and he got one of them walking. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| It's freaky. | ||
| And there's some photos of these gentlemen that shot one near an airstrip. | ||
|
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Huh. | |
| And it's fucking huge. | ||
| You don't know how big the men are. | ||
| They might be small and it's in front of them. | ||
| But it is, without a doubt, one of the biggest chimpanzees you've ever seen in your life. | ||
| They have a crest on their head. | ||
| Their skull has a crest like a gorilla. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Yeah, it has like the bone of the skull. | ||
| It kind of fuses up. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Do you have a picture of that? | ||
| I'd love to see it. | ||
| I'm not familiar with the anatomy of them. | ||
| Yeah, it's really interesting because I think for the longest time they didn't think they were real. | ||
| It's a part of that Michael Crichton book, Congo. | ||
| Remember, there was a really terrible movie that was made? | ||
| I know the book as well. | ||
| Look at the size of that fucker. | ||
| Yeah, that's insane. | ||
| Yeah, that's one of them. | ||
| And that doesn't look like forced perspective, you know what I mean? | ||
| It looks like they're right in front of them. | ||
| And that's one from the early 1900s, I believe, where these guys shot one, and they were like, what is this? | ||
| This is just giant chimp. | ||
| Go, see if you can find the one of the, there, right above is the one where it's walking right there, yeah. | ||
| Oh, that's the trail camera? | ||
|
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|
Wow. | |
| The thing walking. | ||
| And he's erect. | ||
| Yeah, he's wrecked and he's, you know. | ||
| Is he? | ||
| These people that, one of the sightings, they saw one walk by a truck, like walk across a road. | ||
| They said it was the same height as the truck. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| So they have like, you know, like a Toyota Helix or something like that. | ||
| And it's literally the height, like a six foot tall man, but a giant chimp. | ||
| And I mean, you know, to go back to the Bigfoot thing, you can totally see where we get that from, right? | ||
|
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For sure, yeah. | |
| You look at this huge primate that's the size of a human being, and your brain instantly goes, it's mythological. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure that they didn't have photos of this thing until the 20th century, like the late 20th century. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Yeah, it's a trip, man. | ||
| They nest on the ground like gorillas. | ||
| Like a gorilla. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And the locals have two different names for chimps. | ||
| They call them tree beaters and lion killers. | ||
| And the tree beaters are the ones that are up in the trees, the smaller chimps, and the lion killers are these big ones. | ||
| That live on the ground. | ||
| Yeah, and apparently there's some either video footage or there was some eyewitness account of one of them eating a leopard. | ||
| No way. | ||
| So it was a dead leopard that they were eating, whether or not they killed it or they found it, but they were eating this fucking thing. | ||
| Regardless, like, to be a primate at the top of the food chain eating a big cat, I mean, that's nuts. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Would you ever think of going there and trying to find those things? | ||
|
unidentified
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Fuck yeah! | |
| They're deep in there. | ||
| Great! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I think they're in a place called Bili. | ||
| Bili in the Congo. | ||
| That's where they think they are. | ||
| They've isolated a population of them there. | ||
| Really? | ||
| My mom just got back from the Congo and she still does her own adventure stuff. | ||
| And she was saying it's just like, she's been all over as well. | ||
| She's like, it's mind-blowing. | ||
| There's so much remoteness and unstudied area that there could be all kinds of things. | ||
| God damn, man. | ||
| Now, what kind of medication do you have to take if you're going to go there? | ||
| Because you have to take some anti-malarial stuff, right? | ||
| Dude, I'm a pincushion. | ||
| Like, I've had so many shots and pills and, you know, like, preventative, obviously. | ||
| I actually don't do malaria medication. | ||
| I just cover up. | ||
| Because it messes with your brain. | ||
| I don't know if you know that. | ||
| Like, they say the modern ones aren't bad, but the malarone... | ||
| Like, you have hallucinations at night, you have crazy sweats, like, especially if you're in hot sun, so I would rather be more focused, especially if I'm working with reptiles or stuff like that that can, you know, envenomate me, so I try to stay away from it and just cover up. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Is there a specific type of clothing that's like anti-mosquito repellent clothing or anything like that? | ||
| I just do long sleeves and some bug spray. | ||
| And do you do a mask as well? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
| That's silliness. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It looks silly. | ||
| It does look silly. | ||
| No, I just do, you know, good old deet. | ||
| God, that stuff's got to be bad for you, too, though, no? | ||
| It melts you. | ||
| Like, if you get it on, like, say, these things, it will melt the paint off of the headphones. | ||
| It's so strong. | ||
|
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Ooh. | |
| It's probably worse than the malware. | ||
| Have you ever used a thermoset? | ||
| What is it called? | ||
|
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|
Fucking... | |
| Is it called a thermoset? | ||
|
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|
I think so. | |
| I think that's what it's called. | ||
| It's a device that heats up. | ||
| It's got like an element inside of it and like a little canister of gasoline. | ||
| And you put these sheets and it releases this very fine mist that you can kind of smell and mosquitoes fucking hate it. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Yeah, we used it in Alberta. | ||
| Alberta has very aggressive mosquitoes when they're out. | ||
| When they're out, they're out. | ||
| It's like clouds of them, right? | ||
| Yeah, because they're only alive for like three months. | ||
| It's gotta go! | ||
| It's like Alaska. | ||
| Have you ever been to Alaska? | ||
| It's the worst mosquitoes I've ever seen. | ||
|
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Crazy, right? | |
| They pick you up. | ||
| Yeah, they're the size of pigeons and they're fucking everywhere. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I went fishing with my friend Ari and we pulled up the car and we got out of the car and we opened the car door and within seconds, a swarm of mosquitoes was inside the car. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| And we were screaming like, what? | ||
|
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|
What the fuck? | |
| This is crazy. | ||
| It's like something out of a Stephen King movie. | ||
| Like, there's clouds and they... | ||
| I... Yeah. | ||
| That's why you asked me what I'm scared of. | ||
| It's that. | ||
| Fucking clouds and mosquitoes, man. | ||
| Well, we're very fortunate we don't have malaria here in the United States. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Because if it made its way over here somehow... | ||
| You know, I wear this fabric you're talking about, Thermosel, called Hex. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| H-E-C-S. H-E-C-S, Hex, exactly. | ||
| And I wear it for a lot of reasons, because I definitely feel it helps me get closer to wildlife, but I've noticed mosquitoes do not like it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| So that's one of my coverups. | ||
| Explain what a hex suit is for people that don't know what we're talking about. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So it's this interwoven carbon grid that actually holds the body's electrical energy and capacity, like the door of a microwave oven, like a Faraday cage, right? | ||
| And so you naturally emit electrical energy, and then when you wear this clothing, it's got this conductive carbon grid, and when you touch the ground or something, it grounds it and releases all the energy. | ||
| So birds migrate using... | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| Now, has it been proven that this stuff actually... | ||
| I mean, it has been proven that it has an effect on the electrical energy that you release, but has it been proven that the animals can actually recognize that electrical energy? | ||
| With certain animals, yes. | ||
| So we know electroreception is... | ||
| Certain wildlife is capable of it. | ||
| Birds use it to migrate. | ||
| Sea turtles use magnetic poles to migrate. | ||
| They just discovered, I believe, 2014, that lobsters' antenna have electrical detective sensors. | ||
| Electroreception is the word. | ||
| So, it's proven on some things, not everything. | ||
| You know, our understanding of animal behavior and animal adaptability is constantly growing. | ||
| So, it's passive. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| I wear it because it's a passive technology. | ||
| It's like, I'm going to wear a shirt anyway. | ||
| Why not wear one that might or might not help? | ||
| So, I feel it helps. | ||
| My friend John Dudley is a bow hunter. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| A pretty famous bow hunter. | ||
| I know John, yeah. | ||
| Okay, and he swears by it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he wears them constantly. | ||
| He's like, it makes a big difference. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| You know, like, I'm not hunting. | ||
| I'm just trying to get close to stuff and interact with it or find something, but I feel it makes a difference. | ||
| You notice a difference personally? | ||
| Especially with birds, I've noticed a huge difference. | ||
| I've noticed a huge difference in the water. | ||
| Some mammals, I've noticed a difference. | ||
| But yeah, like John, I feel like it helps me get closer. | ||
| And, you know, it keeps the energy down. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, you're emitting all this energy. | ||
| You see this bear or whatever it is. | ||
| Your heart spikes. | ||
| Your adrenaline goes. | ||
| And it keeps that in capacity. | ||
| So I think we sense that. | ||
| I think certain creatures sense that. | ||
| And I like to keep that out of the equation. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Right. | ||
| I guess it would be that there is something coming off of your body, and it probably would be an advantage for animals to be able to recognize that, just because we can't quantify it and put it on a scale or weigh it or something like that. | ||
| It's probably something going on. | ||
| Predator prey, right? | ||
| If you're a lion and I'm an antelope, and my adrenaline spikes and my heart's going, you're going to come for me. | ||
| But if that's out of the equation, the energy stays reduced. | ||
| Well, that's one of the weirder videos that I've seen, I should say, is people that are interacting with predators. | ||
| Like, people that have coyotes come right up to them while they're wearing those things. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And turkeys as well. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Like I said, birds. | ||
| Because birds have that in their brain. | ||
| They have, I'm going to quote it wrong, but they have something that they can detect electrical signals of what helps them migrate around the world. | ||
| So, for sure, I think it makes a difference. | ||
| Yeah, so what else do you use? | ||
| You use the hex suit? | ||
| A ton of different tools, man. | ||
| I mean, I customize stuff, you know, like in the Amazon we were looking for caiman and type of crocodile, so I built like a beefed up dog catcher that I use to try and lasso them. | ||
| I have a snake hook on me at all times. | ||
| A snake hook? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's a snake hook? | ||
| So it's just this like, it's like a golf club with a hook on the end. | ||
| So I can work with venomous snakes without it reaching back and grabbing me. | ||
| It doesn't restrain them. | ||
| It actually like, their body sits in it. | ||
| I do a lot of reptile stuff. | ||
| So I always have a snake hook on me. | ||
| I mean, the list goes on. | ||
| A ton of trail cameras. | ||
| I use a lot of thermal imaging stuff, especially looking for wolves or something like that. | ||
| Wolves are active at night. | ||
| It's really hard to get a shot of them. | ||
| Put a thermal bird in the air, and you can see these animals running through valleys. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, it's cool stuff. | ||
| You'd love it. | ||
| Well, I'm fascinated by wolves. | ||
| I think wolves, to me, are probably the most interesting animal in the wild. | ||
| Canids, man. | ||
| Wild dogs of all kind are unbelievable. | ||
| They're so at the top of their respective food chain. | ||
| Yeah, we have a lot of coyotes around here, and basically they're little wolves, the little sneaky wolves. | ||
| But real wolves, like wolves in Yellowstone, wolves in the northwest area of the United States, they have got to be some of the most majestic animals. | ||
| Oh, they're fantastic. | ||
| Because they operate together, always, as these packs. | ||
| So there's some sort of weird kind of communication and... | ||
| And what's amazing is, like, the social dynamic, like, within the pack, you know, the hierarchy, and then on a hunt, like, you go left, I go right, but without any verbal communication, and then coming together and making a kill. | ||
| I mean, it's mind-blowing stuff. | ||
| You know, you talk about not understanding wildlife. | ||
| We don't understand how they do that. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| We don't understand what kind of communication is going on. | ||
| Do you think there's some sort of like telepathic or is it just facial and recognizing cues and patterns that they've established before of they see an animal, they know to flank it? | ||
| I definitely believe it's that. | ||
| Like, I definitely believe there is an intrinsic understanding of you go left, I go right, you know, facial recognition, you know, your expression tells me to do something, you're dominant, I'm passive, you know, learning that way. | ||
| But I also think there's something more than that. | ||
| Whether it's telepathic, whether it's a low frequency sound that is not audible to us, I have no idea. | ||
| But I do think it's more than just visual cues. | ||
| That's where, apparently, the myth of the werewolf comes from, is that wolves are so smart, they think that a wolf and a person were, like, combined together. | ||
| I don't believe that, per se, but I can see how that came up. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| They're so smart. | ||
| African wild dogs are the same. | ||
| They hunt in these huge packs. | ||
| They go over these massive areas and then they'll push a single animal into one area to make the kill. | ||
| And they're not big animals. | ||
| They're, again, like a coyote size. | ||
| And they'll take down a kudu or some huge antelope. | ||
| I mean, it's incredible. | ||
| Well, African wild dogs are so cool looking, too, with those... | ||
| Black spots and yellow and all the... | ||
| Stunning. | ||
| They look angry. | ||
| They look freaky looking, you know? | ||
| I think they're my favorite. | ||
| You love wolves. | ||
| I love African wild dogs. | ||
| I just think they're so beautiful and majestic and unusual and they're just such a cool animal. | ||
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all of them come from the United States. | ||
| I think all of them originally came from North America. | ||
| Cannids? | ||
| Yeah, all cannids came from North America. | ||
| I think that's... | ||
| Coyote America, the gentleman who's been on the podcast before, what is his name? | ||
| Is escaping me right now. | ||
| But he wrote about it. | ||
|
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|
Huh. | |
| About all the various jackals. | ||
| Dan Flores. | ||
| Dan Flores. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That is a fascinating book. | ||
| Yeah, I'm going to write it down. | ||
| I'd love to read it. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And I did a podcast with him years ago that's excellent, too. | ||
| He has all sorts of crazy insight as to Native American, North American animals that went somewhere else, like horses. | ||
| Horses were native to North America, but they weren't here when the European settlers came. | ||
| They went extinct. | ||
| They had been taken. | ||
| There were other places. | ||
| Apparently, wild horses from Europe all originated from North America. | ||
| And we're taken over and then brought back. | ||
| Somehow or another, and then went extinct here, and then were reintroduced with the European settlers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| That's interesting. | ||
| Crazy, yeah. | ||
| And that's the thing, like, with what I do looking for extinct animals or proof that they're still out there, is, like, there are so many stories like that. | ||
| I didn't know that one in specific. | ||
| America's very well covered with eyeballs, but what's to say there isn't some remnant, small population, somewhere in the middle of nowhere that nobody has found these horses that have been untouched by human beings for millennia? | ||
| And that's what I do. | ||
| That's what drives me, right? | ||
| Find this pocket. | ||
| Find this animal that's been hiding out undetected for thousands of years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what other animals are you looking for? | ||
| A lot. | ||
| Like, we were talking about primates. | ||
| I'm going to Borneo to look for an animal called the Miller's grizzled langure. | ||
| It's a type of monkey. | ||
| I just got back, I was looking for an extinct caiman in the Amazon. | ||
| An extinct caiman? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the difference between that and the caimans that you see? | ||
| Just a different species, you know, just like there's many types of crocodile, there's many types of caiman. | ||
| You know, you have saltwater crocodiles, now crocodiles. | ||
| Same thing with caiman. | ||
| And I was looking for one with a very weird morphological variant. | ||
| It looks very, very different to any other. | ||
| What's different about it? | ||
| It's got a very elongated snout. | ||
| If you've ever seen a gharial, if you know what that is, a type of crocodile with this long, crazy nose, it's like the alligator family, the caiman family version of that. | ||
| This really long, skinny face. | ||
| Super light, super yellow coloration. | ||
| Just very different. | ||
| Last time one was seen was... | ||
| 52 years ago, and then they had one in a zoo that died in the 80s, and nobody's found one since. | ||
| So just really cool. | ||
| And so yeah, the list goes on. | ||
| Last year I did leopards, and I did wolves in Newfoundland, and a bunch of really interesting stuff. | ||
| So it's fun, man. | ||
| You love it. | ||
| You should come with. | ||
| I'll talk to Animal Planet. | ||
| I'm scared. | ||
| I'm such a pussy. | ||
| What about giant sloths? | ||
| What are your feelings on those? | ||
| So, I've had probably three years of research into this, into giant sloths, because Manapuguri, I believe is how it's said, it's the South American name for giant sloths, I don't want to give away too much info before I get to do a chance at looking for it, but after all the research I've compiled, there is, in my opinion, one location on Earth. | ||
| It's in high Peru, where nobody goes. | ||
| It's a bowl of mountains, impenetrable. | ||
| The only way in is a helicopter in the center. | ||
| To me, that ball is going to be like a primordial Eden. | ||
| All of the cultures surrounding it have old stories of giant sloths. | ||
| They all have different names for it, but they all have these stories of these giant sloths. | ||
| They were all hunted to extinction. | ||
| However, they've handed down these traditions. | ||
| But nobody except for a tiny handful of far-out tribal people have ever really got into this impenetrable ball. | ||
| And I think if they're anywhere, they're in there. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I saw a documentary once about this scientist that was essentially risking his reputation trying to find a giant sloth somewhere, maybe in the Amazon, somewhere. | ||
| Probably Peruvian Amazon, that's where I'm thinking too. | ||
| And he kept talking to people that had seen it, and he never could get a hold of it, but he had been there for years. | ||
| Isn't that crazy though? | ||
| Like, why? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you're a little Amazonian villager, you don't read, you don't have TV, there's no reason to make up science fiction, why say you've seen it? | ||
| Because you like to fuck with white people. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Could be. | ||
| Like, get that dude with his stringy hair. | ||
| Yeah, I've seen that thing. | ||
| Oh, dinosaurs? | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| Come on, I'll take you. | ||
| Five days in, you know, you're exhausted, covered with mosquito bites. | ||
| He's like, any day now, we're almost there. | ||
| Just over the next hill. | ||
| He's just going to wait for you to fucking rot out. | ||
| That would be a mean man. | ||
| That's a mean guy. | ||
| Leave you on a log. | ||
| All right, buddy. | ||
| Pat you on the back. | ||
| This is the last spot for you. | ||
| And I'll be taking this. | ||
| I'll take your binoculars. | ||
| I mean, yeah, there's no reason for them to lie, but that's like the thing that people say about everything. | ||
| Why would someone lie? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| People lie for a bunch of weird reasons. | ||
| People do it. | ||
| People are crazy. | ||
| They make shit up. | ||
| True. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, to me it's like you have to take an eyewitness report of an extinct creature or a cryptope creature with a grain of salt, but you still have to take it. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| You still have to bank it and consider it. | ||
| And so that's kind of the way I go. | ||
| I always talk to people, but then I do the biology, right? | ||
| I track, I put the cameras out, I bait, I scent, I do all of that stuff to try and get evidence of my own. | ||
| Because just going with eyewitness reports is, like you say, it's nothing. | ||
| Is there ever been any eyewitness reports that are just too ridiculous? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Like what? | ||
| Oh, man, loads. | ||
| I mean, like, talking about the thylacine, for instance. | ||
| There was a guy that we met there who's like, yeah, yeah, there's thylacine everywhere. | ||
| They run around with the black cats. | ||
| And we're like, what? | ||
| He's like, yeah, there's Black Panthers too. | ||
| They like hang out together. | ||
| Black Panthers in Australia? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I made the same face you did. | ||
| So I'm like, okay, tell me more. | ||
| And he's like, yeah, you know, they like to hang out over there. | ||
| They're behind the trash heap. | ||
| They jump around with Black Panthers. | ||
| Oh, they're just fucking with you. | ||
| And I'm like, well, that's the thing. | ||
| I'm like, you're either crazy or you're completely fucking with me. | ||
| And I'm not sure which one it is because your eyes are telling me crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, how many different pockets in the world are there like that basin that you said you got to get helicoptered into? | ||
| There's a few. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a few. | |
| Yeah, you'd be surprised because, you know, we're here, we're in a city, we're so used to our modern conveniences, but there are totally untouched pieces of the world still. | ||
| Well, do you know David Cho, the artist? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| He went to the Congo, I think it was the Congo, to look for a dinosaur. | ||
| No way. | ||
| It was a really early Vice piece, back when Vice was first starting out. | ||
| And David is one of the more eccentric people that I know. | ||
| He's a multi-millionaire, made a shitload of money gambling, and also he made a shitload of money because he, was it Facebook? | ||
| Yeah, he painted Facebook. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| Like the wall? | ||
| Yeah, the inside. | ||
| They hired him to paint, like do these murals, and they gave him stock. | ||
| And that stock wound up being worth hundreds of millions of dollars. | ||
| And so now he's just this freaky, super talented artist who is just doing weird shit. | ||
| And one of the things they did was like, hey man, you want to go look for a dinosaur? | ||
| He's like, fuck yeah, I'll go. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Why wouldn't you, you know? | ||
| But there's this video of him. | ||
| I want to say he was like 25 at the time, too. | ||
| I think he was pretty young. | ||
| Yeah, look at him there. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| So he's in the jungle in search of a fucking dinosaur. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| And it was one of those things where the locals were saying, hey, there's a dinosaur in the Congo. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which doesn't totally make sense, but... | ||
| But, who knows? | ||
| Why not investigate it, kind of thing. | ||
| But, I mean, how big of an area would there have to be for there to be a species that we are not aware of? | ||
| Like, how big of an area? | ||
| Oh, I mean, you know, it's a generic question, because we discover you'd have to look up the numbers, but it's like 2,000 new species a year. | ||
| But little stuff? | ||
| But mostly little stuff. | ||
| There's an animal discovered... | ||
| Most recently, there's an animal called the saula. | ||
| It's an animal that I'm actually working on later this year. | ||
| And it is an antelope. | ||
| They call it the Asian unicorn. | ||
| Because for generations, people have been talking about this Asian unicorn. | ||
| And Western world's like, yeah, whatever, whatever, whatever. | ||
| And then finally, somebody went down there into the Laotian Mountains and was like, here's a skull and here's a skin. | ||
| And they're like, holy shit, this is a real thing? | ||
| And this is like, not populated, but there's plenty of people living there. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| This isn't like the middle of nowhere. | ||
| This is where there's villages and tribes and people, and they're like, here's this animal. | ||
| Here's a skin, here's a skull. | ||
| And since then, I think one trail camera has, the photo has ever surfaced. | ||
| Like nobody's ever successfully documented it because it's just this incredibly elusive animal. | ||
| Like whether it has super sensory organs, you know, hearing, sight, smell, whatever it is, or it's just super low density and population, nobody really knows. | ||
| But this animal, this huge like antelope has been around forever, People, little tribal people, have been talking about it in like a mythological way, the same way they would talk about dinosaurs in the Congo. | ||
| And the Western world's going, sure buddy, whatever you say. | ||
| And then somebody finally goes down there, does an expedition, just like David did, and goes, oh, it turns out it's here. | ||
| What is it about animals where we're so fascinated by the ones that might not be real or that might be hidden? | ||
| Like, what is it about them? | ||
| I mean, people love to study giraffes and things that are absolutely real, but they also have an even more compelling need to search for things that are not quite sure if they exist or not. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| man i think it's like it's human nature to want to know more right like we of course like not everybody you see a giraffe you're like it's real i know it banked it right some people go to the extreme they study every aspect of it but as a general populace i feel like once we know something's there we want to know what the next thing is yeah i mean we what do you think like what why why is it that we're so fascinated with it i don't know the answer I think it's probably a side effect of our compulsion for innovation. | ||
| Human beings are constantly trying to find out new secrets and find out new discoveries and invent new things and explore new worlds. | ||
| I mean, this is just something that's been a part of human nature forever, this desire to improve and to go further, find the next best spot, find the new thing. | ||
| You know, and then I think that also works with animals. | ||
| I think we have this desire to find animals that we didn't know are real or weren't sure are real. | ||
| Well, knowledge is the foundation of that, right? | ||
| To go to a new planet, we have to have the knowledge of how to get there, right? | ||
| To go to a new habitat, we have to know what's there. | ||
| And I think maybe that's kind of that deep-rooted desire is like we need to know about this thing in order to understand if we can innovate off of it. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, what did you think when they found that Flores man in Indonesia? | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Like, I'm not an anthropologist, so, you know, that's not quite... | ||
| Has that been 100%? | ||
| Is that 100% agreed upon? | ||
| I've only seen kind of headlines. | ||
| I have to defer to you guys. | ||
| I think there was one, there was some scientist that was disputing, but essentially they were talking about a three foot tall, hobbit-like man kind of thing. | ||
| Cave dwelling, little person. | ||
| That existed alongside human beings as recently as like 14,000 years ago. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Which is like, what? | ||
| I think it's completely believable. | ||
| I mean, the koi sand people in the Saharan desert are tiny. | ||
| How big? | ||
| Like four feet. | ||
| And until the, you might have to double check this, but I believe until the 70s, people used to go and hunt them. | ||
| Maybe it was earlier. | ||
| It was 60s or 50s. | ||
| But you could go and hunt this primitive-sized human being as like a hunt. | ||
| Like an old Englishman with his big mustache and his musket would go hunt these people. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| And now we have an understanding that, you know, they're people. | ||
| Like, you can't Fucking go and hunt them. | ||
| But, like, what's to say there weren't tribes like that all over the world that other people used to hunt that drove to extinction? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Say the name of it again. | ||
| You got it? | ||
| Khoisan. | ||
| Khoisan, yeah. | ||
| Let me see what these people look like. | ||
| In my opinion, they're beautiful. | ||
| Like, you'll see what you think. | ||
| But they're very small. | ||
| They're desert dwellers. | ||
| You know, there's not a lot of resources in the desert, so you don't get huge. | ||
| So they're perfectly adapted to the desert life. | ||
| They really used to hunt them? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they look just like people? | ||
| I mean, you'll have... | ||
| Yeah, I'm trying to find a good picture. | ||
| But they're still around. | ||
| Like, these aren't an extinct race. | ||
| They're still there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever seen The Gods Must Be Crazy? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, it's like those people. | ||
| Those were kind of taller Khoisan, but those are Bushmen. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So who are these people that used to hunt these? | ||
| Like I say, I kid you not, it was like the old English explorer would go and conquer Africa and hunt these people like they were an animal, you know? | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Crazy, right? | ||
| And this was until the 1970s? | ||
| That might not be right. | ||
| That sounds too recent, doesn't it? | ||
| God damn, that sounds horrific. | ||
| Yeah, you might need to check that, but it was not as long ago as you'd think. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It was like, very recently they were still under hunting. | ||
| And they're people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, so that's probably what happened to a lot of the non-homo sapien human type people. | ||
| I would think so. | ||
| And even if it's not like for sport, it's for competition or resources or, you know, any reason. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's human nature. | ||
| Conquer. | ||
| Yeah, fuck, man. | ||
| That is so dark. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They would go and hunt small people with a rifle. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| You know, it's nuts. | ||
| Are there photos of people like posing with the dead ones? | ||
| Um, again, I'm not an anthropologist, I'm not sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's brutal. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oof. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So what other pockets of the world are like mostly unexplored or could perhaps contain some of these animals? | ||
| South America, for sure. | ||
| Central Africa, for sure. | ||
| There's some very remote parts of like Russian Arctic, Norwegian Arctic. | ||
| There's areas in Asia that are still unexplored, believe it or not, regardless of their populace. | ||
| There really are. | ||
| Deep, deep China, there's some very unexplored areas. | ||
| Northern Myanmar, ecological hotspot. | ||
| Nobody goes there. | ||
| Very impenetrable. | ||
| I read something about some part of the world where they thought pterodactyls might still exist. | ||
| There's so many of those things. | ||
| I don't know that one specifically. | ||
| Especially doing what I do, I hear them all the time. | ||
| Oh, you've got to go look for Bigfoots or pterodactyls or whatever. | ||
| Mammoths. | ||
| Could there be a large reptile that perhaps flies? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| Is there a pterodactyl as we know it? | ||
| I highly, highly doubt it. | ||
| But a large reptile that could fly would be a fucking trip. | ||
| They were around. | ||
| So you think it would be something that we don't know about? | ||
| Yeah, basically. | ||
| I think there's enough pieces of this world that are unexplored that there are still megafauna to be discovered. | ||
| Not a lot. | ||
| Not a lot by any means. | ||
| And I might get ridiculed as I go back to my scientific community for saying this, but my belief is there are these isolated pockets where small populations of megafauna still exist that we don't know about. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, South America is, I mean, how much of South America is actually populated? | ||
| I mean, you look at the size of the Amazon jungle or something, and it's, sure, there's communities and stuff, but not that much. | ||
| I mean, Australia, you know, if you're not on the coast, there's nothing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, there's all these huge chunks. | ||
| Papua New Guinea, same thing. | ||
| Nobody goes up into the highlands there. | ||
| They just found a dog there, as you saw. | ||
| I mean, there's crazy stuff. | ||
| Now what do you think about these guys that are talking about bringing animals back? | ||
| Like, as a scientist... | ||
| Sure. | ||
| De-extinction is... | ||
| It's a weird word. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's a weird word. | ||
| Reintroduction? | ||
| Is that a better word? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| They call it de-extinction. | ||
| Is that what they call it? | ||
| That's what they call it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| De-extinction is... | ||
| To me, it's fascinating, especially if it's something like, say, the passenger pigeon, right? | ||
| We used to have billions of them in the United States. | ||
| Wiped them out. | ||
| And now they're saying... | ||
| We can take the closest living relative, isolate some genes, and make a new passenger pigeon. | ||
| Is that worth it because it's something we wiped out in the last hundred years? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I feel like we should heal the ecosystem by putting that back. | ||
| That being said, we still need to learn from our mistakes. | ||
| We need to take into account what we did and why we did it. | ||
| And like, do I think there should be a Jurassic Park and a bunch of mammoths and T-Rexes? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| That's a waste. | ||
| Whether we can or cannot do it, to me that's a waste of scientific resources that could go towards conserving things that are on the brink. | ||
| Now when you say, like, heal or mend the environment or the ecosystem, when you would bring back something like a pasture pigeon, isn't like 90% of everything that ever existed extinct? | ||
| Sure, absolutely. | ||
| So does the ecosystem adjust and evolve and would reintroducing something like a passenger pigeon, would it kind of fuck things up that exist now where new animals have taken a different position on the hierarchy? | ||
| It's too short an evolutionary time. | ||
| So we're in what's called the sixth mass extinction event, right? | ||
| There's been five others before us. | ||
| The one we're in now, it's happening at 80% greater rate than it's ever happened before. | ||
| So we are wiping out things more quickly than the world can adapt. | ||
| So, you know, you go into an environment and you take out all the apex predators, the prey explodes. | ||
| The prey explodes, the grass gets eaten down, everything collapses. | ||
| Now, if you left that environment over time, over evolutionary time, it would adapt, right? | ||
| Maybe, say, all of the predators got a disease and they died out over 300 generations. | ||
| During that time, something would evolve within the environment to Adapt the prey so that it didn't wipe out the environment. | ||
| That's just kind of the nature's balance. | ||
| But when you go in there and do it in ten years or five years, it throws off the equilibrium. | ||
| So when you, in theory, when you reintroduce something that's been, and it's not theory, it's science. | ||
| They've shown this even right here in the California Channel Islands. | ||
| When you put something back that's missing from the ecosystem, it's like you're putting a piece of the puzzle back, right? | ||
| And then you can allow it to do its thing over evolutionary time. | ||
| What did they do in the Channel Islands? | ||
| So I was actually a big part of that, and I loved the project. | ||
| So the California Channel Islands were settled by agriculture. | ||
| There were sheeps, goats, pigs, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| There was everything brought over there, right? | ||
| And so not Catalina, but think about the Northern Channel Islands. | ||
| What happened was when all these animals were brought in, all the farmers were there, then golden eagles started coming over. | ||
| Golden eagles came over to eat the pigs and everything else. | ||
| They flew across the ocean? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Flew across the channel, started preying on pigs and everything else. | ||
| There was an animal on the Channel Islands called the Channel Islands fox. | ||
| A very gorgeous, cute, cuddly little fox. | ||
| You can see him if you go to Santa Cruz Island. | ||
| There's loads of them now, thanks to the work that scientists have done. | ||
| Anyway, they were like, okay, the fox is being... | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Isn't he gorgeous? | ||
| A little cute face. | ||
| So the fox is being wiped out through habitat destruction through all these undulates that have been brought in. | ||
| So scientists got together and said... | ||
| What, undulates? | ||
| Like cows? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, domestic animals. | ||
| Cows, sheep, goats, etc. | ||
| So scientists came in and said, you know, the habitat's getting destroyed. | ||
| And that's just the keystone. | ||
| There were several species that were on the decline. | ||
| The livestock is wiping out the habitat. | ||
| The foxes are declining. | ||
| What do we do? | ||
| Well, obvious answer, let's remove all the livestock. | ||
| So we removed all the livestock, right? | ||
| Through helicopters, there was a lot of pigs that were causing damage, all that kind of stuff. | ||
| We removed it all. | ||
| Then the golden eagles started preying on the foxes because their main habitat was gone. | ||
| So now the foxes are under even more pressure. | ||
| So then we remove the golden eagles. | ||
| This is a very abridged version of what happened. | ||
| But now we've got the golden eagles also pushed out the bald eagle, which are fish eaters which lived on the island. | ||
| So now after loads of years of removing golden eagles, like relocating them, removing all of the livestock, Now you have a healthy population of Channel Island foxes. | ||
| The bald eagles are back. | ||
| They're eating fish. | ||
| The whole ecosystem is back in balance. | ||
| Had it been left the way it was, what you would have found at the California Channel Islands over, say, 20 or 30 more years, 40 or 50 more years, no foxes, no bald eagles, a ton of golden eagles, and a ton of pigs, and likely over time, pigs would have exploded to the point that they Easter Islanded themselves, right? | ||
| They ate up all the resources, destroyed all the habitat, population collapsed, golden eagles collapsed, nothing left on the islands. | ||
| What do you mean by Easter Island themselves? | ||
| So you're familiar with Easter Island in South America? | ||
| I know what those statues are and all that stuff, but I'm not familiar with what happened to the island. | ||
| So that island was an ancient civilization that was the Mecca. | ||
| It had everything. | ||
| Offland. | ||
| It had big trees, tons of food, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| People settled there and they said this place is incredible. | ||
| It's paradisical. | ||
| And then they started cutting down the trees to fish. | ||
| They started eating all the mammals. | ||
| And what actually happened is because they were so remote, the middle of the ocean, nowhere near South America, nowhere near anywhere else, they cut down the last tree. | ||
| There were no more canoes. | ||
| There was no more food on the island, and the population collapsed. | ||
| The island was barren. | ||
| It was void of trees, void of life, void of anything, and they didn't have the canoes or anything to leave anymore because they cut down the last tree to build a boat or make firewood, and everybody there died. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| So that's what happens when you use up every last resource. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God. | |
| So, wow. | ||
| When did this happen? | ||
| I couldn't tell you. | ||
| Because I thought it was like a mystery to what happened to the population of Easter Island. | ||
| So they're pretty sure that this happened. | ||
| That's the scientifically accepted understanding. | ||
| And did they get this from fossils? | ||
| They get this from bones? | ||
| So they've sort of pieced it together? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep, they take isotope samples and measure carbon data and yada yada. | ||
| I think the heads are still a pretty big mystery. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I think certain people believe that the heads were calling to the gods to help save things because they were going so badly, yada yada. | ||
| But I believe the heads are still a pretty big mystery, but the actual anthropology, the population, the collapse is known to be due to running out of resources. | ||
| How long did it go for? | ||
| Couldn't tell you. | ||
| Do they have an idea of how long the population lasted? | ||
| I think it's all published. | ||
| I don't know off the top of my head. | ||
| But it was a thriving population that flew too close to the sun, as they say. | ||
| Because of Easter Island's small size, only 63 square miles, it quickly became overpopulated and its resources were rapidly depleted. | ||
| When Europeans arrived on Easter Island between the late 1700s and the early 1800s, it was reported that the Moai were knocked down and the island seemed to have been a recent war site. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Lack of supplies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| See the next one there? | ||
| Constant warfare between the tribes, lack of supplies and resources, disease, invasive species, and the opening of the island to foreign slave trade eventually led to Easter Island's collapse by the 1860s. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So it didn't take long. | ||
| 1700s to the 1860s. | ||
| That was a wrap. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It was annexed by Chile. | ||
| And so they've never tried to repopulate the island with trees or anything else, and they just kind of leave it alone? | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| I know you can go there and visit it and see the heads, and I think there are some things there now, but it's barren. | ||
| There are no trees. | ||
| There's no, you know, it's all been depleted. | ||
| It's so crazy when they introduce animals to an island and it winds up fucking everything up, like Galapagos Island. | ||
| I'm sure you're familiar with the Judas goats. | ||
| Judas goats? | ||
| Are those the ones in the Galapagos? | ||
| Do you know how they do that? | ||
| How they eradicate goats? | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| Not from the helicopters? | ||
| Yeah, well, this is how they do it. | ||
| Goats like to hang out together, right? | ||
| But sometimes it's hard to locate them. | ||
| So they put a radio collar on one goat. | ||
| They castrate it, and then they let it loose. | ||
| And they gun down all the goats around it and let that goat go find the rest of the goats. | ||
| No way. | ||
| He goes and finds the rest of the goats, and they gun down those goats because they have the radio collar. | ||
| Yeah, so these... | ||
| What is this, Jamie? | ||
| It's a picture of a Judas goat, I guess. | ||
| He's just white. | ||
| Wow, that's what... | ||
| Hey. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| How sad is that single goat's life? | ||
| He's like, new friends! | ||
| He's like, what the fuck? | ||
| Helicopters. | ||
| So I'm actually heading there on Monday. | ||
| They make you take your shoes off, right? | ||
| Scrub to make sure you don't have weird seeds in the bottom of your shoes. | ||
| I have to stop eating seeds. | ||
| Quarantine for 48 hours when we arrive. | ||
| Stop eating seeds so you don't shit it out. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Quarantine for 48 hours. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Why is there so much concern about this one area? | ||
| I mean, it's the dawn of evolution. | ||
| It's where Darwin came up with the theory of evolution due to the finches. | ||
| It has been destroyed in some aspects, and the habitat has been fixed in a lot of places. | ||
| There's been great conservation efforts, and personally, I love what they're doing because they're trying to keep it pristine. | ||
| I think it's fantastic that there's a quarantine. | ||
| I think it's great that I'm not supposed to eat seeds for two weeks before going there. | ||
| And it's to keep it as perfect as it is. | ||
| Now, the island that I'm going to with my small team, It has, like, nobody ever stepped foot on it. | ||
| It's an active volcano. | ||
| It erupts every year. | ||
| It's this crazy, harsh environment. | ||
| We have to have a new pair of boots every day because it melts and shreds your boots just walking on it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| Yeah, it's been described as hell on Earth, so I'm stoked. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Now, what kind of protective gear do you have to wear other than your boots? | ||
| Just long-sleeved clothing. | ||
| How hot does it get? | ||
| So, the guy was telling me it's like 45 degrees Celsius, so that's well over 100. And, yeah, we've got to be careful about water and hiking, and there's a lot of elements. | ||
| But that's the thing, is I'm looking for an animal nobody's seen in a very long amount of time, so you've got to go to these places nobody's going. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's incredible. | ||
| You know, it's interesting, the idea of invasive species, too, right? | ||
| Because, like, Hawaii is a good example. | ||
| Hawaii, there's been talk of getting rid of pigs. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And a lot of the natives are like, well, slow down, because if we hunt them, we eat them, and if they're invasive, then what are we? | ||
| Right, totally. | ||
| Because the pigs were here right around the same time the people were there, and we've existed together. | ||
| They need each other, and it's culture. | ||
| You know, at that point, it's Polynesian culture to eat a fire-roasted pig and hunt your pig, and so it's a delicate balance. | ||
| Like, Hawaii's a perfect example. | ||
| There's mongoose that were introduced that destroyed the birds, and there's turtles, there's frogs, there's all kinds of things that have been brought in there, but none of those are culturally significant, whereas the pig, as you're saying, is a huge cultural significance. | ||
| So where is the balance? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yep. | ||
| and they're plentiful. | ||
| And it's one of the most really ethical hunts because you have to hunt them. | ||
| I mean, they're so overpopulated. | ||
| There's 20,000 of them on an island with 3,000 people. | ||
| And have you ever been? | ||
| To Lanai I have, yeah. | ||
| I was diving there. | ||
| I was spearfishing there. | ||
| Do you see all the Axis deer? | ||
| Everywhere. | ||
| It's bananas. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And they're so beautiful with their spots, and yeah, they're amazing animals. | ||
| And, you know, I'm all for it. | ||
| Like, hunting is a tool for conservation? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah, but it's just bizarre that they did that. | ||
| They decided to let deer loose on an island with nothing to eat the deer but people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then when this was done, it was like King Kamehameha, which is, what year was that? | ||
| I couldn't say. | ||
| A long time ago, yeah. | ||
| A long time ago. | ||
| So, back then, I mean, I don't even know if they had guns. | ||
| I mean, how were they hunting these things back then? | ||
| Bows and spears, I presume. | ||
| Probably, right? | ||
| And they brought them over from Asia, right? | ||
| Yep, yep, they're from Asia. | ||
| Same thing with New Zealand, right? | ||
| There's axis deer, there's goats, there's all kinds of things. | ||
| Or not axis, but red deer. | ||
| There's all kinds of things down there. | ||
| And same thing, they're all brought in for sport. | ||
| Yeah, New Zealand's a weird one, right? | ||
| So is Australia. | ||
| They brought a lot of stuff over there from Europe. | ||
| But New Zealand, specifically, they were trying to make it like a hunter's paradise, right? | ||
| And I think it is, right? | ||
| Tell me if I'm wrong. | ||
| No, it is. | ||
| But it's a weird one because it's mostly high fence. | ||
| Dude, you're going to love this. | ||
| So, onto my extinct animal thing. | ||
| They took moose into New Zealand. | ||
| They took like 10 of them. | ||
| Small population. | ||
| Believe that they've been hunted out. | ||
| You know, they shot the last one, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| There's one guy, crazy looking dude, long hair, long beard, like nuts looking guy, and he's been on the hunt, not hunt hunt, but like trying to prove that the New Zealand moose is still there. | ||
| He's found antler sheds, he's found bedding sites, some guy even got a picture of one standing on a rock, and you know moose. | ||
| To me it's 100% a moose. | ||
| And so there, in theory, somewhere down the South Island, there's one or two or three of these super elusive moose that have been in New Zealand for like 50 years. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, New Zealand is so fucking rugged. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a friend of mine who's been there, my friend Adam Greentree, he's been there. | ||
| He lives in Australia and he goes there to hunt tar. | ||
| And, you know, they live in the- On the steepest- The craggiest shale where the rock's real slippery and it's just like cold as shit and really high altitude. | ||
| And you've seen them before, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I have. | ||
| They look like a science fiction animal. | ||
| As me and the guys I work with like to say, stranger than fiction. | ||
| You look at it and you're like, that's not a real creature. | ||
| Like some kid drew that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like a big old shaggy weird looking thing. | ||
| This is the area where they think they are in New Zealand. | ||
| The moose? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you see that picture of the one on the rock sticking out? | ||
| That's right there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tell me that's not a moose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's a moose. | |
| That's the last one that was last picture taken. | ||
| Oh, it was 1952. There's a recent one though. | ||
| There's one from like two or three years ago and I looked at it and I'm like, that's a moose. | ||
| Like, I don't know who's saying it's not, but it's a moose. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I didn't see that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| From 1952. Yeah, that's 100% a moose. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But again, how weird is it that there's animals that you know are there, and then there's animals like, we must find this. | ||
| So they spend incredible amounts of time and all these resources. | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| Oh yeah, that's 100% a moose. | ||
| That's a freaking moose. | ||
| That's no doubt about it. | ||
| See? | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| God damn it, people! | ||
| Yeah, that doesn't even make sense that anybody would argue that. | ||
| Right! | ||
| That's a pretty clear picture. | ||
| But that's not proof, because they need genetic material. | ||
| They need fur. | ||
| They need something. | ||
| What do they think that is? | ||
| A cloud? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| A rubber moose that someone stuck there to goof on people? | ||
| Are they, like, arguing that somebody could have computer generated it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Just to fool people. | ||
| All those, you know, all those. | ||
| And I appreciate it, right? | ||
| As a scientist, I appreciate the fact that you have to have proof. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it does get to the point of ridiculousness. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's certainly possible. | ||
| I mean, it's certainly possible that they've... | ||
| I mean, especially when you're looking at that insanely dense terrain. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But so, there are some efforts right now to try to de-extinct some animals. | ||
| There are. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Give me that new word. | ||
| And, like, what is currently going on right now? | ||
| They're calling it the dawn of de-extinction. | ||
| And it's a lot of... | ||
| Very, very intelligent genetic scientists that are trying to isolate specific genes that are specific to the animals that have been extinct and putting them into extant animals, animals that are still here, to basically make this Frankenstein animal, because it'll never be the animal that's gone, right? | ||
| It will look like it, it'll behave like it, it'll think like it, etc., but it will never actually be the animal that we've lost. | ||
| At least not yet. | ||
| We don't have that technology. | ||
| Right now what we can do is isolate a genome, put it into an existing animal that gives birth to an animal that looks and acts very much like the extinct animal. | ||
| But it's some degree different because it's like a mammoth, for instance. | ||
| They would have to take some DNA from a mammoth. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That they would somehow or another get and introduce it to an embryo of an elephant, and then the elephant would give birth to a very hairy, very large tusk, like these isolated genetic codes, elephant. | ||
| And it would look like a mammoth, it would act like a mammoth, but the reality is, it's a shaggy elephant with big tusks. | ||
| Right, so if you did like 23andMe on it, it would show, oh, it's mostly elephant, but it's a little bit of a mammoth. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if you think of a double helix, like a DNA strand, right? | ||
| You have these little bars in the middle of it. | ||
| So what they do is, this is a very crude way to explain it, but they pull out a bar from an elephant and they put in a bar from a mammoth. | ||
| And then eventually you get this mammoth. | ||
| And so this would be with like gene editing tools like CRISPR or something along those lines? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And so how far away are they from doing this? | ||
| I mean, it's been successfully done a couple of times. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yep. | ||
| They've given birth to a couple animals that are very, very close to the extinct animal. | ||
| Most of the time, there's problems, right? | ||
| It's infertile. | ||
| It has lung issues, whatever it is. | ||
| There's a couple different cases. | ||
| I'm not a geneticist. | ||
| I'm a wildlife biologist, so I don't really understand it, but they've done it. | ||
| They have successfully reproduced things that are gone, basically cloned things, and then the animal hasn't made it to adulthood. | ||
| Man, that seems really, really like playing God, doesn't it? | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is absolutely like playing God. | ||
| I feel like, I mean, are people doing it just because they can? | ||
| Is it one of those things? | ||
| Or is there like a real, valid, scientific reason for trying to reintroduce these animals or de-extinct them? | ||
| Well, the valid reason is to conserve the ecosystem, right? | ||
| Like we talked about. | ||
| But I think it goes back to what we were saying half an hour ago, which is, it's just that quest for knowledge, that can we do it? | ||
| The innovation, right? | ||
| Can we play God? | ||
| Can we fix it? | ||
| Can we take this thing that's gone and say, no, it's not? | ||
| Like, we have the tools to make it not gone. | ||
| Yeah, there was some article that I read where they were talking about reintroducing the mammoth to Siberia and that there would be some ecological benefit to reintroducing the mammoth because of the way they forage for food. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| They would have some sort of an effect on global warming. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Do you know about that? | ||
| I don't know about that specifically. | ||
| See if you can find that, Jamie. | ||
| Reintroducing the mammoth to Siberia to benefit the environment. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Look, whether that's accurate or not, until you put mammoths on the ground, how do we actually know? | ||
| It's a great theory, and that's what science is, right? | ||
| It's coming up with hypotheses and then trying to prove them. | ||
| And it sounds cool. | ||
| Like, do I want to see a mammoth walking around Siberia? | ||
| Fuck yeah! | ||
| But does that mean it's actually good for the world? | ||
| Hard to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Could bringing back mammoths help stop climate change? | ||
| Scientists say creating hybrids of extinct beasts could fix the Arctic tundra and stop greenhouse gas emissions. | ||
| I don't understand that. | ||
| I find it hard to believe, to be honest. | ||
| Maybe it's just some scientist's clever way of sneaking it in because he wants to play God. | ||
| Like, yeah, yeah, we're gonna fix everything. | ||
| Yeah, fucking use coal. | ||
| Who gives a shit? | ||
| We got mammoths. | ||
| We got mammoths, yeah. | ||
| Just give me the funding. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Give me the funding. | |
| Exactly, man. | ||
| Trying to make mammoths. | ||
| That's sadly very real. | ||
| Well, is it really? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, look, if you're a scientist, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You, Joe Rogan, as a scientist, how are you going to make your career? | ||
| Are you going to make your career by raising money through being like, yeah, sure, I'll study cricket legs? | ||
| Or are you going to be like, look, give me the money to stop global warming by bringing back fucking mammoths? | ||
| You can make the outrageous claim if you think it's going to fund your research. | ||
| That's how you make your bones. | ||
| And that's one of the sad realities of some, certainly not all, science. | ||
| Well, mammoths, too, are so iconic. | ||
| It's such a freaky animal to study. | ||
| You know we had them here? | ||
| California Channel Islands? | ||
| Yeah, I heard that. | ||
| Pygmy mammoths. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How long ago was that? | ||
| I want to say pre-ice age. | ||
| Not actually sure. | ||
| But, I mean, still, can you imagine, like, you know, you're out fishing at Catalina and you look up and there's a pygmy mammoth on the cliff? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's so many mammoth tusks in Alaska in particular. | ||
| There's an Instagram page where you can... | ||
| I'll send it to you, Jamie. | ||
| There's a page where they go and look for them. | ||
| And they basically use a high-pressure hose and blow them out of the side of a hill. | ||
| Is it like in ice or is it in like earth? | ||
| It's in earth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The Boneyard, Alaska is the Instagram page. | ||
| If you go to the Boneyard, Alaska, you'll see what I'm talking about. | ||
| It's fucking incredible. | ||
| I mean, they keep pulling these. | ||
| They're using these hoses and cleaning off this dirt and they're pulling these intact tusks. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Well, there must have been so many of them that died. | ||
| And they're preserved. | ||
| I mean, whether it's mudslides or whatever. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| There's this one pocket where they're all concentrated. | ||
| Well, apparently they find quite a bit of them. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| You need one of those in the studio? | ||
| A mammoth tusk? | ||
| Yeah, man. | ||
| Yeah, I guess, but it seems like you shouldn't have it. | ||
| It's like ivory. | ||
| You don't want some rich asshole's house. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| It's part of a skull. | ||
| Oh, short-faced bear skull. | ||
| Holy fuck, man. | ||
| That's a cool animal. | ||
| That's a cool animal. | ||
| Yeah, we've drooled over those fucking things many times on the podcast. | ||
| See right there? | ||
| You see those tusks? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Bottom left. | ||
| Yeah, bottom left right there. | ||
| Those are some tusks that they pulled out. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| Yeah, and there's a ton of them, man. | ||
| I mean, these guys are constantly doing this and pulling these things out. | ||
| So let me ask you, you're hiking through there, right? | ||
| You're on a hike or a hunt or whatever. | ||
| You stub your toe on one. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| You dig it out and put it on your pack? | ||
| You leave it? | ||
| Take a picture? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| I don't know what the rules are. | ||
| Like, if you're in certain places and you find an arrowhead, you're supposed to leave it. | ||
| But rules aside, like, ethically, what do you do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, it depends on how far away you are, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Because that's a lot of weight. | ||
| That's fair. | ||
| That's fair, yeah. | ||
| I would say you mark a pin on a GPS and come back. | ||
| Because it's something you want, right? | ||
| As a human being, it's a treasure. | ||
| You found this incredible thing. | ||
| But ethically, you probably shouldn't touch it. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Well, these guys obviously know what they're doing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But for me, I would say, I mean, look at that one. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| It is huge. | ||
| Did they wrap it up with tape? | ||
| Is that what they did there? | ||
| It looks like all those... | ||
| Those metal things to bind it together, sort of, maybe. | ||
| Oh, like to keep it from falling apart, maybe, as they pull it out of the water? | ||
| Or the dirt, rather? | ||
| If I was thinking of my best me, the best me would mark a pin and then alert some scientists and tell them where it is and leave it the fuck alone. | ||
| Don't be a greedy dick. | ||
| My worst me, I dig that bitch out and put it on my pack and not tell anybody and bring it back home. | ||
| I just don't know what the law is. | ||
| And even beyond the law, like here's this gentleman right here who's pulling this out. | ||
| Even if you don't know what the law is, what's right? | ||
| That's the question, right? | ||
| What's right? | ||
| What's the right thing to do? | ||
| Yeah, there might not be a good law yet, but there might be a, I mean, there clearly is a finite number of these things. | ||
| Of course, there has to be. | ||
| And they're prehistoric. | ||
| Now, let me pose this to you. | ||
| So, I know a guy, he's a treasure hunter by trade. | ||
| Very cool old guy, Australian guy, lived in Perth. | ||
| And for years, he's like, I know where this certain Spanish ship went down. | ||
| Long story short, he finds it, right? | ||
| Digs up one single gold coin, and he's like, it's here, I know it's here. | ||
| He's a big spear fisherman, adventure guy. | ||
| Goes, spends tens of thousands of dollars, he's not a rich man, spends tens of thousands of dollars, gets all this excavator equipment, goes to this very remote area of northwestern Australia, pulls up something like $10 million worth of treasure, takes it home, legally declares it all, tells the government, gets all confiscated. | ||
| They give him three or four pieces. | ||
| You can see his treasure in the museum in Perth. | ||
| Here's this guy who would have retired, been a wealthy man, you know, had his whole life taken care of because of this thing he was obsessed with and then found, and then got the tools on his own dime to go and get it, declares it and has it confiscated. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Well, that's weird because you find stuff in the ocean and they take it and people become billionaires, right? | ||
| They find Russian or Roman ships filled with gold coins and... | ||
| But for whatever reason, this was considered historically valuable, so it was taken for the museum, right? | ||
| And he got a few coins and no money. | ||
| I gotta look up the guy's name. | ||
| I know a similar story. | ||
| It's happened in America. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The guy that went to hunt it got investors. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And when he got the gold, he just kept it. | ||
| When the investors asked for the money, he said, I don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| I lost it. | ||
| Or I don't know where I put it. | ||
| Or I don't know where it is. | ||
| So I think he's currently in jail under contempt of court. | ||
| Oh, jeez. | ||
| Being asked, where is it? | ||
| And he said, I don't know. | ||
| He's taking lie detector tests. | ||
| People think his kids have it or something like that, but they have no idea where it is. | ||
| It's a crazy story. | ||
| Well, that's a weird one, too, because, like, what are you going to do with it? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, if people are staring at you, they're, like, constantly looking, where is it? | ||
| Where is it? | ||
| You're like, I don't have it. | ||
| They're going to keep looking. | ||
| Like, how much is it worth? | ||
| Millions. | ||
| I think each coin might be worth a million. | ||
| You might have something like 20 to 30 of them. | ||
| It's, like, a lot of money. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Well, you've got to bring it to someone who's going to give you a piece. | ||
| You've got to bring it to someone, but then you're going to get caught. | ||
| Where'd you get the $5 million? | ||
| Then what? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Then what? | ||
| Oh, I found it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, what do you do? | ||
| Well, it's interesting when things are historical, right? | ||
| You don't know, like, does it belong to a museum? | ||
| Does it belong to the person who finds it? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, what are the rules, and are we making these rules up as we go along? | ||
| It's, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's worth $20 million. | ||
| I found a story. | ||
| He's still in jail right now. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Jailed treasure hunter ordered to pay nearly $20 million. | ||
| Tommy Thompson. | ||
| Tommy Thompson sounds like the kind of guy. | ||
| What is that island? | ||
| there's one island that has um like this crazy hole in the ground that was made by pirates like captain cook or someone like there's a television show about it you know the curse of oak island yeah that's the show yeah it's up in canada right yes in canada yes and they have some crazy hole in the ground right they're trying to figure out how to get into but there's all these weird little traps and yep that's exactly right yeah what do they think's in there Some astronomically valuable treasure, right? | ||
| And I believe the island's changed hands like seven or eight times because people trying to find it have gone broke, digging it up, excavating it, exploring it, and there's booby traps and all this crazy stuff. | ||
| Yeah, there's some... | ||
| There's some sort of a method that they've devised where if you go deep enough, it just fills up with water so you can never get to the actual treasure itself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the people who put the treasure there might have fucked themselves. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| We're assuming they're so smart that they buried the treasure in a way that nobody could ever get it out, but they might have just buried it in a way that they couldn't even get it out. | ||
| I think that's the case. | ||
| I think it's one of those like, oh, we're going to keep it here and then they couldn't get it. | ||
| I mean, who knows? | ||
| But yeah, what a crazy story. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So do they know who did it? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| See if you can find something on that. | ||
| Oak Island. | ||
| So that television show is, it's just like, they're just like going, well, now what? | ||
| Right? | ||
| I think they're just digging and trying. | ||
| So you can't suck all the water out, right? | ||
| Because it's getting water from the ocean. | ||
| Well, it's subsea level. | ||
| So yeah, it just, you know. | ||
| Constantly filling up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So unless you go down there with a submarine. | ||
| I think they've put divers in it. | ||
| They've had metal detectors. | ||
| I don't really know. | ||
| I'm not super familiar with the show. | ||
| I just know someone that was there. | ||
| And yeah, I think it's this pretty serious ongoing thing. | ||
| Buried treasure, right? | ||
| Remember when you were a kid, it was X marks the spot? | ||
| The coolest. | ||
| The so-called Knights Templar Cross is one of the most exciting treasures found there. | ||
| Really? | ||
| They found it? | ||
| It's so-called. | ||
| It says, upon first glance, it resembles a Knights Templar Cross. | ||
| Do they have a picture of this thing? | ||
| That's in the show right here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hmm. | |
| Hmm. | ||
| So, yeah, when they find these, if they, in the open ocean, when they find these things, it's whoever finds it gets to keep it, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think so. | |
| If it's in international waters. | ||
| I believe so. | ||
| So when they have, like, these ancient Roman ships. | ||
| But you still have to bring it back into port and declare it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What makes it historically valuable. | ||
| Like, I think there's, it's a lot, I feel like there's a lot of loopholes where you can get screwed out of your find. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Yeah, that's a weird one. | ||
| Who owns that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I don't know. | ||
| It's just interesting to me that there were so many ships that went down that you can find these things in the ocean still. | ||
| And they're filled with gold, these Roman ships. | ||
| And people retire off of it and spend their whole career and lose every dime they have trying to find one. | ||
| Yeah, and how do they coordinate? | ||
| Do they read like old logs or something like that and try to figure out which way the people went? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| Hmm, man. | ||
| So what other like crazy trips do you want to do that you haven't done yet? | ||
| There's a lot, man. | ||
| I mean, the one that I've had on my bucket list since I was... | ||
| So there's a couple. | ||
| One is, there's really one place on Earth left where there's true cannibals. | ||
| It's Papua New Guinea. | ||
| And unlike the missionary that went in, you know, with an agenda, I would just love to actually see these cannibalistic tribes. | ||
| So I'd love to do that. | ||
| Nobody has successfully, unless it's happened very recently and I'm unaware of, successfully done Source to Sea of the Congo River from guerrilla warfare, from crazy waterfalls, disease. | ||
| That's an expedition I'd like to try. | ||
| And then when it comes to wildlife, I mean, the list is infinite. | ||
| There's so many of these animals that I'm desperate to try and find. | ||
| Those sound like very dangerous trips. | ||
| Like visiting cannibals? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, like, I don't know how to say this without sounding arrogant, but that's what sounds exciting to me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, is giving that shot that other, taking that shot that other people aren't taking. | ||
| So, have people visited these cannibals and come out of there before? | ||
| Yep, yep. | ||
| There was a Nat Geo photographer who got some incredible photos. | ||
| They're called the Caraway Tribe. | ||
| And he went in there, took him a while for them to kind of assimilate and get comfortable, and then he got these photos that are just mind-blowing. | ||
| Now, how often do they practice cannibalism? | ||
| It's not a daily thing. | ||
| It is a spiritual thing where they actually eat the other tribes deceased after a war or an intertribal conflict as a way to ward off bad spirits. | ||
| So it's not like a daily thing. | ||
| It's not like they're going out hunting each other. | ||
| It's more like when these things occur, they have to eat a certain killer, a certain body to keep evil spirits at bay. | ||
| Do they get that version of mad cow's disease that cannibals get? | ||
| Was it Jakob's Krutzfeld? | ||
| I know what you're talking about. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I think it's probably infrequent enough that they're not getting it. | ||
| Because in the South Pacific, they got that all the time, but they were eating each other all the time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think you get it from nerves, right? | ||
| And nerve tissue or brains. | ||
| It's brain, yeah. | ||
| That's where they're getting it from. | ||
| It's essentially mad cow disease. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| Is this guy hanging out with them there? | ||
| It starts off with sound and he's eating something. | ||
| I don't think he's eating people with them. | ||
| He's going to eat a fucking person? | ||
| That's not a person. | ||
| That's a pig or something. | ||
| I don't think they'd show that. | ||
| But yeah, look at the tribe. | ||
| I mean, they just look amazing. | ||
| Yeah, but it's just so incredible that there's still people that live the way they lived many, many, many thousands of years ago, and they essentially just get their resources from the land, from the area they live, and they're just rocking it old school. | ||
| And then for me, like, the cultural significance is huge, but what's the biological area like, right? | ||
| Nobody's going in there. | ||
| How much biological study's been done? | ||
| The answer is none. | ||
| And these people have large population. | ||
| Look at that lady! | ||
| Isn't she amazing? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you read Sapiens? | ||
| Sapiens? | ||
| No, I'm not sure. | ||
| Evolutionary book about human history. | ||
| Noah Yuval Harati. | ||
| I think that's the name of his. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| Writing it down. | ||
| Yeah, it's a great book. | ||
| But one of the things that they talk about in the book was these nomadic tribes that would... | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| Yuval Noah Harati. | ||
| I fucked up his name. | ||
| They would talk about these nomadic tribes that would kill the old ladies. | ||
| Like, kill the people that were burdens. | ||
| And eat them? | ||
| No, just kill them. | ||
| Just talking about when people became a problem. | ||
| They would just kill them. | ||
| And this was normal. | ||
| But they got along together great. | ||
| Everybody was laughing and smiling. | ||
| Everybody's really friendly. | ||
| But as soon as someone seemed to be a problem, they'd fucking club them from behind. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like, this is going to sound just awful, but doesn't that make sense? | ||
| It kind of does. | ||
| It sucks, but it kind of does. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Like, you're a burden on the community or on the society. | ||
| You know, there's no fucking old folks home out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, that's, it's crazy. | ||
| Like, to us in our culture, that's absurd, but as a culture removed from the rest of the world, it makes sense. | ||
| Like, you're a burden, you know, you've had a good life, it's time to move on. | ||
| And they're nomadic. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| It's like they have to keep moving. | ||
| So if someone stops, and there's one guy, he was sick, and so they left him on a tree, and he became covered with buzzard shit, because the vultures would just sit over him and wait for him to die, but he eventually recovered. | ||
| And he caught up with the rest of the tribe, and for the rest of it, they called him something like buzzard shit or something like that. | ||
| That was their nickname for him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Imagine being that guy. | ||
| Imagine sitting under a tree looking up at vultures being like, it's moments till I die and they're going to drop down and eat me. | ||
| At least they're... | ||
| Polite enough to wait for you to die. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| The guy probably couldn't have fought him off. | ||
| That was a hyena. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hyenas. | |
| They're the trippiest of all the animals, the matriarchal society of them where the females have the fake dicks. | ||
| They're amazing. | ||
| How bizarre. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| Crazy faces, crazy biology and anatomy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, the fellow form, the cat-like, but doesn't belong to any family. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Super weird. | ||
| Love them. | ||
| They have a giant fake dick. | ||
| The females have a giant fake dick they give birth to. | ||
| They do. | ||
| Birth out of, rather. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| They have unbelievable biting power, too, right? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| The strongest mammalian jaw pressure on Earth. | ||
| What a weird looking animal, too. | ||
| Even the way it walks. | ||
| It's all shouldered. | ||
| Totally looks like a villain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like its upper body is higher than its lower body. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| Very. | ||
| What is it like when you encounter those in the wild? | ||
| Are they sketchy? | ||
| Very cowardly. | ||
| Very wary at all times. | ||
| Like... | ||
| I've encountered them a lot. | ||
| And when you're in Africa, if you're taller than it, it generally won't attack you. | ||
| So people get super scared of hyenas. | ||
| When I was a little boy, I learned if you're running in the bush and you see a hyena, stand up and put your arms up like that. | ||
| They say that about cats too, right? | ||
| Like mountain lions? | ||
| Look at that motherfucker. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Look at that thing, man. | ||
| That's so cool. | ||
| You don't like them, huh? | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| It's very cool. | ||
| It's not at my house. | ||
| It's so creepy looking. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love when they circle lions, too. | ||
| When they get enough of them together and they start circling and snapping at the lion's legs. | ||
| Strength in numbers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a documentary on this one male lion who would kill all these hyenas, and he was like the enforcer for the tribe. | ||
| No way. | ||
| You see how the hyenas would come in and fuck with the female lions? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| This giant male would come out of nowhere and there's a video of it, a video of him smashing these hyenas, just grabbing them with his giant head, shaking them, snapping them and tossing them in the air and then chasing after another one and killing them too. | ||
| Unreal. | ||
| No, I haven't seen that. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Have you ever seen Relentless Enemies? | ||
| You ever seen that documentary? | ||
| Netflix? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It might be on Netflix. | ||
| Dude, I've got so much homework to do. | ||
| Yeah, Relentless Enemies is a documentary about a very rare pack of lions that branched... | ||
| The river changed its course and left them stranded on an island with water buffalo. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So they... | ||
| Developed like a much larger frame and they're like far larger than regular lions. | ||
| Like the female lions in this pack are as big as male lions anywhere else. | ||
| They're enormous. | ||
| They don't even look real. | ||
| Is this relentless? | ||
| Yeah, it's from 2006. Oh, it's not very old. | ||
| There's also a book. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| But what's really cool is that they've evolved to take down these enormous... | ||
| Buffalo. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So the cats, when you look at them, they look like a lot, that looks normal there. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| But it's all relative, right? | ||
| That looks like a normal one, but some of them look so muscular. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They almost look fake. | ||
| Oof. | ||
| Oh, he's getting his... | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| He's got the calf. | ||
| She's getting the calf. | ||
| Yeah, Cape Buffalo are terrifying, too, by the way. | ||
| Fuck yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She's like, oh, let that go. | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| But there's, you know, very few things that they can eat on this one island, so they've developed this ability to just have larger frames, and they're much more muscular. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And apparently there's, what's really interesting is there's this pack that's really big, but then there's another pack that lives on the island that's normal sized. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they must be eating the smaller prey species. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
| I'm too stupid. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| Look at the size of that fucker. | ||
| Look at that female. | ||
| Look at the musculature in the hindquarters. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, she's built like a male. | ||
| She's built like a large male lion. | ||
| On steroids. | ||
| Yeah, that's a big female. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The same thing that happened in Newfoundland, Canada, with the wolves. | ||
| You love wolves? | ||
| So there was this island, Newfoundland, and these wolves, gray wolves, were isolated there for a long, long time, and all they were eating were moose and caribou. | ||
| So they just got huge. | ||
| And they were bright white because it was a snow-covered island like 80% of the year. | ||
| And there were just these massive white wolves, all jacked, all shredded, chasing around moose and caribou. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's just the way nature allows animals to adapt to their environment is just unbelievably interesting. | ||
| It's what I live for, honestly. | ||
| It's so fascinating. | ||
| The ecological niches that each animal fulfills and the roles that they play within each other, it's all perfectly balanced. | ||
| And to see it and understand it, it's fantastic to see the individual, but to understand the big picture of the environment and the roles that are filled, as you say, it's mind-blowing. | ||
| Yeah, there's a documentary on the Congo from the BBC from, I want to say, like the early 2000s, maybe even late 90s. | ||
| And it goes into that, into detail about how all these animals have adapted. | ||
| And like dikers, there's dikers in the Congo that swim underwater for as much as 100 yards. | ||
| No way. | ||
| And they eat fish. | ||
| Some of them eat fish. | ||
| A fish-eating antelope that swims. | ||
| A fish-eating antelope that swims. | ||
| Nuts. | ||
| Yeah, and then all these animals that got trapped as this area, these grasslands, turned into rainforest. | ||
| These animals that were essentially grasslands animals, like antelopes and stuff, are stuck in the fucking jungle, the swampy jungle. | ||
| And you see these big packs of antelope running through this swampy jungle area where they just don't look like they belong there. | ||
| They look like they belong in fields. | ||
| And that's how speciation occurs, right? | ||
| So that Dica over a millennia develops fangs to catch those fish and a crocodile-like face and webbed hooves or, you know, I don't know. | ||
| I'm making shit up. | ||
| But the point is that's how you get these crazy new species. | ||
| And here in the middle of Congo in this tiny little pocket is this animal that nobody's ever seen before kind of thing. | ||
| And that, like, to me, that's what it's all about. | ||
| Go to the Congo, find that thing. | ||
| You know, is it there? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| That's why someone like me is so incredibly thankful that there's someone like you out there. | ||
| Because I don't want to go there. | ||
| I don't want to go there, but I want to look at your Instagram page. | ||
| I guarantee you'd love it. | ||
| I'm sure I would love it. | ||
| I'm 100% sure. | ||
| I'm 100% sure you're right. | ||
| I'm also 100% sure I'm not going. | ||
| But I'm happy that you go. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I'm so fascinated by animals and just animal life and adaptation. | ||
| I think it's one of the more interesting things about this planet. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Is these weird organisms that are trying to figure out their way to survival. | ||
| And we're just one of them. | ||
| And they're adapting and moving and changing. | ||
| And we're always finding new ones. | ||
| I found a fucking snake. | ||
| I posted it up on Twitter recently. | ||
| Like a week or so ago. | ||
| A snake that has a tail that looks like a fake spider. | ||
| Have you seen that fucking thing? | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| Do you know the species of it? | ||
| I know the species if you said the name. | ||
| I think it's from Iran. | ||
| And it's a rattlesnake. | ||
| Scaled viper? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Scaled pit viper? | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| Yeah, it's a viper, not a rattlesnake. | ||
| Horned viper. | ||
| Horned viper. | ||
| Have you seen that thing? | ||
| I know what they are, yeah. | ||
| Incredible. | ||
| It looks like a spider. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it tricks birds into coming down and trying to snatch the spider. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| The Iranian spider viper. | ||
| Spider-tailed viper. | ||
| Like, look at its tail. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| I mean, I'm looking at that in a video, and it looks like a bug. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so this thing moves its tail, and it perfectly blends into the rock around it. | ||
| Like, look at that. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| I mean, that amount of camouflage and adaptation, like, how does that happen? | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| Like, look at this. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Oh, gotcha, bitch! | ||
| Dunzo. | ||
| And the bird's like, what was that that almost got me? | ||
| Yeah, it's insane. | ||
| What an adaptation. | ||
| I mean, like, you see the anglerfish. | ||
| That's a very bizarre adaptation as well. | ||
| Same thing, just out of the head. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| I mean, the fact that creatures can create that without, you know, it's not like they're doing it knowingly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Some handful of snakes at one time started waggling their tail and realizing that birds came in. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then over generational time, this tale evolved little spikes and little things, and all of a sudden you have this whole population of animals that look like that. | ||
| Like, that's insane. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, what is it? | |
| How the fuck does that happen? | ||
| I mean, how does something grow something like that? | ||
| A lure. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It grows a lure off of its head. | ||
| And it's like, hey, look, it's something for you. | ||
| You know you want to eat it. | ||
| Look at that one. | ||
| Oh my god, that's got a worm. | ||
| I mean, that thing literally has like a fishing worm, like a bass worm. | ||
| I mean, it's so amazing all of this adaptation and all of these... | ||
| Look at that fucking monster with a light growing... | ||
| I mean, it's got a flashlight on its head. | ||
| But it's just so amazing how much adaptation there is and how all these things... | ||
| Sort of work together, right? | ||
| Like, there's the bacteria, and the fungi, and the plant life, and the animal life, and the predators, and the prey, and it all sort of works together. | ||
| And when something doesn't work, it just sort of drops off, and then the system sort of resets itself in a new order. | ||
| I mean, to me, there is no—you're saying it's one of the most fascinating things—to me, there is nothing more fascinating. | ||
| Like, I'm, you know, I'm obsessed with it. | ||
| I live for it because I find it so interesting. | ||
| Now, when you study these things, do you ever try to think how the fuck that happened? | ||
| If you see that spider-tailed snake, is there anyone that has an idea that this was just a lucky break that this one snake had a freaky tail and then he got to fuck a lot because he ate a lot of birds? | ||
| That's the idea, man. | ||
| I swear to God, you just summed it up. | ||
| That is the idea. | ||
| One or two or three snakes kind of got this adaptation. | ||
| Just a random... | ||
| Random genetic sequencing that led to maybe a white blotch on the tail. | ||
| Something unique. | ||
| Doesn't it not seem like that though? | ||
| It seems like they fashioned it. | ||
| But over time. | ||
| They did, but over millennia, right? | ||
| over thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, the one, what happened was, say there's two snakes with a white spot on their tail. | ||
| Then they have a baby and it has a little bit of deformation, right? | ||
| A little thing sticking out. | ||
| Then that snake all of a sudden catches more birds than the rest of the snakes. | ||
| That snake now reproduces offspring, and its offspring that has a little bit bigger of a spike catches more birds. | ||
| And so those become the prized animals to reproduce with, to continue the gene pool. | ||
| And so that's what happens. | ||
| It keeps evolving. | ||
| It's like a peacock, right? | ||
| You've got this crazy big tail that it's attracting mates with. | ||
| It's not useful to the bird. | ||
| You know, it's entirely made for showmanship, for peacocking, if you will. | ||
| And over generational time, it gets bigger and crazier and more elaborate and more colorful, and the females literally flock to them, and that's the animal that continues on. | ||
| I really wish there was a way, and maybe there will be sometime in the future, where they're going to be able to show you with some sort of supercomputer sequencing, where they'll be able to look at the DNA of this thing and say, oh, this is the exact progression. | ||
| This is what it started off with, and this is what it became. | ||
| This is how some sketchy-looking forest chicken became a peacock. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| This is how some freaky snake became perfectly adapted to its environment. | ||
| I mean, that thing looks exactly like the rock that it sits on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's perfect. | |
| Perfect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is incredible. | ||
| I'm like you. | ||
| I'd love to know who Patient Zero is. | ||
| Who's the first one? | ||
| Yeah, because stupid people like me look at that and they go, okay, well, that's got to be a plan. | ||
| There's got to be something. | ||
| There's a higher power. | ||
| There's something that is looking after these things and making them evolve this way. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I mean, it's super interesting. | ||
| What about cephalopods, like octopus and cuttlefish and the way they adapt to their environment? | ||
| That's even freakier, right? | ||
| Because they do it instantaneously. | ||
| And have you ever heard the theory that octopus are from out of space? | ||
| Yeah, we talked about that with Brian Cox the other day. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not super well read on it, but it looks like a damn alien. | ||
| Yeah, he was very incredulous. | ||
| But, you know, he's obviously smarter than both of us. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he gets to be. | ||
| Yeah, it's like me looking at that going, man, it doesn't make sense. | ||
| Of course it doesn't make sense. | ||
| I'm stupid. | ||
| But he's, you know, when we're looking at this, but this is apparently like peer-reviewed, published paper about the possibility of octopus being reintroduced. | ||
| And I think it has something to do with the way RNA and DNA is on them, right? | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| I don't understand it well, but yes. | ||
| It's like the thought that the population came from out of space because of the DNA sequencing suggests something that makes it extraterrestrial adaptability. | ||
| Yeah, he was super skeptical because he was saying that they're essentially so close to everything else here that it doesn't make sense. | ||
| But the other theory was it might be just this is the path of life. | ||
| And the reason why it's so close to us is that this is the way all life, even if it's extraterrestrial, gets established. | ||
| This is just... | ||
| I don't believe octopus are from out of space, but I love the theory. | ||
| I love the idea of it. | ||
| It looks like it's from out of space. | ||
| It's just wacky. | ||
| Well, it's such a cool thought. | ||
| These things came from out of space. | ||
| That's also a thought about psilocybin mushrooms from the weirder people that they came on asteroids and their spores. | ||
| I've heard that. | ||
| I don't know if you know this, but they've proven that certain, I don't know about psilocybins, but certain mushroom spores are impenetrable to the vacuum of space. | ||
| Yeah, they can survive. | ||
| Yeah, that's bananas. | ||
| I pick a lot of mushrooms, not psilocybin, but a lot of porcini, a lot of chanterelles. | ||
| I do a lot of foraging. | ||
| It's really fun. | ||
| Are you aware of Paul Stamets? | ||
| No, I don't know that name. | ||
| Oh, he's amazing. | ||
| One of my favorite podcasts ever. | ||
| He's a mycologist and a fucking trip in every sense of the word. | ||
| A super genius mycologist who had the craziest story about being in high school. | ||
| And what did he say he took 20 grams of mushrooms and climbed a tree during a lightning storm? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Like something fucking, something where you hear him tell the story and your hands start sweating. | ||
| No way. | ||
| 20 grams or 10 grams or 20 grams, like something fucking bananas. | ||
| Something that would kill a moose, yeah. | ||
| Well, it wouldn't kill it, but it would definitely make it think it's not a moose anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it essentially changed his life, stopped him from stuttering. | ||
| He used to stutter, and he did this, and he stopped stuttering. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've heard about guys that microdose with mushrooms, with psilocybin, and it heightens their focus and cures their autism. | ||
| I'm not very well read on that, but there's a whole idea that microdosing with these chemicals that are naturally produced can actually have very positive effects. | ||
| Yeah, there's quite a few people who do that. | ||
| It's really common. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I've talked to a lot of people that do that. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| And they also microdose with LSD. There's a lot of that going on. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of Silicon Valley people are microdosing with LSD. It's funny, because the one person that I know that's done the microdosing with mushrooms from Silicon Valley. | ||
| Yeah, people grind them up into pill form. | ||
| And in fact, a lot of fighters are doing that now. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Which is really strange. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So why would that help you as a fighter? | ||
| It's not a mental focus thing. | ||
| It's a physical thing at that point, right? | ||
| Well, it gets you into the flow state. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And so, like, with fighters, the real thing is, it's not just your skill, but it's your ability to execute that skill under pressure. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So there's an overwhelming amount of anxiety, there's extreme consequences to... | ||
| Getting hit or going wrong, getting knocked out. | ||
| Losing a fight is absolutely devastating. | ||
| It's devastating emotionally. | ||
| It's devastating physically. | ||
| It's devastating psychologically. | ||
| It changes your perception of who you are and how you fit into the world. | ||
| And that sometimes, I shouldn't say sometimes, oftentimes impedes performance. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Kind of come back from it kind of thing. | ||
| Well, it's not just that. | ||
| The consequences of it possibly go wrong make you hesitate. | ||
| The stress of it all is very constricting. | ||
| It's very difficult to operate under that stress. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| The mushrooms, for some people, alleviate that stress and put you in this elevated state where they say, and I've never fought on mushrooms, but they say that when you're on mushrooms, you actually can see what a guy's going to do before he does it. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah, you have a sense of what they're going to do that's a much more heightened sense than you would if you were just in a normal sober state. | ||
| So do you think you're picking that up through, like, biological cues? | ||
| Like, you could see the muscles twitching in the arm before the punch comes? | ||
| Or, like, what? | ||
| How do you think that? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I haven't done it. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, I've never sparred on mushrooms. | ||
| It doesn't sound like a good idea. | ||
| But it's really common. | ||
| They say it is a good idea. | ||
| The guys who do it love it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And guys have, like, you know, had some really extreme positive results. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huh. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That's fascinating. | ||
| I never thought as an athletic performer, an athletic enhancement, that would be a thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not just the... | ||
| I mean, I don't think it makes you move faster or hit stronger or hit harder, but I think what it does is it puts you in the zone. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| There's states that you get into where you just... | ||
| You can't do no wrong, and they're usually very elusive. | ||
| They come and they go. | ||
| You know, you get them like... | ||
| Do you ever play pool? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| But you know how sometimes you play pool for a few hours and then you just all of a sudden feel like you can't miss? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You just have this feeling of where everything's going to go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's... | |
| Even if you're not very good, sometimes those will come for like two, three shots and it's the zone. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And that elusive state of like... | ||
| And then sometimes you're like, wow, I can't believe I'm in the zone. | ||
| Then it goes away. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Maintaining that flow state. | ||
| But do you think it takes emotions out of it? | ||
| Like, is that why you're in that state? | ||
| Like, if you're not emotionally attached to that shot or that punch, maybe you can execute it better. | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of speculation of what's going on and what's causing this elevated state of consciousness. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Maybe I'll just start microdosing on mushrooms and going out to chase snakes around. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
| Maybe you'd be more in tune with the environment. | ||
| Or maybe I'd get bitten and die. | ||
| That's true, too. | ||
| You'd be like, hello, little snake. | ||
| I'm your friend. | ||
| He's like, fuck you, you are. | ||
| Okay, so I'm not a big drug guy by any means, but I think you'll love this story. | ||
| on this amazon trip i told you about we land in this airstrip when there's plane we meet we get into this village and i'm like cool boats have made it here it took the boats five days we're gonna head up river right and our like translator's like you can't do that yet like what do you mean like we've spent months planning this he's like you have to have the shaman's blessing to go up river and i'm like okay what does that mean he's like He's like, come to the Moloko, which is the, like, spiritual house. | ||
| So, we go to the spiritual house, we sit around, we talk, and we talk, and we talk, and it's like hours of, not like asking him to go, but just like, almost like idle conversation where he's almost like interviewing us, like, well, what are you doing? | ||
| Where are you going? | ||
| Where are you from? | ||
| And he doesn't really understand any of this, right? | ||
| He's like, he's living in this community. | ||
| Long story short, he goes, okay, you can go, but you have to take this blessing. | ||
| And we're like, sure, whatever you need for us to go. | ||
| So he pulls out this snail shell. | ||
| I can show you a picture of it. | ||
| It's a snail shell with a monkey bone in the top and a tube worm to close it. | ||
| And in this snail shell is this green powder. | ||
| And he's like, this is what you need for the blessing. | ||
| So he goes around the circle and through a monkey bone pipe, he blows this green stuff in your nose. | ||
| Is that called a kuhay? | ||
| Not by that word that we heard. | ||
| I couldn't tell. | ||
| The name of the pipe? | ||
| No, no, the stuff they blow up your nose. | ||
| Is it DMT? It's coca leaf. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| Mixed with a bunch of a root and tobacco, I believe, like all together. | ||
| And anyway, so he goes, there's five of us in my crew. | ||
| He goes around the circle and he hits three guys and they all go, whoa, my brain feels like I've got chlorine on the head, you know, whatever. | ||
| He blows it into your nose. | ||
| Yeah, so he gets really close. | ||
| He's got this long tubular monkey bone pipe and he goes, and it just blows it up into your nose. | ||
| And Hits three of my guys, and I'm watching a little bit nervous because, like, I'm very, like, standoffish on drugs. | ||
| Like, I know things affect me very strangely. | ||
| Anyway, hits three of my guys. | ||
| They go, oof, you know, eyes watering, and they're like, wow, it's actually a great feeling. | ||
| Gets to my turn. | ||
| In the nose. | ||
| All of a sudden, I feel like I've got acid on my brain, like chlorine in my head. | ||
| I break into this sweat. | ||
| My eyes explode, and I'm like wobbling like this. | ||
| And 30 seconds later, I'm just curled over in the fetal position, just projectile vomiting. | ||
| Cannot hold it together. | ||
| And Lorenzo, the tribal shaman, goes, good. | ||
| Good. | ||
| And we're like, why is this good? | ||
| And he's like, he had a bad spirit in him. | ||
| If he had gone up the river, he would have been killed. | ||
| He's just got the bad spirit out. | ||
| This is why I had to bless you. | ||
| Now you can go. | ||
| And I was the only one that hit like that out of our five-person crew. | ||
| Everybody else was like, ooh, my brain's sore, whatever. | ||
| I was literally fetal position, feverish, puking, crazy. | ||
| And I've never done any drugs, like hard drugs. | ||
| Like, it's just not my thing. | ||
| And this thing just hit me like a ton of bricks. | ||
| After he said that, did you think... | ||
| I mean, you're a scientist. | ||
| You're a very smart guy. | ||
| But was there a part of you that was like, man, is this guy right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| That's what's so crazy. | ||
| Because I'm a fucking scientist. | ||
| I don't want to believe that. | ||
| I don't want to believe fucking jungle medicine made me not die. | ||
| But this guy, here I am. | ||
| Nobody else fucking affected. | ||
| I'm sitting in the fetal position puking my brains out and the guy's going, good, now you'll be safe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And the whole fucking trip, I've got that in the back of my mind going, maybe the whole reason nothing's going wrong is because I just had green fucking powder blowed up my nose. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Super weird. | ||
| And I, nothing has ever affected me like that. | ||
| I mean, curled up, puking, shivering. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shivering. | |
| Were you trying to make logical sense out of this? | ||
| Was there ever a thought where you're like, maybe in this extreme environment that's so utterly different than any other place in the world that these rules are different? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I mean, I'm sitting there going, going into it, I'm like, cool, yeah, I'll do the stupid powder if it means I can go on my expedition, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I'm not, like, embracing it. | ||
| I'm just, like, going through the motion to get my job done as a scientist. | ||
| And then I had this experience, and I'm not saying I was enlightened or awoken or anything like that, but all of a sudden I attributed my success and my safety in small part to this green fucking powder blown up my nose by a shaman through a monkey bone. | ||
| And the thing about it is, even if that's not true, if you think it's true, and then you wind up being okay, and you have confidence that you're going to be okay, and maybe you have less anxiety and make better critical decisions because you think that everything's going to work out... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Because I was super focused on my mission. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We were very, very successful in what we set out to do, and I... I feel like because I had that crazy experience and here's this old little jungle Indian going, now you're going to be okay, I didn't have any anxiety going into the situation. | ||
| And before that, I had no thought of it ever playing a part. | ||
| Well, like the mindfuck of the placebo effect, right? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| We know that that's real. | ||
| So there's some sort of a physical effect by believing that something works. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But is there a change in the way you interface with reality if you believe that you've experienced some sort of spiritual enrichening and that some bad spirit has been released from your body? | ||
| Is that possible? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think it changes your own reality because of your perception of the outside world. | ||
| That is a freaky thing for a scientist to say. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Right? | ||
| And this is, like, I am a hardcore academic. | ||
| I've never considered spirituality, religion, anything. | ||
| And I had this, just fucking ten days ago, this crazy experience that has, like, changed my mindset on... | ||
| On crazy jungle medicine and drugs and catching animals, everything, because this one guy blew crap up my nose and I puked everywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Now, has this made you want to experiment with other plant medicines? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| The only reason I did that is because it was a necessity to do what I was doing. | ||
| It was coming from an expert, if you will, but a person who saw it as a necessity to do what I was doing, and I was under his guidance. | ||
| To go out and pick a mushroom and try it and have an experience, I don't see the benefit in that. | ||
| But when someone who lives in that community, embraces that wild jungle, says, this is my home and this is how you do it, I will absolutely do it. | ||
| So you do it, like, out of respect. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What if they wanted you out of respect? | ||
| There's a bunch of those different snuffs that they pump up their nose, and one of them is, I think it's some form of 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine, which is that stuff that comes off of toads. | ||
| Oh, gotcha. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it has a bunch of other stuff in it, too, and they do the same thing. | ||
| I think that one's called a kuhay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I've read it, so I don't know if I'm saying that right. | ||
| That must be a hallucinogenic, right? | ||
| Yeah, they blow it up your nose and you see Jesus. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, look, if it was the same situation where he's telling me you've got to do this to go to work, do your job, whatever, absolutely I'd do it out of respect. | ||
| Wouldn't you? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I think you kind of have to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| I mean, you'd be an asshole. | ||
| I mean, I think, you know, when you're in the world of these people and they've survived in this world for eons and this is their environment and, like, you kind of have to let go and give in to this. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You have to embrace it. | ||
| Mmm. | ||
| Man. | ||
| Dude, you live a fucking cool life. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| It's different. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| Well, thank you for coming here, man, and sharing this stuff with us, and thanks for doing what you do. | ||
| It's fucking awesome. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It's been an absolute pleasure. | ||
| I've really enjoyed it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My pleasure, dude. | |
| Thank you for coming, man. | ||
| Got my hands sweaty thinking about all this shit. | ||
| Tell people how to get a hold of you on Instagram, Twitter, and all that jazz. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| My name, Forrest Galante, F-O-R-R-E-S-T, Galante. | ||
| I'm on all the social media platforms. | ||
| Is it Forrest.Galante? | ||
| On Instagram, yes. | ||
| On Instagram. | ||
| On the others, there's no dot. | ||
| Look me up. | ||
| Love chatting to people. | ||
| And thank you again. | ||
| My pleasure, man. | ||
| It was really fun. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Awesome. | |
| Thanks, Joe. |
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