Dec. 19, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:45:54
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| What's happening, brother? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Hey, Joe. | ||
| Good to see you, man. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I've been following your exploits on social media and the yellow caiman. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Dude, that is a wild looking creature. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| It was thought to be extinct. | ||
| Yeah, so this one, it's a little confusing. | ||
| It's a species that was last seen when the last one died in a zoo in the 80s, and because of the region that it occupies in Colombia, which has always been controlled by FARC rebels, nobody had been back down there to look for it. | ||
| And myself, and there's actually this amazing Colombian scientist named Sergio Riena, we're both kind of going and prodding and trying to see if we could get in, and we both found it within a month of each other. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now, it's a beautiful-looking creature. | ||
| Look at that thing. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's such a wild green-yellow color. | ||
| So wild-looking. | ||
| It's super unique. | ||
| Dude, you're just holding that thing by the neck? | ||
| Yeah, we just had a little wrestling match, him and I, so... | ||
| You don't even have body control. | ||
| Don't you want to take a mount here? | ||
| Maybe get a back mount, get some hooks in? | ||
| No, he was good at it. | ||
| You know, reptiles, they tire out, so they're not like mammals. | ||
| Once they expend all their energy, that's kind of it. | ||
| But yeah, absolutely amazing. | ||
| Are they similar to regular crocodiles with alligators in that they don't have to eat for like a year? | ||
| Yeah, so caiman, I mean, caiman don't have as slow of metabolism as certain other species, but they're a member of the alligator family, so to speak, and they can go very long times without food. | ||
| What a crazy animal. | ||
| Like, looks like a monster. | ||
| Yep, look at it. | ||
| I mean, look at the teeth on that thing. | ||
| Swallows things basically whole, just spins to take chunks off of things, swallows them whole, doesn't have to eat for a year, can go underwater for how long without holding its breath? | ||
| Like 40, 45 minutes, some of them. | ||
| Yeah, some species. | ||
| So you have no idea it's there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just waiting for you. | ||
| And they're fairly small, right? | ||
| This is like a 90-pound animal when it's fully grown? | ||
| Well, these ones, it's so little is known about this particular species of caiman that it's hard to say. | ||
| I would say, yeah, 100 pounds is probably about right. | ||
| There's a great photo, Jamie, from the Nature is Metal Instagram page from yesterday. | ||
| That page is nuts. | ||
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I love that page. | |
| I love it, too. | ||
| I love that page. | ||
| There's a great one of a jaguar with a caiman in its mouth. | ||
| That one. | ||
| Look at the eyes on that fucker. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Go expand. | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| The thing of nightmares! | ||
| Look at those fangs right in the throat, like just death grip. | ||
| And you can see that caiman is death rolling in that scene, right? | ||
| It's trying to get away. | ||
| It's rolling and that jag is just locked in. | ||
| The eyes on that thing, my god. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| It's like nature has created, like in those kind of eyes, that's the perfect vision of terror. | ||
| Like those eyes. | ||
| Like if you're locked into those eyes, like there's no forgiveness, there's no emotions, there's just ferocity and aggression and death. | ||
| It seems like nothing but testosterone is behind that. | ||
| You know, I mean, testosterone is probably the wrong chemical, but it just seems so focused and motivated, and like you say, it looks like death. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure there's some testosterone involved in that equation, too, but there's a bunch of other cat shit in there. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| And they have, apparently, the thing in the caption was saying that the caiman has one of the greatest bites per pound of any of the big cats, and they regularly eat these... | ||
| The jag, yeah. | ||
| The jaguar, rather, has one of the greatest bites, and they regularly eat these caimans. | ||
| Yeah, no, they're amazing. | ||
| And, you know, back to the one that we found, it's so great because, like, I'm the hide-and-seek guy, right? | ||
| Like, I look for them, and now there's this scientist, Sergio Riena, down in Colombia, who's going to manage that species' ongoing existence. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| So, it's really cool. | ||
| So, what is involved in that, like, managing their existence? | ||
| What does he... | ||
| I mean, you know, it's wildlife management, so it's getting proper population dynamics, trying to understand them genetically, figure out what their food source is, figure out how much hunting pressure they can take or cannot take, those kind of things. | ||
| And that's not my department, you know. | ||
| I go in and look for them. | ||
| That's someone like Sergio who's in the field, lives in Colombia, can work with the species. | ||
| It's really cool. | ||
| I remember there was a documentary about this guy who was a scientist who was obsessed. | ||
| It was a biologist and he was obsessed with the giant sloth. | ||
| And he was spending all of his time down the Amazon. | ||
| He'd been down there for years. | ||
| And the documentary was following him at this stage where he was getting really frustrated and not sure if he's wasting his career. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There was this feeling like, fuck, this thing might not be real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because they were telling me, yeah, I saw it. | ||
| It was over the hill. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he's like, you sure you saw it? | ||
| And they'd bring these people in, they would speak their native tongue, and they'd have this discussion of this thing that they saw two years ago, big like a bear. | ||
| Walks on its hind leg. | ||
| Megatherium, yeah. | ||
| We discussed this briefly last time I saw you, I think. | ||
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It's funny, we got straight back to the Save Wildlife stuff. | |
| But yeah, no, it's... | ||
| Who knows, right? | ||
| Who knows if it's still out there. | ||
| There's definitely ongoing reports, so much so that... | ||
| I forget what university, but some university actually launched an expedition to try and find the megatherium. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Recently? | ||
| I'd have to look it up probably 10 years ago now. | ||
| Not that long ago, but if an academic institution is putting resources behind an expedition like that, there's a lot of faith and maybe even intel that they're not releasing publicly to say this animal's still here. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That would be crazy. | ||
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Wouldn't it? | |
| How big was a giant sloth? | ||
| Well, there's a couple varieties. | ||
| There was a North American one that was enormous, like bigger than a grizzly bear. | ||
| From what I've heard, what I've read, you're talking about something that stands 14 foot tall walking around the Amazons like this. | ||
| 14 foot tall, like bigger than a Kodiak grizzly. | ||
| That's what the reports say. | ||
| You've got to take everything with a grain of salt. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, you've got to take their existence with a grain of salt. | ||
| But this page, whatever this page is, a Bigfoot cousin? | ||
| What the fuck is this page? | ||
| And look up there. | ||
| Megalodon sightings. | ||
| Is the Megalodon shark still alive? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And straight away, that's discrediting. | ||
| You're like, okay. | ||
| What is this website you pull up there? | ||
| There's an article from June about just lots of information about them. | ||
| It's not even saying it exists. | ||
| It's just saying this is all the information we have about this Mapinguari sightings. | ||
| People love finding Like, undiscovered or mythical creatures that turn out to be, like the Tasmanian tiger. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, that's a perfect example. | ||
| Like, people, they love to try to find, what is it, thylacine? | ||
| Thylacine, yep. | ||
| People love to try to find that thing. | ||
| Like, the idea that it's out there, it's like, what is it about people where it's so compelling to find a species that we thought didn't exist or we thought was extinct, like, whether it's Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or the thylacine, which we know used to be real. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I mean, what do you think? | ||
| I think that people, you know, they long for the unknown and there's this big question mark surrounding cryptids or surrounding extinct animals as to whether it's still out there and that's so much more inviting to the general perspective. | ||
| To the general populace to get an answer to than knowing, oh, you know, there's 700 of them left and we're trying to get them up to 1,400 or whatever the species dynamic is for some other animal as opposed to being like, there could be one out there. | ||
| Where is it? | ||
| And I personally, I've been on two different expeditions looking for thylacine. | ||
|
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Really? | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I did one in northern Australia, up north of Cairns, and then one I spent a couple weeks in Tasmania with an amazing biologist, Nick Mooney, who, he's adamant that he's seen thylacine. | ||
| And he's a biologist. | ||
| This isn't, you know, someone who worked as a biologist that was out in the wilderness going, yeah, yeah, I've seen thylacine. | ||
| And he was terrified to tell everybody. | ||
| And that tells me that... | ||
| It's more credible, right? | ||
| If you're scared to tell people because of your reputation, as opposed to going out there going, I saw it, I saw it, I saw it, that becomes more credible than the people who are just waving their arms in the air going, I told you it's here. | ||
| When did he come out of the thylacine closet? | ||
| Like, were you scared to tell people? | ||
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When did he go, oh god, I gotta go public with this. | |
| I'm not sure if he told us first, or if it was public right before then, but not long ago. | ||
| I mean, maybe ten years ago. | ||
| That is such a cool looking animal too because it's a marsupial tiger, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Or a marsupial predator. | ||
| It's like a marsupial wolf with tiger stripes. | ||
| It's so bizarre and it had this amazing jaw that would open like a snake. | ||
| It's like way wider than its head should. | ||
| Stripes on the back. | ||
| Just such a cool animal. | ||
| Yeah, and the last one died in a zoo, right? | ||
| The last one that we think. | ||
| Yep, in Hobart, in Tasmania. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But, let me lay this on you. | ||
| So, my next expedition for that animal, because I'm like all those other people that are kind of obsessed with it, my next expedition for that animal is to Papua New Guinea. | ||
| So, this species, yeah, that's right. | ||
| This species used to range all the way from Papua New Guinea down through mainland Australia and into Tasmania. | ||
| When people came over and settled that area, they brought with them dogs, dingoes, and dingoes out-competed them in mainland Australia and possibly in Papua New Guinea 4,000 years ago, but the thylacine remained in Tasmania where there are no dingoes to out-compete them. | ||
| But in mainland Australia, you've got a diversity of habitats, so there are places the thylacine could still hide. | ||
| But in Papua New Guinea, the terrain is so crazy that the idea is that in certain regions, dingoes could have never made it there. | ||
| So perhaps there's these isolated regions where very small thylacine populations continued for the past 4,000 years. | ||
| Have there been sightings? | ||
| Many. | ||
| But just the same kind of sightings as a giant sloth. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's all hearsay. | ||
| People are so full of shit. | ||
| Yes, they are. | ||
| It's such a problem if you're going to be a guy like you looking for species. | ||
| You've got to wade through so much bullshit. | ||
| And it's funny because one thing can discredit the entire story. | ||
| That maybe it shouldn't because they're embellishing. | ||
| Or you can be on the hook for someone's story and be like, I totally believe this guy. | ||
| It's all real. | ||
| And it could be complete BS. And it's just so hard to tell. | ||
| You just have to go with instinct. | ||
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Oh, God. | |
| But it is incredibly compelling. | ||
| I mean, if you really did get an absolute photograph of a thylacine and you knew it was real or captured one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it would be the discovery of the century. | ||
| And I think it would kind of... | ||
| people that are on the fence about why do I care about conservation why do I care about wildlife management you know those kind of things to be like check this animal out something that you know last saw when we put a bounty on its head and now it's back like it's hung on by a thread like that's such a message of hope you know let's save it let's bring it back yeah well the whole environment in Australia is so strange and And now, because of the wildfires, you know, there's a lot of species. | ||
| Like, we were just talking the other day about the koala bears. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That the koala bears, a lot of their habitat got burnt in a lot of these fires. | ||
| It's really sad. | ||
| Really sad. | ||
| You see these koala bears are on fire. | ||
| And they're, like, losing their fur. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| They're such a little cute little animal. | ||
| They are. | ||
| And I don't have a lot of first-hand experience with them, but my understanding is they're actual jerks. | ||
| They're really cute and cuddly looking, but their behavior is pretty aggressive and jerkish. | ||
| And I don't know enough about them to really comment on it, but my understanding is it's kind of like sea otters, right? | ||
| Do you know about this thing with sea otters? | ||
| What about them? | ||
| So everybody loves sea otters. | ||
| They're so cute. | ||
| They're so cuddly. | ||
| Sea otters are super destructive. | ||
| They rape each other. | ||
| They're like gnarly animals. | ||
| They're not that sweet at all. | ||
| Isn't that the thing with pandas, too? | ||
| Like, pandas are ruthless? | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| But you look at them and you're like, oh, I want to cuddle it. | ||
| A little sweetie pie. | ||
| My youngest daughter is really into polar bears. | ||
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Oh, yeah. | |
| These polar bears are adorable. | ||
| And she wanted to get, like, a stuffed polar bear. | ||
| And I find it so fascinating that that animal, which is the most ruthless of all bears. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| We associate with Klondike bars and Coker. | ||
| It's everybody's buddy, and they're sliding around in the snow. | ||
| I almost want to show her. | ||
| This is what they do to seals. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Go up there and just watch one. | ||
| Just show a video. | ||
| I want to show her. | ||
| I know she's not looking at that picture. | ||
| There's this image of this seal, and they all have red faces from... | ||
| Blood. | ||
| Did they ever figure out that one polar bear that was in Russia that had been sprayed, it said like T-34 on it? | ||
| You see it in that image right there? | ||
| See that one, Jamie? | ||
| I don't know about that. | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Someone had spray painted T and the number 34 on the side of a bear's body and they don't know what happened. | ||
| That's extremely ballsy to spray paint a polar bear. | ||
| How do they do it? | ||
| And then the real concern is that this bear is going to have a real hard time hunting because they're going to be able to see it much better because of the fact that it has the spray paint on the side of it. | ||
| I've never seen this story before. | ||
| It's really interesting. | ||
| They have no idea what happened. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
| Russian scientists search for polar bear with black T-34 spray painted on its side. | ||
| Cruel joke. | ||
| Can turn deadly for a predator now too visible for both prey and poachers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do they have a hard time with... | ||
| They have a real issue with certain towns in Siberia that are like on the outskirts where polar bears are invading. | ||
| And they have like dozens of polar bears entering their towns. | ||
| They've even evacuated towns because of so many polar bears being there from what I've heard. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Would you imagine just having an army of polar bears roll into town? | ||
| You know, you have a town of like 150 people and in come eight polar bears one day. | ||
| It's like, what can you do? | ||
| It's nothing. | ||
| You've got to get out. | ||
| You're either going to kill them, you're going to shoot them with rifles, or you're going to get out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You probably should just get out. | ||
| Yeah, you should get out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, polar bears are a strange animal. | ||
| Bears in general are a strange animal because people love them because we grew up with teddy bears. | ||
| And we see Yogi, and they're so lovable on television and in the movies. | ||
| And so people have this idea of them, like they want to take bear selfies. | ||
| Like, hey, take a bear selfie. | ||
| How many people get jacked taking bear selfies? | ||
| Yeah, no, that's a real thing. | ||
| I have been contacted by people being like, hey, why don't you not pose with wildlife because it's influencing other people to do that. | ||
| I'm like, I'm a biologist. | ||
| This is my job. | ||
| I don't have another option here. | ||
| Like, I have to pose with wildlife. | ||
| Like, I'm working with it. | ||
| You're supposed to. | ||
| You are the guy. | ||
| I'm the guy. | ||
| Supposed to take pictures. | ||
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Right. | |
| Like, maybe instead don't do what I do. | ||
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You know what I mean? | |
| Don't just jump out and try to get a selfie with something that's going to kill you. | ||
| Like, it's common sense. | ||
| Yeah, that whole idea of, like... | ||
| What you're doing is influencing people to do the same thing. | ||
| Like, alright. | ||
| Well, you know, come on. | ||
| I think it's nuts. | ||
| I mean, you know, how many pages on Instagram are there where people are chugging vodka and jumping off roofs and slamming tables and all this other stuff? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Is everybody looking at that being like, hey, I'm going to jump off a roof onto a table? | ||
| Yeah, there's so many of those pages. | ||
| There's so many of those videos. | ||
| Right. | ||
| People breaking their legs, jumping off balconies. | ||
| Like, oh. | ||
| Just don't do it. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| I think it's probably good to see people do stupid shit so that you don't do it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, and I got the scars to prove it, you know? | ||
| There's shots of me getting bitten by sharks and all this other stuff. | ||
| I was like, this is why you don't do it. | ||
| You've been bitten by a shark? | ||
| Just this year, I mean, it's pretty minor, but just this year I took a single tooth from a lemon shark while I was working in the field with one. | ||
| Dude, let me see that. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| It's on my Instagram page, I think. | ||
| You can pull it up. | ||
| What's the scar below it? | ||
| Oh, that's not a scar. | ||
| I burned myself cooking crab last night on a pot. | ||
| I should have only rolled this shirt down a year. | ||
| Or made up a better story. | ||
| Dude, I burned the top of my foot cooking spaghetti. | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| I was moving the... | ||
| I'm such a moron. | ||
| I was cooking barefoot. | ||
| I was moving the boiling water with the spaghetti in it to the sink, you know, to put it in the strainer, and I spilled it on the top of my foot. | ||
| And I had to keep my shit together because I was holding the pot. | ||
| I was like, fuck! | ||
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Fuck! | |
| And then I poured it in there, and then we were going to Hawaii the next day. | ||
| So while I was in Hawaii, I had to have ointment over the top of my foot, a bandage on it, and I went into the ocean with my chucks on. | ||
| One of my Converse All-Stars in the ocean. | ||
| I was like, look, I have to cover it. | ||
| I'll just do this, and then I'll just clean it after I go in. | ||
| I'm like, I'm not going to not go in the ocean, man. | ||
| I'm in fucking Hawaii. | ||
| I'm like, if it gets infected, I'll figure that out. | ||
| But how cool did you look going in the ocean with your chucks on? | ||
| I look like a loser. | ||
| The next day, they had some sort of an issue with bacteria in the water where they told people to get out of the water. | ||
| Great. | ||
| And you've got an open wound. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's never open, fortunately. | ||
| It's just the skin over it. | ||
| It was all totally red, and then the skin over it bubbled, and then it eventually, after a while, it healed and scratched. | ||
| Now I just have a big, giant red mark. | ||
| So that's when you got bit. | ||
| Thank you, smiley face. | ||
| That was kind of funny. | ||
| Oh, look, I got bit. | ||
| Well, it was totally my fault, and I was being an idiot. | ||
| What happened? | ||
| We were working off the back of the boat. | ||
| We had all these lemon sharks around, and we were working to get tiger sharks. | ||
| And I just dropped my guard for a second, and as I looked back to where my hand was in the water, I saw the shark coming like that. | ||
| And I just pulled my arm back, and I literally just clipped a single tooth. | ||
| But I think if it had been a fraction of a second later, that would have been the hand. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| How big was the shark? | ||
| It's probably the next page over. | ||
| It's probably an 8-foot shark, so it would have got me, and I was lucky it just... | ||
| Oh my god, dude. | ||
| You could have lost your arm. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| This is a tiger shark, but this is pretty cool nonetheless. | ||
| Don't they have Kevlar suits that sharks can't bite through? | ||
| They do. | ||
| Why don't you wear that everywhere you go? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| You should wear that when you go to the mall. | ||
| I'd look about as cool as you with your Converse in the ocean. | ||
| Well, you couldn't see the covers until I got out of the ocean. | ||
| That's true. | ||
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You can see my Kevlar in the mall no matter where you are. | |
| No, I don't know. | ||
| I don't like anything that inhibits the movement like that. | ||
| Does that stuff inhibit, the Kevlar stuff? | ||
| I've never worn it. | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| Yeah, it's those sharks behind, and that's the situation I was in. | ||
| I was on the back of the boat like that. | ||
| Apparently Catalina, like off Catalina, there's a high shark population. | ||
| Yeah, white sharks. | ||
| And they're increasing every year. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Well, because we used to hunt them, first of all, and we used to hunt seals and sea lions as well. | ||
| And that's all been banned for a long time. | ||
| So there's way more seals and sea lions now, and there's more sharks reproducing. | ||
| And I think there's something to be said for them, the water being consistently warmer, And them staying further north than they used to as well. | ||
| Or south, depending on which way they're going. | ||
| But, like, where I live in Santa Barbara, there's this single bay where my buddy and I have been going for the last four years, and it's only for, like, three, four weeks in the summertime that there's, like... | ||
| Six to eight juvenile great white sharks around. | ||
| And when we started going there four years ago, they were like six feet long. | ||
| And then the next year, they were like eight feet long. | ||
| This year, I didn't go because I was traveling, but my buddy went and filmed them. | ||
| He's like, dude, they're getting up to like 10 feet. | ||
| And it's the same animals in the same spot. | ||
| What happens when those are like 14 foot animals? | ||
| It's a very popular swimming beach. | ||
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Oh! | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So who knows? | ||
| Maybe they'll move on. | ||
| Maybe they won't. | ||
| Maybe they eat people. | ||
| Maybe they eat people. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Well, someone got eaten in Santa Barbara a few years back, right? | ||
| I believe a surfer. | ||
| There's a Pismo Beach one. | ||
| I don't know about Santa Barbara. | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| It happens. | ||
| It's like once a year, you know, there's some kind of attack, a bite. | ||
| Usually in October, around lobster season or when the swells start to pick up, somebody gets chomped somewhere. | ||
| Why is it around then? | ||
| I think October, I'd have to check on their ecology. | ||
| I think it's right around when they start breeding, so they're a little fueled up. | ||
| But October is also when lobster season starts, so all the freedivers are freediving in and out of caves, looking like a seal. | ||
| The waves start to kick in for the winter swell, so you've got more people on surfboards. | ||
| It just seems like the perfect cocktail of timing for Miss ID. That makes sense. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| That makes sense. | ||
| It's... | ||
| It's such a beautiful creature, and it's so cool that they're there, but it's also, you're like, this thing can kill people, and it's right there, and we go in the water, and we swim around, and we're like, yay! | ||
| We're so helpless out there. | ||
| Completely. | ||
| And I think that's just the, you just have to know that going into it, right? | ||
| It's not like you're going to, you know, kiss your life goodbye every time you get in the ocean, but... | ||
| Jamie, you're playing some audio... | ||
| It's not should be coming out, but... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What is it from? | ||
| That shark attack in Santa... | ||
| It's not... | ||
| This was two years ago. | ||
| This guy caught it on his GoPro. | ||
| He caught an attack? | ||
| Remember? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Oh my god, dude. | ||
| You're just so slow in there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what's... | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| So is he prodding it to keep it away from him? | ||
| He's swimming backwards, I think. | ||
| And that's the right move. | ||
| You know, give it a poke. | ||
| Keep it off you. | ||
| It bit his toe? | ||
| Wow, barely. | ||
| That is a best case scenario. | ||
| Oh my god, the best case. | ||
| He's got a cool scar. | ||
| You have to take your shoes off to show everybody. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| He kept his little toe. | ||
| That's a little toe. | ||
| Yeah, literally. | ||
| It must have just sliced by. | ||
| They're such cool animals. | ||
| They deserve a ton of respect, you know, and I think you just have to realize they're there. | ||
| Like, that's just a part of it. | ||
| There's also a way to be smart about it, right? | ||
| Don't go in. | ||
| There's bait balls and tons of birds diving and tons of fish in the water. | ||
| You know, stay out of the immediate surf zone in low viz in a high seal area. | ||
| You know, there's ways to, like, really reduce the risk. | ||
| We did New Years in Hawaii last year, and we got to see some whales. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Dude, we were real close. | ||
| It's so wild, man. | ||
| They're so big. | ||
| Aren't they? | ||
| They're so big and so beautiful. | ||
| You're so happy that they're there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Whales are one of those weird ones where you're looking at and you're like, am I seeing this? | ||
| Is this really a whale in the water? | ||
| They're so magical. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And so intelligent. | ||
| That's what's amazing. | ||
| The general consensus is that they're restricted by their morphology. | ||
| Their body type doesn't allow them to share with us how much more intelligent they are than we really realize. | ||
| But we know a little bit. | ||
| We know how they can sing across oceans and communicate and all get together. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Synchronizing the way they swim. | ||
| Amazing creatures. | ||
| orcas who eat them yeah which is even more fucked up because we love orcas then you see when you see an orca killing a whale you like oh well that's where they got their name right killer whale yeah it's because they kill whales yep and they are a whale they're in that family yeah they're marine mammals they kill dolphins too right yeah they're they're dolphins whales fish stingrays seals sea lions sharks like They're amazing predators. | ||
| Yeah, they really are. | ||
| And it's like that polar bear thing we were talking about earlier. | ||
| They're like, you know, Shamu, like cuddly, get your stuffed toy. | ||
| They're smiling in every cartoon. | ||
| But aren't they pretty cool to people in general in the wild? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's strange. | ||
| I believe there has never been an attack on a human being by an orca in the wild, period. | ||
| There have been multiple in aquariums, you know, while there's been shows going on, that kind of stuff, but I believe there's never actually been a recorded case of a death by orca in the wild. | ||
| That's kind of crazy when you think about it. | ||
| It just shows their intelligence, right? | ||
| It shows they look at you and go, nope, that's not on the menu. | ||
| Like, that's not something I need to eat. | ||
| But they must be hungry sometimes. | ||
| Well, what's interesting about orcas is there's really two sects of their diet. | ||
| There's orcas that only eat marine mammals, and there's orcas that only eat stingrays and some other fish species. | ||
| And so I think, you know, for those people, you see some of those incredible photographers like Paul Nicklin and stuff like that that get those images of them underwater. | ||
| They're diving with the fish-eating orcas. | ||
| I think a few people have been successful in diving with the mammal-eating ones, but that's, I feel like that's a dice roll. | ||
| They might mistake you. | ||
| Well, you're a mammal and you're not, you're a seal size, you know. | ||
| Jamie, who are we talking to about orcas and the population that lives in the Pacific Northwest, like around Seattle, that only eats the Chinook salmon? | ||
| Remember we were having this conversation the other day with somebody? | ||
| Phil Demers. | ||
| Phil Demers? | ||
| Was it Phil? | ||
| I mean, that was a clip from... | ||
| Probably, yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So that's a crazy situation, right? | ||
| You have a population of orcas that only eats Chinook salmon, and then there's a decline in the population of Chinook salmon, so they're trying to figure out how to get them to eat seals. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they won't do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They're the local population, but then they have these migratory populations that come in and do eat seals. | ||
| And eat seals, yeah. | ||
| And they're like, hey, you assholes are starving to death. | ||
| There's fucking food everywhere. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But they won't do it. | ||
| They won't switch over. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Very strange, isn't it? | ||
| And you gotta wonder how much of that is learned behavior, right? | ||
| How many parent orcas are passing down, this is the food. | ||
| You know, this is how you hunt salmon, this is what you eat, everything else is off the menu, versus what's instinctual. | ||
| Like, how did that one group of orcas learn to eat seals, whereas the other one is so dedicated to salmon? | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Well, it's amazing that they didn't adapt, right? | ||
| They're starving, and they don't branch out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or maybe they're just unsuccessful. | ||
| You know, maybe they've never learned how to hunt seals, because it's definitely a different behavior to scooping up a fish. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, yeah, it is amazing. | ||
| You'd think they would get to this kind of tipping point where they're like, there's not enough to eat, we need to make a transition, and then are they unsuccessful in that transition because they can't figure out how to do it? | ||
| Are they just not doing it? | ||
| They just don't know about it? | ||
| It's, who knows? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's a real bummer, man, when you hear that they're almost starving to death out there, and they're trying to actually bring Chinook salmon to them. | ||
| You know, like, oof. | ||
| You know, it's one of those things, it's like, that whole kind of micro-environment is a game of Jenga, right? | ||
| And you pull one piece out, and you're like, ah, tower's still standing. | ||
| Pull another piece out, ah, tower's still standing. | ||
| You know, and it just takes that one piece until it all collapses. | ||
| That is an interesting way of looking at it, right? | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| They were talking about Hawaii and all these different invasive species that live in Hawaii. | ||
| And there was this discussion about pigs. | ||
| And they were saying, we should really take the pigs off of Hawaii. | ||
| And a lot of the people in Hawaii were like, hang on. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We've been here as long as the pigs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, like, are we invasive? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like, what's invasive now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like, when does it become... | ||
| Because, obviously, like, luau's, they're synonymous with, like, eating pigs. | ||
|
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|
Huge. | |
| And wild pigs are a big part of, you know, the people that hunt in Hawaii, their food source. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, they're like, well, would it... | ||
| But then you have a situation like lanai. | ||
|
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|
Right. | |
| Where I go every year. | ||
| The axis deer? | ||
| Yeah, which is terrible. | ||
| Environmentally, it's a disaster. | ||
| It's all wrong. | ||
| There's 30,000 deer on this one island. | ||
| That many? | ||
| 30,000. | ||
| They don't know, really. | ||
| They're guessing. | ||
| The estimate's between 20,000 and 30,000. | ||
| And there's 3,000 people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And dude, you ain't never seen anything like it, because it's a little ass island. | ||
| You drive around the whole thing in an hour. | ||
| I mean, maybe a little bit more than that, but not much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| It's a tiny fucking island. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And there's so many deer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You'll see them on, like, you'll get your binoculars out, and you look at this huge field, and you're like, oh my god. | ||
| Just old deer. | ||
| You'll see a thousand. | ||
| Oh, you're kidding. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| No, it's crazy. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's so unnatural. | ||
| No predators. | ||
| Only humans, plenty of food. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| And their population's exploded. | ||
| Everywhere. | ||
| And they're damn delicious. | ||
| I've heard that before. | ||
| For people who live there, it's amazing. | ||
| You don't have to have much money to eat really well. | ||
| You get a rifle, you go out there, bang, you got a deer, and you can shoot as many as you want. | ||
| You can shoot seven in a day and stockpile your freezer and have all your meat for the year. | ||
| And they're that abundant? | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| The only thing that keeps me from killing a ton of them is that I use a bow and arrow, and it's really hard to do with a bow and arrow because they're so fast. | ||
| And they evolved in Asia to get away from tigers. | ||
| They're an Indian animal. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So it's super fast. | ||
| It's a tough argument because you're right. | ||
| Hawaiian people, pig is culturally significant to them. | ||
| Just like probably access deer is to the people of Lanai and has been for however long the deer have been there. | ||
| But I guess it's like at what cost, right? | ||
| At what cost? | ||
| And I don't think this is the case, but if someone said, look, I know these pigs are culturally significant to you, but if we leave them here, the whole island's ecosystem will collapse. | ||
| There'll be no birds, no fish, no lizards, nothing. | ||
| Is it worth it to have pigs? | ||
|
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|
Right. | |
| And it's delicate. | ||
| The pigs in particular, right, because they eat everything. | ||
| They eat ground-nesting birds. | ||
| They'll devastate everything that's in front of their roots. | ||
| They'll fuck up every tree, everything that's coming up, all the sprouts. | ||
| Everything, yeah. | ||
| They're super destructive. | ||
| Here, they're destructive here in California. | ||
| It's not isolated to Hawaii. | ||
| Everywhere that we've brought pigs, they've done a lot of damage. | ||
| We're actually going to... | ||
| We're talking about this out here. | ||
| We're going to film something about hunting pigs at Tohono Ranch. | ||
| Because Tohono Ranch... | ||
| The place gets devastated. | ||
| The agriculture gets devastated by these pigs. | ||
| There's so many of them. | ||
| And they're all over. | ||
| Northern California has a problem in San Jose. | ||
| They're in people's yards. | ||
| They're destroying shit because if you don't kill them, they just breed and breed and breed and breed and breed and breed, and then they just expand. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they're dealing with them now, even in the northern part of the United States. | ||
| They're dealing with them in the northeast. | ||
| There was a New York Times article about it, see if you can find that, from two days ago about the expansion of wild pigs is that they're starting to make their way into the northeastern states. | ||
| And they're just... | ||
| They can't be stopped. | ||
| They can survive in any weather. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| They breed three times a year. | ||
| They can... | ||
| They're viable, I think, from the time they're five to six months old, they have their first litter. | ||
| Feral pigs roam the south. | ||
| Now, even in northern states, aren't safe. | ||
| The swine have established themselves in Canada. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And are encroaching on border states like Montana and North Dakota. | ||
| Fuck, man. | ||
| If they get into Montana... | ||
| They'll do so much damage. | ||
| You know what's crazy about the feral pigs in the United States? | ||
| They were brought here by, I believe, Christopher Columbus, starting with six animals. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| So the entire 200 million or whatever it is across the US, I don't know the number, it was like six or eight or ten original pigs that were brought in by Christopher Columbus and dropped in Florida. | ||
| That's insane! | ||
| You want to talk about how crazy they can reproduce and how much damage they do? | ||
| Think of the biomass of those animals stemming off of like six of them. | ||
| That's insane! | ||
| And they're so tough, you can put them on a boat and they'll make it across the ocean. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And they are terrible for the environment. | ||
| They do so much damage to native species, to riparian habitat. | ||
| Like you said, we were talking about it out there briefly, and it's a good thing. | ||
| People should realize that invasive species like that should not be in an ecosystem. | ||
| Well, they certainly shouldn't be in an ecosystem when there's no balance, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| If they're, like, warthogs and they're in Africa, there's a system for that. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like, they're all, they're supposed to be there. | ||
| Warthogs are wild-looking creatures, aren't they? | ||
| They're amazing. | ||
|
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|
Have you ever seen one? | |
| You've seen one in person? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I grew up there. | ||
| I grew up in Zimbabwe. | ||
| Oh, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Actually, I got a pretty funny story about a warthog. | ||
| My uncle, my mom's brother, we were out on safari one time, and he was young. | ||
| He was much younger than my mother, so he was maybe a teenager or something. | ||
| And he grabbed this plum and started going for a walk across camp. | ||
| And anyway, this warthog decided it wanted this plum. | ||
| And so it came trotting after my uncle and started chasing him in circles around this tree, but my uncle was so panicked by this thing chasing him around this big baobab tree that he wouldn't drop the plum. | ||
| So he's just in this perpetual cycle of being chased around this tree until he eventually threw the plum and the warthog just veered off and went for the plum. | ||
| Lucky it didn't want him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're very funny, very mischievous. | ||
| I love the way their tails stick up through the grass when they're running around. | ||
| They're weird looking. | ||
| Very. | ||
| They're related to pigs, right? | ||
| In some sort of way? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh yeah, yeah. | |
| They're all that same family. | ||
| Speaking of weird pigs, are you familiar with the Barbarossa? | ||
| No. | ||
| This is one we should pull up. | ||
| You're going to love this animal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're going to love this. | ||
| It's one of my top bucket list animals to see in the wild. | ||
| It's a great name. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Barbarusa. | ||
| I don't even want to tell you what it is until you see the image because you're going to be like, no way that's real. | ||
| It looks like something out of Star Wars. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And it's a pig. | ||
| Where does it live? | ||
| Indonesia. | ||
| How big does it get? | ||
| Uh, maybe 200 pounds? | ||
| I'm not positive on the size. | ||
| Whoa! | ||
| Look at that thing. | ||
| Look at those tusks growing out of its face. | ||
| What the fuck is those things that grow out of the middle of its head? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's crazy! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at that one. | ||
| What the f- Bro, that does not look real. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Doesn't that look like something out of Star Wars? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's a real animal. | ||
| That looks like an avatar creature. | ||
| That's what it looks like. | ||
| Is that fighting something? | ||
| Looks like it. | ||
| What's it fighting there? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Barbarossa's going to war. | ||
| It says pig deer. | ||
| They call it a pig deer? | ||
| Yeah, it says Barbarossa or pig deer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| This might be somebody just making a guess. | ||
| Like their nickname of it? | ||
| I actually think they're having sex there. | ||
| Oh, getting it on. | ||
| That's not fighting. | ||
| Making more Barbarossas. | ||
| That's just shitty Barbarossa jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Yeah, that's the kind of fighting mommy and daddy do late at night. | ||
| Mommy and daddy were just playing. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| No one's getting hurt. | ||
| Mommy was gagging. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look at that one right there, Jamie. | ||
| Look at where your cursor is. | ||
| Click on that one. | ||
| What the fuck, man? | ||
| Isn't that a wild pig? | ||
| The things coming out of it, the tusks that come out of the middle of its head are so strange. | ||
| Like, where did that come from? | ||
| I don't know why you evolved that. | ||
| Maybe like a peacock's tail, you know, for showmanship. | ||
| But what's really crazy about them evolving those two teeth or tusks out of the bridge of their snout is if they're not broken in fights and rooting around, they can grow long enough that they will puncture the animal in the head and kill it. | ||
| I've heard of that. | ||
| Oh, you know why? | ||
| Because I put an image of it on my Instagram. | ||
| It was one of those Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself memes. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I saw a few of those. | ||
| You threw up. | ||
| And it was a Barbarossa skull, actually. | ||
| Oh, saying that it can do that? | ||
| That it actually was driving into its own head, growing into its own head. | ||
| Yeah, like that. | ||
| Yeah, insane. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Like, maybe that's nature's way of saying, all right, enough. | ||
| Check, please. | ||
| Your assholes will live forever and eat everything in front of you. | ||
| Like that one. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| Growing into its own brain. | ||
| Imagine one day you have a little bit of a headache and the next day it just gets a little worse. | ||
| You're like, what is going on? | ||
| And what do you do? | ||
| It's like if you go and hit that against the ground, it's only going to get worse. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's already in your brain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you'd have to be smart enough to find a branch where you could slip that over and torque your head. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think that's happening if you're a pig. | ||
| Is this awful? | ||
| I mean, often that this happens where they kill themselves by growing that tusk into their brain? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| That looks like two of them heading that direction. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| A crazy animal. | ||
| What a beautiful animal, though. | ||
| So there's an extinct subspecies of those called the Molokan Barbarusa, which in the single island near Sulawesi used to be, and then they think people have hunted them, you know, to extinction, localized extinction within that island and that subspecies. | ||
| But some people I know that worked over there ate one. | ||
| So they're like, yeah, no, we ate this wild pig with these crazy horns. | ||
| And I was like, yeah, this was like two years ago. | ||
| You know, and they have no proof and they don't have the skull and they don't have the picture. | ||
| They were like, they were traveling and they're like, yeah, yeah, we got back and we ate this pig with these wild horns on this particular island. | ||
| And I was like, wait, is that possibly a Malucan Barbarossa? | ||
| I was like, I don't know. | ||
| And you look where they were and what they said and what they ate and it's like, oh, that could be an extinct subspecies that you guys consumed. | ||
| Well, how many biologists are actually actively out there looking for these creatures? | ||
| Those, I would say zero currently, that species. | ||
| But with regards to this field of presumed extinct animals, it seems to be a movement that's expanding, you know, and I think one of the reasons for that is we have a rate of something like 2,000 species a year being deemed extinct, right? | ||
| So when you have that many animals being deemed extinct every year, there's flags being put up. | ||
| Is it really extinct? | ||
| Have we looked everywhere? | ||
| And so this... | ||
| You know, I don't want to say I was the first, but I feel like I was in that wave of first people to start looking into extinction as far as ongoing animals wrongfully deemed extinct. | ||
| And now it's like mainstream in the biology world. | ||
| It's like there's a lot of people that are like, I'm going to go see if I can find this thing. | ||
| Is it because it's a romantic sort of thing? | ||
| There's a lot of cash. | ||
| Like if you can find a seemed-to-be-extinct barbarousa. | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I think it's very romantic. | ||
| As opposed to just setting out to study something that we know that's there. | ||
| This harrowing journey to find this creature that the world has written off. | ||
| It's very romantic. | ||
| Have you ever heard of the Aurang Pendek? | ||
| This is a cryptid, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I've heard this word. | ||
| It's a little tiny monkey person. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Did we talk about this last time? | ||
| We might have. | ||
| I'm very repetitive. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| It's still fun. | ||
| It's not in my wheelhouse, you know, like the cryptids, the Loch Ness monsters. | ||
| I think that one they think is in Vietnam. | ||
| I think it's in Vietnam and maybe some other parts of Southeast Asia. | ||
| Most people thought it was nonsense until the Homo floriensis, until they found out about that hobbit person that lives in the island of Flores. | ||
| And then they're like, okay, hold on. | ||
| Or lived, I should say. | ||
| As recently as 14,000 years ago, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So when they found out about that thing, they're like, well, maybe these little fuckers are still hanging around out there somewhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're dealing with incredibly dense jungle, and they're very wary. | ||
| I mean, if you're a person stomping through the jungle, something that lives there hears you a mile away. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| You're not sneaking up on a monkey. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, we... | ||
| This year, I went into Songdoong, which is the world's largest cave. | ||
| That was only discovered in 1995. It's this massive opening, six miles of underground cave. | ||
| You know, you don't see daylight for two days. | ||
| Six miles? | ||
| You should look at the pictures of this place. | ||
| You'll love it. | ||
| I mean, it looks like something out of Avatar. | ||
| I mean, this cave, you can fit New York City skyscrapers inside of it. | ||
| It's so big. | ||
| It has its own weather system. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where is this? | ||
| So it's in the Anamite Mountain Range between Vietnam and Laos. | ||
| And we got to go into it this year because we were looking for this habitat. | ||
| In fact, this is my show that comes out tonight. | ||
| We were looking for this habitat. | ||
| Where is it on so people can hear it? | ||
| Animal Planet. | ||
| Extinct or Alive tonight at 9pm on Animal Planet. | ||
| We go into Songdoon Cave. | ||
| Set your DVRs, kids. | ||
| Plug. | ||
| So let's see this. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| There's Hang Songdoon. | ||
| That's the entrance to it. | ||
| And look at the size of it. | ||
| The scope of it is massive. | ||
| I need something to compare it to. | ||
| What am I looking at? | ||
| I'm seeing the... | ||
| Those are little tents. | ||
| Oh, those are tents. | ||
| There's full lake systems in there. | ||
| Oh my god, that's inside the tent? | ||
| I mean, that's inside the cave? | ||
| Yeah, look at the wedding cake. | ||
| That one right there. | ||
| That's called the wedding cake. | ||
| Yeah, that one. | ||
| It's this pyres. | ||
| I mean, it's just the most fantastic looking thing. | ||
| There's a person standing on top of that little pyre right there. | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's insane! | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| More people have summited Everest than have been through that cave. | ||
|
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|
Wow. | |
| Well, people summit Evers every day now. | ||
| Well, that's why. | ||
| But yeah, so we... | ||
| That's the wedding cake. | ||
| Oh my God, that's incredible. | ||
| I have a picture just like that that I'm very proud of. | ||
| My God, that's so spectacular. | ||
| But what's amazing is about two-thirds of the way through the system, you can see what you're looking at is areas where the cave roof has collapsed, and there's isolated pockets of ecosystem, right? | ||
| So we were talking about the pygmy people that could live in the forests of Vietnam. | ||
| My point is, this giant six-mile-long cave with these huge openings wasn't even discovered until, I think, 1995. Whew! | ||
| So, what's to say a tribe of small people couldn't hide in something like that and move in and out and never be seen? | ||
| I mean, it's fantastic. | ||
| There was a stupid movie about people that lived on the ground that ate people. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| There's a bunch of chicks. | ||
| Was that Duck Cave? | ||
| The Descent? | ||
| The Descent, that's what it was. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| So my whole team watched, we spent like, when we were going, like, leading up to this expedition, we're like, alright, let's watch a bunch of bad horror cave movies before we go. | ||
| The first one's bad, the second one is so bad, it's funny. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Because they did a Descent too, and you're like, wait, I'm funny. | ||
| As you were bringing that up, I stumbled across a video that's obviously probably not real of an Orang pen deck. | ||
| No, it's totally real, Jamie. | ||
| Have you ever seen this? | ||
| These guys are on bikes and this thing runs out in front of them. | ||
| It doesn't look like CGI is the only thing I'm going with at the moment. | ||
| It's obviously probably not real. | ||
| That's definitely a person. | ||
| It had a tail or something. | ||
| They were doing freeze frames of it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| I stopped watching because you guys took me on the cave thing. | ||
| What? | ||
| It's a 10 minute video. | ||
| Neither of you have seen this before. | ||
| I've never seen it before. | ||
| Where are they? | ||
| They're in Vietnam? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Bro. | ||
| They were just out riding their bikes and they caught it on their GoPros and they were trying to find it. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| They could also be trying to troll everyone on the internet. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Do these guys have a troll video? | ||
| I mean, what is their YouTube page? | ||
| Have you gone to their YouTube page? | ||
| It's like on a Bigfoot website. | ||
| Sasquatch Chronicles. | ||
| But that's the problem. | ||
| Remember in Men in Black, how they used to always check the... | ||
| Whatever it was called. | ||
| They check the National Enquirer for tips on aliens. | ||
| Where else do you go to get this info, though? | ||
| Let me see this again. | ||
| They're riding... | ||
| Here it goes, the rider. | ||
| What the fuck is that? | ||
| That's definitely a person, or a humanoid. | ||
| It's really tiny, whatever it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's running pretty fast. | ||
| It also could be like... | ||
| Bullshit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Could be bullshit. | ||
| But it could be a little monkey person! | ||
| Look, we know those little monkey people were real. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| Imagine if that's real. | ||
| And keep in mind, and again, I'm not like a huge cryptid guy, but keep in mind, you know, as a homo sapien, they have a higher intellect, which means they're better at avoiding people, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So, it's, you know, it's not unreasonable to say if there was a group of small humanoids out there that didn't want to be discovered, they could stay hidden. | ||
| Yeah, and if it's really small, you know, and also some sort of a hominid that has intelligence, it's probably got a pretty decent food source in the jungle. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But they would find a dead one, wouldn't they? | ||
| That's always the argument, right? | ||
| Why isn't there a roadkill X or Y? But the thing is, there's a lot of mountain lions. | ||
| Good luck finding a dead one. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Look at that, look at that. | |
| I don't think that's a tail. | ||
| That looks like a spear. | ||
| What's to say that isn't a short guy who's been poaching? | ||
| And he's like, crap, I'm getting busted. | ||
| But it doesn't mean it's not fascinating. | ||
| And this is the kind of stuff that we wade through in droves to try and figure out are these animals, are these creatures still out there? | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
| God, I'm such a sucker though. | ||
| Oh, that thing looks like it's wearing shorts, dude. | ||
| Doesn't it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And it's running exactly like a person. | ||
| Yeah, that's a little person. | ||
| But it's so little. | ||
| Right. | ||
| A little kid. | ||
| That's the thing about the... | ||
| It could be a little kid, yeah. | ||
| But that's the thing about the Orang Pendek, is that they think it was like the Homo floriensis. | ||
| I think they think it's really the same thing. | ||
| And the Homo floriensis was really a three-foot-tall human. | ||
| Three, four feet. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Yeah, some subset. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| I hear so. | ||
| There's another image? | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah, that looks like a little person, man. | ||
| The head looks weird, though. | ||
| It's got a hat! | ||
| The thing looks like it's wearing a hat. | ||
| It's wearing a Disneyland hat. | ||
| They're pointing out the ears because it matches the Orang Pendek images of that Sasquatch-type head or something. | ||
| Dude, that is a person with a stick. | ||
| And there, that creature looks naked. | ||
| It doesn't look like there's shorts on it. | ||
| Yeah, it does. | ||
| So how tall do you think that is? | ||
| That looks really short. | ||
| And moving fast. | ||
| Really short and like three feet tall. | ||
| Going into tall grass, right? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Three foot grass? | ||
| Four foot grass? | ||
| That's so weird. | ||
| Okay, so here's size comparison. | ||
| See, I'm such a sucker. | ||
| Look, look how, look, there's a size comparison. | ||
| That is fucking tiny, man. | ||
| That's tiny. | ||
| It's really tiny. | ||
| Oh my god, it's real. | ||
| I want to believe so bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| I'm such a moron. | ||
| I'm such a moron when it comes to this stuff. | ||
| I believed in Bigfoot for so long. | ||
| They estimated it was between 80 and 150 centimeters, which is somewhere between 30 and 60 inches tall. | ||
| So that's three to five feet. | ||
| Tiny little thing. | ||
| Tiny little thing. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| I hope it's real. | ||
| Yeah, I do too. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's fantastic. | ||
| But do you hope... | ||
| Would you rather... | ||
| Not knowing and it lives. | ||
| Or someone kills it and you find out that it's real. | ||
| I'd rather not knowing and it lives. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Me too, but I feel like a bitch. | ||
| I want to know! | ||
| But I don't want it to die. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| Just tell me. | ||
| And how blurry does the line get in that situation? | ||
| Because it's humanoid, right? | ||
| So it's not like you're catching him and putting him in zoos to breed him and keep the population up. | ||
| That gets really dicey. | ||
| That's super dicey. | ||
| Didn't they do that with an African man in the Bronx Zoo in, like, the turn of the century? | ||
| They put an African man in the Bronx Zoo? | ||
| Yes, they did. | ||
| Yeah, they had an African man, I believe it was the Bronx Zoo, in, like, the 1800s or the early 1900s. | ||
| A pigmy? | ||
| Yeah, Bada Benga. | ||
| What year was it? | ||
| 1906. Oh, God. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, they had him in the zoo, man. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Dude's in the zoo. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know what, man? | ||
| People were just figuring life out back then. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| This is the reality of human beings is that we have not been alive that long and we have not been civilized in terms of how we view the world today with inclusivity and objectivity and care and, you know, kindness towards others, like this compassion and altruism. | ||
| This is, on a global scale, this is fairly recent. | ||
| Yeah, we're figuring things out as we go. | ||
| I mean, history is a perfect... | ||
| It can show you how we've progressed. | ||
| It's a documentation of how we've progressed. | ||
| But yet still. | ||
| Still fucked up. | ||
| 50 years after slavery? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 40, 45 years after slavery? | ||
| What the fuck, guys? | ||
| So Bronx Zoo, speaking in our weird cryptid realm, reminded me of something. | ||
| So get this. | ||
| has been attributed to the possibility that there are thylacine in north america and here's what supports that there is documented proof that however many years ago i don't remember the dates there were two breeding pair of thylacine bound for the bronx zoo and they the boat crashed into the shore and most of the animals escaped including the two breeding pair of thylacine | ||
| Fast forward 10-15 years, you start having these chubacabra sightings pop up in the Northeast. | ||
| And these animals were adapted to living in Tasmania, which is a pretty similar climate to the Northeast. | ||
| And so there's people that have kind of drawn these parallels and said, oh, the chupacabra that we've reported running around, you know, the United States is actually a tiny remnant population of these thylacine that were brought here for the Bronx Zoo that escaped. | ||
| What? | ||
| You buy into this? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not personally, but it's an amazing story. | ||
| Boy, you had me. | ||
| If you said yes, I'd be ready to go on an expedition. | ||
| Quick question off of stuff you've talked about. | ||
| If someone could get one for the Bronx Zoo, then would a rich person have been able to buy one, like a rich guy in Texas, for instance? | ||
| A thylacine? | ||
| Been able to purchase one privately? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Back then. | ||
| You could probably get one today. | ||
| If you want to find a thylacine, go to Bubba's house. | ||
| But especially back then, there were no import-export laws about wildlife. | ||
| You could just bring in whatever you liked if you had money. | ||
| Everybody was in a race to collect stuff for zoos and museums. | ||
| What's to say somebody didn't bring some in? | ||
| Texas and their exotics, it's so strange. | ||
| I mean, I had a bit about it in my act in 2016, my Netflix special, that there's more tigers in captivity in Texas in private collections than there are in all of the wild of the world. | ||
| Isn't that insane? | ||
| Just Texas. | ||
| And that's like in guys' living rooms in, you know, a cage. | ||
| Yeehaw! | ||
| Feeding mistake! | ||
| It's nuts! | ||
| Yeah, it is nuts. | ||
| The rules there are so strange. | ||
| It's also, that's one of the rare states where the vast majority of the state is private land. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| There's very little public land in Texas. | ||
| So, like, for yourself, when you go hunting there, it's all private? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If you're going to hunt in Texas, you're going to hunt most likely on a private ranch. | ||
| Just some small patches of public land. | ||
| But in comparison, I think it's in the 90% range. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's all giant ranches. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And what's really interesting is I've been reading a lot about, over the last two to three months, I've been obsessed with Wild West stories. | ||
| I'll just put that book away. | ||
| Empire of the Summer Moon, S.C. Gwynn, wrote this fantastic book about the Comanches and the battle with people in Texas and the Texas Rangers in the 1800s and trying to take over that land from the Comanches. | ||
| It's Crazy that this stuff happened just, you know, 150 years ago. | ||
| It was so insane and really sad. | ||
| Really sad because there's something incredibly romantic about their lifestyle that was just 150 years ago when all of Europe, they were, you know, having... | ||
| Horse-driven carriages, and people were living in these fancy buildings, but right here in North America, people were living like they were in the Stone Age. | ||
| And they had this incredible nomadic life where they were following around the buffalo and killing the buffalo, and they were all just about war. | ||
| There was this wild, ferocious tribe that was about war and hunting buffaloes. | ||
| It's fucking amazing, man. | ||
| And that's like while our great-grandparents were walking the earth. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Really recent! | ||
| You know, I mean, they kind of... | ||
| They put the kibosh on it all by the time it was like 1870s in that range. | ||
| That's when they eventually moved them all into reservations. | ||
| But fucking... | ||
| And not the Comanches. | ||
| The Comanches, they never moved into reservations. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| They just gave them plots of land. | ||
| They, to this day, don't have a reservation. | ||
| And bad land, is my understanding. | ||
| Terrible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Assholes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they were assholes to each other, too. | ||
| That's what's really fucked up. | ||
| You get this idea that the natives all lived in peace and harmony, and the Europeans came over and they fucked everything up. | ||
| They were killing each other, left and right. | ||
| Tribes would raid on other tribes. | ||
| Horrific things. | ||
| This guy goes into amazing detail about the way they would torture both captives from other tribes and Europeans. | ||
| Oh, gnarly. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's fucking amazing though. | ||
| But that's... | ||
| This whole country, this whole continent used to be this wild ecosystem of human beings riding horses, chasing buffalo, all these animals all over the place. | ||
| I mean, during the 150 plus years or 250 plus years... | ||
| They eradicated so many animals. | ||
| They extirpated them from so many different parts of the country. | ||
| And then market hunting came in, and they just almost wiped out so many different species of North American animals. | ||
| And not just almost, but did. | ||
| Pre-human settlement, they say that the North American continent had more biomass, like larger game and more abundant megafauna than the plains of Africa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Huge animals roaming around. | ||
| And European settlement and Native American settlement, it's all attributed to the decline. | ||
| But things like, more recently, like the passenger pigeon, right? | ||
| Billions. | ||
| It used to black out the sky. | ||
| Black out the sky, yeah. | ||
| And down to zero. | ||
| How the fuck did they do that? | ||
| I honestly, like, I know by reading, but I personally don't know. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| How do you kill billions of birds? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that gets intricate because the animal's ecology is such that it needs many others. | ||
| You know, their tactic is confusion. | ||
| Like, they don't run away, they just get in a big giant flock, and then you're like, oh, I don't know which one to pick. | ||
| So, it made them easier to hunt, and they'd actually hunt them commercially for meat. | ||
| It was cheap meat, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| But it's crazy to think that we're able to wipe out billions of anything in such a short amount of time. | ||
| Well, we came real close to doing it to the buffalo. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And some of those, well, the bison, I should say. | ||
| Some of those images of those bison skulls, like, stacked up. | ||
| Piles, yeah. | ||
| Like a mountain. | ||
| It's really disturbing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It used to be, you know, considered entertainment to shoot them from the railway as you were traveling across the country for fun. | ||
| Like, you just kind of hang out the window, boom, got one. | ||
| Well, the other thing is that they would go and mostly what they would take from them is their tongues. | ||
| Which is crazy. | ||
| It's the best meat in the world. | ||
| And they wouldn't even eat the meat. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They would shoot them and take their tongues and they would pickle their tongues. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they would use the fur. | ||
| They would, you know, sell the hides and make buffalo capes and all this different shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It just shows what abundance we had. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Nowadays, not that I'm pro-wiping out anything, but nowadays, you have a small population of whatever the animal is, and most people are utilizing every part of it, right? | ||
| Because we don't have that crazy abundance. | ||
| Like, imagine if you just went out, like you, for instance, imagine if you just went out to shoot elk for the tongue. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense, right? | ||
| Like, why on earth would you ever consider doing that? | ||
| But if you looked out of the studio here and you saw 200 of them, you'd be like, yeah, right, I might grab a tongue today, right? | ||
| That's the difference. | ||
| Make a taco. | ||
| Yeah, that's the difference of the abundance. | ||
| Yeah, well, there were basically two elk, right? | ||
| A bison's like twice the size of an elk. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, they're enormous. | ||
| It's so ridiculous that they just cut the tongue out. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And it's also crazy because it's such an iconic symbol of the American West. | ||
| My friend Steve Rinello wrote a great book. | ||
| It's called American Buffalo. | ||
| And he actually did the audio version of it too, and he's a really good narrator. | ||
| It's excellent. | ||
| I'll check it out. | ||
| But it's all about the history of the Plains Tribes and the North American Buffalo and Fuck, man. | ||
| Sorry, what'd you say it's called? | ||
| It's called American Buffalo. | ||
| American Buffalo. | ||
| Get the audio version, if you're into audiobooks, because he reads it and he does an amazing job, and it's his book. | ||
| He actually had sold it, and then someone else had got the rights, you know, whatever, the book company had decided to have an actor read it. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And it was terrible, apparently, according to Steve. | ||
| Yeah, it was terrible, and then ten years later, he got the rights back, and then he was able to... | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| Do it himself. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I fly so much. | ||
| Audiobooks are my best friend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| I love them. | ||
| I haven't listened to podcasts in months. | ||
| In the last two months, I've been mostly listening to audiobooks. | ||
| I mean, I have a little bit, but mostly just audiobooks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You ever done The Power of One? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That was a couple of years ago. | ||
| It's one of my favorites. | ||
| It's a great audiobook, too, because I read it. | ||
| Who's the author of that again? | ||
| I don't recall. | ||
| I think he's kind of a one-hit wonder with that book. | ||
| I can't remember his name, but absolutely love the story. | ||
| Pull that up, Jamie. | ||
| Let's see what's up. | ||
| A movie? | ||
| They made a movie? | ||
| Probably like some kung fu movie. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| The Power of One. | ||
| Bryce Kort. | ||
| That's right, Bryce Kort. | ||
| Can you pull up the image of the book? | ||
| What's the description of the book? | ||
| What does it say? | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| The Power of One is everything. | ||
| This is a novel, actually. | ||
| No, I don't think that's it. | ||
| No, that's definitely not it. | ||
| Clayton? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| No, no, it's the Bryce Courtney one for sure. | ||
| It's about a young boy growing up in Africa. | ||
| So it is a novel? | ||
| Yeah, I read it first and then I listened to the... | ||
| Alright, I'm confused. | ||
| No, I have not read this. | ||
| Okay, it's very good. | ||
| There's something that has a similar title that's like a self-help book. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, well. | |
| Oh, no, this is not a self-help book. | ||
| This is about a young boy growing up in Africa during apartheid. | ||
| He's very, like, ostracized from his peers because he's not—I believe I'd have to listen to it again—because he's not, you know, Boorah, he's not a Dutch-African, he's English-African, and— It's his journey through life, basically, and it's really good. | ||
| But what reminded me of it is we're talking about all the wildlife, and he grows up very much so in the bush in Africa and around wildlife, and he's juggling that and a kind of defunct social system, and it's really good. | ||
| Africa is so special. | ||
| Whenever I watch documentaries on Africa and African wildlife, it's like, what a Crazy place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where all the nutty things live. | ||
| Pretty much. | ||
| And a lot of them, too. | ||
| That's what's great. | ||
| I mean, we have some nutty things here. | ||
| We have mountain lions and grizzlies and stuff like that. | ||
| But it ain't shit compared to what they have in Africa. | ||
| Having walked kind of through the wilds in a lot of different places, there's nowhere I've been like Africa where you're so like, okay, I'm just a part of the food system now. | ||
| Like, I'm not at the top anymore. | ||
| Like, I'm in the food web. | ||
| You know, lions can be hunting me. | ||
| Elephants can charge. | ||
| There's leopards in the trees. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| You're just, like, you just fit into the food web. | ||
| You're not at the top of it any longer. | ||
| Yeah, it's such a weird place, too, when it comes to wildlife, when, you know, they brought so many animals back from the brink of extinction only because they have value for hunting. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| It's so, it's so, everyone's so torn on that because it's, On one hand, you would love it if people had donated enough money to keep these animals healthy and keep them in good populations because we appreciate them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But that's not really the case. | ||
| It's mostly people that want to shoot them, that are paying money, and because they have value, now their populations are so large. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And so everyone's really torn on that. | ||
| They're like, oh, this is weird. | ||
| Even hunters are torn on it. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And it's full spectrum. | ||
| Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. | ||
| No, it's okay, because they're all fenced in, I was going to say. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So it's not... | ||
| Like, when you think of hunting, you think of, I'm going to go to the wild, and I'm going to experience these animals. | ||
| But no, these animals, like, they're making sure there's a large population of them, because Mike from Cleveland is coming over there with his Creedmoor, and he's going to, you know, shoot some. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's such a spectrum, is what I was going to say, because you have these national parks that absolutely do work. | ||
| People pay enough money for tourism, ecotourism dollars to do photo safaris and the wildlife's managed. | ||
| You have these other areas that are managed by hunting dollars and they're managed beautifully well. | ||
| They're sustaining animals. | ||
| They're reproducing them and they're putting them in other habitats and ecosystems and parts of Africa. | ||
| And then you have... | ||
| ones that are supposed to be managed properly both from ecotourism and hunting dollars and they're just they're funding people's pockets the animals are getting devastated it's super unethical and it's and everything in between and that's the problem with africa is like you know i'm all for hunting as a tool for conservation if it keeps the species around and keeps the the animals up but you got to be careful where you're going where those dollars are going because it's so easy to line someone's pocket and it never returns to the species yeah there's a giant issue with corruption there Huge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huge. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Whenever you have poverty, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where I grew up in Zimbabwe, the Mugabe regime, I mean, it's notorious for being as corrupt as it was and created violence and uprisings. | ||
| And that's why my family came here because we got thrown off our land and like crazy stuff. | ||
| It's very, very corrupt. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, it's a wild place, man. | ||
| My buddy Justin Brand runs this charity. | ||
| Do you know who he is? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He runs Fight for the Forgotten. | ||
| They build wells for the pygmies. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We work with them with the Cash App. | ||
| He came back with a terrible disease. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I heard that on one of your podcasts. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He doesn't know what it is. | ||
| They don't know what it is. | ||
| He's got some crazy parasite, and they think it might be in his brain. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| Not only that, he goes so deep into the Congo that they feel like it might be an undiscovered parasite. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, like, he might be the first one. | ||
| I shouldn't laugh. | ||
| It's like, that's the worst way to find a new species ever. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| It's been going on for six months. | ||
| And he's, like, in really poor health? | ||
| He's all fucked up, yeah. | ||
| And he's a fighter for Bellator. | ||
| He's one of their top heavyweights. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so, you know, he's in the prime of his career, and he can't really work out right. | ||
| Like, He'll work out and then he'll break out into cold sweats and they have to get him in the shower and heat his body up. | ||
| It's a mess. | ||
| It's really bad. | ||
| And the drugs that they put them on, the other thing is when you're on antibiotics, One of the side effects of some antibiotics, like Cipro, is that your ligaments get weak. | ||
| And so he's a fucking cage fighter. | ||
| So he's tearing his shoulders. | ||
| Both of his shoulders are fucked up now. | ||
| Because your connective tissue is just not as strong. | ||
| Our whole system... | ||
| Apparently, I mean, I really don't know what I'm talking about, but apparently our whole system is fueled sort of, it's one gigantic unit. | ||
| And so when you do something like you introduce antibiotics and you crush all these invading diseases or these invading bacteria or whatever the fuck, staph or whatever is fucking with you. | ||
| The microorganisms, yeah. | ||
| All the microbiome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| The rest of your body gets devastated as well. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Including, like, people who are more prone to depression afterwards. | ||
| Dr. Rhonda Patrick was talking about that. | ||
| She had a staph infection, and it screwed her up for a long time. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Just because her whole body was out of whack from the antibiotics. | ||
| Because, you know, you get staph, they're worried about you're going to die. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| So they just pump you full of anything they try to kill. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Moral of the story, no good deed goes unpunished. | ||
| You know, don't try help people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's terrible. | ||
| I'm kidding. | ||
| I'm kidding. | ||
| He's got malaria three times, too. | ||
| Oh, jeez. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I bet he's passionate about what he does, and he's made an impact. | ||
| The most passionate. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| He's like the most generous person I've ever met in my life. | ||
| It's fantastic. | ||
| Every time I talk to him, I feel like a selfish piece of shit. | ||
| He's dedicating his whole life, and everything is for other people. | ||
| Everything is for the Congo. | ||
| Everything is for the Pygmies. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's fucking amazing. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| Very admirable. | ||
| However, he's fucked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like you said, they don't know what, and they think it might be in his brain, which is a giant issue. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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|
Jeez. | |
| I mean, and obviously, if it's in his brain, I mean, depending upon what kind of parasite it is, it could be growing. | ||
| It's just, I hate parasites. | ||
| It's like the one thing that makes my skin crawl. | ||
| That's weird, because I love them. | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure they're your favorite, yeah. | ||
| Who's out there like, man, I love parasites. | ||
| I mean, birds are cool, but fucking parasites, where it's at? | ||
| I had a professor like that in college, actually. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, he's a parasitologist. | ||
| He loved them. | ||
| Well, it's a field of study. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So the last time I saw you, I think, was right before we headed to the Galapagos. | ||
| I was telling you about that crazy island we went on. | ||
| We found that tortoise. | ||
| Did you know that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| First, only one specimen has ever been found before, 114 years ago. | ||
| And we found the second one. | ||
| The biggest discovery in my entire career was the week after I saw you last. | ||
|
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|
Wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It was amazing. | ||
| What kind of tortoise is this? | ||
| The Fernandina Island Tortoise. | ||
| Big Galapagos tortoise on this crazy active volcano on far remote Galapagos. | ||
| We had gnarly sunstroke, heatstroke, I mean everything. | ||
| And after a few days of hiking up and down this volcano, we found scat and then we found a dig like a tortoise had been digging and 15 minutes later we found the animal. | ||
| I mean, how many of them are in the wild? | ||
| There's a return trip that just... | ||
| One return trip just went right now, and then another one will go in January. | ||
| But what's great is, on the first return trip, they had to bail because of weather, and the weather is very harsh there. | ||
| They found evidence of two more animals. | ||
| So things are looking really good. | ||
| So there might be like four alive on the planet? | ||
| Well, right now there's one. | ||
| The one we found. | ||
| She's literally the rarest animal in the world. | ||
| Do you have an image of this? | ||
| It's on my Instagram, but it was on Forbes, Times, New York, you know, everywhere. | ||
| It was like big, big stuff. | ||
| So you can look up Fernandina Island tortoise. | ||
| When you find something like that, what gets done to ensure the population remains? | ||
| There she is. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| So how did you know? | ||
| What's the distinguishing factors? | ||
| What's the only animal on the island? | ||
| It's the only tortoise on the island. | ||
| So because tortoises can't swim, at least not across the ocean, so because of where they were, if we had found a tortoise, it was going to be the Fernandina tortoise. | ||
| Now that being said, the unique shell ridging, the shape... | ||
| What a crazy animal. | ||
| There's a video... | ||
| Yeah, there you go. | ||
| There she is. | ||
| So cool. | ||
| There's a video. | ||
| Oh, I think it's the one on the top right of your screen right now where we actually find her. | ||
|
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|
So you picked it up? | |
| You carried it away? | ||
| Yeah, we put her in a... | ||
| She was super malnourished, underweight, dehydrated. | ||
| She was stuck in an isolated pocket of vegetation because there's nothing but lava around her. | ||
| Nah, this video is boring. | ||
| But there's a cool one where you actually see me find her in the bushes. | ||
| And yeah, it was big stuff. | ||
|
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|
Look at you, you're crying. | |
| You're so happy. | ||
| I was pretty happy. | ||
|
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|
Wow. | |
| It was just such a big find. | ||
| And such, you know, the tortoise, like Lonesome George, is an icon of conservation. | ||
| So to find the species that the world had lost for 114 years was pretty great. | ||
| Imagine being a tortoise, just chilling on this fucking island, hanging out, and some famous biologist flies from all the way around the world to find you. | ||
| Like, you're here! | ||
| He's like crying and shit. | ||
| You're like, I'm fucking here every day. | ||
| Like, leave me alone, yeah. | ||
| I'm trying to find some plants, bro. | ||
| But I think in this case, she was stoked. | ||
| And I'll tell you why. | ||
| She was super dehydrated, super underweight. | ||
| It's terrible living conditions. | ||
| And she was stuck, right? | ||
| So it's not like she could roam around the island and find lots of food and water. | ||
| There's five foot shards of lava rock surrounding this little pocket of... | ||
| So we moved her to the Fausto Lorena breeding facility, which is where Lonesome George was kept, that other famous tortoise. | ||
| She put on like 7 pounds or 17 pounds in like 3 weeks because she was so happy to eat. | ||
| She didn't leave her water dish for like 10 days because she was just so happy to see water. | ||
|
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|
Oh wow. | |
| She was stoked. | ||
| And now they're trying to find a male. | ||
| Trying to get some freak on. | ||
| Yeah, trying to get the freak on. | ||
| And this has spurred a ton of resources, conservation dollars, return efforts. | ||
| It's really big for the Galapagos. | ||
| So how does that work if you do find a male? | ||
| What if she's an old lady and she doesn't want to fuck? | ||
| And you bring some male and he's like, hey baby, and he's like 15 and she's 80. She's like, come on, dude. | ||
| Fortunately, reptiles breed until they die. | ||
| So we should be good. | ||
| And even more interesting than that is tortoises can retain viable sperm. | ||
| So, what we had hoped when we found her was that, you know, maybe she had copulated with a male 10 years prior and had been under such tough environmental stress that she hadn't had the biological energy to lay eggs. | ||
| And we're thinking, oh, let's get her some food, get her some water, who knows? | ||
| Maybe she'll give some offspring. | ||
| So, she might already have fertilized eggs inside of her from 10 years ago? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Sperm can live in them to, like, up to 20 years. | ||
| That's some serious sperm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tortoise sperm. | ||
| Slow and steady. | ||
| Serious sperm. | ||
| What... | ||
| God damn. | ||
| What longevity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if they find a viable male and then they bring him to the facility and introduce him to all the food and water, do they have success in taking these wild tortoises and getting them to breed? | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I think when you hear this, you're thinking they're in a box, you know what I mean, in a zoo. | ||
| They're in this thing that's bigger than your studio here. | ||
| I don't mean this room, the whole studio. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's all natural vegetation. | ||
| Basically, we just moved her from one island to another where there's less stress. | ||
| And now, if they get a male, they'll just have them together. | ||
| Hopefully, they'll be offspring. | ||
| Then they can release the offspring back on the island and the population can remain stable. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's really cool. | ||
| That was fun. | ||
| But I remember I was sitting here and we were talking about it. | ||
| I was like, yeah, you know, tomorrow I leave for the Galapagos. | ||
| It's going to be gnarly. | ||
| It's going to suck. | ||
| And then we had this amazing find. | ||
| So it was really cool. | ||
| Now, the Galapagos is so protected that don't they make you, like, put fresh shoes on? | ||
| Like, you can't bring shoes that you wore somewhere else that might carry seeds? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| We had to go to quarantine for 48 hours. | ||
| Everything we brought with us had to go into a giant freezer? | ||
| Yeah, freezer. | ||
| And sit there for two days, and we kind of had to twiddle our thumbs just waiting, and then we got all our stuff back, got on the boats, and went out to that island. | ||
| So the giant freezer supposedly kills any sort of spores or anything? | ||
|
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|
Wow. | |
| It gets really cold, if I remember correctly, and you go through everything. | ||
| They go through your boots, you look for any seeds, you go through your underwear, like literally everything to see if you're bringing any contaminants in. | ||
| God, that's so fucking cool. | ||
| It is. | ||
| So the Galapagos is really the place where Darwin started formulating a lot of his theories of evolution, right? | ||
| With the finches and the tortoises. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That crazy skeleton. | ||
| What is that from? | ||
| Some kind of marine mammal. | ||
| Sea lion, possibly whale. | ||
| It's hard to say. | ||
| They got beach there or something? | ||
|
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|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Wow. | ||
| And then that's Fernandina. | ||
| That's the Stark Island in the background, actually, where we found the tortoise. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a big-ass island, man, to find one turtle. | ||
|
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|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Tortoise, excuse me. | ||
| It's all good. | ||
| I have a hard time with that. | ||
| I want to get lazy and just call them all turtles. | ||
| She's got a shell. | ||
| What the fuck's the problem? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just swim better. | ||
| Yeah, no, so that was cool. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| It was very difficult and hot and, you know, all those things and just so exciting. | ||
| Wow, that's amazing, man. | ||
| Yeah, that was fun. | ||
| So when you do have a discovery like this, I mean, that's got to, like, open up the door for more funding, more research possibilities, more trips. | ||
| Hugely. | ||
| What do you want to do next? | ||
| Well, that's twofold, right? | ||
| One is, it doesn't necessarily open the door for me more, which is good. | ||
| It doesn't need to. | ||
| It opens the door for the species. | ||
| And what I mean by that is, when an animal's declared extinct, that's it. | ||
| It's gone, right? | ||
| Extinct means vanished, like no longer in existence. | ||
| So when you find it back, that opens up the dollars for return efforts, management, blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And that's what's going on currently for that particular species. | ||
| It's great for me in the sense that it's like, oh, this guy is furthering his reputation of being able to find these things that other people aren't, which really just boils down to me being willing to embrace shittier conditions than I think a lot of other people are. | ||
| But what's next for me? | ||
| I mean, I take off for Africa, I think, January 4th, January 5th. | ||
| And I'll be there for five weeks working on some missing sharks. | ||
| Missing sharks? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What kind of sharks? | ||
| There's four species that in the wild coast, which is like from Durban up to Mozambique on the east, southeastern Africa, that haven't been seen in 30 years or more. | ||
| And it's not necessarily that they're extinct so much as nobody looks for them. | ||
| And, you know, it's like it's a very gray area of are these animals still there or not? | ||
| And so myself, this guy named Dave Ebert, he's the president of the North American Elastomer Brank Society, like big shark guy, you know, big other bio nerd like myself. | ||
| We're teaming up and we're going down there to try and find some of these animals. | ||
| I was reading something recently about great whites in South Africa, that there's a massive decline. | ||
| Orcas. | ||
| Orcas were killing white sharks in Muscle Bay, that area where... | ||
| In Hans Bay, yeah. | ||
| And I don't exactly remember the reason. | ||
| I think they were eating their livers out of the white sharks. | ||
| Yeah, they like their liver, right? | ||
| Why do they like their liver so much? | ||
| Minerals. | ||
| Full of minerals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because, you know, your liver acts as the filter for the body, basically. | ||
| And so it's pretty well known that big predators, orcas, leopards, lions, you know, everything, they like to target the liver. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it gives them lots of minerals that otherwise they can't get from flesh. | ||
| I was watching a documentary on wolves and that was one of the ways that the alpha establishes itself that when there's a kill, it's the first to eat the liver. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| And there's a guy who was living with these wolves and he was like tricking them that he was a wolf and one of the ways he would do it was he would eat a liver in front of them. | ||
| And so they're like, wow, this guy might be the shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then the guy went away because he's a wolf expert. | ||
| And he went away because there was a farmer that was having issues with wolves. | ||
| And they were trying to figure out a way to get the wolves to leave his livestock alone. | ||
| So what they did was they set up a speaker system. | ||
| So they put these gigantic speakers up, and they started broadcasting these aggressive wolf howls to let this other wolf pack know that a new wolf pack had moved into the area. | ||
| So this guy was on this project for several months, came back to the original wolf pack that he was, like, conning into thinking that he was, and a new alpha had taken over. | ||
|
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|
Oh, wow. | |
| And the new alpha was threatening him, and so he had a whimper, and he was, like, really in danger of being torn apart by a wolf. | ||
| And on camera. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| So he's inches away from this wolf and it's baring its teeth. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| I mean, he's with real wolves. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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Right? | |
| And so this guy's like curled up in a fetal position and whimpering and putting his paw out like this. | ||
| And this fucking wolf is baring its teeth just inches from him. | ||
| Huge wolf. | ||
| 150 pound wolf. | ||
| Like inches from him. | ||
| Just ready to tear him to shreds. | ||
| Because they kill each other all the time. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Where was this? | ||
| In the U.S.? No. | ||
| No, it wasn't in the U.S. I don't remember where it was, but it was really weird. | ||
| Like, this guy's life was so strange because he was, for a long period of time, when he was running this research, was living with wolves. | ||
| So he's with them. | ||
| You know, he's a part of the pack. | ||
| I gotta ask you this, and don't answer it if it's uncomfortable, but in my field, working with specialized experts, a lot like him, obviously that's a whole other level, they start to take on characteristics of these animals, I've noticed. | ||
| So, like, I worked with a guy who was a bear expert, right? | ||
| And he spent his whole life with bears, and this man was basically a bear. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| He was grumpy, he was cranky, he was big, he was hairy, like, Every part of him seemed like a human bear. | ||
| I'm wondering if this guy was like that. | ||
| Did it seem to you like he had started to lose touch with social norms and he was starting to take on traits of a wolf? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Is this it? | ||
| Yeah, this is the guy. | ||
| So this guy... | ||
| Is this the guy? | ||
| This is a documentary from 2007-2008 called The Wolfman. | ||
| Yeah, I think this is it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there, like... | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| The way they threaten each other. | ||
| You know, I mean, so he would have a kill, and he would drag it over, and he would eat the liver in front of them. | ||
| And so by doing that, he would trick them into thinking he was the shit. | ||
| See? | ||
| He's got the liver. | ||
| Tell me that guy doesn't express wolf characteristics. | ||
| Like, look at his body language. | ||
| I know he's doing that intentionally for the animal, but to me, that guy looks like he thinks he's a wolf. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| I mean, that's insane. | ||
| How are the cameramen... | ||
| Able to get this close and they're safe too. | ||
| Very good question. | ||
| Look at this guy. | ||
| He's out of his fucking mind. | ||
| Yeah, that's something else. | ||
| Like, bro, you're made out of Jell-O. You are literally a water balloon filled with Jell-O and you're hanging around these super predators. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| I love wolves. | ||
| They're one of my favorite animals on the planet. | ||
| I just think they're so fascinating and now that they've been reintroduced into the West, you know, I know, look at that, like, it's growling, the thing's kissing him to show the submissive, so he's eating the liver in front of it. | ||
| Have you ever been to the wolf sanctuary out here in Palmdale? | ||
| No, no, I heard it's awesome, no. | ||
| If you ever want to go, let me know. | ||
| I would love to. | ||
| They don't do it for the general public, but they rescue wolves and wolf dogs and rehabilitate them, and a lot of times they've been in fights, and they've come out of terrible places, and they've got a few animals that they're very closely related to full-blood wild wolves, and you can go in and interact with them. | ||
| You're not petting them, it's not a puppy, you know what I mean? | ||
| They don't behave like a dog. | ||
| But you can go in and have one come up and approach you and sniff you. | ||
| It's a pretty fantastic experience. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| I'd like to go. | ||
| Let's do it, man. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| I'm in. | ||
| I'll set it up. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not doing what that asshole's doing. | ||
| You can do that. | ||
| I'll be behind the camera. | ||
| What I was saying is that, you know, since they've reintroduced them into the West, there's been a lot of controversy behind that, and there's talks about doing that in Colorado, and people are really freaking out, like ranchers are freaking out, like, hey, there's a reason why everybody killed these things off. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Don't fucking bring them back. | ||
| There was another surplus killing that they found, I think in Wyoming, where they just wiped out a bunch. | ||
| They'll just go ham and kill 14, 15 elk cows just because they can. | ||
| And they don't eat them. | ||
| There's a term for that. | ||
| It's henhouse syndrome. | ||
| Have you heard of that? | ||
| No. | ||
| So it's basically like when a fox gets into the henhouse, They get in this killing frenzy state. | ||
| It's not like they're going to eat 30 different chickens, but they're going to kill everyone because they're in this state. | ||
| I don't know that's necessarily the case for that, but it is scary to think of an apex predator like a wolf getting into that hen house type syndrome, killing 30 elk just because they can. | ||
| But you know what's really interesting, Joe, is... | ||
| If you look... | ||
| I've done a little bit of reading on this. | ||
| If you look at how many instances of wolf fatalities there are in North America... | ||
| For humans? | ||
|
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|
Very few. | |
| For humans? | ||
| It's like two. | ||
| For three. | ||
| It's some very, very low number. | ||
| Yeah, there was one in Alaska a couple years back. | ||
| There was a woman. | ||
| I think she was a jogger. | ||
| And there's one other one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's kind of it. | ||
| That's documented. | ||
| However... | ||
| I have a friend who actually shot an elk in BC, in British Columbia, and they didn't know it, but the elk expired right next to a wolf den. | ||
| Oh, what? | ||
| And the wolves tried to claim the elk. | ||
| They, like, came out and stood over it? | ||
| So he and the guy that he was with had their back to a tree, and they shot and killed three attacking wolves. | ||
|
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|
Wow. | |
| And he killed two of them with a bow and arrow. | ||
| And the other guy killed one with a rifle. | ||
| And they were like almost out of bullets and he had one arrow left. | ||
| And they're surrounded by wolves. | ||
| But they had killed enough. | ||
| So, you know, wolves, they do this, they do like a roll call. | ||
| They howl and they see who responds and they realize that they had lost three. | ||
| And so they bailed and they took off out of the area. | ||
| But they were in the den. | ||
| He said there was bones in there. | ||
| And then they realized like that they just were hunting and they shot an elk and it just happened to be right where the wolves had a den. | ||
| It's terrifying. | ||
| I have one of the skulls at home on my desk. | ||
| Of the wolves? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| The story's nuts when John tells the story. | ||
| Is that John Dudley? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, no kidding. | ||
| There's a video of it. | ||
| You can watch it on YouTube. | ||
| When he's telling the story, you can see him going back to the moment. | ||
| It's fucking crazy. | ||
| That sounds like a scene out of The Grey. | ||
| They're in the den. | ||
| He was in the den. | ||
| In the den. | ||
| I spend my life working with animals that are considered dangerous, and there's wolves, bears, there's a handful of others. | ||
| You just don't want to be in that situation. | ||
| Obviously, it wasn't intentional, but it's just a no-win situation. | ||
| We had Glenn Villeneuve from that show Life Below Zero. | ||
| Oh yeah, I know the show. | ||
| Yeah, and he was on the podcast recently, and he was talking about the time that he got chased by wolves. | ||
|
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|
Okay. | |
| And this was also on camera. | ||
| Like, he's got video footage of this and photographic footage of this, where he's living in this little tiny shack that's right next to a lake, and these wolves had killed a moose. | ||
| And they were in the middle of this frozen lake. | ||
| There was 20 of them. | ||
| It was in a huge wolf pack. | ||
| That's enormous. | ||
| That is amazing. | ||
| An enormous wolf pack. | ||
| Yeah, he's got all the photos of this all on his Facebook page. | ||
| See if you can pull that up. | ||
| Pull up Glenville News. | ||
| 20 wolves in a pack? | ||
|
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|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| It's amazing. | ||
| John Dudley's picture. | ||
| There's John Dudley with one of the wolves that he killed that was trying to kill him and steal his elk. | ||
| They were running at him. | ||
| They were running at him full clip. | ||
| He shot two wolves that were running at him. | ||
|
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|
Wow. | |
| He said they were charging at him full clip. | ||
| And he's at full draw on his... | ||
| You know, he kills one, and then another one comes running down, bang, they kill that one. | ||
| He only carries a four-arrow quiver. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he had one arrow that he killed the elk, two arrows that he killed wolves, one arrow left, and he's got his back to a tree, and the guy he's with had three bullets. | ||
| No sidearm? | ||
| Nothing! | ||
| They were just elk hunting. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, they're like, fuck! | ||
| Jeez. | ||
| Yeah, so see this Glenn Villeneuve. | ||
| So he's got a series of amazing photographs that he took from his shack and they chased him. | ||
| They chased him back to his cat. | ||
| He got close to them, like within, you know, 100 yards or so to take photographs. | ||
| And they started circling him and looking at him. | ||
| And then he starts backing up and they start trotting and then he just runs and they run. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And he got to the fucking door of his cabin. | ||
| And this happened twice. | ||
| And then he got a rifle out and just started shooting him. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| They were running at him. | ||
| He shot three of them. | ||
| I mean, I don't know the situation, but turning your back on a pack of wolves and running. | ||
| I mean, maybe they were already advancing. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But that just sounds terrible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Acting like prey is a good way to get killed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, he's a really wise man. | ||
| He really understands the woods and nature as good as anybody. | ||
| But I think he was one of those situations where he knew he could get back to the cabin, and if he didn't get back to the cabin, the way they were approaching him, they were getting closer and closer. | ||
| Look at that pack. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
| That is a phenomenon in itself. | ||
| You don't see packs of 20 wolves. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He was saying that one of the largest documented packs in that area was 18. This is actually bigger than that. | ||
| And they had a moose down. | ||
| So they had this moose down, moose calf down in the middle of this frozen lake. | ||
| That guy is so interesting, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've really loved the podcast with him because, you know, he had just decided, like, I want to try to live, like, as close to nature as possible. | ||
| No vehicles, nothing. | ||
| Just snowshoes and a rifle, living in a tiny little cabin, eating nothing but meat. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Just what he collects? | ||
| Nothing but meat and fat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And, you know, get really close to starving at one point in time. | ||
| That's when he started. | ||
| This is what it looked like. | ||
| It says 2004. I'm familiar with the show, but I haven't actually watched it. | ||
| He's on The Life Below Zero. | ||
| He was. | ||
| He didn't get along with them. | ||
| He's a really unique character, and I think they had a hard time with his uniqueness. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Out of all those people on that show, he's living the weirdest life. | ||
| Because all the other ones are like, oh, they have sled dogs, and they gather salmon for their dogs with one of those salmon wheels. | ||
| And then they have a cabin, and they have a fire in the cabin, and they're living, and they're eating dinner on plates and shit like that. | ||
| Not him, man. | ||
| He's living in this one little shack that he built himself. | ||
| Everything he's eating is food that he shot and killed walking around. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He stole a caribou from a wolf. | ||
| What? | ||
| A wolf killed a caribou and he ran up and stole it because he was starving. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| The guy's living as close to wild as you could possibly get. | ||
| Other than the fact that he has bullets and a gun and some... | ||
| But even he starts fires. | ||
| He wasn't using matches to start fires because he could run out of matches. | ||
| That's unbelievable. | ||
| So he's using like flint and steel and shit. | ||
| Like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's his motivation? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Does he just want to be closer to nature? | ||
| Like, that's it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You should listen to it if you get a chance. | ||
| He's a really, really unique person. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He has an outhouse today. | ||
| He doesn't have a toilet. | ||
| He doesn't have running water today in Fairbanks. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Yeah, so he's got a plot of land in Fairbanks. | ||
| He built a house there, and he doesn't have plumbing. | ||
| He's like, ah, that's too much work. | ||
| He just goes outside, and it's 50 below outside. | ||
| He's shitting in a hole in the ground. | ||
| I have so much respect for that. | ||
| I'll do it for two, three, four weeks at a time on an excursion. | ||
| I'm very happy to get back to a bed and a shower. | ||
| That's a whole other level. | ||
| I've never gone more than seven days. | ||
| I've done these seven day hunts, like the one where I got this mule deer right here with my friend Steve Rinella, but he introduced us to hunting. | ||
| And this was in Montana, and it was October, and it got down to, you know, like nine degrees outside, and we're sleeping in these tents, and it was wonderful. | ||
| I mean, it was a fantastic experience. | ||
| It really opened my eyes to real wild and wilderness, what it's like to hunt, and then at the end of this week, we went back to Billings, and we got a hotel room, and I got a shower, and I was like, oh my god. | ||
| A hot shower after a week in the woods. | ||
| I was with Brian Callen and me and Callen was like, how good was that shower? | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| It's not what you think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's the best thing ever. | |
| It's the most amazing shower ever. | ||
| You don't appreciate showers because you get in them all the time. | ||
| No. | ||
| Especially in California, because it doesn't get 9 degrees here. | ||
| Right, right, yeah. | ||
| So being outside, freezing your ass off, but also having the reward of actually shooting a deer, and then we ate a lot of it that night, and we were cooking it over the fire, and then the whole trip was done on the Missouri breaks. | ||
| So we're on the Missouri River, and so we took the river 40 miles. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Canoes? | ||
| Yeah, canoes and, you know, we had all our cargo and all our shit in there and we're rowing. | ||
| And so just a long-ass journey. | ||
| It was pretty intense. | ||
| And to go back to civilization after that, it's like you appreciate civilization because most of the time you don't appreciate it. | ||
| Janky little hotel in Billings. | ||
| But to me, it was like a palace. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| It's like, ah, look at this bed. | ||
| Look at this blanket. | ||
| Oh, luxury. | ||
| A television? | ||
| I don't mind if I do. | ||
| I know the feeling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm on your page for that. | ||
| I like returning and decompressing. | ||
| And then for me, it's like within a couple of weeks, I'm like, all right, ready to go for the next one. | ||
| I go back to not appreciating the comforts of home. | ||
| Then I'm ready to go again. | ||
| Well, you've probably developed a taste for both things, right? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| That's cool, though. | ||
| You're experiencing so many different facets of life on Earth. | ||
| You're going to all these different environments and ecosystems. | ||
| You're in the water. | ||
| You're on the land. | ||
| You're in jungles. | ||
| You're on islands. | ||
| You're living, man. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| You're fucking living. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, man. | |
| It's very cool. | ||
| I admire it. | ||
| But it comes, you know, like your buddy, you know, who got the diseases from the Congo, it comes with its costs. | ||
| Like, you know, we were in Borneo this year, and we were at a research station in the middle of the jungle, and I don't know enough about bee ecology, but it was like bee season. | ||
| And I mean, you should see some of our videos on Instagram. | ||
| It's like, I'm talking about... | ||
| Covered, head to toe in bees. | ||
| We were taking like 40 to 50 stings on average per day, per person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You know, and it's just so miserable. | |
| 40 to 50 a day? | ||
| There's 8 hours in a day? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you're literally taking stings all day long? | ||
| Well, no, it's worse than that because we were only at the station in the morning or evenings, right? | ||
| Before waking up or going to bed. | ||
| The rest of the time we're out in the field not taking stings. | ||
| So you're taking like 25 when you wake up and like 25 before you go to bed. | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| It's like, ow, ow, ow. | ||
| It's just so miserable. | ||
| I'm saying it's eight hours in a day as if a day is a work day. | ||
| So when you're doing this, is there a way to prevent it? | ||
| Can you use a repellent? | ||
| Nothing worked. | ||
| We put scarves over our heads. | ||
| And these are bees, not hornets, right? | ||
| So every time they sting you, they die. | ||
| Yes, but then when we were getting that caiman, we encountered hornets that put my cameraman into anaphylactic shock. | ||
| They were so bad. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| Yeah, so it comes with its cost, which I think my point was, it makes you appreciate the comfort so much more when you get back. | ||
| See that tarantula hawk in that little glass vial? | ||
| I did. | ||
| I was picking it up right before you walked in. | ||
| My buddy Maynard sent me that. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We have these here. | ||
| It's from his farm. | ||
| Yeah, he's got it from Arizona, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's from his, he owns a vineyard, and he's got a farm in Arizona, and he was telling me about these things, and he got a dead one and sent it to me. | ||
| They're super cool. | ||
| Look at the size of that fucker. | ||
| It's a bird. | ||
| And they come out of holes in the ground, hunt tarantulas. | ||
| Like, you know their story, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Well, tell everybody. | ||
| Yeah, so I mean, the tarantula hawk, it's a parasitic wasp, right? | ||
| So it comes out, it hunts for tarantulas, it lays its eggs, I believe, in the abdomen of the tarantula, and then the eggs hatch and explode out of the tarantula, and that's the life cycle. | ||
| My nature, you cruel bitch. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You beautiful, fantastic, complicated, cruel bitch. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I'm sure you've seen the video of those hornets that visit this beehive. | ||
| They visit a honeybee hive and just start, these Japanese hornets, and they just start chopping off the heads off the bees. | ||
| No way. | ||
| I don't know about this. | ||
| You don't know about this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I can't believe I'm telling you about animals. | ||
| Teach me. | ||
| Teach me, Jill. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| There's a certain species of hornets that flies into honeybees. | ||
| I think it's Japanese hornets. | ||
| They fly into these hives of honeybees and just decimate the honeybees. | ||
| They cut their heads off with their mandibles. | ||
| Chomp, chomp, chomp. | ||
| And they're so much bigger. | ||
| So they fly in and there's this slow motion video of these enormous hornets flying in and decapitating thousands and thousands of honeybees. | ||
| So what's interesting is the honeybees, they're so outsized. | ||
| I mean, the hornets are literally like 50, 60 times larger than them. | ||
| You see it there. | ||
| Maybe that's not the right number, but they're much, much larger and they're much more powerful. | ||
| But the honeybees figured out a strategy to kill the hornets. | ||
| And what they do is they surround them. | ||
| They get on top of them and then they beat their wings. | ||
| They all generate heat. | ||
| And then they kill the hornets with the heat of their body. | ||
| That's unbelievable. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So here's this thing that's decapitating everyone in your little village, right? | ||
| And so you have to jump on top of it and flex. | ||
| And heat it up, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And heat it up. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| But the fact that they were able to devise this strategy... | ||
| See, look how they do it, man. | ||
| They just grab ahold of these bees and just decapitate them. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| They have these horrific faces, right? | ||
| These giant mandibles. | ||
| Yeah, I can see that. | ||
| And they just swarm in and they just... | ||
| Look at them. | ||
| They're just chopping these fucking honeybees apart. | ||
| You said it, nature, you cruel, beautiful bitch. | ||
| Cruel, beautiful bitch. | ||
| So, 30 hornets versus 30,000 bees. | ||
| Do you know why the hornets are doing this? | ||
| Are they getting honey? | ||
| They probably want the larva. | ||
| The larva, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they probably want the larva or they want the honey. | ||
| They want something. | ||
| But look at all these dead fucking bees with no heads. | ||
| Bizarre. | ||
| It's crazy! | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| I mean, it's just so weird that nature devises these sort of strategies to prevent overpopulation and that there's this balance that takes place where the bees are threatened by something that's very bee-like. | ||
| So you see how they're getting on top of them? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's their strategy for dealing. | ||
| They all get on top of them. | ||
| See, you see a bunch of them now. | ||
| And he's trying to get away, but he can't fly away. | ||
| And so then they swarm, and then they eventually kill him. | ||
| So you think that actually cooks the wasp? | ||
| Something that overheats their body in it. | ||
| See, look how many of them are on there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's something that it does where it overheats their body. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I mean, look at the size comparison. | ||
| They're so much bigger. | ||
| Imagine if you had that hornet, you know, that was six feet long. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Like, I think giant insects would be the worst. | ||
| The worst? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The worst, I think, would be praying mantises. | ||
| They scare the shit out of me. | ||
| We've been on a praying mantis kick lately, been watching them kill rats and everything. | ||
| Hummingbirds. | ||
| The hummingbird one is the wildest one. | ||
| They sit by a hummingbird feeder, just sit there not moving, and the hummingbird comes to feed and they just... | ||
| Just spear it. | ||
| Snatch them. | ||
| It's crazy, right? | ||
| They're so strong for their size. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, there was one with a mouse, and the mouse is so much bigger than the praying mantis, but the praying mantis just jacks this mouse. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's wild. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's a wild creature, man. | ||
| Yeah, they're amazing. | ||
| They're really, really cool looking, though. | ||
| I see them all the time. | ||
| I find them all the time when I'm running. | ||
| Here in LA, right? | ||
| Oh yeah, yeah. | ||
| They're all over the place. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, they're amazingly cool. | ||
| And very diverse. | ||
| You know, there's huge ones, there's small ones, they're spread out all over the world. | ||
| They're an amazing group of animals. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| One got a snake? | ||
| This is lots of them. | ||
| It's like a highlight video. | ||
| Oh my god, look at that. | ||
| He's got a fucking snake. | ||
| I think we can't even imagine how strong they would be if they were our size. | ||
| I think they would run right through walls. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| They would. | ||
| I mean, look at this fucker. | ||
| He's taking on a giant snake. | ||
| Now he's eating it. | ||
| That snake is like two feet long. | ||
| And he's a little-ass humming, little-ass pragmantus, and he's fucking it up. | ||
| He's literally eating it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just pulling chunks out of it. | ||
| They're insane. | ||
| And they have such crazy eyesight, and, like, they're literally covered in body armor with their exoskeleton. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, they're just, they're amazing. | ||
| Well, they seem like what you would think of as being like a horrific animal that lives on another planet. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Like, do you remember that movie, Starship Troopers? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I love that movie. | ||
| That was a great movie, right? | ||
| Yeah, I loved it. | ||
| And that was one of the things in the Starship Troopers, like these big giant insect things. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Bursting out of the ground and shooting stuff out of their butts. | ||
| And they were great. | ||
| I love that movie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cory Rico? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a fun movie, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It was kind of tongue-in-cheek. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| But also really gory and violent. | ||
| Neil Patrick Harris is the genius. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| That was such a fun movie. | ||
| That's great stuff. | ||
| We're really fortunate that those things are small. | ||
| That all insects are small. | ||
| We would be on the menu otherwise. | ||
| No doubt about it. | ||
| They're two indiscriminately perfect hunters. | ||
| Big predatory insects. | ||
| Is there a history on the fossil record of enormous bugs? | ||
| Like isopods and things like that, but not that I know of, like, you know, six-foot-long praying mantises. | ||
| It's weird how things sort of figure out what size they should be, you know? | ||
| Yeah, just based on what the environment can support and what their lifestyle supports. | ||
| Like island dwarfism? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Insular dwarfism. | |
| That's pretty bizarre, too. | ||
| And there's insular gigantism as well, right? | ||
| It exists in both spectrums. | ||
| Like if there's tons of prey and something gets there, it gets bigger and bigger. | ||
| If there's not enough resources, it gets smaller and smaller. | ||
| Do you know about the lions that are in a very specific part of Africa where the river branched off and left them on an island with only buffalo? | ||
| We discussed this last time. | ||
| I don't know if it was on the podcast or in the back there, but that's how I learned more about it chatting with you last time. | ||
| I remember we looked it up. | ||
| There's a great documentary for people who don't know about. | ||
| It's called Relentless Enemies. | ||
| And it's these enormous lions. | ||
| These lions have evolved to only kill buffalo. | ||
| So the female lions are as big as regular male lions. | ||
| Jacked. | ||
| They look fake. | ||
| They look like bodybuilder lions. | ||
| They do. | ||
| They do. | ||
| And they just, all they do, and what's weird, this is what's really weird about the documentary, there's several packs that live on this island, but one pack has these enormous super lions, and then there's another pack of regular-sized lions. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So does that pride of the supersized lions, are they dominant over the other one, or are they just preying on different species? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| I don't know, but I found it weird that one pack evolved and became enormous, and then the other pack just kind of didn't. | ||
| Selective breeding, right? | ||
| If you're big and jacked, hang out over here and eat buffalo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If you're a bitch-ass lion, go hang out over there. | |
| But what's crazy also is how recently it took place. | ||
| I think it was less than 100 years that the river had switched and that these animals started to adapt. | ||
| They literally are twice the size of a normal female lion. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And it's huge. | ||
| But also, they're only eating buffalo. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I bet if you ate water buffalo every day, you'd just get jacked by default. | ||
| I'd look like The Rock. | ||
| Yeah, you would, bro. | ||
| You should do it. | ||
| It's carnivore month coming in July. | ||
| I think those things often rise and fall, you know, and we're in a state where we understand it. | ||
| What I mean by that is... | ||
| So the river changes. | ||
| You've got nothing but lions and buffalo. | ||
| Lions get bigger and bigger and bigger. | ||
| Eventually, they get to the point where they wipe out all the buffalo because it's not sustainable. | ||
| Then the lions collapse. | ||
| So what's cool is that we can actually see that in action, right? | ||
| Over our lifespan, we can see this generational change. | ||
| And the lions, it might not collapse. | ||
| It could last tens of thousands of years. | ||
| But it's interesting that you can actually see it taking place. | ||
| It's evolution in action, basically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's a documentary from the BBC about the Congo that gets into that, and they talk about how quickly the rainforest had grown, and what used to be grasslands became this enormous, dense rainforest, and a lot of these animals that were plains animals had to figure out a way to survive, and so they adapted, and they were talking about the diker. | ||
| That little tiny little antelope that swims underwater for as much as 100 yards and eats fish. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, you just summed it up. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| A fucking antelope that eats fish. | ||
| Right, and can hold its breath and free dive. | ||
| God, nature's crazy. | ||
| Nature is metal. | ||
| Have you always been fascinated by nature? | ||
| I mean, you obviously are now, but what a perfect career you have. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I feel like I have the perfect job, and I have. | ||
| From when I was a little kid, you know, so growing up in Zimbabwe, my family owned safari businesses. | ||
| That was what we did. | ||
| But when you're a little kid in the bush in Zimbabwe, you can't just go out running around, you know, so you're kind of stuck in camp. | ||
| So I'd be the one flipping over logs and grabbing earthworms and catching snakes. | ||
| The way you just said can't, I heard South Africa. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| It's like every now and then it pops out. | ||
| Yep, it's the hard A's. | ||
| You mostly blend in. | ||
| I try. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But yeah, no, I started young and it's just been my driving force since I was a little kid. | ||
| That's so cool. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's such an amazing subject and there's so much to look at. | ||
| You will never run out of things to study. | ||
| Never. | ||
| And you never stop learning. | ||
| Today I learned about the wasps and the bees. | ||
| I consider myself pretty well read in the field of wildlife. | ||
| That's all new to me. | ||
| I'm going to go home. | ||
| I'm going to Google it. | ||
| It's just so fantastic. | ||
| It never ends. | ||
| Do you know about the bees in Nepal that make psychedelic honey? | ||
| I do. | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's wild. | |
| And how they harvest that honey? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Dude, pull up some video or some images of that, because these guys are risking their lives to trip balls on this crazy honey. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the pollen that they're getting it from? | ||
| What are they getting it that's causing it to be psychedelic? | ||
| All I know is what you just said, which is it's the pollen that they're creating the honey out of that is making it psychedelic, but I don't know what it is. | ||
| I want to trip balls on that honey. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| Go lick some honey off a cliff in Nepal and see what happens. | ||
| It must be really good. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If you can get honey other places, but this honey makes you trip. | ||
| I wonder what the actual psychoactive substance in the honey is. | ||
| No idea. | ||
| I've never even looked into it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What does it say, Jamie? | ||
| But these guys, they've apparently decided it's worth rappelling on the side of these mountains because it grows off the side of cliffs. | ||
| Yeah, it looks like big shelf fungus. | ||
| It grows out horizontally off these vertical cliffs. | ||
| Yeah, and as these guys are harvesting it, they're hanging on ropes from cliffs, getting lit up by bees. | ||
| And then popping psychedelic honey in their mouth. | ||
| It's worth it, man. | ||
| Now, when you – The speculation on it was that maybe the higher altitudes allowed this neurotoxin to develop called gray anotoxin, which is in it. | ||
| It's called red honey, specifically. | ||
| Oh, you can buy it? | ||
| It says the potency diminishes over time, so it might not last that long. | ||
| Oh, you've got to get it fresh. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| White ronadendrons. | ||
| Oh, ronadendrons. | ||
| Click on that again, please. | ||
| We have rhododendrons, probably a different family here, you know, as pretty plants around California. | ||
| Oh, that's just a descriptive of the actual plant. | ||
| It might be that specific one in the altitude because it stays up there. | ||
| So, it's exported from Nepal to Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong. | ||
| The red honey is prized for its purported medicinal value and intoxicating qualities and are attributed to this gray nanotoxin present in the nectar collected from white rhododendrons. | ||
| The Gurung, am I saying that right? | ||
| Gurung people in Nepal are renowned for their use of this Mad Honey. | ||
| Dude, we need to buy Mad Honey. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| Is Mad Honey for sale? | ||
| See if we can buy Mad Honey. | ||
| That should be the name of a band. | ||
| It's a good name. | ||
| That's a good name. | ||
| That's a great band name. | ||
| Mad Honey. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, Mad Honey. | ||
| They come out frothing at the mouth. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Where's the Mad Honey, bro? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Mad Honey's safe. | ||
| I don't want to know if it's safe. | ||
| I just want to know if I can get it. | ||
| I'll take a chance. | ||
| Buy Mad Honey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Here we go. | |
| Come on, baby. | ||
| Amazon. | ||
| What do you got? | ||
| MadHoney.net? | ||
| Uh-oh. | ||
| Oh, MadHoney.net. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Mad Honey from Nepal. | ||
| Order that shit, son. | ||
| 115 grams for how much? | ||
| It's like $40. | ||
| It's up there on the top right. | ||
| Strongest, most potent Mad Honey available. | ||
| Done. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Add to cart. | ||
| Order it! | ||
| Alright. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Okay, we'll order something. | ||
| We're going to get some mad honey. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| Now I'm very excited. | ||
| I'm very excited we're not live, too. | ||
| Because that way you assholes out there can't just steal up all the mad honey. | ||
| Because if we were live, we would never have a chance. | ||
| They would scoop up all the mad honey. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| Yeah, we're going to get some mad honey. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I like that. | |
| I'm going to buy you a jug. | ||
| I'm in. | ||
| We're mixing it in coffee next time. | ||
| What do you think it does to you? | ||
| If you had a guess, would you be willing to just sit here and do some mad honey and some tea? | ||
| Something organic like that? | ||
| I'm totally into it. | ||
| Just get an Uber. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Back to Santa Barbara. | ||
| It says it's a psychedelic, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I wonder what kind. | ||
| It says you have to be 18 to order it. | ||
| I'm 18. It says their mad honey does contain the gray anotoxins, or otherwise it would just be regular honey, and it is laboratory tested to assure consistent quality, and it is safe and effective, it says. | ||
| What is effective? | ||
| It's not FDA tested, I wouldn't imagine. | ||
| If it tastes good, is it effective? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, it tastes good. | ||
| Or does it make you feel weird? | ||
| Yeah, what are you saying? | ||
| Does it make you trip, and how long does it last? | ||
| And also, do you have to eat the entire jar of honey to feel anything? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What kind of dosage are we talking about? | ||
| Anything else I should know? | ||
| They have not been evaluated by the FDA. These statements have not been evaluated intended for education and research purposes only. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Dude, I'm all about education and research. | ||
| There's some R&D going on and some honey over here. | ||
| Yeah, but these parts of the world where people are willing to harvest things like that, like, how did they figure that out? | ||
| Who was the first guy that's like, you see that fucking beehive up there? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm gonna get some of that honey, dude. | ||
| Right, I'm gonna dangle off a cliff, yeah. | ||
| Like, good luck, my friend. | ||
| I was saying this the other day to some buddies. | ||
| Who was the first guy to figure out caviar? | ||
| Who's the first guy to suck off a sturgeon and be like, hmm, this is delicious? | ||
| Good point. | ||
| I guess they probably just eat everything they can out of a fish. | ||
| And if you catch a sturgeon, man, the whole village is eating. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, some of them are 9, 10 feet long. | ||
| Dude, they are so big. | ||
| My friends John and Jen, they live in Alberta, and they went sturgeon fishing, and they caught them and put them on their Instagram page. | ||
| And you look at it like, that is a prehistoric dinosaur-type creature. | ||
| That thing is enormous. | ||
| Those big scales down the sides and down the back and the weird mouth and whiskers, they're bizarre. | ||
| Yeah, there's something about the way you're looking at them. | ||
| You're like, I don't feel like you should be catching that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Looks too old. | ||
| Yeah, it looks like you should probably leave that thing alone. | ||
| They think that that might be one of the, you know, there's a lot of those North American things that they think are monsters, like Nessie, you know, like the Loch Ness Monster. | ||
| They also have, like, ones in Lake Michigan. | ||
| What do they call it? | ||
| Lake Champlain. | ||
| They have a Lake Champlain one. | ||
| And they think that it might be sturgeon. | ||
| Oh, interesting. | ||
| Because, you know, especially because people have a tendency to exaggerate. | ||
| If you see a 10-foot sturgeon, you would think it's 50 feet long. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| It's a dinosaur. | ||
| Totally, totally. | ||
| Do you know that, this is kind of interesting, they actually had documented bull sharks stuck in the Great Lakes. | ||
| Yes, I'd heard about that. | ||
| That's pretty amazing. | ||
| That is nuts. | ||
| Sharks swimming a thousand miles from Louisiana up rivers and getting stuck in the Great Lakes. | ||
| Well, they're one of the rare sharks that can breathe fresh water, right? | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Catadromous. | ||
| That's what it is? | ||
| Yeah, in and out of fresh water. | ||
| They go through osmoregulation. | ||
| They can get the salt out or in, whatever they need, and then go into the rivers, spend time in the rivers, go back into the ocean to hunt. | ||
| The inspiration for the movie Jaws was apparently Bull Sharks in New Jersey, a series of attacks in fresh water on a river system. | ||
| Right, but near an ocean, I believe, right? | ||
| Like at a river mouth, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, that was my understanding as well. | ||
| Yeah, these people were going into the river, and these bull sharks were killing them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, in a river. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| Nowhere safe. | ||
| Nowhere is safe. | ||
| Well, they're really aggressive, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They have the highest testosterone of any species of shark, and so they're just ready all the time. | ||
| They're bullish, and their shoulders are kind of arched over, and their pecs are locked, and they look ready at any time to just snap. | ||
| Yeah, they found them all the way up in, like, Illinois. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| What the fuck? | ||
| Like, think of the temperature in Chicago right now, you know? | ||
| Oh, and the shark swims all the way up there. | ||
| Cold-blooded monster. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How'd they get into the Great Lakes? | ||
| Well, they used to go up the Mississippi River, but I think with all the locks that are there now in place, they just... | ||
| I think the idea was that they got stuck there when they were building the locks, and then they died out over time. | ||
| Ah, when was the last known sighting of one? | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Two years ago. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| There's been one found in Iowa, Texas. | ||
| Iowa? | ||
| How the fuck is a shark getting to Iowa? | ||
| Imagine, yeah, we lost Billy, he got bit by a shark. | ||
| What was he, surfing? | ||
| No, he was in Iowa. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| He was plowing corn and got killed by a shark. | ||
| Billy might be an asshole. | ||
| In Ohio they found him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Ohio? | ||
| Sharks in Ohio. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| How did they get into Ohio? | ||
| I mean, all those rivers are connected. | ||
| God damn, that's amazing. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Nature finds a way. | ||
| You know, whenever I look at those videos of bears catching salmon as they're jumping up the river, like, what was the first salmon thinking when it decided, hey, I'm going to go up these rocks back to the place where I was born and spawn there? | ||
| Put a target on my back. | ||
| And then, oh, this gigantic fucking bear waiting to catch me in the air. | ||
| Like, those images of bears catching them with their mouths as the salmon are flying through the air trying to make it up the... | ||
| But it's so weird. | ||
| Like, what a weird system. | ||
| It's like, nature's assuring robustness. | ||
| They're assuring that these fragile fish don't make it. | ||
| Because in order to be able to make that trip to the ocean and back to get through the rivers and streams to survive, you have to be... | ||
| Rugged. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so they're insuring it. | ||
| So they're going upstream, swimming against the current. | ||
| Oh, and by the way, here's a fucking 1,800-pound bear looking to eat you. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| God, it's crazy. | ||
| It's so cool. | ||
| But that that is a viable system. | ||
| This is the system that's been in place forever. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So strange. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that, you know, we can... | ||
| We destroy that so quickly. | ||
| We put one dam in and that ruins that whole ecosystem for that river and the bears and the salmon and the spawning. | ||
| We can remedy it. | ||
| We put salmon ladders in and yada yada. | ||
| But it's interesting that everything seems so tough as you just said and at the same time it's so fragile because we do one thing like put in a hydroelectric dam and it ruins the entire ecosystem. | ||
| Yeah, we were in Seattle, and in Seattle there's a place where you can go, and it's like underneath this bridge, and there's these clear plexiglass walls, and you can actually see the salmon making their way through and up the river, and they were explaining how they had put dams in and didn't really understand the consequences of putting these dams back when they did, and then all these salmon would go to the mouth of the river where they thought they were going to go upriver, and it would be blocked. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they'll be stuck there. | ||
| And they just died. | ||
| And they didn't breed. | ||
| And so the population drastically diminished. | ||
| These salmon died in the harbor. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Like, really wild stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And that supports, you know, like, that food source, that protein supports... | ||
| Not just like the bears and the birds, but like the whole river's ecology, right? | ||
| Like the river, the algaes that live in the river, the little bugs that live in the algae depend on those salmon dying up that river and fertilizing the river. | ||
| So it's like the whole thing is so interconnected and then, you know, one little thing and poof. | ||
| Did you, yeah, that is really crazy. | ||
| Did you see that video of the octopus that had captured an eagle? | ||
| That captured an eagle? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It was in Vancouver Island. | ||
| I know. | ||
| The octopus had captured an eagle and was trying to eat the eagle, and these fishermen saw the struggle and released the eagle from the grasp of the octopus, which to me is like, that is a... | ||
| Here it is right here. | ||
| Holy crap. | ||
| That eagle's like, fuck, help, bro. | ||
| Help, help, help, help. | ||
| Hello? | ||
| Well, help. | ||
| Like... | ||
| To me, it's weird. | ||
| It's like, why are you getting involved in this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's not like... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, people want to think that eagles are an endangered species. | ||
| They are absolutely not endangered. | ||
| You go to Alaska, there are like pigeons up there. | ||
| There are a lot of them. | ||
| There's a giant Pacific octopus. | ||
| They're amazing, those animals. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that's the thing. | ||
| It's like, I kind of like octopus more than I like eagles. | ||
| They're much smarter. | ||
| They're way smarter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, they're really interesting. | ||
| I mean, I love eagles, too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But you kind of got to lay a play out. | ||
| Look, if I saw, like, a lion... | ||
| That eagle might not make it anyway. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He's fucked. | ||
| He's on the side of the water. | ||
| Going, what happened? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| The monkey people saved me from the fucking... | ||
| From the kraken. | ||
| Yeah, he was... | ||
| I don't even know how the octopus got him. | ||
| But, like, what octopus can do... | ||
| Is nothing short of spectacular. | ||
| You know, we were talking about my friend Remy Warren earlier. | ||
| And he had a show on television before called Apex Predator. | ||
| And it was basically they would study apex predators and, you know, the different strategies they used to be successful as a hunter. | ||
| And when they did the one on the octopus, you know, he was in here and like, he was like, dude, they're from another planet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's like, that is... | ||
| The way they change their texture and their color and the way they do it instantaneously to adapt to their environment and how well they blend in, they're so interesting. | ||
| I think they're the most alien creature that exists on planet Earth. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| There's a new documentary out on, I think it's PBS, called Making Contact that's just about octopus intelligence. | ||
| This guy, he's a fisheries biologist, and he gets an octopus and basically lives with it in his living room. | ||
| Like... | ||
| He figures out that this thing likes being petted, like it knows how to... | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's just... | |
| The diverse array of things that this thing can process mentally, it's on par with what chimpanzees do. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's just like it can open jars, it can close them, it can come out of the aquarium, go back into it, it'll swim over if it knows you, it knows if it doesn't like you. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah, really weird, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that how we got this video? | ||
| The octopus dreaming? | ||
| I just looked it up and it starts with the octopus in the guy's living room. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| This is making contact. | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| This video went super viral. | ||
| Yeah, well, apparently as the octopus is asleep and dreaming, it's changing the outside color and texture of its skin in relation to whatever the fuck is going on in its head. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's so wild, man. | ||
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| It's just so weird how they can instantaneously change their coloration and their texture and then perfectly blend in with coral. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like when you see them stop on a coral reef and just become the reef, you're like, what are you? | ||
| Instantly, too. | ||
| It's like, zoop, and it's gone. | ||
| Look at the colors in this thing. | ||
| You know, there are people that actually believe they are from out of space. | ||
| I've seen that. | ||
| I was going to bring that up to you. | ||
| There's biologists that believe that they came in in asteroids and eggs. | ||
| You got it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| What do you think about that? | ||
| Look, I believe in life outside of Earth, but I don't necessarily think that octopus came from that. | ||
| There are other cephalopods that they're related to genetically, squid and cuttlefish and things like that. | ||
| I don't necessarily think they came from out of space, but I can see why. | ||
| There's science to support that it's a possibility, and then I can also see why people think that seeing them. | ||
| Well, there's thoughts about that with a lot of different life forms, like spores. | ||
| There's thoughts about that when it comes to psilocybin mushrooms. | ||
| The real freaky psychedelic heads think that psilocybin mushrooms came from asteroids. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the proof and the pudding in that one, so to speak, is the fact that you can take mushroom spores into the vacuum of space and bring them back to Earth and they still fruit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm trying to grow weed right now to see what happens out there. | ||
| Elon sent a little bit of weed into something on the space station, I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| They're going to test it for 30 days and see if it's viable in some way. | ||
| That's when we get into the weed business. | ||
| Us and Elon, space weed. | ||
| SpaceX weed, yeah. | ||
| Elon sent weed into space legitimately? | ||
| I don't think this is the first time it's been done, but the story went around because it's the hot topic. | ||
| That's interesting because when he was on here, I don't even think he inhaled. | ||
| You know? | ||
| He's growing weed in space. | ||
| Look at what the octopus eggs look like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| And so they're developing those intelligent chromatophores, that thing that basically the skin picks up the color and changes to match, right there in the embryo. | ||
| Look at their little eyeballs. | ||
| How weird. | ||
| And look how many of them. | ||
| Like an invasion. | ||
| Imagine if your wife gave birth to that many people. | ||
| No thanks. | ||
| You'd be like, I have a school. | ||
| I have a school full of kids. | ||
| First of all, I'm getting fucking snipped. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Look how they drop off. | ||
| That's what the Matrix looked like. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Dude, the Matrix is not that far off. | ||
| And it seems like the further we go in time, in human evolutionary time, the more it seems like it's accurate. | ||
| It's like we're getting more and more plugged in every day. | ||
| It's like a combination of the Matrix and the Terminator. | ||
| The two of them together. | ||
| I'm very concerned about the future of our species. | ||
| But going back to octopus, octopus and cuttlefish are closely related, right? | ||
| And they both can change their texture and their color. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cuttlefish have less textural changes. | ||
| They're more color-based. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What was the one they did where they had them over a chessboard? | ||
| And it was trying to... | ||
| You ever seen that? | ||
| No. | ||
| Where an octopus is trying to mimic a chessboard? | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| Yeah, it's really weird because it throws their system off because it's so many right angles and it's... | ||
| The hard transition. | ||
| Yeah, the one-zero contrast. | ||
| So when you look at it, like this octopus, like trying to like figure out... | ||
| Right, what to do? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Could you see actual lines in his color? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| I remember it being weird. | ||
| It's a cuttlefish that they did it with. | ||
| Is it a cuttlefish? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's see if we can see it here. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| Pictures are good. | ||
| Yeah, look at that. | ||
| I mean, that's pretty good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like... | |
| Pretty fucking good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, it's got white squares, man. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The goddamn thing's growing white squares. | ||
| It started with the zebra stripes, and then I think maybe it figured out the squares after a couple minutes. | ||
| That's pretty impressive. | ||
| I like the picture in the bottom right there where the guy looks like he's playing chess against the cuttlefish. | ||
| Oh, never mind. | ||
| I thought there was a cuttlefish on the... | ||
| Yeah, just what a strange ability that these animals have figured out. | ||
| How the fuck did that evolve? | ||
| They're devising strategies in order to be more effective predators while they're in the ocean and hide from other predators. | ||
| And they figured out a way to change the color and the texture of their skin. | ||
| How long did that take? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Millions of years. | ||
| It's an endless source of fascination. | ||
| Wildlife documentaries to me are just truly an endless source of fascination. | ||
| I mean, you preach in the choir, but yeah, I think they're phenomenal. | ||
| There's just so much we can learn. | ||
| It's more than just what we learn. | ||
| Oh, that's cool. | ||
| That's a nice fact about an octopus. | ||
| But, you know, we took how we shape jets off of the shape of birds. | ||
| We've taken so much inspiration from nature into our everyday lives. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Squid skin. | ||
| Squid skin. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's crazy looking. | |
| It's like a television. | ||
| Like the pixels on a television. | ||
| I didn't know squid could do that too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa! | |
| This is so weird. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| They're so strange. | ||
| Such a strange, strange animal. | ||
| Well, the ocean is so bizarre in and of itself. | ||
| There's just so many weird creatures in the ocean. | ||
| It's such an alien environment to us as terrestrial mammals. | ||
| Do you remember when the tsunami hit Thailand and then there was all these animals that they were finding that they had never really seen before? | ||
| Washed up on the shores, I remember that, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and they were documenting them. | ||
| There was a whole website dedicated to tsunami deep-sea creatures. | ||
| Oh, I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, it was really... | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Like some of these things that are living, you know, a fucking mile down under the earth. | ||
| And you're like, what? | ||
| What are you? | ||
| And they, I forget what the number was, but they got like 30 or 40 new species or something crazy like that. | ||
| Literally like combing through the streets of the cities where the tsunami had hit. | ||
| God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God. | ||
| Is that a richer source of bioresources, the ocean, of biodiversity, I should say? | ||
| The ocean than Earth? | ||
| Oh, there's more life in the ocean than on terrestrial land, for sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You mean is there more diversity in general? | ||
| Yeah, more weirdness. | ||
| Oh yeah, there's way more. | ||
| I guess it depends how you define weirdness, but look at an octopus, look at a cuttlefish, look at those deep sea creatures, crabs, and all the way into the marine mammals and all the way down to the tiny little insects or isopods that live in the ocean. | ||
| I think the ocean creatures are very bizarre. | ||
| How about those giant squid that they found on that oil tanker? | ||
| Yeah, and they saw that one come through. | ||
| Giant squid with the crazy crab legs? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| The crab legs? | ||
| Maybe not. | ||
| Never see that one? | ||
| With the crab legs? | ||
| Is he walking along the bottom? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's got, like, it looks like it has appendages. | ||
| What? | ||
| Like, with joints. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Haven't seen that. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Oh, I'm going to show you something else. | ||
| I'm learning a lot today. | ||
| I like this. | ||
| Crazy, alien-looking squid. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| I found a... | ||
| The thing about those pictures, they've been gone around multiple times after tsunamis. | ||
| Apparently they don't have anything to do with the tsunami. | ||
| They are real photographs of real strange sea creatures. | ||
| They just didn't wash up on shore after a tsunami. | ||
| But what about the thing that you had saw? | ||
| That's what I heard. | ||
| It came up in 2004 and 2011, the same photos. | ||
| Oh, so people are bullshitting. | ||
| Oh, so it's like a... | ||
| Russians! | ||
| I blame the Russians. | ||
| Go to pull up that alien squid discovered near oil rig. | ||
| So they had a camera deep under this oil rig and they spotted this thing with these insane long appendages. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Oh, whoa. | ||
| Yeah, that's different. | ||
| That's not what I thought you were talking about. | ||
| Look at the fucking length... | ||
| What are those things that dangle from it? | ||
| What would you call those things? | ||
| Tentacles? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Legs? | |
| Tentacles? | ||
| Legs? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| But look at the legs on it. | ||
| It's like an insect. | ||
| Yeah, that's very bizarre. | ||
| See how they have like very obvious bends. | ||
| Video courtesy of Shell Oil Company. | ||
| Doing a good job for nature. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Let me see the deep. | ||
| There's another one. | ||
| Is that another image of it? | ||
| There's another thing. | ||
| But look how weird it is how it has like clear bends. | ||
| Like when you see that thing underwater floating around like that, like that looks like an alien. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| That is our exact kind of depiction of what an alien species is. | ||
| Go to that green one right next to it. | ||
| Yeah, look at that. | ||
| Like look at that thing. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| I mean if you saw that underwater you would shit your pants. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| And it's 100 feet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| I mean is it that big? | ||
| How big they say it was. | ||
| Am I making that up? | ||
| Didn't they say the tentacles go crazy long? | ||
| It looks like it. | ||
| Yeah, they said the thing was enormous, but that the length of the actual tentacles, or whatever the fuck it is, was really long. | ||
| So strange. | ||
| And before they got this video footage of it, they didn't even know something like this was real. | ||
| And there's a lot of those where you get these deep-sea cameras and you're like, oh, there's a species we haven't ever documented before. | ||
| So it's in the Gulf of Mexico. | ||
| They caught it at a depth of 7,800 feet. | ||
| Does it say how big they think it is? | ||
| You can just type in that magnapena squid size. | ||
| Look at the fucking... | ||
| Just how weird it looked. | ||
| The way that the head of it sort of pulsates and moves with the waves. | ||
| It's like a Steven Spielberg creation. | ||
| Yeah, there's that, and then there's also a puppy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, that's how diverse life is. | ||
| Okay, the length is up to 15 to 20 times the mantle. | ||
| 26 feet. | ||
| 26 feet. | ||
| Okay, that's pretty big. | ||
| Or more. | ||
| Or more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, giant octopuses, too, right? | ||
| Giant squids were thought to be bullshit until, like, fairly recently, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know when specifically, but they found a few that have washed up, and then they got some actual footage of some. | ||
| That's what I thought you were talking about on some rigs. | ||
| Which is just crazy. | ||
| What about octopi? | ||
| What's the largest of the octopi? | ||
| The giant Pacific octopus. | ||
| So the species that you saw attacking that eagle, that's not a huge one, but as far as I know, that's the largest one. | ||
| Look at the fucker! | ||
| Look at that thing! | ||
| Look at that dead one! | ||
| That's a giant squid? | ||
| It's a big cephalopod. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| That thing's huge. | ||
| That looks like it's more than 28 feet. | ||
| You stretch that bitch out? | ||
| No, those ones are like 100 plus feet. | ||
| Okay, that's what I'm thinking about. | ||
| The giant squid, yeah. | ||
| 100 plus feet. | ||
| They can get up to that, yeah. | ||
| That is so nuts. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| A hundred foot jelly creature, you know? | ||
| And you know what's interesting is sperm whales will leave the surface of the ocean and dive down to their depths to hunt those. | ||
| Jeez, it must be delicious. | ||
| That's what their teeth are for. | ||
| Calamari, bro. | ||
| It's a lot of calamari. | ||
| Calamari's good. | ||
| Look at that fucker. | ||
| So weird. | ||
| So the large Pacific octopus, how big, giant Pacific octopus, how big does that guy get? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, you know, because they're fan out. | ||
| So I'm not sure. | ||
| Maybe five feet long, six feet long. | ||
| But heavy, like 40, 50, 60 pounds, something like that. | ||
| They've got a really big one at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really cool one. | ||
| Oh, I've been to that. | ||
| I've been to that aquarium back in the day. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The legend of the Kraken, like, they used to think that that was all total horseshit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Until they found some fossilized cups. | ||
| They found some suction cups that were, you know, some fossilized evidence of enormous cups. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That they think are indicative of this, you know, real hundred-foot octopus or huge fucking octopus. | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| Or just a hundred-foot squid on the surface. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like you said, those stories always get embellished. | ||
| So even if it was a 60-foot squid on the surface, say it was injured or dying, and it was alive, and the boat hit it, and it starts slapping the boat with its tentacles. | ||
| Hi, mate! | ||
| It's the Kraken! | ||
| Like, that's not going to turn into a crazy sea fable. | ||
| Can you imagine, though, if you were one of those dudes that was, like, making your way across the ocean and you, you know, in the 1100s or some shit, and you jump in the water to wash off and you get eaten by a giant octopus in front of your friends? | ||
| Yeah, that's... | ||
| You see something come out of the desk. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And it eats you with a beak. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Chomps you. | ||
| It's literally suction cups that rip you apart. | ||
|
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|
Oh. | |
| It's crazy. | ||
| And it's totally possible that those things were huge. | ||
| We just don't have the fossil evidence because they're all made out of jelly. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| You know, they're just like... | ||
| They don't fossilize. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All you get is like, if you... | ||
| Those fossilized images of the... | ||
| The cups is just because it left an imprint in some sort of soil or something at the bottom of the ocean. | ||
| So you like these kind of far out there ideas. | ||
| How do you like this idea? | ||
| There's a group of people that say that dragons were real. | ||
| And I'll explain. | ||
| Ooh. | ||
| So, around the same time period, so to speak, and I'm not one of these people, so I'm probably going to get the details wrong a little bit. | ||
| It's like a Matthew McConaughey movie right now. | ||
| Yeah, seriously. | ||
| So, around the same time period in China, South America, Africa, Rome, all these places, images depicted people fighting dragons, right? | ||
| And every dragon was slightly different, but it was all a giant, scaly animal that could fly. | ||
| So, when you break that down, you think about the fact that large birds had a hard time being fossilized because their bones are so porous, right? | ||
| So, because bones, they have like hollowish bones, they break down very easily and they don't fossilize. | ||
| So, the group that says this... | ||
| Basically, they're saying the evidence is the reason there's no fossils of dragons is because they had bird bones and they were actually very delicate animals. | ||
| But a handful of these small population of these giant flying lizards existed and basically encompassed all these different countries where they all depicted fighting dragons in their own way and they were all killed off by knights or whatever it is and then didn't fossilize. | ||
| What? | ||
| So it's like the science is saying that if there were lizards big enough to fly around and eat people, they didn't have bones that could fossilize. | ||
| So it'd be like an eagle. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's why all these human populations around the world have depictions of them, because they did actually exist. | ||
| Now, are there any stories of dragons, like, written, like, in the times of people that actually had the written word, or is it just depictions? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Not in my field. | ||
| That would be interesting, because, like, are these depictions, like, ancient accounts told by generation after generation, like, passed down? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know anything about dragons or whether it's real, but I think it's interesting to think... | ||
| Oh, well, the science supports that if there were flying lizards, their bones wouldn't have fossilized, and these have been stories that have been exaggerated and passed down from generation to generation. | ||
| And some of them breathe fire, but some of them don't, depending upon which culture it was significant to. | ||
| I wonder what the fire is supposed to represent. | ||
| Or are they just... | ||
| People are full of shit. | ||
| Probably that one. | ||
| Yeah, it probably made it sound even cooler. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
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Not only did I kill him, he was trying to burn me. | |
| Do you think that... | ||
| Do you hold any weight? | ||
| Do you think that holds any weight? | ||
|
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No. | |
| Like, there's actually dragons? | ||
| I mean, we know there were large flying lizards during the times of dinosaurs, right? | ||
| The only weight that it could possibly hold is that a few of those somehow survived much later than we previously thought. | ||
| But do I think that there were dragons attacking human beings and civilizations? | ||
| No, I don't. | ||
| But it's still interesting. | ||
| It's so much cooler if there were. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The fact that we know that pterodactyls did exist, that's cool. | ||
| It would be way cooler if they existed with people. | ||
| Right, 2,000 years ago. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
|
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Why is that? | |
| Why is that so much cooler to us? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's like, I would be, I would, I mean, people would dedicate giant chunks of their life trying to find out if pterodactyls did coexist with human beings at one point in time. | ||
| They really would. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Many of you, there was a hundred foot pterodactyl snatching kids. | ||
| It would be terrifying. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Well, do you know about the Moa Eagle? | ||
| Yeah, the host eagle? | ||
| The host, exactly. | ||
| I call it Moa eagle because they used to attack Moas with the host eagle. | ||
| They weren't that big. | ||
| No, but they did supposedly snatch Maori children. | ||
| Yeah, but when I googled it, I remember, I think the large ones were like 40 pounds or something like that. | ||
| I don't think they were that big. | ||
| Is that all it is? | ||
| Yeah, like an eagle is really light. | ||
| Right, but their wingspan is still enormous. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they have incredible power. | ||
| Like, when you see an eagle snatch a salmon with its claws and fly away with this 10-pound salmon in its claws, I mean, that's insane. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Because that salmon probably weighs more than it. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Like, birds are weird, right? | ||
| They sit on you like, oh, you're not very heavy. | ||
| No, they don't weigh anything. | ||
| And again, that goes back to that whole hollow bone type thing. | ||
| Right, that's why chickens are strange, because they're fat. | ||
| They weigh a lot. | ||
| Like, you pick up a chicken, you're like, you fat fuck, you're trying to fly. | ||
| But bird, like a hawk, fairly light, for what it is. | ||
| Yeah, I think, what was the biggest host eagle? | ||
| How big was the host eagle? | ||
| But they were hunted by people, because they posed a threat. | ||
| And because people hunted the moa to extinction, that giant bird that the host eagle primarily preyed on, and so the two-fold kind of made them collapse. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Large, gigantic, ancient things. | ||
| Eight and a half. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Wingspan for a female is typically 8.5 feet, possibly up to 10 in a few cases. | ||
| Why female? | ||
| I'm trying to talk about dudes, bro. | ||
| That's just the first thing I see. | ||
| I want to know about the big dudes. | ||
| Males, 25 pounds. | ||
| Females, 31 pounds. | ||
| Oh, females are bigger. | ||
| Females are bigger. | ||
| Atriarchal society. | ||
| Largest female could have been 36 pounds in mass. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's not that big. | ||
| But a 10-foot wingspan is pretty huge. | ||
| Oh, huge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, talons, they've got, I don't know, but they had to have been enormous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Flying knives. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you've seen the videos that the Mongols use where they train golden eagles to kill wolves. | ||
| And they fly down. | ||
| And they shoot them out. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| They fuck up wolves. | ||
| They're way smaller than a wolf. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And the wolf has zero chance. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They swoop down and grab a wolf by the back of the neck and just fuck them up. | ||
| Isn't it crazy? | ||
| The wolf's like, trying to get away, and they're just killing them. | ||
| And I believe, maybe it's not Mongolian culture, but one of those, you know, falconry cultures, you have to, like, as a teenage boy or something like that, your rite of passage is to go climb the cliff and take the chick out of the nest. | ||
| And it's like this crazy process where, you know, a number of kids die trying to get to the eagle chick, and the ones that come back, that's their bird for however long the bird lives. | ||
| I don't really know the whole process. | ||
| That's right out of Avatar. | ||
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's bananas. | ||
| You gotta steal the chick from the next and raise it? | ||
| Who figured that out? | ||
| Who figured out you're going to train a fucking raptor? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Like, how weird are people that they figure these things out? | ||
| And someone was the first. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Someone was like, I'm going to go get that baby bird. | ||
| You know what he probably did? | ||
| He probably got high off that honey. | ||
| He said, I'm going to keep climbing. | ||
| I'm going to get me a fucking bird and have a bird do all the hunting. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Everyone's like, you're crazy, man. | ||
| Bro, you can't have a bird do the hunting. | ||
| When I was in Venice this summer, there was a guy that had a hawk. | ||
| That he had trained that was sitting on his arm, that he would stand there to keep the pigeons from disturbing all the customers that were eating in this restaurant. | ||
| No way. | ||
| Yeah, because the pigeons in Venice were so aggressive that this place we were staying at called the Gritty Palace, which is this beautiful old hotel in Rome, or in Venice, rather. | ||
| And now, up until really recently, I think the water subsided, but it was under four feet of water in the lobby. | ||
| I saw the flooding, yeah. | ||
| Shit's changing. | ||
| Got to get out of there, folks. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But this guy was standing there as we arrived with a hawk on his arm. | ||
| And I think it was an American hawk that he had trained in just to keep these pigeons on check. | ||
| Because the pigeons would see the hawk and be like, fuck this! | ||
| And they'd just get out of there. | ||
| Would he send them, or he was just standing there all day? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe he did, which would have been dope. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I would have loved it to see a hawk jack a pigeon while I'm eating linguine with clams. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're like, well, this is perfect, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, look at this hawk. | ||
| No, this is perfect. | ||
| Falcons. | ||
| Oh, these are Falcons. | ||
| These guys are... | ||
| Planes. | ||
| They take them on the planes. | ||
| Are these emotional support Falcons? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| It literally says, plane with emotional support Falcons. | ||
| Here's one with a lot of them on there. | ||
| What? | ||
| I don't know if they're transporting them or where they're going. | ||
| What the fuck out of here? | ||
| Imagine being on that flight. | ||
| You'd be like, listen, man, I'm going to wait for the next flight. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I'm not flying with a bunch of fucking birds that are wearing masks over their head. | ||
| They have execution hoods over their heads. | ||
| It does look like that. | ||
| So strange. | ||
| But humans are so weird in our ability to domesticate and capture animals. | ||
| But there is evidence that other animals do it too. | ||
| Have you ever seen the baboons that raise dogs? | ||
| I know what you're talking about. | ||
| Yeah, there's a couple different primates that have basically had pets. | ||
| They steal dogs and then bring the dogs and feed them and put them in the camp because the dogs will bark when things are coming so they can sleep. | ||
| So they can eat and sleep. | ||
| So the hyenas just hang out with these dogs. | ||
| So the dogs become like their buddies. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| But they steal them and they literally know that if they get this dog and bring it over here and then feed it, the dog will be like their guard dog. | ||
| This is my pet. | ||
| Yeah, which is what we think happened with humans and wolves, which sort of fostered this relationship with people and dogs. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| These hyenas have figured that out. | ||
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| What the fuck, man? | ||
| How are hyenas figuring that out? | ||
| Have you read any of Sapolsky's work on baboons? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Robert Sapolsky is a fascinating guy. | ||
| He's out of Stanford. | ||
| I found out about Sapolsky initially because I became obsessed with toxoplasmosis. | ||
| That's that cat parasite that alters the behavior of rodents and makes them attracted to cat urine. | ||
| It actually makes the rodents erect their testicles and their scrotum enlarges and engorges with blood when they smell Cat urine. | ||
| They become sexually aroused by the smell of cat urine. | ||
| So this makes them get eaten by cats because the only place where this parasite can grow and breed and reproduce is inside the gut of a cat. | ||
| so it's crazy so it rewires the rodents sexual reward system and makes them lose all their fear of cats not just all their fear but they become sexually aroused by cat urine so they run around and actually chase cats like you see cats they're just like trying to get the away from these rats that have toxo that's insane right so then it gets in the cat and then it gets in the people And Sapolsky, | ||
| when he was studying, he found, I think he was doing his residency, one of the doctors he was working with was telling them when they get a motorcycle patient in, check them for toxo. | ||
| Because there's a giant percentage of the population on Earth is infected with toxoplasmosis. | ||
| And this toxoplasmosis gandhi apparently... | ||
| It changes human behavior, and it makes people more reckless. | ||
| And there's a direct correlation between motorcycle accidents and infection with toxoplasmosis. | ||
| And they think that what happens is, look at this rat. | ||
| This rat is sexually attracted to this cat. | ||
| So this rat is running on these cats. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| He's running towards them. | ||
| That's nuts. | ||
| They don't know what the fuck to do. | ||
| Look, he's running on top of the cat. | ||
|
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Look at him. | |
| Jeez Louise. | ||
| He's on his back, and the cat's like, what the fuck is going on? | ||
| Like, look at this. | ||
| Look at him. | ||
| Yeah, that's nuts. | ||
| That's so strange. | ||
| Their whole brain is rewired because of this parasite. | ||
| So then the parasite gets in people. | ||
| It makes people more aggressive. | ||
| It makes them more impulsive. | ||
| And they think that that's related to the disproportionate number of motorcycle accidents that are connected to people that are toxoplasmosis positive. | ||
| So they have this infection and they just take risks. | ||
| And they wind up crashing. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| What a crazy correlation to put those together. | ||
| In some countries, the rate of infection is crazy. | ||
| Like in France, at one point in time, it was more than 50%. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| More than 50% of the population was positive for toxoplasmosis. | ||
| And they think that, I don't know what the number is now, but they think that in the United States, more than 50 million people No way! | ||
| Yes, more than 50 million people test positive. | ||
| Is it cat owners? | ||
| Yes, cat owners or people who live in rural populations where there's feral cats and they step in the shit and then the shit gets in their skin or they eat something that has eaten this cat shit or the cat shit infects the cows. | ||
| There's all sorts of different methods of infection, but the thing about it is it's not fatal. | ||
| But it does have these marked behavioral changes in human hosts. | ||
| Massive changes in rodent hosts. | ||
| Nothing to the cat. | ||
| The cat seems to have no noticeable change in cat behavior. | ||
| But the gut of the cat is where they breed. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| They reproduce inside a cat's digestive system. | ||
| And the only way they get in there is by tricking a rat to try to go near a cat. | ||
| To hump a cat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What? | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| So Sapolsky did a bunch of work with baboons and these ruthless, vicious baboon tribes. | ||
| And one of the things they found was that these certain baboons started eating human food because they started eating at dumpster sites. | ||
| And they got poisoned by, you know, poison food. | ||
| Like the food was bad or it was infected with a disease. | ||
| And the alphas were the first to eat, right? | ||
| So these alphas died. | ||
| And so the ruthless, vicious, bully hyenas, or not hyenas, I said hyenas, I meant baboons. | ||
| You said that earlier, too. | ||
| Did I say hyenas earlier? | ||
| You're good, I gotcha. | ||
| I blame the weed. | ||
| It's goddamn weed. | ||
| Baboons, sorry. | ||
| Baboon populations are the ones that had the dogs, right? | ||
| I said that, but I didn't say hyenas raised dogs. | ||
| You slipped one hyena in there, but I gotcha. | ||
| I was following. | ||
| Trying to keep up with biologists. | ||
| So the baboons raised the dogs. | ||
| The baboons, the alpha baboons that Sapolsky worked with were eating this poison food and the alphas died. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they were left with a bunch of beta baboons. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And these beta baboons changed their behavior. | ||
| So they stopped being ruthless to each other. | ||
| They started grooming each other. | ||
| And it lasted like several generations. | ||
| So he would return to Africa to study these baboon populations. | ||
| And there was a complete shift in baboon culture. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he's got this really great speech on it where he goes into depth about how extraordinary it is. | ||
| We thought this was just how baboons existed and behaved, and they completely changed. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's attributed down to one individual. | ||
| Well, it's attributed to several that died off because they were eating this poison food. | ||
| And then the ones that remained were like the ones that used to getting bullied. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Let's just be cool with each other. | ||
| Softer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they became a different kind of baboon population. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they got like really sick and fat from all the human food. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| It's really unhealthy. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| There's a lot of that globally, you know, these populations of primates that depend on human food. | ||
| Have you ever seen the famous, like, obese monkey? | ||
| There's a famous obese macaque. | ||
| They put him in fat camp. | ||
| They put him in monkey fat camp. | ||
| No. | ||
| He's pretty funny. | ||
| What was he eating? | ||
| Human garbage, basically. | ||
| But he... | ||
| There he is. | ||
| Oh, that's real? | ||
| It's literally on my page, yeah. | ||
| I've seen that picture. | ||
| That's real? | ||
| That's real. | ||
| I forget his name. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| He's so fat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh yeah, and look at the one behind him super fat. | ||
| Like, they're just eating human trash and getting absolutely obese. | ||
| But it looks like someone's feeding them, because that human trash is cut up cooked corn. | ||
| That corn looks really... | ||
| They are, and I think they've restricted it wherever this was. | ||
| And it is sad, because it's basically a form of animal cruelty. | ||
| You know, you're just making them enormous. | ||
| But, uh, it's... | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, look at it. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| Yeah, they're a fat fuck. | ||
| He's got a lot of corn there, though. | ||
| He's not aggressive towards anyone. | ||
| No, he's chilling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Monkeys will fuck you up, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Primates are... | ||
| Baboons are terrible. | ||
| I mean, they can be super aggressive. | ||
| And old primates, I mean, they're sweet by nature, but if you're a threat to them, they can be terrible. | ||
| Yeah, but those little monkeys will steal shit from you, too. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Steal your phone. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Try to get it back. | ||
| They'll kick your ass. | ||
| My partner in production and I have this ongoing joke where we say we're going to make a show called Monkeys are Assholes, and it's just a show traveling the world where monkeys pickpocket and bully people and jump on trains and steal stuff. | ||
| Well, they exhibit some of the worst aspects of human behavior. | ||
| We see how monkeys behave. | ||
| Well, chimps, we love chimps, right? | ||
| Chimps are adorable when you see them in movies. | ||
| They're adorable in concept, but they're absolutely vicious and ruthless, including to each other. | ||
| They gang up, and they'll wage war, and they'll go capture a neighboring chimp and kill him. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| No, they're brutal. | ||
| I mean, they're like a step backwards from human beings. | ||
| You look at how they behave and you're like, oh, if we had no social order, no structure, no laws, nothing, this is kind of what we'd be like. | ||
| But what's amazing is that we coexist. | ||
| What's amazing is that we get to see, oh, this is probably our past. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, what was it like back when humans, like, you know, Australopithecus, we were like barely removed from monkeys. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And hanging around with them. | ||
| Like, how did we figure it out? | ||
| And they didn't. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, at some point it was like, oh, if we collaborate, we benefit more, right? | ||
| And they were like, if we fight, we benefit more. | ||
| And it's just kind of diverged from that. | ||
| Well, that's what's interesting to me is how some animals, their progress or their evolution remains stagnant like crocodiles. | ||
| They're essentially the same way they were tens of millions of years ago. | ||
| Whereas humans, it's this market change over the last half a million years, a spectacular change. | ||
| Or two million years ago, the doubling of the human brain size really quickly. | ||
| Special moments in evolution. | ||
| But then other things don't grow at all. | ||
| But then you have these lions that get trapped on this island. | ||
| They go, okay, we've got to get way bigger. | ||
|
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|
Right. | |
| And we've got to fuck up these buffaloes. | ||
| It's the only thing we can eat. | ||
| You can't fuck up a buffalo if you're little. | ||
| And the bigger survived, and those are the ones that bred. | ||
| I mean, it's so interesting to see how this stuff sort of plays out. | ||
| And that we're studying it, and really over the last only few hundred years, we're really getting an understanding of it. | ||
| Even less than that. | ||
| I mean, we're really only starting to understand it on a big picture now. | ||
|
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|
Wow. | |
| Yeah, it is amazing. | ||
| And everything in between, like you said, these crocodiles reaching their pinnacle of evolution tens of millions of years ago and us constantly evolving. | ||
| It's just, it's insane. | ||
| The world, the living world is so fascinating. | ||
| Have you ever seen the video of these people? | ||
| They're in a crocodile park and they're feeding these crocodiles and this lady's like chucking chickens, like chickens out. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And then the one crocodile bites the other crocodile's leg off. | ||
| And does the death roll and the leg comes straight off. | ||
| And the other one barely even moves. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| His leg comes off and he's like, what the fuck, bro? | ||
| It doesn't even move. | ||
| It doesn't react in pain. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I know the exact video you're talking about. | ||
| It went totally viral. | ||
| He just rolls and the leg just pops right off. | ||
| Swallows his foot. | ||
| Swallows his buddy's foot like fucking A. It's nuts. | ||
| It's absolutely nuts. | ||
| That is a cleanup machine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's a 65 million year old cleanup machine. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And they figured out, this is a great, it's like a hammer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know how to make a hammer, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's no new hammers. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| Hammer's like, this is it. | ||
| There's a stick, and then the end, there's a metal thing, and bang, bang, bang. | ||
| It's a hammer. | ||
| That's a hammer. | ||
| And it's a perfect tool. | ||
| Yeah, it's perfect. | ||
| I mean, there's different size hammers. | ||
| You've got a caiman. | ||
| You've got a Nile crocodile. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| That is a very good analogy. | ||
| I'm going to use that the next time that someone asks me to explain that because that's genius. | ||
| This is a hammer. | ||
| It's like they nailed it. | ||
| There's no reason to make another knife. | ||
| Knives are knives. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the strap edge, handle at the bottom, got it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's exactly right. | ||
| Now, I love crocodilians. | ||
| I think they're just so interesting. | ||
| I don't know if I told you the story. | ||
| When we were in Myanmar, we were retracing the Ramry Massacre. | ||
| Are you familiar with the Ramry Massacre? | ||
| No. | ||
| You'll love this. | ||
| So during World War II, when the Japanese were holding Ramri Island in Burma, Myanmar, the Allies came in and started making the Japanese retreat. | ||
| In the course of like two days, a thousand Japanese soldiers were eaten by crocodiles, by saltwater crocodiles. | ||
|
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|
What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So they were retreating in two days. | ||
| I mean, some reports say it was over a couple weeks, but the general consensus is a thousand soldiers were eaten by crocodiles in a very short amount of time. | ||
| And it was this kind of perfect storm of situations where, because there were all these soldiers, they were eating all the prey, all the crocodiles were particularly hungry because of that. | ||
| When the Allies pushed all the Japanese back into the swamps, you know, they started screaming, and one scream would trigger all the others, like all the crocodiles, to get into a frenzy, and it just wiped out this entire populace of people that ran through the swamp. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we went and retraced these steps to figure it out. | ||
| We're like, why did this happen? | ||
| To try and understand it better. | ||
| And while we were there, this kid got attacked by a crocodile that was 100 years old. | ||
| So probably the same animal that had eaten people during World War I or one of them, right? | ||
| And we saved this kid's life. | ||
| Like we got to the village and he had just been pulled out from this croc attack. | ||
| His arm was broken in like 25 places. | ||
| He was torn up. | ||
| He had lacerations all over his leg, his ankle, his arm. | ||
| How'd you get him out of the crocodile's mouth? | ||
| We didn't. | ||
| So he fought off the crocodile, basically, and then the buddy he was with fishing pulled him into the boat and got him back to the village. | ||
| What a savage that kid is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Totally. | |
| He fought off a fucking crocodile? | ||
| And a big one. | ||
| How did he do it? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| We were so focused on saving the kid because myself and one other guy had medical training, so we were stopping the bleeding and bandaging him up, and we had the only speedboat. | ||
| Because we had to get to this island, and this is very, very remote. | ||
| So we got this kid on the speedboat and got him back to a hospital, and he lived. | ||
| I think he lost the arm, but, you know, he was just going to bleed out and die right there in the village. | ||
| A hundred-year-old crocodile. | ||
| There probably was one of the crocodiles that ate the Japanese people. | ||
| During the massacre. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God damn. | ||
| My friend Jim Shockey was in Africa, and they had hired him to hunt crocodiles that were terrorizing this one village. | ||
| These people had fenced off this area where they could get water and clean, and crocodiles had figured out a way to get through that. | ||
| And everyone in the village had a bite mark here, a missing hand, a bite on their head. | ||
| So many people had lost loved ones and friends. | ||
| While he was there, a woman who was washing clothes got killed by a crocodile while he was in the village. | ||
| And these are Nile crocodiles. | ||
| These enormous, 20-foot-long-plus huge killing machines. | ||
| And these are, you know, I try and dispel anybody that says to me, oh, these animals were hunting people. | ||
| And I'm like, no, they were not. | ||
| Crocodiles are. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Crocodiles will hunt human beings. | ||
| They will lock in outside of a small village or an area that someone's collecting water. | ||
| They'll spend weeks watching, studying the pattern, learning the behavior, and just wait for the perfect time where they can sink under, sit right there waiting for someone to gather water. | ||
| In my opinion, they're not distinguishing that from another prey animal. | ||
| They just know this thing's coming to water here at this pattern, and they will absolutely target people. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| They don't care if you're a person. | ||
|
unidentified
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Exactly. | |
| That's the weird thing about people. | ||
| We feel like we have some sort of a deal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, they're not really after you. | ||
| Sharks aren't after people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, what are you talking to sharks? | ||
| They're trying to eat, yeah. | ||
| Do you have a treaty with sharks? | ||
| Like, what are you talking about, man? | ||
| You know, like, people have this weird thing about animals, you know? | ||
| And, you know, when animals find out how easy we are to eat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then it becomes a real problem. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Lions of Savo, right? | ||
| Those famous lions. | ||
| They were targeting people. | ||
| The Ghost in the Darkness. | ||
| That's a great movie. | ||
| Fantastic movie. | ||
| And they were targeting people. | ||
| They knew that people were easy prey, and they're like, cool, we're going to keep eating them. | ||
| Once they get a few meals... | ||
| And they're like, not bad. | ||
| And fucking real easy to catch. | ||
| That's right, yeah. | ||
| It's the opposite of fast food. | ||
| Yeah, we're like mussels growing on the beach. | ||
| Just pluck them. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's, you know, about the Sundarbans in India? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's a crazy place. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| I did a bit about that in my act as well, back in 2009, my Comedy Central special, where over a period of 200 years, I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 people have been killed by tigers in the Sundarbans. | ||
| Isn't that nuts? | ||
| I mean, it's just like that number, it's unfathomable. | ||
| There was a story that I talked about in that set where there was a boat filled with five guys and one tiger swam out to the boat, killed a guy, dragged his body to the shore, jumped back in the water, swam out to the boat, killed another guy. | ||
| Did it with three different guys until he got tired of killing people. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Killed three people in a boat of five. | ||
| So these two guys lost three of their friends, just shit in their pants. | ||
| They swim. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
| Tigers are crazy. | ||
| And what's crazy about the Sunday barns, too, is there's saltwater crocodiles. | ||
| There's tigers. | ||
| There's bear. | ||
| I mean, there's elephants. | ||
| Yeah, there's Asiatic sun bear there. | ||
| It's just like, it's just got, it's this crazy little habitat. | ||
| And I know a couple photographers that have been in there, and they're like, you don't see anything. | ||
| It's like huge, tall tufts of grass. | ||
| You know, everything can hide perfectly. | ||
| And it's all there. | ||
| And you just don't see it coming. | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| And a bunch of people that are living in these huts and these villages. | ||
| They have no protection. | ||
| But you said something earlier today about how your friend projected the wolf howl into the... | ||
| Not my friend, that guy in that thing we watched. | ||
| Oh, sorry, that weird wolf guy. | ||
| The wolf guy. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| The wolf expert. | ||
| But what I... I love... | ||
| I find that those non-conflict mitigations are going to be the wave of the future, right? | ||
| Using technology to come up with biocontrols, like a wolf growl to other wolves, or an alarming sound, or a smell that animals don't want to interfere because of territories, I think that stuff's fascinating. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| It really is interesting. | ||
| And I think one of the cool things about all this wildlife is that if we handle it correctly, we can make sure that these things are sustainable and they stay around and we can still just marvel at their presence. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it is possible to keep wolves here. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's possible to keep grizzly bears here. | ||
| It's possible to keep all these things here. | ||
| And we really, really, really, really should. | ||
| Because if you go back in time... | ||
| I mean, how amazing would it be if we could go back in time and see saber-toothed tigers? | ||
| It'd be incredible. | ||
| To be able to see some of these animals that you only see depictions of or you see skulls of, you know, that were caught in the La Brea tar pits or something like... | ||
| We have those things right now. | ||
| We have a lot of them. | ||
| And we can save them. | ||
| And we have the knowledge, the power, the technology, the tools, the finance. | ||
| We have all the pieces of the puzzle to make it work. | ||
| Well, I think that's one of the really cool things about what you do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| and you let people know and you have a big signal and you show people all this cool stuff like that tortoise that you found or like all these other different animals and you let people know like this is interesting, this is exciting, and it's something that it's like, it's in our DNA to be fascinated by other life forms. | ||
| - Right, and it's worth saving. - Yes. - You know, like we don't wanna be sitting here, our great grandkids, Joe, sitting at the same table, you know, a hundred years from now going, "Man, imagine if we could have seen a grizzly bear." We don't want that. | ||
| Well, we still have them here in California. | ||
| It's in our state flag. | ||
| It's in our flag, the golden grizzly. | ||
| Yeah, but there's not a single one left. | ||
| No, there's not. | ||
| They killed all those fuckers. | ||
| Possibly, I don't want to get down a weird rabbit hole here, possibly in Mexico. | ||
| The silver grizzly bear in the high Mexican Sierras. | ||
| What? | ||
| Ongoing reports of grizzlies. | ||
| So the same species that would have been here, right, that hung out in the Sierras, traveling all the way down into the Sierra Madres of Mexico, and then in these, what they call sky islands, if you're familiar with that term. | ||
| I'll explain in a second. | ||
| These islands of isolated habitat up in the sky where they get more rainfall and everything else. | ||
| There's big tracts of private land down there in Mexico where a couple of these farmers are like, something's killing my cattle and it's not a mountain lion. | ||
| And it could potentially be like half a dozen Mexican grizzly bears. | ||
| Couldn't it be jaguars though? | ||
| Could be, but they're saying it's not cats. | ||
| There's like reported sightings of seeing bears. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And if you look up the Mexican grizzly bear, you know, it was declared extinct 20 years before another one was killed. | ||
| So like, nah, they're gone. | ||
| They're declared extinct. | ||
| Then 20 years later, some guy shoots one. | ||
| Google Mexican grizzly bear. | ||
| I need to see this. | ||
| So what'd you say? | ||
| I'm trying to find some, like, this just shows pictures of grizzly bears and stuff, so I'm trying to find, like... | ||
| You can add the word silver in my... | ||
| Why silver? | ||
| I think it's just the fur color. | ||
| Oh, so they have, like, a silvery color to them? | ||
| Like, oh, wow. | ||
| It's a black and white photo here, so... | ||
| It's hard to tell. | ||
| What? | ||
| Those are real? | ||
| These are stuff in Chicago, but they're from Mexico. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what year is this? | ||
| It's probably World Fair time. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| 1899, this is. | ||
| But take a look at when the last one was killed, and then if you can find it, see where it says they were extinct, and it's many, many years later. | ||
| We took this one on a parade of some sort. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Look at that fucker. | ||
| 1960? | ||
| 1960s, yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| So it might be possible that that thing is still alive somewhere. | ||
| There are reports floating in. | ||
| And I mean, the 60s, that's not long ago, right? | ||
| So, you know, there's reports that on these giant tracts of private land up in these mountains, there's potentially a very small population of Mexican grizzly bears. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Which I think is fascinating. | ||
| And it's one of those things that I don't think it's like so crazy that I don't think anybody's gone and looked. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like if some rancher who owns half a million acres in Mexico is like, yeah, I've got a bear killing my cows. | ||
| It's like, sure you do. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But maybe he does. | ||
| Like who's gone to investigate up in the high mountain peak areas of this million acre ranch? | ||
| Well, there's not supposed to be grizzly bears in Colorado, but my friend Adam Greentree, who is a very experienced outdoorsman, he was hunting in the San Juan Mountains, and he got a grizzly bear filmed on camera. and he got a grizzly bear filmed on camera. | ||
| He's looking at it through a scope, and he documented it on his Instagram page, and he's like, that is a fucking grizzly bear. | ||
| And there's sightings of them from the past. | ||
| That was when he was getting chased by one, but that was in, I believe that was in either Idaho or Wyoming, places where they're known about grizzly bears. | ||
| His sighting of... | ||
| This is when he's holding up a gun and a female kept bluff charging him. | ||
| See her standing there in the background? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| She's not happy. | ||
| Not happy. | ||
| Fuck that. | ||
| Wasn't his gun not right? | ||
| No, his gun, he had the wrong caliber bullet in his gun, so it didn't really load all the way into the pistol. | ||
| And he didn't know that until after this altercation. | ||
| So even if he had pulled the trigger, nothing would have happened. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No bueno. | ||
| But she bluff charged him. | ||
| She got within like 30 feet a couple of times. | ||
| Did I show you that lion that we were extracting DNA from in Zimbabwe? | ||
| Did I tell you about this? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Dude, this was pretty nuts. | ||
| So in... | ||
| Late last year, I was tracking this giant lion that this friend of mine had told me that he'd seen in this Limpopo Valley of Zimbabwe, like just north of the South African border. | ||
| And we surmised that there was a potential that this animal, because it was so big, it had such unique behavior in the fact that it was hunting buffalo and even juvenile elephants, might have remnant cape lion DNA in it. | ||
| Because the cape lion is this extinct subspecies of African lion, it was bigger than your regular lion, and they would follow the elephant migrations north and then back south, but generally they hung out in South Africa. | ||
| Anyway, long story short, we wanted to test the DNA of this lion to see if it had any cape lion DNA in it, and it was this one individual animal. | ||
| So we tracked it for over a week, hung bait every night, did the collars, did everything that you do to get a lion in. | ||
| And then finally, this massive black-maned lion came in, and I darted it from about 30 feet away from a blind. | ||
| 30 feet? | ||
| But wait, it gets worse. | ||
| I was in a blind, so I felt kind of safe, right? | ||
| But when I hit it, I had dosed for... | ||
| And it wasn't even me. | ||
| We had a vet with us. | ||
| He had dosed for a regular-sized African lion. | ||
| So the animal takes off running as I hit in the back of your quarters. | ||
| And we trot after it on foot looking for it. | ||
| And we get up to it. | ||
| And we're like, oh, he's down. | ||
| Okay, time to do our workup. | ||
| And I start walking up to it to check it, as you do when you've tracked an animal. | ||
| I get, Joe, from me to that television, the big one right there. | ||
| And it pops up. | ||
| And it's like, hello. | ||
| It's not all the way asleep. | ||
| And I just dropped to the ground and just go limp, right? | ||
| Because I'm like, crap, he's going to come and kill me. | ||
| And fortunately, he was drugged up enough, even though he wasn't asleep, to just kind of not know where I was. | ||
| And didn't really charge, but growled and came forward a step or two. | ||
| And then kind of turned off and laid back down again. | ||
| Then we got another tranq into him and he went to sleep. | ||
| But it was really scary. | ||
| How big was he? | ||
| I think there's a... | ||
| Do you want to show them the picture on my page? | ||
| Huge. | ||
| I mean, I don't know lion weights or points or, you know, any of the hunting stats, but... | ||
| But unusually large. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Biggest one I've ever seen, and I grew up there. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| Did you get the DNA, and did they run the tests? | ||
| We did, and there was a 14% discrepancy. | ||
| No, it's not... | ||
| This is the tortoise, actually. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was a lion. | |
| Oh. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Right here? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Why is it running that? | ||
| No. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| No, I think this is just an ad and I just, sorry, I just used the line. | ||
| I scrolled down a little ways. | ||
| Keep going down. | ||
| You got a fucking awesome Instagram page, man. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| So cool. | ||
| You got so much cool imagery. | ||
| Yeah, it's a little further down. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I don't mean to make you go forever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No worries. | |
| But it was huge. | ||
| I mean, it was just... | ||
| You'll find it. | ||
| It's down a little ways. | ||
| So you said there was a 14% discrepancy? | ||
| Between it and regular South African lion DNA. So there's something off. | ||
| So there's something off. | ||
| So we couldn't quite figure out what it was. | ||
| We drew blood. | ||
| We took hair clippings. | ||
| And the latest is, you know, I'm not a geneticist, but the latest is that sample has been sent down to South Africa to run against cape lion DNA to try and figure out what the discrepancy is. | ||
| But yeah, there was a discrepancy. | ||
| So there is something unique and unusual about this. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Something unique and unusual. | ||
| Got it there? | ||
| No? | ||
| Let me see if I can find it. | ||
| How long ago do you think this image would be? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| A year ago? | ||
| Two years ago? | ||
| No, it shouldn't be that long ago. | ||
| It should be just a couple weeks ago because it only came on a couple weeks ago. | ||
| Let me see if I can find it quickly. | ||
| It's a big, big animal. | ||
| And I've got it on my phone. | ||
| Otherwise, I know this is boring for viewers. | ||
| No, don't worry about it. | ||
| But it's just this massive lion. | ||
| And to have him charge me on foot, it was pretty terrifying. | ||
| So you're talking about something that's twice the size of a normal lion? | ||
| I would say like one and a half. | ||
| 25%? | ||
| Yeah, 25% to 50% larger. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I mean, the paws were just... | ||
| It's just... | ||
| Yeah, I'll show you on my phone. | ||
| I can send it to you guys. | ||
| But it's just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Huge. | |
| Huge. | ||
| Big, black mane. | ||
| Unbelievable animal. | ||
| We'll get you to airdrop it to Jamie. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If you got the image. | ||
| Yeah, I got it here. | ||
| Sorry, Jamie. | ||
| Maybe I didn't end up putting the actual images. | ||
| Yeah, that's the first line I see on your... | ||
| Yeah, sorry about that. | ||
| You might not put it on Instagram? | ||
| Is that even possible? | ||
| In this day and age? | ||
| Well, you have so much cool shit on Instagram, you probably forgot. | ||
| I do lose track. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, your Instagram is just all like crocodiles and monkeys and gorillas and shit. | ||
| So much wildlife. | ||
| It's lots of fun. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| I got it here. | ||
| Where did you eat that food that you sent me? | ||
| You sent me a picture of some delicious elk that you were eating. | ||
| Dude, so the elk came from... | ||
| Remember we were talking about Hex? | ||
| The technology. | ||
| Those Hex guys are friends of mine that created that technology. | ||
| I've tested it in the field. | ||
| I'm wearing it in these lion photos. | ||
| Here you go, Jim. | ||
| I'll just give that to you. | ||
| You can just airdrop it or email it or whatever you like. | ||
| Explain to people. | ||
| Well, Hex, I actually use that when I hunt now too, particularly in lanai. | ||
| So it's a screen that keeps animals from recognizing your magnetic signal? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| You 100% think that's real? | ||
| I completely believe in it, especially for certain species, sharks, birds, things that are known to detect. | ||
| Particularly for water. | ||
| And the water, it's like almost 100%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you can measure it, right? | ||
| Like you can get a meter that measures the body's electrical impulse, put hex on it, run your arm over it, and the meter doesn't move. | ||
| But what is the mechanism? | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So that's when he's tranked? | ||
| Yeah, so that's it. | ||
| See the dart in his back? | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| That's just a picture of a picture. | ||
| But that's the time he pops up when we go to check on him. | ||
| Oh my god, dude. | ||
| He's so big. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| And there's some pictures you'll see in a second of him on the ground when we're doing the workup. | ||
| Is that him right there? | ||
| Yeah, we're putting a collar on him. | ||
| Jesus, he's jacked. | ||
| I mean, just a massive, massive animal. | ||
| Do you guys know how... | ||
| Look at the size of his sack. | ||
| Yeah, he's hung. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Do you guys know how old he is? | ||
| We didn't actually look into that. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I'd be fascinated by that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This was crazy. | ||
| Keep us informed on what that discrepancy turns out to be. | ||
| Yeah, it's fascinating. | ||
| You know, that work takes a long time and it travels around, but we've got the sample, which was the main objective. | ||
| There used to be a North American lion that was even larger than the African lion. | ||
| Significantly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, significantly. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that was not that long ago, right? | ||
| Like in the last 15,000 years ago or something like that? | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| It definitely coexisted with human beings. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We had lions. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Huge ones. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And big planes game and everything else. | ||
| But, oh, shoot. | ||
| So, the stew. | ||
| Anyway, the Hex guys gave me some elk, you know, that they had got. | ||
| And Hex is that technology that blocks the bodies naturally occurring electrical energy. | ||
| And they had given me some elk. | ||
| And we were on that foraging trip where I brought those porcinis from for you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And we picked porcini and chanterelles, and we had cauliflower mushroom, and we just made this amazing stew. | ||
| And I was like, Joe's the only person I know to appreciate this as much as I do. | ||
| You're headed back to Santa Barbara tonight? | ||
| Uh-huh. | ||
| I have some elk for you. | ||
| I'll take you up on it. | ||
| Dude. | ||
| Any day. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, listen, man, we just did three hours, if you can believe it or not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Jeez, Louie. | |
| Yeah, it's already 3.35. | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| Time flies when you're having fun. | ||
| I would have guessed 30-ish minutes. | ||
| I know. | ||
| No, crazy. | ||
| I really appreciate you, man. | ||
| I appreciate all the stuff you're doing. | ||
| I appreciate your social media and tell people again about your show. | ||
| Yes, Extinct or Alive on Animal Planet, Wednesdays at 9pm. | ||
| We travel the world, searching for animals, wrongfully deemed extinct, and we're pretty damn successful. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Thank you, bro. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Appreciate you, man. | ||
| Thanks, Joe. | ||
| Bye, everybody. | ||
| Man, that was... | ||
| I had no idea what you came through there. |
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