#613 - Forrest Galante

Today's guest is an outdoorsman.

He's a master of animalia, or animals means animals.

He's known for his focus on animals close to extinction.

He's a host on Discovery.

He's been to some of the most insane parts of the world.

I'm grateful to get to know him and learn about his life.

Today's guest is Mr.

Forrest Galante.

would stay in host.

Yeah, that's the best, dude.

Forrest Galante, thanks for coming in, man.

Yeah, dude.

Thanks for having me.

Glad we made it work.

Yeah, I really appreciate it.

I'm excited, dude.

I'm excited to talk about Animalia and a little bit about your life so our listeners know who you are.

Sure.

Yeah, I was complimenting those shoes, dude.

Those things are nice.

Dude, the Gorux.

Is this a company that's all about putting heavy weight weight on your back and training?

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

Yeah, they look pretty springy, dude.

I went with the boots.

How do you like the cowboy boots?

Is that your go-to?

Are you a cowboy boots guy?

About two days a week now.

Two days a week?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Trying to quit, though?

Yeah.

You have none of these six milligrams.

Yeah, there you go.

That's a heavy dose of boot right there.

Dude, what if they do come out with boots?

Like, what if Zen or Alp comes out with a boot that has like nicotine in the rim of it, so it like soaks into your body?

Reaching into the feet.

Yeah.

Getting that little head buzz.

I'd buy them.

Dude, I would put them on if I had to do one of those field sobriety tests.

There you go.

There you go.

Yeah.

You're like, I'm good from the knees up.

Good to see you today.

You were, you grew up in, I mean, you were kind of born into Animalia there in like

on the edge of Africa in Zimbabwe.

That's where you grew up.

Yeah, exactly right.

So son of safari business owners.

If I wasn't in school, we either lived on a farm or my family ran ran safaris.

So I was out in the bush.

So I've just been around wildlife my entire childhood.

Oh, wow, that's you right there.

Yeah, look at them teeth right there.

Oh, yeah.

I wouldn't want to get bit by that.

No, yeah, I was part beaver growing up.

Yeah.

Take me into some of that.

Like what it's like growing up on in like a safari land.

Does it give you a different appreciation of animals?

Does it make you more fearful of animals?

It's a good question.

I mean, I think.

Anything you grow up with, you become used to, right?

It's like this is the norm when you're a kid.

You just expect that that's the the norm.

So I grew up, you know, I'd come home from school, kick my shoes off, run out on the farm, try and catch snakes or be looking for jackals or all these, you know, just like a coyote, all these kind of things that sort of is parallel to if you grew up on a farm here, right?

If you're a farm kid here, you go out and, you know, you're from Louisiana, maybe you see a cottonmouth or coyote in the bush or whatever, right?

Yeah, just tickle a chicken or something.

Tickle a chicken, you know?

Yeah, that meant something else when I got to high school.

But,

you know, I grew up thinking that was the norm.

And

then I'd go out into the bush on safari with my family.

And it would be like, don't leave the tent after dark and stay here.

And, you know, there were rules, but as long as you didn't break the rules, you were pretty safe.

And what I saw throughout my childhood was like a decline in animals, you know, the same camps we'd go to where there used to be huge herds of elephants, there's now two or three elephants, or big wild spaces, there's now farm fields.

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

Like, I don't want it, I don't want all that wild stuff to go away.

And so I didn't really realize it when I was young.

But over time, even as a child, I was like, this is something that I would like to dedicate my life to is making sure that all this wild stuff, spaces, animals, all of it doesn't go away.

So I'm guessing you're thinking then along the lines of like conservation, like that, did you come out of your youth just feeling inspired towards that?

That's a very nice way to put it.

It starts by breaking a lot of rules, bending the laws a lot, and just being, you know, you, you know, those kids, right?

You're the yoink kid on Instagram.

He's catching all the snakes and stuff.

You're one of those kids.

Got it.

You You know what I mean?

And so in the U.S., there's a lot of laws against, you know, don't harass this and don't do that.

In Zimbabwe, there's fuck all for laws, right?

So

it's just kind of do whatever.

So I think that love and that appreciation came from fiddling with everything, catching it, trapping it, working with it.

But ultimately, as you grow, as you fall in love with something, you want to protect it.

And that's conservation.

And so

what was thinning the herds there?

People, just mostly encroachment, a little bit of poaching, you know, ivory poaching and stuff, hunting elephants but more like habitat encroachment you know villages popping up big trees getting cut down for farm field goats and things getting moved in you know stuff like that like grazing and so pushing the animals out and was it affecting like were you guys on a bigger piece of like nature reserve or the safari camps were they were all out in the bush but it would still you know you still would just see a general impact like like a thinning of animals okay yeah so did your family continue the safari business in Zimbabwe or how do you get from there

sort of to here into the U.S.?

Yeah.

So we tried to, but during the early 2000s, Zimbabwe was under something called the land reform campaign, which was President Robert Mugabe at the time, who declared himself supreme leader for life.

He did this thing where...

Or like a boss, huh?

Like Birdman.

Yeah, he came in hard.

Yeah.

And

he made it, this land reform made it so that it was was very, very hard.

Like my family's sixth generation Zimbabwe, but basically it was a race war.

And if you were white, you weren't supposed.

There was a land reform campaign passed that meant that if you were black and you had heritage, you could come and take that land away because, you know, of colonial settlement and things like that.

Obviously, I grew up long after any colonial settlement took place.

But yeah, we had gunfights and we had, you know, neighbors murdered and punguis, which is indoctrination through torture into the political party, the ZANU-PF political party.

There was some crazy political turmoil.

Zimbabwe's land reform refers to a controversial program that began in 1980 and escalated in 2000, redistributing farmland from white commercial farmers to black Zimbabweans.

So your family was.

We were farmers.

So you were farmers, and this happened as you guys were there.

So when I was a kid, I mean, it says here in 1980 is when it started, which it may have, but when I was a kid, we never locked our doors.

There was no, we didn't have barbed wire fences, nothing.

It was very safe, very peaceful country.

But in like 99, 2000, and then 2001, when we left, it got really bad, really quickly.

And it was sort of an attempt by Robert Mugabe to

retain power for his party, the Zanu Pev political party.

Oh, I see.

So his party would feel like maybe they were going to be pushed out.

And so he's like, I need to do something drastic

in order to stay in.

Exactly.

And so I'm going to return this

colonialized land to the people.

From whites to the black, to the black people.

Exactly.

Got it.

And so we're, but you saw that like in neighbors, you saw people's lands being taken over, stuff like that.

Oh, I saw a kid get shot in the head.

We saw everything.

It was crazy.

Yeah.

I mean, there were gunfights.

We had these war veterans settling on the fence lines.

We were the smallest farm in the Shamva district.

That was where I grew up.

And so we were the last ones to get taken because we had the lowest political incentive or financial incentive.

Right.

So you look at the area where we lived.

There were all these huge farms, right?

Million dollar a year plus tobacco farms and things.

We were a tiny little Ulstrom area, which is an exotic flower farm.

And so we were the last ones to get grabbed because why bother with us, right?

We'll get them at the end.

Exactly.

So we saw neighbors get murdered, these pungwees, like I said, which is indoctrination through torture, crazy war chants, shootouts, everything.

It was nuts for a little while.

And would these groups just kind of come like in just trucks?

Like and sort of, or would they come in like force?

Was it the

government coming or was it just like citizens, black citizens?

It was pretty much just citizens, like unemployed unemployed citizens, basically.

And for the majority, it was kids with guns.

Wow.

You know, you're 14, 15 years old.

You grew up maybe on the streets of Harare.

And all of a sudden, you have this dictator-like president going, hey, those rich white guys over there, go get them.

Right.

You know, and they're like, okay.

You know, you know, they call it war veterans that survived the war.

There were no war veterans.

It was just kids with guns, like 14 to 20-year-old kids.

Wow.

And that's, that's what, you know, shootouts and all this.

But all that being said, I don't want to paint a bad light on it.

It was an incredible childhood.

There was just a couple couple rough years there.

Yeah.

Well, one thing that's fascinating about Africa, even like places that I've been there, is you see the race, like the racial colonial, you see that.

It's very evident in a lot of places.

You also see a lot of like

like black leadership that comes into power and gets very desperate and will try to

own everything themselves as well.

It's a tribal mentality, right?

It's like, I come from this culture, whether it's Shauna, Zulu, whatever it happens to be.

And that tribe is like, the way that I've been a dominant tribe is I dominate another tribe, right?

And this is not a racial thing.

It's just, it's a cultural thing.

And they're, you know, they get leadership, whether that's being a president or being a minister or whatever it is.

And then how am I going to retain it?

I'm going to dominate another tribe.

Doesn't matter if they're white, black, Zulu, Shauna, whatever.

You know, it's just, I'm going to dominate.

And that's, it's a, it's a crazy thing.

I'll tell you a crazy story.

I don't think I've ever told anybody this publicly.

I grew up on a farm, 200, 200 employees that worked on our farm, right?

Like 200 people that pick flowers, blah, blah, blah.

My best friends were all black China kids, Zimbabwean kids.

And I remember one day going to school, I was 14, so I didn't really understand what was going on, other than it was stuff was going bad.

And my best friend, who had been my best friend since we were like seven years old, we went to lunch that day, like a random Tuesday.

And the prefects, which like the older, like the seniors, right?

They come out and they're like, you two, come over here.

Like, Forrest, go on that side.

And I'm like,

at school, like proper school, you know, like button down, like, you know, very formal school.

Like, Forrest, go over here.

And Malusi, go over here.

Malusi was my friend.

Malusi's black.

And they're like, go on this side.

And I was like, why are we getting split up?

And they're like, we're having a fight, black versus white at school.

And my best friend, who was felt as shocked as I would, he got like moved by the seniors to the other side of the rugby field to have a fist fight with us.

And I was just like, why are we doing this?

You know, I was like so confused because we didn't understand it.

We were just little kids, but this racial tension got insane.

And yeah, it just, it, it boiled over.

And you've seen like Donald Trump, you know, just called out the South African president around it.

But that similar sort of thing is taking place in South Africa now.

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

Exactly.

Well, I think it's the same thing.

Sometimes when you look at Hamas in Gaza, it's like a lot of people believe that Hamas was elected because they felt no other way to try and stop

Israeli people from coming and just taking over their homes.

That's a lot of what I hear from friends on both sides of it.

That like

they just they needed to do something drastic, right?

So they elected the most drastic element that they could.

And I think that's a sign of desperation, right?

Regardless of the situation, it's like if you're desperate, you do something drastic.

It's a Hail Mary.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think some of that's even, it's human nature.

Totally.

I do it myself, right?

You're like, shit, what do I do?

Let's just send it, you know?

Oh, definitely.

When it's getting late at night and your wife left you or or whatever and you just text some girl that you knew from a couple years still up yeah let's go yeah

yeah dude so I think that happens a lot you you saw someone get shot uh yeah one of the neighbors uh we were riding our motorbikes and uh he got shot yeah wow yeah I mean so these groups they come and then would they kind of kick people out of their homes I mean was that sort of how it was happening and then how did you guys end up eventually leaving?

Yes, so basically they'd come, they'd surround the property or the farm, but but white Zimbabweans, similar to like white South Africans or whatever, they're pretty hard people, grew up farming culture, you know.

So they dig their heels in and say, bring it on.

And there'd ultimately end up being a shootout or something like that.

And so what happened to us, and I kind of speak for every farm, but a lot of our friends, like a lot of their dads got murdered and all this other stuff.

But what happened to us is my mom was a single mother with my sister and I on the farm at the time.

And they came, they surrounded our farm and they came and they said to my mom, they're like, we'll give you 24 hours to leave or we're going to kill you and take everything.

And so my mom, and I remember I was 14, I ran upstairs and I grabbed my gun and I grabbed a knife and I was like, bring it on.

And my mom like hit me.

And she's like, go get in the car, pack your shit and get in the car.

And I was like, yes, mom.

You know, and so we left.

So nothing bad happened to us physically, but it was, it was just a very like ripped from everything overnight kind of situation.

Wow.

So Mama Galante had the sense, huh?

Yeah, thank God, because I didn't, still don't.

Yeah.

What happened to your dad?

He wasn't there?

No, they split up when I was pretty young and he moved into town and remarried and all of that.

And he just didn't want to have much to do with it.

And your mother ran a botanical farm out there?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ran the flower farm.

Flowers and oranges.

Was it pretty beautiful out there with the flowers?

So beautiful.

So we had these big massasa trees.

We lived on a copy, which like a granite mountain with the house on top.

Masasa tree, it's called?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I want to see it.

It's real, really, yeah.

Like your iconic African tree.

Yeah.

Dude, there's something so amazing about being in Africa.

Where'd you go when you went to Africa?

We've been to

Kenya

to Mombasa.

Oh, Mombasa.

Yeah.

It's on the coast there.

Mombasa.

Oh, I'll tell you, this is just a funny story.

It's different, but so we went to some bar there.

It was called Florida.

It was like, they give it like an American name because they know that Americans are going to come and

get off of cruise ships and stuff.

And I was there.

I was on a thing called Semester at Sea.

It's like a floating university.

Oh, you went as a kid?

Yeah.

That's cool.

Yeah.

And so it was pretty impressive.

I worked in the bookstore on the ship, and you got to, and that worked as my tuition.

So I got to go on this crazy adventure.

But we're there, and one of my buddies, this little Jewish guy, he like got a beat, he got a blowjob from a local possibly a prostitute or just a like gray area, yeah,

yeah, from a nice gray area woman, cute girl.

And um, he said that while he was taking his wiener out of his pants, that it cut on his zipper, and so now he's scared the whole time.

He's like, We're in Africa, he's like, What if I catch someone?

He's getting AIDS, he's getting AIDS,

he's like, Dude, I'm getting AIDS.

He's like asking people, He's like trying to nonchalantly ask people about AIDS at the bar and stuff.

So, dude.

That's Florida.

He was so,

he was so neurotic.

He ended up ordering a glass of vodka and it was like three hours till our ride was coming.

And he literally stood over in the distance and put his wiener just into a glass of vodka and held it in there.

I like the resourcefulness, though.

I feel like that would work.

That might be the cure.

Shout out to my buddy Michael from South Florida, dude.

He was a, and he was an awesome guy.

But anyway, that was one place that we went.

Africa is a great place, man.

It's, it's, it's wild.

There's no political stability anywhere on the continent, in my opinion, but it's a great, it's just such a great continent.

There's so much wildlife.

There's so much freedom.

There's nothing you can't do there.

You know what I mean?

If you can dream it, you can do it.

It's which isn't always a good thing because if you can dream of taking over people's houses, you can do it.

But

it's a crazy cool place.

Yeah.

So you grow up in this wildlife.

I mean, everything about Africa, it's so per like, even I remember being there, and like we would sleep at night with the mosquito nets.

Like nature was just right there.

Like it was like, you know, so much so that, you know, I mean, I grew up in Louisiana, we have mosquitoes, but we didn't have the nets.

Like you had to keep these things, you know.

You, I mean, if someone were big, you almost needed the Brooklyn net standing there to block them off.

You know what I'm saying?

Like, oh, yeah.

But just the fact that nature's right there, you can feel it breathing in the distance.

It always feels like there.

So you grew up in that like dedicated,

like

immersed in wildlife.

When did you kind of feel like you wanted to have it as a career?

Not until I'll tell you, can I tell you a quick funny story about mosquito nets?

Yeah.

So I grew up in this farmhouse, right?

Like all open windows, no air conditioning or anything like that, big open verandas and balconies and stuff.

And we were plowing a field when I was probably nine or 10 years old.

Found a baby monkey in the field, a little vervet monkey.

Vervet?

Vervet monkey.

Yeah.

They call them vermin monkeys because they're like pest monkeys.

And I scooped him up.

I was like, what's wrong here?

That little guy right there.

Oh, yeah.

And his blackface, too, first of all.

Yeah, yeah.

He's got to do something about that.

Well, he may.

He may just be lashing back at Drewski, who just did white face.

Dude, I saw 200 million views or something.

It was funny, though.

I don't know if it's bad or good, but it was funny.

I think it's great.

Dude, when he's driving around, he rolls down his window.

He's like, you lost, boy?

The guy's like, no, sir.

It was so bad.

We rescued him.

Spit.

And the funny thing is, he has that big hat on, so he has to kind of move.

He moves his head out the window.

Dude,

it's too much.

I literally saw it this morning.

I couldn't believe it.

But take me through your story.

I'm sorry, man.

No, you're good.

Bad mosquito net.

Long story short, I rescue this baby monkey.

Turns out, and monkeys do this.

Her mother, his mother abandoned him because he had a heart murmur, like a bad heart condition.

So he got dumped in the field, right?

Because they do that to, then they can have another baby, and it takes a long time to raise the baby, blah, blah, blah.

So I scoop up this little monkey named Chippy and bottle feed him till his eyes open, the whole thing.

And he ends up growing up and he's my bunk bedmate.

So he'd sleep on top of my mosquito net.

You know how there's like a round coil and it comes down on a mosquito net?

He'd sleep up there.

And every morning as I'd get out of bed, he'd jump down off of that onto my shoulder.

We'd go down to breakfast and then he'd scamper off into the trees.

And like, you know, that's a good depiction of like how I grew up wild-wise.

Like I had a monkey sleeping in my mosquito net with me, you know, like it was, it was an awesome, awesome childhood.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's just something about being there, especially when you're in a safari house.

Like one of, you know, you get out into the the bush and then sometimes you'll, you'll stay at kind of like a, it's kind of a hotel in a way.

It was like kind of like

a lodge, yeah.

And some of them would be nice and some of them would be very bare bones, but it was like,

you know, you'd have the animal skin rugs and you'd have the nets and you just have a silence that was loud, but completely, it was like,

God, it was like the thickest silence that ever was made.

That's such a good way to put it.

It was so fascinating.

And your story reminds me of this guy.

They had this guy.

i want to say his name was marco

oh i'm thinking of a guy dr wiggins there was a guy dr wiggins maybe john wiggum

he he had his child he raised his child with a monkey oh whoa that's cool oh this is it sorry winthrop kellogg oh boy winthrop kellogg's experiment commonly known as the ape in the child involved raising a baby chimpanzee named gua alongside his own son, Donald, under identical conditions to study the effects of environment versus hereditary on development.

That's crazy.

Yeah, in 1931, Kellogg and his wife bought Gua, then seven and a half months old, into their Florida home.

It's always Florida.

It's always Florida.

There's nowhere else.

Where else are you raising a monkey and an ape and a kid together?

Florida.

It's got to be Florida.

It's not like this happening in London.

You know what I mean?

It's always Florida.

That's our Africa.

Yeah, it's our Africa.

He into their Florida home to grow up with Donald, their 10-month-old son.

Both children were given the same care and subjected to daily scientific observations.

Can we see a video of it?

There's no way this kid grew up normal.

Oh, no.

Look at this.

Look at the little shoes on him.

I know they put shoes on the chimps.

Do you ever just think I was born in the wrong era?

Like, if I was born in the 30s, I'd do this.

Oh, for sure.

I'd have nine kids and five chimps, no problem.

And I'd live in Florida.

Oh, it was a different time.

Look at them right here.

They're trying different stuff with them.

That's crazy.

Trying to put a hat on each of their head and then teach the monkey to keep it on its head.

And he just keeps pulling it off the kids' head.

Tickling.

Oh, man, that's nuts.

And they're just tickling both of them.

Yeah, if you guys get to watch on the YouTube, I mean, this is absolutely ridiculous.

I've never heard of this.

That's crazy.

What were some of the findings?

Can you go back?

Oh, here we go.

Gua learned many human behaviors.

She dressed in clothes, walked upright.

Ooh, used a spoon.

That's crazy.

Drank from a glass, opened doors, and imitated gestures of affection, sometimes outperforming Donald in motor skills and tasks.

The Kellers concluded that there are definite limits to how much non-human species can be humanized.

Towards the end, Donald began imitating Gua's chimpanzee vocalizations, raising concerns about potential language delays for the human child.

Wow.

So the human also ended up becoming more

like the chimpanzee.

Why did they end it?

Did they say why?

Because the chimp ate the kid's face.

I mean, that's what all that's how these things always end.

It really is, dude.

It's like, there's no good coming of this.

Look, it's the same reason why we ended the Pit Bull circus that we were doing in our backyard.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

It ends one way.

Wenthrope Kellogg concluded that while Gua behaved like a human child in many ways, her physical and brain structure limited how human she could become, confirming the experiment's demonstration of hereditary limits.

After the experiment, Ghoul was returned to a primate center and sadly died less than a year later.

Donald's later life was marked by tragedy as well, dying by suicide at 43.

God.

That's not good.

In short, the experiment ended due to concerns about Donald's language development, Gua's increasing strength and behavior, yep, and the practical and ethical difficulties.

I mean, it's just, there's a whole argument for nurture over nature, but at the end of the day, chimpanzee is incredibly strong.

They get violent.

The best way I think to describe it is when a chimpanzee sexually matures, it doesn't mentally mature past that of like a toddler.

So when a three-year-old throws a temper tantrum, it's like, be quiet, you know, and you restrain them or whatever.

When a full-grown chimpanzee throws a temper tantrum, it rips you to shreds.

And it might not hate you or anything else.

It's just a temper tantrum, the same as a two or three-year-old does, right?

Oh, it's fascinating.

Yeah, I kind of interrupted you, though.

You were going to, so you were talking about

we were going into.

Oh, well, you know what you were saying?

Sorry, I don't want to interrupt you, but you were talking about that thick silence that you get in Africa.

When you and I were texting last week and you were like, dude, I'm overwhelmed at the moment.

To me, that is the most like ground, that silence that you're talking about.

That's what like brings me back, you know, like, because I'm on my phone all day too.

I'm sure you are working and texting and emails and blah, blah, blah.

That feeling, though, that you just described, that thick silence, that being out in the bush, you don't have to be in a tent in the middle of nowhere.

You can be in a lodge or whatever, but being a little bit disconnected from modern civilization and more connect, more plugged into the bush and the wildlife.

I think that's the most grounding thing, man.

Yeah.

And I think Africa, I do believe it feels like makes like the purest form of it.

I can't explain it.

I've tried to, yeah, I mean, you know, it just, I mean, they say it's the birthplace of civilization, I'm sure, for a reason.

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So when did you know that it was kind of a career calling for you to work with animals and to work with nature so closely?

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

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

I got in trouble a whole bunch.

Like I felt very confined coming to the U.S.

because I'd grown up on a farm, 200 acres, barefoot, guns, motorbikes, freedom.

And then I came to Central California, or I'll actually start in Oakland, California, which is the pole, went into government housing, you know?

And long story short, I felt very like trapped, I guess.

Got in trouble a bunch.

My mom moved us out of Oakland before I got in really bad trouble.

Went to a little town in Central California called Cayucas.

And it was great, like surfer town, 2,000 people.

And I used to to go diving and fishing all the time because that felt like the wildest place to be.

Like, kind of connected me sort of a little bit back to Africa.

And I think,

long story short, I met a girl.

I went to college, blah, blah, blah.

But at some point, I wildlife, I'm a one-track mind.

It's the only thing, wildlife and rugby are the only two things I've ever, ever really, really cared about.

So I was like so passionate about it.

And then I was like, well, I'm not going to be a safari guide in Cayucas, California.

So I'll go to school to be a biologist.

And that was sort of the next best thing.

It's like, I'll, I'll become a scientific animal guy instead of a physical animal guy.

And then ended up coming back to being a physical animal guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I'm glad you did, man.

Um, you have a new show

that definitely like sparked me up.

It's animals on drugs.

That's right.

We're texting when I was in Columbia.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's on HBL Max as of like yesterday, I think.

Oh, yeah, dude.

I was just like, dude, send me a gift from Columbia so I can snore together.

But take me through this show, Animals on Drugs.

Because, you know, they had like the cocaine bear.

Uh-huh.

Cocaine bear, the movie.

Cocaine bear.

And then they have, I was trying to think of some, oh, crackoons would be good.

Crackoons.

How did I not think of that as a title?

Come on.

Crackoons.

What is, bro?

What's in my bunch?

That's a no-brainer.

What's that in your recycling bin?

Yeah.

You see a little bit of smoke coming up from the recycling bin?

Yeah, the bin's vibrating.

Yeah.

Poof.

Crackoons.

He's like,

smiling.

Crackoons.

So, yeah, I was thinking of crackoons.

I'm trying to think of what it is.

Oh, that's actually a movie.

I didn't even know that.

Kracco is a movie or lying.

2024 official trailer, Kraccoon.

Oh, my God.

I mean, look, so for that show, we capitalized on this, this hilarious thing that we're talking about.

But the show is legit.

It's the reality is

animals are getting into like human substances across the world, right?

Whether that's bears breaking in to get on booze and getting hit by trains and stuff because they're licking up booze off train tracks.

Just a whole story I can tell you.

The cocaine hippos in Colombia, like Pablo Escobar, brought hippos over.

They escaped.

Now there's 200 of them.

They're going crazy because hippos are not native there.

In Florida, we found an alligator that actually tested positive for having meth in its system because it was living in the cesspool behind a meth house.

So that's what the show is about.

It's really at its core, it's a show about human-wildlife conflict.

You don't get people to watch a show called Human-Wildlife Conflict, but you do get them to watch a show called Meth Gator.

So that was kind of what it was.

Oh, yeah.

Or ketamice.

That's what I was thinking.

Ketamice.

There we go.

Man, we need like four.

You're like the chat GPT of drug animals over here.

You're like, oh, you see a mice go in a hole.

What about a K-hole?

A K-hole.

He's just old.

He's surrounded by cheese, but he can't even swallow.

No, well, take me through some of that.

Like, so, so take me through the Escobar one.

Is that when I was texting you in Colombia?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, what was that trip like down there?

Sure.

So, I mean, I had this idea to do that show a long time ago.

And really, originally, I just wanted to go work on the hippo problem in Colombia.

So, for context, Pablo Escobar brought hippos to his personal zoo called Hacienda Annapolis in the 90s.

Because he just wanted nice, he just wanted big animals?

Yeah, he built this insane place down there.

And so, he brought in giraffes and elephants and lions and all this stuff.

When he died in 99,

93, when he died in 93,

the Colombian government came in and they're like, you know, they had a shootout.

He died, whatever.

Then they came in.

They're like, we'll take the lions, we'll take the giraffes, we'll take whatever.

Oh, we can't do anything about these hippos.

Like, hippos are gnarly.

People think of of hippos like Fantasia, happy, whatever.

Hippos are gnarly animals.

And so the hippos, they let...

They're angry?

Super hungry.

They're angry, I said.

No, they are.

They're just very territorial, very defensive.

I think on my Instagram, there's clips of them charging me at the fence and stuff.

But

anyway, these hippos got out, four of them.

Now there's over 200.

There's no predators because it's Colombia, not Africa.

There's no lions to eat them.

There's no crocodiles to eat them.

There's unlimited food, and they're killing people and injuring people.

And

so, and but some of them have also ingested cocaine.

Well, there was a rumor that Pablo Escobar used to feed them coca leaves to make them more aggressive to kill his enemies, which is a really cool legend, whether it's true or not, I have no idea.

But

anyway, the Colombian government and I have been, so, you know, I work on these kind of large-scale animal projects.

So, I started speaking with the Colombian government about this when there was like 100 hippos, like four, five, six years ago.

And they're like, please help.

We're underfunded.

We're understaffed.

We need whatever help we can get to help mitigate this problem so people columbia don't want to kill the hippos they like them they've created a tourist uh like a tourism industry around them there's like kind of cute the whole town there um where hacian anapolis is i'm blanking on the name of it now it's like hippo themed there's like hippo statues everywhere they've created like a thing around them but so they're dangerous but also it's part of the culture now yeah exactly so it's a weird thing where it's like okay there's this huge invasive species that's super dangerous but the average people love them like the people from medellin will take weekend trips to go see them, and they don't want to kill them, but they don't want them to get worse because they'll hurt people.

So, what do you do?

So, we went down there and worked with the Colombian government, with Cornare, which is the organization down there, and we came up with this sort of threefold approach, which doesn't kill them.

So, it's castrating them, chemically castrating them, sterilizing them, and relocating them.

So, I went down there with trank rifles, and chemicals, and vets, and all these things, and caught and caught and snipped nuts off of hippos.

So, chemically castrating.

So, take me on that.

Are you finding them in the wild?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we build bomas, which are like giant, like funnel traps, basically.

And then we bait them in with giant bags of carrots and beets and things like that.

Boma, it's called?

Yeah.

There might be one on my Instagram and do y'all find it.

Do y'all sneak up on them?

Yeah, yeah.

So

you sneak up on them, you find, yeah, that's like a boma, that second picture there.

So a boma trap, it's kind of like a kennel.

Exactly.

Okay, exactly.

You put a lot of good snacks in there.

You put all the goodies in there and you make a tripwire so that when they go in, the door closes.

And then they go nuts, you know, and they start banging against the fence and blah, blah blah so we're catching these hippos it was super fun and the little ones you can chemically castrate with a chemical called gonacon meaning basically you shoot them with this dart and the chemical goes in and it stops them from ever sexually maturing so they grow up but they don't if you go to that one on the far right there down oh there's me doing surgery uh in the middle of the night yeah is this uh a castration surgery yeah castration surgery so this is surgery right here so you guys have a hippo here that's been sedated yep so this was a large female she had four offspring with her we chemically chemically castrated all the four offspring with the Gonakon, that chemical.

Okay, so Gonakon, you inject it.

So now

are those asleep as well?

No.

So them you can do awake, but the Gonakon only works if you're pre-sexually mature.

Once you hit adolescence, it's too late.

It just, the effects would just wear off.

So that's me darting them right there.

I kind of saw it for a split second.

Okay, so you can dart them with the Gonakon, and it doesn't hurt them?

No,

it's just like getting a shot.

And then they can have children.

They can never have children.

Do they care or they're okay with it?

I don't think they know.

yeah to be honest i think they still get all the fun um okay okay and uh and then but then the adults that doesn't work on so we have to go into the bush and catch the adults and then actually perform surgery on them which is what that video was which is much harder to do what do you have here pause it for me

So that's the mouth of a hippo held open with a piece of like metal pipe between the tusks.

Oh my gosh.

And then a breathing tube going into its diaphragm.

Can you smell their breath while they're breathing?

Oh, yeah.

Is it pretty intense or is it okay?

And they mostly eat veg.

Well, they primarily eat vegetation, so it's not too bad, but it's kind of like forced.

Like being at a salad bar or something?

Yeah, you know, they got some stuff in their teeth.

It's hot.

Like you get your head up in there, and it's like

with this big, hot, sticky breath coming out.

Yeah, that's crazy.

And so you have their mouth pride open.

They're asleep.

Yep.

And so what do you do then in order to, because

you have to castrate them a different way.

Yeah, so the males are easy.

You just grab the nuts, lop them off, sew it up, right?

Takes a few minutes from when they sleep.

Reach in through their mouth to do it?

No, you just go down, downstairs.

Well, why are y'all doing this then?

That's just to keep them breathing and alive.

So see, there's a pipe in the bottom, bottom right there, bottom left.

That's a breathing tube.

So that's just keeping them breathing.

But this is a female.

So females are way harder.

You have to make an incision that's like this long, reach in there, feel for the gonads, snip them, quarterize them, pull them out, and then close her back up.

And if you don't close her up perfectly, one stitch breaks, water floods in there, get an infection and die.

So it's got, got, it's a, it's like a 12-hour process per animal.

Really?

Yeah, it's a big, and you have to do it at night because it's so hot.

If you do it during the day, they overheat in the sun because it's Columbia.

So like you catch them, keep them as calm as you can until like 9 p.m.

Then you start putting them to sleep and work all night and release them at like four or five in the morning.

Wow.

And so how many people does it take to really pull this off, honestly?

Honestly, we probably had a team of 30.

Yeah.

It's a big to deal.

Is it exciting?

So exciting.

I mean, I get goosebumps talking about it because it's just like it's high adrenaline the hippo's trying to kill you you're you're racing the clock before the sun comes up you can't over anesthetize the hippo because then it dies and if we kill one the freaking columbians are going to kill us you know what i mean not really but they'll be so upset my career is over yes if i kill a hippo giving certain my career is over right i'm canceled across everything so it's like It's like, oh, this action and adrenaline.

It doesn't sound exciting because you're spending 12 hours like with your elbows deep in a hippo, but it's, it's really exciting.

Yeah.

I think it's, it certainly seems high energy, especially since there's other people there and you guys are all locked in with this one mission.

Oh, yeah.

It seems like that game, remember that game Operation you played as a kid?

Yeah.

It seems like they have like the highest level.

That's right.

Yeah, exactly right.

It's fun, man.

It's cool.

Wow, dude, that's incredible.

So that was the experience of going down there and

those animals, the drug relationship was that Escobar brought them over.

And so that's why they're there.

And so that gets you into that whole universe of hippos in Colombia.

Exactly.

It's not that the hippos are doing lines, you know, it's just that they got brought here through the drug trade.

And it's like a vessel to tell that story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's network TV.

That's cable, right?

I'm on Discovery.

That's how you do it on Discovery.

Oh, it's exciting.

Yeah.

And it's, you know, it's cool.

It's cool, man.

Nobody else is doing that stuff on TV, you know?

Like, get to catch hippos and show the world how you cut their nuts off.

And like this whole backstory on Pablo Escobar.

And I mean, it's like a rodeo.

You know, it's cool.

Yeah.

I like it anyway.

Oh, dude, it's fascinating to me.

And do you get to keep any of the animals' nuts or not?

Dude, I wanted to, but in order to travel with animal parts, you have to have CITES permits, which is this international conservation thing.

Oh, yeah.

I wanted a jar of hippo nuts on my shelf so bad, so bad, but I left them all in Colombia.

Oh, yeah.

Dude, you can't even fly out of Hawaii with an avocado.

Nope.

So it's like...

Same thing.

Yeah.

So imagine trying to explain, especially in Colombia, you know, I got them like wrapped up in a little bit of paper towel tucked under my dirty underwear.

They're like, what's that?

It's like, yeah, that's going to be hard to explain.

But hey, I think they'll be glad that it's not cocaine.

They'll be like, oh, dude, yeah, he just says there's a couple kilos of fucking

hippo nuts.

It's bam bam, but a different kind.

Yeah.

Dude, I remember we went on a,

I remember in South Africa, we had, we met, I was there performing one time.

It was really good.

I bet you're huge in South Africa.

Dude, we actually did really good there.

I haven't been there in forever.

I need to go back.

Being very familiar with that culture, your style of comedy is so on brand for that South Africa audience, I think.

But sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

No, I need to go.

And I think it's been my favorite country that I've ever been to.

Let's go, man.

I'll take you around.

I'll show you the bush side of it.

Dude.

Let's go.

You do a show, and then we'll go out into the bush, catch some animals, work with some creatures.

It'd be rad.

That would be really cool.

Yeah, man.

Dude, one of my goals, I was even going to say, I was thinking about this yesterday, is I want to get more involved with nature.

like fishing, hunting, just learning how to be able to survive myself out in the woods over the next two years.

It's such a grounding thing, Theo.

I don't want to be all ethereal, but it makes you so connected to the planet.

It's such a good feeling when you feel self-sufficient out in nature.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I want that.

I think it would just allow me a different level of peace, you know, and a different level of like, I don't have to be so attached to like

these more worldly things because I know that would be okay, you know, like a level of like confidence.

You, you get confidence.

You get such natural confidence and you, the outside, I don't know if you're like this, but you know, I'm also not to your degree, but I'm in the public light as well.

I read these like negative comments on YouTube or whatever, and I like get in my own head and I'm like, fuck, that sucks.

Like, why do these people not like this or whatever?

You got in nature.

There's no time for that.

Yeah.

You know, you're there.

You're working on the fish you're trying to catch or the bird you're trying to hunt or the animal you're trying to save.

And that's what you're on.

You're not checking your phone.

You're not looking at tweets or YouTube comments.

You're just there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's not like some little like

a bear cub in the distance on his phone.

This loser's trying to hunt me.

He don't know.

Yeah.

You're like, I'm trying really hard.

Now, that would be cool, actually, if animals were like, these, look at these bitches trying to hunt us.

And they can't.

You're like sitting in the blind.

He's behind you taking a photo.

He's like, look at this loser.

That would actually be awesome, dude.

But no, I do.

I just, yeah, I think I'm missing out on a piece of existence.

Yeah.

And I can kind of start to feel that.

I didn't realize it for a long time, but I can start to feel it more and more.

I like that.

But that would be great, dude.

I'd love to put a show up over there and then we go do something cool.

Let me know, man.

I'm going to be in Zimbabwe at the end of October doing a big animal rescue.

I don't know what your schedule's like.

I'm sure that's pretty soon, but you know, let me know.

What I could try to put a show up

because I wanted to go to like London anyway to interview this.

There's a guy, there's a professor who specializes in

genocides.

Okay, that's that's deep.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it's kind of just interesting, you know?

So I just wanted to learn about why that happens over time.

Sure.

And because you would think that after a while in existence, we would get past that, you know?

Yeah, right.

The modern brain is like, we can't wipe out a group of people.

Yeah.

Apparently not.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like every article is always like, you can never do this again.

And then it's like, hey, but we can do.

So we're working on it.

Yeah.

But then it's like, you know, in the end, you come back to some sort of survival.

And sometimes survival is a sickness, I think, in people too in a way you know um what do you mean like how is it a sickness in people well just the fact that you would you would throughout history there's been uh genocides and that people have annihilated other cultures i mean it used to be of

like a flat a badge of honor totally like look what i did like conquering and stuff like that and that's kind of who's to say that that's right or wrong i'm judging it through my perspective today but at the time it was probably the most regal thing you know?

But doesn't it go back to, and I, this is not my area of expertise.

I'm not an anthropologist, but didn't, we're Homo sapiens, right?

Didn't hope Homo sapiens wipe out like the two other hominids?

You know what I mean?

If I don't know if you can fact-check that, but I think there was Homo sapiens, Homo Florencius, and Homo something else.

And Homo sapiens were like, nah, we, we got to get rid of these other guys.

You know, and that's like what we stemmed from, if I'm not, you know, yeah, what is it with Neanderthals?

And I don't know.

Let me see what it says.

Oh, the Den.

Oh, we were just talking about this the other day.

The Denisovans were out-competed by Homo sapiens, but proof of a direct wipeout is absent.

Oh, okay, there you go.

So instead, limited resources and climate change has played significant roles.

But who knows?

I'm sure people got super tribal back then.

One person could have had fire, and they're like, we got to kill these people off where they come in.

Burn them.

They're going to take our fire.

Right.

We cannot let them take our fire.

Yeah.

Totally.

Yeah.

But there you go.

I'm wrong.

So I didn't know that.

But I thought there was that competition at play.

At least you were wrong.

I didn't even have a shot at that information.

At least you're firing off.

You've had.

You've had some.

Thanks so much for coming, dude.

This is awesome.

Of course, bro.

It's so much fun.

Yeah, it's great.

I want to get you out there or at least see you go out there into nature and get connected with it.

I would love to.

Really, the South Africa thing is the thing.

Let's do it, dude.

I think it's big, and I love South Africa, and I would love to go over there for a show and just get to have a new experience there.

And then just thinking what type of thing would I want to do.

I did get to swim with sharks there once, which was pretty cool.

Huns Bay of like Seal Island.

Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah.

That's true.

Yeah.

It's a good experience.

Bro, it was super scary.

It almost felt,

it was just unbelievable.

We laid out there in that sun, dude.

I got the craziest sunburn.

Got crisped, yeah.

I mean, like.

Colors of like fluid were just like purples.

And yeah.

I know what you're talking about, man.

What lagoon has been launched by the sun on my face?

Because we went out with like some dude who I think he was just a mechanic who had like a couple hours on his lunch break.

Yeah, he's like, Yeah, we'll make it work.

That's South Africa for you.

Yeah, dude.

He's like, I got a boat.

Yeah, we'll figure it out.

Yeah,

dude.

I mean, there was no cut.

We're just lay, I mean, in the boiling heat.

Yeah, but we got in those cages in the round circular cage and we got in and some sharks came.

One of them got stuck between two cages

in the boat.

Oh, cool.

That's rad, dude.

It was Harry.

I got to reach through and touch one of them.

I can see you getting fired up on it.

That's the best thing about like an adult reconnecting with nature.

Not to say you're totally disconnected, but you get this kid-like

enthusiasm and sense of wonder that's been gone since you were like seven years old looking at earthworms.

You know, remember when you're a kid, you flip over a log, you're like, whoa, dad, look at this earthworm.

You know, that goes away because you become an adult and then you get back into it and you're like, oh, that never really went away.

I just like went a different direction.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Sorry.

Oh, dude.

No, that's such an important thing to say.

That never went away.

I just went a different direction.

Yeah.

Because, yeah, sometimes I think I even romanticize it.

Like so much of like childhood stuff is gone, but it's, but there's ways that it's still there.

It's just like, um, yeah, you went a different direction and that's okay.

Yeah.

But you can always go right back.

That's okay.

That's what I think.

That's what I think.

Yeah.

Um, soon we'll get you cutting off hippo nuts.

Yeah.

Dude.

Oh, the thing I was going to tell you was we went on a safari one day.

This, there was like some diamond miner, right?

Like some very rich guy, like some guy who was just fucking being rich or whatever.

Like I tapped him on the shoulder.

I was like,

what are you doing?

And he's like, being rich.

He couldn't even fucking, you know.

You don't even know.

Dude, I saw him yawn once and he had $40.

Right after he yawned, he had $40.

It just fell out of his mouth.

He's like, oh, that's where I put that.

He had just that kind of wealth.

But he took us to,

he had his own animal sanctuary somewhere.

Oh, interesting.

And they took us there and we got to just go see a lot of endangered species, like the big five.

Oh, sick.

And a lot of endangered species.

We just got to go look at them.

And then

six weeks later in my inbox, in my email, I get an email from him.

He goes, oh, that's it.

Oh, that's brutal.

Oh, the rhino.

Yeah.

And this, I cannot believe you just found this.

And

this.

And he sent me this picture and he goes, the rhinos that you guys went and saw

a few weeks ago, poachers came in night night and cut their horns off it's so brutal man it's it's an ongoing war over there for the rhino ivory thing yeah it's brutal but things like this are important you posting it you know to an audience that's not tuning in for animals that goes holy shit that's bad that that's really cool it's really important that people realize that it's shock i got because you hear about it yeah but then i was like oh my god the ones that we were looking at that we were so like enthralled by yep and they were their whole body is left there and this one piece of them cut their face off that's crazy yeah um yeah that's a bummer, man.

Good for you for sharing it, though.

I really think that's great.

Well, yeah, if you hadn't been here today, I don't even think I would have thought about it, man.

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Thank you.

What are some close encounters that you've had with animals out there, man, that

almost sometimes you're like, oh, you know,

that gets that childhood engine, like, you know, just really revs it into the red area.

I'm not an adrenaline junkie, or at least I like to pretend I'm not.

Okay.

But I get that rush when something like that happens.

Literally, the hippo thing, I had a hippo charge me out of the water there that was crazy and everybody scrambled.

I had an instance where a sea, one of the craziest ones I never forget, the one that always comes to the top of my mind.

We were in Australia and we were interviewing people in this Aboriginal village, like way up north in far north Queensland.

And as we're talking to people, I hear people screaming, shouting,

and I look over and there's this guy holding a cinder block over his head like this, and he's about to throw it.

I'm like, wait, wait, wait.

And I run over and there's a coastal Taipan, which is one of the most most venomous snakes in the world, big brown snake.

And he's about to smash it with this rock.

And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, I'll catch it and move it for you.

This thing right here.

And it's a big one.

It was like five, five, six feet long.

And

so the guy, this Aboriginal guy is about to smash it.

I'm like, wait, wait, like, I'll catch it and move it for you.

And he's like, okay, whatever.

And the snake disappears under the house, right?

This is like a house on like, like, kind of like Louisiana where they elevate the houses a little bit, you know, down south there.

Satan's right under them.

Yeah, exactly.

And so there's, you know, they're up on like cinder blocks or posts or whatever.

Dude, that makes me so scared a snake under the house.

So the snake disappears under the house, and the guy's like kind of mad at me.

He's like, what the fuck, man?

I could have killed the snake.

Now it's in the neighborhood, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And I'm like, let me handle it.

Like, I'll take care of it.

I'm sorry.

And it all happened really quick.

So I grabbed my flashlight and I grabbed my snake hook, whatever, and I go looking for the snake.

And my camera guys are filming.

We're filming a show of Extinct or Alive, which show I did on Animal Planet a while ago.

And we're going to get into that in a minute.

Yeah, yeah.

And

my camera guys are filming.

I look from one.

Is it under the house?

Not yet, but I'm looking.

I'm like crouched down looking and I see the snake in like the far back corner.

And I'm like, oh, he's right there by the stairs.

Come with me.

Like, we'll go get him.

So I grab my light and I jog around the side of the house and I stick my head through the like slats in the stairs.

They're like this far apart, right?

So I can just kind of wiggle my head and shoulders in.

And I know the snake's over here because I've just seen him from the other side of under the house.

I'm like, he's right over here.

So I wiggle in, I turn my light on, my headlamp, whatever it was, and I turn to the side.

I'm like, fuck, where's that snake?

I can't see him.

And all of a sudden, I just feel like this on the back of my neck.

The snake has gone around to the other side and he's moving around.

These snakes are fast.

And he's literally licks the side of my neck.

You know how snakes stick their tongue out like that?

And then he starts crawling over my neck and I just freeze.

And like, you see the hair on my arms right now.

Like it rattled me.

Because one bite, I was like 14 hours from a hospital.

From one of the most venomous snakes in the world, a relatively aggressive snake.

And I just freeze.

I just stop moving.

One bite, everybody knows the rules.

That's right.

That's right.

Thanks, Dave.

And yeah, so I just, I freeze while the snake fully slithers up over my neck and then comes and coils up like three feet from my head over here.

And then I like slowly back out.

We ended up catching him 10, 15 minutes later, moving it, blah, blah, blah.

But that moment where the snake like licked my neck right behind my ear there.

And then I started to feel like the underside of his mouth go on my neck.

I was like, that's it.

Like, I can't move.

I can't do anything.

I'm dead.

Like, it's going to realize it's sitting on top of a warm human and that it's been chasing him and just go.

And that's it.

I'm finished.

I was

i was the most rattled i think i've ever been coming out of that yeah i was just so like on edge while that snake was crawling over me

well as you're saying that i can feel my glands almost like just like tighten up yeah

dude it was a horrible horrible feeling and that that's my you know what it is and it's so the fact that it's something so subtle it's almost like a dracula just being right there And the hardest part was my stomach dropped and your instinct is to like pull out, you know, like panic immediately, get away.

And if I had done that, if I had even jolted, I think it would have just been boop, you know, and so I just had to try.

Like, it felt like 10 minutes and it was probably 10 seconds that it went over my neck for, but I was just sitting there like, please, please, please, please.

And then it went over.

It was crazy, man.

It was terrible, terrible feeling.

And it was very like novel, naive of me to go in and just stick my head in and like be like, I'll be your hero.

I'll help.

It was stupid, you know, it was just stupid.

And I learned from that experience so much so that I've done it again a dozen times, but like I try not to be that stupid anymore, you know?

Yeah, it's funny how sometimes ego and even knowledge can become a little bit of ego.

Mm-hmm.

Like enough knowledge makes you think confident, you know, confidence can just teeter over the edge of

wisdom in a way.

Totally.

You know, the fulcrum of that is so fine-tuned that, yes, it's like, it's almost like when you're like, I know what I'm doing.

And then immediately you get checked by just by existence.

Well, confidence is complacency, right?

So you're like, I got this.

Step aside.

That means I'm complacent.

If I even have that attitude going into it, it means I'm not fully focused.

Right.

Like, and that time and time again, every narrow miss I've ever had, which is not that many, but there's been a few, is because I've been, first of all, I've put myself in that scenario.

It's not the animal's fault, right?

This wasn't the snake's fault that I stuck my head under the

house, but it's always because I'm overly confident to the point of being complacent.

Like, yeah, I can stick my my head in here.

I'll find the snake.

You know, it's it's stupid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, let me show, like, it's not even like, let me show off, but there's a part of you that gets so comfortable that it, it almost just shows off because it's well, can I show you something?

Yeah.

Do you mind?

Sorry to ask you to do this.

Do you mind pulling up the last YouTube video I just posted on my YouTube channel?

I don't want to dogleg us too long, but I'll show you where the snake almost got me recently.

And again, it's a, it's a result of, oh, sorry, it's the one with the, that silly crocodile thing.

Yeah, right near the end, maybe the last two or three minutes there yeah right here so look so i'm holding the snake this afertilantes the deadliest snake in in the americas kill responsible for more deaths than any other snake now where did you find this at brother costa rica oh yeah and so i'm holding the snake and this is the deadliest snake in south america in the americas total across all canada united states south america central america

huge one biggest one i've ever seen and for no reason at all because it's a stupid youtube video he's peeing on me i'm like i'm gonna pin it and hold it behind the head now watch here i'm holding it and i'm i'm showing off, like we just talked about, telling the camera all about, you know, this is this deadly snake and this many people a year die from it.

And you got to be careful because of how they hide, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I start to loosen my grip here.

See how I'm looking to the side and I'm jabbering to the camera.

So my grip's starting to loosen.

Now watch what the snake does when he feels my grip loosen.

It's coming in the next few seconds.

I don't want to bore you, but you can almost see him.

He's side-eyeing me right now.

And this is complacency because I'm busy presenting to a camera like an idiot, talking about how deadly the snake is, and I'm adjusting my grip.

I'm not paying attention.

Here it comes.

Any second here, look at that.

So he starts to open his mouth.

Oh, see how close that is?

That was me.

Boots are up.

Dude, I'm ready for the cough.

Look at that.

Look at that.

Oh, that is so close to my hand with that fang.

Those fangs are two and a half inches long.

So he was maybe a quarter of an inch from getting me, and that would have been my hand gone.

Play that one more time.

Play that strike.

There's that slow-mo strike just a few seconds back here.

Look at this.

and what what method did he use to be able to make himself have the uh torque to do that but it's so if i had been holding the snake perfectly right he couldn't have done that right but i had been holding him for two or three minutes talking to the camera showing off because it's stupid youtube right and i had loosened my grip and slowly slipped down so much so that he had leverage in his neck So that was the problem.

It's not, it's, it's my

bad.

His ground game was strong.

He would have whooped me.

Yeah, and it was close, man.

If I hadn't dropped him right there, I'm talking another half second, and that would have been just one nick, one fang into the hand.

That's definitely the finger gone.

Maybe my hand, you know?

When a snake bite happens, what is like, and especially when it's one that's as venomous as this one, you're saying?

Yeah.

Highly venomous.

How quickly can someone really lose like an appendage or something from that or potentially die?

Like, how real is that?

But it all depends, right?

It's like saying what happens if I get stung by a bee.

Well, are you allergic to a bee?

How much venom did the bee put in you?

God, if If you and I get stung by a bee, we're going to react completely differently, right?

My hand might swallow up like a balloon, you might have a tiny little mosquito bite itch.

So every human body responds differently to venom.

And then there are multiple types of venom and then there are cocktails of venom.

So there's cytotoxic, hemotoxic, and neurotoxic, like brain, location, organ failure, different.

And then there's cocktails.

So some snakes have a cocktail of like location venom and organ venom.

And some have respiratory venom.

And so it's just crazy.

That's why anti-venom is such a difficult thing because there's so many different kinds of snakes, so many different cocktails of venom.

People all react differently to it.

An allergy to venom means you're going to die almost no matter what.

Like it's just, it's a crazy like variable of things.

Yeah.

Wow.

But in that case, I would have been in big trouble.

Yeah.

God, dude.

So don't do that.

When we go back to the cool animal stuff, don't do that stuff.

Are there moments where you feel like some animals are of God and some animals are of Satan?

Do you ever feel like that?

Hippos are of Satan.

Really?

They're such angry freaking animals.

And there's a few animals like that, like cassowaries, if you know what they are, big vulture, velociraptor-looking birds.

There's a few animals that just,

you know, I'm not very religious, so I'm using that term as jokingly, but there are some animals that just have terrible attitudes.

Scroll down real quick.

Check out that one where he's kicking.

I saw it a second ago.

He's kicking the guy's board.

Like, look at that.

You know, these things just come at you.

They've got

these talons, this head.

Hippos are the same.

If a hippo sees you, it's going to charge.

A Cape Buffalo, like in Africa,

they call them the Black Death because when they smell you or see you, they don't think about running.

They just think about charging.

And it's just some animals just have this attitude.

And

I don't think it's an ethereal thing.

I think it's that hippos and Cape Buffalo and Cassowaries, they've grown up with tons of predators.

Historically, they've been hunted, so they're defensive instead of their fight or flight is just a fight response.

Got it.

Do you know what I mean?

that's the way.

Yeah.

And that is, that is just scary to work with those animals because at any given time, they're going to turn on you versus run away from you.

Yeah.

Have you encountered, like, I'm sure whenever you get out into these worlds of animalia and some of these worlds where you probably don't even speak the language, have you encountered people that are as dangerous as the animals?

Way worse.

People are always, every close call we've ever, I mean, you know, not including those snake things or whatever, but every time that that I've really felt threatened, which isn't like an instant spur of the moment, when you feel threatened from an animal, it's like, okay, it nearly bit me, that's over.

When you feel threatened on a whole, it's because humans are so unpredictable.

A good example is you're working in a country that has political unrest and they know that you've got money because you've got cameras or whatever.

And now the government's got to get you.

The mafia is going to get you.

They've sent, you know, we had this instance in Myanmar where the government wanted to get us for having a drone and we had to flee.

And like, those are the scariest things is the human element and of all the places I've ever been and I know this is an anomaly but of all the places I've ever been Papua New Guinea the last time I went to Papua I've only been once but the time I went to Papua New Guinea in 14 days I saw two people get hacked by machetes I was only there for two weeks

I mean that's how like violent that society is and it's a very tribal culture and things one was in the capital of Port Moresby the other was actually near to this place and it plays a real picture here yeah real picture and what's the place called I'm sorry I stepped on you this was near to Tufi an area called Tufi, yeah.

So how do you know when you're meeting?

I mean, this is a tribe, right?

And they were lovely.

A little bit scary at first, but it was the town people that were that were the problems that were high on betel nut and been drinking and fighting and those kind of things.

But this was a tribe.

You see the guy on the left of me that has the shark mask on?

So this was a tribe that had a very special, that's shark jaws on his face.

It looks like Otis Nixon a little bit.

A good athlete, too.

Yeah, Otis was great.

Yeah.

So this tribe had a special relationship with shark fishing.

So we went to seek them out to try and find these sharks.

And we went and like got in this burial cave where they kept human skulls.

It was a whole thing.

But then they took us to the village and we sat with this guy.

The craziest part is these guys' names are like John Thomas and Thomas Johnson.

And because the missionaries have all been through there.

Like Collier Anthony?

Yes.

It's insane, dude.

They all have these like British dear Williams.

Yeah, it's so busy.

You like meet this guy and he's like, looks all intimidating and stuff.

And then he introduces himself as like Paul Johnson.

And you're like, okay, yeah.

Yeah, his name is Philip Banks.

Yeah.

It's so strange.

Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

You're like, that's a crazy name.

Yeah.

There you go.

There he goes.

Yeah, what a happy looking dude, though.

Oh, he was, man.

He definitely was a happy.

That guy was a great character.

He passed away a few years back.

Oh, shame.

Yeah.

Wow, dude.

Yeah.

So that would just be the scariest thing.

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

Yeah, many.

I try not to like advertise that because it's truly bribes.

It really is.

Like there's no other way to put it.

And it's so funny, dude.

I've never shared this.

When you get back from a shoot, right?

Usually my expeditions are funded by like Discovery Channel or Animal Planet or something.

And then you submit like a cost and expense report.

And they're like, what's this $4,000 for?

And you're like, groceries.

Yeah.

You know, because you like handed handed somebody a stack of four thousand bucks cash to not you know take your car tires or something and you're like yeah i just gotta lie about that you know like there's you can't write bribe money on the invoice yeah

well it just goes to show that at every level of existence right whether it's like uh first world third world 50th world there's this there's a checks and balances system of capitalism so often for sure and it's and that doesn't even change you can be in the shittiest place in the world.

You pull up, you park your car.

There's a guy that's going to walk up and he's like, for $4, I'll make sure your car is there when you get back.

Yep.

And it's just, that's the cost of doing business.

And if you don't pay the $4, you better believe your windows are getting smashed.

You know, and you, you, you, it's funny because you talk to these guys in these offices at the networks or whatever, and they don't get what you just said.

And you're like, no, no, I had to do that.

Otherwise, there would be no, like, they would have smashed the windows, taken all the cameras.

Right.

You know, and it's like, oh, well, why did you have to bribe them?

It's like, how do you not understand this?

Like, it's, it's commerce, you know, like, this is how the world works outside of L.A.

That's perfect, man.

You mentioned a little bit ago one of your shows, Extinct.

Or Alive.

Or Alive.

Yeah.

What was one of your most surprising discoveries while shooting Extinct or Alive?

Yeah, the tortoise in that cover image from season two.

That was probably the biggest one.

It was crazy.

We went to this island in the Galapagos that basically nobody goes to called Fernandina.

That species of tortoise hadn't been seen in 114 years, and only one specimen in history had ever been recorded 114 years prior by the California Academy of Sciences.

So, to date, that animal that I'm holding in that picture, which has been doctored for the

trailer poster thing, is the rarest animal in the world.

There's only one known individual of that species, and that's her right there.

Damn, and it's a woman, huh?

It's a girl.

Yeah, her name's Fern.

Yeah, Yeah, women,

they're survivors.

Yeah, yeah.

Dude, chicks are, like, we're talking about survival and stuff.

Girls are so much better at it than guys.

It's not even close.

Is that in the animal kingdom as well?

Oh, I mean, I was talking about humans, but yeah, probably in the animal kingdom, too.

I mean, like, I feel like females, girls, women, whatever, they have more to fight for because they have kids to protect, you know, whereas a male, I'll just make more kids.

You know what I mean?

Like, I'm not investing all of my body energy into raising this one young.

Like, I'll just go find another mate.

I'm talking on like a very base evolutionary level.

Like, it's just like, I'm going to spread my seed.

Whereas it's incredible how like tenacious and hardy female animals, women, everything are.

It's crazy.

Oh, dude, I think, and also, and also men have that, they have testosterone in them that like, you know, it's that I'm going to put my hand in the fire.

Exactly.

Right there, you're going to lose 30% of dudes right there because they're trying to taste a fucking car that's going by.

That's, you know, stick my tongue out.

Yeah.

Let me look right here.

In the animal kingdom, are females generally better at survival than males?

And we looked at it on perplexity.

That's what we like to use.

Females in the animal kingdom are generally better at survival than males.

In a large-scale study of 101

wild mammal species, females lived an average of 18% longer than males and more than 60% of those species.

For most mammals, including species like elephants, lions, and seals, females surpass males in longevity.

The difference in lifespan between the sexes is often more pronounced in the animal kingdom than in humans, where women live about 7.8% longer than men.

We're expendable.

Yeah.

Like think if there's one guy and a hundred girls, you're repopulating the planet.

Right.

If there's a hundred guys and one woman, you're not.

You know what I mean?

Like we are expendable.

Males across all species for the most part are expendable.

Fuck.

Sorry, bro.

No, I just, I felt something was, I knew something was off.

Yeah, yeah, that's it.

Yeah.

Damn it.

Should have been a check.

I know.

I just got to, I got to wander around with a, I've got to get some new knee pads.

I'm going to have to get some protective armor.

I get some new knee pads.

I got to get some protective armor, dude.

That's for sure.

The idea that you're going to find like extinct species is such like, it's a cool sport, right?

Because it's like, it's.

chasing this Atlantis in a way, kind of.

It's the most ultimate hunting form of hunting.

You're looking for the rarest thing in the world, so much so that the whole world thinks it doesn't exist anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm thinking about, just thinking about extinction and stuff, it's like, where's that last day where people are just standing there with the clipboards and they're just waiting for the last like one of a species to die off?

And then they're like, there it goes.

Yeah.

Well, it's like, yeah, what classifies something as extinct?

That's a great question.

And that's part of the premise of like why we made that original show, Extinct or Live, is like it's some, for the most part, and i'm oversimplifying but it's some stuffy dude british dude in a smoking jacket going yeah yes i believe this is gone you know and then he like checks a box and the problem with that is from a conservation model the second you check that extinction box that's it There's no funding, there's no effort, it's gone.

Extinct doesn't mean hiding or around the corner or there's a few left.

Extinct means give up and move on.

We're out 86, the dodo bird.

That's it.

Yeah.

And so I think it's super arrogant for humans to come in and go, that's extinct.

I mean, not to, I don't want to belittle extinction.

It's a very severe thing.

But oftentimes we give up too quickly.

We go, it's extinct.

It's not here.

Or now it's sort of been reclassified as like lost to science.

But for a long time, it was just like, oh, it's extinct.

Science hasn't seen it in 20 years, 30 years, 100 years.

Used to be 30 years was the benchmark.

And

it's just sort of an arrogant thing to come in and say, like, you know, oh, I went to Borneo for 10 days.

I promise you it's not there.

It's like, shut up, dude.

You know what I mean?

Like, what the fuck are you talking about?

It sounded gave him a clue, you idiot.

Yeah, exactly.

And I'm oversimplifying it, but I think that's what ended up happening a lot.

Is all this information, you know, there's millions and millions of species of animal out there, tons and thousands of scientists and things.

And they're like, oh, that one's gone.

Move on, you know.

And what I like to do is be like, well, hold on, let's give the little guy a second shot here, you know?

And I think why we were successful, why we found eight animals that were previously lost to science, was because we didn't give up after 10 days.

Like some of those expeditions were two months long, you know, living in tents, filming every day, like setting camera camera traps, going out, baiting stuff.

You know, it's, they were, they were hard work.

I love the work, but they were hard work.

And then it's like, oh, there it is.

We found it, you know, and the first time was like utterly shocking, but then we did it seven more times.

And it was like, oh, wow, there is a pattern here.

And I don't want to say it's just like our show and the work I did, but between that and some of the conservation organizations and stuff, there was a little bit of a mentality shift of, oh, wait a minute.

It's not extinct.

It's like a lost species.

It's been lost to Western scientists studying it or finding it.

So now we'll put in campaigns to find lost animals as opposed to just decide they're extinct and move on.

And that's sort of changed things a bit.

It's kind of like cold case files of animals.

Yeah, totally.

It's like go back in, you know, check, check the records.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, I don't think we had a, let's see if we have a better DNA sample now.

Yeah, exactly.

And the technology's come so far.

Dude, this sounds just like cold case files.

It is.

It is, man.

It's the same thing.

It's forensics.

It's animal forensics.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow.

It's cool.

Are there animals out there that are almost extinct?

Like, do you believe?

Are we getting like, does extinction happen every week on the planet and we just don't realize it?

How common is it?

3,000 species per year.

Nuh-uh.

You're lying.

You're lying.

That's the estimated number.

Yeah.

And a lot of things, a lot, crazy, right?

The fucking what?

Bro, a lot of things are going extinct before we've even described what they are.

Like in the Amazon, where there's all this clear-cutting and stuff, there are little species of, and I'm not saying they're, I'm not talking about a buffalo, you know, I'm talking about a bug this big or a little orchid or something.

But before we've even described what it is or looked into the medicinal properties of it or tried to conserve it, it's gone because we wipe out that chunk of habitat.

There you go.

The estimated number of species that go extinct every year ranges from about 2,000 over 100,000, depending on which scientific estimates and total species counts are used.

Yeah, we...

I know this is the chat GPT answer or whatever perplexity answer, but we dug into this pretty heavily across a bunch of organizations and we estimated it was close to about 3,000.

Now, most of that, as in like 2,500, are plants, but the other 500 to 700 or so are animals that are going extinct every year.

But to think that we're losing plants, which are,

I mean, unbelievable, just the things that they're, the medicine and stuff that they're finding in plants, the possibilities.

And it's, it's, again, going back to technology standpoint, the more that we advance our technology, the more we use that technology to realize that old ancient ways of medicine and herbal medicine and stuff actually is really effective.

Look at the sups game now, right?

Like you go on, it's like

supplements.

You know, every supplement's like, oh, this is, I'm making all this up, but like berberine, which is a derivative of an almond shell or whatever, you know, and it's like beetroot.

Beetroot, you're like, that's medicine.

Yeah.

You know, we, it's so crazy because I think medicine swang, swung so far away in the pendulum where it's like, it has to be fully synthetic.

And it's like, oh, wait, half this shit isn't working, giving you terrible side effects.

Well, look over here.

Beetroot actually is a great detoxifier.

Why don't we just do that?

You know, it's like, it's like the pendulum swung too far and now it's swung back a little bit, where it's like, yeah, all these, all these natural things actually help us.

And when you're losing 1,500 species or so of those a year, I'm not saying any of them are going to cure cancer, but they might.

You know, who knows?

Like, we haven't tested it.

Yeah, it's fascinating.

It's crazy to think that that's that

that's where we are.

And

how much of that is just evolution?

And how much of that is man-made, do you think, or man-like

involved that

species become extinct?

It's a little bit of both.

And I think the pro one of the things that we see a lot is people are like, oh, it's all humans' fault.

That's why everything's going.

Extinction's been around forever.

We're not going to get rid of extinction, and we shouldn't.

But what we shouldn't do is accelerate it.

And that's the problem.

Extinction has been around, dude.

I've been getting rid of these hoes forever.

You feel me?

That's it.

Dude, I'm just joking, hoes.

Sorry, hose.

I'm very respectful.

Yeah, but

it's interesting because I think man-made extinction.

So they say that we're in the sixth great mass extinction event right now.

There's been five others throughout history, like when the dinosaurs went extinct, when the when the earth froze over, the grape freezing or whatever it's called.

I don't, I'm not an anthropologist, paleontologist, so I don't really understand that as well.

But they say right now we're in the sixth great mass extinction event, and that is, that is directly caused by human beings.

So my thing is like, we shouldn't end extinction.

We shouldn't stop extinction.

We just shouldn't be like racing towards it as much as we can.

And when you're killing like, you know, a million, eight million sharks a year or whatever it is we're fishing and cutting down a thousand acres of rain, I'm making all these numbers up, a thousand rain acres of rainforest a day, we're like racing towards extinction.

We're like, how fast can we get rid of these things?

You know, and that's the problem.

Like, that's where we need to just reassess.

I'm all for human growth and development and everything else.

We need it.

Like, we need to make the planet sustainable, but we got to do it in a way that's also fair to all the species.

Do you know what I mean?

So that we don't collapse.

Kind of on this topic, I have a question about extinction, like, um, and the

idea that I know there's companies now that are bringing back or attempting to bring back extinct species, right?

That's been something that I know you're kind of close to.

Yeah, de-extinction, yeah.

De-extinction.

Um, but first, I was wondering: do you think that after a lot of your time being in nature and spending time around nature and animals,

do you feel like humans are supposed to be here?

Or do you feel like, do you feel like we are an additive or a deterrent?

It's a really interesting question.

What we should be as humans is docents of this planet.

We're the smartest creature on this planet, bar none.

Docent, what does it mean?

The guardian of the planet.

We should be the ones cultivating this garden that is planet Earth and taking care of it.

Instead, and I don't know when this happened or how this happened, and this may be a weird take on it.

It almost feels like we're like

an ant colony, like a parasite on the planet, where we're just like overexpanding and just sort of taking over this whole thing.

And I don't think we intend to do that.

And I don't think there's a single human being on this planet that's like, we should wipe out everything, we should take over.

But everybody like running on their hamster wheel of survival and needing to eat and needing clean water and needing new shoes and blah, blah, blah.

It ends up being this sort of almost like parasitic thing on the planet.

And instead,

what I think we need, and this is such a weird answer, but is this sort of mentality shift of like, okay, there's a lot of us, there's 8 billion people here, 10 billion, whatever we're up to now.

How do we take care of the planet so the planet takes care of us instead of how do we industrialize as much as possible and take from the planet?

And I don't think people want to take from the planet.

I don't think generally they do.

It's just, I believe we should be here.

We're supposed to be here.

But I think we've lost sight of the fact that as the most, what's the Peter Parker quote, with great power comes great responsibility?

We have that power.

We need to be responsible for that planet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I almost wish there was like a breathalyzer for people that were in power.

Interesting.

So you could just see if they're fucking like, do like, all right, just blow in here.

Make sure you give a fuck about it.

You good?

You good?

Here, blow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you watered your plants at home today?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You good to drive this planet or not?

Yeah.

Yeah, dude.

Hey, I'm going to need you you to pull this planet over to the side of the road for a second.

Yeah, let's take it, let's take a quick look at you.

Yeah.

Dude, that's hilarious, bro.

Thank you, bro.

That's, that's so funny.

But yeah, I don't understand why if we can tell if somebody's drunk, we can't tell if they have a moral compass when it comes to

trying to be ethical or, you know, trying to, yeah, I guess trying to care about things outside of themselves, you know, but maybe that's coming.

I think it's coming.

And I also don't think, like, I hate the idea of me sitting here and going, Theo, don't, don't use a plastic bag at the grocery store.

Come on, man.

And like, guilt tripping you.

I use plastic bags at the grocery store.

Yeah, yeah.

But you know what I mean?

It's like that, what's the bigger offset?

It's like, okay, you know, like, fine, we shouldn't be using as many plastic bags, but also like.

Let's just choose, make smaller choices that add up that don't impact us.

You know what I mean?

It's like, don't be preachy.

Just care a little bit.

Yeah.

It's it.

It's not that hard.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And I think also that I think some, you know,

we're all at such the whims and responsibilities of so many bigger corporations, not to put it onto them because we all play a part in our own governance as humans and just governing ourselves.

But the fact that,

you know, that we live in societies that have dirty water, just the things we're like, what are we doing?

Yeah.

Right.

Like we could be doing so much better than this.

I think so many of these things are becoming cool and mainstream, though.

I just saw a thing from Mr.

Beast a couple of days ago where he got like, I don't know the number, like a million people clean water.

That's as mainstream as it gets, man.

He's the biggest YouTuber on the planet and YouTube's the biggest medium on the planet.

Like I think that's awesome.

Yeah.

You know, like if you're making clean water for people that don't have clean water mainstream, how cool is that?

Hell yeah, dude.

Yeah.

I've been hearing about this initiative for a while.

Let me see.

Mr.

Beast launched his team water campaign in August 2025 to provide 2 million people with clean water.

2 million people.

Heck yeah.

That's so cool.

Like, how much cooler is that than like, you know, like watch me drive my Lambo or whatever, you know, it's like, this is mainstream now.

Bro, 100%, especially the fact that everything is becoming privatized, the fact that the government of Michigan couldn't do this for their people, but here he, you know, right, and individuals doing it as opposed to a nation or a government, that's that's badass.

And I think I really, I mean, I'm always an optimist, but I think the world is going to like follow suit.

Like, I feel like people, when people like Mr.

Beast are leading the charge, everybody else is going to be like, Yeah, this is rat.

This is awesome.

Well, it's funny that somebody who had to come along to take care of like healthy environment was had Beast in their name, you know?

It's kind of badass.

It's pretty cool.

It's pretty cool.

Yeah.

Especially for a vanilla white guy like Jimmy.

The campaign's core promise is that every dollar donated provides one year of clean water for someone in need.

That's all.

So cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, like, not that I'm anywhere near a Mr.

Beast level, but like, this is what I hope to do one day is to make wildlife conservation and science mainstream and cool.

You know, it's like if it's cool, people will do it.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah, I agree, man.

I think you're right.

I think having the attitude that that's where we're headed, that...

Let's take some of this stuff out of the government's hands.

Let's put it into people's hands because a lot of government has gotten so corrupted and can be so corrupted.

Even going back to like what you're talking about in different countries and where you grew up and how like the influence of government can get so

it can get so desperate definitely whereas hopefully the heart of an individual human and and individual humans overall can um can hopefully remain uh

can can remain more hopeful and uncompromised um you would hope no in no organization government body ngo is going to have the passion and the drive of an individual obviously mr beast thing is clean water for people right nobody i don't care if you're the government of the united states you don't have that same passion that that individual has.

You know what I mean?

And that's where impact comes from.

It comes from that passion.

It's so true.

And you start to realize that sometimes, too.

Like you're like, oh, shit, I see how somebody cared.

Yeah.

And they just kept caring.

And they just kept doing it.

They just kept hammering it until we all cared.

And it started to figure things out.

Yeah.

It's rad.

I want to talk about the de-extinction, right?

Sure.

Take me into some of that world.

There was a company.

There's a company Colossal.

Colossal Biosciences.

Colossal Biosciences, who recently they were in the press with recreating the dire wolf.

That's right.

Yeah.

And was it actually recreated?

Yeah.

So there's some interesting stuff here.

So I, you know, our buddy Joe Rogan, I, I connected him with Ben Lamb, the CEO of Colossal, and they went and spoke about it.

And I'm a, I'm a conservation advisor to Colossal.

So I don't can't tell you much about genetics because I don't know much about it, but I know a lot about conservation.

So I help say, here's where we should put the dire wolf if we release them, that kind of thing, you know, the conservation side of it.

Not going to release dire wolves, by the way.

But that's the role that I fill there.

So I'm luckily on the inside of this de-extinction thing.

The dire wolf's interesting.

There's a woman named Beth Shapiro who's in charge of it, and she can explain the genetics wholeheartedly.

What my understanding of is it or isn't it a dire wolf, which is your main question, is Colossal found through, they did more genetic sampling than anyone else has ever done.

And they found that the dire wolf was actually closely related to a gray wolf, which is what they built their dire wolf after, or they built it from rather, versus the people who got upset and said, this isn't a dire wolf, is because they thought dire wolves were originally more closely related to jackals, which is a different kind of canid.

So my understanding, which is very limited because I'm not a geneticist, is that they did make basically a giant white gray wolf, which is what a dire wolf was according to the most varied genetic sampling that's ever taken place.

Not an expert, but I think the thing to think about is not the minutiae, at least for me, of is it a dare wolf?

Isn't it?

What genes does it have?

It's like saying, Are you a human?

Am I a human?

Well, but Theo's got long brown hair and Forest has short brown hair.

This guy has a beard and that guy's a goatee.

It's like, wow, they're not the same.

It's like, right, but we walk the same, we talk the same, we eat the same, you know, we fill the same ecological niche.

And I think that's the point of what the science is.

Okay.

Putting dodos back in Mauritius is going to help the forest.

Putting thylacine back in Tasmania is going to help with the overabundance of all these macropods, which are like marsupials.

And that's what Colossal is trying to do with the de-extinction, at least as I understand it.

And I think that's awesome.

Okay.

So do you think that they, so they're kind of creating something as close as possible?

That's right.

Yeah.

Okay.

And by creating something as close as possible and putting them back into animal society, basically, it will help fulfill a space that could help.

nature be more robust.

Exactly.

That's a perfect way to put it.

A good example is like, imagine aliens came to Earth and they found a tribe in the middle of the jungle and the tribe had jaundice.

And they're like, oh, all humans are yellow, right?

Now the aliens think humans are yellow.

That's how humans are.

That's how we look at, say, Tasmania.

We go, oh, Tasmania is an island nation that just has a...

tons of roadkill and a bazillion macropods.

Well, it actually shouldn't.

It's very unhealthy, just like our tribe with jaundice, right?

Like it's a very unhealthy population because it's lost that little niche, that thing.

And in this case, we're talking about a thylacine, which is like a Tasmanian tiger.

So if they bring that back, or something very, very close and similar, it looks like it, walks like it, talks like that, acts like that.

And it's not like they're just going to be like, all right, we brought them back, chuck them out there.

You know, it's going to be a slow thing.

And that's the part that I like to help with.

But if they're able to put that back into the ecosystem, they're going to balance out that ecosystem.

And that balance creates health.

It gets rid of diseases, gets rid of overpopulation, all the things that throw

a system off balance,

which I think's cool.

And that's why I love it.

Like, I love the idea that we can right humanity's wrongs.

Like, where we've to the stuff with like dire wolves and mammoths are less for me, but the stuff where they're like, here's where humans took an animal, killed it till it was completely gone, and here's where we can come in and go, we can fix it.

Then I'm like, let's go.

Let's go.

Do you know if you, if we would ever be able to

create, like, you know, create the woolly mammoth, create a

dinosaurs.

Do you know that if that's possible?

What I know is that if you take something that has really healthy intact DNA and has a close living relative, for instance, you take the mammoth, whose mammoths only died out 10,000 years ago.

And so there's lots of fresh DNA, frozen in ice and tusks.

And you know, that guy, John Reeves, up in Alaska, you know who that is?

This guy's got this crazy place where he gets all these tusks and mammoth chunks, stuff.

He's even eaten mammoth.

Crazy, dude.

He's super cool.

Oh, really?

Yeah, this guy.

So he's constantly getting mammoth parts, right?

So there's really good DNA.

Now

you take that and you take an Asian elephant, an Indian elephant, and they're 99.6% related to a mammoth.

Okay, so now you've got really good DNA.

You've got an animal that's 99.6% related.

All you've got to do is combine those to get that 0.4%,

and you've made a mammoth, essentially.

Dude, and then you've made a movie called Mammeths.

Mammeths.

Meth Mammoth.

Meth, Math, Math, Mathmath?

know.

The methmets.

The mathmaths.

That's hard to say.

And they all have lists.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

Dude, being on meth and having a list would be the worst.

Boy, that'd be hard to follow.

Wow.

So, so that's what you're saying.

So it's like we're going to get,

so you're getting as close as you can get.

Yeah.

Do you think we could get into like actually increasing the scale then over time?

I mean, do you think some of those things are possible?

I do.

Yeah.

I think with technology it will be.

And that's why I don't think a dinosaur is possible.

Dinosaurs died out millions of years ago.

That's too far.

That DNA is just shattered.

You know, it's like the puzzle's too hard to put back to.

You take an egg, you crack it.

It's like, oh, these cracks go back together.

You smash it.

You're like, oh, I can never get that egg back together.

You know, it's like that.

That's how I see it.

Yeah.

Now, how interesting would it be then, though, that

if certain companies own the DNA or own this genetic mapping, it's able to put these things back together, then now animals would in some way become kind of privatized in a weird way.

I think it could.

I really do.

Like, you know, I don't know what, how that would work, but imagine you're this

crazy billionaire and you're like, all right, the technology is there.

I know it's going to cost $500 million to bring back a, I'm making this up, titanoboa.

I don't know if you know what that is, giant 50-foot-long anaconda.

Bring them back.

Right.

So there's probably no such thing as healthy titanoboa DNA, but what we could probably do, I'm making all this up as we go, with the technology, is take a regular anaconda, take out its growth restrictor through genetic engineering and make it 50 feet.

And this guy's like,

I want the Titanoboas and I have 500 million.

Now he's just privatized this mutant creature.

Probably Nicholas Cage would do it.

Yeah, you think?

I think.

Seems like a Nick Cage kind of thing to do.

Yeah, I think it would just be cool.

You know, you teach a Titanoboa to just

bring you in your date some almonds or something while you're watching Shangillis's tires on Netflix or something.

That'd be crazy.

That's just the weirdest image I just painted in my head as you said that.

Let me bring up the information on the Titanoboa.

Let me just rattle it off so we know what it is.

That's pretty, pretty.

It's just watching Shane Gillis's tires.

Titanoboa is an extinct genus of

giant boid, the family that includes all boas and anacondas, snake that lived during the middle and late Paleocene.

It was first discovered in the early 2000s by a tropical research institute.

Is the largest snake ever found at the time?

Titanoboa could grow up to 42 feet long, perhaps even to 47 feet long and weigh around 1,600 to 2,500 pounds.

That's crazy, man.

Like

imagine a snake that was eating full-grown horses.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

That is so crazy to think about.

But I don't know.

Yeah, to your point, I think they could privatize these things.

I certainly know that that's not what Colossal's goal is.

They're just trying to fix the ecosystem and get carbon credits and whatnot.

But

it's a crazy thought.

It's a crazy thought.

Nick Cage, don't do it.

Yeah.

Yeah, dude, it would probably be like some of the richest people ever would be doing it.

Probably Nick Cage.

Sam Altman would probably have some, you know, like a beautiful parakeet or something that's never, that makes a sound that only he can hear.

What would you have?

Ooh, oh, I'd have probably one of the most famous, probably

I would have a hamster or a gerbil.

Okay, a giant one or just a standard?

Pretty big.

Pretty big.

Yeah.

Like that.

Like you ride it to town.

I mean, I would at least break it out to show the ladies at night.

Yeah, that's smart.

Yeah, a pickup gerbil.

Yeah, they're like, what is that?

Yeah.

They're trying to pick up Richard Gere or what are you doing over there?

They're like, oh, is that a French bull gerbil?

A French bull gerbil.

No, No, I just breeze funny.

Dude, that'd be so great.

If you had a French bull gerbil, you would get all of the girls.

Yeah, yeah.

Nothing gets pussed like a French bull gerbil.

That's a fact.

Oh, it would be wet.

Watching a French bull gerbil get out of the pool and then shake itself off after.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The girls are just like, oh, Theo, I'm yours.

Braziers are just landing on it.

It's like a rock concert.

Are there any species that you think should go extinct?

I don't think, I mean, there's invasive species that need to go locally extinct.

Like, we shouldn't have Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades, right?

I don't know if you know about that, the big snakes in the Everglades.

Yeah, they're a problem.

Like, that's localized extinction that should happen.

But that's, again, because we've caused a problem.

There are other animals, and this is a very unpopular opinion.

They're trying to make themselves extinct.

Panda bears.

Panda, if you, Theo, if you're at a zoo and you go to a mama panda bear and you offer her an apple, she will hand you her baby for that apple.

True story.

You can literally find a video of what I just said.

I mean, these things are trying to go extinct.

I don't want them to go extinct.

They're incredibly cool, but they are so dumb.

Like, look at this.

Give mama an apple and you can just take her baby away.

I mean, that should not be.

You know what I mean?

Because they're just so, they're just addicted to the food.

They're food motivated.

They're bad parents.

They're sort of a creature that, and I, again, I don't want to see them go extinct.

I think they're super cool, but they're they're sort of a creature that naturally was probably edging towards extinction before humans intervened.

Another good example is the Great Auk.

So, this is a bird that once had colonies of millions and millions.

The Great Auk.

Great Auk.

It's like basically, so penguins are from Antarctica, the south.

This was kind of our version, the northern version of a penguin.

Yeah, yeah, northern penguin.

Let's go.

And they had these huge colonies of millions of birds, but during the when down feathers became a thing, we drove them to extinction.

Humans did.

But had we not done that, had humans not done that, they probably were on their way towards extinction anyway, because their numbers had shrunk and shrunk and shrunk.

Their colonies had shrunk and shrunk and shrunk.

There was only 10 or 12 or whatever colonies of these birds left.

So they were like on the road to extinction anyway.

And then humans came in and put the nail in the coffin.

So naturalized extinction does happen and it's a normal thing, but it's probably not good when industrial consumption, like I'm going to take every feather from every auk I can comes in and speeds up that process.

And the reason I say it's not good is because nothing else can adapt.

All the animals that would eat great auk, that relied on great auk, all of a sudden they're gone overnight.

Whereas if they slowly die out over time,

nature is such a complete system that something else comes in to take its place.

The animals find a new food source, a different bird comes in and starts nesting there.

You know what I mean?

Like it adapts.

Whereas if we just come in and drop the knife, it's like, oh, shit like the whole thing's broken what's the greatest example of that where humans have come in and affected the ecosystem so much with kind of like leading to the extinction or loss of an animal uh that you believe has had the largest effect probably a combination of things in Australia.

Like in Australia, we came in, we brought cane toads, which is a big frog from South America that

we brought them in because we started farming sugar cane in Australia and then they got cane beetle, which is a parasite.

So they're like, hey, let's get cane toads in to eat the cane beetle.

Well, the problem is these giant-ass toads that you're seeing here, they came in, they have these venom sacks.

See those big bulbous things behind its eyes?

That's full of venom.

Yeah.

And nothing in Australia has ever been adapted to tolerate that venom.

So they brought these cane toads in.

Cane toads, everything would try and eat them, all the goannas and the snakes and stuff, and they'd be dropping dead.

And so this single frog, this act of bringing in these frogs to help combat the cane beetle has probably had one of the greatest ecological disasters in history.

And like the country of Australia is at something like a 70% reduction in animals because of these things.

Wow.

Yeah, it's crazy.

And that's a straight human fumble.

Like, we're going to put, we're going to bring, it wasn't a removal, it was bringing something in, but it same, same effect.

Who brought them there?

Sugar cane farmers.

I don't know who specifically.

Yeah.

God, that's wild, dude.

We were crazy.

We were doing a tour.

We were doing some shows up in,

i want to say it was maine or new hampshire right along the coast uh-huh and we went down but it's by the docks because it was beautiful down there just seeing the boats it was like a kind of like all like about an hour before sunset and we had a show nearby and we just stopped in this little town and some of the guys who were they were bringing in lobster traps

and they all they had all these things on them called sea squirts okay it was a plant see if you could bring it up it's like a like a sponge right yeah it was like a thing that it got, it looked hollow.

It almost looked plastic.

Sea squirts, also known as Assidians or tunicates, are marine filter feeders with a sac-like body covered by a tough cellulose-based tunic.

Yeah, they almost look like it was a candy or something.

It was just full of like kind of water.

They filter bacteria and plankton from water drawn through their siphons, and their larvae possess a primitive backbone, making them a part of the cordophyllum.

What does it say that they, how did they get to America?

Are they invasive?

These guys were saying these were all invasive.

They all came from Asia.

Oh, really?

Oh, that's interesting.

Oh, yeah.

They're invading Long Island Sound, attaching the hulls of commercial recreational ships, being transported in their ballast water, a process known as hull fouling.

They also could have been introduced via aquaculture shipment, such as oyster seed or by hitchhiking or fishing equipment.

There's another huge example of that called a zebra mussel or zebra mussel, which is in all the lakes across the U.S.

And they get so bad, see how they grow on everything that like your boat engine and stuff gets filled with them.

And it's crazy because all you have to do is run your live well, you know, to go bass fishing or whatever.

And the fry is microscopic.

So then you have one drop of water with a little bit of fry in it, and you take your boat to another lake, they're all over the lake.

What does fry mean?

Like the larval stage, the baby.

Wow.

Yeah.

God.

I know.

And that's man.

That's man doing that probably most of the time.

And oftentimes, like the cane toad was unintentional.

This is completely unintentional.

And we've done that over and over, like taking rats to New Zealand and Hawaii and blah, blah.

And it's just humans doing what humans do, you know, just traveling and learning.

Crazy thing, you know, dingoes?

We brought dingoes to Australia.

Humans brought dingos to Australia 4,000 years ago.

When Aboriginal people came across from Indonesia, New Guinea into Australia, they brought dogs with them.

And those dogs were dingoes.

They're like the OG invasive species, and they're like a national treasure in Australia, but they've been there 4,000 years.

But humans actually brought them there.

Yeah, they weren't even supposed to be.

No, dude, that's the kind of shit that happens, dude.

My step grandmother, she brings her fucking cat over to Thanksgiving, and everybody's fucking pissed.

That thing is a piece of shit.

Most cats are.

I hate cats, but yeah, I feel you.

Being everywhere.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What is one of your biggest like sleeper creatures?

Like a creature that we are all kind of sleeping on that people don't know how awesome it is or that just doesn't get the acclaim that it should, do you think?

You know what I think is a good one?

Soft shell turtle.

A turtle with a soft shell.

Why?

It's so crazy.

Very brave.

It's brave.

It's nuts.

These things evolved away from having a hard shell.

It's like a gay dude in the military, kind of.

You know?

No, I don't.

Please explain.

I don't know how to explain.

I'm just guessing.

Fair enough.

Yeah, fair enough.

It's just brave.

It's just brave.

Yeah.

Never mind.

Thank you for your service.

Don't ask.

Don't shell.

Oh,

don't shell.

I don't know.

I think these things don't get enough credit.

You see them on highways in Florida and stuff.

So they're really, the shell is soft?

Soft.

It's like feels like leather.

No.

And it's just such a weird, like, if you think about a turtle, you think about this, this like living rock.

It's flippers, its head, its feet, whatever.

Then you got this guy.

Like, what the hell is this guy doing?

He's got this leathery shell.

They get like this big.

There's There's certain species that get, if you look up the Raffidas, they get massive.

Like, I'm talking about the size of a car.

A soft shell turtle.

Talking about an animal that just doesn't get enough credit.

A turtle is just crazy, isn't it?

Yeah, they're insane.

They're weird.

Look at these guys.

Look at these penis-headed things.

It's nice to have like your kind of to-go home on your back or whatever, but it's just crazy.

Yeah, they're insane.

They're such weird, cool animals and don't get enough credit.

Hmm.

I think because they feel so, I wonder, are they nervous?

That's why they pop back in their shell?

Or are they?

Oh, it's called out, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, their defensive mechanism is to go into their shell unless you're a soft shell, then it's being fast.

Yeah, they've, they've evolved to be faster instead of retreat.

Oh, that's a large one you showed right there.

Yeah, the raffidas, yeah, and they get huge.

So they're, this is an animal that there's currently believed to be

three left.

One male with a broken penis and two females.

Nuh-uh.

So they got to fix that wiener on him.

So yeah, it's pretty sad.

So we went and did a show on these guys.

It's crazy.

It's a whole political turmoil, everything.

So the male, there were two males and two females.

And one of the males died because a kid dropped a brick on its head from the enclosure in a zoo in China, in Shuzhu, China, I believe.

So now there's one male and two females.

That's an op.

Then, yeah, then the male, they tried to breed it or something.

broken dick.

Legit broken dick.

Yeah.

So now they've got two females in this lake in Dong Mo in Vietnam and one male in China, I believe that's where the current numbers are.

And neither country is willing to give the other their turtles, but it wouldn't really matter anyway because it's got a broken dick.

So the whole thing's kind of fucked.

Somebody, so Trump needs to arrange a meeting between all these people, I think.

You know, I think he should sit down and be like, all right, how are we fixing this dick?

You know?

I know we got some other stuff going on, but how are are we working on this?

Wow.

The most widely cited figure is two confirmed individuals, both male, one in Suzhou Zoo, China, and one in Dongmo Lake, Vietnam.

Dang.

I thought one of those males died like I was talking about.

I'm not sure, but oh, yeah, last known female died.

It's yeah, it's hard to track.

I think it's one male and two females that we know of.

The future of the species now depends on last-ditch conservation and breeding efforts, as well as the possibility of verifying additional individual turtles.

Wow.

So we went out to Dongmo Lake and we ran eDNA and got samples and even filmed one of these animals.

And this is where like colossal biosciences, right?

Like if they could get an X and a Y chromosome, a male and a female, they could make those turtles.

And that would be awesome.

That's where like that technology.

To me, there's no ethical concern.

There's no moral concern.

It's like, hell yeah.

Like we went and got these samples, male and female chromosomes, tissue, built new turtles, ground up, good to go.

Are they out there?

Are they searching for these things?

And how are they doing it?

How are they trying to get DNA or genetic material so that they can create or recreate or re-establish species?

Well, I don't think, oh, you mean How's Colossal doing that?

Yeah,

they're going all over the world.

They're digging up stuff like that guy, John Reeves, that place in Alaska, they're getting samples from.

They've been on multiple digs in Mauritius, getting dodo samples.

Yeah, they're collecting all that kind of stuff.

How much more animals existed at one time, do you think?

Like, what percentage are we down to right now?

Oh, that's a good question.

We have a lot of diversity in this era, more so than like when there were dinosaurs and stuff like that.

That's really, that's, I mean, you should fact check me on that.

But yeah, it's mammalian diversity is higher than when like reptiles were at their peak.

And yeah, there's a lot of metals.

It's really good.

Yeah.

But, you know, we have.

eliminated a lot like we talked about, but we're still, and I don't believe in this whole like, we're fucked thing.

Like we're still an planet's incredible.

Wildlife's resilient.

Like we're not down that much.

yes we've knocked huge populations down meaning we've knocked down you know shark species to 10 of what there were or we've not populations we've knocked down certain mammal species to five or ten percent of what they were that's all it takes to bring it back you know what i mean like you just back off a little bit they'll they'll bounce right back right there's a study that got put out a few years ago i'd be curious if anybody's done a study since that said if you didn't if we as human beings didn't fish the ocean for seven years it would be back to 99 fullness of what it's at now that's at seven years is all it would take, allegedly.

That's not very long.

We can't do that because 99% of the world's protein comes from the ocean or something like that.

But that's all it takes for nature to like build, fight its way back up, you know?

Do you think there's a certain country or certain part of the world that

you find that they have it right when it comes to nature and to animalia?

No.

I think there's lots of places that are trying.

You know, the Galapagos has done a really good job of like really taking care of their islands.

Like you go through quarantine when you go there and blah, blah, blah.

And there are other play like Palau, which is a tiny little island nation.

I think it is either the only or definitely the first country in the world that said no commercial fishing.

It's like, go out and kill your own fish all you like and eat them, but we're not doing any commercial fishing.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

You know, it's like you want to go out and shoot a fish?

Go shoot a fish, but you know, you're not buying it from a purse sainter who's killing dolphins and wiping out Coral Reefs.

Like that kind of thing's awesome.

But, you know, we wouldn't be having Nobu in Tennessee if that existed.

So it's, you know, it's a trade-off.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And whoever fucking brought Nobu to Tennessee is out of their fucking mind.

I don't know if there is one, but I think there is.

Is there?

I don't know.

Every time I see somebody going to something where it's like they're trying to put it in Nashville, I'm like, what are you doing?

You know?

Dude,

Nashville's wild.

I got to walk around today.

It's fun.

It's cool, man.

It's busy.

I'm going to go out this evening, check out Broadway, right?

Yeah, you have some other friends here or no?

I got a friend here.

Yeah, he's going to meet me.

I mean, you're welcome to join, but we're going to check it out.

I'll try to come say, hey, or go get a snack with you or something.

Anything else you want to chat about for us?

I think this has been good first episode so far.

Do you think?

Dude, I think it's great, man.

I'm just like, if you're interested, I'm interested.

My thing is like,

if people love it, I'm into it.

I want to go to South African South Africa thing.

Let's do it, man.

I'm happy.

And if, you know, October may be too soon.

Sure.

But I could always do it in the spring or something.

If you're planning on going, let me know and I'll try link with you and then we'll go do some really cool, like a safari thing for a few days.

But I'm talking not like, hey, let's go on safari.

I mean, like, hey, Theo, let's go catch giraffes and put radio colors on them.

No way.

Like something that people don't get to do that we'll do through the conservation groups that I work with.

That house respond on your neck.

Yeah, take that, boy.

Yeah.

He's just showing up to his

P.O.

Dude, the ladies are like, that's a bad giraffe right there.

That's a bad giraffe right there.

Is there an animal that you wish could speak up for itself ever better?

Man, that's a good question.

An animal that could speak up for itself.

Yeah, you know what the Vaquita is?

The Vaquita?

Yeah, ever heard of that?

No, but

I'd put some damn cheese on one of my fingers.

That sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Well, it's Mexican, so that makes sense.

Oh, it does.

Yeah.

Vaquita with the Verde sauce.

Yeah, no, that makes sense.

But these little guys, smallest porpoise in the world, there's now

estimates between 9 and 11 of them left on the planet.

Which is the worst to have 9, 11 of them left.

Sounds fucking like

bad luck.

That's a bad sign.

Yeah.

I wish these guys could speak up for themselves because they're, they're just these crazy, cute little dolphins.

They're driving towards extinction.

There's not a lot that can be done based on how things are going.

They need a flip her up to somebody and just be like, eh, help.

And we'd be good.

Aquita.

Yeah.

Oh, they look like the quokkas of the sea.

Yeah, nice.

Good pull.

Where their smile is kind of built on.

Uh-huh.

It's funny how some animals, God kind of put a smile on them so you would just see that they're okay, you know?

I mean, you look at a cuoka and you're like, right, well, we're never letting that thing go anywhere.

It's too cute, you know?

If everything was cute, we'd be good.

Yeah.

Why are some animals only in one spot?

Because aren't the cuokas only native to an island off the coast of Australia?

Yeah, near to Perth, yeah.

I mean, that's crazy to think on a whole planet that they're that specific of a place.

I mean, that's wild, isn't it?

It's crazy.

Yeah, so they get there as something else, like as a small wallaby or whatever.

And then, like, with a cuoca, for instance, they're like, oh, wait, having tails doesn't help us.

So year after year, shorter tails, shorter tails, shorter tails.

Hey, wait, having this big, goofy smile on these big, fat cheeks, that's actually good because we store food.

I'm making this stuff up.

But, you know, and then they breed more and more and more.

And then before you know it, you've got its own species that's stuck here that's completely different from these guys because their environment dictates that these characteristics make it useful for this place only.

Yeah.

I don't know if that makes sense.

Yeah, it does.

Well, Well, I think it shows also why humans have adapted and become different ways because

they needed to become fit for their territory.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You look at what is it, the Sudanese, South Sudanese, the tallest people in the world.

Like, why are those guys so tall?

You know what I mean?

And it's obviously genetic and cultural and everything else, but these guys are all over seven feet.

Like, that's incredible that that only takes place in that one area.

Why?

Why do they need to be so tall?

Do you know?

I don't know.

I would like to know.

Let's look it up right now and see if we can get a little bit more information.

I'd like to go go there.

Wouldn't you like to stand around with seven-foot-tall people?

It sounds so interesting.

Yeah, until you freaking, you know, until you hit your head on something and realize that it's like, oh, God.

It wipes you across the face.

Oh, boy, that's not what I wanted.

Then you and your buddy from Florida high school are sharing the same problem.

Yeah, it's like, like, when you see that person that's blindfolded, and the pinata hits them when he's swinging around.

Yeah.

Danglers get you.

South Sudanese people, particularly the

Nileotic groups like the Dinka and the Nuer, are among the tallest in the world, largely due to a mix of genetics, natural selection, and nutritional factors.

The tall, lean bodies of the South Sudanese nilotis help with thermoregulation in a hot, dry climate.

Longer limbs facilitate heat dissipation, supporting survival in tropical conditions, a phenomenon aligned with the Bergman's and Allen's rules in biology.

How crazy is that?

It's so damn hot here that we're going to make you taller so that you can off-gas more and stay cooler.

And by the way, you're all going to be seven feet tall.

Like, that's so cool.

That's fascinating.

Isn't that wild?

Well, yeah, it's just fascinating how, I mean,

it's all just fascinating.

To exist is fascinating to me.

Yeah.

And we're lucky we live on this planet, man.

I mean, not that I know where else we'd live, but there's just so much cool stuff here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think that's one thing that's just nice to even get to talk today, man.

It's just a reminder of that, you know, just a reminder of it.

Dude, I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me on, man.

It's really cool.

Oftentimes when I talk, do podcasts or whatever, I talk to guys that, you know, we have similar interests.

We talk a lot about, you know, I know, they know a lot of, like even Joe, right?

Like when I do Joe's show, he knows a lot about animals.

Oh, yeah.

He's an animal nut.

But to talk to you, who, no offense, but maybe knows less or has less connection, you see that, like I was saying earlier, that child sense of wonderment, be like, no way, you know, like that's so cool that you can bring that back.

Yeah, thanks, dude.

Well, I just, yeah, I feel lucky to get to talk to people.

I feel lucky to get to learn.

I mean, I feel, you know, like even just to be inspired today that I want to go back to South Africa, you know,

and that it would be neat to go do something there, you know.

One of my friends said yesterday I was talking to him.

I don't know if I was talking to him on the phone.

Let me think about who it was really quick.

Oh, damn, I can't remember.

But he goes.

Man, you know what's crazy to think?

He goes, if you think about your life, think about how many summers you have left.

Yeah, it's not that many.

And you're like, whoa.

Yeah, what?

We got 20, 30 summers left, you know?

It just starts to put the perspective of your life.

You know, if even, you know, if you're 25 and say you have,

you know, until you're 65, you can kind of do whatever you want.

You have 40 summers left, right?

That's a lot of summers, but that's not that.

But it's not that many summers, dude.

And if you think, like, I think of my, this past summer, like I basically worked all summer.

I was on the road.

I barely had a time to hang out with my kids or go to the lake or do any of the summer things.

That's it.

I lost one of those.

Never getting that back.

That summer's gone.

It's going to be cold when I get home now.

You know, like, I know.

That sucks.

It's cool.

Yeah.

But it's nice today to be able to be reminded of that and just be reminded that nature's out there waiting for us, that there's a lot of things that are happening out there and that we're lucky to exist and be a part of them, man.

Yeah, brother.

Boris Calante, thanks so much for coming in.

People can check out Animals and Drugs.

Animals on Drugs.

Animals on Drugs right now.

And I challenge you guys in the comments of this episode if you can think of any good names for

drug animal

crossovers.

We need them.

We need more kracoons.

Yeah.

We need more crackoons.

Thanks, Forrest.

I must be

cornerstone.

I found I can feel it

in my bones.

But it's gonna take

a little while.