Transcript of #2531 - Forrest Galante

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day!

My friend.

Joe, it's good to see you, man.

Bro, it's good to see you.

So I've been sending you stuff because like we've been— I knew that you were coming on and I sent you that one, uh, that video of the guy who got a trail cam photo of a black panther.

Yep.

So is that just a melanistic Mountain lion? Like, what is that?

It's a great question. There's never been a melanistic mountain lion. Nobody's ever seen one, ever. Never hit one with a car, never born one captivity, nothing.

Whoa.

So mountain lions, by definition, pumas, you know, whatever you want to call them, um, there's never been a black one ever. But every year, I mean, I got a buddy in Florida who swears blind that he's seen a black mountain lion in his backyard. And yet that photo that you sent me That photo circulates like once every 3 years.

It's bullshit.

It's bullshit. It's a real photo, but it's a trail cam photo. Oh, it wasn't this one, but—

Well, that's— I think that's the first one, and then there's another one with the cat gets like right up to the lens. That one? Yeah, that one.

So that photo is a real— I want to say jaguar. It's hard to tell, but either jaguar or black leopard, both of which do become melanistic.

Right.

And you can tell that because you can see the spots barely, like the rosettes. So all these melanistic cats, like, like jags and leopards and things that do get melanistic, they still have those rosettes under the black coat. Yeah, so not a mountain lion.

Too bad.

I know, it's such a bummer. One day if somebody finds one, that'll be like a huge thing scientifically.

Isn't it funny that we want it to be different? Because just a mountain lion itself is amazing. I mean, if they were all black and there was like a tan mountain lion, it'd be like, oh, somebody saw a tan mountain lion.

100%. It's like whatever's different and rare is what people just are like, I want that one thing.

I've always said that about Bigfoot. Yeah, Bigfoot is kind of interesting, but not as interesting as an orca.

100%! Right. Like, we have gorillas that are cooler than Bigfoots.

Well, orcas in particular because they have languages that we can't decipher.

Languages, specialized diets, some kind— I'm sure you know this— can't even talk to each other. Right. Yeah, it's unbelievable. Like, it's the same as if you or I went to India or Africa and it's like, we can't communicate, we don't eat the same food, we look different, and yet to us an orca is an orca. Right.

Yeah.

And super smart and huge brains and don't kill people for some strange reason. Except when they're in captivity.

That's right, yeah, which is so crazy. I did a thing in Baja, Mexico, maybe 3 years ago, where we were just cruising on this little panga, this little fishing boat, and we saw these orcas go by. And now people seem to be doing it a lot, but at the time it was like nobody had really just tried this, and this was a transient population, which means they primarily eat seals and sea lions, not the stingray eaters, and so we're like, Fuck it, let's just go. And we like ran the boat up ahead and jumped in and the orcas came up and the bull never came out. So, you know, the bull has a huge fin, like he's the biggest, like the dominant protector of the pod. But the cows and their babies came up and the boat like drifted away. And me and my buddy Mike, and they just circled us, like just looking at us with their big eyeballs.

Whoa.

And it was me to you from orcas. And they did like two circles around us, like, what are these things? Then we're just like, Meh, boring, and kept swimming.

They must know, right? If they're that intelligent and they have language and they communicate, they must know what a person is, right?

I think I have it.

Look at this.

Oh dude, I saw the guy that filmed this. This is so crazy.

Orca headbutts a sunfish so hard it explodes?

Boom, turns into pieces. So this is a newly documented behavior. Just in the last maybe 6 months, they've found that orcas will literally explode fish from impact. Whether it's a game or what, but they're finding that this is not the first time this is done. They're doing this. They're starting to just explode these fish on impact just because.

How are they doing that? Like, how fast are they going?

I do not know the answer to that, but it's impressive.

I would have never imagined that that would actually be possible, right? Like, how fast can you—

I'm trying to like, what does the starfish look like? Flat like a stingray?

A sunfish. It's like a mola mola, those ocean sunfish with the big goofy fins.

They're pretty huge.

Some of them are huge. £600. They get huge.

—How do you think this thing literally turned to dust?

—Dude, I think those are the orca equivalents of like a redneck that wants to hit a turtle on the road, and they're just like, "We're bored, let's explode it." Or those guys that do that—

have you seen that game? Well, it's not a game, but it's, I guess, whatever it is, an activity where these guys just run at each other full blast? Dude, RNC, Run Nation?

I fucking love that. It's one of my favorite things. I'm such a huge fan.

How could you love that?

I love it, dude, because I play rugby, so it's rugby boys that are doing it, right? It's like an Oklahoma drill except for rugby guys. And that's a drill that when I was playing rugby we used to do all the time. Just run at each other? You just run at each other. It's my favorite. Run Nation, RNC, it's my favorite thing. I watch every video. Look at these guys.

I would have never— they both just went unconscious. Look at that. They both went unconscious. Well, that guy's fine. I'm such a fan. But I've seen it where they both get unconscious.

I want to bring these guys to the US and see how they stack up against NFL linebackers. Oh, Jesus Christ, they both headbutted each other, dude. Dude, you love fight sports. What are you talking about?

This is not a fight sport. This is just retarded. I'm sorry. I'm such a fan. Oh, that's so silly. Oh, that's so crazy that you like that. I know too much about brain damage, and you should too if you like rugby.

I've had too much brain damage to know too much about brain damage. No, I'm just kidding.

How long did you play rugby for?

Well, I grew up in Zimbabwe, and so like Southern Africa, rugby is life, right? So it's like probably Deep South football kind of culture. So I still play, believe it or not, except now I play very intermittently because one game puts me out for weeks at a time.

Have you ever got your brain examined?

Uh, no, I have not. I guarantee it. But I've only had one concussion in my life, so I think I'm okay. Oh, that's silly.

Because you guarantee you'd have subconcussive trauma.

What is subconcussive trauma?

Well, where you don't go unconscious, but you get rattled, and then you have some brain damage. You're probably right. Yeah, soccer players get it. Really? Yeah, soccer players get it. From headbutting? Yeah. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Yeah, that's— soccer players get it.

I did not know that. From heading the ball. So is that— and you know a lot about UFC— is that brain trauma worse than UFC-type trauma?

Well, it's all brain trauma, and it's dependent upon many factors. It's dependent upon how many times you've been hit, and also there's a gene variation. It's APOE4. Is that what it is? I think so, yeah. If you have this one particular gene, it makes you more susceptible to CTE for some strange reason.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. 'Cause a concussion is when your brain sort of impacts against your skull, is that right?

There's that, and I mean, I think it's also, it's not just that, it's like if you get hit in the neck, you can get a concussion. Really? Also, yeah, also a lot of people don't realize, you can get a concussion from getting hit in the body. Really, how does that work? 'Cause you get rattled. Yeah, also another group of people that seem to get CTE are people who ride jet skis.

That's wild. Oh yeah.

So how does that work? Well, my friend Mark Gordon, he's a doctor who specializes in traumatic brain injuries and treating football players, soldiers, and he's treated some fighters as well. He said that any repeated stress, any banging, anything like that, headbanging, like if you're fucking headbanging, like you're probably gonna get brain damage. No way. Yeah, legitimate brain damage. Like I can't remember what I was doing 5 seconds ago. Wow. Where's my keys? I forget what I'm talking about mid-sentence. Dude, you're scaring me here.

These are all things I enjoy doing.

Oh, I'm sure. I enjoy running straight at people full blast. Yeah, I just, uh, look, those guys are animals. They're tough guys, no doubt about it.

And those Pacific Islanders, like, because those are the guys that are doing it primarily, right? Like, they play rugby league and stuff. They're built different. Oh yeah. Like, they're so hard, it's insane.

Do you remember David Tua? No, I'm not. David Tua was a heavyweight boxer back in the day who, uh, was like one of the most ferocious guys that ever fought in boxing. And it just just built like, like a— your prototypical island warrior guy. Yeah, just— yeah, that's David Tua.

Yeah, just a tank. You don't want to run into that guy, I'm telling you what.

Yeah, I mean, just a monster. Knock people out. And he knocked out John Ruiz like famously in the first round, and like something like 30 seconds or something like that.

Was crazy. Different breed, man.

Crazy left hook. Yeah. That kind of guy. I mean, we've got a bunch of— Mark Hunt, who's a famous kickboxer, was another guy built like that. Yeah, just, just wide as a fucking barn.

There's like no waist. It's just like a brick. Solid as a rock. Yeah. Yeah, I— again, playing rugby, I played rugby against guys like that, and it was the worst.

Well, those are the dudes that have the balls to get in a little tiny boat and make it across the fucking ocean. And then kick your ass. That's what it is, really. I mean, you think about it, like, only the super robust survived, right? So it's like nature just weeding out any possible weakness. Only the strongest human beings made it.

Absolute natural selection. It's similar to the African Americans that we have in North America. Like, those are the strongest, best guys that came over here. Right, right. And that's why they're all the most incredible athletes. I don't know about all, but you know what I mean.

Yeah, I know what you're saying. Yeah, there's— I mean, it's— and also, like, when you look at, like, guys from Iceland, the strongmen. Yeah. So how many strongmen are from Iceland? Well, how many fucking Vikings are from Iceland? Like, let's legit— yeah. It's weird when you think about it, that like nature finds its way.

It's the same thing. It's like we think we're so different and above like animals and stuff. It's natural selection. We just bring the biggest, the best, and the strongest into some area, whether that's Vikings colonizing Iceland or, or the Samoans on their islands or whatever it happens to be. And you're just like, well, here's a superior population because we've— all the biggest, best, and strongest have made it and all of the weakest have died off.

Isn't that weird? Like, you as a guy who studies wildlife biology, Isn't it weird that we want to think of ourselves as being a different thing? Like, we are clearly not.

We're not. We're not even at the top. That's the thing that people never understand. Intellectually, we are, obviously. Look at what we've built. But like, we're not even— we don't even sit at the top of the food chain.

Well, we kind of do because we kill everything else if we want to. Well, because of our brains. Yeah. Well, not even our brains, really. It's other people's brains that invented guns. It's like, it has nothing to do with you and me.

True.

No, no, no. That's such an interesting— it's like our brains are our evolutionary advantage. It transfers over to people that don't have good genetics. Yeah, right. Like, because you could be built like a bag of shit, like a literal bag of shit, and you can kill a grizzly bear with a rifle. That's right. Kind of nuts, right? It's crazy. You just be sitting there on a ridge. Yep. Like with a scope and boom, and you kill a 1,200-pound Kodiak brown bear.

Because all of our biological energy goes into this thing instead of being physically big or intimidating or —any of those other things.

Also, we can transfer what we figured out onto other people. Yeah. Which is— no other animal's ever figured out how to do that.

Nope. Isn't that crazy? Wild. Yeah.

It's really wild. Yep. It's— when you think about it, it's like, what a— if you were studying us, if you were coming from another planet and you were studying us, you'd be like, wow, this one animal is fucking weird. Yeah. And this one— this one's doing something different. Yeah, absolutely. But they would still look at us and go, oh, well, they're definitely animals. Like, look at them.

Oh yeah, if you looked at the Earth from an Earth shot, you'd look at what we've done and be like, this is the top animal, but they're parasitic and colonizing the whole planet and changing things and manipulating things, whereas all the other animals are just getting by. Yeah.

If we found out that there were, were actual visiting aliens, that there, there was actual intelligent life from somewhere else visiting us, I think there, a lot of us would probably be like, why didn't you help? Yeah, right. Why didn't you come along and say, hey, cut the shit?

It reminds me of the— I don't know, did you watch South Park ever? Yes. There was an old South Park episode where Earth was like a reality show. And it's like, let's see who's getting along this week. The zebras are fighting with the giraffes and the people are doing this. And it's like, it's like we're just like a reality show for the universe where you just put a bunch of species. We're like a big, big brother situation. Well, we are kind of that for us. Oh, totally.

Where we are, that's what a reality show is. A reality show for us is the world. Yeah. You know, Lindsey Graham, did he die in a rocket accident or did he die, was he poisoned by Russia? Let's tune in to Twitter and find out.

You know what I mean? Exactly, exactly, man.

It's hilarious. We are locked in on whatever the fuck is happening all over the world all at once. And that's one of the weird things about social media now is that we're constantly being inundated with new things to occupy our attention. You know?

Yeah, and we have no attention span to watch anything for more than 5 seconds.

But yet at the same time, this is the rise of podcasts.

Yeah. Which are long form. Right.

So it's clear that that's not really the case with everybody. There's enough people that are interested in actual fascinating things and have an attention span. It's just like we're all susceptible to the brain rot that comes with just scrolling.

It's so hard not— like I've tried to make conscious decisions because, you know, you can imagine what my Instagram feed looks like, right? It's animal after animal. Half of it's AI now, whatever. And I still try and make a conscious decision to not look at it, and I find myself just reaching for my phone and doing this. It's just— we're wired into it now. Yeah. Dopamine hits crazy.

And it's not even really rewarding, which is really terrifying to me because it's not something that's like really feels great.

And you barely retain the information. Like, even if you watch an educational one where you're like, wow, that was amazing, you barely retain that information because it's such a quick thing until you're on to the next one, at least for me.

Yeah, there's a little bit of that in there for sure, but I think I've gotten a pretty good algorithm lately. So lately, for whatever reason, my algorithm has been really excellent. It's really dialed in where I'm only getting like really fascinating things. Oh, that's good. The last couple of weeks.

Yeah.

Oh, it's been great. That's way better. And then every now and then some retarded shit comes on. I just skip through it real quick and I'm like, gotta keep this algorithm going good.

Or you text me a Bigfoot AI thing.

Bigfoot ones are so silly. They're so bad. They're so silly. You actually texted me the Bigfoot one.

Well, it was the same guy. You, you said the same guy. I texted you back. I was like, I don't think so, dude. He's like, this guy raised a baby Bigfoot in secrecy for 10 years.

It's so bad. It's so bad. It's so obvious. This is like a shitty AI photograph of like, like a blurry Polaroid photograph.

And then you read the comments and there's like 400 people going like, oh my God, I can't believe this happened. And you're like, come on.

Oh dude, Duncan and I, um, back in the day, like in 2012 or '11, whatever it was, when I did that sci-fi show, Joe Rogan Questions Everything, we went and hung out with Bigfoot people. We actually went Bigfoot hunting. No way. Oh yeah, we hung— yeah, we were with them for a couple days.

How was that?

In the woods of the Pacific Northwest. It's kind of sad. Yeah. Because the way I describe it, I always said, here's what you don't find when you go looking for Bigfoot: black people. You're more likely to find Bigfoot than you are black people looking for Bigfoot.

It's just such a crazy white guy.

Unfuckable white guys out in the woods staring at shadows.

It's like making something out of nothing, right? Look at that leaf, it must have been here.

It's just unfuckable guys It's really what it is. It's, it's unfortunately, that's really what it is. It's not that there's not something to the story because I think there is something to the story. Yeah, I think it's an old story.

Well, it dates all the way back to Native Americans, right?

Well, not just that. There's how many? We looked this up before, like how many different names there are, and I think it was more than 50 different Native American names.

I was asking if you've seen this going around.

Yeah, that one's great.

This guy was dead big. By the way, you imagine sitting that close to that thing, how bad that would smell? Yeah, it's revolting. I mean, that thing's been dead for who knows how long, and this guy's just hanging out. Yeah, I'm gonna take you a picture.

How do I look? Side fun fact, this guy was on your mom's house like 12 years ago. Was he?

Yeah. For what?

He's like a fun guy on Instagram. He's a dog trainer. That's hilarious. Tom found his videos a long time ago, and they brought him in to do a podcast with them. And I just— No way. I know who this guy is.

No way.

I don't know how he got into Bigfoot. He has Bigfoot's body.

Look at how bad that looks. It's so bad, dude.

Oh my God, look at these. Look at that. Look at the smile.

I mean, he could be just a full-on satirical troll.

Oh, he's sawing into it.

Look at this. It's a cake. It's going to turn out. It's going to be a cake. Oh my God, he sawed into it. Open it up, Tom.

Oh, he found a foot. Oh yeah, very real.

Very real looking foot.

That's really— also, if you can't trust a guy in overalls with no shirt, who can you trust?

By the way, guy's in great shape for his age. He is. Looks, looks ripped. He's out there lifting up fake Bigfoots all day.

These things are heavy.

I think there was—

I mean, obviously we know the Gigantopithecus was real, but we were reading about this the other day that it seems like Gigantopithecus wasn't bipedal. And that there was some dispute as to whether or not it was bipedal, but apparently there's some biologists that are saying, no, it was most likely walked around like an orangutan.

Interesting. It was just huge.

Just, just, oh wow.

Just a huge orangutan looking thing.

Huh. No, I've heard of it. I didn't know that it wasn't bipedal though.

That's fascinating. I think it's under dispute. I think it's been disputed. That's interesting. It's hard to say. I mean, they don't have a lot of bones, right? They only have like a few jawbones and some stuff.

Of them. Yeah, dude, I learned something pretty interesting this last week. So I, I just got back from India, literally flew in here from India, and we were doing some elephant rescues with Vantara, that big Indian wildlife rescue place. This elephant got hit by a car that we went and rescued, so its leg was all jacked up. Speaking of non-bipedal things, so you would think just the elephant would walk with a limp. Well, having that trunk, it's incredible. They use that trunk as a limb. So I was watching this elephant walk— I wish I had photos or video to show you— but I was watching this elephant walk and it wouldn't put weight on its leg that was hit by the car, so it would walk with 3 legs and its trunk as its 4th appendage. Oh wow. Which is an amazing thing to see, because you think of the size of an elephant's cranium and its head and the weight, and in order to move that distribution off of that broken leg, it was using this trunk as a limb. It was just— it was incredible. It was really sad, but it was an incredible thing to see.

The way they sort of figured out how to maneuver using that fifth appendage. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter.

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So, in India— Was it broken? I don't know. It went— so we went to— basically, so I work with this place called Vantara, which is the world's largest wildlife rescue and rehab center. It's unreal, dude. It would blow your mind. I mean, like, on a whole nother level. All privately funded by Anand Ambani, this Indian billionaire guy. The guy who had the huge wedding, if you remember that. Oh, I do. Justin Bieber sang at his wedding and stuff. He's a great dude. Him and I are buddies now. But, um, so he's funded this world's largest wildlife rescue and rehab. It like, it makes the San Diego Zoo look like a roadside attraction. I mean, it's like crazy big. And so he does all these rescues, right? So the reason I'm telling you all this is they go and respond to these rescues and then take it into this gigantic world's biggest animal hospital that they've built. So we went and rescued the elephant and now it's probably by today back in Vantara. Yeah, here you go. And they'll be treating it. So this is Longtoy, this is the other one. We did two rescues. This one was born with splay legs and then went into logging.

And so all the weight and stuff from logging, see the splay legs on the front there? Ouch. Yeah. So anyway, that was just incredible. But the short answer is they do let people treat them because these animals are raised in captivity by what's called mahouts, which are elephant riders. And it's a really, the whole dynamic's really fascinating. So you grow up with an elephant as a mahout. In Indian culture. And then there's usually one or two mahouts that spend their life dedicated to the elephant, and all they do is ride 'em, log 'em, they use them as tools, but they still love them very much. It's just they use them as a tool. Elephants obviously aren't made to do that, so they break down over time.

So that's why its legs are like that? It's from carrying the amount of weight that comes from logging?

So that one would have been born with a deformity. Oh, okay. But then years of compounded weight and everything else makes its legs like that. Oh. It's crazy. And then, yeah, so we go and we take the elephants in plus the mahouts and take them all back to Vantara, give the mahouts a full-time job. These guys are sleeping on mattresses on the floor, right? And then take them back and it's a whole thing, reform everybody. It's an amazing thing. Yeah.

Oh wow. So when they treat the elephants, like what do they do for an elephant that has a broken leg?

So most of it's just pain management, right? Because you can only get so far.

So the one that got hit by— Can you set them in a cast? Uh, not really, no.

You know, it depends. I guess it depends on the fracture. I'm not a vet, but I guess it depends on the fracture. But what they do is they have— and Jamie, you might be able to see it, it's incredible— they have this giant jacuzzi. Like, imagine a jacuzzi the size of your building here for elephants, and it's their hydrotherapy pool. So these animals that have terrible arthritis or fucked up feet or bad legs like that, they just spend all day in the water because then there's no weight on their limbs. Oh wow.

Which is really cool. Do they have medication like anti-inflammatories for elephants?

Everything, man. This place uses unbelievable Eastern medicine, Western medicine, this crazy hospital. There's a lot of guys talking on their Instagram, unfortunately. But yeah, yeah, look at that. Isn't that crazy?

So they do these amazing things. Oh, fuck, man.

But yeah, it's a really, really cool place, and we get to do some fun stuff. So I was really privileged to be part of those elephant rescues. Really emotional when you see an animal like an elephant that has so much, like, intelligence. Look you in the eye and be like, I'm in so much pain. And then you like start to relieve it.

It's cool. I went to visit this place in Thailand a few years back that has wild elephants. So they're wild elephants, but you can ride them and that you feed them. So you make— you have— you make friends with them first. Yeah. Like you feed them sugarcane, you hang out with them, you pet them, and then they let you ride them. Yeah. And they put their arm out like this, like, go ahead.

Yeah. To walk up to step on. Go ahead.

Yeah. So let's, you know, like, okay. Yeah. I didn't like the riding part. I felt wrong to me. It's just like, it's a thing that like all the tourists did, but my family wanted to do it, so I said okay. Yeah. But it's okay. But the animals themselves are so sweet. Yeah. They're like, when you're hanging around with them, they're like, they're so— one of them, I got a video of it on my Instagram. She was just like eating a log. Yeah. She kept chewing on this log, and I'm just hanging out with her, and I made this like video with me. I'm like, she's eating a log. I don't know why she's eating this log, but They're so cool. She's really sweet. But it wasn't, it was, it was a weird, it's a weird relationship that they have. And then you wash them at the end of the trip. Yeah. So you get them in the, they get in this pool, this big pond. Yep. And you could just wash them and hang out with them. They like it that you do that.

Yeah.

So it feels good to them. And they're like, thank you. Well, no, thank you for carrying me.

There's good and bad. Like, I mean, elephants have been used through history, right? In war, in logging, in circuses, everything else. But now, I would say in the last 20 years, we're finally sort of waking up to, hey, a lifetime of being on an elephant's back, like you can see the deformities, you can see the bedsores, you can see the hip displays or hip issues. Oh, from carrying people?

Just carrying people?

They're just not designed for it. You know, they look, you think they are when you look at them and you're like, what could it, you know, we're like an ant on that thing's back. But it's pretty hard on them. And the hardest part is actually not you or I or anybody riding them, it's walking on concrete. Oh, because elephants have these soft padded feet. They're not designed for rock hard ground. So the impact of walking on pavement is actually that compounding with weight, added weight. That's what's actually so bad. I bet the heat of the comp—

the asphalt too. And they're dogs. Like, dogs hate the heat of asphalt.

It's horrible for them. And the weirdest thing about an elephant foot, if you look at its anatomy, they're one of the few animals that walk on their toes. So they don't have toes splitting out like we do. They walk on top of their toes. So that, you know, imagine that compounding on heat plus weight. Um, close-up, I guess. Weird.

It's a weird animal. Yeah. Isn't it cool that they thought that that's what a cyclops was when they found this?

Yeah, because the skull. Yeah, yeah.

That's why they thought cyclopses were a real thing.

Dude, have you ever seen— have you ever been to the Explorers Club in New York City? No. That's worth a visit. You would love it. They have the Champawat Tiger there, like the most famous man-eating tiger.

That's the one that killed like 476 people. Yep. Is that what the number? Something crazy like that, right?

I actually have it on my YouTube and I don't remember the name. It's more than 400 people, right? It's crazy. And then Jim Corbett went and shot it. Yeah. And he— I almost named my son Corbett because I love that story so much. But, um, but they have the only four-tusked elephant at the Explorers Club in New York City. Whoa. I'm sure Jamie, you could find a picture of the skull. Nobody knows why. Total anomaly. Nobody's ever seen it. Nobody knows why. I think it's the only one in existence and it literally has four tusks. Coming out of it. Just a weird genetic thing? I think so, like that splay-legged one we look at.

Because sometimes with elk, they'll get an injury when they're young and then they'll get weird deformities of their antlers.

But is that different because they shed their antlers every year so they grow back in weird ways? I don't know. That's a good question.

I think it's an injury to the skull. Yeah. So an injury to like the area where the antler is, like sometimes they'll just have one sword. Yeah, like there was a ranch that in California that had this one elk that was killing all the other elk because he didn't have antlers the same way. Oh, they got a Yeti skull. Where'd you find that, Jamie?

11 interesting things you can see there. Oh, at the Explorers Club? Oh, interesting.

Oh, I'm sure that's legit. Yeah. So this one elk had on one side, he had like normal antlers. Uh-huh. But the other side he just had a spear.

Oh wow.

And so he was just stabbing all these other elk. And it was killing the other elk. What the fuck is this guy doing? Wow. Because he wasn't— like, they're used to their antlers interlocking. Of course, yeah. And this is the thing, they get together and they clash. Of course. They try to impress the ladies. Yep.

Well, there he is. Look at that.

Oh wow, the tusks. Isn't that cool?

Isn't that so weird? Very weird.

Four. And they're like weird the way they're interlock— they're going towards each other is weird.

Which makes you realize it's a genetic deformity, right? Because it's not like this perfect symmetrical, like, nature made it. It's just— it's a mutation of something.

Kind. Well, that's what's weird about genes, right? Like, things go wonky all the time. Someone's born with an extra arm, you're like, okay. Yeah, exactly. Sometimes people are born with tails and you're like, oh, it's so, so weird, you know?

Dude, you, you and I talked about Barbarossa one time, the, the pigs that have those crazy—

yeah, they go into their own skulls.

My buddy who's a vet, he just cut a horn out of a sable, you know, sable antelope that was growing into its own skull. Oh God, it's crazy. I have a video of it on my Instagram, Jamie, if you want to see it, but it's, um It— so it got an injury, so it killed part of the horn. And you know, they're antelope, they're not deer, so they don't shed their horns, right? So they grow forever. So this guy had this giant horn just circling back, punching into its own skull. Can you imagine that?

It was gnarly. The pigs are nuts though, or what— whatever that animal's called, the babirusa. Is it a pig? It's technically a pig.

Yeah, yeah, it's like an Indonesian warthog.

Yeah, but the way it goes into its own skull no matter what, like it always happens.

Yeah, because they have to fight and break them off. And if they don't fight and break them off, they just— it's just nature's so weird, man. Yeah, I mean, that is fucking crazy. They're so cool.

I wonder what those things taste like.

I bet they taste great. I think all the swine tastes great.

Mm. I had javelina, which is not technically a swine. It's a peccary. Uh-huh. It wasn't that good.

Not good? No. Huh. That's unfortunate. It's odd. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like, oh no, just not the best. Like, well, you got to think of what they're eating.

They, you know, for what I know about javelinas, they eat garbage primarily.

Yeah, I think that's part of the problem. Yeah, cuz like that's the case with bears, right? Like my friend Steve Rinella cooked a bear steak or a bear ham on his friend's smoker, and he said to his friend, he said, hey, you should probably clean that smoker, it smells like fish. Yeah, he goes, I've never cooked fish in that smoker once, and it was just from the bear. The bear had eaten so much fish that as he was smoking the bear, all you could smell was fish.

That's disgusting. It's like eating a seagull.

Whoa, look at this one, it's going right into its head. That's the guy. Yeah, isn't that crazy? Wow, that's nuts.

And it's, yeah, he like cuts the horn off and you can see, 'cause the horn's a living thing, there's only—

How is that animal still alive?

Barely. Like, he had millimeters of growth to go before it punched right into his brain. That's crazy.

Gnarly. So gnarly. It's like digging in. Imagine that like every day, just a tiny little amount more is growing into your brain.

It's gotta be this constant pain where like it just, it just gets tiny bit worse all the time. Sawing through it. See how much into the skull it went? Like it was right there.

That's crazy.

So gross. I thought you'd like that.

I don't know what that says about me. Yeah. You thought that I would like that. Yeah. I don't know. That is gnarly, man. That poor dude, now he doesn't have any antlers. Yep. Or horns, right? Is it technically horns? Horns, yeah.

But he's still got a brain, so that helps.

Well, carry on, bro. Yeah, nature's a fucker, dude.

Dude, it's crazy.

Um, where's the thylacine, man? What's going on?

It's gone pretty cold, dude. Really? Yeah.

I mean, so I was hoping you'd come in with new evidence.

I wish I was. There's a group that I've, I've been working with called Mammal Watching, like if you heard of bird watching, and they've been going into Western Papua and Papua New Guinea, which is, as you know, where I think think there could still be a tiny population. And so I'm working with them. They're giving trail cameras out to guys. They're still hearing legends here and there. But it's just, I don't know, it's, it feels like the legends are getting fewer and further between, like almost over generational time. It's disappearing, if that makes sense.

Oh, that's a bad sign. Yeah. That means whatever's left is probably dying off, right? If at all.

Yeah. And I mean, I still hold out hope. It's something I've always wanted to be. And I like I want it to be there, but it just, it feels like those bits of evidence that were compounding have all sort of started to fade.

That sucks. I know. Really does. It is a very interesting thing with the incredible variety of wildlife that we have that we're so fascinated by the ones that might not be alive. This, like the things like the thylacine or the giant sloth. Yeah. Like I remember I watched this documentary on the giant sloth. There was this one scientist, this biologist who had spent an inordinate amount of time, like years, in the Amazon looking for a giant sloth and was realizing at some point in time during the documentary that he might have ruined his career. Overdoing it, yeah. Because he might have been chasing something that doesn't exist. And it's this wild gamble if he listens to these people and they're telling him the truth. Right. Because all the natives are like, "Oh yeah, bro, they're out here." Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right around the next turn.

"We'll find them tomorrow." Right over the next mountain. Yeah, I've been there. But you know, if you don't follow those leads, like, do you know what the saola is? The Asian unicorn? I've heard that, yeah. Same thing. Same story, but real animal. And you know, there was basically one ever seen by Western science, an animal named Martha, and for years, scientists, Western scientists were going into Vietnam and Laos, and they were going, "Yeah, yeah, we have this thing called the saola, the Asian unicorn," and they're like, "Shut up," you know, and then all of a sudden, turns out, here's this giant bovid that still exists. That's a cool looking animal too. Yeah, and nobody knows whether they still exist now or not.

Is that it right there?

That's it, yeah. So basically there's been 3 or 4, maybe more, that have ever been seen. Most of them caught in poacher snares like this one, but then really cool, a guy named Bill Robichaud got a call once from a prince and he had caught one and it was in his village and he flew in there and overnight the poor thing died. And that was the only time a single Westerner in history has ever seen a live saola. Oh, wow. And this guy had it, and then he's like, can we please preserve it? And the king was like, nah, we're going to eat it. And they ate it. Whoa. Got nothing out of it. Yeah. He's got pictures and stuff, so you know it's all real. But they call it the unicorn because its horns are so symmetrical that when you look at it from a side profile, it looks like one horn coming out of its head.

Oh, like that.

Exactly. Yeah. That's weird. Yeah. They're very cool, but it's a bovid. It's a cattle. That's not one. I don't know why they're using that photo. Oh, how odd. Yeah. But that's the same thing as these, you know, these things around giant sloths and thylacine and Bigfoot and everything else. It's, it's, they are out there, you know, some of them, not all of them, but they are out there. And if you don't follow the lead, if you ignore it, then you miss things like that.

Well, there's also like, when you think about things like the Amazon, like if you ever see footage of the Amazon from above, you go, oh, there's no way, you know, that's so big. You look down and you go, oh, well, there's no way, you know, this is, this is way too big. There's no way there's a bunch of people scouring every inch of that place.

I mean, given there are still groups of human beings uncontacted. Oh, a lot.

Like my friend Paul Rosely. Yeah, I know Paul. Yeah, he's come in contact with them multiple times. Yeah. See if you can get some aerial footage of flying over the Amazon. I mean, it's in multiple countries. It's— what is it? Oh, it's crazy.

Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina. It's crazy. It's so big. It's huge. It's so fucking big. And I had a similar experience. In New Guinea, talking about thylacine, where we got on a plane in a place called Tufi and flew to another area. Okay, like, look at this. It was just like this. For 4 hours, we didn't see one building.

Amazon in 4K. So, just imagine, like, there is no fucking way you know what's in there. No way. There's probably a bunch of shit in there that no one has found.

And then there's, oh, undeniably there are. And then there's stuff, you know, like, you'll get a kick out of this, Loch Ness Monster. What do you think it is?

Maybe a sturgeon or something like that.

Jamie, what do you think the Loch Ness Monster is?

I mean, I think they know, but I don't know. Uh, probably—

I don't know. Whale dick. What? Whale dick. Whale dick? Whale dick. Not a narwhal dick? Pull it up. Loch Ness Monster versus whale dick. Look at this and tell me this isn't what they think is the Loch Ness Monster.

Do you mean like the photos, the hoax photo of the one that's poking out of the water?

That one, I mean, you'll see it in a second here, I think, but there are these photos of a whale's penis compared to the Loch Ness Monster. And I mean, I— that's certainly not proof, but it kind of answers a lot of— like, that's a whale dick right there.

That is a whale dick. But that photo, I'm pretty sure, is a proven hoax. That one is. Yeah, right. I think that photo was like a guy like made something out of wood and like floated it in the water and took a picture. Is that what the story behind that?

There's something along those lines.

No, Loch Ness Monster isn't a whale penis, professor says.

Oh, okay, well, if the internet professor says it, then—

oh, a professor! Oh, well, let's take him seriously. He's out there. There's no whales there. If you're the type of professor that they call upon when they're trying to figure out if something's a whale dick, maybe—

sir, would you please study these 9 whale penis and tell us your thoughts on this? Maybe that's what happened to the—

what? It was his claim, and then he said he was just like kind of messing around.

Well, I'm sticking with it. I like it. I like the whale.

He's the one, the guy that proposed it?

Yeah. Oh, darn it. I like his theory.

He's since walked back his salacious claim. That's so funny. Maybe that's the guy that was looking for the giant sloth. Yeah. He's like, I need a new angle. This giant sloth thing did not pan out.

I like it. Big difference.

If you're a guy looking for a giant sloth in the Amazon, like, where do you look? Like, how? Good luck finding it.

You have to find geographically isolated areas, you know, because they're little pockets, right? If little pockets of, okay, people aren't coming in here, animals aren't going out, there's a big ring of mountains, there's whatever it happens to be. I met a guy who said he guaranteed he knew, you know, all these people like this, but I always enjoy the story of it, that there was this pocket in Peru that was completely geographically isolated by the mountains, and that's where they were. And the idea is that these areas remain unchanged, right? It's like an island, basically, in the Amazon. Like, things just don't change because it's so isolated from everything else.

Well, I think the idea also is that giant sloths, where we know they existed in North America, that whenever whatever happened that ended the ice age, the Younger Dryas impact, that it didn't affect things below the equator or at the equator. It was more of a northern hemisphere thing.

Yeah, because the climate shift was so much stronger. —exactly.

And so the most of the animals that died off, well, if you look at like the— I think it was 65% of North American megafauna died off during this very short window. Yep. That, that didn't happen, right, in South America, right? And that we're just guessing that they're dead. Yeah, right. Because if there was a healthy pop— like, think how many tigers are there in the wild.

I think there's 5,000, something like that. Yeah, it's gone way up, by the way. Used to, it was down to 400.

Fun fact, more tigers in captivity in Texas— I know— than there there are in all of the wild of the world.

It's— Texas is crazy, man. It's such a wild—

people's yards. Yeah, in private collections in Texas, there's more tigers than all of the wild of the world.

It's such an insane statement that should not exist. Yeah, I love this state.

It's just my favorite place.

Get away with it.

It's just a wild place, like, for all intents and purposes.

Yeah. It's hilarious. Wild for people. Dude, I love Texas. Every time I come to Texas, I'm like, this place is great. It's always fun. Everybody's so nice too. Exactly. That's the best part. It's like nobody scowls at you. You get in the elevator and they're like, hey, how's your day going? And you're like, very friendly. I'll tell you how it's going. Very—

a lot of people, especially coastal elites, I would like to say, like people, coastal snobs, they have this idea of it being like filled with rednecks and ignorant people and foolish people. Yeah. Not that way at all. Especially Austin. Austin is like one of the most like liberal, easygoing, progressive cities. Yeah. But like even the progressives here, they're like more reasonable.

It's like down to earth. Yeah, it's not like extremism, right?

Well, they, they're definitely more crazy than they were 20 years ago when I first started coming here. Okay. But way less crazy than like liberals in LA. Yeah. Or liberals in Cali or liberals in New York.

Just where they're, where it's just extreme, right? Like protests and all these. Yeah.

Well, it's like, like this. There's a saying about Austin: keep Austin weird and surrounded. And surrounded?

Yeah. What is the— and surrounded?

Surrounded by red people. Like, it's all red states around you, and it's this pocket of blue that's in the center of this red state. I think that's good for everybody. Yeah, I think that's good. It's a balance. And like, the, the liberals that want to turn Texas blue, like, don't. You're gonna ruin it. You're gonna ruin it for you too. You don't get it. Like, balance is important. It's like, you can't kill all the predators, right? Because then the deer will get overrun and you're hitting them with cars. Yep. And you can't kill all the deer because then there's no food. And I mean, that's what they did when they were market hunting. Yep. Balance. Yep. And you need balance with humans too. 100%. And the Austin balance is a great balance. Yeah. It's a liberal city surrounded by like hardcore Republicans with guns and tigers.

And it works!

And it all works!

It works! It makes for nice people. It's like, it's a good mix. Yeah. And a misunderstood mix. That's interesting. People on the outside, they have a very distorted perception of what Texas is, especially Austin.

Yeah. Well, how do you feel as a California— I mean, you bounced around, but as a California transplant, did you bring your acai bowls and your, you know, you're like, I need all that California stuff here? What stuff? I don't know.

I mean, I don't know.

That's like, that's the thing though, right? It's like all the Californians coming here and messing it up kind of thing.

I was never one of those. Yeah, so my— what I got out of California was The Comedy Store and work. Yeah, and then jiu-jitsu. So like you get all that here. Austin is arguably the jiu-jitsu capital of the world right now. Really?

Oh yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Is this where the new league is based out of?

No, that's— you mean the UFC League?

Yeah.

No, that's in Vegas. It is. They do that in Vegas. Yeah, because that's where the UFC's headquarters are. Sure. But Austin has King's World, which is Gordon Ryan's place. It's got— B Team is out here. Sean Giba— Ribeiro's out here. Okay, there's a bunch of Gracie Baja schools out here. There's multiple 10th Planet schools out here. It's like there's an incredible amount of jiu-jitsu out here.

So what I'm hearing is this is where to bring Run Nation, bring it to Austin.

They'll never win. The only people are gonna win are those wild New Zealand dudes and those Australian guys. Those guys will win every time. They're built for that shit. No, but it's, uh, it's just a great city, period. Artistically, it's always been like a great music city. Now it's arguably the comedy capital of the country.

Yeah, I mean, there's incredible— so many comedians here now, right?

It's because they got here and they went, oh, this is way better. There's no traffic. Yeah, one's nice. Yeah, and you could do whatever you want. And also there's a lot of places to do comedy. Yeah, just on my street where my club is. Yeah, there's 5 or 6 other clubs that have opened up since we opened up. Oh wow, so it's incredible. So if you're a young comic and you— yeah, or a an established comic that just wants to work out material, you could go to my club, you can hop down the street to the Sunset Room, which is my friend Brian's club right down the street, and you can go down the street to the Creek in the Cave, an amazing club that's just 2 seconds away. Oh, cool. It's like one block over. Like everything's close. The Vulcan, which is right there. Everything's right there. Huh. It's incredible. It's incredible.

It's great. I'm glad you're so stoked here. I love it. I remember when the first, maybe the second time we hung out down at your show in, not Westlake, where was it? Woodland Hills, right? Yeah. And you were like, dude, I gotta get out. Out of here.

Yeah, I would want to— I wanted to get out a long time ago. Yeah. And fun fact, we started the podcast because I was depressed because I had to move back from Colorado. Oh, really? So I lived in Colorado for a little bit, but my wife got pregnant. And when she was pregnant, it was like, if you are at altitude— we were at 8,500 feet above sea level— it's rough. Yeah. And we went back to LA for a short period of time and and she was fine. And then we went back to Colorado and she was sick again. I was like, okay. And then we were reading about low birth weight, premature birth, there's a lot of really bad things that happen to people, especially if you're not acclimated. So you move to these high altitude areas. By the way, working out there, when I worked out there, I thought I was gonna die. And then I went to Philadelphia, and I had to do some gigs in Philadelphia, and I worked out, and I felt like I could run through a wall.

You just had so much oxygen in your blood.

So much! I was like, this is incredible. It's the only time in my life I've ever been altitude adjusted, like where my body had adapted. Yeah, and I was like, there's a— this is a massive advantage. No wonder why fighters do it.

And you don't acclimate being up at that height over months or anything else? Oh, I did.

I certainly did. Like, I could work out there, and I used to I did jiu-jitsu in Boulder. So Boulder was— I was in a place called Gold Hill, which is 8,500 feet above sea level, and Boulder's like 5,500. Okay, so I was doing— shout out to Amal Easton, my friend Amal. He has a jiu-jitsu gym in Boulder, great place. Okay, and when I was training there, I was fine. I mean, you train, but you definitely could feel it. It was— and I had trained there once before when I had come from LA, and I was like, whoo, this altitude's rough. Like, it's like working out in Denver, you're like, whoo, yeah, feel feel it, but not like you feel it at 8,500 feet. 8,500 feet was— I do these kettlebell workouts, and I was doing it, and I'm used to what it does. Like, I'm used to be— and I was like, this is crazy, this feels like I'm drunk.

Yeah, like, it felt like nothing.

It really felt like I drank a bottle of whiskey and tried to work out.

I was so tired. I went to the Himalayas like maybe 4 or 5 years ago to look for red pandas up in the trees, you know, those cute little guys. Guys, and day 1, I literally maybe made it 400 feet and then had to sit down. And I was like, all right, we're trekking for pandas, we're heading up into the mountains, we'll find these pandas, and I just, I don't remember what the elevation was, but I'd come from Santa Barbara where I live, which is sea level, to the high Himalayas, and I had to sit down like every 15 minutes for the first couple days.

I saw the most horrifying video the other day of this guy who was on one of those summit summit hikes and slipped. Oh no. His friends watched him slide like all the way down to his death, just sliding down ice and snow and couldn't stop and couldn't— and they just had to stand there and watch this guy slide away.

What can you do? Nothing. That's so crazy.

Nothing. Was he climbing? Yeah, yeah, he was trying. He was making it to the summit and slipped. Yeah, it's brutal. It slipped off be, you know, just a very clear path and slipped off of it and just starts sliding. And you realize, oh, he's gone. That's it. He's gonna go off forever. That's crazy. Oh, it's horrible.

And I always want to like take my kids to do these things with me, you know? And I'm like, I want to take them to trek and see the mountains and catch crocodiles and do all these various things that I like to do. And you realize it's like, my 6-year-old can barely walk in a straight line without falling down, you know what I mean? Like, imagine taking him on a mountain Oh, so scary.

But on the other hand, like, you don't want to protect them too much. You want to expose them to a certain amount of danger because I think it's good for them.

It's good for them to see. 100%.

Yeah. Yeah. It's good for them to experience. It's also good for them to have, like, a broader understanding of what the world is, right? Like, the world is a bunch of different things. That's right. It's not just Santa Monica. That's right. Yeah. Like, oh, there's Costa Rica. Like, whoa, this is crazy. Look at these bugs. These are nuts. Like, birds. It's nice for that.

It's important. It's valuable. Because otherwise, we live in a bubble. Like, America's great. I say this to my wife all the time. I'm so patriotic. I love this country. It's great, but it's a bubble. Yeah. Everything's easy. It's safe. You can order shit on your phone. It shows up at your house. You know, there's a million restaurants to pick from. Obviously, it depends where you live, but you get my point. Yes. And then you get out of here and it's like, okay, everything closes at 4 PM. Like, go figure out your food. You know what I mean? And then you're like, okay, well, now I'll I have 2 kids who are hungry and we're in the jungle, or it's, you know, in a town that everything shuts down on Sundays or whatever. It's like, figure it out. Those are important lessons for little kids to be dynamic and figure out like how the rest of the world works and that they have to figure out how to get things when it's not all just at the touch of your, you know, phone.

Also to recognize that there's gonna be times where you don't have food. Yeah, like, yeah, people are just so accustomed to having food anytime they're hungry. And in fact, sometimes when they're not even hungry. They're just bored, so they start stuffing their face when they're bored, which never existed in all of human history.

No, no. Dude, I just read— you might be well-read on this, but I just read something interesting. The 8-hour night of sleep? Yes. Invented by a mattress company? You know about this?

I didn't know it was invented by a mattress company, but I do know that traditionally in the past, people would do 2 sleeps.

That's right, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this was— yeah, so you know about what I'm talking about. I just read this literally yesterday in one of my doom-scrolling things.

It's interesting because I did that a lot when I was young, where I would wake up in the middle of the night and I just decided to watch TV. Do something for an hour. I'd watch TV for a few hours and then I'd go back to sleep. But it was just, for me, it was just like being indulgent because I was single and free and, you know, 25 years old and I had my own apartment. I'm like, I do whatever the fuck I want. Yeah, get up at 3 o'clock in the morning, watch TV for a couple hours, then go to sleep till noon.

Why not sit around in your boxers, eat cereal?

Yeah, just party. Is a myth.

Oh, it is. Oh, goddamn it. Everything I keep bringing up is a myth, Jamie. No whale dicks. No, Matt is the killer of dreams.

I saw the same Instagram video you guys saw, and I thought it was interesting too.

Yeah, that is a myth.

I think that might be a myth. Yeah, I think the two-sleep thing, it was a way that people would get up in the middle of the night. And but you also have to think, I think a lot of people went to bed way earlier because it got dark.

We didn't have electricity.

And there's a normal circadian rhythm where people get— it gets dark out, you eat, maybe hang out in front of a campfire for a little while, and then you go to bed. Right, right. If you've ever gone camping, that's what most people do. Most people don't stay up till 4 in the morning when you're camping.

Not without booze.

No, nothing to do with that. If you've got booze, you might be up late telling stories and laughing. And if anybody breaks out a guitar, you're fucked.

Yeah, then you're up all night. You mentioned pandas.

I was gonna ask you about a meme I had seen going around the same places that pandas are famous fake.

Did you see the zoo in China?

There's a lot of people talking about that.

Did you see the zoo in China that painted the Pomeranians? Yeah, I see that.

But the thing is about pandas is that I— and I, I went down a rabbit hole with this the other night— there were no depictions of pandas in like ancient Chinese history. No. Is that true? Yeah, it is true. Yeah, they didn't show up until like, God, I want to say it was like the 16th century or 17th century. That's bizarre.

I wonder why that is, because you know there were explorers going through the area and all of that.

Well, the idea was that maybe they were engineered to eat bamboo because bamboo, if you think about it, is like a very prolific plant. Absolutely. Like, I have bamboo on my property. That shit just grows like it's crazy how well it grows.

Grows so quickly. And there's almost no nutritional value in it either. Right. Yeah.

So here's the panda. Okay. Interesting. The claim is largely true with nuance. So was that— what did you search into? Perplexity, our AI sponsor. Is it true that pandas aren't in Chinese ancient history? The claim is largely true, though with nuance. Okay, giant panda strikingly absent from China's classical cultural record, unlike the dragon, which is weird. Tiger, crane. By the way, our conversation about it made it to The View. I don't know if you know about that.

I texted you. I texted you. You changed your status to dragon believer. It was so funny.

Joy Behar's like, he believes in dragons. Like, oh my God, this is wonderful. Oh, it's so good. Oh, this is so good. Okay, so when did it happen? Unlike the dragon, tiger, crane, or tortoise, doesn't appear on ancient bronzes or pottery in Tang poetry, Song paintings, Yuan— Yuan— Y-U-A-N. How do you say that? Beats me. Yuan drama, Ming novels, or Qing— Qing— before the late 20th century, it had essentially no symbolic role in Chinese civilization. Its status as a national treasure is a post-1949 invention. That's bizarre. After pandas became famous, famous globally in the 20th century, Chinese scholars went back and combed old texts looking for them. A few candidate references exist. The Xi Jing Book of Odes and Shangshu mentioned a creature called pai or mo, which some modern scholars retroactively identified as the panda, but the identification is contested. And those same words were also used for leopards, tapir, tapir, tapir, or mythical beasts. Emperor Wen of Han, 2nd century BCE, reportedly had a mo buried in his mother's tomb, sometimes claimed as a panda. But that's— it's weird. That is very bizarre. Fragmentary, ambiguous, and rare. Nothing like the deep iconographic tradition around dragons, phoenixes, or tigers.

Why the absence? Rogan-style claim.

I've never even said it before. Fuck you. How dare you, Perplexity? That is so funny. It's a Rogan-style claim. I think it's essentially on the podcast also.

It's listening right now. Because sometimes they'll bring in questions I've asked from like last month and I'll be like, are you? And I'm like, no, I didn't. This is a separate search, but it's like all locked into the AI history.

Oh, I asked it a question once and it said, as you have previously stated.

No way. I was like, whoa.

Interesting. I was trying to find out like how many views something had gotten. Yeah. And you're like, as you've previously stated.

It told you, yeah.

I was like, you're using me as data? This is why AI is so fucked up. Like you're trusting me? I'm trusting you. Don't trust me at all. I get all my information from you.

Dude, that's so weird. I— 'cause you wonder—

It is weird.

'Cause it's not like, you know, okay, there's no mention of ducks. I get it, 'cause there's ducks everywhere. Who cares, right? Like, so why do we write about them? But it's not something like that. Like, pandas were never so abundant that it was not worth talking about.

Yeah, see if where this theory— who invented this theory that they were engineered to eat bamboo.

So who did this engineering in this theory?

Well, that's a question. Like, who did dogs, right? Why do we have dogs? Right. Which is really weird. You know why? Why? I have a dog. He's a King Charles Cavalier. Mm-hmm. You know those little—

I do, they're very cute. He is adorable.

Yeah, he's so cute. I love him to death, but he— and he's made an appearance on the podcast. Oh nice. He's the furthest thing from a wolf. Yeah, as far as we've taken a wolf. Yeah, to make it so fucking adorable and cute. But that is what it is. Yeah, it was at one point in time a wolf, right? Somehow or another we engineered it down to a dog. That's adorable and just wants to cuddle with you and sit in your lap and play and weighs £25. So what happened? Yeah, how did we do that? And could you do that with a bear? And could you get a bear, then take, take that bear and make it something? I think it's the only bear that's a true herbivore as well.

Yeah, I think that's correct. Yeah, which is also bear.

Yeah, weird. So what have we done? Their digestive tract? We changed— yeah, and they're required like It's like koalas. I think they only eat eucalyptus. That's right. Yep. Fucking weird.

Bizarre. Weird. Also has no nutritional value, and you probably know this, makes them like high basically.

I was looking up who did it and started going on the thing that it's not— no one is known for the theory. It's because they're actually carnivores.

Oh, they're a taxon. Oh, so koalas, I think, are the ones that are pure herbivores?

They definitely are, but they're not bears at all. They're a marsupial. They just call them koala bears. I see. So when they say they are taxonomic carnivores, that means taxonomically they're in the order Carnivora, if that makes sense.

So, but it says with a short digestive tract and gut microbiomes of a meat eater. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. So they're vegans, but you could selectively breed for anything to some degree if you had enough time. But look, but that's the other thing. Like, why are they so cute? I think of that because they're so much cuter than any other bear by far. Like that face, even with the teeth out, like, oh, it's adorable, buddy.

They also have the best PR campaign in history. Like, they're, they're the dumbest animals in the world. You know this, right? Really? Oh my god. I don't know if that's the right terminology, but like, you can hand a panda an apple and it will hand you its baby. I'm not joking, dude. You can find videos of this.

Well, isn't that more evidence that it's raised, that it's been engineered, because it doesn't have the instincts that a wild animal would have?

Dude, their parental instincts are bonkers. Bonkers. Like, they will drop their baby and go for an apple. That's how zookeepers take their babies away. It's like these guys are trying to go extinct. I swear to God, it's insane.

So where did the theory come from? See if you can find out where the theory came from that they were engineered to eat bamboo. That's why I asked that exact question. It says just, uh, well, it just started showing up on my Instagram about 3 months ago. Huh.

Dude, Instagram, you never know what you're gonna get.

Of course, but that's what's fun. Yeah, as long as you don't buy into it.

Dude, the problem is even like me and what I do as a biologist, I can, I mean, I'd say 90% I can tell, but there's a 10% where I can't tell if it's AI or real or, and I'm looking at it going, well, that behavior is wrong, so it has to be AI, but it's crazy what's going on in like the animal space with the AI mockups now.

I watched one today where it was a wildebeest that a leopard had jumped on its back and the wildebeest jumped into the water and the crocodiles killed the leopard on its back and then the wildebeest The wildebeest got away. Totally fake. It has to be.

Sounds fake. I mean, it sounds insane.

Wildebeest is smart all of a sudden? So smart that it figured out, all I have to do is get to those crocs and the crocs— also, like, you're gonna run— I don't— like, you're gonna give yourself more problems.

Right, by going into the water, yeah.

By the way, multiple crocodiles, so why wouldn't they just eat you too? They would.

They'd just kill everything. They would kill everybody. Everything. If they wouldn't care.

If both of you are compromised, it's not gonna just grab the leopard on your back. It's gonna grab you too, 'cause you can't get away.

Anything they can get. Yeah, yeah, no, it's fake.

It's crazy, but it was also fun.

Yeah, exactly. It's also fun. Get away.

A different video, but yeah, here it is.

Yeah, yeah, I know. So this is a— that's a longer cut of the video, but you can see by like the saturation of the leopard, it's a little fake. And like the way the claws are kind of like— there's no claws. It's almost like soft pawing it, do you know what I mean?

Right, right. Look how he's hanging on.

This could be a video of a real wildebeest getting eaten by a croc and they just added the leopard to the back.

That very well could be. It's pretty amazing.

Look, that's a fake croc.

Yeah, no, bro, that's real. Guys, stop. This is different. This one's different because this one— the wildebeest— also, by the way, the wildebeest is doing way too well in that struggle. Yes, because when crocodiles do get wildebeest, they get them quick.

The leopard got him this one. Someone put some time into this.

Yeah, when the crocs get a hold of something, it's really— it's a wrap. Dude, I just— there's not much of a struggle.

I just did— I'm probably not supposed to talk about this yet, but I just did this show for Discovery that I've been working on for a couple years where basically I put myself in the perspective of prey. So I would have been in the perspective of that wildebeest through engineering and doing all these like builds and stuff like that. And I lowered myself into a pond of crocodiles. It was insane. I had a cage around me, so a very small cage. It was basically a coffin.

Made out of what though? What's the cage made out of?

Whatever the guys in the workshop could find. I think steel.

Did they try it out first?

No. I mean, we tested it with nothing in it and we're like, okay, this is working. I could send it to Jamie. I have it on my phone, but it was—

Send it to Jamie.

Okay, dude, it was crazy. It was nuts. Why would you do that? I don't know, man. Well, it's like those shark cages, man.

Those things don't hold up. You've seen that before, right?

Oh yeah, where they go straight through the shark cage? Yeah. Yeah, it's craziness. It's absolute craziness. Oh, fine. Here we go. Dude, we did I don't know why I did. Oh, you know what, Jamie, go on the, if you don't mind, go on the Discovery Instagram. I think it's there. Good luck finding it. I can send you something in the meantime, but I think they posted like a short teaser of it. It was nuts though. So I'm in this little cage. We rigged up these cables.

Were you wearing scuba gear or what?

So I had a scuba tank with me in case the thing broke and I ended up on the bottom. Sounds dumber out loud.

And then you have so much oxygen before they can get you out?

30 minutes before. Oh god, dude. And then I was talking to our guy, so, you know, it was a TV production, so there's like stunt coordinators and all this stuff, and I was like, so okay, cable snaps, I go down, I grab the regulator, I've got 30 minutes to 40 minutes in my tank, then what? He's like, oh, well, I have this grappling hook. We'll throw it, hook it with the grappling hook, and pull it out. I'm like, bro, what if you hit a log? He's like, hmm, hadn't thought about that. I'm like, how you getting me out of here?

Not only that, that easily could take more than 30 minutes.

Of course it could take more than 30 minutes.

So you might have to get out and swim swim? Oh, I couldn't.

Can you get out? I couldn't. I locked myself into the cage. There was no getting out. You did this? Yeah, it was pretty dumb. It was fun. It was cool though because it was such a unique perspective. But I told my wife when I got home from that one, I was like, yeah, I think this is my last year doing this shit. Like, it's getting too, too much now.

That's the thing about those kind of shows. It's like, it's not enough to just see the animals. You have to do something that makes it spectacular enough to get people to tune Like that polar bear one where the guy got in that big Plexiglas box.

That literally inspired the whole series, I swear to God.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I hate that video.

It's crazy.

I mean, I watched it 100 times. I know, me too. I don't hate it, but I hate the idea of it because it just shows you how predatory polar bears are and how they don't give a fuck. It's just trying to get at that guy.

Isn't it crazy? Yeah, it's gnarly. I mean, just actively hunting him.

Yeah, it's so different than the other bears, which Like, if you get killed by a grizzly, generally it's like you fucked up. Yeah. Like you stumbled upon one that's old. Startled it. Or you startled it, or you zig when you should have zagged.

Have you seen the city in Russia, the abandoned island city where the polar bears have taken over? No. Oh, you gotta see this. It's incredible.

I've seen videos of Russia of people like getting chased by polar bears in their town. Oh yeah, yeah.

There's like the one where the guy jumps on the snowmobile and like runs after him and stuff. Barely gets away. Area in the Bering Sea that was, I want to say, a former mining town or maybe fishing town, and people moved out because it collapsed for whatever reason. This place, look at this, the polar bears have just moved into town.

Oh, they're living in the house.

They're living in the house.

Look at this. They're just like, they took it over as a den. Completely took it over.

Wow. How cool is this? That's amazing. They're just fully moved in, like living in the house. That's a drone shot, but this is not AI. This was legit. Yet they're so cool looking. Oh, they're the coolest.

They're so interesting.

How amazing is that though? Imagine like, imagine you're out on a boat and you're like, oh man, we've been sailing for 3 weeks. Oh look, there's like a little village. Let's pop in there for a day. That'd be a cool movie.

Yeah, that would be a good movie. Yeah, a bunch of people like, oh, we found a village, let's go there.

You like head in and turn, you know, like set up in the— and then all of a sudden you're surrounded.

Yeah, it's all polar bear. You're like, why is there so much shit in this house? Yeah, because they probably just shit right in the house. Oh yeah, so they're pawing at the Drones.

Yeah.

Wow, look how cool they're hanging out the window like, hey Tom, yeah, come on over, have a drink.

You could put me in the glass box on this island. This looks so cool.

It is so cool. They're, they're an amazing animal. They really are. But they're, they're so weird. They're so long too.

I went and did a, a sort of a trek with them. What, Jamie?

Where are they getting food on that island if they're the only ones there?

Oh well, they're the only ones there, but it's not— there's seals and all kinds of other shit.

They'll be hunting all the marine mammals in the area. Yeah, they're, they're the cleanup crew, and they swim huge distances. Oh yeah, a couple have turned up in Iceland. Did you know that? What? Yeah, there's I think 2 or 3 cases of polar bears that have swum from Greenland to Iceland. How far is that? I'm not sure, but it's not close, obviously. I mean, it's crazy. The Vikings, like 100 years to do it. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah.

And then they can swim that far?

200 miles. 200 miles. Wow. Are you— hopefully this isn't a myth. Are you seeing—

this one says it was shot dead after it did it in 2008.

Yeah, and it swam across, right?

Yeah, I mean, they don't want to get off our—

they don't want to go off.

100 miles! How crazy is that? Just take a swim one day and end up colonizing an entirely new place.

So it's like the David Goggins of polar bears. Yeah, it says, bro, I can make it. Feel no pain. Operation to kill the animals captured on film. Let's fucking go. Video might not— let's fucking go. Let's see that video. I got an error. 404.

Yeah, but isn't that crazy? 200-mile swim as a bear.

This says it might have, well, jumped off of just a piece of ice somewhere, so it could have, you know, got a little float, right?

It could have hung out for a little bit to shore, but still, even 50 miles, that's pretty far. Well, they can last so long with the fat that's on their body, and they like snooze float.

Have you seen that? They'll like— they won't just like actively swim, they'll like kind of like snooze float in between hunting. Oh, it's kind of amazing because in the winter they have so much fat, you know, that— or, uh, yeah, in the winter stored up, getting ready to chill, because they don't eat as much during the summer. Am I getting this right? I think so, right? Um, that they, they like— yeah, you see them like snooze floating in the ocean.

Well, they eat a lot in the summer to get ready for the winter, right?

Uh, they're meta— I know they eat a lot in midsummer. They don't eat a lot. It's too hot for them to actively hunt.

Oh, I know How hot is too hot for them to actively hunt?

I went to Manitoba, Canada to go see them on foot, and it was like 75 degrees at the height of the day, or maybe 70, and yeah, they wouldn't be hunting.

Polar bears were frequently tamed during the Middle Ages. What? Says no bear has been captured alive in Iceland. Oh, but since then, receding North Pole ice is diminishing their hunting and mating grounds and jeopardizing their survival.

Oldest sighting in Iceland was 890. Whoa. 16 years after the first people got there.

But what's crazy if you think about that is all it would take if people weren't there is 2 polar bears over the course of polar bears' lifetime to wash up on the island. And then you have a population of polar bears there. Right. Do you know what I mean? The male swims there, 5 years later the female swims there, boom, there's a population of polar bears. There's plenty of food, you know.

What an adventurous female it'd have to be. Yeah, true. 1252, Henry III took delivery of a white bear sent to him as a gift from King Haakon IV of Norway. He decided to keep it in the Tower of London. The bear was either too big or too exciting to be taken to Oxfordshire, where there had been a royal menagerie at Woodstock since Henry I's reign. What's more, it needed to fish. So the beast was sent to the Tower, and from what we could tell, it was well looked out for. Although it had a muzzle and a chain to wear while on land, the sheriffs of London were obliged to lay out more than a shilling a week for its upkeep, which added up over a year to roughly the expected income of a knight.

What a wild story. They had no guns to stop them.

What the hell would you do to them?

Bows and arrows, I guess, and spears. The bear had a long swimming leash. The man wore waterproof clothes. What? The keeper— so it had a keeper. The bear came with a Norwegian keeper, and the keeper was allowed to lead fishing trips into Thames. How do you say that? Thames? The Thames River, yeah. Which the tower sat. The man wore waterproof clothes, again billed to the crown. The bear had a long swimming leash. There were salmon in the Thames in those days, so while being in London was probably not half so pleasing to bears sitting on an ice floe in the Arctic Circle, it sure beat working.

The way this guy wrote this is hilarious, by the way. Yeah, they, uh, do you know what a sloth bear is? Yeah, mean as anything.

Yeah, there's— they're in Japan, right?

Uh, India, India and into Nepal in that area. Um, amazing. They're like a perfect example of not the size of the dog in the fight, but the fight in the dog, because they're not a very big bear, but they will take on tigers and everything else. They, um, a certain group, I don't know the name of them, a tribe I think in India, used to capture sloth bears and they'd put a ring in its nose, like a nose ring, and then, this is barbaric, it doesn't happen anymore, but then they would take the bear onto the street as a street performer. I just read about this, and they would light a fire and put like a big sheet metal over it and then walk the sloth bear onto it so the bear would dance because its feet were burning. Yeah, and yeah, they called it the Dancing Bears. I guess it was in Nepal. And yeah, it was a horrific thing that people used to do. People used to be so rude. Imagine doing that though and being like, oh, this will be worth a shilling or two.

Well, bear baiting, they used to do that with dogs. They used to have a chained up bear and they would allow dogs to fight the bear. Yeah, it's crazy. They did that with bulls. Yeah. You know, they'd have a chained up bull and have dogs attack the bull.

Yeah, they used in South Africa in the early colonial days, they used to do it with baboons and let the dogs and the baboons fight and bet money on it.

Yeah. People are so gross. It's crazy.

But you know, like, I always have this weird stance. Do I agree with any of it? Of course not. But we wouldn't be where we were and care about wildlife and conservation if we hadn't made some of those mistakes.

Is that what that is, a mistake? I mean, it's also if you hadn't seen half of your friends get cut in half by swords you're probably— like, your understanding of the value of life is probably completely distorted.

Completely, yeah.

You're living in a horrific time. Everyone's dying of the plague.

Violence is entertainment, right? You know what I mean? Like, that is something to do, and life value is incredibly low, right? Life comes and goes. The Colosseum was when?

When was that? I don't know.

I should, but I don't.

I think it was 2,000+ years ago. Yeah, somewhere around there, when they first started having these these crazy games there.

You know, they used to flood the Colosseum and do ship battles. Yeah, I went there a few years back and we went on a tour. Was it cool?

Oh, it was amazing. Yeah, but it's also like you stand there and you try to take it in. Like when I go to these ancient places, I try to just like sit and just try to imagine. Like when you're actually— it's one thing to imagine when you're looking at a photograph or a video, but when you're actually in the spot, yeah, you know, like when you're in Athens, yeah, and you're like, yeah, Standing at the Parthenon, you're like, okay, what the fuck was this like? Yeah, yeah. What was this like?

And that was like the center of everything. Everything.

Democracy.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And also drugs. Those guys were high as fuck. They were all doing drugs. That's true. Because we went to Eleusis, rather, and, uh, that's the place where they had the Eleusinian mystery schools, and people would go on this trek where they wouldn't eat and they'd walk from Athens, and they would have these psychedelic rituals. And, you know, you're in this place where they did it, you could like feel it.

It's weird. Well, I mean, obviously not synthetic, but were they— was it just mushrooms? What were—

what were these psychedelics? Totally no, but they have had residue from some of these clay pots that had ergot in it. What's ergot? So ergot is a fungus that has a very similar psychoactive effect as LSD. Oh, interesting. It's, uh, I think it has lysergic acid in it. Like, what— let's find out what the— what, what, what actually— it also kills people. There's been cases of ergot poisoning through wheat. Oh, interesting. People have died. And they also think it's connected to the Salem Witch Trials.

Oh, driving people crazy.

Yes. Oh, so the Salem Witch Trials— I don't know if this has been proven or if this is just a theory, but the idea is that if you have an early frost and that some of the wheat survives, but the wheat can have this fungus on it that grows ergot. So this ergot fungus. And so you're eating this wheat and you're making beer out of it and like everybody's tripping balls. They think, "All right, so fucking witch." They're all like on accidental acid.

That's hilarious. Probably like, "Man, this beer is really good." Right. Until there's a witch.

And then you're like, "Man, this beer is bad." Well, there's also, I mean, imagine first of all, you've got a bunch of crazy superstitions and people are afraid of everything already, 'cause you don't know anything about science.

You don't understand a thing, yeah.

So there's a lot of fears, and then there's a lot of people that claim to be the wise people of the town, and they tell you crazy stories about witches, and you're like, oh, witches are real. Yep, oh, for sure. So lysergic acid, amides, ergometrine, all these share lysergic acid, ergoline core, which is why LSD, semi-synthesized from lysergic acid, is chemically related to ergot compounds.

And all of this comes from that mold on the wheat. Yeah.

Wasn't there a time where they, they did it to people on purpose in France? I feel like this might have been like a CIA thing. See if you can find that story. Ergot or LSD? Ergot. I think they they, they, they, because I think they were experimenting on the effects of ergot. And I think they like picked a town and said, let's see, because we know they've done that before.

We definitely know they've like just hit whole places. Yeah, let's see. Let's see. Yeah, why not?

Like, think about like what we found out during MKUltra, that the CIA was running brothels and they would give the johns LSD. Really? It was literally called Operation Midnight Climax. And so what they would do is they would have these two-way mirrors set up This is proven. This guy named Jolly West, who was the head of MKUltra, okay, who would— they would say, let's find out what happens. Do you give people acid? What's the best way? Well, you get a bunch of people and do it to them in a way that, you know, totally unethically, but this is a way they're not gonna tell. Yeah, you did it to them because they went to a whorehouse.

Yeah, no one's gonna admit they went to a whorehouse, right?

So you get these guys, they go to the— get to prostitute. The prostitutes like, would you like a drink? Like, I'd love it. Of course. Yeah. Oh, hard day's Hard day at work here. The guy sits down, he's thinking, I'm gonna fuck, this is gonna be great.

Fucking walls are dropping balls.

Oh my God, candles talking to him. Do you find anything about the French thing? Here it is. I likely think of the infamous Saint-Esprit cursed bread incident of 1951. Long-running allegation that wasn't ergot at all, but a secret CIA, US Army LSD experiment. What happened in Pont-Saint-Esprit, this small town in southern France? Hundreds of residents suddenly suffered violent hallucinations, convulsions, insomnia, and psychotic episodes over several days. 250 people were affected. 50 were committed to asylums. 7 died, including some who leapt from windows convinced they could fly or being chased by snakes and tigers. The official French investigation blamed ergot-contaminated rye flour. From a local baker. Classic ergotism, St. Anthony's fire, that's another case of it. Some later scientists propose— or maybe the same story— some later scientists propose alternative culprits: mercury, fungicide, nitrogen trichloride, bread bleaching agents, or mycotoxins from Aspergillus Fumigatus. Fumigatus. I call bullshit on this.

This seems like something where they test.

Yeah, yeah, it seems like a CIA thing. Sure. 2009, American investigative journalist H.P. Albarelli Jr. published a terrible mistake arguing that Pont Saint-Esprit was actually a covert LSD field test run jointly by CIA's MK Yeah, MK Ultra programs and the US Army Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, with Swiss drug company Sandoz, who first synthesized LSD, allegedly supplying the compound. So his evidence included a declassified CIA document quoting a Sandoz representative saying the Pont Saint-Esprit secret is being discussed alongside references to LSD. Oh, they definitely it.

Yeah, it sounds way more likely.

That's way more likely. Uh, testimony he attributed former CIA SOD scientist Frank Olson, who died in a 1953 fall from a New York City hotel room after being dosed with LSD by his colleagues. What a bunch of assholes. These guys just dosing each other and admitting MKUltra incident. Uh, interviews with former US intelligence officials. Why most historians remain skeptical. Serious pushback came quickly So symptoms don't match LSD. Victims had gangrene-like vasoconstriction, weeks-long psychosis, and physical necrosis consistent with ergot alkaloids. Not a single acute LSD dose. Interesting. LSD is water-soluble and heat-sensitive, so baking bread would degrade it. The Sandoz-Cable-Alberelli cited is ambiguous and predates the incident in some readings. No corroborating documentation has surfaced despite extensive MKUltra declassifications since the 1970s Church Committee hearings. Yeah, but the problem with that is like one of the, one of the reasons why we know about MKUltra was evidence that they found that had been in storage. So, you know, when you say like Freedom of Information Act, they don't give you no shit.

They just bait you with a little bit here and there to go, oh, okay, we know.

Now just tell we don't have any evidence, go fuck yourself. I mean, look how hard it is to get the Epstein files. This is a guy that was alive in 2019.

Right, where there were plenty of records of everything happening. Exactly, and the internet. This reminds me, do you know about the Lyme disease? Oh yeah. You know about this? Oh yeah. Like the Plum Island thing?

Oh yeah. Seems very legit.

That conspiracy, I'm not a huge conspiracy theorist, this one to me is like a no-brainer.

Well, it's also people wanna say that Lyme disease has existed forever. Whatever. Absolutely true, but not to the extent that it exists today. Also not as contaminant, like not, not as— right, right.

And spreading like crazy, like crazy, like it's just sweeping out west.

Not only that, Plum Island, they were absolutely doing gain-of-function research on ticks. And the idea was the reason why they were doing it— and this is, this is all me what I've read. I don't have any direct information. Yeah, but it's still fun. But what they said was what they were doing was engineering ticks with these diseases so what they could do is they could spray them from planes and they would overwhelm the medical system of any— like overwhelm a town. That's right. Overwhelm their armies. You couldn't keep up and it would—

they wouldn't be able to fight. That's right. And it could wipe out food sources. It had like multiple implications. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

So now we have these fucking creeps from the World Economic Forum that are talking about the dangers of eating meat, right? And about how people eating meat is what's wrong with the— that's why it's accelerating climate change. All horseshit, but they're saying it, and they're saying that it's almost a moral obligation to create a tick or to create more ticks that would have this alpha-gal in them.

The one that makes you allergic to meat? Yes. Yeah. So they're saying that they want more of that? Yes. This guy was talking about—

not only that, I have a buddy who has it, my friend Evan from Black Rifle Coffee.

Oh yeah, I know Evan.

Yeah, one of my best friends, love him to death. Evan has it bad and it fucks him up. It's not as simple as he's allergic to red meat, like it fucks up all of his blood work. His body's a mess.

And he picked it up hiking and hunting.

He got a tick and he didn't know and he got He got bit. My friend Bert Kreischer, his wife's family, half of them have this fucking problem. No way. Yeah. Are they from the East Coast?

Yeah, Tennessee. East Coast.

It's the Texas Lone Star tick, it's the Lone Star tick, it's called, not the Texas Lone Star tick. But this one tick carries this thing, and they think that that might perhaps be genetically engineered as well. It's crazy. Because there was no alpha-gal problem 30, 40 years ago. No. It just didn't exist. And all of a sudden it's ubiquitous. And it's everywhere. It's spreading too.

Crazy. I, I never used to think twice about getting a tick. I get ticks all the time hiking around doing the stuff I do. I never used to think twice about it. Now I'm terrified of it. Yeah, I'm terrified of it now.

It's not just the red meat. The Lyme disease is fucking devastating.

If you don't catch it early, it can fuck with you the rest of your life.

Uh-huh. Yeah, I know multiple people that have it, including Jim Miller, guy who fights in the UFC. He had it really bad. Jeez. And it fucked up his career for quite a while, but he got his diet under raps, and he figured out what to eat, what not to eat, and now he's fine.

Do you know about some of those other animal warfare things they used to do? Like the spy tech they put in city cats? Do you know about this? No. Oh dude, there's some amazing ones. Spy tech in cats? So during World War II, Jamie would have to confirm what city this was in, I believe it was the Russians used to put little hearing devices in street cats because the Brits would go and meet in back alleys and have meetings, but there were feral cats everywhere. So they'd have all these cats running around with these wires in their brains and stuff, and these little, little— yeah, acoustic kitties, that's it. The CIA— dude, how crazy is this?

Acoustic Kitty was a Central Intelligence Agency project launched by the Directorate of Science and Technology in the late 1960s, in the 1960s, intended to use cats to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies.

In an hour-long procedure, a veterinary surgeon implanted a microphone in the cat's ear canal and a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull and a thin wire into its fur. Oh my God, how crazy! Imagine that, you're just like having a secret meeting in a back cove, you know, back alley, and there's a cat there just live streaming your conversation to the CIA.

Go back up a little bit here. It says, do the cat sense of hunger had to be addressed in another operation? What? Interesting. First Acoustic Kitty mission was an eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately. It was probably— the thing was all fucked up. Yeah, I probably couldn't get out. It's like, what is in my head? They put a wire in my head! Schizophrenic cat. However, this is disputed in 2013 by Robert Wallace, a former director of the Office of Technical Service, who said the project was abandoned due to the difficulty of training the cat to behave as required, and that the equipment was taken out of the cat. The cat was resewn for a second time time and live for a long and happy life afterwards. Lies! Yeah, come on, you fucking killed that cat.

It got hit by a taxi but it was fine and they took it out of its head.

But I mean, more than one cat, I'm sure. But this idea, the equipment was taken out of the cat, the fuck you did that? You spent money taking the equipment out? Did you really? Or did you just kill the cat? 100%. Fucking assholes.

Dude, there's a few of these. And the bats that would light fires, you know about those ones? Hold up.

The military did not give up on its use of animals as spies, as in 2006 the Pentagon requested the creation of cyborg insects for use in espionage. The request was made by fucking DARPA, of course, of the Pentagon. Scientists at Cal Berkeley responded by creating a controllable cyborg beetle in October of 2009. What?

There's a cockroach under your carpet here listening to us somewhere right now.

They're not gonna hear anything other than the stuff we already talked about. Yeah, true, true, true. The wonderful thing about having such a retarded show is like, who cares?

Just say it all anyway. Yeah. Whoa, look at this. Look at this.

Look at this as a fucking battery in the Beetle. Come on. That's crazy.

Look at the microchip on its back.

It's amazing that the Beetle can live through all this.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing.

That's wild. Wow. And I guess as these things have gotten smaller and smaller as chips and battery technologies increase. Of course.

Think of your cell phone in '09 compared to now. Right, right.

Fucking wild, man. Yeah, there were a few of these.

They used to light bats on fire and then they'd send them to roost, and then they'd burn down whole towns and things like that. That's going back even— dude, there's spy pigeons where they put cameras. Like, there's a handful of these that the CIA tried.

Well, how about what they did with dolphins? Oh, like the—

oh, well, you know the whole— the, um, not beluga. What's— yeah, it was the beluga, the Russian spy whale. Whale?

I don't know that. I was talking about dolphins that they use to detonate things. Oh, tell me about it. I don't know much about it. They use dolphins as like literal distributors of warheads. Oh really? So you get a dolphin to go somewhere and then they blow them up.

No way. Like a kamikaze dolphin?

Yeah, I don't know the exact details of it because I got sad when I was reading about it. I was like, aww.

Poor guys.

I have a deep attachment to dolphins. I fucking love dolphins.

I always say anybody who hates dolphins has to be a bad person. I've had some experiences with them.

I had one where I was like really high on edibles in Hawaii. And the dolphins would jump out of the water near the boat and they look at you. Yeah, they look at you when they were jumping out of the water like, look, look at me. Yeah, like, look, it's so cool.

And they're literally just playing. They're playing.

Yeah, 100% playing because they came to the boat and they were jumping in the wake of the boat. Mm-hmm. And the more you would cheer and yay, look at that, the more they were doing it and they were having fun. And I was like, these These are incredible creatures.

Oh, they totally pick up on your energy.

So the secret dolphin program began in 1959 to detect underwater mines and enemy divers, but I think they did stuff where they—

You mean whether this is correct or they just like, uh, the one that's the history, it says that they didn't do anything to harm humans or engage in combat. They like told their handlers to do it.

The one that I've heard about is that they put them out ahead.

They were just signifying in dark water 'cause they could see stuff better than our current technology back then. So they would echolocate and say, yo, we got something over here, come check it out. That's what this is.

Well, how's the dolphin communicate that back to the people and how's it know what the person's intended? I don't know. That was pretty good there. But I think there was some speculation that they actually used them as weapons though.

Well, have you seen, not to transition off dolphins, but Valdimir, Valdimir, Vladimir, I don't know, the Russian spy beluga? No. Okay, this is a real thing. Like, 100%, this one's real. So there was this beluga whale named Valdimir or Vladimir or something like that, and he turned up in Norway and he was escaped from a Russian spy program and he had a harness with spy gear on him. This is him right here, look. See the spy gear on him? It's like a whole thing. And so the Russians had been training this whale as a spy spy and had harnesses and spy equipment on him, and then he just peaced out and turned up in, I want to say Norway, and then they followed him for a while, and then he mysteriously got shot.

Mysteriously.

Some things with the dolphin, like with the dolphin story, I don't know if this is accurate, but I did read this one time that we would, like if we knew Russia was doing this, we would put some paperwork out that said, well, we've got dolphins that are blowing up mines.

Right, like that guy's now. Just so you guys know, now we gotta figure that out.

Chases.

That's a good point. That's a good point. It's like you never really know what's real, right? How cool do beluga whales look though? Look at that thing. That looks like an alien. Ah, they're super, super— I mean, look at that. That looks like if the— we have come to your planet to discuss your use of nuclear power.

And he would talk in that very calm tone.

That looks like something that would be very calm.

Um, no, that was a—

yeah, this was a crazy— well, you know the John Lilly research with dolphins? Do you know about that?

I'm not sure.

Okay, John Lilly is the guy who invented the sensory deprivation tank.

Oh, Yeah, you have one of those, don't you?

Yes, we have one over here. John Lilly was the man who was the inspiration for the movie Altered States. Okay. So John Lilly, who was this really interesting guy and was famously like out there with psychedelics, like he would, he would take intramuscular doses of ketamine and jump in the sensory deprivation tank. Oh damn.

Yeah. Trying to unlock lock brain thing.

My friend Todd actually did it with him. Oh wow. Yeah, so John Lilly, who was also a pioneer in interspecies communication, so they were trying to figure out how to communicate with dolphins. So they set up a house and this lady lived with the dolphins in the house to get the dolphin and trying, trying to coach the dolphin. And the way, like, literally she lived in water. So the water was like, you know, 4 feet deep and she lived with a dolphin. The problem was the dolphin was super horny. Oh no. And so the only way that she could get this dolphin to cooperate was she had to jerk him off. Yep. So she was jerking off the dolphin and somehow or another they found out and they cut the funding for research. But she had to do it. That's what I said.

You gotta do it, that's the job.

But look at that, it seems like she liked it though. Look at her. The way she's hugging him. She's like, yeah. I mean, after a while she probably did enjoy it a little bit.

I mean, what else are you gonna do? You're stuck in a tank with a dolphin.

The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins. So is there a documentary on this? Yeah. Oh, let's, uh, is there a clip? Uh, is it like blurry where you see her hand moving?

Water turning white.

So I guess, but if she jerked the dolphin off, then the dolphin would try to talk to her. But the thing was, you can't really get them to— they can't make the noises that we want them to make. They don't have the ability. Like, you could say hi. It, but it can't like the vocal cords aren't there for it.

Right, right, right. That's one of the things where AI may actually start to make a huge difference. Right. Yeah. Right. Because they are able to decipher a lot of like cetacean, like dolphin and whale language now. And with enough of a database, they'll start to be able to say like, this means this, this means this.

Have they actively deciphered?

It's so it's coming up to a, so basically, you know, AI works, you have to train it on something. Is this the lady?

I think so. She looks like the kind of lady that would do that.

She's got a real dolphin jerk look to her.

This is such a crazy story. Listen to these orca whales imitate human speech. No, it says it's responding.

Let me hear it. Oh, there's your guy.

There's my guy. Yeah, let me hear it.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Aww, it's getting there. It's trying.

Yeah.

Amy! Whoa.

Hello?

It's amazing.

Whoa. One, two. I bet what it wants to say is, let me go, you fucking asshole. Put me back in the ocean, you crazy Bitch, quit jerking me off and put me back in the ocean. Maybe if they jerked off the killer whales, they wouldn't have killed them.

Yeah, yeah, good point.

It's like, you know, like, just like SeaWorld alone, it's just, it's so awful. And it wasn't until those, that documentary, what was it called? Blackfish. Blackfish. Yeah, that was like the first one where people went like, hey, It was really eye-opening.

Yeah, we shouldn't support this at all.

I mean, I can't believe people still even go to fucking SeaWorld.

It's pretty crazy. You know, basically prison. You know about those two in France that are trapped there? No. Oh, this is interesting. So there is basically a SeaWorld equivalent in France, and the government shut it down. I forget the— I'm sure we can figure it out, but it was shut down. But then the dolphins and the two orcas were not released, and the guy's like, these are mine, I'm not releasing them, and I can't afford to release them or move them. So they've just been sitting in these abandoned tanks for, I want to say, a year now, maybe, maybe more. Yeah, this is it here, the race to save these two. Jamie, I don't know if you can see if there's an aerial shot of it, but yeah, so they're just sitting in this thing, but, but it's closed. The guy can't afford to feed them because nobody's visiting. And then I believe the government just doesn't want to do anything about it because they're like, we just wanted to shut you down, we don't want to actually like do anything about it. So there's just these two orcas sitting in these tanks.

And how do they get food?

I mean, he's feeding them, but he's like doing it out of his pocket, and it's like few and far between. Oh man. So yeah, it's a crazy— they're, they're, yeah, the abandoned whales, and they're just sitting in these tanks.

We've had a— do you know Phil Demers? He's a guy who, he helped shut down Marineland in Canada. Oh, okay. Yeah, it was an awful, awful place. Bad facility. Yeah, there's so many of these fucking places like that where you see what they're doing and just like Oh man, if we could understand them. Yeah. And we could, I think someday in the future we're gonna look back at that the way people today look back at slavery. Oh, totally. We're gonna say these are intelligent creatures that just, they just don't have the ability to manipulate their environment like we do. Yeah. But like, just dolphins, their cerebral cortex is 40% larger than a human being's. So something's going on in there, and you think it's okay to put them in a swimming pool? That's crazy.

Dude, it's the same thing like what I was talking about elephants. Their EQ, their emotional intelligence, we can't even comprehend it. The way those animals feel, like the highs that an elephant experiences and the lows it experiences, are way bigger than the highs or lows that most humans, I think any human, can experience. Like their EQ is way bigger than ours. The trauma that they feel from losing a loved one or from being abused or whatever happens to be is like 10x what humans can even emotionally comprehend. How do we know that? Based on their brain scans and whatnot. I don't know the specifics of it, but because that part of their brain is so much larger than ours. Oh, wow. And so you have they might not have the same like, computative skills as we do mentally, but they have this emotional intelligence that's like so much deeper and broader than ours, at least that's my belief.

It is a weird thing with us where we only characterize intelligence as the ability to manipulate your environment. Yeah, like— We want you to write a book. Right. I don't trust you. You're real? You're really smart? Make a house. Prove it. Why don't you, why don't you, how come you don't have a rocket ship? Right, right, yeah.

If you're so smart, where's your phone? Right, yeah. Yeah. No, it's crazy. It's weird, right? It's a weird way to look at things. Yeah.

It's like, I think there's a part of people that recognize that this direction that people like, that this classification of intelligence in that way is wrong. But I don't think we can really quantify it yet. And if AI really can decipher dolphin language, orca language, whale language, if they really can, and we realize that they're actually communicating communicating, God, I would hope that would change our approach to how we deal with those things. I think it would. Because there's— I think they are sea people. I really do. They're just— they don't need to manipulate their environment. First of all, they can travel 3D. Yeah. They go up, they go down, they go across, they can hold their breath for an hour. They don't need to make a house. No. Their food is everywhere. Also, they're at the top of the fucking food chain. That's right. They're orcas.

And they're nomadic. They don't— we are not nomadic by trade, so we have to manipulate our environment to make it more comfortable. Orcas are not low.

Yeah, they move so fast they can make a sunfish explode.

Straight up. Yeah, straight up.

We're so slow. Like, the fastest people, like, we just run into each other and knock each other unconscious. That's what we could do.

Fun to watch though. Dude, but I want to go back to what you said about— I agree, by the way, about orcas in captivity and whales and things things like that. There's this huge anti-zoo movement that I just don't agree with though. Like, I, I believe— I agree with you that in the future we'll go, why did we keep animals the way we did? And when you look at old zoos and concrete boxes and stuff, but there's so much good that animals in captivity have done— saving species, keeping things alive, connecting kids to nature. There's a, is a lot of gray area. There's Tiger Kings and there's fucking San Diego Zoo, you know what I mean? There's a lot nuance to it. San Diego Zoo is an excellent example of a really great zoo. It's unbelievable.

It's incredible. I've been to that place before. Yeah, but I also went to that wolf place with you. Yeah, and that made me sad.

I know.

Yeah, I know. Went there, I was bummed out, man.

But at least they're rescuing them, you know?

Like, I know, but they also cut their balls off. Yeah, that bummed me out hardcore.

Otherwise they all fight. I mean, but that's the gray area that you have. Like, what's the alternative? You know, it's like they die. Let them loose. But then none of— but only a few of them were pure wolves. You can't just let loose a wolf dog, you know, because then you're muddying genes. It's such a complicated thing.

Well, isn't that the whole reason why black wolves exist in the first place? I think black wolves exist because it's a trait that they got from domesticated dogs.

I read that, and then I read it was false, and then I read it again. I don't know what the truth behind that is.

Let's put it into perplexity. We should probably say it's a Rogan-esque claim.

That's cock sucker.

As stated on today's podcast, you're gonna work word that so you kind of get a good—

that's interesting. How do you word that? Would you say, is it true that black wolves inherited that trait from domesticated dogs? Because that is one thing that absolutely has happened, is that there's been interbreeding between— oh yeah, and not just on purpose.

No, no, like, yeah, yeah, it happened. Yeah, I mean, you get coyotes and wolves. Yeah, yeah. Is the genetic mutation of a black fur color brought about by domestication? Yes. Sorry, throwing a lot at you, Jamie.

Is it— is the black— the trait of black wolves, did they inherit that from domesticated dogs?

Edit my thing then. Good enough or not?

Uh, from domesticated dogs, I would—

yeah, yeah, see, see what what it says.

Let's see. Do do do.

If you're not pointed enough, it'll start guessing.

I love watching it work where it's like spinning. Yes, this is well supported by genetic research. Black coat color in North American wolves comes from mutation in the K locus, especially, um, specifically, excuse me, a 3-base pair deletion in the CBD103 KB, I don't know what that little thing is. Yeah, I don't know. Defense in gene. Beta defense. Is that what it is? I think so. Produces a dominantly inherited melanistic phenotype. The mutation originated in dogs and moved into wolves through hybridization, not the other way around. Interesting. 2009 study by Anderson et al. first identified the KB black allele in wolves is derived from dog-wolf interbreeding. Breeding. Follow-up work analyzing 331 wolves and 20 dogs found that North American wolf, uh, how do you say that word, haplotypes? Oh, haplotype, yeah. Uh, are monophyletic, meaning a sing— I feel like you're my teacher— of a single— good job, Dale— introgression event from dogs most likely seeded, uh, the allele through the continent, probably in the Yukon or Northwest Territories. Um, You know, I went to where Colossal has made the dire wolves.

Ben texted me when you guys went.

That was an interesting experience.

Was that cool to see? Yes. I haven't even seen them. I know it's a whole hush-hush.

I brought my youngest daughter and she was cuddling with the 4-month-old wolf. Well, there you go. You can cuddle with them when they're 4 months old up until a certain point, but it was like a puppy.

And it was still huge, right?

It was— no, no, no, no, no, it was pretty small. Yeah. It's like, uh, £40, something like that. Okay, but it was not outrageous. Fucking cute, man. She was so sweet. She was so sweet. She would cuddle with you and you'd pet her and she'd kiss you.

That's cool.

It was like a fucking dog, man.

That is, uh, yeah, Romulus. There you go. That is— oh my God, she's so sweet.

But the males, they had two males that had—

that's her name.

That's right, Khaleesi's the girl. So there's Romulus. Look how cute they are when they're little babies. And Remus. Remus, Romulus, and then Khalisi, the girl.

That was pretty cool.

So Khalisi was the one that we got to cuddle with.

Man, they're cute.

Oh my god, she was so fucking adorable. But you could only hang out with her for a little while and then they got big. Yeah. And now they're big. Yeah. He sends me pictures. So they were like that when we went there.

Like that size picture?

Like that size. That's already—

I don't know if I let my kids in with a wolf that size.

Well, they kept away from you. Yeah. And we were in a large contained area. Uh-huh. But we got to go out with them. Yeah. And they just kind of hang out and look at you. They keep away from you for the most part, but she didn't. She just came right up. But she can't be with them yet. With the males? Yeah, she was too little.

Interesting.

It was too like, you know, they didn't want her to get killed and just, just too sketchy. She's tiny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she was, you know, she was still a baby still, but they were older. I think they were a year or close to a year, but they could hang out with them for the first like 5 or 6 months, I think. Oh wow. And after a while they just got different. There's also some stuff about them that they didn't even know dire wolves had, like the mane, which is— they're getting a big— they have a mane. Oh wow. Like almost like a lion's mane. Oh wow. Which they didn't know, and they didn't know they were going to be white either.

Now is that a variant from their genetic mutation work, or is that something that's just expressing itself?

Very good question that you'd have to talk to a geneticist about, because like there's a lot of people that don't even agree they're actually dire wolves.

A lot. Yeah, a lot.

Yeah, they're essentially saying that what you've done is you've taken the traits of dire wolves and you've made them be expressed in a gray wolf.

This is a gray wolf. But that's what Beth says they've done. You know what I mean? Like, she's not— they're not hiding that. They're like, we're trying to fill a niche. We're trying to make something. Yes. Yeah.

But she's also said that— I think— I don't want to mischaracterize, but essentially what they're saying is, but that's what a direwolf was, right? Like, that they are a wolf that has all these traits, right? Like, the size is the same, the look is the same. You can get technical and say, no, you've taken a gray wolf and made it express— but Yes, but they got those genes specifically from dead dire wolves.

Right, right.

So it's like, well, what is it? Our own classification of these things that we're disputing, right? Because we can't just decide like that, this— I call this a dire wolf and that's what it is. Like, the genes don't give a fuck what labels you put on them. Not at all, you know. And if you make a dinosaur like, that's not a real T-Rex, it ate everyone in the city, right? It's a real T-Rex. It just took over a fucking city. It just ate everyone in a VW bus.

It's a 30-foot tall lizard. It's a dinosaur. Like, it doesn't matter how you shape it. Yeah.

Oh, the wooly mouse is really cool too.

Yeah, they're really neat. Ben, Ben told me one day I could have a wooly mouse, so I'm holding him to that.

Yeah, it's, it's really interesting seeing the dire wolves though and just imagining what was it like when those things are just roaming the earth. I know, because it's like a 200-pound wolf that's all white with like thick fur and a mane, like a lion.

Dude, speaking of roaming the earth, have you heard the theory about how, uh, sloth bears stopped— sorry, not sloth bears, uh, what were the big cave bears? Short-faced bears stopped human immigration. Yes. Have you read about that?

Yeah, that's really cool. Totally makes sense. It totally does.

They just stood there waiting for people like salmon to cross the Bering Land Bridge, and they're like, well, it's that time of year again.

Also, like, who would do that knowing that those things are out there. That thing was so big. Yeah, it's like double the size of a polar bear. It's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. Twice large polar bear that is— can run 50 miles. Look at that thing.

I don't care how smart we are, that is not something you want to face, right?

Even if you have a gun, like, good luck. Like, if you have a 9mm handgun and you run across a grizzly bear, you're dead. Yeah, it's not going to be enough firepower. No. So what are you gonna— what are you gonna hit that thing with?

Well, they have rocks, so, you know, that's good. Rocks and spears.

Yeah, rocks. Oh rocks. I mean, when they first started coming across, did they even have fucking bows and arrows yet? I don't know.

Yeah, but they— I mean, spears for sure, but like that?

But then there's the real question: is that the only way people got here? Right. When you see the White Sands footprints that are 22,000 years old and you start going, okay, well, this predates the Ice Age.

That's before any humans were known anywhere in the New World. Yeah.

So it's like, well, what's going on there? Right. Because this is actual human footprints —right— that have been dated to 22,000 years ago. Yeah. And that's just all we found. Yeah. That's just because they left footprints. Yeah. Like, that doesn't mean there wasn't something there 50,000 years before, 100,000. Exactly. Exactly. And then there's in Mexico this evidence that looks like predation on mammoth bones by humans. Oh, really? Like spearheads and things? Carvings into the mammoth bones. It looks like they're broken open to get marrow. Oh, interesting. Very disputed, right? Because there's also also some people that think it could have been like some rocks falling on the bones. Sure, sure, sure.

I'm not sure how this is happening, but it does think that.

Oh, let me write this up for Joe. Fuck off. I'm gonna have to figure something. I'm gonna have to erase some stuff. We're gonna have to get a, a separate computer that we only use for Perplexity. Um, what is the question?

Oh, sorry.

Um, well, how would humans have contested short-faced bears on the Bering Strait?

Let me write this up for Joe. Fuck off, man. Like baby.

So the actual evidence of monster bears kept humans out of North America doesn't hold up any longer, apparently.

So yeah, when I was talking, people said it was a myth that someone, a scientist, sort of commented on a paper that doesn't necessarily— he could have thought that, but they didn't really have evidence for it.

Well, here's the thing, like, the idea of a bear line, no, because the problem is bears, they would have to eat so to sustain that kind of mass. Yeah. That there couldn't really have been a lot of them.

No, but it sure makes sense that they were predating upon people when they came across them.

Oh, hold up, hold up. Go back, back up here. This guy's saying something kooky. He's saying that a hypercarnivore built for pacing long distance, he argued that it was primarily a scavenger using its size, sense of smell, and long-legged gait to kleptoparasite, parasitized— you got it, there it is— kills from lions, dire wolves, and scimitar cats rather than the rundown prey itself. That doesn't even make sense. Long-legged gait would make it faster.

I, I heard about this. So yeah, the theory is that short-faced bear would come in and rob a kill, like basically what a hyena does to lions, or what wolves do to mountain lions. Yes, but I think it— to me it doesn't add up.

Well, you know, grizzly bear chase down moose and kill them. There's plenty of video. I watched a video yesterday of it.

They've also shown now that hyenas are incredibly efficient predators, and until like 10 years ago, we thought hyenas were only scavengers, or 50— I mean, it's longer than that, but you know what I mean? And right now they show they have like a 30% success rate, which is very high.

Yeah, there's no reason why they wouldn't be if they're carnivores. Like, why would they be completely reliant on other animals to do the work for them when they have that kind of biting power?

They're just opportunistic like all carnivores.

And they move as packs. Yeah. They work as pack animals, so they kind of move like dogs.

If you're going to get food, get food. Do you know what I mean? If you can kill it, kill it. If you can fight something off for it, fight something off for it. Like it doesn't really matter. That's how carnivores are.

What is this, Danny? What are you saying?

It says this is how they hunted brown bears. They probably would have done it the same way.

Oh, get them in the dens.

And then yeah, burn it, burn the entrance with fire, probably kill the babies.

Right, but that's if you had access to fire.

They had an atlatl and a spear at best, and maybe some fire that they could maybe move, you know.

You know how close you have to be to hit something with an atlatl? Yeah. Okay, there's, uh, there's some videos that are really interesting where they're showing people, uh, realistic scenarios where a bear is charging you and— oh, and they pulled them out. Yeah, showing bear spray and guns, like showing them like A mat— like, imagine you have a 10mm semi-automatic pistol and you have to rack it. So you have to rack a slide. Yeah. So the gun— the bear's coming, you have to draw the gun, rack it, take the safety off, and then point it towards the animal and squeeze it. You're dead. You're done.

You're already dead. It's, it's like that.

It has to be like 100 yards away from you as it starts running for you to get a shot off.

I think the, like, idea is the bear gives you some fine.

Look at that bullshit-ass thing.

I've tried one. It is impossible to throw accurately.

Well, that's true, but you're not practiced in it.

No, of course not.

Like, yeah, I mean, I've seen people that are super accurate with spears.

Isn't your buddy Adam Greentree— doesn't he do the atlatl? He might.

He's such a psycho.

I think I've seen him.

He probably knows how to do it. Yeah, but I mean, pretty wild. It's not a good weapon. No, I mean, it's definitely better than no weapon.

I mean, what's the advantage over throwing a spear? It just goes further.

Mechanical leverage. Yeah. So it's just— I have a thing like that for my dog. It's like a— it's like a thing with the ball that has a ball on the end of it. And you can— it's so easy to not blow your shoulder out. You can throw it pretty fucking far, right? And that— and I— whenever— every time I do it, I was like, wow, of course this is way better. Yeah, extra leverage with this thing. And then also you can kind of whip it with your wrist and you get all this action with the ball. You would do the same thing with a spear, with a turtle paddle. Makes sense.

Yeah, makes sense. Seems hard to be accurate though.

Super hard. Well, it's hard to be accurate with a traditional bow, right? You know, it's so hard. Like, yeah, I, you know, I shoot a compound bow, and a compound bow is— there's so much technology involved. Oh yeah. First of all, I have a laser rangefinder, and I'll range something, it says 52 yards, then And then I go to my sight tape that's on my sight on my bow, and I dial it to 52 yards because I use archery software that measures the weight of my arrow. So I have this 500-grain arrow, and then it has the speed, so it's 390 feet per second for a 500-grain arrow. And then I put it into this computer and it spits out a sight tape so that I can move my pins specifically. Put it in a quarter. Wow. 52 yards if I was accurate enough. I'm not. Yeah, no one really is. Sure. Except like really excellent world-class archers. Sure. With a traditional bow, you're just guessing.

Yeah. Yeah.

So you're just guessing the arc of the arrow, and then you have to think, okay, I'm buying arrows, right, that are made by a guy who's measuring them, right? They're all down to like— they're within 2 grains of each other, and they have like inserts so my front of center is very high.

Perfect aerodynamics.

And they're made out of carbon fiber. These fucking arrows, they're making them by hand, and then they're making the arrowheads by hand, so they could be off, each one of them. Like, so you're just guessing where that fucking arrow's gonna go, and you have to shoot every day to get a real sense of like what the drop is at a certain distance. And then you have to kind of judge how far is he? Is he 20 yards, 30 yards? 50 yards. So even with modern traditional bows— and that's like, it sounds like a—

yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, recurves and longbows, right? Yeah, right.

I mean, it— that sounds like an oxymoron, but they are still traditional in the sense of you're not using cams. Yeah, right. You don't have like a cam that rolls over and it's a mechanical advantage. Yeah, fiberglass limbs and all this jazz. You're using like wood still, right? Even with those things, you're still buying arrows. Arrows weigh the same amount. Yeah, they're perfect. So if you did that over and over again in your yard, you did it every day for 3 hours a day, you would get a sense of how far, and then if you did it a bunch, you'd get an idea of judging distances. And there's like little tricks. Sure. There's certain archery tournaments where you're not allowed to use a rangefinder. Oh, really? Yeah. And so the idea is you have to develop the skill of being— and I think these tournaments probably started started back when rangefinders didn't exist. Yeah. And then when rangefinders did exist, they're like, nah, that's cheating. Keep that out.

Right. And then the targets are at various— yes. Yeah.

And so guys develop a very good way of measuring distance. Sure. And what essentially they do is they can pretty accurately judge 5 yards, and then they double that, and then they triple that, and then they try to figure it. And they get within like 10 or 15 yards. Sure. But you, you know, that's a lot a lot, even with a compound bow. You know, that drop of 10 or 15 yards is pretty significant, even something that's going 300 feet a second. But when you're doing with a fucking wooden arrow that you made yourself with a stone tip, like, like one of these bad boys— I have one here somewhere, somewhere on this desk. Yeah, here it is. So cool. Like that, somebody made that. So if you make that one and then somebody else makes one right next to it, it might be 15 grains different, it might be 50 grains different.

And the aerodynamics are different. Yeah, like the flint knapping is completely different.

Yeah, yeah, this thing's not very— that's not good. Yeah, plane like a motherfucker. Yeah, shot it out of a really good bow.

And not to mention the stress of if I don't kill this thing, I'm either gonna die or I'm not gonna eat, or, you know, all the other things.

And you have a 15-foot bear, right? Right. Yeah, probably bigger. Like, what was the height of of a short-faced bear, or the length? Like, what is a big short-faced bear?

You seen those caves they have in like Missouri where there's still claw marks from short-faced bears and things? Really? Oh yeah, you can go visit like middens of them in Missouri where they used to live.

Where they carved out a cave, like a den?

Yeah, where they lived in dens and you could see their claw marks in the mud and everything else. It's amazing.

11 to 12 feet. 11 to 12 feet. I think they probably have to be bigger than that because Kodiak bears get that big. Big. Kodiak bears can get 12 feet.

Do they? They get that big? Kodiak?

Yeah, I mean, maybe they're measuring them squirrelly because, you know, like a lot of times they measure stuff to try to make it seem bigger. So what is the largest Kodiak bear ever killed? Let's look, let's look that up. Largest Kodiak bear. Mm, largest Kodiak bear ever killed. World ever recorded. There you go, recorded the same thing. Okay, they have it by weight. Um, it's £1,656, which is, by the way, holy shit, it's insane.

Yeah, nearly a 1-ton bear.

Yeah, that's so crazy. Oh, the hind foot measured 18 inches. Oh God, how tall was it? How long was it?

There's £500 more than that.

Oh yeah, what? Over a ton in a zoo. He was a zoo. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh my God. But he might have been fat.

He was fat. He might be a short fatso.

What is the— so what is the longest, the largest length? I'm pretty sure he's sitting—

I think I've seen this bear and he's sitting in the Anchorage airport when you land there. Oh, there's a big—

is that that bear?

I think that's the largest bear I've ever seen.

Yeah, I've seen that in Anchorage. Carriage. That's— that thing's nuts at the airport there. Yeah, yeah, it's in like a glass case or something.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the biggest bear ever, ever shot.

Look at that one, ever recorded, £2,130. No, uh, no, no length measurements anywhere. That is so big. That's so crazy. The Short-Faced Bear, they don't even really know how much it weighed. They're just basing it on the Yeah, right. They don't have a dead one. No. So that, right, that photo up there, that's Fred Bear with his 1962 world record Alaskan bear. Go back to that photo that you just were at before. Yeah, look at that. That's his stuffed bear. Geez, he shot that with an old bullshit bow.

Yeah, look at his bow, the recurve bow.

That bull— that bow sucks.

Wooden arrows.

That's so crazy. He was the, the first like modern bow hunter bow hunter. Oh really? Yeah, I mean, he's the guy who popularized bow hunting. Fred Bear is a legend. Oh, interesting. In the bow hunting world. And I mean, you got to think, how good does life have to be where you go, let's try to do something that people used to do before guns?

Yeah, just because.

Yeah, because it wasn't really a thing that people practiced for fun. Like, the food had to be so readily available that we had to say, let's make it harder.

Yeah, go back. Wards.

Yeah, let's have so much food. Yeah, let's make it more difficult. Yeah. And then there's guys today that they don't like compound bows because they're too hot, they're too easy.

Yeah, they're using recurve. Yeah, yeah, it's crazy.

My friend Aaron Snyder, who's a like a world-famous bow hunter, went back to using a recurve bow. Really? It was killing too many things with a compound bow, felt like it was too easy.

But that's what happens, right, is these guys master their craft and when they spend all that time on it, and then they're like, how do I make the challenge harder on myself?

Also, they're competing with other world-class class bow hunters, like they're all like, who's the man?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A bit of an ego stroke thing.

Yeah, there's a little bit of that, but it's also like, that's how they get good in the first place. Like, there's a weird thing about people in competition. You could say competition is bad, like, okay, are you saying that on your phone? Because how do you think you got a phone? Yeah, you got a phone because somebody's competing against other people and they developed a phone. It's just a different kind of competition.

I think competition is essential to human culture.

It's certainly essential to progress. Yeah. And this is why socialism is never going to work. Yeah, you got to reward people. Yeah, if they're not rewarded, they're not gonna work hard enough to do anything really spectacular. Why bother? So you're never gonna get a laptop. It would have never happened. Yeah, you would have never had high-speed internet. Yeah, somebody has to profit wildly. Yes, for them to be enthusiastic about spending 17 hours a day making something like that.

But that's the joy of competition paying off. Yeah, right, is like, I know not so much bow hunting, but if you're competitive as a person to the point that you succeed the most at developing a phone or a cup or whatever it happens to be, you win and you get paid the most.

We just have to have regulations. Regulations to make sure that those people don't run amok and then take over entire countries.

And become a monopoly. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. What was going on with Microsoft in the 1990s? Remember all those?

Remember that? No, what was— how were they taking over? Bill Gates was a maniac.

Still is. But before— people think of Bill Gates now. Well, now I think COVID kind of ruined his— people's impressions of him, because now they think of him as a vaccine pusher. Mm-hmm. But also as a philanthro-capitalist, where he's doing philanthropy that makes millions and millions of dollars for him.

Didn't he also put out that anti-protein film? Wasn't that him? Do you know what I'm talking about? I think Bill Gates' wife— Anti-protein film? Bill Gates, correct me if I'm wrong, but Bill Gates' wife is vegan, I believe, and he funded like some Netflix documentary all on how like bodybuilders get huge without protein. Are you thinking about James Cameron? Am I thinking about James Cameron?

I know James Cameron's wife is vegan.

I might be mixing them up.

You're talking about Game Changers. That the vegan documentary? Yes, yeah, with the huge jacked guy being like, "I never touch protein." Eh, it turns out the problem, I think, if you're looking at that from an ethical perspective and you're saying factory farming is bad, I'm on your page. Totally. I'm with you. But that had an agenda. But yeah, it was a clear agenda, also just not accurate.

Anyway, I pirated your thing on Bill Gates though, sorry.

So the point was, during the 1990s, he was, —there was all these trials where they had these monopolistic practices. OK. And they were buying up competition or destroying competition.

These— Just anybody that developed any computer engine.

Yeah, anybody developed browsers that competed with Microsoft. Windows. Stuff. Yeah. Here is landmark 1990s trials refer to United States versus Microsoft Corporation, massive antitrust lawsuit filed by US Department of Justice and 20 states. The key elements included browser war integration, the antitrust ruling, and the appellate settlement. And so everybody in the '90s thought of him as this guy who is this like ruthless capitalist that was trying to destroy all the competition. OK. So he kind of reinvented himself. Gotcha. And the way he reinvented himself is first of all, he donated an enormous amount of money to the media. So to NBC, CBS, CNN, all these different—

they gave them hundreds of millions of dollars just to fluff, just to kind of say, guys, I'm your friend, I'm your buddy over here.

And then he developed the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and yeah, they were really concerned with global health.

Oh my god, it's— dude, do you know what they did fucking in the Kibera-Bassa Delta with their mosquito nets? Why would you? But do you know what I'm talking about at all? What'd they do, dude? I'm gonna go on a fucking tirade here. Yes, do. Okay, so the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation decided that there was too much malaria in Africa, right? Which you and I could probably agree with. Malaria is bad. So what did they do? They gave all of these people living in tribal villages— I totally pirated your thing, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna go on a fucking rant here. They gave all these people living in the Kaborobassa Delta, which is the breadbasket of the Zambezi Valley, meaning like where more fish are born. It's a nursery for fish. Right? Not just there, but this is a good micro-example. They gave millions of mosquito nets out to all these people to avoid malaria. Guess what the people who are starving to death did with their mosquito nets? They fished with them. They fished with them. Mosquito net has a hole that is so small that a mosquito can't get through, so guess what?

These mosquito nets now indiscriminately catch tiny baby fish in areas like Kabora Bassa, where the fish go to breed and reproduce, and populations populate. So now all of a sudden, you have thousands and thousands of people that have been handed nets, that have been living one way for hundreds of thousands of years, they don't give a shit about malaria, they have their own way of dealing with malaria, they sit in smoky huts at night, they sleep with a campfire, everything else. Yes, they still get malaria, some of them, but they deal with it their own way. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation come in, hand out millions of mosquito nets, absolutely collapse the entire population of fish that feed millions of people because these people just take the nets and fish all the baby fish out so that those fish don't grow up to make substantial protein sources. So now these wonderful philanthropists that have given out millions of nets have destroyed an ecosystem, crashed a fish population, and created widespread hunger for people that otherwise had plenty of resources. All because they were trying to help with their mosquito nets. Oh God. It's just like It's a fucking disaster, dude.

They've taken such a rich and important part of Africa, one of the most abundant freshwater fisheries in the world, and destroyed it because they're helping by handing out mosquito nets. Good God. Yeah, I know, sorry, I told you I'd go on a rant, but it's like, it's so bad what's happened over there. And they're still giving out mosquito nets, by the way. And you literally watch these guys line up, take a mosquito net, and it never goes in their house. It goes straight to catching fish that are this big for them to eat. Oh God, sorry, I know, I mean, crazy.

You just feel bad for them too. It's like, can't you just double up the net thing and just get them other nets too? Like, say, hey guys, that's what happened in 2018.

They got the new nets.

Oh, is that what it says? That's what I'm—

that's— I'm looking at the thing. Yeah, but it's— find out other information.

It just totally might have ruined— crashed the ecosystem.

It completely crashed it, and it created widespread hunger in a place that had no hunger. So now you have people with malaria and hunger. Ugh, God. And it's like done from a place of good intent, or maybe it isn't, and I think that's where you were going, but—

I don't think it is. I think it's a ruse, and I think what a lot of it is is this thing like, "We are doing philanthropy," but then you go, "Oh, but you're profiting. You're making hundreds of millions of dollars from this philanthropy, right?" But you're buying goodwill. And you're also on television promoting vaccines. Like, why are you— you're a guy who didn't even graduate college. Yeah, like, I don't know. I mean, I don't even know if he made it out of high school. Like, he's a weird guy. Like, he's obviously very smart. Yeah, of course. But why? You're not a health expert. Why? And you look like shit. Like, why are you promoting health? Yeah, like, this is great. Good global health. Yeah, like, he's just a fucking weird guy, man. Yeah, the weirdest thing— have you ever seen that? You know, he was obviously friends with Jeffrey Epstein or communicated with him and had some sort of a relationship.

Gates did? Yes. Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, it's popular.

Gotcha. Well known.

I feel like everybody is connected to Epstein now. Like, I've lost track.

A lot of people are. But the craziest conversation was there was a woman who was asking him, did he regret his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? And he's just trying to say that the only reason why he talked to Jeffrey Epstein, because Jeffrey Epstein was gonna— he was gonna donate money to his philanthropy and all the different things that he's involved I was involved in, but it didn't work out, and I do regret it. And she said, "Did you—" I forget what her question was, but Gates says, "Well, he's dead now, so there's that." Geez. There's something about it, is you gotta be careful. It's like a weird, veiled threat. It's very odd the way he answers the question. Yeah. Essentially saying, I'm reading it like, like, you got whacked. Yeah, like, that's what I'm reading.

Interesting.

Weird. Find that.

I was— while you find that, I was talking to some buddies about this, you know, just like standard bro chat. If Epstein happened today, right, and you had no knowledge of the weird stuff going on on the island, like, you would be invited, you know what I mean?

They'd be like, hey, Joe, they did invite me. Oh, really? Oh yeah, 2017. To the island? I'm like, not to specifically, yeah, but to meet Epstein.

But that's what I'm saying. And I was like, what if that happened today? Some guy came to me— oh, sorry, let's do it. Reported at that time, uh, that you had a number of meetings with Jeffrey Epstein, who, when you met him 10 years ago, he was convicted of soliciting prostitution from minors. What did you know about him when you were meeting with him? As you've said yourself in the hopes of raising money?

You know, I had dinners with him. I regret doing that. He had relationships with people he said, you know, would give to global health, which is an interest I have. You know, not nearly enough philanthropy goes in that direction. You know, those meetings were a mistake. They didn't result in, uh, what he purported, and I cut them off. You know, that goes back a long time ago now. Uh, there's, you know, so there's nothing new on that.

It was reported that you continue to meet with him over several years, um, and that, in other words, a number of meetings. Um, what did you do when you found out about his background? Well, and, you know, I've said I regretted having those dinners. And there's nothing, absolutely nothing new on that. Is there a lesson for you, for anyone else looking at this? Well, he's dead. So, you know, in general, you always have to be careful.

And, you know, I'm very proud of what we've done in philanthropy, very proud of the work of the foundation. Weird. Listen, listen.

First of all, record scratcher.

You have billions of dollars, right? And this guy didn't give you money for years, right? And he still kept meeting you. What about your money? Like, what is it? What is he going to give you? How much is he going to— how much does he have?

Especially compared to Bill Gates.

But he also probably doesn't have a fraction of what you have, right? So like, if like Elon started hitting me up to donate money to something, I'd be like, hey, bitch, why don't you—

you got— dude, do you know how much money you have?

You have so much money. Why would you— why are you asking? I'm the wrong guy. If he kept meeting with me for years. Yeah, for years. It's questionable. Try to get me to donate. Like, it's kind of similar. Yeah, right. This is what we're talking about. He's a billionaire, right? Like hundreds of billions of dollars. Like, none of it makes any sense. The guy was providing a party for rich people. That's what he was doing. He was providing a way where these rich people can fucking let their hair down and have a good old time and do coke or whatever they did. That's all it was really, right?

It was just like, come, but the party had no rules and that's what makes it a problem.

I'm just guessing. I'm just guessing, but I had a guy who tried to get me to meet him in 2017. In LA or where? Well, I was in LA when he reached out to me. Epstein appeared to have drafted himself claiming Gates had— oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Like he wrote it to himself. Right. This is an email that Epstein appears to have drafted to himself claiming that Gates had contracted an STI from encounters with Russian girls and hid antibiotics from Linda. Gates said the emails were never sent and are false. His spokesman called them absolutely absurd. So absurd that someone could get an STD from a Russian girl. Gates has separately admitted to affairs with two Russian women and with a Microsoft employee, but says none of them were connected to Epstein or his victims.

Some people said those emails were like a journal he was keeping. Like, why would you keep emails himself. He was— well, he wrote on an iPad all the time, apparently. That's why the typos were so bad. And he just liked email, you know.

That's, you know, I mean, imagine that's your journal. But why would you do that? Why would you make up a story about a guy having STDs? I think more likely because— so there was a rumor, and this is an unsubstantiated rumor, I want to be real clear, that Epstein was trying to blackmail Gates with some story about a bridge that he was having an affair with. Oh, interesting. Really hot Russian bridge player.

I also think they've intentionally flooded the internet with so much misinformation.

Perhaps, but my point was if he could have drafted that email, which was never sent, and then sent the draft to Bill Gates or showed it to him. Yeah. And say, "What do you think about this?" Right.

"If you don't, how about you shut the fuck up?" Yeah, yeah, yeah.

"How about you give me some money?" That guy's—

this goes real deep. So Columbus, this guy got— he was going to go to talk to the IRS about specifically what, I don't know, 1984, but he was like the tax guy for that company. He was murdered in a mob hit style.

Dude, that's why I like this podcast. I'm just like an animal nerd. I like talking about snakes and I'm like, find out about Victoria's Secret, Epstein and shit. Well, I mean, it's what the human animal does.

Yeah, the human animal, when it's in these very controlled spaces, where just— so let's look at it this way. So imagine you're a guy who's— especially if you're a nerd and, you know, you were never really good with women when you're in high school, college.

Yeah, socially awkward.

And then all of a sudden you have literally $100 billion. Yeah. And you could just get prostitutes anytime you want. And I guess if you get the really high-end ones, they know how to shut the fuck up. Sure. And if you have this friend of yours who's in the Mossad and that guy can get the best hookers, he's got a fucking island. You go to the island, it's the best. Yeah. We fly, we talk about philanthropy. We fuck.

Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, that's what I was saying before. It's like, you're just like, it's just a party for a bunch of dorks who can come here with a lot of money.

But there's also some weird science connection with him, and that's where it gets really odd, is that there's— he got that ranch in New Mexico so he could be close to the guys that were working at Los Alamos who were famously not making much money. So he's around these guys and he's talking about going into business with them and and giving them this chance to make an insane amount of money. And this is what he did with Eric Weinstein. With Eric Weinstein, he contacted him and they had a meeting, and he was trying to get Eric Weinstein to do something with him. And if Eric did it, he had the potential to make an enormous amount of money. And Eric is very wise, and he just didn't buy him from the start. He's like, this guy's a construct. Yeah, everything about him, he's like, he doesn't know anything about finance. Like, he was talking to him, he's like, this guy's a construct. He's not— this is not a real finance guy. Yeah, he's like, there's something going on.

The wheeler and dealer. So wait, what was the science they were working on?

A bunch of different physicists were connected to him. Einstein— Epstein reportedly hoped to develop super race of humans with his DNA. Wow. Wow. What is that from? What? That's New York Times.

I've got a different one of the article. Oh my God. The New York Times. That is crazy.

But he had a bunch of relationships with some very impressive scientists and physicists. Fascists, and also oddly connected to the whole UAP world. The whole Los Alamos thing's weird because the thing is that he, by buying that ranch in New Mexico, put him close to Los Alamos, which was in New Mexico. Yeah. And he then he had access to all these scientists that were famously underpaid. Weird. Right. So these guys were not making much money. Yeah. And he was this incredibly wealthy the guy through no way that anybody could ever rationally explain. Ever, yeah. It was all weird, and who knows what he was trying to get them to do.

He was probably just one of those guys, I mean, you never ended up meeting him, but he was probably just incredibly likable as a conman, do you know what I mean? You probably sat in a room with him and you're like, wow, this guy's really great, maybe I should give him some money, maybe I should, what a cool guy, and he's just a dirtbag under the veil.

We're just speculating, but maybe, maybe also if you have a bunch of really hot Russian chicks that are hanging out with you, you know. That'll do it. You don't need to be that charming.

That's so true. It's so true.

You're a billionaire with a bunch of hot Russian chicks. Yeah. And there's a bunch of people that are willing to hang out with billionaires just because I've seen it where people just get enamored by the fact that someone's insanely wealthy and they want to go to the party at their house like, ooh.

But all those people do is work like crazy. Do you know what I mean? They're not fun. I mean, I don't know. I don't know that many. He was. That's true. That guy partied hard. Yeah. Good point. Good point.

Yeah. To be a billionaire, I mean, in most cases, what you have to do is be insanely driven.

Yeah, you have to be that guy that works 18, 20 hours a day, and right, you know, and give up all the other things.

Yeah, you have to give up all your time. Exactly. That becomes your whole life. Yeah. And I— but I think that's also why they wanted a guy like that that could provide them— this is how Weinstein described it. He said he provided them with experiences, I believe. Yeah, that was his— and I think he's right. I think that makes sense.

So I mean, my one and only billionaire friend is that Anand Ambani, that Indian guy I was mentioning. I think it's so cool he's built this gigantic wildlife rescue.

That is pretty dope. That's a great thing to do with money.

He's just like, he's a nerd like me. And if he hears this, he's gonna be like, thanks a lot. But like, he's just an animal nerd. Do you know what I mean? He's gonna be like, he just like, he just loves animals and conservation. And he's like, I have generational wealth that my, you know, it came from his family. His family's like 5th or 6th generation of having huge industry. And he's like, okay, so with my excess money, I'm gonna rescue animals. Instead of do other, you know, space race.

That's very cool.

I mean, for me, it's amazing.

Yeah, I mean, there's no— look, there's nothing wrong with space race stuff too. It's all fascinating. No. But it's just— it's— and I get it from a perspective of people who think there's not enough money in the world, and then why do these people have so much money, and they should give all their money away. And it's like, okay, but you could do that all the way down to like $100,000 a year if you really wanted to do it, especially when you compare yourself to everyone else in the world.

That's right, that's right. Just living in this country alone, we're in the 1%, right?

Yeah, most people, I think 1% of the world, we looked this up, it's like $50,000, $60,000. If you make more than that, you're in the 1% of Earth.

Right, and that's the majority of people in the United States. Yeah, it's crazy.

Yeah, you're barely getting by in America and you're in the 1% of the world.

Exactly, which is wild. It's wild. It's really wild. It really is, yeah.

Yeah, we're the weirdest animal. You should study us. I should.

Well, I learned a lot today, I'll tell you what.

Yeah, but we're, We're not fun. Like, you study us and you go, oh God, what are they fucking doing? Whereas you study animals and you're like, oh, fucking cool.

They're way cooler. They're way more interesting. More teeth, more claws, more slithering.

Well, it's also just the fact that there's so much variety and that they are real and that they are, then some of them are so strange. How about that new monkey that they just found in the Congo?

With the lipstick? Crazy looking monkey. His orange mouth.

Yeah, it looks like he just ate one of them freeze pops. Yeah, exactly.

Like your kid after, yeah, 100, dude. That's so cool. And new primate species coming out still. I know. I love that. I think it's so great.

Do you believe in the Bondo ape? Do you think that thing is—

Yes and no. There's probably likely a group of chimpanzees, do you know what I mean, that just are more aggressive, that are a social construct. And are larger. And are larger. But it doesn't mean that it's like this, you know, 'cause they have the whole thing about them being lion-killing apes and all this stuff. And other stuff. There's probably a family troop, a group, and you know they're in war now? Have you read about this? Oh yeah. Yeah. So I think that the Bongo ape is real in the sense of there is probably an isolated larger group of chimps that just act like chimps.

The thing about this Chimpdos, they said that their skulls are different.

Yeah, the cranial ridge. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. Things with stronger jaw muscles have a cranial ridge. You see it in hyenas, you see it in things like that. Gorillas. Yeah, gorillas, yeah, exactly. More, more surface area for the muscle to attach to, basically.

It's just like, that would be so fascinating to find those things. And that's what, you know, that Carl Armand guy spent his whole life hunting, reading rumors.

And but at least he got some photos, unlike that poor fucker that was looking for the sloth. Yeah, still, still trying.

Yeah, like he got some camera trap photos of them. Yeah.

And yeah, no, and they were bipedal in the photos, right? Didn't he have them? Yeah, a lot of them, which chimps are, you know, they'll walk on hind legs and stuff. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It is pretty cool.

And then there's a photo of the one that they killed that was at the airport. Do you know, you ever see that one?

I don't think so. Oh, it's crazy.

At the airport? Yeah, there's a small airport and they, they killed this one enormous chimpanzee. So there's these two guys that are standing with it. It's hard to tell how big the guys are, but yeah, normal-sized human beings. That's the biggest fucking chimpanzee I've ever seen in my life. Look at that thing. They're amazing. Look at that. I mean, the guys, you could tell by perspective that that the guy's— he's got his hand on it, so he's right behind it. Yeah, yeah, it's not a forced perspective. His arm is not extended, so it's not fake. Yeah, and that chimpanzee looks way bigger than him. Way bigger. Yeah, it's amazing. So they think that is one of them.

Yeah, yeah, like I said, I think it's real in the sense— oh yeah, this, this famous photo.

See, but that one just to me looks like a chimpanzee. That just looks like a big chimp. Yeah, where the one that's sitting down, that looks way bigger than those guys. The size of its head is fucking —enormous.

Do you know that there's one river where— I'm trying to remember exactly how this works, but basically there's one area where the rivers collide where the chimps and the gorillas go into conflict with each other over this one river spot. Do you know what I'm talking about? Have you ever heard about this? Yeah, it's really interesting. So somewhere in the Congo, there's this particular river, and I think it's called the Cross River. Can't remember now. And it's an area that the chimps will come on one side and the gorillas will come down on the other, and they will have, they'll like throw stuff at each other across the river, and like, it's like a whole thing, it's been documented, and these guys will, there's sort of these like two clans of great apes that come and communicate across the river and throw rocks and like show off to each other, and then they kind of go back into the jungle, but it's been seen in this one particular river several times. Wow. Yeah, it's like the real Planet of the Apes.

What are the chimp wars? What are they, are they fighting over food, territory?

Unless I'm mistaken, it's relatively unknown, but it's sort of a social construct, So if you think of humans, for example, once our population gets too large and we have too many men and not enough women, we fight, right? We've seen that throughout history, Roman times, Mongolian times, you name it. So there was one troop of chimps that all lived together in relative harmony, and then two leaders basically sprung up and there was a lack of enough females. And so all of a sudden this, this clash clan divided into two clans, and now they're at constant war with each other. Like, they live in the same relative territory, but they'll come in with— come into contact with each other and go to war over who's gonna be the leader of the alpha troop, the mega troop. And it's been going for maybe a year or 2 years now. Fuck. Yeah, but how human is that? So human. Like, to be like, okay, we're all part of this group, like, you and I don't like each other now, like, this is my side, that's your side, we're gonna fuck each each other up.

Study highlights friends with benefits relationship between gorillas and chimps. What, they're fucking each other?

No, it's like the younger ones hanging out, it says. It's probably in the same area they're meeting. Yeah.

Pictures of them like in the same tree. Yeah, yeah, I think this is that river.

They're looking for figs, they want figs out of these trees.

Yeah, but friends with benefits generally—

Well, benefits are, yeah, I was looking for wording that got to what you're getting at.

But you don't really say that with like, why do you go to dinner with Bob? Well, we're friends with benefits. Oh, you're fucking Bob? Yeah. When did you start fucking Bob?

No, no, we just like figs, both of us.

The chimpanzees though, they caught them beating their chest, which is only something gorillas have ever done.

Yeah. Oh, they're imitating them.

Mimicking each other, yeah. Oh.

Isn't that cool? Yeah. I'm sure you've seen that one documentary, I think it's called Relentless Enemies, where there's a particular pride of lions that grew enormous because they're only eating water buffaloes. They got trapped on an island because the river changed paths.

Yeah, yeah. I remember what you're talking about. I don't know the documentary, but yeah, they're eating Cape buffalo exclusively. And the lions are just getting bigger and beefier, and they're all fat and like, yeah, it's pretty cool.

Well, they have to get bigger. The females are doing all the killing, and so they're as big as male lions in other places.

And they're jacked. And they don't have a choice. Because otherwise they're gonna die while trying to hunt the Cape buffalo.

Right, but so we're watching natural selection in real time because they just keep getting bigger and stronger. Longer. Yeah. And you know, like, these fucking buffalo are enormous, man. They're jumping on these things and hanging on them and trying to drag them down to the ground.

The Black Death, that's what they call the Cape buffalo. Yeah, those motherfuckers are so scary, so mean, so scary. Yeah. And they'll charge so unprovoked, like they'll just turn and come anytime. But it's, uh, it's crazy how you have that basically insular dwarfism and insular gigantism throughout animals, no matter like, yeah, animals stuck on an island, they're either gonna get big or they're gonna get small.

Well, lizards usually get big on an island, right?

Or tortoises, right? Like the Galápagos or the Seychelles. Yeah. Why, why do they get bigger? No predators and limited resources. Mm. Yeah. So all of a sudden, you know, you're a little tortoise that's this big, and every time you get to this big, something spots you from the air and eats you or whatever it happens to be. But now you're stuck on an island with all the grass and fruit you could ever eat, and nobody wants to beat you, so you just get bigger and bigger to outcompete each other.

Look at that face.

Yeah, look at those guys.

I mean, just imagine that's the only thing you can eat is something 3 times bigger than you and can fucking kill you.

That kills a lot of lions, by the way.

Oh yeah, yeah. Well, they kick you in the face when you're trying to take them out, and then that's it. Your jaw's broken and you never eat again. Yep. And you starve to death slowly.

I love the little, the little cub there covered in blood. Look at that. It's a really cool documentary.

Yeah, it seems so weird when you're looking at the size of the females. They just look exaggerated to the point where they look fake. They look like Hulk lions. It's awesome.

It's very cool. Very, very cool.

Nature is such a wild thing, man. I mean, such an amazing, fascinating, endless resource of just cool shit to see, and our understanding of it changes all the time.

Every animal theory we've ever had evolves and changes as we learn more, which is what makes it so fun because it's so dynamic. It's not a static thing.

Well, it's just crazy that we keep finding new things like the new primate. All the time. See, find that little new monkey that they found.

With the orange lips.

He's really cool. He's in the Congo. Well, the Congo is another place. It's like, what? Yeah. I'm sure you've seen that BBC documentary on the Congo. From, God, it was like the early 2000s. But look at him. What a weird looking guy.

So cool. So strange. There's a few lost primates out there too, like species that we've seen once or twice that have never been seen since. Like what? Miss Waldron's red colobus is one that comes to mind.

It's called Miss Waldron's red colobus?

I think it's called that, or maybe it's just Waldron's red colobus, but it's a colobus monkey that there's like 3 or 4 museum specimens and no live specimens. Yeah. Really? Uh-huh. There's a few of those. Yeah. Whoa. Miss Waldron's. Yeah. Red colobus.

Why is it called Miss Waldron's? I don't know. Who's that lady? Good question. What do you have to do with this monkey lady? West Africa.

Previously described as subspecies. Not been sighted since. Oh, I saw it for a second.

And what's crazy is a lot of these animals, especially primates and essentially anything that lives in the Congo is in a place that's so scary and so dangerous to visit. Yeah, there's not a lot of research being done.

Well, that's always what I tell people when they're like, oh, well, you know, find these animals, find that animals. Nobody's looking. It's too hard. They're— the local people know they're there. Like, these lost species are species that the people that hunt and eat them know they're there, but they have no communication to the outside or the scientific world. And, you know, for you or I to go into that part of the Congo is probably a death sentence. Yeah, yeah. But there's a lot of cool stuff out there.

Are there any other animals that might be real that people think they've seen?

As far as like cryptids, they could still be real?

Weird ones? Oh man, like the giant sloth or something like that?

I mean, there's that whole like the dinosaur in the Congo thing that people always talk about. It's silly. It's not real. That one seems silly. I mean, I can't think of any. I I think, you know, like—

David Cho went looking for that one.

Yeah, yeah, I actually— that's one of your pods that I watched the whole thing. He was talking about that. David's crazy. Yeah, I can't think of any, but you know, it's, it's those rumors, like there's a sloth, we've seen it, there's an Asian unicorn, we've seen it, that if people don't follow, you never know. It's like you can, you can absolutely be the tinfoil hat guy, like I can be with the thylacine, but if you give up and don't look, you know, we never really know.

And if it's gonna be, it'll probably be in a place like the Amazon or like the Congo. So enormous place. Like, isn't the Congo as wide as the contiguous North America?

The country or the river?

I think the country, country of the Congo, the Congo, the jungle of the Congo, I think is almost as big as America.

I did not know it was that large.

Africa's fucking huge. It's It's huge.

If you see the, 'cause United States imposed on Africa, you're like, oh my God, the continent of Africa is enormous.

Well, that's what's squirrely about maps, right? Especially like when you look at the globe, like everything's so distorted, which I don't understand why they do that. No. I've never had that explained to me in a way that like, oh, I get it.

Or timelines. Have you ever looked at how like timelines are drawn on the globe? Like, you know, like the time zones.

Oh, right, right, right. It's so weird.

There's all these like squiggly jigsaw puzzles and you're like, why is that island in this timeline? Zone that's 3 slots over. Like, it makes no sense to me.

Doesn't make any sense. Yeah. But like, see if you can find the size of the Congo. Like, if you see the size of the Congo versus— I think it's almost as big as the United States. That's crazy.

I didn't realize that. It's the same. Yeah, there are, there are these— there's so many of these incredible remote areas.

I think it's thousands of miles wide. Okay, so if you took the took that and you shoved it— why doesn't it put it over? Right, the bottom one there is a better one. Bottom one, that one's better.

So not quite. Yeah, but it's still enormous.

Yeah, it's like 35%. Yeah, and there's more political unrest there now, which means stuff shuts down there. I mean, that's crazy. That's an enormous piece of land. Look how big that is. You get all of India, all of Eastern Europe, the United States, China, Fucking crazy.

France, Spain, look at that. It's a big place.

And the cradle of civilization. Yep, the cradle of humanity. Everything. And then also Egypt, that's, that's also part of Africa.

You know about the eclipse coming up there? What? Biggest one in history, 2027. Yeah. So in 2027, I want to say April, there'll be a 6-minute total blackout in Egypt. Be the longest one in 100 and something, or maybe 80-something years over the Red Sea in Egypt.

Oh, that's when you want to go see the pyramids. Can you imagine when the aliens are gonna return?

That's what I'm saying, dude. Can you imagine being at the pyramids and seeing a 6-minute-long— 6-minute-22-second— that's what it's gonna look like. And it's in a place that never has fucking clouds, so you're gonna see it. I mean, they do, but not that time of year. So yeah, total solar eclipse for 6 and a half minutes.

So we had one here. Yeah, yeah, 2 years ago. Yeah, 2 years ago, Jamie.

Yeah, it was really cool. How long did that last? I wasn't— not that long.

I believe, but yeah. A couple of minutes. What was really cool about it though was that all the animals got oddly silent before it happened. Yeah. It was really weird.

Like they know something's coming.

Yeah, so we were outside waiting for it. And as the eclipse starts taking place, everything went quiet. Yeah. It was really wild. So crazy. And then while it's happening, like, whoa. And you imagine living like thousands of years ago before anybody understood what the fuck was going and thinking like some wild magical moment had happened and that we entered into a new timeline or something. Oh yeah.

You'd have all crazy theories. I'd be like, grab somebody, we gotta sacrifice them right away. Something's going on here. Yeah.

Get them to the pyramid. Cut their heart out.

Yeah, straight away.

It's also, it's like so weird that the sun and the moon are the exact right distance that when they cross, the moon just completely outlines lines where the— I mean, just fills in everything. Yeah. But the light around the outside, the edges, it's bizarre. Like, how is it perfectly sized like that?

Have you seen— oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, it's just, it's an incredible coincidence that it's the right distance and the right size, because obviously the moon is so much smaller than the sun. Yeah. But perfectly distanced. The scale. So that when the sun and the moon is there, it's like, boom, it's like the right size. Not like half of it. Yeah. You know, it's perfect. Yeah, perfect. It just sits right in there.

Yeah, it's like an Oreo and the cream. It's amazing.

The really screwball theories are that the moon is fake.

I've never heard that one.

Yeah, yeah, the panda, the panda fake has nothing on the moon being fake. The moon is fake? Yeah, yeah, they think the moon is artificial and then it was like put here by aliens and it's hollow.

You're kidding. Oh no, no, no.

That's a good one. And that it was put here in order to sustain life on Earth, to give us a stable orbit.

I mean, it does do that.

It does do that. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. Because imagine, like, how fragile life is on— like, we're really concerned about climate change. Like, oh my God, the climate changes. Well, guess what? If the fucking moon wasn't there, you'd be doomed.

Oh, that's just nothing. There's no way. Yeah.

You need a big moon to control all of our oceans. And a quarter of the size of the Earth. Yeah. It's a weird moon. Yeah. Like, I don't think there's another moon on moon in our entire solar system that's comparable in terms of like the size and the relationship to the other planet.

To the planet itself.

I think it's way bigger than every other moon on— let's find that out. I think that's pretty sure.

Formulates the conspiracy theories like it was brought in. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting.

There's also, we did something, some sort of experiment. We shot something at the moon and it rang like a bell for like a long time, which is really weird. That's wild. It was like, it echoed like way longer than we thought. Which of course could just be they didn't know what it would do because they'd never done it before. Right. And they don't even know, like, fifth— the fifth largest moon in the solar system with a diameter of the width of the contiguous United States. While it's dwarfed by Jupiter and Saturn's largest moons, it's uniquely massive compared to its parent planet. Yeah, that's what it is, making the Earth-Moon system more like a double planet. Yeah, so in relationship to the planet, like It's so Jupiter and Saturn have huge moons, but Jupiter obviously is fucking massive, way bigger than us. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can look at the size of Jupiter in comparison to the size of Earth.

Yeah. So it's the scale of the moon to this, to the Earth. Yeah. Interesting. That is a wild conspiracy theory. Imagine just being the guy who's like, you know what? Why don't we shoot at the moon? Let's give that a whirl. See what happens. Yeah.

They did something. I think, I don't know what they shot it with. I think they sent a rocket to the the moon and just to measure the sound, huh, like see what would happen, huh. And it was odd. They found it was odd the way it rang. It rang like a bell, huh. But you know, it's like they've never done that before, like. And also, who knows what the fucking center of the moon's made out of? Yeah, who knows where you hit it? Yeah, totally. Who knows? Maybe it's weird. You got some caves in there. It's hollow. Apollo experiments and the ringing effect, uh, the The phrase "Moon rang like a bell" comes from Apollo 12. In 1969 November, NASA deliberately crashed the lunar module's ascent stage onto the Moon. Seismometers recorded long-lasting vibrations for nearly an hour. This description is a metaphor for how dry, cold lunar rock reverberates without water to dampen the shockwaves.

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Retards and dorks say, oh, it's hollow, it's made by aliens. And there's also people that think that, you know, there's stuff there, like there's a monolith.

Oh, the cities on the moon and all that. Yeah, yeah, the other side that we can't see. Yeah, man, bases. Reddit's a wild place, huh?

This is not even Reddit. This is like, you got to go to like weird message boards.

Uh-huh.

Crazy people go.

It's deep crazy. Yeah, people that Hollow Moon's on Wiki.

What's that? Hollow Moon. There, the Hollow Moon, closely related to Spaceship Moon. Ah, that's the one. Our pseudoscientific hypothesis that proposed the Earth's moon is either wholly hollow or otherwise contains a substantial interior space. No scientific evidence exists to support the idea. Let's go to Spaceship Moon because that seems even more interesting. Yeah, Spaceship Moon. Come on, baby. Baby, all these pseudoscientific— the moon spaceship, uh, includes historical— oh no, no, no, it's not— I didn't know what that means. Spaceship Moon Theory. Okay, try that. Theory, a pseudoscientific hypothesis proposing that Earth's moon is an artificial hollowed-out satellite constructed by an alien civilization.

Oh See, it's like the Death Star. There you go, bro.

Yeah, well, you need to get into like space is fake. That's even better. Space is fake. Is popularized in 1970 by two Soviet scientists, Mikhail Vasin and Alexander— how about that word? Yep. Shcherbakov. Shcherbakov suggested the moon was reinforced by an armored titanium hull to survive impact.

Oh man, people need more to do. No, they don't. You like this? I love, I love the kookier the better.

Yeah. Like #spaceisfake is one of my favorite things to look up because there's a whole community of people out there that think space is fake. But I also think that a lot of these people, what you're getting is there's been some, there's been some people who develop fake theories in order to see if people bite. And then, and then they put them out there like on Reddit or somewhere on 4chan. 4chan is a great place for some of these. Like that, because you got a lot of schizophrenics that like to visit those places. And then they'll put it out there and see if people run with it, and then they'll do it to see if just for fun.

And it gives you a community, right? It's like, oh yeah, I have this group of flat earthers that I hang out with on Saturdays and we talk about how the Earth's not round, you know what I mean? It's like I have a— I made my own lunatic community.

Bigfoot hunters, same thing. There you go. Unfuckable white guys looking for cryptids.

Something to do.

Are there any other cryptids that are even remotely interesting?

To me, not really. I mean, I always enjoy the fun of it, like when we chat about it, but as far as like the reality of it, I don't think so. You know, I know it's a boring answer, but I think that—

Well, you would know. I mean, that's why I'm asking you. I mean, you're a guy who actually goes to these places. I mean, goes looking for stuff.

I love when you hear about something like a Burrowing Snake and everybody's like, that's not real, it doesn't exist. And then turns out somebody finds this weird snake. And it's not really a cryptid, but it's something that nobody's been looking for, because why would you, right? Nobody's digging in the earth in the center of the Congo to find a mud snake, you know, or whatever it happens to be. And I think those are the things that they end up being cryptids in small communities. You know, like you hear from the village about the snake— I'm making the snake up— but about the snake that lives under the mud and only bites when people dig their crops or whatever it happens to be. And it creates this generational legend that becomes a cryptid. But the truth is there is a snake that lives under the crops in the mud. It's just nobody ever goes looking for it because why would you?

Well, there is a weird arrogance that we have in 2026 because we have uncovered so much in comparison to people that lived 200 or 300 years ago. Oh, for sure. That we have this maybe arrogant assumption that we have an accurate accurate audit of all the animals on the planet.

And it's such a human thing to do, is to be like, "We've quantified it all. We have the answers." Yeah. You know, it's like we put a finite on something. And then you have all these guys, like especially in the scientific community, which is— that's a whole story for itself, but they're now like, "Okay, I need funding, so I'm going to speciate a bunch of stuff. So I'm going to go look at 4 things that are exactly the same except one lives on one side of the creek and one lives on the the other, and now I'm gonna make it its own species because that'll fund more work for me. So now you have this speciation race.

Yeah. There's no gatekeeping on that where someone goes, hey.

I mean, there are certain criteria that you have to meet, but they're pretty easy to meet. Do you know what I mean? You have to say it looks different. It has some kind of genetic anomaly. It has some kind of physical anomaly. There's a population of it. Okay, now I've named my own species and that makes noise and I can publish a paper and now my research is funded. Funded. And it's just like, it's not, you know, is it a species? Do we— did we need this one frog to be split into 4 different groups because they live on, you know, 4 different patches of the mountain? Not really, you know. And it sort of lessens the conservation for that frog in general because now all of a sudden it's like, well, there's 4 different kinds of them, so who cares if one of them gets extinct? You know what I mean? So it's sort of like, it's a weird thing that's going on in the sciences where there's this race to do speciation. Creation and pull apart everything into more and more and more, and then it sort of lessens the value of them, in my opinion.

Mm, that's interesting.

So there's this reward thing that happens that encourages people to do these things.

Dude, I'm writing a whole book on this right now. It's coming out next year because it's just the scientific system in wildlife and conservation is so broken because it's very— first of all, the— first of all, If you're an animal guy, you're probably not a great people person to begin with, right? Myself included.

You're no bad people person.

Thanks, but for the most part, the people that get into the sciences probably are— don't have the best— Awkward. Yeah, they're awkward. They don't have the best human social skills, right? So then those people become professors and heads of parties and academics and all these things, and again, I'm generalizing. There are great people that I work with too, but just as— just a picture of the the system. So now you have all these socially awkward, somewhat introverted people studying animals. Now there's this tiny little resource pool of money, and everybody that's socially awkward, that's already somewhat arrogant because they've made it to the top of their field or close to the top of their field, is competing for this tiny little pool of money. So now they're putting out anything that's headline-worthy, and headline-worthy could be as simple as speciating a frog on a mountain, or it could be discovering something, but basically you have to just publish something to show that you are accomplishing something to then pull from that tiny little pool of money. So now a system like, say, you, me, and Jamie here should all be working towards saving this guy right here, this metal chimpanzee.

Well, we're not. We're all fighting because there's this tiny little pool of money that we all want, and we're all saying that each other are wrong because we need to prove that we're right so that we're funded because you two— because all three of us can't be funded to save that species. Does that make sense? So now we're all fighting each other to save the thing that we all care about because the resource pool is so small.

So what's the solution to that?

Well, it needs to become more mainstream. Um, and I, I think there's a lot of bullshit science, you know, to be honest with you. Like, there's a lot of this speciation and publishing and all this stuff that's just sort of making noise that isn't really helping. And I think the solution is, well, one, once it becomes more mainstream Here's, here's the short answer. Conservation is incredibly easy to measure. We try and make it very difficult and complicated. Are there animals now? After your work, are there more? Have you fixed the problem? That's all conservation is, right? Are there, are there more or less than when you started? If when you started there are less and now there are more, and this is very black and white and every system is different, but if you had 1,000 frogs and then you worked on the project, now you have 2,000 frogs, and frogs, you're doing conservation right. As long as the ecosystem supports, as long as the prey is there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's all conservation is. We try and make it so complicated and so in-depth and require all these papers and this publishing and this information that is sort of an information overload that the common person doesn't care about it.

I mean, when's the last time you read a paper on frogs? Probably never, right? Me neither, 'cause they're boring, 'cause I don't want, I don't care about it. But I would care if you just came out and said, "Look, these frogs need a home. We're gonna fight chytrid fungus," which is this big widespread fungus that's killing all amphibians, "by building frog hotels." And if we build, which are these little brick hotel things that frogs go in to incubate to kill the fungus. And if we build enough frog hotels, then there's gonna be more frogs. That's good conservation. So instead of fighting over that, make that popular and mainstream. Don't make it so complicated so that nobody understands it. I'm not saying don't publish papers and things. Those still very much so have their place and they're important, but focus on the messaging to the common person so the common person now cares, then there becomes more funding and resources, then we don't all have to fight over this tiny little pool of resources to publish things that aren't actually accomplishing things.

Well, this is actually the value of getting into a crocodile cage. That's right. 'Cause you get people actually interested in animals and— That's why I do YouTube.

That's why I do all these things is that I hope that it helps people people care. I don't need to get funded by it. Like, it's great when my YouTube does well and I make money, but like, I just want people to care about these things, because if you care about them, then that resource pool widens.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's— you got to make things interesting to people, right? And this is where like David Attenborough was so amazing, because absolutely, right? Because he developed these documentaries and he— but so— and the voice that he had, he's explaining these things. Mind-blowing. He was the first guy to document chimpanzees eating monkeys. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that. Incredible. That was incredible.

All his stuff, he's the, the goat, literally.

But you kind of— that's another thing about being a wildlife biologist, you kind of have to get your hands dirty. You have to. You got to get in there.

And the other part of the system that's so broken is a lot of these world-leading experts have never touched, seen anything with a living one of these animals. Like, I worked with a person, and I don't want to say her name because she's a lovely person who's a world-leading expert on a certain type of shark. And we're like, great, you're the world's leading authority, you're perfect to come with us on this trip to study these sharks. We fly to the opposite side of the planet, and I don't wanna give too many details, it's not fair to her, she's a very nice person. We fly to the opposite side of the planet, she's published 50 papers on this species of shark. And we get there, and I'm like, all right, day one, let's gear up, let's hop in the water and look for this thing. She's like, I don't know how to swim. I'm like, "What do you mean?" She's like, "Ah, I've never been in the ocean before." I'm like, "You're the world's leading authority on this type of shark." And she's like, "Yeah, yeah, I don't dive, I don't snorkel, I don't know how to swim." I'm like, "Well, how are you the world's leading authority on this shark?" She's like, "Well, I've never seen one alive.

I've dissected them, I've published all these papers, I can tell you about the tooth count, but I've actually never seen one alive." I'm like, "You're the world's leading authority, and you've never seen one of these animals alive to study it? The guy who fishes and eats it in the village next door is more of an authority than than this person, do you know what I mean? But that's the scientific process, the world's leading authority because they've published the most papers on something that sits in a pickle jar.

Do you think that that is an absolute requirement though? Like, do you have to have some sort of physical contact with the world that they live in?

I think you have to have observational knowledge. You don't have to have physical contact. Like, you shouldn't have physical contact with wild chimpanzees, they'll rip your arms off. Right, but I mean the world they live in, I mean being on the ground. I do, I think it should be a requirement. I think if you're gonna be considered an authority on that thing. You have to have observational data as well as scientific data. You can't just live in a world where you're like, I've studied them in pickle jars and I can tell you everything about them.

Well, to me, that was like one of the most fascinating aspects of Chimp Nation. Mm-hmm. You know, that these scientists had been embedded with these particular chimpanzees for more than 20 years.

That's science. Yeah. That is science. Yeah. That means you are sitting there, and that's why the best scientists are the guys that hunt and fish and spend their life surrounded by these animals that will never once be credited as a scientist, 'cause all they do is study the behavior of the animal. And I'm with you, like, that is— that's the real deal. 20 years watching a troop of chimps, learning their behavior, understanding their social dynamic. I'm not saying you shouldn't also cut one open and measure its canines. You should when you get a dead one, but that doesn't make you an authority on it. Right. In my opinion.

Well, that was the thing about that particular documentary and those particular scientists was that it was so unusual that they had this long history where these chimpanzees had lived and died and raised new chimps around these people, and as long as they followed this protocol, stay within, you know, 20 yards, at least 20 yards away from them, never have food around them, don't look them in the eyes, you're good. Yep.

And you got insane footage because of that. Yeah, because there's a mutual respect. Right. Like, they've learned to appreciate each other, and you can't do that with every animal, It doesn't matter how many years you spend sitting watching a crocodile, it'll still eat you at the first chance it gets. But you've earned a mutual respect with a highly intelligent creature. That to me, as a field biologist, is science. That's incredible.

If not a respect, at the very least, you've become a part of their world to the point where they don't think of you as being an anomaly. That's right. So they act normal. Yep. Where they're not weirded out. Like if you just show up out of nowhere and you're wearing a space suit, spacesuit, the monkeys are going to go, "Hey!" Exactly. "Fuck, what's this new thing?" But if there's always people with spacesuits around, they never bother them, they go, "Oh, it's just the spacesuit guy. Normal.

I'm just going to go eat my bananas like normal." It's the same as seeing an impala and a wildebeest hang out together at a watering hole. They're used to each other. They know they're not threats to each other, but you or I walk up and both of their ears perk up and they sprint in different directions. Yeah, that's— You can have that time put in to make things calm. It's amazing. But I mean, has there ever been anything other than Chimp Nation where they did that that effectively? I mean, Grizzly Man sure tried. Uh, didn't work out so well. Didn't end well.

Or did it? Yeah, it probably ended the way he wanted it to, honestly.

There's no way he could have wanted to go out any other way.

I think, I think that was suicide by bear.

Yeah, you think?

I also think it was Werner Herzog's attempt comedy.

You think?

Yeah, there's something about the way he edited it where I'm like, this guy's fucking with us. Because there's one time where he's talking about the sheriff and they asked the sheriff like, what do you thought of him? And the sheriff goes, well, I thought he was retarded. Smash cut to something else. I'm like, you're trying to make me laugh. It's pretty funny. I've wanted to try to get him on the podcast. Yeah, that's gonna be one of them. He probably never answer honestly because it'd probably be disrespectful to Timothy Treadwell and You gotta get him on. I would love to get him on just because I think he's amazing. Yeah. And also his documentary Happy People: Life in the Taiga is one of my favorite documentaries of all time. Oh really?

I don't know it. It's good?

It's all about these people that live in Siberia, and they have like no mental illness, and all they do is they live a subsistence lifestyle. They're just hunting and fishing and trapping, and they ride around on snowmobiles, and they make these huts, and they live up there with their dogs. Dogs, and they have these extended periods of time where they're alone. Yeah. And all they're doing is like taking their snowmobiles to different traps and gathering wood for fire and fish to eat. It's— and they're all happy and they're drinking and laughing and they're like— it's weird because he documents it and it's called Happy People. That's how the documentary is called. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And it's like with his He says like, "The way he describes these people living in Siberia." Nice Siberia. Fucking amazing.

Oh, that's cool.

It's really amazing. It's an amazing documentary.

I think he's incredible. I have said forever, you don't, look, mental illness is a real thing. I'm not gonna pretend it's not. But if you spend a lot of time outside and in nature and especially by yourself, the noise goes away. I don't care who you are. I don't care what your history is, drug history, anything, when you, you're much more present when you're alone in nature. And mental illness, I have no experience in this, this is just opinion, but mental illness comes from when you're wrapped up in your own being, right? When you're thinking about all the problems and this, that, and the other thing. But when you're alone in nature, you have to think about your surroundings and what you're doing. And you don't have time to sit and manifest on these things that create depression and anxiety and all of those types of things.

Types of things. There's also no comparison. You're not comparing yourself to anyone else because you're living in a community that are subsistence lifestyle people. All these people are doing the same thing you're doing. Yep. What are you going to do? You're going to have the biggest fish? Like, nobody gives a fuck. Nobody cares. It's all hunting, fishing, living off the land. They all do it. And they're all like sharing and drinking together and having fun. Right. It's really wild when you watch it. You go, well, God, boiled down to like the most simplistic community-driven ways that people exist. Like this, like seems to be the best way for people to live.

But like you said earlier, you have to have both sides, right, of the coin. It's like the red and blue in Texas because you have to have innovators and overthinkers and workers, or it wouldn't be a society.

Or they, and by the way, they wouldn't exist because they use snowmobiles and not one of those motherfuckers is going to invent a snowmobile.

Exactly. So you got to have the red and the blue. You got to have both sides. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. That's awesome.

Well, hey brother, it's always good to talk to you. This was really fun. Really fun. What is this, you and the crocodile? Oh, here it is. Oh my God, dude, you had, you didn't tell me that you put meat all around the outside of it.

Told you I was an idiot. Look at this. We made that cage, by the way, and I am no engineer. Oh my God, that cage looks so flimsy.

That thing looks so flimsy, and you're just hanging by a thread.

Literally, like this cable that we sourced from a village and hoped it would hold up. I mean, we tested it as far as put some rocks in it and tested it and empty cage, but. Dude, this is a terrible idea. It was dumb. Look at these things doing death rolls. But people are gonna watch this, Joe, and they're gonna learn about crocodiles. Great thing you filmed it, right?

That's insane. It was fun. That cage looks way too flimsy. Don't do that again.

I'm not doing it again, I promise.

Yeah, tell people how they can see that, where they can find all your stuff. Dude, it's Shark Week.

We got an awesome show coming out this week, Alien Sharks: Untamed America, looking at some incredible sharks, celebrating America's birthday, our craziest, weirdest Sharks.

How long has Shark Week been going on?

Since the '80s. 39 years old, same age as me. Yeah, it's been around my whole life.

That is so crazy.

Yeah, it's an institution. Plus we got the YouTube channel, that's where I'm doing most of my stuff now. I hope people check that out. I know you watch some videos. Yes, I've heard you comment.

I appreciate that.

Well, I appreciate you. I appreciate you doing that stuff.

Thanks for having me, dude. Always a pleasure.

Always great to see Bye everybody!

Sehr gut, sehr gut, sehr gut! Sehr gut?

Wieso? Steuer ist sehr gut! Das sagen ganz viele! Wer sagt das? Stiftung Warentest, Computerbild, Focus Money, Chip, Finanztipp. Such dir was aus!

Mega! Aber das ist doch bestimmt kompliziert!

Nö! Einfach Foto von der Lohnsteuerbescheinigung Reinigung machen und fertig. Klingt sehr gut. Ist sehr gut.

Mit WISO Steuer bis zum 31. Juli abgeben.