#2531 - Forrest Galante

24:04It'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'll make friends with them first Yeah, like yeah sugarcane hang out with them you pet them yep, and then they let you ride them Yeah, and they put their arm out like this like good 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.

24:36Yeah, 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. She kept chewing on this log, and I'm just hanging out with her. And I made this video with me. I'm like, she's eating a log. I don't know why she's eating this log, but she's really sweet. But it's a weird relationship that they have. And then you wash them at the end of the trip. So they get in this pool, this big pond, and you can just wash them and hang out with them. They like it that you do that.

25:13So it feels good to them. And they're like, thank you. Well, no, thank you for caring me. There's good and bad. It's 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 bed sores. You can see the hip displays or hip issues. Oh, from caring people? Yeah. Just caring people? They're just not designed for it. You know, they look, you think they are when you look at them.

25:41And 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. 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 added weight. That's what's actually so bad for them. I bet the heat of the asphalt too. Like 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

26:28It'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, that's why they thought cyclopses were a real thing dude 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 skin. Oh, that's the one that killed like 476 people? 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?

26:55It's crazy. And then Jim Corbett went and shot it. Yeah, and he almost named my son Corbett because I love that story so much. But they have the only four-tusked elephant at the Explorers Club in New York City. Whoa. I'm sure, Jamie, you can 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 like. I think it's just a mutation. Sometimes with elk, they'll get an injury when they're young, and then they'll get weird deformities of their antlers.

27:28But 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 the area where the antler is. Sometimes they just have one sword. Yeah. There was a ranch 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 did you find that, Jamie? It's one of the 11 big interesting things you can see there. Oh, at the Explorers Club? Oh, at the Explorers Club. Oh, interesting. Oh, I'm sure that's legit.

28:04So this one elk had on one side he had like normal antlers 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 is this guy doing? Wow, it wasn't like they're used to their antlers interlocking of course Yeah, the thing they get together and they clash and of course they try to impress the ladies. Yep Well, there is look at that the tusks. That's so weird very weird four and they're like weird the way they're going towards each other 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 some kind well that's just 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 so weird dude you you and I talked about Barbarossa one time the pigs that have those crazy Yeah, to go into their own skulls.

28:59My buddy who's a vet, he just cut a horn out of a sable, you know, sable antelope Yeah, it was growing into its own skull. Oh, it's great 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 their antelope they're not deer so they don't shed their horns 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 animals called the Baburusa is a pit It's technically a pit. Yeah. Yeah, it's like a 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 It's just nature's so weird man.

29:45Yeah, 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 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. You know? For what I know about javelinas, they eat garbage primarily. Yeah. I think that's part of the problem. Yeah. Because that's the case with bears, right? Like my friend Steve Ranella cooked a bear steak or a bear ham on his friend's smoker.

30:26And he said to his friend, he said, hey, you should probably clean that smoker. It smells like fish. 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 because the horn's a living thing. How is that animal still alive? Barely. Like he had millimeters of growth to go before it punched right into his brain.

31:02That's crazy. Gnarly. That's 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 got to be this constant pain where it just gets a tiny bit worse all the time. I saw him through it. See how much into the skull it went? It was right there. That's crazy. It's so gross. I thought you'd like that. I don't know if that says about me. You thought that I would like that, but 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.

31:40Well, carry on, bro. Yeah. Nature's a motherfucker, dude. Dude, it's crazy. Where's the thylacine, man? What's going on? It's gotten pretty cold, dude. Really? Yeah. Damn it. I was hoping you'd come in with new evidence. I wish I was. There's a group that 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 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 feels like the legends are getting fewer and further between.

32:17Like 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 want it to be there. But it just feels like those bits of evidence that we're compounding have all sort of started to fade. That sucks. I know, really. 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. The things like the thylacine or the giant sloth.

32:52Yeah. 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. 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.

33:24Right 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 Sala 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. They're going, yeah, yeah, we have this thing called the Salo, 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. What a cool looking animal, too.

33:54Yeah. And nobody knows whether they still exist now or not. Is that it right there? That's it, yeah. So basically, there's been three or four, maybe more, that have ever been seen. Most of them caught in poacher snares like this one But then really cool 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 salad Oh wow And this guy had it and then and then he's like can we please preserve it and the king was like nah We're gonna eat it and they ate it Whoa got nothing out of it.

34:29Yeah 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 things around giant sloths and thylacine and Bigfoot and everything else. 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 let you look down and you go.

35:17Oh, well, there's no way, you know No, 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. He's come in contact with them multiple times. See if you can get some aerial footage of flying over the Amazon. I mean, it's in multiple countries. What is it? Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina. 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.

35:57Okay, look at this. It was just like this. For four hours, we didn't see one building. Amazon and 4K. So just imagine, 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 a Loch Ness Monster is? I mean I think they know but I don't know I don't know Whale dick What? Whale dick Whale dick? Whale dick Not a narwhal dick?

36:32Pull 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 Wait a minute 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 is 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?

37:12There'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 nine whale penis and tell us your thoughts on this? Maybe that's what happened to the. It was his claim. And then he said he was just kind of messing around. Well, I'm sticking with it. I like it. I like the whale dick theory.

37:45He's the guy that proposed it? Yeah. Oh. Oh. So, darn it, I like that theory. He has since walked back his salacious claim. That's so funny. Maybe that's the guy that was looking for the giant sloth. He's like, I need a new angle. This giant sloth thing did not pan out. I like it. Big dick energy. If you're a guy looking for a giant sloth in the Amazon, like, where do you look? 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.

38:22I met a guy who said he guaranteed he knew 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.

39:02It was more of a northern hemisphere thing. Yeah, because the climate shift was so much stronger. Exactly. And so most of the animals that died off, if you look at, I think it was 65 % of North American megafauna died off during this very short window. That didn't happen in South America. We're just guessing that they're dead. Because if there was a healthy population, how many tigers are there in the wild? I think there's 5 ,000. Something like that, yeah. Fun fact. It's gone way up, by the way. It was down to 400. Fun fact, more tigers in captivity in Texas than there are in all of the wild of the world.

39:42Texas is crazy, man. It's such a wild. Just in 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 my favorite place ever. Get away with it. It's just a wild place for all intents and purposes. Yeah. It's hilarious wild for people did I love text every time I come to Texas. I'm like this place is great It's always have fun everybody so nice to exactly that's the best part is like nobody scowls at you You get in the elevator and they're cake. How's your day going?

40:17And you're like very friendly. I'll tell you how it's going very a lot of people especially Coastal elites you know it's like to say like people coastal snobs They have this idea of it being like filled with rednecks and ignorant people and foolish people and yeah Not that way at all, especially Austin. Austin is like one of the most liberal, easygoing, progressive cities. But even the progressives here, they're like more reasonable. It's like down to earth. Yeah, they're not. It's not like extremism, right? Well, they're definitely more crazy than they were 20 years ago when I first started coming here.

40:53Okay. But way less crazy than like liberals in LA. Yeah. Or liberals in New York. It's just extreme, right? Like protests. And all these, yeah. Well, it's like, 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 the liberals that want to turn Texas blue, like, don't. You're going to ruin it. You're going to ruin it for you, too.

41:34You don't get it. Like, balance is important. It's like you can't kill all the predators because then the deer will get overrun and you're hitting them with cars. 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. Balance. 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 It'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've bounced around But as a California transplant Did you bring your acai bowls And you're like I need all that California stuff here What stuff?

42:27I don't know I mean I don't know That's the thing though right He's like, oh, the Californians coming here and messing it up kind of thing. I was never one of those. Yeah. So what I got out of California was the comedy store and work. Yeah. And then jujitsu. So you get all that here. Austin is arguably the jujitsu capital of the world right now. Really? Oh, yeah. Oh, that's interesting. Is this where the new league is based out of? No. You mean the UFC league? Yeah. No, that's in Vegas. It is based in Vegas. They do that in Vegas. Because that's where the UFC's headquarters are. Sure. But Austin has King's World, which is Gordon Ryan's place.

43:03It's got B Team is out here. Shanji Ribeiro is out here. There's a bunch of Gracie Baja schools out here. There's multiple Tenth 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. No, keep that. They'll never win. The only people that are going to 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 just a great city, period. Artistically, it's always been a great music city. Now it's arguably the comedy capital of the country.

43:41Yeah, I mean, there's incredible. There's so many comedians here now, right? Because they got here and they went, oh, this is way better. There's no traffic. Everyone's nice. And you can do whatever you want. And also, there's a lot of places to do comedy. Just on my street where my club is There's five or six other clubs That have opened up since we opened up So it's incredible So if you're a young comic Or an established comic that just wants to work out material You could go to my club You 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 two seconds away It's like one block over Everything's close, the Vulcan Which is right there, everything's right there It's incredible It's incredible.

44:23It'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 of here. Yeah. 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. Okay. My wife got pregnant, and when she was pregnant, it was like if you are at an altitude, we're at 8 ,500 feet above sea level. It's rough. Yeah. And we went back to L.A.

44:58for a short period of time, and she was fine. Yeah. 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, like, really bad things that happen to people, especially if you're not acclimated. So interesting. And you move to these high-altitude areas. By the way, working out there, when I worked out there, I thought I was going to 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.

45:35So 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. And I was like, 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 is like 55. Okay. So I was doing – shout out to Amal Easton, my friend Amal. He was a jiu-jitsu gym in Boulder.

46:09Great place. Okay. And when I was training there, it was fine. I mean, you could train. But you definitely could feel it. Yeah. And I had trained there once before when I had come from L.A. And I was like, whew, this altitude is rough. It's like working out in Denver. You're like, whew, you 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. I'm used to being. And I was like, this is crazy. This feels like I'm drunk. Yeah. You know what I mean? Just had nothing in the tank. It really felt like I drank a bottle of whiskey and tried to work out.

46:41I was so tired. I went to the Himalayas like maybe four or five years ago to look for red pandas up in the trees, you know, those cute little guys. And day one, 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 this high Himalayas. And I had to sit down like every 15 minutes for the first couple days. I did the most horrifying video the other day of this guy who was on one of those summit hikes and slipped.

47:19Oh, no. And his friends watched him slide. Like all the way down to his death? Just sliding down ice and snow and couldn't stop. 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 making it to the summit. and slipped. Yeah, it's brutal. And slipped off the, 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 going to 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?

47:57And I'm like, oh, 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 six-year-old can barely walk in a straight line without falling down. You know what I mean? Like imagine taking him on a mountain track. 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. 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?

48:29Like the world is a bunch of different things. That's right. It's not just Santa Monica. That's right. Like, oh, there's Costa Rica. Like, whoa, this is crazy. Look at these bugs. because these are nuts, like birds. Like, it's nice for them. 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.

48:59Yes. And then you get out of here, and it's like, okay, everything closes at 4 p.m. Like, go figure out your food. You know what I mean? And then you're like, okay, well, now I have two 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 going to be times where you don't have food.

49:28Yeah. Like people are just so accustomed to having food anytime they're hungry. And in fact, sometimes when they're not even hungry. Oh, yeah. They're just bored, so they start stuffing their face when they're bored. 100%. 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 eight-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 two sleeps. That's right. Yeah.

49:56Yeah. Yeah, so you know about what I'm talking about. I just read this literally yesterday in one of my doom scrolling things, but... 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 can do whatever the fuck I want. Yeah. Get up at three o 'clock in the morning and watch TV for a couple hours and then go to sleep till noon.

50:26Why not? Sit around in your boxers, eat cereal. Yeah. The mattress part is a myth. Oh, it is. Oh. God damn it. Everything I keep bringing up is a myth, Jamie. No whale dicks, no mattresses. Jamie is the killer of dreams. You're the front of all my stuff, man. I saw the same Instagram video you guys saw, and I thought it was interesting, too. Yeah. That is the myth. I think that might be a myth. I think the two sleep thing was a way that people would get up in the middle of the night. But you also have to think, I think a lot of people went to bed way earlier because it got dark. And we didn't have electricity.

50:57And there's a normal circadian rhythm where 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 until four in the morning when you're camping. Not without booze. There's nothing to do. No, there's a little of 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, that's it. Then you're up all night. When you mentioned pandas, I was going to ask you about it. Me and my team going around the same places that pandas are fake.

51:27Dude, did you see the zoo in China that painted the dogs? There's a lot of people talking about that. Did you see the zoo in China that painted the Pomeranians? I did see that. I did see that. But the thing is about pandas is that, and I went down a rabbit hole with this the other night, there were no depictions of pandas in ancient Chinese history. No. Is that true? Yeah, it is true. That's bizarre. 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.

51:59Well, 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. It 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 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.

52:36Unlike the dragon, which is weird, tiger, 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. I'm 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 Q-I-N-G, Qing? Qing.

53:18Qing. 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 globally in the 20th century, Chinese scholars went back and combed old texts looking for them. A few candidate references exist. The Shijing Book of Odes and Shang-Zhu mentioned a creature called Pi 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, or mythical beasts. Emperor Wen of Han, 2nd century BCE, reportedly had a moe buried in his mother's tomb, sometimes claimed as a panda.

54:12But that's weird. That is very bizarre. fragmentary ambiguous and rare nothing like the deep iconographic tradition around dragons phoenixes or tigers why the abs rogan style claim 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 cuz I sometimes they'll bring in questions I've asked from like last month and I'd be like 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 I asked it a question once and it said as you have previously stated No way. I was like whoa Interesting.

54:57I was trying to find out like how many views something had gotten and you're like as you've previously stated I 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. It is weird. Because it's not like, you know, okay, there's no mention of ducks. I get it because there's ducks everywhere. Who cares, right? So why do we write about them? But it's not something like that. 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?

55:37So 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 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 like as far as we've taken a wolf yeah to make it so fucking adorable and cute But that is what it is That was at one point in time a wolf And 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.

56:17And weighs 25 pounds So what happened and how did we do that And could you do that with a bear And could you get a bear Then 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 Which is also weird So what have we done? Their digestive tract? We've changed? Yeah. And they're required. It's like koalas. I think they only eat eucalyptus. That's right. Yep. Fucking weird. Bizarre. Really weird. Which also has no nutritional value. And you probably know this makes them high, basically. So I was looking up who did it and started going on a thing that it's not.

56:54No one is known for the theory. It's because they're actually carnivores. Oh, they're a taxon. So it's 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. So when they say they are taxonomic carnivores, that means taxonomically they're in the order carnivora, if that makes sense. But it says with a short digestive tract and gut microbiomes of a meat eater. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. So they're vegans. But you could selectively breed for anything to some degree if you had enough time.

57:28But look, but that's the other thing. Like, why are they so cute? That I cannot answer. Because they're so much cuter than any other bear, by far. Like that face, even with the teeth out. That's adorable. Like, aw, buddy. They also have the best PR campaign in history. Like, 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 dude it's like these guys are trying to go extinct i swear to god it's insane So where did the theory come from?

58:19See 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 which just start showing up on my Instagram about three 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 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. 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 the animal space with the AI mock-ups now.

58:57I 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 the wildebeest got away. Totally fake? It has to be! It sounds fake. I mean, it sounds insane. Wildebeest is smart all of a sudden. Right. So smart that it figured out all I have to do is get to those crocs and the crops. Also, like, you're going to run. I don't like you're going to 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?

59:30They would. They'd just kill everything. They would kill everybody. Everything. They wouldn't care at all. If both of you are compromised, it's not going to just grab the leopard on your back. It's going to grab you, too, because you can't get away. Anything they can get. Yeah. Yeah. No. So it's fake. It's crazy. But it was also fun. Yeah, exactly. It's also fun. I just found it in a different video, but yeah, here it is right here. Yeah, I know. Oh, so this is a longer cut of the video. But you can see by the saturation of the leopard. The leopard's a little fake. And the way the claws are kind of like, there's no claws.

59:58It's almost like soft pawing it. Do you know what I mean? Right, right. And look how he's hanging on. This could be a video of a real wheeled beast getting eaten by a croc, and they just added the leopard to the back. That very well could be. It's pretty amazing. Look, see? That's a fake. Oh, this is different. Yeah. No, bro, that's real. Guys, stop. This is different. This one's different because this one, the wild... 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 on this one. Someone put some time into this.

1:00:29Yeah. When the crocs get a hold of something, it's really... It's a wrap. Dude, I just did... It'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 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?

1:01:00What's a 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. I'll find... Here we go. Dude, we did...

1:01:31I 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? 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. 30 minutes before. Oh, God, dude. And then I was talking to our guy.

1:02:01So, you know, it's 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, 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 are 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.

1:02:28Oh, I couldn't. And 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 it's my last year doing this shit Like I'm 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 get people to tune in like that polar bear one where the guy got in that big Plexiglas box that literally inspired the whole series.

1:02:58I swear to God Yeah, I hate that video. It's crazy. I mean I watched it a hundred 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 is 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. Yeah. Or you startled it or you, you know, you zigged when you should have zagged.

1:03:31Have 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 getting chased by polar bears in their town Oh yeah, yeah, there's like the one where the guy jumps on the snowmobile and runs after him Barely gets away There's a whole 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, and the polar bears have just moved into town Oh, they're living in the house.

1:04:03They're living in the house. Look at this. Oh, 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 shop. But this is not AI. This is legit. They're so cool looking. Oh, they're the coolest. They're so interesting. How amazing is that, though? Imagine you're out on a boat and you're like, oh, man, we've been sailing for three weeks. Oh, look, there's a little village. Let's pop in there for a day. That would be a cool movie. Yeah, that would be a good movie. You know what I mean? Yeah. A bunch of people like, oh, we found a village.

1:04:36Let's go there. You like head in and turn, you know, like set up 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? 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, 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 an amazing animal. They really are. But they're so weird. They're so long, too. I went and did sort of a trek with them. What, Jamie?

1:05:10Where are they getting food on that island if they're the only ones there? Oh, well, they're the only ones there, but they're seals and all kinds of other shit. They'll be hunting all the marine mammals in the area. Yeah, they're the cleanup crew. And they swim huge distances. Oh, yeah, man. A couple have turned up in Iceland. Did you know that? What? Yeah. There's, I think, two or three 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. That's crazy. It took the Vikings like 100 years to do it. That's crazy. Yeah. They can swim that far?

1:05:42200 miles. 200 miles. Whoa. Hopefully this isn't a myth. This one says it was shot dead after it did it in 2008. Yeah. What? And it swam across, right? Yeah. 200 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 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 got an error 404 Yeah, but isn't that crazy 200 miles 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.

1:06:27But still, even 50 miles, it'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? Really? They won't just, like, actively swim. They'll, like, kind of, like, snooze float in between hunting. Oh. It's kind of amazing. In the winter, they have so much fat, you know, or, 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. Right. That 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?

1:07:02I 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 that. How hot is it too hot for them to actively hunt? Dude, 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. What? They wouldn't be hunting. Polar bears were frequently tamed during the Middle Ages. What? It says no bear has been captured alive in Iceland. But since then, receding North Pole ice is diminishing their hunting and mating grounds and jeopardizing their survival. The oldest sighting in Iceland was 890.

1:07:39Whoa. 16 years after the first people got there. Wow. But what's crazy if you think about that is all it would take if people weren't there is two 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? Right. The male swims there five 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 would have to be. Yeah. True. 1252, Henry III took delivery of a white bear, sent him as a gift from King Hakan IV of Norway.

1:08:15He decided to keep it in the Tower of London. to be taken to Oxfordshire where there had been a royal menagerie at Woodstock since Henry the Henry the first 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.

1:08:54The 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 men 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, the bear sitting on an ice floe in the Arctic Circle, it sure beat working. The way this guy wrote this is hilarious, by the way.

1:09:33Yeah. Do you know what a sloth bear is? Yeah. Mean as anything. Yeah, they're in Japan, right? India and into Nepal in that area. 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. A certain group, I don't know the name of 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 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.

1:10:09and 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 are 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.

1:10:46Yeah, 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 the the your understanding of the value of life is probably completely distorted completely yeah You're living in a horrific time.

1:11:22Everyone's dying of the plague Violence is entertainment, right? Do you know I mean like that is something to do and life value is incredibly low Right like life comes and goes the Coliseum was when when was that? I don't know I should but I don't I think it was 2000 plus years ago somewhere around there when they first started having these crazy games there Do you know they used to flood the Colosseum and do ship battles and things? 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 let 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.

1:12:03Yeah, you know like when you're in Athens and you're like, standing at the Parthenon, you're like, okay, what the fuck was this like? 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 Ulysses. Ulysses? Ulysses, rather? And that's the place where they had the Ulyssian mystery schools and people would go on this trek where they wouldn't eat and they'd walk from Athens. Oh, wow. They would have these psychedelic rituals. And you're in this place where they did it.

1:12:39You could feel it. It's weird. Well, I mean, obviously not synthetic, but were they just mushrooms? What were these psychedelics? They don't totally know, 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. I think it has lysergic acid in it. Like, let's find out what actually 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.

1:13:20Oh, interesting. 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. Okay. 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. I think, everybody's a fucking witch. You're all on accidental acid. That's hilarious. Yeah. 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 because you don't know anything about science.

1:14:00You 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 did it to people on purpose in France? I feel like this might have been like a CIA thing.

1:14:44See if you can find that story. Urgot or LSD? Urgot. I think they – because I think they were experimenting on the effects of Urgot. And I think they like picked a town and said, let's see. Because we know they've done that before. Yeah. We definitely know. Just hit whole places. Yeah, let's see. Let's see. Yeah, why not? Think about 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 is insane.

1:15:22This guy named Jolly West, who was the head of MKUltra, who 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 going to tell that you did it to them because they went to a whorehouse. No one's going to admit they went to a whorehouse. Right. So you get these guys. They go to the – get the prostitute. The prostitute's like, would you like a drink? Like, oh, I'd love a drink. Of course. Thank you. Hard day at work. Hard day at work here.

1:15:47The guy sits down. He's thinking, I'm going to fuck. This is going to be great. The next thing, the fucking walls are melting. He's tripping balls. Oh, my God. The candles talking to him. Did you find anything about the French thing? Here it is. I likely think of the infamous Pont Saint-Esprit cursed bread incident of 1951. Long-running allegation that it wasn't ERGOT at all, but a secret CIA U.S. 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.

1:16:26250 people were affected, 50 were committed to asylums, seven 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 alternative culprits, mercury fungicide, nitrogen trichloride, bread bleaching agents, or mycotoxins from aspergillus fumigatus. I call bullshit on this. This seems like something where they test. Yeah. It seems like a CIA thing. For sure. 2009, American investigative journalist H.P.

1:17:22Albarelli Jr. published a terrible mistake, arguing that Pont-Saint-Esprit was actually a covert LSD field test run jointly by CIA's MK Ultra programs and the U.S. 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 did it. Yeah, it sounds way more likely. That's way more likely. A 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.

1:18:16What a bunch of assholes. These guys are just dosing each other. It admitted an MKUltra incident. Interviews with former U.S. 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-Albarelli cited is ambiguous and predates the incident in some readings. No corroborating documentation has surfaced despite extensive MKUltra declassification since the 1970s church committee hearings.

1:19:04Yeah, but the problem with that is one of the reasons why we know about MKUltra was evidence that they found that had been in storage. So when you say like Freedom of Information Act, they don't give you shit. They just bait you with a little bit here and there to go, oh, okay, we know now. Also, they'll just tell you 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?

1:19:40Oh, yeah. You know about this? Oh, yeah. Like the Plum Island thing? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Seems very legit. I, like, I'm not a huge conspiracy theorist. This one to me is like a no-brainer. Well, it's also people want to say that Lyme disease has existed forever. Absolutely. True. Not to the extent that it exists today. Also, not as contaminant. Like, not as... That's 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. It's known. And the idea was, the reason why they were doing it, and this is all me, what I've read, I don't have any direct information.

1:20:23Yeah, 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 that would overwhelm the medical system of any like overwhelm a town. That's right. Overwhelm their armies. You couldn't keep up and 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 horse shit.

1:21:01But 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. They're saying that they want more of that? Yes. This guy was talking about Not only that, I have a buddy who has that 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 It fucks up all of his blood work His body's a mess And he picked it up hiking and hunting Picked it up, he got a tick And he didn't know, and he got bit My friend Bert Kresher His wife's family, half of them have this fucking problem.

1:21:49No way. Yeah. Are they from the East Coast? Yeah. East Coast. It's the Texas Lone Star Tick. It's a Lone Star Tick. It's called not the Texas Lone Star Tick. Yeah. 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. No. 30, 40 years ago. No. It just didn't exist. No. And all of a sudden it's like ubiquitous. And it's everywhere. Everywhere. It's spreading too. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. 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 now.

1:22:21I'm terrified of yeah I'm terrified of it now. It's not just red meat the Lyme disease is fucking devastating 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 fights in the UFC really bad and it fucked up his career for quite a while but he got his diet under wraps and he figured out what to eat and 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 those? No. Oh dude there's some amazing ones.

1:22:58Spy 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, 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 in Soviet embassies.

1:23:38In 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 having a secret meeting in a back cove, 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, dude, the cat's 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.

1:24:19Probably the thing was all fucked up. I probably couldn't get it. 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 re-sewn for a second time and lived 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 Come on But I mean, more than one cat, I'm sure But this idea, the equipment was taken out of the cat.

1:24:57The fuck you did that? You spent money taking the equipment out? Did you really? Yeah, exactly. Or did you just kill the cat? A hundred percent. You fucking assholes. Dude, there's a few of these. And the bats that would light fires, do you know about those ones? Hold up. Oh, sorry. The military did not give up on its use of animals as spies. As in 2006, the Pentagon requested the creation of a cyborg, 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.

1:25:34What? There's a cockroach under your carpet here listening to us somewhere right now. They're not going to hear anything other than the stuff we already talked about. Yeah, true, true, true. The wonderful thing about having such a retarded show. Who can't just say it all anyway? It's all out there. Whoa, look at this. Look at this. Look at this. There's a fucking battery in the beetle. That's crazy. Come on. That's badass. 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 technology has increased.

1:26:10Of course. Wow. 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—well, you know the whole—not beluga. Yeah, it was the beluga, the Russian spy whale. I don't know that. I was talking about dolphins that they used to detonate things.

1:26:42Oh, tell me about it. I don't know much about it. They used dolphins as, like, literal distributors of warheads. Oh, really? Get a dolphin to go somewhere and then they blow them up. No way. Like a kamikaze dolphin. I don't know the exact details of it because I got sad when I was reading about it. I was like, oh, 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.

1:27:15Yeah. They look at you when they were jumping out of the water like, look, look at me. Like, look, we're doing this thing. And they're literally just playing. They're playing. 100 % playing. Because they came to the boat and they were jumping in the wake of the boat. And the more you would cheer and, yay, look at that. The more they do it. The more they were doing it. And they were having fun. And I was like, 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 I mean whether this is correct or they just like changed 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 is that they put them out ahead they were just signifying in dark water because 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 does the dolphin communicate that back to the people and how does it know what the person's intended

1:28:17that's pretty good I think there was some speculation that they actually used them as weapons though well have you seen not to transition off dolphins but Valdemir the Russian spy beluga no okay this is a real thing 100 % this one's real so there was this beluga whale named Valdemir 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 and had harnesses and spy equipment on him.

1:29:01And 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. Yeah. Mysteriously. Yep. Some things with the dolphin story, I don't know if this is accurate, but I did read this one time, that 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. Just so you guys know. Now we've got to figure that out. Yeah. I just said, wow, goose 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?

1:29:32Look at that thing. That looks like an alien. Nah, they're super, super cool. I mean, look at that. That looks like 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. No, that was a, yeah, this was a crazy story. But you know the John Lilly research with dolphins? Do you know about that? I'm not sure. Tell me about it. 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.

1:30:06Okay. So John Lilly, who was this really interesting guy and was famously out there with psychedelics. He would take intramuscular doses of ketamine and jump in the sensory deprivation tank. Oh, damn. Yeah. Trying to unlock brain things. 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 to coach the dolphin. And literally she lived in water. So the water was like four feet deep and she lived with this dolphin.

1:30:50The problem was the dolphin was super horny. And so the only way that she could get this dolphin to cooperate was she had to jerk him off. 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 got to do it. That's the job. 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 going to do? You're stuck in a tank with a dolphin. The girl who talked to dolphins. So is there a documentary on this?

1:31:22Yeah. Ooh. Is there a clip? Is it blurry where you see her hand moving up and down? 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, 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.

1:32:03And with enough of a database, they'll start to be able to say like this means this, this means this. Have they actively deciphered? So it's coming up to a – so basically, you know how 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. I see this. 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.

1:32:38Bye-bye. Bye-bye. 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. Yeah, quit jerking me off and put me back in the ocean. Maybe if they jerked off the killer whales, they wouldn't have killed him. Yeah, good point. It's 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 Because it's basically prison You know about those two in France that are trapped there?

1:33:47No 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, remove 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, there is. I just saw it.

1:34:19Yeah, so they're just sitting in this thing. Oh, God. 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 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 doing it out of his pocket, and it's few and far between. Oh, man. So, yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, the abandoned whales, and they're just sitting in these tanks. We've had a, do you know who Phil Demers is?

1:34:50He's a guy who helped shut down Marine Land in Canada. Oh, okay, yeah. Which was an awful, awful place. It was a bad facility, yeah. There's so many of these fucking places like that where you see what they're doing and you're just like, oh man, if we could understand them. Yeah. And we could, I think someday in the future we're going to look back at that the way people today look back at slavery. Oh, totally. We're going to say these are intelligent creatures. 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 beings so Something's going on in there, and you think it's okay to put them in a swimming pool.

1:35:28That's crazy dude It's the same thing like what I was talking about elephants their their EQ their emotional intelligence We can't even comprehend it like the way those animals feel like the highs that an elephant experiences and the lows that experience 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 it 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.

1:36:04And so you have these they might not have the same like Computive skills as we do mentally, but they have this emotional intelligence It'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 I don't trust you. You're real. You're really smart Make a house should prove it to 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.

1:36:35It'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, 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 a dolphin language, orca language, whale language, If they really can and we realize that they're actually communicating, God, I would hope that would change our approach to how we deal with those things. I think it would. Because I think they are sea people. They really do. Basically, yeah. They don't need to manipulate their environment.

1:37:14First of all, they can travel 3D. 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. Orcas are slow. 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.

1:37:47That'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 and captivity and whales and 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 king and there's fucking san diego zoo you know what i mean there's a lot of nuance to it.

1:38:23San 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. When we went there, I was bummed out, man. But at least they're rescuing them. You know? I know, but they also cut their balls off. Yeah. That bummed me out hardcore. Otherwise, they all fight. I know. But that's the gray area that you have. I know. What's the alternative? You know, it's like they die. Let them loose. But only a few of them were pure wolves. You can't just let loose It's a wolf dog.

1:38:53That's true, too. Because then you're muddying jeans. 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. They'll probably say it's a Rogan-esque claim. As stated on today's podcast. How do you word that so you kind of get a good response back? That's interesting. How do you word that? But would you say, is it true that black wolves inherited that trait from domesticated dogs?

1:39:31Because that is one thing that absolutely has happened, is that there's been interbreeding between them. And not just on purpose. No, no. Yeah. It happens. Yeah. I mean, you get coy wolves. Right, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. Is the genetic mutation of a black fur color brought about by domestication? Yes. Well, hold on. Sorry Throwing a lot at you Jamie Is it The black The trait of black wolves Did they inherit that from domesticated dogs Edit my thing then Is that good enough or not From domesticated dogs Yeah See what it says Let's see If you're not pointed enough I love watching it work where it's like spinning.

1:40:21Yes. This is well supported by genetic research. Black coat color in North American wolves comes from mutation in the K locus, specifically a three base pair deletion in the CBD-103. 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. 2009 study by Anderson et al. first identified the KB black allele in wolves is derived from dog-wolf interbreeding. Followed work analyzing 331 wolves and 20 dogs found that North American wolf, how do you say that word?

1:41:13Haplotypes? Oh, haplotype, yeah. are monophyletic, meaning a single, I feel like you're my teacher, a single. Good job, Dale. Introgression event from dogs most likely seeded the Allel through the continent, probably in the Yukon or Northwest Territories. 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 him. I know it's a whole hush-hush. I brought my youngest daughter and she was cuddling with the four-month-old wolf Well, there you go. You can cuddle with them when they're four months old Yeah, up until a certain point, but it was like a puppy and it was still huge, right?

1:41:57No, no, no, no, no, no, it was pretty small. Yeah, it's like 40 pounds, okay, that was so fucking cute man. She was so sweet. So sweet. She'd 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 a yeah Romulus. There you go. That is a god She's so sweet, but the males they had two males that had Felicity that's her name. That's right. Felicity's the girl So there's Romulus look how cute they are when they did a baby Remus Romulus and then Khaleesi the girl. That's pretty cool So Khaleesi was the one that we got to the cuddle with and they're cute.

1:42:36Oh 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 that size That's already yes 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 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 she's right up But she can't be with them yet. With the males?

1:43:08Yeah, she was too little. Interesting. It was too, like, you know, they didn't want her to get killed. It was just too sketchy. She was 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, five or six months, I think. Oh, wow. And then 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 really interesting. They're getting a big arch mane. They have a mane. Oh, wow.

1:43:35Almost 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 there's a lot of people that don't even agree they're actually dire wolves. A lot. Yeah, a lot. 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. Exactly.

1:44:00Do you know what I mean? They're not hiding that. Right. We're trying to fill a niche. We're trying to make something. Yes. Yeah. But she's also said that I think, and I don't want to mischaracterize, but essentially what they're saying is, but that's what a dire wolf was. Right. Like that they are a wolf that has all of 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, is it our own classification of these things that we're disputing?

1:44:36Right. Because we can't just decide, like, I call this a direwolf and that's what it is. Like, the genes don't give a fuck what labels you put on them. No, 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 and 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 woolly mouse is really cool, too. Yeah, they're really neat. Ben told me one day I could have a woolly mouse, so I'm holding him to that.

1:45:06It's really interesting seeing the dire wolves, though, and just imagining what was it like when those things were just roaming the earth. I know. Because it's like a 200-pound wolf that's all white with thick fur and a mane like a lion. Dude, speaking of roaming the earth, have you heard the theory about how sloth bears stopped—sorry, not sloth bears. What were the big cave bears in North America? 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.

1:45:41Also, 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. A twice-large polar bear that 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 going to hit that thing with? Well, they had rocks. So, you know, that's good. Rocks and spears. Yeah.

1:46:13Rocks. Oh, rocks. I mean, when they first started coming across, did they even have fucking bows and arrows in that 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.

1:46:46Yeah. And that's just all we found. Yeah. Right. That's just because they left footprints. Yeah. Like, that doesn't mean there wasn't something there 50 ,000 years before or 100 ,000 years before. Exactly. Exactly. And then there's in Mexico this evidence that looks like predation on mammoth bones by humans. Oh, really? Yes. Like spearheads and things? Like carvings into mammoth bones. No way. It looks like they're broken open to get marrow. Oh, interesting. Very disputed, right? Because there's also some people that think it could have been like some rocks falling on the bones. Sure, sure, sure.

1:47:16I'm not sure how this is happening, but it does think they... Oh, let me write this up for Joe. Fuck off! I'm going to have to figure something out. I'm going to have to erase some stuff. We're going to have to get a separate computer that we only use for perplexity. What is the question? Oh, sorry. Well, how would humans have contested short-faced bears on the Bering Strait? Let me write this up for Joe. Fuck off, man. You're like a baby. Grounded into the actual evidence. The wall of monster bears kept humans out of North America doesn't hold up any longer, apparently. Mmm. Human. Oh 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 I guess.

1:47:59Well, here's the thing. Like the idea of a bear line, no. Because the problem is bears, they would have to eat so much to sustain that kind of mass 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 Oh, hold up, hold up. Go 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 kleptoparasitize kills from lions, dire wolves, and scimitar cats rather than the run-down prey itself.

1:48:42That doesn't even make sense long legged gate would make it faster. 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, well, you know grizzly bears chase down moose and kill them. Yes 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 right now They show they have like a 30 % success rate, which is very high.

1:49:17Yeah There's no reason why they wouldn't be if they're carnivores Like why would they be completely relying on other animals to do the work for them when they have that kind of biting power? They they're just opportunistic like old carnivores and they move as packs. Yeah, they work as pack animals So they kind of move like dogs if if you're gonna 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, James? What are you saying? It says this is how they hunted brown bears.

1:49:44They 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 adal-adal 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 adal-adal? Yeah. Okay. Okay, there's some videos that are really interesting where they're showing people realistic scenarios where a bear is charging you. Oh, and they pull the mace out? Yeah, showing bear spray and guns, like, imagine you have a 10mm semi-automatic pistol, and you have to rack it, so you have to rack a slide.

1:50:25So the bear is coming, you have to draw the gun, rack it. Take the safety off. And then point it towards the animal and squeeze it through it. You're dead. You're done. You're already dead. 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 idea is the bear gives you some sign. 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, right? No, of course not. I mean, I've seen people that are super accurate with spears. Isn't your buddy Adam Greentree, doesn't he do the atlatl?

1:51:03He might. He's such a psycho. I think I've seen him tossing them around. He probably knows how to do it. Yeah. That's 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 I have a thing like that for my dog. It's like a thing. With the ball. That has a ball on the end of it. And it's so easy to not blow your shoulder out. You can throw it pretty fucking far. Right. And every time I do it, I was like, wow, of course this is way better. Yeah. You have this extra leverage with this thing.

1:51:39And then also you can kind of whip it with your wrist and you get all this action with the ball. There you go. You would do the same thing with a spear, with a battle. It makes sense. It 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. Yeah. 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 range finder, and I range something. It says 52 yards. 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.

1:52:19So I have this 500 grain arrow and then it has the speed per so it's 390 feet per second from a 500 grain arrow Yeah And then I put it into this computer and it spits out a sight tape so that I can move my pins Specifically so I could put it in a quarter Wow At 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 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 two grains of each other and they have like inserts 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 arrow heads by hand yeah so they could be off yeah each one of them like so you're just guessing where that fucking arrow is gonna go And you have to shoot every day to get a real sense of like what the drop is at a certain distance.

1:53:22And then you have to kind of judge how far is he? Is he 20 yards? Is he 30 yards? Is he 50 yards? So even with modern traditional bows, and that sounds like a – Yeah, I know what you mean. Recurves and long bows. Right, right. I mean that sounds like an oxymoron, but they are still traditional in the sense of you're not using cams. Yeah. You don't have a cam that rolls over and it's a mechanical advantage and fiberglass limbs and all this jazz. You're using wood still. Even with those things, you're still buying arrows, and the 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 three hours a day, you would get a sense of how far.

1:54:05And then if you did it a bunch, you'd get an idea of judging distances. And there's little tricks. 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 back when rangefinders didn't exist. Yeah. And then when rangefinders did exist, they're like, nah, that's cheating. Yeah, keep that out. Right. And then the targets are at various levels. Yeah, makes sense. And so guys develop a very good way of measuring distance. And what essentially they do is they can pretty accurately judge five yards, and then they double that, and then they triple that, and then they try to figure it.

1:54:46And they get within like 10 or 15 yards. But, you know, that's 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 one of these bad boys. I have one here somewhere somewhere on this desk. Yeah Here it is. So 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 Like the the flint knapping is completely different.

1:55:23Yeah, yeah, yeah, this thing's not rare. That's not good 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 going to die or I'm not going to eat or, you know, all the other things. And you have a 15-foot bear. Right. Right. Or probably bigger. Like, what was the height of a short-faced bear or the length? Like, what is a big short-faced bear? Have 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.

1:56:00Where 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. I think they probably have to be bigger than that because Kodiak bears get that big. Kodiak bears can get 12 feet. Do they? They get that big? Yeah. Kodiak? Yeah. I mean, maybe they're measuring them squirrely 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 that up. Largest Kodiak bear.

1:56:37Largest Kodiak bear ever killed. Ever recorded. There you go. Recorded. Same thing. Okay. They have it by weight. It's 1 ,656 pounds, which is, by the way, holy shit. It's insane. Yeah. Nearly a one-ton bear. Yeah. That's so big. The hind foot measured 18 inches. Oh, God. How tall was it? How long was it? It was 500 pounds more than that. Yeah. What? Over a ton. In a zoo? It was a zoo, yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. But he might have been fat. He was fat. He might be a short fatso.

1:57:19So 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 one. Is that that bear? I think that's the largest bear ever killed. I've seen that. Yeah. I've seen that in Anchorage. 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 shot. Look at that one. Ever recorded? 2 ,130 pounds. No length measurements anywhere. That's not Santa Claus. That is so big. That's so crazy. The short-faced bear, they don't even really know how much it weighed.

1:57:58They're just basing it on the bones. Yeah. They don't have a dead one. No. So 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. Jeez. He shot that with an old bullshit bow. Yeah. Look at his bow. The recurve bow, yeah. That bow sucks. Wooden arrows. Jeez. That's so crazy. He was the first modern 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.

1:58:45Yeah, just just because it wasn't really a thing that people practiced Right, like the food had to be so readily available. Yeah, we had to say let's make it harder. Yeah, go backwards 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 hard to too easy Yeah, they're using recurve only. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, my friend Aaron Snyder who's a like a world famous bow hunter went back to using a recurve bow. Really? Because it was killing too many things with a compound bow. Felt like it was too easy.

1:59:19But that's what happens, right, is these guys master their craft 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 bow hunters. Like, they're all like, who's the man? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 can say competition is bad. Like, okay, are you saying that on your phone? Because how do you think you got a phone? You got a phone because somebody is competing against other people and they developed a phone.

1:59:49It'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. You got to reward people. If they're not rewarded, they're not going to work hard enough to do anything really spectacular. Why bother? So you're never going to get a laptop. It would have never happened. You would have never had high-speed internet. Somebody has to profit wildly for them to be enthusiastic about spending 17 hours a day making something like that. But that's the joy of competition paying off.

2:00:18Yeah. Right? It's like, not so much with 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 to make sure that those people don't run amok and then take over entire countries. And become a monopoly. Yeah. Yeah. What was going on with Microsoft in the 1990s? Remember all those? Remember that? No. 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 people's impressions of him.

2:00:51Now they think of him as a vaccine pusher. But also as a philanthropist 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... Is it an anti-protein film? Bill Gates, correct me if I'm wrong, but Bill Gates' wife is vegan, I believe, and he funded some Netflix documentary all on how 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.

2:01:23You're talking about Game Changers, the vegan documentary? Yes. Yeah. With the huge jacked guy being like, I never touch protein. Yeah, 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, there was all these trials where they had these monopolistic practices. And they were buying up competition or destroying competition.

2:02:05Just anybody that developed any computer. Yeah, anybody that developed browsers that competed with Microsoft stuff. Yeah. Here is landmark 1990s trials refer to United States versus Microsoft Corporation. Massive antitrust lawsuit filed by U.S. Department of Justice in 20 states. 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. Okay. 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.

2:02:50So to NBC, CBS, CNN, all these different – And they gave him hundreds of millions of dollars. Just to fluff them, basically. 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 they were really concerned with global health. Oh, my God. Dude, do you know what they did fucking in the Kaborvasa Delta with their mosquito nets? Why would you? But do you know what I'm talking about at all? No, what'd they do? Dude, I'm going to go on a fucking tirade here. Please do. Okay. So the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation decided that there was too much malaria in Africa, right?

2:03:24Which 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'm totally pirated your thing. I'm sorry, but I'm going to go on a fucking rant here. They gave all these people living in the Kaborabasa 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?

2:03:57They fished with them. They fished with them. A 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 Kaborabasa, where the fish go to breed and reproduce and 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. 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.

2:04:27Yes, they still get malaria, some of them, but they deal with it their own way. Bill 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.

2:05:03Oh, 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 don't 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.

2:05:36It's just crazy. It's so bad for them feels like can you just Double up the net thing and just get them other nets to like say hey guys that's what happens 2018. They got the new nets Oh, you know what it says what I'm not some looking at the thing. Yeah, but it's find out other information It just totally might have ruined crash 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 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 yeah i think it's a it's a ruse and i think that what a lot of it is is this thing like we are doing philanthropy yeah but then you you go oh but you're profiting you're making hundreds of millions of dollars from this philanthropy right yeah 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.

2:06:31Yeah, like I don't I mean, I don't even know if you made it out of high school Like he's a weird guy. 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 crazy global health Yeah, like just a fucking weird guy man. Yeah, the weirdest thing if you ever seen that, you know, he was obviously Friends with Jeffrey Epstein or communicated with him and had some sort of a relationship did yes. Oh, I didn't know that Oh, yeah. It's popular. Gotcha. Well known. I feel like everybody is connected to Epstein now.

2:07:03Like I've lost track. A lot of people were. 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 I talked to Jeffrey Epstein, because Jeffrey Epstein was going to, he was going to donate money to his philanthropy and all the different things that he's 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. There's something about it is you got to be careful. Like he's, it's like a weird, like veiled threat.

2:07:44It's very odd the way he answers the question. Yeah. Essentially saying that I'm reading it 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 Dude, they did invite me. Oh really? Oh yeah, 2017 To the island? Not to, specifically, but to meet Epstein But that's what I'm saying And I was like, what?

2:08:22If that happened today Hey, some guy came to me. Oh, sorry. Let's do it. ...reported at that time 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. that. He had relationships with people he said would give to global health, which is an interest I have. Not nearly enough philanthropy goes in that direction. Those meetings were a mistake.

2:09:08They didn't result in what he purported, and I cut them off. That goes back a long time ago now. There's nothing new on that. JUDY WOODRUFF It was reported that you continue to meet with him over several years, and that, in other words, a number of meetings. What did you do when you found out about his background? CHRISTOPHER HOLMES, Former Vice President - Well, I have 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, the you know, I'm very proud of what we've done in philanthropy, very proud of the work of the foundation.

2:10:03Weird. Listen, first of all, the record scratch. You have billions of dollars. Right. And this guy didn't give you money for years. Right. And you still kept meeting. Yeah. What about your money? What is he going to give you? 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 if Elon started hitting me up to donate money to something, I'd be like, hey, bitch, won't you? Dude, do you know how much money you have? You have so much money. Why would you ask? I'm the wrong guy. If he kept meeting with me for years, for years to try to get me to donate, it's kind of similar.

2:10:40This is what we're talking about. He's a billionaire. Like hundreds of billions of dollars. 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 a come. But the party had no rules. And that's what makes it. I'm just guessing. I'm just guessing. But I had a guy who tried to get me to meet him in 2017. In L.A. or where? Well, I was in L.A. when he reached out to me. Epstein appeared to have drafted himself claiming Gates had...

2:11:18Oh, 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 Melinda. 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 are connected to Epstein or his victims. Some people say those emails were like a journal he was keeping.

2:11:55Why would you keep an email? He wrote on an iPad all the time, apparently. That's why the typos were so bad. And he just liked email. 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 there was a rumor and this is an unsubstantiated rumor. I want to be real clear that that Epstein was trying to blackmail Gates with some story about a bridge player that he was having an affair with. Oh, interesting. It was a really hot Russian bridge player. I also think they've intentionally flooded the Internet with so much misinformation.

2:12:34Perhaps. 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 and say, what do you think about this? Because I could just— If you don't, yeah. How about you shut the fuck up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. How about you give me some money? How about you— It's a bold play. Because there was a bunch of people that gave him a lot of money. That gave Epstein a lot of money? Oh, yeah, yeah. In fact, the guy, the Victoria's Secret guy, gave him a house. He gave him a house in Manhattan. He was in control of 100 % of his finances. So it wasn't just he gave it to him.

2:13:09Oh, 100%. Could have taken it or, you know. And he goes like, I didn't know what he was doing. Wait, so did Epstein fund that house, right? Did he fund the Victoria's Secret guy to start Victoria's Secret? No. No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. That's how he got involved after 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 finding out about Victoria's Secret, Epstein, and shit.

2:13:41Well, 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 were in high school and college. Yeah, socially awkward. And then all of a sudden you have literally$100 billion. Yeah. And you can 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.

2:14:16Right. And 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 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 giving them this chance to make an insane amount of money.

2:14:52And 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. He's like everything about him. He's like he doesn't know anything about finance. He was talking to him. He's like, this guy's a construct. This is not a real finance guy. He's like there's something going on here. The Wheeler and Dealer. So wait, what was the science they were working on?

2:15:21A bunch of different physicists were connected to him. Einstein Epstein reportedly hoped to develop super race a few words with his DNA Wow What is that from what that's the New York Times? I 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 and Also oddly connected to the whole UAP world the whole Los Alamos things 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. And then he had access to all these scientists that were famously underpaid.

2:16:09Weird. So these guys were not making much money. And he was this incredibly wealthy guy through no way that anybody could ever rationally explain. 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 con man. Do you know what I mean? You probably sat in a room with him and you're like, wow, this guy's really great. Like, maybe I should give him some money. Maybe I should, like, what a cool guy. And he's just a dirtbag under the veil. We're just speculating, but maybe.

2:16:38Maybe also if you have a bunch of really hot Russian chicks that are hanging out with you. 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. 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.

2:17:07That's true. That guy partied hard. Good point. Good point. Yeah. To be a billionaire. I mean, in most cases, what you have to do is be insanely driven. Yeah. And you have to be that guy that works 18, 20 hours a day. Right. You know. And give up all the other things. Yeah, you have to give up all your time. Exactly. And that becomes your whole life. Yeah. But I think that's also why they wanted a guy like that that could provide them. This is how Eric 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.

2:17:37That's why, I mean, my one and only billionaire friend is that Anad Ambani, that Indian guy I was mentioning. I think it's so cool that he's built this gigantic wildlife rescue. That is pretty dope. Because he's a dude like— 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 fifth or sixth 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 that's very cool it's it's very cool i mean for me it's amazing yeah i mean there's not look there's nothing wrong with space race stuff too it's all fascinating and it's cool 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 a hundred thousand dollars 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 you know we're in the just living in this country alone we're in the one percent right most people i think one percent of the world we look this up it's like 50 60 thousand dollars if you make more than that you're in the one percent of earth right and that's the majority of people in the united states yeah it's crazy so like yeah you're barely getting by in america and you're in the one percent of the world exactly yeah which is wild it's wild it's really it really is yeah yeah we're 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 not fun Like you study us and you go, oh god, what are they fucking doing?

2:19:14Whereas 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 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, it'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?

2:19:47Do you think that thing is? Yes and no. Like 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, because they have the whole thing about them being lion killing apes and all this other stuff. there's probably a family troop, a group, and you know they're in war now? Have you read about this? Yeah. So I think that the Bondo 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 chimp though is they said that their skulls are different.

2:20:24Yeah, the cranial ridge. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Makes sense. Things with stronger jaw muscles have a cranial ridge. You know, you see it in hyenas, you see it in things like that. Gorillas. Yeah, gorillas. Yeah, exactly. It's just 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 with you know that carl armand guy spent his whole life hunting yeah 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 you have them yeah sometimes which chimps are you know they'll walk on hind legs and stuff yeah it's pretty cool It is pretty cool.

2:21:05And then there's a photo of the one that they killed that was at the airport. Do 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 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 if they're normal-sized human beings, that's the biggest fucking chimpanzee I've ever seen in my life. Yeah, it's huge. Look at that thing. They're amazing. Look at that. I mean, the guy is—you could tell by perspective that the guy's—he's got his hand on it, So he's right behind it.

2:21:35Yeah. Yeah. It's not a forced perspective. His arm is not extended. No. 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 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. Yeah. It's crazy. 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?

2:22:17Do you know what I'm talking about? No. Have you ever heard about this? No. Yeah, it's really interesting. So somewhere in the Congo, there's this particular river, 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.

2:22:48But 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.

2:23:26And so all of a sudden this 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 into contact with each other and go to war over who's going to be the leader of the alpha troop, the mega troop. Wow. And it's been going for maybe a year or two 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 going to fuck each other up. Study highlights friends with benefits relationship between gorillas and chimps.

2:23:59What? They're fucking each other? No, it's a younger one's hanging out. It says, it's probably in the same area they're meeting. Yeah. There's pictures of them like in the same tree. Yeah, yeah. I think this is that river. They want figs out of these trees. Yeah, but friends with benefits generally. Well, the benefits are, yeah, I was looking for wording that got to what you're getting at. The benefits are figs. 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, man? No, no, we just like figs, both of us.

2:24:27The 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. Wow. 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. Yeah. 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 So they're as big as male lions in other places.

2:25:08Yeah, and they're jacked and they don't have a choice Yeah, because otherwise they're gonna die. Exactly trying to hunt the the Cape buffalo But it's so we're watching natural selection in real time because they just keep getting bigger and stronger. Yeah And you know they're like these fucking buffalo are enormous man and 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. Those motherfuckers are so scary. So mean. So scary. Yeah. And they'll charge so unprovoked. Like they'll just turn and come anytime.

2:25:38But it's crazy how you have that basically insular dwarfism and insular gigantism throughout animals. No matter like animals stuck on an island, they're either going to get big or they're going to get small. Well, lizards usually get big on an island, right? Or tortoises, right? Like the Galapagos or the Seychelles. Why? Why do they get bigger? No predators, unlimited resources. Yeah. So all of a sudden, 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 eat you, so you just get bigger and bigger to outcompete each other.

2:26:15Look at that face. Yeah, look at those guys. Just imagine that's the only thing you can eat is something three times bigger than you. It can fucking kill you. That kills a lot of lions, by the way. Oh, 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. And you starve to death slowly. I love the little cub there covered in blood. Look at that. It's a really cool documentary. 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 feels like Hulk lions.

2:26:51It'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 cuz 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, and the Congo's another place. It's like, what?

2:27:27Yeah. 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 three or four museum specimens and no live specimens. Yeah. Really? Uh-huh. There's a few of those.

2:28:04Yeah. Oh! Miss Waldron's, yeah, red colobus. Why is it called Miss Waldron? I don't know. Who's that lady? Good question. What do you have to do with this monkey lady? You have to West Africa, previously described as subspecies. Not been cited 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. That 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.

2:28:38Nobody's looking. It's too hard. 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 that 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 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 a asian unicorn we've seen it that if people don't follow, you never know.

2:29:39It's like you can absolutely be the tinfoil hat guy like I can be with the thylacine, but if you give up and don't look, we never really know. And if it's going to be, it'll probably be in a place like the Amazon or like the Congo. Totally. Enormous place. Isn't the Congo as wide as the contiguous North America? The country or the river? I think the 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 is fucking huge. It's huge. If you see the United States imposed on Africa, you're like, oh, my God. The continent of Africa is enormous.

2:30:19Well, that's what's squirrely about maps, right? Especially when you look at the globe. Everything is 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 timelines are drawn on the globe? Like the time zones? Oh, right, right, right. It's so weird. There's all these squiggly jigsaw puzzles. And you're like, why is that island in this time zone that's three slots over? It makes no sense to me. It doesn't make any sense. But see if you can find the size of the Congo. If you see the size of the Congo, I think it's almost as big as the United States.

2:30:58That's crazy. I didn't realize that. It's the same. Yeah. 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 that and you shoved it. Why does it. Why does 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. 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.

2:31:36Fucking 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 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 six-minute total blackout in Egypt. It'll 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? That's when the aliens are going to return. That's what I'm saying, dude. Can you imagine being at the pyramids and seeing a six-minute long, six-minute, 22-second eclipse?

2:32:16That's what it's going to look like? And it's in a place that never has fucking clouds. So you're going to see it. I mean, they do, but not that time of year. So, yeah, total solar eclipse for six and a half minutes. So we had one here. Yeah, yeah. Two years ago? Yeah. Was it two years ago, Jeremy? Yeah, yeah. It was really cool. How long did that last? I wasn't in the country. But, yeah. A couple minutes. Yeah, a couple of minutes. What was really cool about it, though, was that all the animals got oddly silent before it happened. Yeah, yeah. It was really weird. Like they know something's coming.

2:32:45Yeah, 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. Like, imagine living like thousands of years ago before anybody understood what the fuck was going on. And thinking like some wild, magical moment had happened and we entered into a new timeline or something. You'd have all crazy theories. I'd like grab somebody. We got to sacrifice them right away. Something's going on here. Get them to the pyramid. Cut their heart out. Yeah. Straight away. It's also so weird that the sun and the moon are the exact right distance that when they cross, the moon just completely outlines, just fills in everything.

2:33:32Yeah. But the light around the outside of the edges. It's bizarre. How is it perfectly sized like that? Have you seen? Oh, sorry. Go ahead. No. It's just 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 distance. 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.

2:34:07I've never heard that one. The panda fake has nothing on the moon being fake. The moon is fake. Yeah, they think the moon is artificial, and then it was 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. Because imagine how fragile life is. We're really concerned about climate change. Oh, my God. The climate changes. Well, guess what? But if the fucking moon wasn't there, you'd be doomed. Oh, there's nothing. There's no way.

2:34:43You need a big moon, too. It controls all of our oceans. It's a quarter of the size of the Earth. Yeah. It's a weird moon. Yeah. Like, I don't think there's another moon in our entire solar system that's comparable. Oh, interesting. In terms of, like, the size and the relationship to the other planet. To the planet itself, yeah. I think it's way bigger than every other moon. Let's find that out. Is that what formulates the conspiracy theories? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 a long time, which is really weird.

2:35:16That's wild. It echoed way longer than we thought, which of course could just be they didn't know what it would do because they had never done it before. They don't even know. Fifth largest. 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 way bigger than us.

2:35:52Yeah, yeah. We can look at the size of Jupiter in comparison to the size of Earth. Yeah, so it's the scale of the moon 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 moon just to measure the sound. Huh. See what would happen. Huh. And it was odd. It's very weird. 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.

2:36:26And also, who knows what the fucking center of the moon's made out of. Yeah. Who knows where you hit it. Yeah, totally. Maybe it's weird. Maybe they've got some caves in there. It's hollow. Apollo experiments and the ringing effect. 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 shock waves. Oh, interesting. Yeah. But retards and dorks say, oh, it's hollow.

2:37:09It's made by aliens. And there's also people that think that, you know, there's stuff there. Like there's a monolith there. Oh, the cities on the moon and all that. Yeah, yeah. On the other side that we can't see. Yeah. The bases. Reddit's a wild place, huh? This is not even Reddit. This is like you got to go to like weird message boards where crazy people go. It's deep crazy. Holomoon's on wiki. What's that? Holomoon. 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.

2:37:46No scientific evidence exists to support the idea. Let's go to spaceship moon because that seems even more interesting. Spaceship moon. Come on, baby.

2:38:02All these pseudo-scientific The moon's spaceship Includes historical Oh, no, no, no I didn't know what that means Spaceship moon theory Try that It's theory A pseudo-scientific hypothesis Proposing that Earth's moon is an artificial Hollowed-out satellite Constructed by an alien civilization Oh, boy. See? It's like the Death Star. There you go, bro. Well, you need to get into, like, space is fake. That's even better. Space is fake. It's popularized in 1970 by two Soviet scientists, Mikhail Vassin and Alexander... How about that word? Yep. Shurkabakov. Shurkabakov. Shurkabakov. Shurkabakov. You said it.

2:38:49Suggested the moon was reinforced by an armored titanium hull to survive impacts. Oh, man. People need more to do. No, they don't. You like this? I love the kookier the better. Yeah. Like hashtag space is fake 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 people who develop fake theories in order to see if people bite. And then they put them out there like on Reddit or somewhere on 4chan. 4chan's a great place and stuff like that because you've got a lot of schizophrenics that like to visit those places.

2:39:30And 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 made my own lunatic community. Bigfoot hunters. Same thing. There you go. Unfuckable white guys. 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.

2:40:04But 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, your guy 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. And 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.

2:40:34And 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.

2:41:09Oh, for sure. That we have this maybe arrogant assumption that we have an 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, OK, I need funding. So I'm going to speciate a bunch of stuff. So I'm going to go look at four things that are exactly the same, except one lives on one side of the creek and one lives on the other.

2:41:42And now I'm going to make it its own species because that'll fund more work for me. So now you have the 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. And it's just like, it's not, you know, is it a species?

2:42:15Did we need this one frog to be split into four different groups because they live on four different patches of the mountain? Not really. And it sort of lessens the conservation for that frog in general because now all of a sudden it's like, well, there's four 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 and pull apart everything into more and more and more. And then it sort of lessens the value of them, in my opinion. Hmm, that's interesting.

2:42:46So 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, if you're an animal guy, you're probably not a great people person to begin with, right? Myself included. You're not a bad people person. Thanks. But for the most part, the people that get into the sciences probably don't have the best. 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.

2:43:26And again, I'm generalizing. There are great people that I work with too, but this is just a picture of 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 a 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.

2:44:04So now a system like, say, Yumi 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 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. 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 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?

2:45:02Have you fixed the problem? That's all conservation is, right? 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's different, but if you had a thousand frogs and then you worked on the project and now you have 2 ,000 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 i mean either because they're boring because i don't want to care about it but i would care if you just came out and said look these frogs need a home we're going to fight chytrid fungus which is this big widespread fungus that's killing all amphibians by building frog hotels.

2:45:56And 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 going to 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. 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 because you get people actually interested in in animals and that's why I do YouTube That's why I do all these things is it I hope that it helps 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.

2:46:51Well, you've got to make things interesting to people, right? And this is where David Attenborough was so amazing. Absolutely. Because he developed these documentaries and the voice that he had was explaining these things. Mind-blowing. He was the first guy to document chimpanzees eating monkeys. Yeah. I remember that. Incredible. Incredible. All his stuff. He's 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.

2:47:32I 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. I don't want to 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.

2:47:59She's like, I don't know how to swim. Like, what do you mean? She's like, I've never been in the ocean before. 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 the 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.

2:48:26The guy who fishes and eats it in the village next door is more of an authority than this person. Do you know what I mean? Right. 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.

2:48:55Right, but I mean the world they live in. Yes, I do. I think it should be a requirement. I think if you're going to 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 pickled jars and I can tell you everything about them. Well, to me, that was like one of the most fascinating aspects of Chimp Nation. 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.

2:49:25And 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. Because 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 it was so unusual that they had this long history where these chimpanzees had lived and died and raised new chimps around these people.

2:50:07And as long as they follow 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. Like 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.

2:50:40That's incredible. Well, 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, the monkey's going to go, hey. Exactly. Fuck is this new thing? But if there's always people with space suits around and they never bother them, they go, oh, it's just the space suit 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.

2:51:12They'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. 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 the grizzly man sure tried didn't work out so well didn't end well or did it 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 that was suicide by bear I also think it was Werner Herzog's attempt at comedy You think?

2:51:49Yeah. 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 ask the sheriff, like, what do you thought of him? And the sheriff goes, well, I thought he was retarded. And they smash cut to something else. I'm like, you're trying to make me laugh, weren't I? It's pretty funny, though. I've wanted to try to get him on the podcast. Yeah. And that's going to be one of – he'd probably never answer, honestly, because it would probably be disrespectful to Timothy Treadwell and his memory. You got to get him, though.

2:52:17I 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. Huh. 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. 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.

2:52:53And 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 what the documentary is called. And it's like with his, 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 going to 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.

2:53:35I don't care what your history is, drug history, anything. 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. There's also no comparison.

2:54:07You're not comparing yourself to anyone else because you're living in a community that are assistance lifestyle people. All these people are doing the same thing you're doing. What are you going to do? Are you going to have the biggest fish? Like nobody gives a fuck. Nobody cares. It's all hunting, fishing. That's right. Living off the land. That's right. They all do it. And they're all like sharing and drinking together and having fun. It's really wild when you watch it. You go, well, it got 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.

2:54:38But 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 he wouldn't be a society. 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've got to have the red and the blue. You've got to have both sides. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. That's awesome. Well, hey, brother. It's always good to talk to you. It's a pleasure, man. This was really fun. Really fun. Is this you and the crocodile thing?

2:55:04Oh, here it is. Oh, my God, dude. You didn't tell me to put meat all around the outside of it. I told you I was an idiot. Look at this. We made that cage, by the way, and I am no engineer. Oh, my God. Look at this. That cave 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 in an empty cage. Dude, this is a terrible idea. It was dumb. It was dumb. Look at these things doing death rolls. But people are going to watch this, Joe, and they're going to learn about crocodiles.

2:55:39It's a great thing you filmed it. Right? God, man. That's insane. That was fun. That cage looks way too flimsy. Don't do that again. I'm not doing it again, I promise. 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 wow plus we got the YouTube channel that's where I'm doing most of my stuff now I hope people check that 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 you alright bye everybody see ya