898: Forrest Galante | Seeking Unicorns and Resurrecting the Dodo

23:46Yeah, I'm looking it up. Yeah, they flew over it three times and got a photograph of it, and it's pretty remarkable because there are not supposed to be big snakes in the Congo, and the Congo is undeniably one of the least well-studied jungles and areas in the world. And also, by the way, it makes perfect sense for there to be a giant snake there because all these snakes hang out in wet, tropical, dense forest, which is exactly what the Congo is. Every large, wet, tropical, dense forest on the planet has its own version of a large snake, except for the Congo for some weird reason. So why it doesn't have a big wetland snake like a reticulated python or anaconda with all those prey sources is hard to say.

24:24So I believe there's a lot of validity to the story. I don't believe that it was 50 feet long and lunged at the helicopter the way that they think it did. It says 25 feet here, according to the guy's own account, which still is enormous. And also they were in a helicopter. So how do they know how long it was? I mean, they do have a photo, but it's a World War II photo taken from a moving helicopter and a handheld camera. So whatever. That's still a big darn snake, man. I think any snake over a couple feet long is like hard pass for me. I don't know how to pull up photos on here. I'd show you some of the like 20 footers that we've caught, but they don't look 20 feet.

24:58I mean, I look tiny next to a 20 foot snake. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's hard to explain. And a 25-foot snake is a very, very large snake that's incredibly powerful and incredibly capable of hurting someone. I mean, that's a big animal. What would they do to a human? Would they actually eat a person or would they just squeeze you until all your bones break and let you writhe around until you die? Well, both. I mean, anacondas have never really done it, but there's a tribe called the Aida tribe in the Philippines. and they're a tribe of pygmies who have regular incursions from reticulated pythons where the reticulated pythons will come out of the jungle canopy and eat people now they're smaller people like i said i mean i was gonna say they're pygmies sucks sucks to be food size snack sized fun size a fun size person in a jungle with big snakes is not a good it's not a good combo for survival but no just scale it up right so those are 18 foot snakes eating five foot people and i'm making up these numbers, you know, rounding out these numbers.

25:56So a 25 foot snake would very easily eat a six foot person. So and they have, by the way, like there have been accounts of larger people being eaten, especially by reticulated pythons. They're more much more likely to attack than than an anaconda. So, yeah, no, they would eat a person. They'd come in, bite you, wrap you up, crunch, you know, basically just asphyxiate you, break all your ribs and crunch you to nothing. and then sure enough, they'd swallow you up. And I don't want to say this because I'm fear-mongering about something that doesn't really happen. I'm just pointing out it's very, very capable of doing that.

26:32We've all seen the movie Anaconda where John Voight gets eaten alive. Yeah, I just remember Ice Cube in it. It's been a minute since I've watched a documentary as fine as Anaconda. That's right, Jennifer Lopez, yep. Right, I forgot she was in that. That's right. Oh my gosh. So let's talk about something that's not going to give us nightmares. You went into this cave system in Laos that you said was so big, it has its own weather system. Is that for real or is it just humid in there? No, it's for real. So, you know, you're in like super tropical, dense Vietnamese jungle where it's like 105 degrees out.

27:08The air is heavy. It's so humid and you go into this cave system and parts of it are warm, sticky, humid. Other parts of it are freezing cold and windy. I mean, you know, keep in mind you can fit an upright Empire State building inside of this cave. Like this is not. Are you for real? Oh, I'm dead serious. It's a hard to imagine how big that is. That's so wow. Not only is it hard to imagine, it's hard to like because you're in complete blackness for the most part and you're shining around, even with like our very high powered flashlights, you still have a field of vision that's like, you know, the size of a flashlight spot, you know, so maybe six feet wide at the end or something.

27:49And you're shining around this cavern that is like 10 Walmart super centers in width, plus 100 of them stacked tall, like it's unbelievably large. It's hard to actually like, yeah, like I said, I mean, you know, you can stand up the Empire State Building, you could land a jetliner inside of them. They're so big. And it's just, yeah, it's sort of unfathomable, to be honest. It is incredible how big the Songdun cave system is. This obviously has animals in it that can't exist anywhere else than I would imagine if there's that much room in there. They've got to have their own ecosystem and everything.

28:22You always see those blind fish and blind frogs that live in caves. I'm having a little bit of a moment here because that big of an empty, black, dark space is somewhat terrifying for absolutely no good reason. And it's crazy, too, because within it, not only do you have its own weather system, its own endemic species, albeit most of them are smaller, but still, you know, there's unique snails, frogs, fish, so on and so forth. Eels. You also have its own terrain. So part of it has like white sandy beaches with clear water. Part of it has rushing rivers. Part of it has, you know, very little vegetation where there's no light, as you can imagine.

29:01but um you know part of it's really rough like rocky difficult to traverse and where we camped multiple times was like beautiful white sand beaches next to clear water just in close to pitch blackness wow it's pretty fascinating yeah what did you go in there to do to look at some kind of animals inside these caves yeah so at the end of the six mile long cave system is a big collapse in the cave roof and there is its own jungle that sits below the floor of the main jungle above. And we were looking for an animal called the Saula, also known as the Asian unicorn, the most recently described large mammal.

29:37They were only described in, I want to say, 95. It's a bovid, meaning related to cows. Beautiful, beautiful creature. And nobody knows whether they're extinct or alive, whether they're gone, whether they're still there. There's odd sightings, blah, blah, blah. And so I had this theory that potentially in this jungle, which was so inaccessible if Sala had made it in there because they were known to have some presence around caves and things like that, they would at least remain unharmed. And we also this never made the show, but we also collected a bunch of ticks and leeches of which there were many and took their blood to check their DNA to see if the blood in the leeches had been eating Sala.

30:16That was inconclusive. But regardless, the idea was to look for this unicorn, pretty much this real unicorn, not a fake unicorn. Yeah. When you say unicorn, do you just mean it's rare or does it have a horn in the center of its head like a unicorn? It has two perfectly symmetrical horns that when looking at it from a side profile align so perfectly that it looks as though it has one staggering unicorn horn. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Forrest Golante. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, It is because of my circle of people around me.

30:53You might call it a network, but that word's gross. We don't use that anymore. I mean, I guess we don't. Aside from the name of the course, which is Six Minute Networking, and is it available for free over at jordanharbinger.com slash course. The course is about improving your relationship building skills, developing relationships in a non-cringy, non-cheesy, non-gross way. Just a few minutes a day is all it takes, and many of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to the course. So, hey, come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. you can find the course at jordanharbinger.com slash course.

31:22Now back to Forrest Galante. Fascinating. So this, you said it's a really inaccessible remote place. I'm going to Laos in October of 2024. Nice. And I'm like, oh, I wonder if we'll go check out this cave. But if it's super in the middle of nowhere, it's, it's unlikely. It's in Vietnam. It's in the very middle of nowhere. It's in Vietnam. I don't even have the right country. Nevermind. That's okay. But I will say this, if you're going to Laos, where are you going in Laos? I'm not even sure. It's an adventure trip with an itinerary where they don't really tell you. They just tell you what to pack because they don't want everybody to complain or make suggestions.

31:55Gotcha. Well, I went to Laos in my younger years and there's probably stories I shouldn't share from Laos, but we went to a place it was Viyang Vien and Viyang Vien was this, I think they shut it down. Somebody told me, but it was this backpackers paradise. It was this river in the middle of the mountains where, and I'll try and not try and not what's the word like condemn myself here too much. But it's this backpackers paradise in the middle of nowhere with this river floating through and all of these like hookah bars that serve you anything you can think of, not just hookah. Got it. With a bunch of futon couches.

32:33And, you know, you spend like 15 cents on a bowl of pho and they bring you the pho. And there's there's like family guy on all these TVs in Vietnamese. And then you go float down this river And along this river, it's lined with all these makeshift like rope swings, rubber inner tubes, crazy slides. And each bar serves its own specialty cocktail of drugs and alcohol. And it's, you know, and there's a reason that kids die there because they go. And I mean, you know, I won't go into too much detail, but you rock up to the crazy looking bar with the weird techno that's all over the stunning river in this insane location.

33:12The bunch of people partying and backpackers. And you're like, how it's like that. The Brad Pitt movie, the or no, Leo DiCaprio movie, the island beach, the beach, the beach, the beach, the beach, the beach. Yeah, the beach. Yeah. You're like, how did these people get here? Like, this is the middle of nowhere. How did we find this place? Yeah. And then, yeah, you like rock up to the bar and the guy's like, you want milkshake? And I'm like, no, I don't want a milkshake. I want a beer. He's like, you know, like milkshake, milkshake. I put mushroom. I put ecstasy. I put weed. I put, you know, and I'm like, I put, you know, opium.

33:41I'm like, no, no, no. I don't want any of those things in my milkshake. In fact, I'm going to just have a beer, but it's a crazy place. I want to see you open the bottle of anything you serve me. Yeah, exactly. I'll open it myself. Yeah, that is, no wonder kids die. That sounds like a terrible milkshake. Not even just the taste, which I can imagine is absolutely vile, but mixing ecstasy, weed, opium, and mushrooms, it does not sound like a good time. And then just, hey, go ahead and have fun swinging from high altitude into the water. Exactly. What could go wrong? Exactly. No, it's a pretty wild place.

34:17So anyway, if you're going there, make sure you have yourself a nice opium milkshake and good luck to you. Yeah. Oh my God. For 15 cents. That sounds terrible. I would, yeah, I'm too old for that. Way too old. Oh yeah. Yeah. Way too old. Yeah. I was too old for it at 23. So yeah, no, it's gnarly. If you survive that milkshake, the hangover has really got to be something special, like an unforgettable four days where you are just hating every minute of life. No question. Oh my God. You searching for these extinct or thought to be extinct species, are they just missing in inaccessible areas like this bovid unicorn creature you were looking for?

34:56Basically like, look, we don't know if it's extinct, but nobody's seen one because it's either so remote or it's in a dangerous place. Is that generally the case? That's a huge part of it. And look, since we did that Extinct or Alive show and I put in all this work looking for these lost species, it's become way more of a thing now in wildlife science and biology. I think we talked about this last time. Like when I first proposed the idea, I was like a Bigfoot hunter tinfoil hat guy. Right. It was like, you're insane. Like it's declared extinct. It's gone. What's the matter with you? Like I had all these old professors and stuff that I worked with who literally like wrote me off and said I was a lunatic for even proposing such a stupid idea.

35:35And then we found one, two, three, eight different lost species. And then all of a sudden there's now it's pretty funny when I look at it, there's like and I won't name organizations or point fingers, but there's like six or seven different groups and organizations that are on the quest for lost species, hunting missing animals and like not hunting to kill, but like all these like very notable groups, some of which were the same exact groups that laughed at me and called me a quack, are now doing it themselves and, you know, hiring their own trackers and biologists and blah, blah, blah, which is pretty hilarious because, yeah, it came from a place of like, you don't know what you're talking about.

36:12And the reason that's a very long winded way of answering your question. But the reason that I always thought, hey, wait a minute, like this isn't whack job, tinfoil hat stuff is because it's so incredibly arrogant to assume that we definitively know whether or not something is gone, especially when it comes to super remote, like other countries, incredibly hard to access places, places. And you look at like, oh, when was this declared extinct? Oh, in 1973, some British scientist went there for two weeks, you know, probably hung out in like a really luxurious camp, looked for it. I'm not saying they didn't give it a good shot, but looked for it, didn't find it, came home and said it was extinct.

36:52And it's like, that's it. Now we've written off the species as gone. All conservation and funding and hope for it has dried up and gone away completely. Doesn't that seem like a wax system that we just trusted this one guy who went there once 30 years ago for two weeks? And it's like, wait a minute, there's something, the system's broken. And I think that was the thing is like, I realized the system was broken more so than like, I have all these incredibly special talents for finding animals. It was just like, the system's wrong, and I'm going to go show you how. That makes sense. Plus, also, they didn't have, you mentioned looking at a tick's blood, looking for DNA.

37:27They didn't have anything like that. So they probably went there, looked around at the usual spots, then asked the guides, hey, when's the last time you saw one of these? Oh, man, I haven't seen one of those for at least a few years. All right, they're all gone. Nobody was looking inside a leech's gut or whatever leeches have for the blood of the species that you're looking for. I mean, you said it was inconclusive, but it was a pretty clever way of looking for clues. We did a lot of that kind of stuff and still do, by the way, like eDNA, environmental DNA, where you can take a water sample and go, hey, did this rare fish or turtle poop in this water at all in the last three weeks?

38:02You know, like, let's check the water or taking the blood from leeches or mosquitoes, you know, catching a bunch of them and taking the blood and going, did it bite this animal? We took fecal samples from sharks to see if they were eating these rare seals, you know, So like we've these sort of innovative techniques of sort of wildlife forensics are the technology is advancing. So it's allowing us to be more creative and do more and more of these kinds of tests and things. It's just it's a real headache still. Yeah, I bet. You said you found eight or was that just a random number? How many? Wow.

38:33It is the number thus far. Yeah. Eight species that were previously lost to science. It's actually nine. It's just we didn't make a show about the ninth one. OK, we were there doing human wildlife conflict on spectacle bears in Peru. And then literally the gardener, it wasn't the gardener, but it was like the guy that was in the makeshift kitchen was raking through the kitchen scrap slash compost heap and found this tiny little what looks like an earthworm as a species of blind snake that hadn't been seen in 70 years. So we've actually found nine at this point. Yeah. So, you know, I can't take all the credit, certainly, because there have been collaborations.

39:09And like I said, it wasn't me who found the blind snake. It was the guy cleaning the kitchen. But he handed me this sort of beat up worm looking thing. And I was like, wait a minute, that's a blind snake. And I didn't even know blind snakes occurred in this part of Peru, which ended up being, you know, a lost species. So yeah, no, we found nine. And a big part of the message is just go and look. I didn't realize how common it is to find new species. You know, you think it just never happens or it requires a decade long expedition because you see things like that in movies. Sure. But when I went to, I went to the Amazon last or a couple of years ago and they have a guy who collects moths.

39:43Like that's his whole thing. And he's like, come tonight and look at the moth cloth. And there's this cloth of a light shining on it. There's a billion different moths. And we all went out there and he's like, Hey, collect moths with me and help me label them. And all this stuff, basically real science kind of grunt work as an intern would do. And he's like, you might find a new species. And I was like, yeah, whatever. and it turns out that somebody on our trip did find a new species of moth and i said how often does this happen he goes oh i would say every couple months we find a new one i'm like wait every couple of months crazy you find a brand new species of moth not like a different color of the same one right he's like no totally different yep that is incredible that there are just hundreds of thousands or millions of different species of insect animals that no one's looked for them because they only exist in this area where there's one guy collecting 100 samples a night, and he's literally recruiting dumbass half-drunk tourists, backpackers, to help label and categorize these things because there's too many.

40:44What's crazy is, so speciation is one thing, like how you determine a new species, and I won't get into the whole thing of that because as time has progressed, we've got, with technology progressing, we've got more and more and more ways to decide that something's its own species. So you have a lot of like hardened academics who's really excited to just name new species. So they look for reasons for something to be a new species. So they look at two moths that are identical that occur in the exact same location that have the same role in the environment. But they go, hey, there's these are two different species because one comes out during the day and one comes out during the night.

41:18And here's a tiny piece of genetic evidence that supports that. And then they get to write a paper and name a moth after themselves. So I'm not saying this guy was doing that, but that is sort of one of the shady is the wrong word, but one of the things that scientists are doing now to sort of give themselves an edge and be like, oh, I named a species. I did this. So there's that factor. And then the other is, like you said, a lot of it's just not looking in places that there's it's just understudied, right? Like who's going to the heart of the Amazon to count moths? Who's going to the middle of Sumatra or Borneo or certain places in Africa or South America or wherever to look at beetles or look at snails or whatever?

41:55And then people do it and go, yeah yeah find a new species every few months you know because nobody else has ever looked or tried to do this so you know it's not happening in our backyards in california because that's so well studied by first world science but it is happening in these remote locations with high species diversity like tropical wetlands and things like that and it's uh yeah it's fascinating it's so interesting and i would imagine there's a lot of especially with insects because in 1950 it was probably really hard to catch a fly that you can barely see and then go oh well this one has different, I don't know, exoskeleton properties, it would just be hard to even examine something like that at that 100 years ago.

42:34And so you have new tech that's even able to look at like the, what is it, the genetic, what do you call that, the genotype of something, and be like, oh, this is actually new. And we didn't know it because it looks just like another ant. Exactly. How much has conflict and war prohibited exploration of certain areas? I'm thinking like Colombia, right? The FARC controlled all this territory. And then it's like, oh, peace deal. And now you can walk into a place where you would never, ever in a million years have gone a couple decades ago because you would have been immediately killed or kidnapped for 20 years by the FARC.

43:09I don't know if that's your perfect setup for what we did in FARC rebel control Colombia or not, but go for it. Yeah, no, it's so exactly to your point, you know, there was a species of crocodilian called the Rio Apoporus caiman, which is a long nosed yellow crocodilian that lived in one and only drainage, the Rio Apoporus drainage, which had been controlled by the FARC rebels since the 80s, 70s. I don't remember anymore. And, you know, literally immediately after the peace treaty was made, when things were still very, very and they still are very dangerous down there. It's like there's still a lot of FARC issues.

43:45we went and grabbed a cocaine dealer's giant B cargo plane and flew into the strip in the middle of Colombia and went and found this lost to science species of crocodilian which couldn't have been doing better by the way it was absolutely thriving in this remote Colombian jungle it's not like there was one or two left and we found it and oh my god you know what heroes we are for finding it not at all myself this other scientist Sergio who's working in a different part of the region I found out later had found massive populations of these Cayman because nobody had been going there because the fart rebels had controlled it and they weren't interested in killing these crocodiles.

44:25So there was just tons of them and they were absolutely thriving. They're super healthy. They had tons to eat. Like things couldn't have been better for the crocodilians. They weren't so great for the people of the region, but for the crocodilians, things couldn't, it wasn't that bad. I mean, everybody was happy and healthy, but, uh, you know, they, I remember that our like river guide, the guy taking us up the river, uh, was like, Hey, you know, like we were chatting with him one night around the fire and he's like, yeah, you know, been running, running drugs for a lot of years and come up here and blah, blah, blah.

44:52And he's like, yeah, if you guys had come like a year ago, we definitely would have cut your heads off, but you know, things are okay now. And we're like, Oh, that's cool. I was going to say alleged cocaine dealer, but that's by far the, that's the least of his crimes. Oh no. He said it like it wasn't even a thing. Jeez. Yeah. That's a little scary. to have somebody say, yeah, we would have cut your heads off, but now it's fine now. It's like, really? What? So this piece of paper that's over in Bogota is the reason I'm alive right now. That's right. Mildly terrifying. And keep in mind, we were like the middle and, you know, like he could have cut all our heads off and just buried us and gone about his day, you know, doing whatever he did.

45:28And nobody would have known nobody, but he wouldn't, it wouldn't have made no difference, but his, whoever his higher ups were obviously didn't care anymore. So they were like, yeah, you don't need to murder them. And it was like, all right, we'll just take you up the river instead. Sure. I read somewhere that you found a tortoise where they'd only seen one ever. Yeah. And they, of course, they killed it immediately as a specimen because that's what science was a hundred years ago. And you found it, I want to say, because somebody said, I saw tortoise bites in a cactus a few years ago, and that was the clue.

46:00That's such a small shred of hope to bank on. Well, we do all of our expeditions based on like a list of criteria to say, is it likely to still be there? And this one didn't meet that full list of criteria, but my gut instinct, I'm a turtle tortoise guy, right? Like I got turtles and tortoises all over. I love them. And anyway, I'm friends with the guys at the Turtle Conservancy up in Ojai, which by the way, if you're listening to this, go and Google it. It's an incredible facility. This guy who's, I don't know how he's raised the money, but he's built this insane facility to breed turtles and tortoises, which are one of the most endangered groups of animals in the world because they're being collected for soup, habitat loss, pet trade, blah, blah, blah.

46:40And anyway, I'm friends with the Turtle Conservancy guys. I went up there. I spoke to this guy, Russ, can't remember his last name, who'd been on Isla Fernandina in the Galapagos some 30 years prior and had seen bite marks on this cactus and alleged scat, alleged tortoise poop on an island that only one specimen of tortoise had ever been found 114 years prior by the California Academy of Sciences. And it immediately been bopped on the head and stuffed and collected, as you said. And that was the only known specimen of this species in recorded history, period. There had never been another known animal ever.

47:18And so, you know, Russ told me about these bite marks. I knew the story from 114 years prior about the California Academy of Sciences. And I was like, man, we got to go look, you know, like Fernandina Island's incredibly remote. It's incredibly barren and harsh, very difficult to traverse over, volcanic, boiling hot, not a lot of vegetation. And so we partnered with a couple of people, the Galapagos Conservancy, the Galapagos National Parks, and we funded this expedition to head out there. And myself and those two other organizations all went together and they sent representatives from their organizations.

47:50And we had a great collaboration working together. They wanted to go to the top of the mountain because it was the wettest area, which I just didn't believe in. And I wanted to go to a lowland area that had the most vegetation because I thought that made the most sense. And we did their thing first. We're unsuccessful. then on the second or third day we did my thing and went to this vegetative area and within a couple hours found this tortoise and everything was wonderful collaboration was great and then it all went a little sour after that but we found literally i dove into this bush and picked up the rarest animal in the world the only specimen living of the fernandina island tortoise the one and only of its entire species so yeah it was uh it was pretty incredible let me back up a little little bit.

48:33Is the running theory, okay, there's cactus bites and, or sorry, tortoise bites in the cactus and scat from this tortoise. They live so long that it doesn't matter that this was 30 years ago or whatever. It could still be there because tortoises live 100 years or 200, whatever it is. Pretty much. Wow. It could have been that exact same animal. The problem is it's a very active volcano. I think it's the second or third most active volcano in the world. So these limited swaths of habitat get covered up by lava regularly. And it's down to only a few locations of habitat. So, yeah, we went to the one that, like I said, I did a lot, you know, look, it's not like we just cowboy at all.

49:10Right. Where we're like, oh, let's go. Let's check it out. We do a lot of research and prep and planning. And I'd found this location on a map that just based on the vegetation alone, I was like, that's where we got to go. And then, yeah, sure enough, we went there and And knowing that the same animal that Russ had seen some 30 years prior could potentially have been in this swath of habitat. Sorry, he hadn't seen the animal. The same animal that left those bite marks could still be alive today. We went to look and we found her. Oh, my God. The odds seem incredibly slim. Yeah, I guess you're also lucky that that guy knew what tortoise bites look like.

49:46Because otherwise, I mean, if he wasn't an expert in that particular thing, you'd be like, what did this guy really see? He saw some poop. he thinks it's from this rare species. Come on. For sure. He just happened to be like one of the few people in the world where you'd go, that guy knows tortoise poop when he sees it. And that's the thing too, is because as you can imagine, I get dozens to hundreds of messages per week of people reporting to have seen an ivory-billed woodpecker, a thylacine, a this, a that, and the amount that are credible. What's a thylacine? A Tasmanian tiger. Super, yeah, animal I'm obsessed with.

50:18We can talk about that next. But yeah, the amount of reports that are credible are very, very, very slim. But when you have a PhD doctor in turtles and tortoises who had been working on that island doing other surveys, I forget vegetation surveys or something and goes, yeah, no, I saw a tortoise bite mark. And we're literally sitting at the turtle conservancy with, you know, 100 different species of turtle and tortoise around all taking bites out of cactuses. He's like, yeah, it looked like that. You take that pretty seriously. You know, that's a credible event. So yeah, that's the thing is getting these credible reports and being able to follow those leads and we and weeding through that.

50:56Where do you get most of this stuff that I like Instagram DMs where it's like, hey, man, I know you're just check it out. My dad was hunting and he saw this huge and you're like, OK, I could probably send you a screenshot of exactly what you just said. An Instagram DM where somebody goes, my dad was hunting and he saw blank. Yeah. But it comes in everywhere. I mean, in the beginning, we just, you know, scrubbed the hell out of the internet and would just look everywhere and libraries and old papers and research. And then as we began to make a name for ourselves in the space of wildlife and conservation, people would start reaching out to us.

51:28And now, you know, I get a ton of reports through social media, through my website, and most of them are garbage, more than most of them. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it's you're finding it's probably harder to find a credible DM or message incoming than it is to find a tortoise in Galapagos. And the amount of dick pics you got a weed crew to get to those sightings. Well, that's just a bonus. You're welcome. Yeah, literally. How do you get something like that? What do you do when you find that tortoise? Do you try to get them to reproduce? But if it's the only one, well, do tortoises asexually reproduce?

52:00I don't even know. They lay eggs. They do not asexually reproduce, but they are able to retain sperm for very, very long amounts of time. So if that... How long? Female. So I want to say like up to 60 years? Maybe it's less, maybe it's 40. I'd have to check. I was not expecting that answer. I thought you were going to say like up to a month. No, no, no, no. Wow, 60 years. It might be 30, but whatever it is, it's a long period of time. So, you know, when we found Fern, which was the female tortoise that we found, the one I was mentioning, she was very underweight, very malnourished, had a lot of ticks on her and so on and so forth.

52:31So we, not something I really wanted to do, but the Galapagos National Parks insisted we take her to the breeding center, the Faustal Arena breeding center on the East of Santa Cruz. So we scooped her up. We took her to this breeding center. She put on like 11 pounds in like three weeks, which by tortoise stats is wild because she was very hungry, very dehydrated, blah, blah, blah. And the hope was, well, there were there were multiple hopes coming from my end. One was that, you know, maybe she had some sperm retention and was able to lay some fertilized eggs that never took place. And the other hope was that we'd go back and find a male because once we found her, all attention was on that.

53:07Right. There was no like, all right, let's chuck her in the bag and look for another one. That's not really what you do. Right. So all attention was on her. But then, yeah, the Galapagos National Parks Conservancy, whatever. I don't even know the group's names exactly. They've been back three or four times and been completely unsuccessful, which is a pity because I think if I went back, I think if I went back, we probably would be successful again. But they're doing it on their own and they're not doing very well. So you said you didn't really want to take it to the breeding center. Why? I should restate that.

53:37It wasn't that I didn't want to take her to the breeding center. It was that we found this crown jewel rarity of a creature. And she seemed like the right thing to do is what we did. But it seemed difficult to take this animal out of her habitat. You know, that being said, her habitat fucking sucked. Like it was boiling hot. There was nothing to eat. She was super dehydrated. She was buried in under a bush. Like her life was not good. Now she lives in this tropical, like giant enclosure where she's fed cactus fruit all day long and like lounges around in a swimming pool. And I'm not joking when I say that.

54:11So her life is great now. But if there were another male in that same patch of habitat, which I don't believe there was, but if there was, he's now got one less breeding female to mate with. Right. Yeah. If there's even any of them left. So, you know, it was the right thing to do if the management organizations were able to continue successful conservation efforts or continue repeated surveys, but they were not. And so that is really sad and difficult for the species because the outlook for that species is it's very grim at the moment. It sounds like there's a little bit of competition among scientists for discoveries and stuff.

54:48A little bit. A little bit. Yeah, a little bit. Because you mentioned the moth naming thing and the speciation thing. And then I'm, I don't know, I'm no expert, but I'm detecting a little bit of maybe a little bit of, you said it went sour. And maybe it's like, oh, okay. You said if we could go back. But, I mean, I assume it's not you who can't go back. You haven't been able to go back. No, I haven't been invited back. I mean, look, I don't want to throw shade at anybody. I'm not going to name any organizations here and say they fucked up or anything like that. You don't have to do that. Here's what happens, right?

55:18Everybody goes to school. Everybody loves animals. They all get doctorates or PhDs. and become researchers or biologists or scientists and then find out that there's absolutely no money in our field, right? There's none. There's like no money in wildlife. And so everybody, first of all, they all have egos. They all think they did it the right way, like any doctor in anything. If it's not their idea, it's a bad idea. They're socially awkward because they're used to their animal people and not human people. And they're all competing for little bits of resources because they care about their species, by the way.

55:51And that's the important thing to point out here. They're not bad people. There are always bad eggs and everything. But for the most part, they're people who genuinely care about their species. And if the difference of$5 ,000 can make a huge difference to them, any of these researchers in any of these locations, and if they can be the one to name a species or accept credit or point out that they found something or point out that they saved something, they might get that$5 ,000 that otherwise would go elsewhere. And so, you know, their entire careers, reputations, lives and species rely on these career milestones of accomplishing something.

56:27And so there becomes massive like ego and competition and all this stuff, which, Jordan, it freaking sucks because it should be a giant collaboration where we all work together and figure out how to do the best for the species. but the system does not support that. The system supports everybody working for themselves and trying to do something for their species, which in turn makes people like greedy and selfish. And then you throw human ego into the equation and it becomes a mess. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Forrest Galante. We'll be right back. Hey, if you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment to support one of our sponsors or multiple sponsors.

57:12I mean, I'm not going to stop you. All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. You can also use the AI chatbot on the website. It should know all the sponsors. And when it doesn't, y 'all tell me, and that's great, and I appreciate that. You can even email me or whatever. I'll send you the code if you're that lazy. But I just really need you to support those who support the show. And now for the rest of my conversation with Forrest Galante. It's a shame because you're right. It should be like a giant collab, but science already is at war with other interests for money exactly and attention and the environment essentially it's so it's kind of a shame that there's also infighting just by the design of the way the whole the whole thing works exactly some of the finds are skill and experience but other stuff sounds like it there's just a little bit of a luck component didn't you find a rare shark in a fish market that some guy had caught by mistake or something i can't remember if i read this in your book, but you found some shark basically like, wait, you're selling this incredibly rare shark in the middle of nowhere?

58:13A luck component is definitely there, but it takes perseverance and the initiative to go and do the thing before you can get lucky. Right. You're not like if we hadn't known and I'll explain the shark thing in a second that we were looking for Pondicherry shark, it would have just been another dead shark on the table. Right. And so you only get lucky because you're already targeting something and looking for it and putting energy into it. So with that being said, my wife and I were in Sri Lanka investigating reports that the believed to be extinct Pondicherry shark had been in the Yala River in this Yala National Park.

58:47And me being the, you know, the hero that I am, poking fun at myself here, I was like, I'm going to go offshore. I'm going to take 10 ,000 pounds of chum. I'm going to look. I'm going to get all these sharks around the boat. I'm going to find the Pondicherry shark. I'm going to catch it. I'm going to do all this crazy stuff. Charter this boat. Get this team. Get this captain. Get all the divers. do all this stuff. And my wife's like, she's a zoologist. She's like, all right, well, you do that. I'm just going to go ask around. And she's like, I'm out on this like six day like mission spending way too much money, like, you know, dumping bait in the water, doing all the things that I thought would genuinely attract the shark I was looking for.

59:22But, you know, like doing this like big preposterous thing. And my wife's literally walking around fishing villages, chatting to people, showing them pictures of a shark on her phone. And the one guy, she's like, Hey, have you seen the shark? And he goes, Oh no, shark. I have shark shark. No good. Buy lobster, buy lobster. And she's like, no, no, I don't want lobster. Do you know the shark? Yes, I have two shark, two shark. And she's like, all right, well, can you show me the sharks? He's like, come with me, come with me. So she like walks with him through his hut and lying on a table is literally like 15 beautiful, big succulent lobster, a pile of little fish, a dead bull shark and a dead Pondicherry shark.

59:56And she's like, Oh my God, that's the shark we're looking for. And he's like, shark. No good. Shark. No good. You buy lobster. And she's like, no, no, I don't want lobster. I want that shark. Right. Like, I'm not trying to eat this. Yeah. And it was so valueless to him that he didn't even want to sell it to her. So she traded him for a box of she doesn't smoke, but she went and bought him or she someone on the crew did. She traded him a box of cigarettes for a lost species of shark that is now in the Sri Lankan National Museum. So, yeah, it's pretty wild. I assume the next round of questioning is like, where exactly did you catch this shark?

1:00:30Do you know? Because theoretically, there's not just one there, right? You do the whole thing. You do the whole thing. Where did you get it? What time of day? What time of night? Can we go out fishing with you? We then spent a week fishing with him and of course never caught another one. You know, we found out what estuary mouth it was hanging out at. We turned all this information over to the people in Sri Lanka that manage the conservation efforts of that habitat, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, you do the whole thing. It's not like, oh, cool, got the shark moving on. But, you know, like what I do, I'm like the mercenary, right?

1:01:02Like I'm the guy you just call in to find the thing or catch the thing and then hand it off to way more capable scientists than myself to do the ongoing species management. Like I, I don't have time to like, be like, okay, you know, like I found this now let's come up with a 12 point plan. That's going to take 15 years. And like, all I can do is be like, all right, we found this animal. You now have a flagship species with which to build a conservation program around and show how important it is because this animal that we thought was gone is still there. Now you can extend your national park, enforce regulations, ideally unlock some funding, you know, so on and so forth.

1:01:38And so that's sort of what we do. But we certainly get as much information as we can while on the ground and dealing with it. I would imagine it takes some persuasion. Do these fishermen think like, I'm going to get in trouble. These white people came in and I caught this rare thing and now they want to like bring it to the capital? Are they worried they're going to get heat for this? Sometimes, but most of the time it's in such unregulated places that they it's not even a factor. You know, it's more like, oh, cool. Like you like the shark? Like, here, you can have the shark. It's worthless to me because there is no fishing regulation.

1:02:09There is no enforcement. It's OK that they were gill netting or whatever. Like there's no they're not breaking any laws or doing anything wrong. So most of the time they don't care. The things that are hilarious that happened is like when we were in Colombia and I'm showing pictures of this caiman asking if they've seen the caiman. And the one guy goes, oh, yeah, very good. Delicious. And I'm like, that's what everybody wants to hear. Like the extinct animal you're looking for is really tasty. So, you know, you just most of them don't care. Most of them are really happy to show you what they know and where the animals are and so on and so forth.

1:02:41I think you showed me this on Instagram. You might have posted this. They're using they this company is using dna to bring back things like the woolly mammoth yeah how real is that extremely yeah so i'm on the board of conservation advisors for colossal biosciences and colossal biosciences yeah yeah it's a what a company they are headed up by ben lamb and george church oh he's legit yeah he's like the og yeah yeah dna exactly exactly so you know that should tell you enough in itself but um i can't say too much but what i can say is you're going to want to see what happens at the end of this year, because there's going to be something that the whole world is going to go, holy shit, at the end of this year.

1:03:21Other than that, what I can say is without a doubt, thylacine, the animal I mentioned, dodo birds, and woolly mammoth are all going to be walking around the planet in our lifetime. And I'm working with the team that's coming up with the conservation management plans for these species. They're all going to be walking the planet thanks to colossal in our lifetime. And this is a big deal. This isn't, you know, oh, I'm just this crazy, eccentric, Jurassic Park-y billionaire. This has phenomenal, grandiose conservation applications, like the carbon emission offset from putting mammoths back in the Arctic tundra, the regulation of disease and explosion of undulates, or not undulates, but fleet grazers in Tasmania by reintroducing the thylacine, you know, just the amount of hope and righting humanity's wrongs that putting the dodo bird back in Mauritius is going to do.

1:04:13It's the most everybody in the world knows what a dodo is, yet nobody alive today has ever even seen one. And, you know, it's crazy. And this company is going to bring these animals back and like fix humanity's wrongs when it comes to wildlife. So it's very, very exciting. I don't know about that dodo thing, man. My uncle went hunting once and he swears he saw one out there. Send me the picture. I'll send you the photo on Instagram. That's really fascinating. Can you walk me through the conservation thing? I didn't quite get how putting a woolly mammoth back has a carbon offset. Can you explain that to me?

1:04:46With pleasure. Yeah. So a lot of people don't know this, but during the Pleistocene Epoch, during the Ice Age, up in northern Alaska, Canada, that area, the Bering Land Bridge, that was not big, giant icebergs and crazy deep forest. that was an African savanna-like grassland. I shouldn't say African. It was like an African savanna grassland. You know what I mean? It was this big open savanna. And the reason being, woolly mammoths were up there and they used to knock over trees and they would propagate all of these grass seeds. And so what that does is that has multiple effects that ultimately keep the permafrost on the ground longer.

1:05:25And while the permafrost is on the ground and not receding, all of the carbon that's trapped underneath that permafrost remains trapped because the habitat stays cooler. So let me explain it as simply as I can. By putting mammoths back up in what used to be mammoth steppy environment, the mammoths come along, they knock over the trees. Okay. When they knock over the trees, that allows the grasses to grow and the ice to form and melt and ice and snow to create an ice cap over all of that. The mammoths then come along and trample that ice as they walk back and forth over it and push the snowpack into the ground.

1:06:00All of these effects together, no trees that are pulling in sunlight that are breaking up the snow, no insulating snow layer that has a bubble of air under it, so on and so forth, allow the earth to be cooled more up to six degrees. And with that cooling, that allows the permafrost to stay there longer as the permafrost recedes, as I'm sure you know, that releases all of that dead vegetation that's under there, which has a massive, massive carbon off. So by putting mammoths back up in that environment, they're going to tailor that environment to be the way that it was before human beings drove those animals to extinction 30 ,000 years ago and keep the Arctic colder, change the tundra, change the environment.

1:06:41I'm not talking about the whole Arctic. This is going to happen in portions, and it's going to be done very regulated and cleverly, and ultimately slow down the carbon release some insane number. I don't remember the metric off the top of my head, which is going to combat global warming. You know, it's going to slow down climate change substantially because we're not losing all of that Arctic ice. That is really incredible. I had no idea. I just thought, I guess I never thought about how animals could contribute to... Oh, yeah. protect against global warming. That's really, that is just one of those examples of all the environment and ecosystems being like interlinked to the point of, you know, like, you know, that game Jenga, where everything is stacked together.

1:07:23But then if you pull out enough pieces, the whole thing falls apart. That's probably a decent analogy for this kind of thing. I think I'm the one who might've told that to you, but I use that analogy all the time. I do that often where I repeat crap to people and they're like, wow, that's really smart. And then I look at their book and I'm like, crap, this is on chapter three. That's okay. That's okay. But yeah, it is just like Jenga. It's all connected and you pull out the wrong tile and the whole thing collapses. So what what Colossal is doing is they're putting some of those tiles back in. They're making the tower stronger.

1:07:51And that's really exciting. And look, from a selfish standpoint, I'm so excited. You know, I get to see mammoth, thylacine, dodo. I get to interact with these animals that are just so incredible that our early human ancestors got to see and interact with and right those wrongs that humanity have caused. You know, dodo birds, we just would come along and bop them on the head out of boredom. They weren't even good eating. And, you know, and we wiped them out very, very rapidly. The fact that Mauritius is going to have its national bird back for the first time in human history running around the island, like that's so exciting.

1:08:24It's super exciting. And it's it's fascinating that it's going to be possible. OK, not to rain on the parade. I have another possibly dumb question here. But if you bring a woolly mammoth back using this new technology, how is it born? Is it born out of an elephant? Correct. Okay, so something gives birth to it, and it's just, it doesn't give birth to its own species, basically. Correct. So what they do is they take lily mammoth, and I'm going to try and simplify this as much as I can. And by the way, I'm not George Church. I'm not a geneticist. So I'm the guy that goes, hey, here's how we take care of these animals, you know, not here's how we make them.

1:08:58So the how we make them is, in the simplest form of my understanding, is you take the closest living relative, in this case, the Indian elephant, And then you take existing DNA from woolly mammoth, of which we have tons. There's mammoth tusks being found all the time and frozen mammoths in the ice and blah, blah, blah. And you compare the two and go, all right, we take this mammoth DNA. Here are the pieces of the DNA of the double helix that are missing. Let's pull those pieces over from the Indian elephant because they're super close. All right, so now we have this Indian elephant. Okay, well, we know that a mammoth was basically an Indian elephant that had a crazy cold tolerance.

1:09:34Add that. All right. We know that a mammoth had a big, shaggy coat. Add that. We know it had bigger tusks. Add that. We know it had a larger forehead. Add that. And they genetically engineer all of these pieces of the puzzle and then impregnate a female Indian elephant with an embryo of this woolly mammoth, you know, artificially inseminated. And then 22 months later, the gestation period of an Indian elephant, it gives birth to a really hairy, big, four-headed, so on and so forth, Indian elephant that's actually a woolly mammoth, a recreated woolly mammoth. And so that's, yeah, that's the process.

1:10:09That's so interesting. It must freak out, the elephant that gives birth to this hairy, freakish-looking beast. Especially an elephant, because they're so intelligent. They're probably like, oh, I fucked up. Yeah, who did I sleep with? What happened last night? Yeah, exactly. That is so, okay. That's amazing for sure. It's mostly the same DNA, but maybe not exactly the same as a real mammoth. Is that the case then? I'm sorry. I'm just blanking on the number right now. I want to say it's like 99.6 or 99.8 % the same. So I mean, very, very close. Is it habituated like a real mammoth would have been?

1:10:48You know how sometimes animals that don't of a mother, they raise them in a zoo and then it like can't find its own food because it doesn't know how. Is that going to be a problem for these mammoths? So it shouldn't be because, you know, if myself and the other conservation advisors, and by the way, they have an incredible board of people like I highly encourage anybody to go check out Colossal Biosciences website and see who's on their team. People way more qualified and smarter than I am. Their goal is to not make this, you know, a fluffy, scruffy pet, right? Not something that runs around following a person around because it was hand raised in a zoo.

1:11:21The goal is, I'm sure with the first generation or maybe several generations, there's going to have to be a pretty good amount of human involvement, right? They just they can't just throw it out there and be like, figure it out. But the idea would be after reaching a certain point of these animals, you know, they start to replicate and then they can raise their young and so on and so forth. Human contact should become very, very minimal. And it should just end up being the same as any other animal, you know, a deer or an elephant or anything else. Maybe they're not scared of people, but they're not habituated and need people for their survival.

1:11:54That's the idea. Are there any unintended consequences that they might be worried about? Maybe this is a George Church question, but you know how there's pigs in Hawaii because they brought them for food and now they screw up everything and dig up everything. Totally. Big time. Is there an issue that could happen with a woolly mammoth with that population? There shouldn't be because we're not putting mammoths in Hawaii. You know what I mean? We're We're not introducing animals. We're not putting them in places they shouldn't be. You know, we're not bringing animals and relocating them. And, you know, there's no Jurassic Park Zoo being made.

1:12:26This is being made very intentionally and ethically in order to restore the environment, restore species that have been lost. And so all of the consequences should be similar to everything that we faced in human history. So, for instance, a thylacine was driven to extinction due to the fact that farmers put a bounty on its head because they were killing Tasmanian sheep. OK, so if we get a bunch of thylacine, it's not like we're going to just dump them in Tasmania and be like, hey, good luck to you. You know, because three weeks later, they're going to start killing sheep. So there's going to be a fenced in area.

1:12:57They're going to be monitored, blah, blah, blah. There's going to be a big campaign to let people know if reintroductions, rewilding ever truly takes place into the whole island. Hey, everybody, you know, make sure you have a fence around your sheep and it should be an electric fence and blah, blah. So it's not like there's just going to like Jurassic Park, for instance, right? Oh, here's an island where we just dumped all the animals. Come and take a train ride. You'll be fine. It's not like that. You know, it's very calculated. It's very thought through. I'm only a tiny, tiny piece of that group of people that are working on that.

1:13:28But it should there shouldn't be any unintended consequences. That being said, who knows, right? When you put a mammoth back, we're probably going to learn stuff about mammoths. We didn't know because they haven't been around for 30 ,000 years. Maybe they're incredibly docile. Maybe they're super dumb and come walking through people's living rooms. You know, maybe they're really, really violent. The history tells us they're not, but you don't really know. But the point is that we're not going to be so hands-on with them that we really need to encounter problems. I suppose you could also breed the first few generations of these to not be super violent.

1:14:00Exactly. And to be mostly docile, but still walk around and crunch down snow. It seems like that's something. I mean, it's so fascinating to be in the beginning of a species. Exactly. You have a blank slate with what you can do with this. This is going to be the biggest news in the world, first of all. It already sort of is in some regards. But when it actually happens, the whole world's going to come to a screeching halt to see this, right? For sure. We've been able to engineer them with bigger fur and longer tusks and larger size and blah, blah, blah. I think we could probably make sure, and I'd have to check with George.

1:14:32I'm pretty sure we can make sure they're not overly aggressive or whatever else. because this is genetic engineering, by the way. You know, like we're not trying to pretend it's not. We are engineering animals to be back to what they were some 30 ,000 years ago. So amazing. Man, we'll have to do another show when the stuff is all public because I know there's a lot you can't talk about on the record. Oh, definitely. But I'm blown away by this. And it seems like we could do, with that technology, I mean, you could, there's so many endless possibilities. I'm speechless. Yeah. Mosquitos that can't transmit disease.

1:15:03Oh, yeah. But outcompete current mosquitoes, for example. and that's just mosquitoes. So this is a big company, by the way. It's not like it's like me and a group of nerds in a room on the weekends. Yeah, this is a large company that's growing very rapidly and so on and so forth. But what we should do at some point, Jordan, is you, me, or maybe just you and Ben Lamb, the CEO, should jump on because he can talk you through. I'm probably being too cautious because for obvious reasons, there's certain information I can't divulge, but he runs the show. So yeah, he's someone you'd be worth chatting with, but it is fascinating what they're doing, what the group is doing, the future of this, like the profitability side of the business, the other animals that are on deck, some of the larger implications for conservation, some of the larger implications for human health.

1:15:48Like there's a lot going on with this and it's really exciting. Yeah, definitely introduce me to Ben. I would love to talk with him. I think that, I mean, provided that he's able to slowly explain a lot of this stuff to me because a lot of it's kind of complex. I mean, I didn't even understand the carbon footprint thing. And that's probably the easy part. He's smart enough to explain it to me and I'm a dum-dum. So I definitely think he can get it through to you. Thank you very much, man. I really appreciate you coming back on the show. We'll have you back again at some point, I'm sure. And just always appreciate the work that you do.

1:16:19There's no scenario where I would go milk sea snakes. So it really does take - Not yet. A special breed. Two or three more podcasts. We're going to talk again about that. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Thank you so much, man. All right, buddy. Thanks for having me. I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, here's a preview of my conversation with one of al-Qaeda's most respected bomb and poison makers who swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden himself. Here's a quick listen. We took so many prisoners. 80 of them were taken to a clearing, and it was decided there and then that these people will have to pay for the crimes that they did.

1:16:59Seeing the bloodthirsty nature of people who, just until a year ago, I used to see them as sweet, tender, decent, good people, suddenly basically became people who would use chainsaws to dismember these people alive. How could one year in Bosnia, one year of ugly conflict, turn these wonderful souls into ugly, bloodthirsty individuals? When I went to sleep that night, all I could think about was, How could I unsee what I've seen? None other than the mastermind of 9-11, Khalil Sheikh Mohammed. He said to us, you should go to Afghanistan, where the training camps are reopening, to become good at bomb making, to become good at urban warfare, to become good at assassinations, at kidnapping, a new kind of war that will never be fought in the mountains anymore, but it will be fought in every urban center from the pole to the pole.

1:17:55Suddenly, you know, I thought that the nature of the war is changing from, you know, fighting in the mountains of Bosnia. I mean, basically, we are talking about gassing people in cinemas and nightclubs and trains. Of course, that was unsettling, but I thought this is just the ranting of one insane individual. Al-Qaeda carried out its first serious attack against American interests. Everyone was jubilant in the camps. They were firing bullets into the air, you know, in celebration and shouting Allahu Akbar. we are no longer just a bunch of freedom fighters. We are now bona fide terrorists. To hear why and how Amon Dean eventually switched sides from being a jihadi to spending eight years as an MI6 spy trying to take al-Qaeda down from the inside, check out episode 383 on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

1:18:47Like I told y 'all, fascinating guy. I mentioned some of the stuff about the woolly mammoth coming back. I'm actually doing a whole show about that. So stay tuned for that. I'm doing that with the CEO of the company that is doing that. So we're going to get a real deep dive into bringing back extinct species using their DNA straight out of Jurassic Park, y 'all really interesting and worth doing a whole show. I almost didn't even finish in time because it was so dang interesting, man, the ecosystem, the wildlife stuff. It is fascinating. And if I wasn't so comfortable in my air conditioned casa here in California, I would consider, no, I would never consider going to the jungle with Forrest, but I'm glad that we can do it through these conversations.

1:19:24All things Forrest Galante will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or ask the AI chatbot also on the website. Transcripts are in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support this show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. We also have our newsletter. Every week, the team and I dig into an older episode of the show and dissect lessons from it. So if you are a fan of the show, you want a recap of important highlights and takeaways, or you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do just that.

1:19:55JordanHarbinger.com slash news. That's where you can find it. And don't forget six minute networking also at JordanHarbinger.com slash course. I'm at JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Milio Campo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends and you find something useful or interesting. And hey, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

1:20:25And even people you don't even like, just share it with them too. Why not? They already don't like you. They're not gonna be annoyed, any more annoyed with you if you send them this podcast. But if you do know somebody who loves wildlife and exploration and animals, definitely share this episode with them. I think it would be a good one for them to crack open the show with. And in the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show. if you need to milk any venomous snakes, for example, so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.