304. Forrest Galante: Why Comfort Is What Actually Ages You

22:50Gary Brecka:Like the red blood cells weren't touching. They weren't clumped up. And as I found out what that was from, what's called a Rulo and repolarization, I realized that, you know, that's why I always feel so good when I'm out in Colorado with my wife. We have a log cabin out there. I will tell you to this day, I say this all the time and nothing makes me feel better than putting on a rucksack and going for this three and a half mile loop that i have in the woods love it and i come back and i'm like recharge dude the lights are on we've been forest bathing in ancient in eastern medicine for centuries right right um and like we were talking about before we got here if something's around for 5 000 years it's probably because it works you're not gonna be like yeah look it didn't work the first 5 000 but maybe next year you know like Like, yeah.

23:37Gary Brecka:Do you feel disconnected now when you're not in nature? Not really, because I am a modern person. And it's not like I, like I said, I don't want to sleep on the ground and live in a tent. And, you know, like, I don't want to do that. I want to have nice things and have creature comforts, but I also understand the value. And what I do see, and this has taken a lot of sort of self-awareness, if I'm home for too long, and if I'm too consumed with work, and this could be the case for anybody, I don't care what your profession is or anything else. If I'm too consumed with work and I'm waking up and I'm going to the office and my only reprieve from work is going to the gym, which I'm still in artificial lighting, you know, and I'm still wearing sneakers on a rubber mat.

24:16That's my only reprieve from my work. My physical, well, even though I may get fitter because I'm working harder and I'm on a consistent diet, my physical and mental wellbeing is not as good. And I have realized, and this is maybe just about me and not everybody, but I need to get into nature minimum, minimum once every other day. and it can be as easy as just going for a half an hour walk in my garden you know i have a nice garden i can just take my shoes off walk around the dirt trail in my garden sit there look at the bees pollinating the flowers you just leave my phone alone it doesn't have to be for six hours it can be 30 minutes but if i don't do that and it's very easy to slip into not doing that and people listening at home are thinking i do that every day do you though do you know what i mean think about it for a second do you yeah if you don't do that at least if i don't for seven eight days, that compounding starts to really wear on me.

25:06And I don't do all the amazing things that I'm learning from you, all the biohacking and things like that. I think there are ways to combat it. And there's a whole nother side of this. It's like, well, why aren't all the people in the middle of the Amazon jungle, the healthiest in the world? And we can talk about that as well, because there's a flip side to this coin. But the point is, I think the modern human living in North America, in the Western world, their biggest reality for mental health issues, for physical health issues is a disconnection from nature.

25:32Gary Brecka:Wow. That is a bold statement, but I can't say that I would disagree with that at all. Based on my own human experience, number one, I mean, I grew up on a 300 acre tobacco farm and I spent my entire childhood outside. In fact, my rule with my father, who was a disciplinary and he was a Navy captain, was you have to be home by sundown. That's it. So I loved it when I got that extra hour of daylight because sometimes it wouldn't get dark until nine o 'clock. Right. But as that sun was going down, I could feel my dad's like, you're like, I better get home. So I was more scared of my dad than it was of anything.

26:06Gary Brecka:And, and you know, and I didn't realize how valuable that was until very recently. Yeah. Right. The, the uniqueness of growing up like that. And I was actually fine to take a BB gun and just walk the stream and try to find a frog to shoot or, um, you know, I built so many tree forts that fell out of trees. And, and now I just, I really want to get back there. You know, I think I want to ride out my final days on a regenerative farm. Yeah. I love that. And I think that's part of the cycle, right? We all do it. It's a, it's no different to the guy who grows up in Kansas and then moves to New York city to make his nut, you know, and then wants to retire back on his farm in Kansas.

26:43Right. It's the same story, but I think we get caught up in this rat race. We get caught up on our phones, in social media, staring at a computer screen on our nine to five. And we forget that we're just a part of the program here. We are just something, another organism that is designed to be in nature. Don't want to be there 24 seven. I don't, you don't, nobody should, but you, you need it.

27:04Gary Brecka:Yeah. Um, so why is it then just to get back to what you were saying earlier that some of these tribes and remote areas that are in nature all the time, um, why is their health and life expectancy going the other? Well, so great question. And again, I'm not an anthropologist. I can't really, or a doctor, but this is just my opinion and my observations. Sure. First of all, we do need to live in a modern reality. Medicine is great, both Eastern and Western, in my opinion, doctors, hospitals, creature comforts. It is a balance. If you spend your entire life living in the Amazon jungle, you're going to get a parasite.

27:39And if you don't have medicine to treat that parasite, you are probably going to die a little bit younger than if you did, you know, and so on and so forth. So it is a balance. It's not like this black and white thing where it's like, oh, you should live off grid 24 seven and be completely disconnected from the modern world. And it's also not in my opinion, okay, you should live nothing but wired into the modern world. I think we should take the best of both worlds. Don't be an extreme either way. You know, I think take modern medicine for what it is. Use prescription drugs. If you need them, don't overdo it.

28:14You know, use your phone. I'm on my phone all the time. I'm probably on my phone four hours a day, but it doesn't mean that I'm so on it all the time that I never put it down. You know, it's like everything is a system of checks and balances. And so to answer your question, I think the reason that we see some and not all unhealthy tribal people and things like that is one. Now we're seeing obesity be rampant globally because of seed oils, fast foods, You know much more about this than I do. So they're getting this injection of Western culture by getting the bad, the worst, the baddest and the cheapest, including bad clothing, polyester clothing, bad foods, stuff that's cannibal, tinable, preservative, riddled, you know, all these things.

28:51And now that's being injected into their way of living. So you're actually seeing more increase in bad health because we're giving them the worst of our society. Wow. And then they're also not having the benefits of having the most up-to-date medicine, super clean things, sterilized things. You know, it's a balance. Like you have to have that balance. Yeah. I don't know if that explained it very well, but that's how I feel.

29:12Gary Brecka:No, it does. I mean, some evolution has got to occur. Of course. I know exactly what you mean. I mean, look, sedentary lifestyle, we were talking about this on a previous podcast this morning. Sedentary lifestyle is the leading cause of all cause mortality. I mean, sitting is the new smoking. Right. Totally. It just is. And it's what we all do. It's all because we want to be comfort. That's it. We want to be comfortable. We want the air, like you said, to be, I want a little bit cool inside in the summer. I want the lighting to be perfect. I mean, I've tried to modify my interior of my home because I spend so much time here to be more in tune with nature with circadian lighting and those kinds of things.

29:47Gary Brecka:But it is absolutely true. I am most at peace, happy, zen, focused, clear, cognizant, awake, like feel the less, least stressed when I'm spending time in nature. No question. But I think I interrupted you there briefly. You were saying that, or right, correct me if I'm wrong. We were talking about how sedentary is the worst. Yeah, I mean, sedentary lifestyles, the leading cause of all cause mortality. So the lack of movement, you know, we've got escalators, we've got moving walkways, we've got elevators, we've got cars, we've got everything to do what we were actually designed to do for us, for convenience.

30:22Gary Brecka:Right. You know, we, I have a saying that aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. The more aggressively you pursue comfort, the faster you age. I believe that. Full stop. And so challenging our bodies, hormetic stress, it's okay to be hot. It's okay to be cold. That's right. The sun is not going to kill you. In fact, it's the opposite. It's a life source. You know, most of us are not getting enough sun. It's not that we get too much sun. That's right. That's right. And, you know, vitamin D3 is a pandemic deficiency in the world. African-Americans are 85 % of them are clinically deficient in vitamin D3.

30:55Gary Brecka:And in the rest of the population, it's about 50%. Crazy. and this is when you think about the fact that it's the only vitamin that human beings make on our own just think how important that much be must be to human that's right survival and function you don't even need to eat or drink and you know what's crazy to me or breathe to gary is and and i'd love to actually get your take on this because you are the master of this craft we now by the way i have a sauna and a cold plunge love it i love my sauna and cold plunge love it love it to death would not give it up. But how silly is that? Imagine taking a sauna or a cold plunge to a guy in Africa.

31:31Imagine taking a treadmill to a guy in Africa and be like, just get on here for exercise. He's like, well, what am I chasing? You're like, no, nothing. Just run on this machine. Yeah, you're going to go nowhere. Yeah, he would look at you like you're an absolute lunatic. Same thing if you took a cold plunge to an Eskimo, right? Or a sauna to a guy who lived in the Panamanian jungle. He'd look at you like you're an absolute lunatic. But you'd look a mile and a half to get water any day of the week, right? Any day of the week. but we have now we've created so much pursuit of comfort to your point that we have to now simulate discomfort yeah i never thought about how oxymoronic it is but you're right it's crazy we now have to simulate discomfort as a tool to be healthy that's it because we're not doing it naturally we're not sleeping out in the cold and walking in the heat which these people all around the world are but not us we have to myself included i have to go sit in my cold plunge and get in my sauna.

32:21Gary Brecka:Yeah. And that's just a microcosm of how absurd we have created our culture. Like how, how backwards we're going. And it seems so, so crazy to talk about farm-raised, um, you know, like, uh, grass-fed meats and pasture-raised eggs and free range chicken. And there should be no other kind. I know there shouldn't be another kind, Gary. I was in Columbia one time. I went down there for a stem cell treatment. I was in Columbia and I'm in, I was in this restaurant and we're having this broken English conversation and I'm trying to ask the waiter if the meat was grass-fed. Yeah. And the reason why he was so confused was because he didn't know any other way that meat was raised.

32:59What else would it be eating? Yeah.

33:00Gary Brecka:He's like, this is the dumbest question. I bet. He must have looked at you. Did this fish swim in water? Totally. You know, like being like, what? You're an idiot. Totally. I thought you were a lunatic. Is this a swimming fish or a dry fish? Like, you know. So me asking him if this was grass fed, just threw his whole day for a loop. And I thought it was a language barrier, but it was a, what the hell else would a cow eat? Exactly. There's nothing else out there. I was like, you know what? Good point. We do have to ask these questions in the US, but we don't have to ask them here. People ask me health questions every single day about their labs, their sleep, their supplements, their genetics.

33:40Gary Brecka:I want to help every single one of them. And that's why I built Just Ask Gary. It's an AI trained on everything I know, including my protocols, my research, and my methodology. You ask the question, you get my answer. Any time of the day. Go to theultimatehuman.com forward slash AI and check it out. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. So you extended me an invitation, which I may actually accept right here on this podcast because I'm profoundly curious about this. there is a, an animal refuge in India. Yeah. Ventura? Ventara. Ventara. And it's run and operated and funded by a very wealthy family.

34:21Gary Brecka:Anad and Bonnie, the individual. Yeah, the son. The individual, the son. Yeah, he's a good friend of mine, a wonderful person. Oh, really? Yeah. Who must just have an absolute love for animals. Hugely so. Really? Huge passion, huge heart. Yeah, amazing guy. Yeah, he's just so obsessed with caring about animals. Yeah. Really, I love that. and, but there's a health and wellness component to it. Yeah. I'm a little freaked out because I don't want to get bit by anything weird. I'm not going to let that happen. And I know I'm a hard guy to trust. I know you said you're not going to let this out. It's just the dude in a cage in a river with the crocodiles, swim with the shark, and then, you know, eyeballing an elephant.

34:52Gary Brecka:I'm not going to let it happen. I promise, Gary. I promise. I promise. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to go here. Yeah. And I'm going to bring the best of modern biohacking to these elephants, which we'll talk about in a second. But first I want to talk about what this place is like. And what is your, you know, attraction and connection to this place? What can I expect when I get there? So my adoration for this place is, is I was very skeptical when I first went there, to be clear. You know, I heard about this very secretive zoo, quote unquote, in India that was owned by an individual who was a billionaire, sounded like something out of a James Bond movie, right?

35:32And I was like, I don't know, I was super skeptical. And then I went and I spent two days walking around it. And then Anad and Bonnie, the owner asked me like, well, what do you think? And I told him the goods and the bads in my opinion. And I'll be honest with you, most of it was very good. Cause it's, it's unbelievable. It makes any other wildlife facility look like a roadside attraction. I mean, it's, it's, you've never seen anything like it. You really haven't. If you see my videos, you'll understand what I mean, the way they care about the animals. But the point is the reason I lost my skepticism and why I'm so enamored with it is this place has fully dedicated itself to the animals.

36:06The animals don't serve the people, the people serve the animals. If you go to a zoo, the animals serve the people. You go there to be entertained by an animal, to see an animal on display. At Ventara, every single enclosure, every single animal, every single, anything is designed with the animal's welfare in mind, which is why when you and I started talking about it, I said, Gary, bring your hydrogen cellular machine or whatever it's called, please correct me here. and let's work on these arthritic elephants because elephants get some of the worst arthritis of any animal in india yeah man because in india they use elephants in a lot of places but i'm using india as an example they use elephants as as utilitarian tools they're logging with them they're riding them they're walking them on concrete all day long burning their feet and their joints give out these are the heaviest animals in the world oh yeah they're not made to carry 5 ,000 pounds of logs up and down mountains on concrete.

36:58And so some of these animals get such terrible arthritis that they have to spend their lives in water just to relieve the stress on their joints. And you're telling me, you're saying, Forrest, I've got this machine and please tell me the name of it. The hydrogen nanobath. The hydrogen nanobath that penetrates through the skin and people will come out of that machine skipping that have terrible arthritis. I want to do that for elephants

37:21Gary Brecka:because I care about animals more than people because I'm a bad person. So we're going to do this and document it. And I'm going to bring these, it's called a hydrogen nanobath. Yeah. And I use it with all my clients and athletes. And it's an absolute game changer. My wife actually has an L5 S1 fusion. Okay. From a really bad car accident she had years ago. And if you know anything about spinal surgeries, they never really fix anything. They kind of just kick the can down the road. They might stop some ridiculous pain, but then you just bought yourself another problem. And when it acts up, I mean, she just cannot sleep.

37:53Gary Brecka:Yeah. And so I'll put her in this bath for 25 minutes and she's good to go for seven or eight hours. That's amazing. I put Sean Ryan in there. Oh, cool. Yeah, yeah, I know. Former Navy SEAL. And so many folks. But hydrogen is the smallest, slightest element in the universe. I truly believe that the discovery of the role of hydrogen gas in the human body is the greatest discovery of our millennia. Really? That's a bold statement too. We just discovered hydrogen. Yeah. But its role in the human body is a selective antioxidant, its capacity to reduce inflammation. But even more fascinating, its capacity to reach areas of the body that are not reachable by other classic anti-inflammatories.

38:34Gary Brecka:And if I think about it, I won't say that I'm intimately familiar with an elephant's anatomy, but skin is thick. It's tough. That's right. It's coarse. It's very porous, though. It is. Yeah. Okay. So that hydrogen doesn't care. it will go right through that skin right into the joints into into the capsule of the joint through the ligaments through the tendons through the muscles even into the bone yes it is the smallest element that we know of and when it arrives there it will have a dramatic anti-inflammatory effect amazing pain modulation any inflammation so what a cool story i'll donate these machines.

39:15Gary Brecka:He does not need to buy them. We'll fly them over there and we'll go save some elephants. Let's do this, dude. Let's go. I'm jacked for this. We're going to bring the world's best biohacker to the world's most advanced wildlife hospital, marry the two things and hopefully relieve pain for hundreds and hundreds of elephants. That's so awesome. That's what it's all about, man. I'm really excited to do that. So what else, what else is there on this refuge? And how did he get into this? He's a billionaire. He loves animals. And is it a rescue? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have a never say no policy. So it doesn't matter if it's a giraffe in Namibia or a dog on the street of Mumbai.

39:53If it needs a home, if it needs rescue, if it needs medical care at all, regardless of the cost, they say yes. God bless him, man. It's incredible. They have helped over a million animals, both on the facility. A million animals. One million. They have helped over a million animals, both in the walls at Ventara and abroad, because they do conservation all over the world. And they have 200 plus elephants, 200 plus conflict leopards, thousands and thousands of animals of all kinds of shapes and sizes, different species. I mean, I unboxed a shipment that came in from a meat market in the Congo where he sent his people and they said, shut down this whole market.

40:27We'll employ everybody here for the rest of their lives. As long as you don't start this market, they put everybody, they gave everybody employment and conservation and they brought every animal. and took them to Ventara and we took 2000 animals out of boxes, animals with holes punched in them, animals with hooks in their stomachs, animals with ropes around their necks, everything like that. No way. What were they doing with the animals? Meat market. They're going to eat them. Ah. Yeah.

40:48Gary Brecka:But just a very cruel way to treat them before. Yeah. You treat it like an apple. You grab it, you pluck it out of the water, drill a hole in its shelf. It's a turtle, tie it to a stick, you know, whatever it is. Yeah. Oh man. And these are living sentient creatures, right? Yeah. And like, I'm not a tree hugger. Like I go fishing and, you know, I'll, like that, but there's a difference between going to get your, your meat and basically torturing an animal. And anyway, regardless, the point is, I think that with your amazing skillset coming to this place would be incredible. Yeah. Yeah. No, we are a hundred percent going to do that when we, when we're done with the podcast today, we're going to get our teams together.

41:23Gary Brecka:We're going to plan this and, uh, and we'll, we'll document the whole thing. It would be, that would be the greatest like gift to me too, to take some biohacking knowledge and bring it and to do a species that, you know, is just standing in pain because they've lived a life that wasn't the way that they were genetically designed to live. And what's so cool is a knot, as a friend, he trusts me. So if I say to him, hey, I'm going to bring Gary over and we're going to work on these elephants. Like, obviously we'll meet with the vet staff there and do it all properly. I'll give him all the science.

41:53Gary Brecka:Yeah. Send him the data ahead of time and all that. He's going to be like, whatever helps the elephants, you know, and that's so cool. Yeah. That's awesome. Did they have like fish? do they have uh i mean is there everything everything everything i'm so excited everything so excited to go to this place so as have you as you've done like all of these docuseries and and youtube videos and travel the world and know the world um do you have a favorite place you spend so much time in the water so do you find that um it's more fascinating what's beneath the surface than what's above the surface i just kind of like it all i mean i'm such a dork i think an earthworm.

42:32I find an earthworm just as fascinating as a panda bear. You know what I mean? Like they're all, everything has its own place. And what is the best place? I can't answer that. It's I can tell you my best place for diving and my best place for seeing reptiles and my best place for big mammals. And it's just, it's all different, you know? And we're so lucky because right here in North America, we have some of the greatest wildlife on the planet. And I think people think that you have to travel to the Serengeti of Africa in order to see cool animals. You don't. yeah we have incredible dude right here i could probably see a ledge from your window right here that has 5 000 sharks on it right now and you could have one of the best shark dives in the

43:09Gary Brecka:entire world 20 minutes from where we are sitting right now that's so awesome my wife's been trying to get me to go you know um i'll set you up dude andy casagrande yeah i know andy really well you do okay so he he's from naples and he knows my wife's family very well and he has been inviting me on shark dives. Um, and so I might have to take him up on a shark dive too. You should, ABC is the man. His shark dive videos are gnarly. Crazy. He's the best. Yeah. He's a, he sits in a, in a gold standard ABC. Have you dove with him before? Never dove with him. I've sat with him plenty of times and shared a drink with him and shared a meal with him.

43:44And he's a great dude. What's the gnarliest thing you've ever done under the surface of the ocean?

43:50Gary Brecka:Is it cave diving? Is it manta rays? Is it sharks? It was probably what I did earlier this year. So do you know what a Humboldt squid is? I know what a squid is just in general. So a Humboldt squid is a hive minded cyclical animal. So meaning they, they boom and bust in these amazing swarms, think like a bee swarm and they will in the sea of Cortez, which is in Baja, Mexico, they will appear and disappear once every 15 to 20 years, usually tied with the El Nino. Well, I don't know if you know this, but we have an El Nino year this year, Gary. So I got a call from a Mexican buddy who said, Hey, Forrest, the Humboldt squitter here, they haven't been here in 17 years, get down here.

44:28So I grabbed my whole crew by discovery channel crew. Don't let discovery hear this was zero plan in place, zero pre-production, zero thought, anything loaded my truck up with toys. I put literally like all my scuba gear in there, spearfishing gear in there, deep drop gear in there, brubs in there, ROVs in there, all my toys and just bombed down in Mexico. And I tell you all this because long story made short, maybe the gnarliest thing I've ever done in the water was we're drifting about 15 miles out into the sea of cortez 2000 foot deep bottom so there's no no seafloor wow and we have a swarm of squid around the boat now these squid you may not find them is it like you know when you look for birds and no so so sonar it's way gnarlier than that um so they don't show up on sonar because they have no swim bladder so a swim bladder is an air pocket in a fish that gets read by sonar so you can't tell they're on sonar so you They perform a vertical migration.

45:22They come up from the depths. They're a deep water creature that only comes to the surface during a certain full moon event in order to eat the small fish and things. So you're out there in the middle of the night in a tiny little pongo, a tiny little fish, a Mexican fishing boat on the Sea of Cortez, throwing lights over the boat to simulate moon light, to bring up the krill and the small things to then bring up a swarm of seven foot long squid. They're seven feet long. I can show you some pictures. Seven. Whoa. We got to throw that up on that. Look at mine. Don't show them that one. Look for a Scalante Humboldt squid.

45:53I'll show you some stuff will blow your mind. Yeah, I want to see that. And then. We're going to throw this up on the bod too. They have a beak, like a parrot beak, that's this big that there's only two people that have ever been, well, no, there've been more, but two relatively recent documented attacks, they'll slice you to pieces. And they're cannibalistic and they're swarming. So like a swarm of bees or a swarm of piranhas, once they get feeding, they will rip each other into shreds. They're fully cannibalistic or anything in their way, including sharks, including anything. So here we are.

46:23I haven't even heard of this. It's crazy, dude. I'll show you pictures. In fact, there might not be any when you're searching. I don't know. I might not have posted it yet. I'll give you, I'll give them to you first. You can have them. Give them to me first.

46:32Gary Brecka:They're all yours. We are throwing this up. Can I see the picture of the squid? I'm at least going to hold it up. You have my phone right there. Can you hand me my phone? I'll show you right now. And so here we are, Gary. Now, in order to not die, I did two things. So I get the squid up to the surface. I'm way out in the deep pitch black. I'm talking 1 a.m. Middle of the night, simulated moonlight, vertical migration, swarming Humboldt squid. And I get these squid to come up. Now, I don't want to be ripped to shred by these squids. So I put on chain mail, literally night style chain mail. Yeah, that shark.

47:02That's right. Neptunic shark suit. Exactly. But the problem with the chain mail, Gary, is that it weighs 50 pounds. So if that's me with one in chain mail.

47:11Gary Brecka:Whoa. So if these sharks attack, they can't, sorry, these squid attack, they can't get through the chain mail, the shark chain mail. So now I'm on a rope system hanging off the boat in the pitch black middle of the night with swarming seven foot long squid trying to attack me. These things are huge. Huge. Yeah. Wow. I got plenty more to show you. That's just one I had on my phone. And the only thing is like they have all these tentacles. They could just hold you and just kind of gnaw into you. Each one of those tentacles has about a hundred suction cups with razor sharp teeth on it. Plus the beak in the center.

47:46Gary Brecka:There's teeth inside that tentacle. Every single tentacle. That sounds like something out of a horror movie. It is. And guess what? They're gone already. They've disappeared again for the next 20 years. They were there for about three weeks and they're gone again. So I managed to get them, document it, go scuba dive in chain mail in 3000 feet deep water with a rope holding me to the boat while these squid were all over me. Yeah, because I imagine the chain mail is like a lead anchor that would just take you right down. Bye bye. And they were just going by everywhere. And dude, the crazy thing is I've dove a number of times in my life.

48:19Gary Brecka:Nothing close to what you're talking about. And I did two night dives. Night diving was so gnarly for me. Because when you talk about zero visibility, there's zero visibility. And you're holding a light and all you can see is like the sediment, you know, coming through the light. and as soon as you move the light your brain plays a trick on you and it's like something big just went right there yep like you see things you know that that are not there yep um and and as you're like moving this light around we did a um it was part of my dive certification we were only in like 30 feet of water yeah um and we all had the little globe things on the back of our our tanks and i I just remember being super petrified because if you shut the light off, that's it.

49:06Gary Brecka:It's a very special kind of black. It really is. It's a kind of black where you don't know if your eyes are open or closed. Yeah. And then when you're neutrally buoyant, which means you're not going up or down, you're neutrally buoyant other than the pressure in your ears. You can't even tell whether you're swimming down or you're swimming up or you're swimming level. You think you can. Yeah, you can't. You can't. No. Three dimensionality. And people that were on the night dive with us were banging into the reefs and swimming into the, swimming right into the bottom. And they warned us about all this, but it is really, I think a humbling feeling.

49:40Gary Brecka:And it's, it makes you realize how small we are. Yes. And that's an important thing, by the way. It goes back to what we were talking about earlier in the pod. It is an important thing to realize how small we are. Yeah. I think we as human beings, I don't care if you're the most humble person in the world, have huge egos. because we think we sit on top of the food chain like no other creature. We control our environment. We manipulate it to build high rises and cities and roads and cars and blah, blah, blah. We can protect ourselves from anything because we have guns and clothing and can build tanks.

50:13We're not, we're very small. We're just little ants on this planet, you know? And it's important to get that bit of reality check.

50:19Gary Brecka:Yeah. I think. I'll tell you what, one way to get it is to go night diving. I mean, if you've never done it, You don't know what I'm talking about. If you have, you know exactly what I'm saying. There you go. So, I mean, have you done a lot of night diving? Tons. Tons. Hundreds and hundreds of nights. What's the whole purpose of that? Because are there just things that you only see at night? Yeah. Like these squid. You would never see the squid during the day. Yeah. One in a billion chance. And I mostly night dive lobster hunting because lobster come out at night. So I mostly go night diving to hunt lobster.

50:50We eat a ton of lobster.

50:51Gary Brecka:You don't have to do that right here in the Keys. They have lobster. I know. I know. And they just grab. I know. It looks so much easier. than where I have to do it. You have like 90 of them in a day. That's like. I know. It's way better over here than where I live. But yeah, I've done a lot of night diving. Night diving for sharks because you see shark behavior different at night. A lot of sharks are nocturnal. That's gnarly too because then you, once they're out of your beam of light, you don't know where they are. Nope. And sometimes you only find them when they bump into your tank. Yeah, I swear.

51:17Do they bump you? Oh yeah, because they'll feel with their noses. So sometimes you're shining your light in the dark and all of a sudden you go, and you look and there's a tiger shark that's bumped your tank.

51:25Gary Brecka:Aren't, I remember we studied sharks in human biology. It's something like the ampulla of water or something. The ampulla of Lorenzini. The ampulla of Lorenzini. That's it. Ampulla, I really slaughtered that. That's okay. I did take some marine biology. But, and this is a sensory organ that's in the nose of the shark. I'm going to bastardize this and you'll clean it up. But these animals have so many different ways of communicating. They don't have stereoscopic vision because their eyes are on opposite sides of their head. Correct. But they can see better in the water than we can. I remember learning about how in a school of fish, and you tell me if this is true or not, in a school of fish, like a dolphin or a shark can be on the outskirts of this school and knows which fish is in trouble.

52:11Gary Brecka:That's right. And can go right in and hit that fish. That's right, yeah. Yeah, and that's mostly about reading body language cues. So if you look at a school of 500 fish, you can't pick a fish because that's the whole reason fish school. safety in numbers but if you look at the school of 500 fish and one of them has a fin that's wobbling a bit funny or is swimming a bit different and there's a pattern recognition element you're looking at the pattern and you're looking for the disruptor of the pattern and whoever this disruptor of the pattern is there's something off about that and that's who you target wow yeah yeah i remember reading about that i was just so fascinating fascinated by it um and it's been decades uh ago that that we learned about this and marine biology is part of my uh human biology schooling.

52:54Gary Brecka:And, and I was just so fascinated about it. It's like being able to like stand at the side of a crowd, if you're a police officer and be like, that's the dude that's committing the crime. That's right. It's the same, same thing. And do that. And then, you know, the, the way that they sonar communicate to, and it's a lot more intelligent than we think it is. Absolutely. It's not just locating. It's like a language. That's correct. Yeah. And we're learning more and more in so many more mediums than we think. For instance, going back to elephants briefly, and then we'll come back to marine mammals.

53:30Elephants, we now know, communicate through vibrations in their feet. So now we have recently learned in the last 20 years or so, maybe 15, that an elephant five miles away can trumpet. And it's not just the sound and the acoustics, but the vibration from that trumpeting through the ground and up through the petrodactyl feet of an elephant that is sending a message. And they're speaking a language that way. In addition to that, we're starting to see and understand and not fully understand, but recognize that there is actual telepathic communication that we don't really understand outside of the sound communication in marine mammals.

54:04Things like orcas, gray whales, blue whales can actually telepathically communicate, not through body movements, not through sound, actual mental connection that we do not understand. But what we do understand is that the medium of saltwater travels messages better than than we really know. But we don't really understand what's happening. But we're starting to realize that two whales can be swimming together and one can tell the other something without any physical cues, without any sound cues, nothing else.

54:31Gary Brecka:No. Isn't that amazing? Wow. And so they could call each other over. they can yeah you know it's yeah i had an argument with a friend of mine uh a while ago that said uh try to convince me that dogs don't feel emotion well he's wrong that's what i said i go first of all you don't have a dog yeah so let's just start there but you know i grew up with black labs and i'm like listen this dog feels guilt oh yeah shame happiness like he literally wants to come out of his own fur oh yeah when he sees me um anger the whole he's like no no it's all instinct dude they don't feel any emotion they're in the same mood all the time they're just reacting based on uh instinct and i'm like you're wrong like if i walk in the house and my dog had ate a bag of candy the bag of candy is nowhere in the room that i'm in dude the shame oh the embarrassment that i look at you yeah look at you in the face oh yeah turn their head away if you know me you know i don't recommend anything I haven't personally tested.

55:30Gary Brecka:That's not a marketing line. That's just how I operate. I've been on the road my entire career, different time zones, brutal schedules, no margin for days off. And so I'm constantly testing what actually works in my own body. NAD was something I keep coming back to. It's the molecule your cells use to produce energy and repair, and it declines faster than most people realize. When I found Symbiotica's liposomal NAD, the absorption technology is what got my attention. I tested it. I felt it. And it's been in my bag ever since. I'm always evolving what I put in my body. And this one has stayed on the list.

56:02Gary Brecka:I'm genuinely excited for you to experience it. This is the standard we hold every product to before it even reaches you. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. Are we starting to understand like that animals have the same level and awareness of emotion that humans do and may be able to communicate that? I think in many cases, greater emotional intelligence than we have. Um, but you know, it's interesting, you know, we're talking about, um, forest bathing and the fact that if it, it's been happening for 5 ,000 years and if it's not broken, don't fix it. Same thing with animals. We have known if you read old biology books, you talk to old trackers or, or old shaman or, or, you know, people that have worked with animals hundreds of generations ago, dozens of generations ago, they talk about animals, understanding and animals, knowing what you're thinking and why a certain animal is so hard to hunt.

56:57Gustav's a perfect example. If you know, he is the crocodile. Um, is he a crocodile hunter? No, sorry. Gustav was a very, uh, infamous crocodile that killed like 130 people, but every single, don't fact check me on that number. He killed a ton of people, but every single time the hunters would show up, he'd disappear. And the second he would, the second, the day I'm talking within hours, the hunters would leave, he'd be back to basking on the bank, sunning himself, relaxing like he's the king of the jungle. It took like seven years for them to shoot Gustav because he was so mentally aware that there was a change, probably an energy of predation that he went to hiding.

57:34And then he'd come back out as soon as the hunters left. Nobody was calling him and being like, Hey, Gustav, there's a hunter here this week. Yeah. Yeah. But it took like seven years for them to kill Gustav, the man eating crocodile. He knew that they were stalking him. He knew. And he could just sense it, feel it. We don't know why, but the point is for 5 ,000 plus years, we've been saying animals have a certain intelligence. They have a certain awareness. They know certain things. And then in our modern society, we went, nah, animals are all just dumb animals, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's all instinctual.

58:02It's all instinctual. And now we're starting to come back around again and go, well, actually there's a lot of things that we're learning scientifically that align with our beliefs from 5 ,000 years ago.

58:12Gary Brecka:Yeah. And we look at the age of some of these marine mammals. You know, I read the other day about sharks living over 500 years. Yeah. Greenland sharks. The Greenland shark. And what do we attribute that to? I mean, they're down at the depths, so they're under a lot of pressure. Yeah. Right? They're slow. That's right. Right? Their metabolism is very slow. That's right. They don't, I guess, have any, can't have a lot of natural predators if you're around for 500 years. Yeah. And I wonder what we could borrow from that for human physiology. Maybe we should just slow down. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. They must not be very stressed out.

58:51You realize that in the natural world, anything that lives a very slow lifestyle has to live a very long lifestyle. So whether you're looking at Galapagos giant tortoises or Greenland sharks or sloths, They have very extended lives because everything they do is at a fraction of the speed that we do things. They eat once a week. They barely swim. They barely sleep. Whatever it happens to be, you know, they do things slowly. And when you do everything slowly, it extends your lifetime. Now, whether that's the case for human beings or not. I don't know if it fits with the sedentary lifestyle thing.

59:28It doesn't. But that's different because none of them are sedentary. They can be slow, but they're not sedentary. Okay. A shark's always moving. If a shark sedentary, it dies. Yeah. So they just do things slowly. Now, some of these animals like Greenland sharks, for instance, they don't reach sexual maturity, the ability to reproduce until they're 50 years old or 100 years old. That's what I read, too.

59:48Gary Brecka:Over 100. Some of them, 150 years, they estimated before they made it. Right. Exactly. Dude, that's a long time to get laid. That's a long time to wait. Yeah. Yeah. In college. Yeah. Most of us can't wait till we're 16, you know? My great grandfather wouldn't have lined it up yet. That's right. That's right. That is so wild. I mean, all these parallels in the animal kingdom. And, you know, I think what else is fascinating is how little we actually know about the depths of the ocean. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think we we've got a pretty good handle on what's going on above sea level, but there's so much landmass and so many miles and miles of uncharted waters in the ocean that there's it seems like every year or two, there's some new like wild discovery about something that's living down.

1:00:39Gary Brecka:deep down there. Like in your journeys, like doing all these docuseries and everything, is there anything, I mean, aside from this, this squid episode that you had, which is, that's, that is just riveting, man. I mean, that is wild. Like that's reframed the way that you think about our connection with nature or, or what you think about the way that human beings live, or there's a way that animals live. I mean, you, you've had, you've been connected to so many different species in so many different environments, you know, it's fascinating to me. I don't, I can't think of one specific example to answer that question.

1:01:17I think it's just a compounding amount of information. You know, the more time I spend exploring and learning and seeing new animals and learning about different ecosystems in different environments, the more I realize that we as humans are just a piece of it. And my greatest awakening or awareness is maybe it's that elephant thing I story I shared, or maybe it's seeing this, these pilot whales get slaughtered. I don't know what it's been. There are very impactful moments, but I think it's just a big picture that is formulated for me. And it's not necessarily the right picture. Yeah. I'm not an expert in this field, but I've started to paint a picture.

1:01:53And I think part of it is getting older, growing up, having kids, having a wife, having a family. It's not just about like, Oh, I'm going to beat my chest and catch a snake or I'm going to travel somewhere. Nobody else has traveled before, but it's about what is exploration? What is the human species role on this planet? Is it to be a dosing of the planet as the smartest and most intelligent creature on this planet? Should we not use that to our advantage to take care of everything? Do we not have this massive responsibility as human beings, as the smartest, most sentient being on this crew on this planet to then take care of it?

1:02:28I think we do. And my best version of doing that, because I don't have billions of dollars and I don't have incredible technology and I'm not as smart as a lot of other much smarter people is to share a passion. Yeah. Because I think if I can share that passion, then more people can feel that responsibility.

1:02:44Gary Brecka:Yeah, you talk about the closer you get to nature, the more you want to protect it. That's it, 100%. And you're trying to bring people at scale closer to nature. If I can, yeah. You know, I had a really wild experience with my family. I took the whole family on what they called an extreme vacation to Costa Rica. Oh, cool. And we hired a guide that was also an adventure series racer, but it lived in Costa Rica's entire life. And we did whitewater rafting and rappelling and canyoneering and ziplining and all the stuff. So much fun. It was one of my favorite vacations. My daughter hated it because they strapped her on a, you know, like a zipline from the top of one of these waterfalls down into the down into this valley.

1:03:29Gary Brecka:But what really fascinated me was the comfort level that this guide had in nature. So he talked about what was the most poisonous snake. It was a... Fertilance. It was a... No, I think it was a viper or it had a... The head was shaped like a starfish. It had a point on the top of its head. So all vipers have that. So in Central America, I think it would probably be a fertilance or a type of pit pit viper pit viper yeah yeah that's what he called it um and this thing was stuck to a tree it was bright colored i wouldn't say it was like yellow but it was stuck to a tree he had been talking that would be an eyelash viper okay so we found an eyelash viper we weren't super excited about it okay um small right very small yeah eyelash viper yeah and he was like if this snake bites you yeah you will not make it out of the jungle that's right and um and then he would open these flowers and down in the flower would be these tarantula size spiders, but he would slide his hand in there and let it walk onto his hand and he would just lift it out.

1:04:36Gary Brecka:Love it. You love it? Yeah, I love it. I love it. Count me in. We didn't love it, man. And then we stopped at this place called the Pecori Lodge on the Pecori River. You raft in, you stay overnight and you raft out. and he would go out and find these bullet ants. They were the biggest damn ants I'd ever seen. Same thing. He was like, this is one of the most either poisonous or venomous creatures. The most painful bite in the animal kingdom on the Schmidt pain index. On the Schmidt pain index, right? It's a real thing, yeah. Same thing. He put it on a wooden spoon and it walked up this wooden spoon and it walked on his arm and he's describing to us and then he would just take the spoon and he would and flick it off and i was like how do you know that that's not going to bite you yeah um so there's this i don't even really know the point that i'm trying to make but this oneness that he had with nature that i found so fascinating yeah and i was really fascinated by this guy because he wasn't doing it to brag or show to us yeah he was really interested in us understanding what this animal or this insect was and how beautiful it was and obviously he could have stepped on it yeah um yeah but he didn't want to like he thought it was a beautiful creature to me there was something in the way he felt about that environment or that insect or that animal that they felt back at him like when you talk about the lack of threat from the elephant, he was able to exude this sense of not being, that spider could have bit him.

1:06:17Gary Brecka:He didn't grab the viper. Smart. Very smart, yeah. He did not grab the viper. But the bullet ants walking up the arm, this big spider crawling down, he grabbed a bunch of other snakes. I bet. He was snatching, I mean, big, big snakes out of trees. Out of the trees, uh-huh. Yeah. And were they pythons? boa constrictors that would crush you and it would wrap a little bit on his arm and he would just hold it and then he would unwrap and kind of let it go and snake would just kind of slither off yeah um but just in the time that we spent with him we got to know him for a week um he was just so comfortable in in that environment with all of this shit around that could really kill you you forget that we've been conditioned now in our world to fear all these things yeah But our ancestors and people around the world live just like that guy.

1:07:10You know, they have enough exposure to those environments to understand what can kill you and what can't kill you. There's a reason he didn't grab the eyelash viper, right? Yeah, he didn't grab that. He knew that that one's a no-go. Yeah. But he also knew that if you let the bullet ant walk up his arm, it wasn't going to do anything unless he tried to pinch it. Right. If he had tried to pick up the bullet ant, it would have bitten the hell out of him, you know? So that level of comfort and that level of adoration comes from a respect and the respect comes from understanding.

1:07:38Gary Brecka:But his level of calm while he was explaining, he didn't say the Schmidt scale pain, but he was like, it was the most painful bite. Yeah. So he's like, if this bites me, it is the most painful bite known to man. Known to man. Yeah. And if this viper bites me, I won't make it out of the jungle. and this, you know, uh, spider, uh, uh, bites me. I immediately am going to the hospital. Yeah. A hundred percent. But he just in all these venomous and poisonous, you know, insects and everything around, he was calm. He had a pair of Tevas on. Yeah. Teva sandals with, with a little, little strap. The straps.

1:08:15Gary Brecka:Yeah. Boots up to here. I'm more of a boots guy, but yeah. And the leg, and the leg pants and everything. But, you know, I, I just found that so fascinating. His, his level of comfort in the complete absence of fear, but also his absolute non-desire to cause them any harm. And, you know, what triggered my memory of this is when you talk about like these animals that are communicating without sound, like somehow even an insect knew this wasn't a threat. That's right. It just got picked up out of a flower, just walked on his arm, and it got put back where it belonged. There's a lot of things that we forget we understand without hearing cues, right?

1:08:57If you walk into a bar and you look at the bar and you look at the room of people, you can see the guy that's going to be a problem. Yeah. You know what I mean? He's me, he's looking at you, he's looking, he's furling his brow, he's clenching his fist. You're like, wait, that guy's going to be a problem. You know what I mean? We know that. The same way we know to turn over our shoulder and be like, oh, there's Jimmy. You know, I know Jimmy. Right. Why did I, what, what happened in my brain to make me look over my shoulder and see the guy I know walking across the street? We can't really answer that, but there's something there that we forget.

1:09:27We, there are other things and I'm not the most philosophical person in the entire world, but there are other things that we don't understand why we understand them. Do you know what I mean?

1:09:35Gary Brecka:And those are good examples of that. The quantum it's that everything is connected. That's it. Forrest, this is fascinating, man. I'm totally going to take you up on the offer to come to India. I would love to bring my team there. I would love to help some elephants. Let's do it. I would be absolutely humbled to bring the best of what biohacking has to offer for human beings to an injured animal. We have to do it. And then watch this have a positive impact on them. So I'm super excited about that. We'll document it. Maybe we'll get it on the calendar before the end of the year. 100%, Gary. So for my audience that's not familiar with you, how do they find you?

1:10:11Gary Brecka:Where can they see your docuseries? And please tell us what you're working on now. Sure, yeah. I have shows on all the various networks. Well, not really. I have shows, not all of them. Um, I have shows on HBO and discovery channel. You know, my favorite place that I've been working on for the last couple of years is YouTube. Um, really just launched a YouTube, uh, nearly three years ago. Now love doing YouTube, get to tell the stories I want to tell, go to the places I want to play. Um, and then all the various social media channels, just, just my name. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is awesome. So we're going to head into my VIP room because my VIPs have a whole bunch of great questions for you.

1:10:49Gary Brecka:But before we do, I wind down all my podcasts by asking my guests the same question. What does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? To me, being an ultimate human means giving back to the thing that makes you human. My passion is what makes me human, right? I have a passion for wildlife and I believe that we have a responsibility to care about it and protect it. And I give as much of myself as I can to that. And that makes me the most ultimate human that I can be. And I think anybody that does that around their passion, you do the same thing with biohacking and many other people that we both know, mutual friends of ours, do the same thing about their passion.

1:11:25If you can do that with your passion and give everything to that passion, I think that makes you the ultimate human.

1:11:31Gary Brecka:That is amazing. That may be one of the best answers. My podcast manager is back there going, that was a good one. Forrest, thank you so much for coming on the Ultimate Human Podcast, brother. We're gonna follow your journey. I hope you'll come back again. I would love to. especially after you release this new series, flipping the script on prey versus predator. And guys, until next time, that's just science.