Top DNA Geneticists are Building REAL Jurassic Park by 2030 | Forrest Galante

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So his species, and he spent like a hundred years at this facility, and people could visit him and stuff.

So they took Fern to that facility, and they've launched, I believe, four return expeditions to look for a mate since then.

Haven't found any, you know, they never found any before I came there. They've never found any since. I'm not saying I'm the only reason, but

there's certain tricks and tools and things. I didn't say that you did, but you know, we're doing it. Yeah, so unfortunately because they got upset about our finding and, you know, the sort of machismo around it, they haven't asked me to come back and look, but I happily go look for a male.

Do we know how old she is, approximately?

Somebody did some kind of like radio isotopic analysis. I think she's around 70 or 80 years old.

And how long would that species be able to live?

About a hundred. Yeah, maybe a little over a hundred, maybe 110, something like that. She's healthy now, though. I think if we'd left her.

So it's crazy. It's Fernandian Island, the island.

It's one of the most volcanic islands in the world. So there's lava flows constantly taking place.

And when you have a little patch of like jungle, right? It's not really jungle, but like scrub land and bush and trees and stuff. Then all of a sudden the lava flow comes down. It just blankets that kills everything there and it's gone.

And it doesn't exactly regrow through lava. So an island that used to be relatively green and have lots of patches of greenery. There's now like two patches of real greenery left.

So it's a relatively confined area. There is another tortoise there. I saw tracks of it. I'm almost certain.

It's just hopefully a matter of time until they find it. But like a 70 year old lady, she could have kids.

Yep. So unlike humans and other mammals, they can reproduce almost up until the day they die.

Oh, wow. And they even have spinal paws. Nope, no menopause. And they even have spur more attention. So if she had made it with a male five years ago, she could have hung onto that sperm in her system and then laid eggs five years later.

Oh, my God. Humans don't have that.

I know, right? I think I mean, I think I'm any kids you'd have.

I said, I'm getting goosebumps now.

That's also pretty cool, though, that you found this one in the cradle of the evolutionary.

Yeah, you know, invention itself and in the glampagos island. That's a place I've never been. My parents went, I think like 30 years ago.

But I mean, that's got to be unlike anything else on earth. No.

That was my favorite discovery or find ever. We found four shark species, a primate species, a Cayman, which is like a crocodile.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, of course you do. Yeah. But that, that one, that specific one, finding that animal that was that rare.

To me, that was the most incredible. And like you said, the cradle of our understanding of evolution, it was such a cool thing.

Yeah. Where did you find the Cayman again?

The Rio Apaporus area of Colombia.

Okay. Is that, that's not touching the Amazon.

It does, but much further down than where I was.

Okay. It is Amazonian though. It is Amazonian now.

Yeah, but doesn't touch the Amazon river. We were on a river called the Rio Apaporus River.

Okay. Got it. Yeah. The, the, the, the, the, the whole trail cam thing and like tracking species is like the coolest thing to me.

I was down there with our mutual friend Paul Rosalia.

So obviously he does a lot of the same stuff. Uh huh.

He has trail cams everywhere, also trying to find species that we may have never even heard of. Yes.

In the Amazon. And he's very likely to do stuff.

Yeah. I remember we were looking at some shots they had that are like hard to see because they were close, but not quite close enough.

And he's like, that's not a jaguar. That's not a such and such.

Something different. So what the fuck is that? Yeah. Which is really cool.

But we got to go out and actually lay a few new trail cams and like see the strategy of what it is.

And we didn't even do any of the more complex stuff.

You were talking about like dragging a dead car trails or stuff like that.

But it's really wild that you that we can actually use this technology now to be able to just put it there,

and you're going to get animals who are just in their regular ecosystem coming by and they're not suspecting anything.

It's not just like a human sitting there or something like that. It's an amazing development.

And it's evolving. It's such an incredible rate.

I was just working with a woman two weeks ago in Texas.

And she's using drone surveys at day and night.

So nighttime they use thermal ones and day they use camera ones to film elephant herds.

And then they take all the data of the elephants.

And it's credible. It looks like saying out of Iron Man.

They take all these like points on the elephant's heads.

If the elephant moves its head to the left, it's telling these two animals to go this way.

But this one to stay there. If it moves it's you know, I'm making up the actual analysis.

But it's like it's it's it's takes all these shots, composes them into a database.

Then AI runs all these analyses on it and goes, yeah, yeah, if the elephant moves left twice, nods left twice.

It means be careful. There's something in the bush over there.

Oh my God. And it's literally decoding the way like it can take a herd of elephants go.

That one's the matriarch. That one's the beta. That one's the omega.

These two are the babies. This one's this. This one's telling that one this.

This one's saying go over here. This one's pointing to water this way.

And like it's breaking down language that we as a human observer can watch elephants our whole life and go.

Yeah, I think that one's leading them that way.

But this is like, no, no, he's actually saying there's water here and watch out for that bush.

You know, it's like decoding the way they're communicating.

And you know, like AI's garbage still.

It's where the tip of the iceberg for what that's going to be in ten years.

I've been able to actually interact with publicly.

Yeah. Who knows what they got privately.

True. True. Yeah.

But yeah, the technology and the data is far surpassing me, drag, and dead animals around in the bush.

But I think one thing that we can never forget from a wildlife science standpoint.

And this is something that's gone away.

And part of that book I'm writing, you've got instinct is so important.

And we science denies that like feverishly denies that you should listen to your gut instinct.

Like field science.

It goes against human nature.

It goes against human nature.

But they're like, follow a protocol, create a grid.

You know, so like if you're doing a camera trap survey for an animal, the scientific way, you build a grid.

Okay, every 100 feet, 500 feet, you put a camera here, 300 feet this way.

You put a camera and you do a grid in a square.

Why?

I am a human being.

I'm a biological creature.

I can look at an area and go, that's a game trail.

That's where the animals will walk.

There's water here.

I know that they need water.

They're going to go to water.

There's a food source here.

See that be hive right there?

We know that this animal eats honey.

Okay, I'm going to put three cameras here, one here, and five here.

Not a square grid.

Like that.

Yes, you might cover more ground in your square grid, but use a combination of understanding and not just methodology.

Because just methodology is stupid.

Yeah, you answer my question for me.

I was going to ask you like, there's got to be room for both.

Like I was feeling it could go there, but also like scientifically we got to cover X amount of space to get something realistic data.

Right.

But you got to rely on that instinct.

Like when we went to that bush, that area,

that was pure instinct.

It went against what was being told, which is go up to the top where it's a little bit wetter.

And there's a little bit more greenery.

Check the high elevation.

I just looked at a map and went trees there.

Yeah, that's my instinct and brain going, let's go to where there's trees.

If I was a tortoise, I'd want to be where there's trees.

Yeah.

That's it.

You have such it because you grew up among it as well.

It's just second nature for you.

You have that gene that you see.

When you go to some of these places, like when I met some of Paul's guys in the Amazon jungle,

who had lived there their whole life, where they'd hear a bird two miles away

and they'd almost be able to talk back to it.

They didn't have to sit there and Google this stuff for read a book about it.

Obviously, you've educated yourself over the years on a lot of different things,

but you were in it.

You grew up among it.

Not to be too meta here, but you can feel it in ways that I can't.

Anyone else listing pretty much can't.

Right, but you sitting here can tell when something's off with the audio in your podcast,

or I'm not in your space, but it's just different.

It's whatever you train yourself to have a instinct.

You know right now whether this is a good conversation for your show or not a great conversation.

It's great.

That's good.

I'm glad to hear that.

But you know that because this is what you're trained in.

The average person does not know that.

Just like I, not like Paul's guys because I don't know the Amazon like they do,

but I know big picture.

If I work here, I'm more likely to find the animal.

That's right.

And it's just, it's same if you're an investment banker.

You know, like this is the stocks we should trade and trust me.

I just, I got a feeling.

You know, it's just human instinct is an incredible tool.

It's just cool when it overlaps with nature.

I think that's like the coolest part of all.

I agree.

Real fast-fast.

I just got around the bathroom, but we'll be right back.

All right.

We're back.

So we, you and I were just saying this off camera,

but by the way, alluding to it.

So we might as well go into it, but you are an advisor for Colossal.

Yeah.

Who I had, Ben and Matt James in here together.

Yep.

A few months ago, fascinating stuff.

We're going to have, I know at least Matt coming back.

Good.

I think in the fall, I was talking to, he was here for like two days in July.

So we couldn't make it work, but he's going to come back because there was still so much more to go there.

But we're getting in the weird territory here.

For sure.

Yeah.

Colossal's weird.

I mean, what they're doing is weird, but it's cool.

What made you want to be on it as an advisor?

Well, I, I found out about it very early on, you know, like in the earth, because everything

I've done, like what we've been talking about is in this, not everything.

But a lot of it is in the space of looking for extinct animals, right?

And Colossal is literally a de-extinction company.

So Ben and, and Matt together, they reached out to me and Matt's become a very good friend.

But they reached out to me together.

They both are really, but they both reached out to me very early on when there was probably

25 people like brainstorming and working at Colossal and just said, hey, you know, with you being

this kind of figure in finding extinct species, would you be willing to be a part of what we're doing?

And I had my reservations, like I think anybody does when you hear about what they're doing.

And I was like, is this real?

Is this some pharinose thing?

Like what is this?

And well, you know, it sounds crazy.

Like now they've proven themselves, but at first it sounded crazy.

And we just had a few conversations and I just said, I'd love to be an advisor.

You know, I'd love to help you.

If you do make woolly mammoths and dodoes and thylacine and all these things,

I'd love to help come up with the plans as to what to do with them from a conservation standpoint

so that it's impactful and has big purpose to the planet.

And something that I don't know if they talked about on your show or not, but they also do a lot of good conservation work.

That was the, that was the key for me.

And that's what I want to continue to see moving forward because if,

and we can get into the nitty gritty with this because you've been involved for a while.

But if, in fact, trying to make a woolly mammoth and the work you're doing on just in gene sequencing before you

to make a species can help solve the problem of, I forget what it's called,

but like the elephant's herpes disease.

The kids 20% of, right, if it can help solve something that kills 20% of all current elephants

and regardless of what we figure out or don't figure out with a woolly mammoth,

that research legitimately is able to do that and, and help, you know,

such a magnificent creature in conservation right now.

Yeah.

Then to me, there's something that's very worth it.

That's it.

I mean, a good example is, you know, the dire wolf news, right?

You saw that.

Yeah.

Big, loud, splashing news, controversy, everything on it.

That's great.

And I think it's really interesting.

It's interesting proof of concept, whatever.

Dire wolves aren't going back into the wild, into the wild.

But the thing that didn't make the news that should have is the same technology they used for that.

They used to clone red wolf.

Yeah.

North American red wolf.

And it sounds like you guys talked about, so I won't go into detail.

But like, no, not please do because people got to hear this who haven't heard that.

Sure.

North American red wolf is the most critically endangered wolf species on planet earth.

And colossal use the same technology or some version of it that they used to make the dire wolf to make to clone red wolf.

So no matter what happens now, we'll never lose red wolf.

So as long as that company exists.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

It does make sense.

That's a huge win.

It sounds like it's a huge win.

The question that I still have on any of this, and I don't know, like, you know,

people like to point fingers at this stuff because you're working on something so new and it's controversial or whatever.

But like, I want people working on things.

Like, I think I think it's cool to try to find something we haven't done before.

That's how the human race moves forward.

But like, if you clone a red wolf, you're cloning at DNA.

You're cloning at sequencing.

So you're obviously cloning its looks, its features, all those things.

But can you clone its evolution?

Meaning like, I'm going to make something up right now that isn't real.

But let's say red wolves could jump 30 feet because they, you know, over millions of years

trained themselves in their environment to be able to jump 30 feet away from a fucking vice in those chasing them or something.

Can you really clone that trained behavior just by grabbing its DNA sequencing and saying, boom, we cloned?

My understanding of it, and I don't know.

Because I'm not a geneticist as I told you, I basically failed those classes in college.

But my understanding of it is the hardware is the same.

The software is different.

Yeah.

So we can make another Julian.

Not me.

They maybe can make another Julian.

Are you going to be a podcast host who has the same knowledge and skills and personality that you do now?

I don't think so because that's software.

Right.

So you can still jump as high as you can jump.

You'll be the same height, same color hair, same eye color.

But your software is completely pro, it's just different.

It's open to interpretation.

That's my understanding of it.

So does that mean like, again, you and I aren't the science experts here.

So just looking at it from like, what is this rather than the software that goes into it?

Does that mean that it's a new type of the same thing?

Oh, I see what you're saying.

No, so I think if you took that cloned red wolf and put it out with other red wolves,

it would not stand out as any different.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

It would just be another red wolf as part of it.

Now, the dire wolves, you know, they're genetically modified from gray wolf blah blah.

That's different.

And that was, I think that was just a proof of concept.

That's my understanding.

What do you mean that's different though?

Because there's no other dire wolves to put them out with.

You've brought something back that wasn't there.

You're starting from scratch in a sense.

Yes.

Whereas cloning a red wolf is you could take that red wolf and put it out with the pack.

It'll get accepted by the others.

It'll learn the same behaviors.

It'll hunt the same way, how the same way, den the same way, pop the same way.

It'll be a red wolf.

Because they exist right now.

We're working with things that actually we can quite literally copy and paste.

That's right.

And to me, like a very good example of that is the Northern white rhino.

There's only two females left of that species in the world.

If colossal, and I think bio-rescue, and I think there's a third partner,

but forgive me if I'm getting them wrong, are working to clone that.

If they can clone a male, and they can use their crazy blue genetic engineering stuff

to add diversity to the species, the genetic diversity, they can save that species.

To me, I'm getting the goose bumps again because that is what the technology is for.

The fact that human beings have fucked up so badly, do you care if I swear?

Just making sure.

Where do you know Jersey?

You said I don't know what you want.

Human beings have fucked up the Northern white rhino so badly,

poaching them for literally fingernail keratin.

That's what I, that's what I know Horn is.

But now, income colossal and Ben and Matt and all these guys with their big brains,

and their crazy technology, and they can go, hey, wait a minute.

Before we lose this incredible thing, these two Northern white rhinos,

give us some blood, some hair, some tusks, and whatever, some fingernails.

And I'm going to make a male, and then we can put that male back in.

And I'm going to make a female, put that female back in.

And in 10 years, we can have 150 of these rhinos.

Like, that's what it's all about.

You know, it's like, we're fixing, we're writing humanities wrongs.

Like, the crimes we've committed against animals.

It's not to stop extinction's a natural thing.

We don't want to stop extinction.

Like, you don't want to stop it.

What you want to do is stop what human beings have done.

Yeah, where it doesn't make sense.

You know, and where it doesn't make sense.

Human caused extinction because we wanted this skyscraper,

where this frog lives, or, you know, whatever it happens to be.

We just want to mitigate that.

And if that technology can be used for that,

I think it's the most wonderful technology.

So you're in support of continued nature, survival of the fittest.

You just want to stop for 8 billion people in the world.

That's it.

There's a perfect way to put it.

Okay. Yeah.

Got it.

Now, going back to the dire wolf example, though,

and let's even talk about the woolly mammoth,

which is one they're trying to bring back.

In this case, you are bringing back something

where it doesn't, it hasn't exist in thousands of years.

We don't have, you know, the active DNA to be able to do it.

So you're sequencing what you can to create it.

Do you, do you think that there is,

there are potential downsides to trying to do something like that?

Obviously, we can look at the conservation of current species

that it can help with.

But do you think there's a downside to creating woolly mammoths?

Are creating a dire wolf and putting it out into the wild

when it's not evolved from there?

100%.

There are going to be unintended consequences,

just like there are unintended consequences with AI

or any new technology.

When we got cell phones, now we're all addicted to cell phones

and we all hunch over staring at our cell phones.

It's still allowed the whole world to communicate.

Yeah.

Same with the internet.

Now, everybody's addicted to porn.

Like, you know, like these things come up

and there are things that you weren't accounting for,

you know, that happen.

I don't know what that will be.

But what I do know, at least from my experiences with colossal,

they're anticipating that there will be those consequences.

And it's not like a, okay, we made 100 mammoths.

Let's put them out in Alaska, see how it goes.

You know, it's not like that.

It's like it's very controlled.

That's why there's a board of advisors

like myself, scientific conservation, everything else.

You guys got a lot of advisors.

A lot.

A lot, it's grown.

When I became an advisor, I think there were six of us.

Advises.

Yeah, now there's like 6,000.

I know, it's crazy.

But that's a good thing.

You have these summits.

Everybody talks.

Everybody has a place to talk.

But the point is like, let's use a willing mammoth as an example.

I don't know that this is what a colossal is doing.

That's not, I don't work with them day to day.

But if they bring back one or five,

they put it in a controlled environment.

And they study like what's happening in this control.

You know, okay, now we can expand it from 10 acres to 100 acres.

Okay, now we can expand it from 100 acres to 1000 acres.

You know, it's got to be a very slow rollout.

And that's, I hope, how we learn how to mitigate the bigger problems that it could cause.

I hope.

Yeah.

And, you know, the people seen the movies, right?

Oh, of course.

So we see where the one guy goes crazy goes, let's go with humans.

That's right.

Yeah.

You're like, all right.

Put them on an island.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like we got a chill a little bit here.

But maybe in our lifetime, I don't know if this is the case or if this is what you think.

But within our lifetime, you know,

do you think we could have something like a private island?

I don't want to go too far.

But like a Jurassic Park kind of thing where we've created things that they're, you know,

they're recreations, but you could at least see how it might behave in the environment.

I think it's awesome.

The little kid in me, if you could tell me I could go to Pleistocene Park and see

woolly mammoths and giant bison and all these ice age animals or, you know,

go to Jurassic Park.

Of course, I want to see that.

Do I know if that's what they're going to do or if that's a good thing for the environment

or anything else?

No.

Probably not, you know, but the little kid in me goes, I can go to these places and see

these things like it would be insane to see.

Yeah.

I don't think the technology is there yet.

Maybe it will be.

It's not.

And I'm sure Matt and Ben explain that to you.

Yeah.

But I don't think we can make T-Rexes and Titanoboas, you know.

I don't think the DNA is too fragmented, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I just don't think that that's what Colossal stands for.

I think it stands for trying to put a band-aid on the problem and write humanities wrongs.

Yeah.

And I hope that's what they continue to do.

Yeah.

Because that was really, that was the bulk of our conversation was, I would say, a piece of it.

This was episode 297 for people who didn't see it.

But there was a piece of it that was, you know, certainly discussing like the scientific implications.

Like, can you actually recreate this?

What does it mean if you recreate it?

What does a clone look like?

Some of the stuff you and I just talked about.

But a lot of it had to do with what it can, how the science can be used on current species.

Like we obviously talked a lot about the middle of the six extinction world.

Yeah.

The numbers, by the way, of like animals that are being declared extinct right now.

It's like north of 50%.

Isn't it terrible?

Yeah.

It's fucking insane, man.

It's crazy.

And that's why somebody's due.

And what I think so great about Colossal is like, there's this idea.

I don't mean interrupt you.

No, no, no.

There's been this idea that like if you're a biologist, if you dedicate yourself to conservation,

you have to be poor, you have to struggle, you have to give up everything to dedicate your life

to saving the planet.

Well, if you become a doctor, you know you're going to be rich.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Like if you're like, I'm going to go to medical school and be a doctor.

It's like, yeah, I'm going to get rich.

And I'm going to save people's lives.

Yeah.

Like Colossal to me, and this is like a weird perspective.

But there are four profit company.

Yeah.

It's been a long and been like, we can save the planet and get rich doing it.

And it's like, why is that a bad thing?

Like good for you.

You know, who cares?

I'm not getting rich.

Like by me saying this, I'm not getting rich.

I'm just an advisor.

But like good for you.

Like flip the conservation model on its head.

Like conservation is a battle that we have been losing since its inception.

We lose more and more species every single year.

The numbers are astounding.

Like you just pointed out.

These guys are like, we're going to try something different.

Yeah.

We're going to break the mold.

We're going to make money off of saving species.

Like do some good for the world and make a billion dollar company.

It's great.

Like why not try it?

Because the other stuff's not working.

That was probably like one of the funnier moments where Ben, I think he was talking,

it was his first conversation with Matt when they were back talking about Matt being an advisor

and obviously then eventually coming on.

Yeah.

But Matt's whole life had been in conservation.

Right.

And specifically a lot of work with elephants.

And so his big thing talking with Ben was like, look if you're going to do this,

like I really, we need help in the conservation.

Here's all this statistics with elephants.

Here's the problems we're having.

And Ben was just like, so how much would you need to really make a big dent in this?

Yeah.

And Matt goes, fuck it.

$50 million would really do something.

And Ben goes, you know, I'm a business guy.

Yeah.

I've built a lot of companies.

I'm a billionaire.

He didn't say that, but he is.

But he is.

Yeah.

I just looked at him.

I said, oh.

Well, that's not much.

Yeah.

So you need 50.

I'll just go get 50 million dollars.

Yeah.

But to a wildlife guy like me or Matt, you're like, I'm sorry, what?

Yeah.

So we'll just go make that.

Yeah.

No problem.

I'm like, I need you to come do that here too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm going to go make 50 million.

Yeah.

Maybe I wouldn't have the studio in the master bedroom.

Yeah.

It's so crazy.

Yeah.

The world is changing.

That dynamic is changing.

And it's, yeah, the fact that you can fix the elephant problem, elephant problem for 50

million dollars into some guys.

That's their boat that they see twice a year.

Yeah.

You know, it's like, and I love that Ben, who's, I think, is a really interesting guy.

It's just like, yeah, okay, let's do that.

You know, it's like, fuck yeah, let's do that.

Like, why not?

Man.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He lives here.

No, Jersey, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what's crazy is I was telling you the first three and a half years I did this, I was in my

parents house in South Jersey, which is where I'm from.

Yeah.

Had no idea.

This was in my backyard.

What are these doing?

The bone hub of the whole world.

Yeah.

In Manchu, well, fucking New Jersey.

Underneath a home depot.

Under, literally underneath a home depot, like the most insane thing ever.

But I love that podcast.

We recorded it's coming out really soon and the time of us recording this.

Nice.

Nice.

The dinosaur thing is just like the little kid in me loves that because it's just like the

coolest thing ever.

But how much time have you spent, you know, like trying to find dinosaurs or, you know,

obviously they're gone, but they're gone on earth, what they were.

I've not a lot.

I'm not an archaeologist.

I haven't put or paleontologists.

I haven't put a lot of time into digging that stuff up.

I know Ken from the explorers club.

Yeah.

And I think Ken is awesome.

He's such a cool guy.

And have you been to his place yet?

We're going to do it because my parents still live down there.

Yeah.

We're going to do like five of it too.

I'll swing over because he's invited me too.

He's like, come over.

Yeah.

No, that's going to be a crew now.

Dude, I'm down.

Yeah.

Because I think what Ken's doing is so cool.

But no, I mean, you know, there's some like crazy, like I've spoken to Joe, Joe Rogan

about stuff like this, like, you know, these mucola mimebe, which is like this dinosaur

of the Congo.

There's like these rumors and things that float around out there.

I've put no effort into looking for living dinosaurs.

I've done some diving in the black waters of Florida to pull up fossils and shark teeth

and stuff like that.

But there are dinosaurs among us, you know, and this sounds cliché, but chickens, chickens

are basically T-Rex's, you know, like crocodiles have been around as long as dinosaurs.

Sharks have been on this planet since before trees were here, you know, like I find those

things fascinating enough.

And my interest really is in being hands-on with living stuff.

So dinosaurs, for me, my son absolutely loves them and I'm now getting into them again

with him.

But like, I like the tangible stuff, like the, I want to, I want to hold the tortoise,

you know, not just look at the bones.

I feel you there.

Yeah.

What was the, what was the story with the dinosaur in the Congo?

I think it's called, I think it's called, you could look it up if you want mucola mimebe

or something like that.

And it's this good luck with your spelling there.

It's this rumor.

I almost got it.

I'm 100% right.

Nice dude.

Nice.

Yeah.

So what does it say here?

Legendary creature reported to inhabit the Congo River Basin described as a large sauropod

like dinosaur.

So.

Oh, like, you know, like Ken talked about this with me.

Oh, did he?

Yeah.

What did he say?

What was his thought?

Can't remember.

Dude, we went through fucking a thousand dinosaurs.

That was one of the coolest podcasts ever.

And that's the problem is Ken talks to you about dinosaurs, probably the same way I do

about animals like everybody knows a thousand dinosaurs.

And I can name like six.

But yeah, allegedly in the Congo, I think he's found like six himself.

Oh, I know.

It's crazy, including the largest one in existence.

But yeah, so this mucola mimebe is this rumored to be extant dinosaur living in the Congo.

And it's rumored because it's, it's been reported by like hundreds and hundreds of people.

Like they've all seen it, you know, allegedly.

Like still living.

Yeah.

I mean, I don't know if you imagine just walking through the jungle and this fucking thing walks

up.

No, not really.

I'd lose my shit.

Like that excited about it.

Tort us.

Imagine if I saw this thing.

We're in the simulation.

If that's happening.

Dude, seriously.

There's a glitch.

Yeah.

He was telling me a lot about like the lost dinosaurs, the Egypt, like more shit in Egypt.

What else happened there?

Right.

But yeah, what I mean?

Totally.

But he's been all over it.

It's just, it's so cool.

I'm coming around on Egypt just being a complete alien experiment place.

Bro, you know, you are not crazy to think that at all.

It's just everything there that comes out.

You're just like, oh, now there's pillars going down 10,000 feet into wells and you're like,

wait, what?

It's so crazy.

Yeah, some core of the earth.

Like, what else is there?

Yeah.

I don't totally.

And all these guys, you know, who's studying inside now, they got all these different

theories and stuff.

I'm like, it all sounds great.

Right.

Just put it all together.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just maybe there's some truth like in the middle of all of it.

Totally.

Totally.

Yeah.

But what's the environment in Congo, I might be mixing this up, but I remember way back

when the first podcast I did with Paul number 124 a few years ago, I like how you remember

all the numbers off the top of your head.

That's pretty impressive.

Yeah.

Thanks, man.

But he was telling me about how when the, when the continents were obviously like shaped

differently and closer together, originally the rainforest that is the Amazon jungle emanated

I think from Congo.

Maybe I fucked that up, but the Kong, the Congolese rainforest.

And so now there's even like a, I forget the term for it, but you can run the tape on

it.

I think he talked about this like two hours and something into that podcast, but there's

like a wind that comes off of the African continent emanating from Congo that still goes

across the Atlantic over time and makes its way into the Amazon.

Do you know what I'm talking about that?

I don't know about the wind, but I didn't make that up, I'm sorry.

I don't know about the wind, but if you look at, you know, South America and Africa, they

in during Pangea, they fit together like this.

Yes.

And then they broke off.

That's right.

Right.

And so what you have is creatures on both sides that evolved convergently.

So called convergent evolution, meaning like, why does a dog here look like a dog here,

even though they're not related?

Well, it's because they both occupied the same niches in the environment.

So they had to have four legs.

They had to have a bushy tail.

They had to have big canines, you know, whatever it happens to be.

And then you get the variation like, well, this one's a gray wolf or a white wolf because

it lives in the Arctic and has a big shaggy coat.

Well, this one's a sleek little North American red wolf because it lived in the Florida

Everglades.

You know, and they're like the same thing, but different if that makes sense.

Yeah.

All those animals at one point in time stemmed off from the same root.

And then they, I mean, it's like, it's like the simulation playing out in front of you.

It's so crazy.

Yeah, it's like the Sims or something like, you know, and it's funny because now with all

the stuff we were talking about earlier, with AI and stuff, we can sort of predict with

a not very good degree of certainty, but predict what is it going to be like in another

several million years if we don't, you know, wipe ourselves out like what animals are

going to be the, you know, for a point in time, insects were the biggest thing.

Then it was reptiles.

Now it's mammals.

You know, what's coming next?

Is it going to be giant birds or are we going to have rats that turn into everything because

we take over the planet and, you know, I've seen the rats here in New York, like they're

huge.

Oh, there's fucking no joke.

Dude, they're like bigger than my dog.

Um, so you ever see how they catch them in New York now?

How do they do it?

They had, there was a vice documentary on this a few years back.

You can watch it.

But like they have like rat hunting dogs that run them down and they send them out at

night.

They go, oh, she's like, take them the fuck up.

Good.

That's good.

Yeah.

There's too many rats and they spread disease.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's just crazy.

It's like, we think we live in this here and now that is the way that things are and

have always been, but the planet was so different.

I mean, even human civilization was so different a hundred years ago.

Oh, it's insane.

Imagine what it's going to be like in a million years.

Yeah.

And it gets weird though, like you're saying, when you can actually like kind of use something

like AI that's like a weed growing on itself and just like expanding into its own brush

and forest to predict these things ahead of time and then be able to like, I can't even

conceive it because we don't even know where it goes yet.

But then maybe be able to create it digitally, but also real like, you know what I mean?

It gets very bizarre, but hopefully, as with all technology that we do throughout mankind,

it's used for really good things like this and where it can actually help species or something

like that.

We do that.

I hope so.

Yeah, as long as we maintain good diversity on the planet, like as long as, because things

collapse when we lose diversity, that's when systems collapse, you know, so the environmental

system will collapse when you need a bug that feeds a fish, that feeds a bird, that, you

know what I mean, that the bird dies and that creates soil, that creates plants.

You know what I mean?

That's like, you need diversity, you need complexity.

As soon as we eliminate that too far, so that there's only one kind of bug, only one rat,

only whatever it happens to be, that's when we're fucked, that's when we have system

collapse.

Yeah, but it's even like sometimes it's something simple where you just look at you take one

species and look at the environment and go, yo, we'd have a problem.

People have talked in the past, I'm not the guy to ask on this, maybe you would be, but

like if bees went extinct, we'd all be fucked.

I've heard that one.

Yeah, I've heard that because bees are our biggest pollinators and they create all the

crops and the food and everything.

They carry stuff.

They have like the things dropped from them along the way.

So all these biospears around the world, they're basically like responsible for the seed

that creates it.

And bees are massively declined, like they're at like 70% decline since, you know, human

started farming or something like that.

Yeah, so it's not a good, it's, there's all these things, man.

I always describe it like the world is like a big game of jenga, you know, and it's

like cool.

Well, you, you pull, you know, you pull the first few tiles out and you're like, this

tower is great, man.

This thing's going to stay stable forever.

And then, you know, you remove the bees, you remove the clean water, you take away the

swamps, whatever it happens to be and the tower gets pretty wobbly.

And I, I, I hate the doom and gloom thing.

I don't think the tower is that wobbly yet.

This is purly anecdotal.

I don't think we're about to collapse the tower.

But if we do keep pulling those tiles out, if we run out of bees, we kill all the sharks,

we cut down all the Amazon, the tower will collapse eventually.

That's what I'm saying.

There's it, there's an exponential point in the other direction and no return.

This is what it's like with Paul about for years because he's been yelling out

about it.

It's like you look at just the Amazon jungle, for example, you're talking about 20% of

the global supply of oxygen for the world on a piece of land that's a lot less than 20%

of the world.

And we're burning it down, we're burning it down.

And it's like Paul can't sit here and say, once we have depleted 37% of the Amazon,

it's the point in overturned.

We don't know exactly where that point is.

Right.

It's a sliding scale.

But there is a point to which the slippery slope no longer has the physics to be able

to get back up to the top.

That's right.

That's right.

Right.

So there's things that I feel like, especially with tools like the internet now over

the last 15 years specifically being able to connect all of us, there's things that

like as a human species altogether, we should be able to at least on a generalized level

come behind and be like, all right, well, that would be very bad, right?

We fight it.

We make everything political.

Whatever this bullshit and that bullshit, but like if you could be able to just educate

people and say, hey, you know, if we lost the Amazon, here's legitimately what happens.

So therefore, if everyone could just do this, we won't lose it, then it's a small thing,

but it can make a huge difference over the long term.

It seems like it, but the problem is our nature, your nature, my nature, I mean, even

on a granular level, we are reactive and not proactive.

If my car is not going to break down, I'm going to keep driving it.

That's right.

You know, and only when my car breaks down, I'm like, oh, shit, I got to get to the mechanic.

You know, I don't just take my car in to get checked.

I mean, yeah, you take it in for services, but like you don't just take it to get checked

when you hear a weird noise.

You know what I mean?

And that is just human nature.

Like we as a species are reactive.

We're not proactive.

And that's why, and I'm not saying Paul's falling on deaf ears, I love Paul.

I think his mission is so pure and great, but like he probably, not probably, I know this

from talking to him.

He feels like sometimes.

Absolutely.

He's preaching to a deaf audience.

He's like, stop before it's too late.

And people are like, I will deal with it when it's too late.

That's right.

Yeah.

100%.

That's what I've been talking about since day one, you know, and it's like, God bless the

guys like that.

We're out there, like living it and at least trying, you know what I mean?

And he is making a difference.

Yes.

Let's be clear.

Like he's raised a bunch of money.

He's protected a giant chunk of land.

Over 100,000 acres.

Yeah.

I mean, he's an awesome dude.

And his mission is true.

And anybody listening to this, I just say go support Paul.

Please do.

Absolutely.

Because he's awesome.

But I know that he feels like he's preaching to a deaf audience a lot.

Have you been down there with him yet?

No, we've been talking about it for about a year now.

So I need to find the time.

I just, I travel so much for work and shoots and shows and YouTube.

And I need to prioritize going to stay with him for a week.

Yeah.

I think like being in it with him.

Yeah.

I mean, you like to be detached and out there doing the shit.

Like he's on the same page.

So it was, that was definitely a life changing experience for me to be out there.

Tell me a little bit about it.

And if you've talked about it too many times.

No, I haven't talked about it in a while.

Tell me about it.

Cause like I, I've heard Paul's take on it.

He's like, come stay with me.

Here's what we'll do.

But as a guy from Jersey, like tell me what was it like going down there?

It was.

So I hadn't at the time I went down May, 2024, I had been doing this podcast seven days

a week since March 13th, 2020 and never taken time off.

So it was like, all right, this was over four years in.

I'm like, I want to go down, not turn on a fucking phone and just be in it for a while.

Like I grew up with a huge animal guy.

I love nature.

Like that's certainly a side of me.

So I'm like, this is the coolest thing.

Like the five year old me is pumped to do this.

And obviously I had known Paul for a couple of years.

It'd been nice to see him grow.

So I wanted to go see for myself all the things you always told me about.

But you go down there and it's really hard to describe.

It's not like this emotional like, oh my God, it's more like, whoa, I'm so insignificant.

This is like, I'm living in at the time, 2024, you know, I'm coming from this place right

here that we see on the wall.

And I'm going down here to where you are just this little speck in the middle of this

just thing that goes on top of itself, exactly.

But what really struck me is how safe you feel out there.

And I don't mean that it's like to be like the assholes like nothing's going to happen.

I mean, there's shit that can kill you out there for sure.

But you feel all the animals, if you're not fucking with them, they don't want to

fuck with you.

You know what I mean?

You are your own little thing.

And the river we were on, obviously, he's in Peru towards the Brazilian border, really

beautiful area.

And to see how he lives, you know, there's a lot of people and I'm sure you've seen this

over the years and people you've come across.

There's a lot of people who say they do things or say they're about this life or it's

really like this.

And then you see it and you're like, no, you're not.

You're right.

Yeah.

You're living in like an Airbnb.

Yeah.

Totally.

But I got to Paul's place and he lives about 200 yards back away from the research station

and into the jungle in a spot with no running water on a wood floor to where the

way I describe it is like, you know how in college, when you were fucking, you'd put

a sock on the door or whatever.

Sure.

Don't disturb me.

Yeah.

So he has to put like a 20 foot industrial towel over like the outside fence to make sure

that it's actually enclosed in when he's fucking and it's just like, you see how legit

it's been for at this point.

It's right at about 20 years being down there most of the time, most of the year.

And I had a great and even greater appreciation for just how about that life quote unquote

he is.

He lives and breathes it.

There's no doubt about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, literally like I'll be on a Zoom call with him, you know, once in a while and he'll

like, oh, I got to go.

We're hiking into the jungle.

Like if you want to follow up, I'll be back in three days.

That's right.

Okay.

Bye Paul.

Don't die.

Yeah.

I'm going to tell it a full story now because we'll be here for way too long.

But I told him my friend John Rhondie's podcast after I got back, but Paul almost got us

killed by leaf cutter ants.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

That's one of my number one.

Yeah.

That was the second to last day there and that was when I was like, you know, I think

I'm ready to go now.

Yeah.

You're like, okay.

I'm like, this was my personal 9-11.

Yeah.

We're we're going to we're going to get past this.

He's just such a fucking he's one of those guys that's that likes to touch the hot coffee

just to see how long his fingers feel until they burn while you're preaching the choir

over here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm like, all right, dude.

But you have spent a lot of time yourself in the Amazon previously.

Not nearly as much as Paul's like, but yes, I've done multiple like three to four

week long expeditions.

Now when when was the first time you went?

The first time I went, I went for spring break as a junior in college.

Yep.

True story.

Who'd you go with?

My best friend from university guy named Nick and our friend who was working as a researcher

down there named Mike.

And we got together.

We went out of Coco's Ecuador up the real Coco and then yeah, it just camped, lived out

of the canoe, caught a 19.8 foot anaconda, which at the time, this is kind of a crazy like

weird ethereal story around that.

But I mean, you got to tell it.

That's why you're here.

Yeah, but yeah, and just we literally just a couple 18, 19 year olds just spent two

weeks in the Amazon, took a week off of school and did a week of spring break and then just

stayed there.

That was instead of going to Vegas or Havasu.

Yeah.

You did it the right way too.

You were like living off the land.

Had to.

We were so poor.

I remember.

I found my headlamp that I see you've got one there, but I found my headlamp.

It's running the Amazon.

Nice.

I found my headlamp that I took there.

This is how poor I was at the time.

It was one from Kmart that cost 12 bucks that like, you, I probably couldn't see that

wall.

And that was what I used as light at the night looking for snakes.

Like it was so crazy, but you caught a 20 foot anaconda 19.8 foot and I've caught a lot

since then.

In Jersey, that's 20 feet.

Yeah.

I like that.

Yeah.

I've caught a lot since then.

Never caught one that big again, even including the huge one we caught for our animal

planet research stuff, but or discovery, whatever it was, but it's a weird story.

So we're 18, 19 years old.

We go down.

We get in this boat where with this local, I think he's sunny Indian is the name, like the

native tribes.

I can believe it's sunny Indian guy.

His name's Fausto and Fausto, apparently speak a like a English, but there's a boat driver

who can.

So there's just me, Mike Nick, the boat driver and Fausto.

And we go up and the first day takes us to his home and he's a native guy.

So he has a home on the river that's like three hours from Coco, you know, and you sleep

in his home and you sleep on the floor and his wife cooks you a meal and you swim and

catch piranha and all the, all the stuff I'm sure you did.

Epic.

I wasn't catching piranha.

Just to be clear.

No.

Did you eat piranha though?

I did eat piranha.

It's good, right?

It's fucking fire.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not good after 20 days of eating boiled piranha, but for that first week, it's pretty good.

Um, anyway, so we tell Fausto, you know, we're all big nerds.

We're like, we just want to catch a big anaconda.

Now it's like a thing, right?

You've got like Garrett Galvin and these kids like chasing anaconda.

Because back then, we were just weird kids who wanted to catch a big snake.

And I'll be very clear about this.

There was no research.

There was no purpose, nothing.

It was just like, I want to catch a big snake.

And we tell Fausto and he's like, ah, you know, maybe I've seen a few big ones like

we might get really lucky.

Go on this whole trip and we're like two or three days from leaving and this big thunderstorm

lightning storm hits.

And so we're in like a hot or tense, whatever we were in that night.

And we're sleeping and we're waiting for the rain to pass and in the morning, Fausto

comes up and he goes, ah, today you will catch an anaconda and we're like, wait, why Fausto?

And through the translator, he goes last night, I had a dream of a woman in a white dress.

So that means today you will catch an anaconda and we're like, okay, Fausto, yeah.

And to this day, I don't know if he was like pulling our leg and had a spot or what, but

it sure didn't seem like it.

And so he told us he had this weird dream that he saw this woman in the white dress.

And so we catch a big snake.

Sure enough, literally two hours later, we pull the boat into this random patch of bank.

We're going to go on this hike through a game trail.

There's like an old abandoned like hut there.

It's all falling down and stuff from other, I think it's sunny, but sunny Indian native people.

And get off the, get off the canoe, walk 10 feet and I go this way and I start filling

with a little tiny venomous snake, this big, like a type of diaper.

And then my buddy Nick just goes, get the fuck over here right now.

We run around and there's a snake and its coil is as big as you to me, just coil down.

And yeah, we caught it, whatever we took photos, measured it, blah, blah, blah.

But the point is it was just so weird because the likelihood of us catching a snake was infinitely

small.

Fausto said like, you're probably not going to catch one, you know, they're very rare.

We only see the big ones once in a while.

This isn't like a predictable place like going into the Rio Benito area where they see

them and they dive with them and film them and I've done that and it's incredible.

We saw like five.

This is like raw jungle like where Paul lives where you have no idea what you're going to

see on any given day.

And then he comes in and goes, I had this dream, something to do with the weather too.

I don't remember.

But he's like, I had this dream and when you see lightning plus the woman in the white dress,

I don't remember that part.

It's from the woman in the white dress part, today we'll catch a snake.

And it was like, it was as if you had said today we'll pick up a Starbucks latte.

It's like, it wasn't like maybe, you know, it was like, yeah, yeah, we'll grab a coffee

today, you know, and he was just 100% convinced and three hours later we found one.

And it was pretty quick to be able to because you found a coil up, it was pretty quick to

be able to actually look at it.

It was an old snake really like sunken in eyes, like very old animal.

And so my buddy Nick grabbed it by the head and then that we, we uncoiled it from his

body as it tried to coil him, you know, because they try and wrap you up and stuff.

And it was a, you know, probably a eight minute fight or wrestle if you will.

And then the snake relaxed and we could, you still to hold its head, but you didn't have

to hold it tightly and we could like look at it and appreciate it.

And it was just, honestly, like, it's not good for me to even admit this, but it was just

kids being kids.

Like we were 18 years old.

We just wanted to catch big snakes.

We saved up enough money to go visit our researcher buddy and we just did it.

And it was awesome.

There was no purpose to it.

It was just awesome.

Did you interact with any natives out there in the Amazon on any of your trips?

I mean, obviously, you're being taken around by some, but like, did you, did you visit

not necessarily uncontacted tribes because there's a reason they're uncontacted, but some

of the tribes of, of the Amazon.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, we were with the Sony people there, a Fausto and we met his wife and his kids

and we bumped into a couple others that were canoeing and fishing in the area.

You know, we only saw like three people the whole time we were there.

So it wasn't like we were out there.

And then in the real apoporos, we worked with former FARC rebels.

So FARC rebels?

Yeah.

So the FARC controlled the Colombian Amazon and the cocaine and all of that and fought

the government for like 30 years there.

And then they finally reached a truce and we flew in on a, you might ask yourself, why

a World War II cargo plane used to fly in and out of the jungles of Colombia for nothing

but sightseeing and tourists?

That's right.

And had a lot of cargo hold for some very strange reason, but that's what you got to do.

That's right.

And we flew in and landed on this very well manicured strip that happened to be near

coca plantations for some weird reason.

Listen.

It's a product that people need.

That's right.

And you know, it was, it was interesting because on that one, we're going up the river

with the sky and then the boat driver, again, the boat driver.

He goes, I was like talking to him, you know, and like broken Spanish and stuff and I was

like, so how are things here since like the truce and blah, blah, I've been like a 30 year

ongoing war basically.

And he's like, oh, yeah, really good.

Like where everything's calm now, like people can visit, like it's, there's no, no conflict

anymore.

And I was like, cool.

Do you know any FARC rebels?

And he's like, well, yeah, I was FARC.

I was like, oh, wow, that's cool.

And then I go, so, you know, I was like kind of joking, but I'm like, what would it happen

if I'd come a year ago?

He's like, I would have cut your head off.

And I was like, oh, right on.

And I'm like, okay, and he was dead serious.

He was just like, yeah, I would have cut your head off.

Like you couldn't have been here a year ago.

I'm like, cool.

It's a whole different reality down there.

Yeah.

I mean, it's, but that's the thing, like you go into some of these places, the minute

you go into the jungle, you go two miles in, that's two miles farther than anyone from

the military or the police or what you may know is like law and order civilization would

be willing to go.

That's right.

So there's no, you can do, like it's a, it's a no man's land out there.

You can do what you want, which is kind of crazy to think about.

I think that's why Paul loves it so much.

In addition to everything he stands for, it's just he has complete freedom.

He is his own lawmaker where he lives.

Right.

There are no rules, you know.

But you went back, that was your spring break.

You went back down there a bunch, like in your adult life too.

Yeah.

So I went there, then I went to that Rio Apaporus thing where the guy said he'd cut my

head off.

Oh, that was after that.

That was later.

That was, that was a different, different trip.

And then I've been to the pontinal, which is the big wetland that's in South America.

That's connected to the Amazon.

I've been to Benito, which is where they have that clear water, where we caught a bunch

more big anacondas and took isotope analysis, scale samples, while a while like for purpose,

not just for fun when we were a kid.

But yeah, I've spent some time down there.

I love it down there.

Yeah.

It's, it's really cool that like, you know, a lot of places could certainly use western

medicine to be able to heal normal afflictions that we have and stuff like that.

But like Paul has a quote, we have a sap for that, a sap for that.

Yeah.

Because they use all the tree sap, right?

Yeah.

Like they have, they have amazing innovations down there as well to be able to heal, you

know, common types things that we deal with that might drag us down a lot longer than

it does them.

Definitely not everything, though.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Like when we did that apaporus one where the far-grabble guy was, this was like seven,

eight years ago now.

We got back from our trip.

We found the crocodilian we were looking for was a huge success.

And when we got back to the village that we were staying in where the cocaine dealers

there strip was, the plane couldn't come that day because we got in like three o'clock

in the afternoon or something.

And the plane couldn't come.

So they weren't going to come until the next day.

And so we're like, oh, it's cool.

We'll spend the night in the village, stay in the huts.

It's all good.

We've done this before.

And our medic was with us, our medic Josh.

And this is a crazy story.

But I did these like had to snort this powder out of a monkey bone to go up the river, blah,

blah, blah.

But you can't skip over that for us.

Hold on.

Let's get the exposition here.

Yeah, the snort powder out of a monkey bone to go up the river.

So the tribal leader at that village was a guy named Lorenzo and he invited us into

his meloca, which is a hot in the jungle.

And he was also like the shaman of the area.

And he said like, I told him we had to get his permission.

This is all on our animal planet show, by the way, which is crazy.

Let me put this on air.

But he said to us like, I said to him like, we need to go up the river and look for the

Cayman, the yellow Cayman, as they call it.

And he's like, all right, well, if you want to go up there, it's very, very dangerous.

Like there used to be farc up there, like people die up there, blah, blah, blah.

There's big snakes.

There's Cayman.

I caught big snake on that one too.

And he's like, you have to have this, this Jopu stuff, which Jopu is like a kind of

a generic term for like a mix of powders and tobaccos and things.

Again, I told you where this was and what they had.

So who knows what was in it.

But it was green.

It didn't, it wasn't purified white.

That's for sure.

I know it had some roots ground up in there, all kinds of things.

Anyway, we go around in the circle, getting the stuff blown up your nose by Lorenzo, the

tribal chief.

And you know, like, I'm not a big drug guy.

I've never done a lot of drugs.

And it goes first like my sound guy and he's like, oh man, my brain, my brain, it

hurts.

It feels like chlorine on the brain.

I'm like, oh, fuck.

I'm like getting all nervous and anxious and stuff.

Then it goes to my camera guy and he's like, whoah, whoah, whoah, whoah.

And he's like doing it, you know?

And then it comes to me and I'm like, I'm about to have a fucking panic attack because

I like don't want to do this.

I'm not a drug guy, but I have to do it, you know, it's like not just a wedding room,

but like if I don't do it, I'm not going to go off the river blah, blah, blah.

So I do it.

Again, this is all of my animal planet show is a kids show.

I don't know how this is going.

For God and content.

Let's go.

Dude, it's crazy.

So I do it.

But I'm like, hyperventilating ready.

So I'm like, so I like shoot it into my brain.

Anyway, and immediately I turn pale white green, start projectile vomiting all over

the ground, hands and knees, like puking up, fetal position, and Lorenzo, who's like super

stern this whole time, like cracks a smile.

And our translator asks him, they're like, why, why are you smiling?

Why are you laughing?

He's like, he's cleansing himself.

And we're like, what do you mean?

He's like, he was the one who was going to die.

If he hadn't done this and had a cleanse, he would have died when he went up the river.

I'm the one who dives in the river and catches the crocodiles who catches the snakes,

who's hands on with the vipers, you know, like, I'm the lead, like I'm the guy that does

the hands-on part.

And I always thought it was interesting, not that I necessarily believe in this, like,

the voodoo-y stuff, but of everybody that had to blow stuff up their nose, there's only

one guy who's waiting in the water and catching the snake, diving in and catching the crocodile.

There's only one guy who's likely to die, and it's me.

And I was the one that when it came to, ended up cleansing all night and throwing up all

night.

And Lorenzo said, that's what made me safe.

And then the next day I could go, whoa.

So when we got back to that village a week and a half later, whatever it was, we got

back.

And Lorenzo said, my wife said, can you, can you please look at her?

And so Josh Armedic was like, yeah, of course, like happy to look.

And we were, the expedition was over.

We're just waiting for the Coke plane to take us out of the jungle.

And so I'm like, Josh, just like, give them all the medicine we have, like, do whatever

you can.

Long story short, this is a village of like 20-ish people, 25-ish people.

Every single woman there had a yeast infection.

Ooh.

It's pretty gnarly.

And so Josh, like, set up a little tent and like went in a hut and he treated every single

woman.

Doesn't seem like there was a sap for that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, to be clear, what I'm not getting at is that it can, it can heal a lot of muscles.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's cool that there's some things that they can like take care of.

And there's literally a tree sap that has it.

But they're still disconnected from the world in the sense that they don't have access

to the Western medicine that we do.

Everything, I'm going to get a little grandiose here for a second.

But like, everything we do as human beings is like so pendulous.

It's like one side or the other.

You're either Republican or Democrat or, you know, you, hey, you're left or you're right,

whatever, you're gray or you're blue, you know, it's like, it's also divisive.

Yes.

There's always like a happy middle ground with these things, of course.

And medicine, just like I said with science, it's like, yeah, you need technology.

But you also don't have to follow every protocol and you have to listen to your gut.

I feel the same way about medicine.

It's like, there probably is a sap for that, but there also isn't a sap for this.

So use a little bit of Western drugs and a little bit of, uh, you know, jungle medicine

and you put those together.

But that would be nuanced, far as we can have that society.

It makes so much sense.

And yet it's like, it's so crazy that we think that that's like such a big, it's like,

no, that stuff doesn't work.

Only this works.

It's so dumb, man.

It's like, don't be fully homeopathic and don't be completely reliant on your hospital.

Like, just find something in the middle that works.

Moe is that old Bruce Lee quote where he's like, take what is good and discard what is

bad.

Right?

That's simple.

There's, there's positives and negatives to everything.

So try to find them and get on with life that way.

It's that simple.

Yeah, man.

And it's in everything.

I feel like politics, religion, medicine, science, like it's just, just be like a rational.

I've probably said I were in episode three, twenty or three, thirty something at this

point.

I, because I don't know when, when I'm putting this one out, but it'll be in that area.

Yeah.

And I've probably cited this over a hundred, twenty five times on my podcast before it's

not an exaggeration.

But the universal law of physics says for every action, there's an equal but opposite

reaction, which is to create, create equilibrium.

And all I ever asked for in our world is that the actions are a little less violent and

they're a little closer to each other.

But we, what we seem to be doing with everything to your point right now is it gets farther

and farther apart to where, you know, the violence to create equilibrium gets stronger

and stronger.

This is a lot easier than this huge clash.

Right.

And there's got to be a way to kind of mix the worlds a little bit.

And also, you know, you being a world traveler, going all different cultures and whatever,

let people do the things that are inherent to who they are and where they're from and

what they're about.

Like we should keep, we don't want to be this homogenous society where everything's the

same.

I think the beauty of the world is that things are so different.

Totally.

But it also doesn't mean that you need to praise or go after every single thing that, you

know, another group of people in whatever the context is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The live and let live thing.

It seems like it's become so hard specifically us here in the U.S. I feel like as a society

to just live and let live is let people who cares.

Like if you want to kill yourself by only taking this medicine and not visiting a doctor

or you want to believe that and not that don't get hangry, just let people do it.

Just live and let live.

It's so weird.

Have you had some situations though where it's difficult for you to do that because you're

like, man, we just do this thing and you wouldn't have to deal with that?

I think so, but more for me because I'm not and I've been criticized for this, you know,

by my family and my friends and everything else.

Like I don't really care what people do.

Like there's billions of us people in the world.

I don't care what you as an individual do.

I don't want you to hurt people or be violent or be rude or anything like that.

But like the live and let live thing for me applies and this is where I'm my own hypocrite.

But like it applies to people.

But you have to also live and let live with the planet, you know, and like you can't.

So if I, for instance, when I say I got criticized when I was working in Taiwan, there's one national

park on the island of Taiwan, literally one.

We get there, we meet some local hunters, some local guides and they're going to take

us in to look for an extinct cat, the foremost and clouded leopard and go look for this cat

for mose and clouded leopard.

Yeah.

So like a clouded leopard, but it only existed on this one island.

And we get there and we're, we're three hours into like a 10 hour hike to get to where

we're building base camp.

And these guys start pulling out rifles to shoot monkeys out of the trees to eat.

It's the one and only protected habitat in the entire country.

There's nowhere else in the whole country.

And these are our guides assigned by like the government to take us in there.

And I flipped out, I grabbed a guy's gun and broke it over my knee.

You broke the gun over your high-prabbit and smash.

I was like, what the fuck are you doing?

And then we had a local scientist with us and he's like, well, these are their native

lands.

They've been hunting here for a long time and blah, blah.

And like I don't have sympathy for that because the rest of the entire country has nowhere

else protected.

This is the one little swath of land where animals and wildlife should be allowed to

be a piece with people.

And you know, this is why I said I'm my own hypocrite because I say live and let live.

But I couldn't let those guys like live and let live because this is just the one, go

outside the park and shoot all the monkeys you want.

You know, like I don't agree with it, but I'm not going to stop you.

You're within the laws ethically.

That's up to you.

But if you're in this one little place and the law literally says you cannot kill here,

going under the guise of this is cultural and this is something they've been doing for

a long time doesn't fly with me.

Right.

Like we need these little pockets of protection.

Yeah, there's a line.

There's a line.

I mean, you're also from Africa where I don't need to explain to you how rampant the problem

of poaching is.

It's terrible.

And that's part of my like frustration whether it has grown up seeing it.

Yeah.

Oh, you grew up seeing that as well.

Absolutely.

Up on a carcass of an elephant with its tusks cut off and stuff where poachers have come

in and shot it in the head and, you know, those things used to happen all the time when

we were kids.