Forrest Galante - Obesity That Does Not Exist in Nature | TUH #304
In this episode of The Ultimate Human Podcast, host Gary Brecka interviews wildlife explorer Forrest Galante. The conversation weaves through vivid personal anecdotes—night diving in the ocean, hunting lobsters, encounters with sharks, and a Costa‑Rica adventure guide—to illustrate how immersion in nature reshapes perception. They discuss animal sensory systems (ampullae of Lorenzini, fish schooling, whale "telepathy"), emotional intelligence across species (dogs, elephants, the infamous crocodile Gustave), and the astonishing longevity of slow‑moving creatures like Greenland sharks and giant tortoises. The dialogue expands to broader themes: humanity’s inflated sense of dominance, the humility gained from darkness and deep‑sea experiences, the responsibility of humans as the planet’s most sentient species, and the importance of aligning one’s passion (wildlife, bio‑hacking, conservation) with purpose. Gary also shares a personal endorsement of liposomal NAD+ as a bio‑hacking tool. The episode concludes with Forrest defining an "ultimate human" as someone who gives fully to their passion—protecting wildlife—while Gary invites him to collaborate on bio‑hacking projects for animal health.
Chapters
I think the modern human, their biggest reality for mental health issues, for physical health issues, is a disconnection from nature.
Sedentary lifestyles, the leading cause of all-cause mortality, the lack of movement. You know, we've got escalators, we've got moving walkways, we've got elevators, we've got cars. I have a saying that aging is the aggressive pursuit of comfort. The more aggressively you pursue comfort, the faster you age.
You 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 Galápagos giant tortoises or Greenland sharks, they have very extended lives because everything they do is at fraction of the speed that we do things.
They're doing what they were designed to do. And human beings, we have pursued comfort to such an aggressive extent that in the United States, we're now the sickest, fattest, most disease-ridden nation in the world.
I think we get caught up in this rat race and we forget that we are just something, another organism that is designed to be in nature. We've taken away something that is programmed inside of us That we are supposed to be connected to.
How does getting back in tune with Mother Nature, in your opinion, impact our health?
I believe strongly that.
Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecka, where we go down the road of everything anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything between. This is like one of those really cool in-between podcasts. I'm so excited to run this with today's guest. Fascinating upbringing in Zimbabwe and fascinating career. He's really brought Animal Planet right into your living room. His care for animals, his perspective on how Mother Nature can actually impact your health, how disconnected we are from the wild is so philosophically aligned with what I talk about every day. I am super pumped to run this podcast with you, Gary.
Gary, you're just pumped, man. That was such a long That was a lovely intro. Thank you.
Yeah, yeah, I've done it a few times, but no, I really mean it, man. I'm— I am fired up for this podcast because— so I have a— I have a younger, uh, daughter, Alina, 18-year-old. And ever since she was a little, little girl, this is a girl that was like snatching frogs out of ponds and picking up lizards and chasing the boys with— with spiders.
Love that.
Um, uh, daddy long legs. And she's got, you know, a wildlife refuge in her— in her room, um, all of which she Completely like suckered me on. We we we actually have a dog. We have a staffy now because we were supposed to foster it, and then nobody wanted the dog, so we had to keep the dog. I actually don't think she tried to sell the dog.
No, I'm sure. I'm sure she didn't.
We got lizards stuck to tanks. We got a python in there.
Love it. Fish.
I mean, there's all kinds of stuff going on in that room. But dude, you have had a fascinating life, fascinating career, and and what I find really interesting is is the crossover that you and I have. about human beings and human physiology, how disconnected we are from Mother Nature.
Yeah, yeah.
And how getting back very often to the basics is so empowering for, and so healing for human beings. But I wanna start with, assuming that my audience doesn't know who you are. I mean, most people have heard of you, have probably seen your videos.
Oh, absolutely.
Like, I recognize that dude. He was crawling in a cage across a pond with the alligators. That's me. Yeah, and then he's like, I wanna invite you to this place in India, to this animal refuge. I'm like, dude, I'm not—
You're like, not with you. I don't wanna be bitten by something.
Something weird. And, uh, because you've been bitten by all kinds of weird shit. But, um, I'd love to start with your, your upbringing in Zimbabwe.
Sure.
It had to have something to do with how you shaped the rest of your career.
I think it did, but I also think that it was hardwired into me because, you know, my sister had the same upbringing and she works in fashion. So, you know, yeah, I think, I think there was something hardwired into me. But I did— I grew up in Zimbabwe in Southern Africa. Beautiful country, idyllic childhood. You know, we never locked the door. I lived on 200 acres, big farm, a small farm by African standards, but a lot of land. And my family ran safari businesses. So, if I—
Oh, wow.
Yeah, if I wasn't in school, I was in the bush, barefoot in the bush, chasing animals around.
Wow.
Yeah.
And, you know, I talk about grounding, sunlight, breathwork, you know, the foundation of health and wellness is found in just the basics, like those easy things. And it's, it's interesting because when you, when you look at Mother Nature, you don't see chronic disease, right? You don't see obesity, right? Um, you see big whales, um, but you don't see like obese cats and you don't see, um, obese deer.
Yeah, no, never. Doesn't exist.
Yeah, because they're, they're just, they're doing what they were designed to do. And human beings, because of the way that we chase comfort and we, we Change our lighting, our air. We have pursued comfort to such an aggressive extent that in the United States, we're now the sickest, fattest, most disease-ridden nation in the world. And I think we could learn a lot from animals.
We're also hardwired for indulgence.
That is true.
You know what I mean? As a physical organism, human beings are hardwired for indulgence and animals are not. You do not see an animal that wants to overindulge and eat itself sick. And, and literally eat itself sick to the point of obesity and liver disease and cancer and all the things that we're talking about. You do not see that in the animal kingdom. However, us who are also part of the animal kingdom are wired for indulgence. Wow.
I never really thought about that. You know, we have a place in Colorado, right outside of Gunnison, 10,500 feet. And every morning and every night, the meadow is full of deer.
Love that.
Like, like just dozens and dozens and dozens of deer. It never really dawned on me There's this giant meadow that they feed in, and they could, if they wanted to, just stay out there and eat.
Yeah.
But they don't.
They don't. And there's a couple factors there, right? One is understanding predator-prey relationships and risk versus reward and everything else. But at the end of the day, well, to our point, they don't just sit there and eat and eat and eat until they're sick.
Yeah.
And we do that.
Yeah, we absolutely do. And you talk about predator-prey, you have a new series coming out where you're actually reframing the way that most, um, uh, wildlife documentaries and docuseries are done, and not filming from the predator's aspect.
That's right.
Filming from the prey's aspect.
That's right, that's right.
That sounds like a horror movie.
It's a crazy show.
It's like already like freaking me out.
I got myself in way over my head with that one, Gary. I gotta tell you, it's a lot harder than you thought, right? It's so much harder, and it sounded so good on paper. You know, I was sitting in there in the room at Discovery Channel going, you guys, nobody's ever seen it like this before. We'll do it all from the perspective of prey. We'll We'll put ourselves in their shoes. And they're like, we love this, we love this, and go do it. And then when it came down to executing, it was like, oh crap, this is really hard.
Yeah, 'cause you gotta find something that maybe nothing is chasing right now.
That's right.
Wait for something to chase it.
That's right, yeah.
So what is this gonna do? Why is it gonna be such an amazing reframe of traditional docuseries in the wild?
I think for one, it's loud and splashy. You know, the title is to be determined, but it's probably gonna be something like I Am Prey, you know? And so it's loud and it gets your attention, but more importantly, it allows you to see not from a field Not from a fearmongering standpoint, but from a standpoint of wow and awe and shock of how incredible these predators are. I read a stat recently, Gary, that said something like— I'm making the number up— but 65% of people think that they could beat a wolf in a fight. Wait till you see my show where the wolf attacks. Do you know what I mean?
Really?
You cannot. I don't care who you are. I don't care if you're the best MMA fighter in the world.
Black belt in jiu-jitsu, a nice rear naked choke.
No chance.
Not even—
Ankle lock. 0% chance.
Yeah.
And that's, that's the mentality I think that a lot of people have now is like, oh, you know, I'm tough. I go to the gym, I work out, I can fight, whatever it is. Yeah, I could take on a wolf, I could take on a bear, you know, I could beat a lion. You have no idea how wrong you are.
Yeah.
And I will show that to you in this new series.
Yeah. They, they, I mean, they kill for a living. That's right. Right.
Things much bigger and stronger than us too.
And faster.
And faster. That's right. Yeah.
I think, you know, that's super well documented and most of us have grown up on National Geographic. There actually used to be this show that I used to love. Who, who's the guy from, Star Trek with the pointy ears.
Oh, uh, Spock. Yeah, Spock.
Leonard Nimoy.
Leonard Nimoy.
Yeah, that's right. He had this show called In Search Of.
Okay.
And it was like, uh, Easter Island and Stonehenge and, and was my early, like, fascination with animals. It was sort of a hybrid between National Geographic and all of the just wild— the pyramids and the Great Wall of China and all these fascinating structures around the world. Um, but He, he had did a series on film from the predator's perspective.
Cool.
On, you know, just these lions that would, you know, hunt and hyenas, how they're intelligent, they are to like hunt in packs and like, and it reframed the way that I just thought about the animal kingdom just being so random.
It's not.
It's not. There's like a very much a hierarchy of intelligence. You know, I've read recently about Whales and how the level that they communicate with sonar. I'm gonna really bastardize this.
That's okay.
But finding prey, locating prey, even taking turns eating.
Yeah, absolutely.
Like, okay, you go and I'm gonna bring, you know, the food to you. Then I'm gonna go and you're gonna bring the food to me.
Strategy, implementation, communication, EQ, not just IQ, their emotional intelligence. Orcas have been documented carrying their dead around. When a mother orca loses loses its baby, sometimes they've been seen carrying that dead baby around for 2 weeks. That is a state of mourning. That's all that is. That is the orca crying and mourning and begging its baby to come back to life. It knows it's dead, but that is it showing EQ, emotional intelligence. Wow.
Yeah. It just makes you realize the beauty of nature.
Yeah.
Um, and orcas are fascinating too because they're the ones we call killer whales.
That's right. Yeah. But do you know how they got that name? Fun little fact for you.
Uh, SeaWorld?
Good, good guess. Because they don't kill in the wild human beings, right? That's right. Despite their name, killer whales, they've never documented killing a human being in history in the wild. In captivity, they've had a few accidents. But the name killer— I'm their best PR rep, by the way. But their name killer whale comes from the Spanish word, which they were actually named whale killer because they hunt for whales. And when we translated it to English, we called them the Spanish word because you know how in Spanish it goes the other way around. Killer whale. Yeah. Wow.
I had no idea. Um, you not so long ago jumped off a boat into a school of, uh—
Yeah, I've dove with orcas several times. Yeah, they're amazing.
Which has got to be scary because knowing the stats, you're like, okay, I'm gonna go with the, with the stats. They've never killed a human. But being in the water with an animal like that must have been— you have to respect their size. You're in their territory, their capacity. If he chose to To just take you out in a second.
It's the only time in my entire life— I dive a lot, right? I'm in the water probably on average 150, 250 days a year, right? Between those two.
Right.
I dive a lot. And it's the only animal I've ever been in the water with where I had no say. I was not on my terms. And what I mean by that is I've been in the water with crocodiles, right? If a crocodile approaches you, you can kind of approach it. You take a broomstick, you bop it on the nose, and it gives you like a posturing. It goes, all right, this predator is looking at me, I'm looking at it. This is not to be messed with.
Right.
If you're in the water with a great white shark or a mako or a bull shark, you give yourself an assertive presence. You make yourself big. You swim right at it. You maintain eye contact.
Swim right at it.
You have to. You have to. And the shark goes, whoa, okay, this is not a prey animal. When you're in the water with an orca, doesn't matter what you do. They're so intelligent and so big and so powerful and so fast. Not that they wanna hurt you, but it wouldn't matter what body language I put out, what ideas I had. It wouldn't matter if I had the biggest spear gun in the world. If those orcas wanted to do something, there is nothing I could do.
Wow.
I've never had that feeling before except with them.
That's so wild. You know, I was watching an episode that you were on with Joe Rogan. It was a while ago. And he put up this video. I wanna say it was an orca exploding a fish.
Yeah, the ocean sunfish.
I've never even heard of that, but the speed that they have, is that, that's a real thing?
That's real. Yeah, it's newly documented behavior. Yeah. Wow.
And they just, They don't— they could obviously just open their mouth and eat it, but they ram into it and the fish literally explodes.
Yeah, disintegrates.
And the amount of force it must take, because I've caught tarpon and, you know, tuna. These are tough, like, gristly.
Oh yeah.
Well held together.
You couldn't explode it. Not with a baseball bat, nothing. You couldn't do it. No way.
So they just swim right at it and take their nose and—
Yeah. Just they had they can go. I mean, I'd have to fact check this, but it's forty miles an hour, forty-five miles an hour, and then there's this huge mass. You know, plus they have the ability to punch with that nose, and you just put all that together, and they know they can do it, and they vaporize these ocean sunfish.
That is that is so wild, and they do it almost for sport because then they don't and then eat the sunfish.
Yeah, it's fun. Yeah, yeah.
That's that is wild, man. So I've been working out with my son lately, trying to keep up with him and his high rocks competitive athletes, and I've been starting to use this perfect amino pre-workout. I really like it. It's got B H. It improves nitric oxide output, but it actually seems to stay after the workout and not crash. There's no stimulants, so no caffeine, no ma huang, nothing that gives you that kind of amped feeling. You just feel like you're maybe better able to move during the workout, like you have better blood flow. So if you're in the market for a pre-workout, check out the Perfect Amino pre-workout. It's my favorite now. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. You know, in all of your journeys, there's so much I wanna talk to you about, but sure. If, if you were to sort of step back and, and, and reframe your, your life as it is today, you know, having so much exposure to wild animals. What was one of those Perry Mason, like, ta-da, mind-blowing moments that you had about the intelligence of animals? What fascinated you about how they communicate?
Yeah.
What have been some of those eureka moments for you?
There's one that comes to mind right away when you ask me that question. And it was really interesting. I was probably about 8 years old. I grew up in Zimbabwe in Southern Africa. And, um, we went to the Zambezi River, which is a big, beautiful river on the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, where my family ran safari businesses. And, um, I had my grandpa, old guy, he was a store clerk. He wasn't exactly, you know, the— he was a great bushman, but he was not, not a safari guide or anything. He said, come on, Forrest, let's go fishing. And I love fishing, right?
Yeah.
So I was like, yes, I'll sneak off with my granddad and go fishing. And so my grandpa and I, we run, we run up from camp up the river. Just on foot and take our fishing rods and we go to fish. And in order to get down to the water, you have to take one of these gullies that goes down to the river. Okay? So we go down to the— down through the gully. And as you get to the bottom of the gully, there's like one little flat spot about the size of where you and I are sitting here, where you can fish without being 20 feet above the riverbank, you know? And you don't wanna be 20 feet above 'cause you can't fish as well. You can't pull the fish up, blah, blah, blah. And so we're standing there fishing, and there's actually a photo of this, believe it or not. But we're standing there fishing, and all of a sudden my grandpa puts his hand on my shoulder. He goes, Forrest, don't move. And I was like, you know, I was like 8 or 10 years old, and I look over my shoulder and this bull elephant— and bull elephants are the worst, by the way, like they're the ones most likely to hurt you and everything else— a lone rogue bull elephant has walked down the same gully. Now we're completely trapped. It's steep cliff on both sides, a river filled with crocodiles here, and a bull elephant behind us.
Yeah.
And we're completely trapped. And so, this elephant could have decided at any single moment that it just wanted to flatten us, get rid of us, and go on with its day. He'd come down to drink, you see. And we stood there and my grandpa just kind of put his hand on me and he just sort of moved me into the corner. Again, probably from me to that post right there, I'm talking about a 10-foot area that we had. He moved me into the corner of the gully and the bull elephant stopped and looked at us 'cause he got a bit of a fright just like we did.
Mm-hmm.
He wasn't expecting 2 humans to be there. And he looked at us and he smelled the air and he could smell what we were. And he looked and there was a moment of freeze where nothing happened and it was just tense. You could cut the air with a knife, it was so tense. And he looked at us and we looked at him and there was a moment, and this was such an impactful moment in my entire life, where I looked into this elephant's eye from me to your camera lens right there. And it was about the size of that camera lens.
Hold on, he's that far away?
Yeah, right there. The bull elephant? I could feel the heat of his breath on me.
It's like 3 steps.
There was nowhere to go. We were trapped. And, um, And I'll tell you why there's a photo in a moment, but there's actually a photo I can share with you of this that's incredible.
That's cool. We're gonna get it and put it up here.
Yeah. And, um, and I'm standing there and there's this moment where I'm holding my little fishing rod and I'm standing next to my grandpa who's got his hand on me and he's like shaking a little bit. I look in this elephant's eye just like I'm looking in that camera lens, and I see something that you can't describe in words. I can see this animal take a moment to assess the situation, to look at me and look at my grandfather, and look at the scenario. And this animal who can't communicate in English, doesn't speak to me, tells me through its own way, just by understanding. And maybe this is my gift, I don't know. You're not a threat, and I'm not gonna treat you like a threat, but don't push me. And I could learn this, and I could see this just by looking into its eye.
Wow.
And right after it looked at me like that, it turned its head to the water, began drinking, took a nice big drink. And just then my mom came out of our tent which was just 300, maybe 600 yards away. She walked along the river and saw us and went, oh shit, my son's gonna die, and took a photo, believe it or not. True story.
Good mother would do.
Yeah, and that's why I have the photo. But the elephant finished drinking, looked at us again, turned around, and walked back up the gully. And we spent, from me to that camera, the whole time away from it. And there's a photo, like I said, to prove it.
Wow.
And that was such an impactful moment to me because even at 8 or 10 or whatever years old I was at this point in time, I realized right then and there That even the biggest animal in the entire world, the African elephant, a young testosterone-fueled bull who wants to just fight something or mate with something, can look and have the reason and the rationale to understand when something is not a threat to them, it's not there to hurt them, can, I believe, look into our souls more or less and say, this is not a bad person. There's no angry energy, there's no nervous energy, nothing like that, and say, we can live together in peace.
Wow.
That was impactful to me.
Wow, that is such a reframing. You know, you, you often talk about the similarities between, you know, the wild and what we can get from getting back to the wild.
Yeah.
Um, and how health and wellness is really not found maybe in these exotic things that we're trying to do, but more, you know, in the basics. What do you, what do you mean by that? Like, How does Mother Nature and getting back in tune with Mother Nature, how does that, in your opinion, impact our health?
Gary, we sit here—
And why has that disconnection been so problematic?
Well, I'll start with the disconnection point. We sit here in your beautiful studio, in your beautiful home, with the most incredible technology I've ever seen in the wellness space. And you tend to, myself included, not just you, Everybody forget that we are just part of this ecosystem. We're part of this blue marble that we're living on here, cold Earth, and we are just one of the pieces of the puzzle. We're not that special.
Yeah.
We're not that different from that elephant that I just mentioned, or that deer in the park by your field, in the field by your house. And you forget that through millions of years of evolution, through the hundreds of thousands of years that human beings have been human beings, We are programmed to be a part of that system, and we have done everything in our power to remove ourselves from that system. And we've done that, as we talked about already, to chase comforts and overindulge and feed ourselves. And I completely understand why.
Yeah.
I live in a nice house too, you know, like I don't wanna, I don't wanna live in a tent. Like I get it. But at the same time, we have done everything as a species to remove ourselves from that system. Now, in doing that, we've created a plethora of comforts— incredible medicine, beautiful cars, nice houses, the list goes on and on. But we've taken away something that is programmed inside of us that we are supposed to be connected to. Now, I don't think this is one of those things like eating food. You can easily go a week without eating food, you know. You can easily go a week without being in nature. But if you're never— if you never go in nature, If you're completely disconnected from it, something, I don't know what, I don't know what it is on a cellular level or a mental or physical level, something inside of you is broken. And I believe strongly that a lot of the physical ailments that we see, a lot of the mental health ailments that we see, come from a disconnection with nature. When you're programmed to stare at a screen, look at a phone, live in artificial light, never be exposed to the elements, never be too hot, never be too cold, always breathe air-conditioned air, and I can go on for another 30 minutes.
Right.
get connected to nature. That is so damn important. And this new movement of go ground yourself, go, go get sun on your skin. Yeah, no kidding. That's what I'm talking about.
That's it. So novel. I've been talking about this for 12 years, and, and I used to get so much grief online for talking about grounding.
Really?
Oh yeah, sunlight, all kinds of stuff. It's becoming a lot more mainstream now, but like, you know, 11, 12 years ago when I started my first clinic and I was reading, uh, what was the book? Sundial. I read, I read a book on, um, grounding And sunlight. And I did this little experiment where I actually held this one end of a pole, uh, of a voltmeter, and I plugged the other one into the ground. And I stood with my bare feet on top of my tennis shoes, and the meter was resting on the, uh, on the left side. And then I stepped off on the ground and pegged all the way to the right.
Interesting.
Yeah.
And, wow.
And so I started going down the rabbit hole of grounding. And, and then I started doing finger pricks. In fact, I took my, um, my guy right here, Max, who's my cameraman, who's right off camera right now. I used to make him the guinea pig, and I would prick his finger and I'd put it on a microscope and look at it under a microscope, see all his blood cells all stacked together. And then we'd either go ground or, or lay on a PMF mat for 20, 30 minutes and then check the blood again. It was all free-flowing. And it was just Beautiful. 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 rouleaux and repolarization, um, I realized that, you know, that's why I always feel so good when I'm out in Colorado with my wife.
Yeah.
We have a log cabin out there.
Yeah.
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 3.5-mile loop that I have in the woods.
Love it.
And I come back and I'm like, damn, dude, the lights are on. We've been forest bathing in ancient, in Eastern medicine for centuries.
Right, right.
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, yeah.
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, Yeah. and I'm still wearing sneakers on a rubber mat, That's my only reprieve from my work. My, my physical well-being, even though I may get fitter because I'm working harder and I'm on a consistent diet, my physical and mental well-being 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.
Wow.
And it, 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, just leave my phone alone. Doesn't have to be for 6 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?
Yeah.
Yeah. Think about it for a second. Do you?
Yeah.
If you don't do that, at least if I don't for 7, 8 days, that compounding starts to really wear on me. And 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. Yeah. 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.
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.
Yeah.
And I spent my entire childhood outside. In fact, my rule with my father, who was a And it 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.
Yeah.
Because sometimes it wouldn't get dark until 9 o'clock.
Right.
But as that sun was going down, I could feel my dad like—
You're like, I better get home.
I better get home. So I was more scared of my dad than I was of anything.
Sure.
And, you know, and I didn't realize how valuable that was.
Yeah.
Until very recently.
Yeah.
Right? 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—
That's it.
Yeah, I built so many tree forts that fell out of trees. And now I just, I really wanna get back there. You know, I think I wanna 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 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, right? 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 9-to-5, 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 24/7. I don't, you don't, nobody should.
Right.
But you need it.
Yeah. So, why is it then, just to get back to what you were saying earlier, that some of these tribes in remote areas that are in nature all the time, Um, why is their health and life expectancy going the other way?
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.
Yeah.
And 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?
Mm-hmm.
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 24/7 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.
Be—
don't be an extreme So, either way, you know, I think take modern medicine for what it is. Use prescription drugs if you need them. Don't overdo it. You know, use your phone. I'm on my phone all the time. I'm probably on my phone 4 hours a day.
Sure.
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.
Oh my God.
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, tinnable, preservative-riddled, all these things. And 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. It's a balance. You have to have that balance. I don't know if that explained it very well, but that's how I feel.
No, it does. I mean, some evolution has got to occur, but—
Of course.
Yeah, 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 comforted.
That's it.
We want to be comfortable. We want the air, like you said, to be, I want it 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. But it is absolutely true. I am most at peace, happy, zen, focused, clear, cognizant, awake, like feel the 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, um, how sedentary is the worst.
Yeah, I mean, sedentary lifestyle is 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. Yeah. Um, for us, for convenience, 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.
Yeah. And so challenging our bodies, hormetic stress, you know, 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. Um, 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, or 85% of them, are clinically deficient in vitamin D3. In, in the rest of the population, it's about 50%.
Crazy.
Um, and, 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 must be to human survival and function.
You don't even need to eat or drink And you know what's crazy to me too, 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. Imagine 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 gonna 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, or a sauna to a guy who lived in the Panamanian jungle. He'd look at you like you're an absolute lunatic.
They'd walk a mile and a half to get water any day of the week.
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 We 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.
Yeah.
And that's just a microcosm of how absurd we have created our culture. Like how, how backwards we're going in a sense.
Yeah, it seems so, so crazy to talk about farm-raised, you know, like 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 Colombia one time. I went down there for a stem cell treatment. I was in Colombia and 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.
What else would it be eating?
Yeah. He was like, this is the dumbest question. I bet.
He must have looked at you.
Does fish swim in water?
Totally. You know, like, you're an idiot. He probably thought you were a lunatic.
Swimming fish or 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.
Yeah.
But it wasn't. 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. Yeah. We do have to ask these questions in the US, right? Just so you know.
Right.
Yeah. But we don't have to ask them here.
No.
People ask me health questions I get questions every single day about their labs, their sleep, their supplements, their genetics. I wanna 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/ai and check it out. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. So you extended me an invitation, which I, I may, I may actually accept to write here on this podcast. Yeah. Um, because it's, I'm profoundly curious about this. Um, there is a, uh, an animal, uh, refuge in India.
Yeah, Ventura— Ventara.
Ventara. Um, and it's, it's run and operated and funded by a very wealthy family.
Anant Ambani, 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. 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 'cause I don't wanna get bit by anything weird.
I'm not gonna let that happen. And I know I'm a hard guy to trust.
I've seen you in the past have the dude in the cage in a river with the crocodiles, swim with the shark, and then, you know, eyeballing an elephant.
I'm not gonna let it happen. I promise, Gary. I promise. I promise. Yeah.
Okay. So we're gonna go here.
Yeah.
And I'm going to bring the best of modern biohacking to these elephants, We'll talk about in a second. But first, I want to talk about what this place is like.
Sure.
Um, and what is your, you know, attraction and, 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? And I was like, I don't know. I was super skeptical. And then I went and I spent 2 days walking around it, and then Anant Ambani, 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 because it's unbelievable. It makes any other wildlife facility look like a roadside attraction. I mean, it's—
Really?
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 is this place has fully dedicated itself to the animals. The animals don't serve the people, the people serve the animals.
Wow.
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 Phantara, 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 the—
Really?
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 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. And so they, some of these animals get such terrible arthritis that they have to spend their lives in water just relieve the stress on their joints.
Wow.
And you're telling me, you're saying, Forrest, I've got this machine, and please, please tell me the name.
Hydrogen nanobath.
The hydrogen nanobath that penetrates through the skin.
Yes.
And fixes— people will come out of that machine skipping that have terrible arthritis.
That's right.
I want to do that for elephants because I care about animals more than people because I'm a bad person.
So gonna do this and document it, and I'm gonna bring these. It's called a hydrogen nanobath. Yeah. And I use it with all my my clients and athletes, um, and it's an absolute game changer. My wife actually has an L5-S1 fusion.
Okay.
Uh, 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 particular pain, but then you just bought yourself another problem. And when it acts up, I mean, she just cannot sleep.
Yeah.
And so I'll put her in this bath for 25 minutes and she's He's good to go for 7 or 8 hours.
That's amazing.
Um, I put Sean Ryan in there, uh, you know, a big podcast.
Yeah, I know.
Former Navy SEAL. And, um, so many, so many folks. But hydrogen's the smallest, lightest 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.
Hydrogen, yeah, but its role in the human body as a selective antioxidant, its capacity to reduce inflammation, but even more fascinating, its capacity to reach areas body that are not reachable by other classic anti-inflammatories.
Yeah.
So, and if I think about it, uh, I won't say that I'm intimately familiar with an elephant's anatomy, but the skin is thick, it's tough.
That's right.
Um, it's coarse.
It's very porous though.
It is.
Yeah.
Okay, so that, uh, hydrogen doesn't care. Um, 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, uh, even into the bone. Yes, it is the smallest That we know of. And when it arrives there, it will have a dramatic anti-inflammatory effect.
Amazing.
Pain modulation, anti-inflammation. So what a cool story. I'll donate these machines. He does not need to buy them. Um, we'll fly them over there and we'll go save some elephants, man.
Let's do this, dude. Let's go. I'm jacked for this.
Let's do this.
We're gonna bring the world's best biohacker To the world's most advanced wildlife hospital, marry the 2 things, and hopefully relieve pain for hundreds and hundreds of elephants.
That's so awesome.
That's, that's what it's all about, man.
I'm, I'm really excited to do that. Um, so what else, what else is there on this refuge? And how did he get into this? He, um, he's a billionaire, he loves animals, and is it a rescue? Did they—
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. If it needs a home, if it needs rescue, needs medical care at all, regardless of the cost, they say yes. God bless them. It's incredible. They have helped over a million animals, both on the facility.
A million animals?
1 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+ elephants, 200+ 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 They said, shut down this whole market. We'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 in conservation and they brought every animal and took them to Ventara. And we took 2,000 animals out of boxes, animals with holes punched in 'em, animals with hooks in their stomachs, animals with ropes around their necks, everything like that.
No way. What were they doing with the animals?
Just— Meat market. They're gonna eat 'em.
Ah.
Yeah.
But just a very cruel way to treat them before that.
Yeah. You treat it like an apple. You grab it, you pluck it outta the water, drill a hole in its shell. If it's a turtle, tie it to a stick, you know, whatever it is.
Yeah.
Oh man. These are living sentient creatures, right? So, and like, I'm not a tree hugger. Like, I go fishing and, you know, I'll spearfish all the time and love stuff like that. But there's a difference between going to get 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 100% gonna do that when we're done with the podcast today. We're gonna get our teams together, we're gonna plan this. 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 into a species that, you know, is just standing in pain because, yeah, they've lived a life that wasn't the way that they were exactly designed to live.
And what's so cool is Anant, 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.
Yeah.
And send him the data ahead of time and all that.
He's gonna 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?
Dude, 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 traveled 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 is just such a dork. I 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 the— 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 You know, and we're so lucky because right here in North America we have some of the greatest wildlife on the planet.
Yeah.
And I think people think that you have to travel to the Serengeti of Africa in order to see cool animals. You, 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 can have one of the best shark dives in the 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.
Oh, you do?
Okay.
So he, he's from Naples and he knows my wife's family very well. Okay. And he has been inviting me on shark dives. Um, and so I, I might have, have to take him up on a shark dive too.
You should, because you should. ABC is the man.
Some of his shark dive videos are gnarly.
Crazy. He's the best. Yeah. He's, uh, he sits in a, in a gold standard. ABC.
He's, he's the man. Have you, 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.
He's a great Dude, what's the gnarliest thing you've ever done under the surface of the ocean? Cave diving? Is it—
No.
Manta rays?
Is it sharks? 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, Um, they will appear and disappear once every 15 to 20 years, usually timed with the El Niño. Well, I don't know if you know this, but we have an El Niño year this year, Gary.
Whoa.
So I got a call from a Mexican buddy who said, hey, Forrest, the Humboldt squid are here. They haven't been here in 17 years. Get down here. So I grabbed my whole crew, my Discovery Channel crew— don't let Discovery hear this— with zero plan in place, zero pre-production, zero thought, anything, loaded my truck up with toys. I, I put literally Like all my scuba gear in there, spearfishing gear in there, deep drop gear in there, bruvves in there, ROVs in there, all my toys, and just bombed down to 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, 2,000-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 know—
How do you find them? Is it like, you know, when you look for birds and—
No. So, so sonar, it's way gnarlier than that. Okay. 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 have to go out at night because they perform a vertical migration. They 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.
Wow.
So you're out there in the middle of the night in a tiny little panga, a tiny little fishing, Mexican fishing boat on the Sea of Cortez, throwing lights over the boat to simulate moonlight to bring up the krill and the small things to then bring up A swarm of 7-foot-long squid.
They're 7 feet long.
I can show you some pictures. 7-foot-long.
Whoa, dude, we gotta throw that up on the—
Look at mine. Don't show 'em that one. Show— look, Forrest Galante Humboldt squid. I'll show you some stuff. Will blow your mind.
Yeah, dude. Yeah, I wanna see that.
And then we're gonna throw this up on the pod too. They have a beak, like a parrot beak that's this big, that there's only 2 people that have ever been— well, no, there's been more, but 2, 2, 2 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, so here we are. I didn't even know you 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. They're all yours.
We are throwing this up. Can I see the pictures? If you want to see a picture of the squid, I'm at least gonna hold it up on here.
You have my phone right there? Can you hand me my phone? I'll show you right now.
This is—
And so here we are, Gary. This is awesome. Now, in order to not die, I did 2 things. So I get the squid up to the surface. I'm way out in the deep pitch black. I'm talking 1:00 AM, middle of the night, simulated moonlight, vertical migration, swarming Humboldt squid. And I get these squid to come up. Now, I don't wanna be ripped to shred by these squids. Right. So I put on chainmail, literally knight-style chainmail.
Yeah, that shark, uh, that shark suit.
That's right. The Neptunic shark suit. Exactly. But the problem with the chainmail, Gary, is that it weighs 50 pounds. So if— that's me with one in chainmail.
Whoa.
So if these sharks attack, they can't— sorry, these squid attack, they can't get through the chainmail, the shark chainmail. So now I'm on a rope system hanging off the boat in the pitch black middle of the night with swarming 7-foot-long squid trying to attack me.
Huge.
Huge. Yeah. Wow. I got plenty more to show you. That's just one I have.
The gnarly 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 100 suction cups with razor-sharp teeth on it, plus the beak in the center.
Hold on. 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 3 weeks and they're gone again.
Dude.
So I managed to get Get 'em, document it, go scuba dive in chainmail in 3,000 feet deep water with a rope holding me to the boat while these squid were all over me.
Yeah, 'cause I imagine the chainmail 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, nothing even close to what you're talking about. And I did 2 night dives. Night diving was so gnarly for me because—
It's crazy.
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 are not there.
Yep.
And as you're like moving this light around, we did a, it was part of my dive certification. We were only in like 30 feet of water. And we all had the little glow things on the back of our tanks. And I just remember being super petrified because if you shut the light off—
That's it, blackness.
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.
But you can't. Yeah.
3-dimensionality of space.
Yeah, 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. And 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. We're not. We're very small. We're just little ants on this planet, you know?
Yeah.
And it's important to get that bit of reality check.
Yeah.
I think.
I'll tell you what, one way to get it is to go night diving.
Yeah.
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.
Really?
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 these squid during the day. One in a billion chance. And I mostly night dive lobster hunting 'cause lobster come out at night. So, I mostly go night diving to hunt lobster. We eat a ton of lobster.
We 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—
90 of them in a day, that's like—
I know, it's way better over here than where I live. But, um, yeah, I've done a lot of night diving. Night diving for sharks because you see shark behavior different at night. There are 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.
Do 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 dunk and you look and there's a tiger shark that's bumped your tank.
Aren't, um, I remember, uh, we, we studied sharks in human biology. It's something about like the ampulla of Vater or something.
Ampullae of Lorenzini.
The ampullae of Lorenzini. That's it. Ampullae. I really slaughtered that, but that's okay. I, I did take some marine biology, but, um, and, and this is a sensory organ that's in the nose of the shark. I'm going to bastardize this and you'll, you'll clean it up, but these animals have so many different ways of 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.
That's right.
And can go right in and hit that fish.
That's right, yeah. And 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, 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 ago that we learned about this in marine biology as a part of my human biology schooling. 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 thing. Right into the crowd and do that.
And then, you know, the way that they sonar communicate too, and it's a lot more intelligent 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. Elephants, 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 5 miles away A gray 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, the petrodactyl feet of an elephant that is sending a message. And they're speaking a language that way.
Wow.
In addition to that, we're starting to see and understand, and not fully understand, but, but recognize that there is actual telepathic communication that we don't really understand outside of the sound communication in marine mammals. Things like orcas, gray whales, blue whales can actually telepathically communicate, not Not through body movements, not through sound, actual mental connection that we do not understand. 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 2 whales can be swimming together and one can tell the other something without any physical cues, without any sound cues, nothing else.
No.
Isn't that amazing?
Wow. And so they could call each other over. They can—
Yeah.
It's, I had an argument with a friend of mine a while ago that said, tried to convince me that dogs don't feel emotion.
Well, he's wrong.
Yeah, so I said, I go, first of all, you don't have a dog. 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 when he sees me. Anger, the whole— he's like, no, 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 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. The 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. 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 test Yes, it did. 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. 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, and may be able to communicate that?
I think in many cases, greater emotional intelligence than we have.
Wow.
But you know what's interesting? You know what we were talking about, forest bathing and the fact that if 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 old shaman or 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. Gustave's a perfect example, if you know who he is, the crocodile.
Is he a crocodile hunter?
No, sorry. Gustave was a very 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 7 years for them to shoot Gustav because he was so mentally aware that there was a change, probably in energy of predation, that he went to hiding. And 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 7 years for them to kill Gustav, the man-eating crocodile.
He knew they were stalking him.
He knew. And he could just sense it, feel it. We don't know why.
Yeah.
But the point is, for 5,000-plus years, Whereas 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.
It'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.
Yeah, and we look at the age of some of these marine mammals. You know, I read the other day about a shark 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, right?
They're slow. That's 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. And I wonder what we could borrow from that. For human physiology, maybe we should just slow down.
Maybe. Yeah, maybe.
They don't— they must not be very stressed out.
You 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 Galápagos 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.
It 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's sedentary, it dies. Oh, that's true.
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. It's over 100, some of them 150 years they estimated before they made it.
Right, exactly.
Dude, that's a long time to get laid.
It's a long time to wait, yeah. Yeah, I'm in college, right? Yeah, most of us gotta wait till we're 16.
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'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—
Yeah.
Deep down there.
Yeah.
Like, in your journeys, like, doing all these docuseries and everything, is there anything— I mean, aside from this, this squid, um, episode that you had, which is— that's— that is just riveting, man.
It's bonkers.
That is wild. Like, um, 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 versus the way that animals live. I mean, you've had— you've been connected to so many different species.
Yeah.
In so many different environments. You know, I— it's fascinating to me.
I don't— I can't think of one specific example to answer that question. I 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 and 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, story I shared, or maybe it's seeing 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. And 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 gonna beat my chest and catch a snake, or I'm gonna 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 docent of the planet? As the smartest and most intelligent creature on this planet, should we not use that to our advantage?
Yeah.
To take care of everything? Do we not have this massive responsibility as human beings, as the smartest, most sentient being on this planet, then take care of it? I think we do.
Oh yeah.
And my best version of doing that, because I don't have billions of dollars and I, 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.
Yeah. You talk about, um, the, the closer you get to nature, the more you wanna protect it.
That's it.
Yeah.
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 had lived in Costa Rica his entire life. And we did whitewater rafting and rappelling and canyoneering and ziplining and all this stuff.
So much fun.
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. But, um, what really fascinated me was the comfort level that this guide had in nature, seeming— so he talked about, um, what was the most poisonous snake?
It was a fer-de-lance.
It was a— no, it was— 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, okay, in Central America, I think it would probably be a fer-de-lance or a type of 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 want to 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 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, um, open these flowers, and down in the flower would be these tarantula-sized, um, spiders. But he would slide his hand in there and let it walk onto his hand, and he would just lift it out.
Love it.
Um, you love it?
Yeah, I love it. I love it. Count me in.
Yeah, we didn't love it, man. Um, and then we, we stopped at this place called the Pacori Lodge on the Pacori River. You raft in, you stay overnight, and you raft out. And, and he would go out and find these bullet ants.
Uh-huh.
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.
Yep.
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 flick it off. And I was like, how do you know that that's not going to bite you?
Yeah.
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.
Yeah.
From the elephant.
Yeah.
He was able to exude this sense of not being— that spider could have bit him. He didn't grab the viper.
Smart. Very smart. Yeah.
He did not grab the viper, but the bullet ants walking up the arm, the, you know, this big spider crawling down, he grabbed grabbed a bunch of other snakes.
I bet.
He was snatching, I mean, big, big snakes out of trees.
Out of the trees.
Yeah. Um, and, uh, uh, were they pythons?
Boa constrictors.
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 it 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, He was just so comfortable 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.
Yeah.
You 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, yeah, he didn't grab it.
He knew that that one's a no-go.
Yeah.
But he also knew that if he 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 it— that, that level of comfort and that level of adoration comes from a respect, and the respect comes from understanding.
But his level of calm while he was explaining— he didn't say the Schmidt scale of pain, but he was like, it was the most painful bite.
Yeah.
Um, so he's like, if this bites me, it is the most painful bite known to man.
Known to man. Yeah.
Um, and, and if this 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, 100%.
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.
Yeah.
With, with a little, little strap.
The straps.
Boots up to here.
I'm more of a boots guy, but yeah.
And the leg 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.
Yeah.
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 had just gotten picked up out of a Just walked on his arm, um, and it got put back where it belonged.
There's a lot of things that we forget we understand without, without hearing cues, right? If 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— he's looking at you, he's looking, he's furrowing his brow, he's clenching his fist. You're like, wait, that guy's gonna 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 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. We— 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? And those are good examples of that.
The quantum— it's that everything is connected.
That's it.
Um, Forrest, this is fascinating, man. I'm totally going to take you up on the offer to come to India. Um, 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, and then watch this have a positive impact on them. So I'm super excited about that. We'll document it. We'll, uh, maybe we'll get it on the calendar before the end of the year.
100%, Gary.
So for my audience, uh, that's not familiar with you, how do they find you? Where can they see your docuseries? Um, and please tell us what you're working on now.
Sure. Yeah. Um, 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 years is YouTube. Um, really just launched a YouTube, uh, nearly 3 years ago now. Love doing YouTube. 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. No, this is awesome. So, um, we're gonna head into my VIP room because my VIPs have a whole bunch of great questions for you.
Cool.
Um, but before we do, I wind down all my podcasts by asking my guests the same question. Um, what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?
To me, being an ultimate human means giving to the thing that makes you human. My passion is what makes me human, right? I have a passion for wildlife, and I, 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.
Yeah.
If you can do that with your passion and give everything to that passion, I think that makes you the ultimate human.
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, uh, until next time, that's just science.
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