Giant Sloths & Asian Unicorns | Joe Rogan & Forrest Galante

Yeah, so what other animals are you looking for? A lot. Like we're talking about primates. I'm going to Borneo to look for an animal called the Miller's grizzled langur. It's a type of monkey. I just got back, I was looking for an extinct caiman in the Amazon. An extinct caiman? Yeah. What's the difference between that and the caimans that you see? Just a different species, you know, just like there's many types of crocodile, there's many types of caiman. You know, you have saltwater crocodiles, now crocodiles, same thing with caiman. And I was looking for one with a very weird morphological variant. It looks very very different to any other. What's different about it? It's got a very elongated snout. If you've ever seen agar.io, you know what that is a type of crocodile with this long crazy nose. It's like the alligator family, the caiman family version of that. This really long skinny face. Super light, super yellow coloration, just very different. Last time one was seen was 52 years ago. And then they had one in a zoo that died in the 80s and nobody's found one since. So just really cool. And so yeah, the list goes on. You know, last year I did leopards and I did wolves in Newfoundland and a bunch of really interesting stuff. So it's fun, man. You love it. You should come with. I'll talk to animal planning. Scared. I'm such a pussy. What about giant sloths? What are your feelings on those? So I've had probably three years of research into this, into giant sloths because man, man up who agree, I believe is how it's said. It's the South American name for giant sloths. There's I don't want to give away too much info before I get to do a chance, a chance at looking for it. But after all the research I've compiled, there is in my opinion one location on earth. It's in high Peru where nobody goes. It's a bowl of mountains. Impenetrable. The only way in is a helicopter in the center. To me that that ball is going to be like a primordial Eden. All of the cultures surrounding it have old stories of giant sloths. They all have different names for it, but they all have these stories of these giant sloths, right? They were all hunted to extinction. However, they've handed down these traditions, but nobody except for, you know, a tiny handful of like far out tribal people have ever really got into this impenetrable ball. And I think if they're anywhere, they're in there. Wow. I saw a documentary once about this scientist that was essentially risking his reputation trying to find a giant sloth somewhere that maybe in the Amazon somewhere. Probably Peruvian Amazon. That's where I'm thinking to. And he he kept talking to people that had seen it and he never could get a hold of it, but he had been there for years. Isn't that crazy, though? Like, why? Yeah. What if you're a little Amazonian villager, you don't read, you don't have TV. There's no reason to make up scientific science fiction. Why say you've seen it? Because you like to fuck with white people. Could be could be like get that do the stringy hair. Hey, yeah, I seen that thing. Oh, dinosaurs. Fuck. Yeah. Come on. Take you. Five days in. Yeah. You know, you're you're exhausted, covered with mosquito bites. He's like any day now. Yeah. Just over the next hill. He's going to wait for you to fucking rot out. That would be a mean man. That's a mean guy. That's a mean guy. Leave you on a log. All right, buddy. Patch you on the back. Right. This is the last spot for you. And I'll be taking this. Yeah. I'll take your binoculars. Right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's no reason for them to lie, but that doesn't. That's like the thing that people say about everything. Why was there a lie? Well, I don't know. People lie for a bunch of weird reasons. People do it. People are crazy. They make shit up. True. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to me, it's like you have to take an eyewitness report of an extinct creature or a zoo, crypto creature with a grain of salt. Yeah. But you still have to take it. Do you know what I mean? You still have to bank it and consider it. Yeah. And so that's, that's kind of the way I go. I, I, I always talk to people, but then I come up with, I do the biology, right? I track, I put the cameras out, I bait, I sent, I do all of that stuff to try and get evidence of my own because just going with eyewitness reports is like you say, it's nothing. Is there ever been any eyewitness reports that are just too, too ridiculous? Where you're like, Oh, for sure. Like what? Oh man, loads. I mean, like talk about the style scene, for instance, there was a guy that we met there who's like, yeah, yeah, there's style scene everywhere. They run around with the black cats and we're like, what? He's like, yeah, there's black Panthers too. They like hang out together. Black Panthers in Australia. Exactly. I made the same face you did. So I'm like, okay, tell me more. And he's like, yeah, you know, they like to hang out over there. They're behind the trash. They jump around with black Panthers. Oh, they just fucking with you. And I'm like, well, that's the thing. I'm like, you're, you're just, you're either crazy or you're completely fucking with me. And I'm not sure which one it is because your eyes are telling me crazy. Yeah. Well, I mean, how many different pockets in the world are there? Like that basin that you said you got to get helicoptered into? There's a few. There's a few. Yeah. You'd be surprised cause you know, we're here, we're in a city. We're so used to our modern conveniences, but there are totally untouched pieces of the world still. Well, do you know David Cho, the artist? I don't. He, um, he went to the Congo, I think it was the Congo to look for a dinosaur. It was a really early vice piece back when vice was first starting out. And David is one of the more eccentric people that I know. He's a multimillionaire made a shitload of money gambling. And also he made a shitload of money because he was at Facebook painted. Yeah, he painted Facebook. What does that mean? Like the wall? Yeah. The inside they hired him to paint, like do these murals and they gave him stock and that stock wound up being worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And so now he's just this freaky, super talented artist who is just doing weird shit. And one of the things they did was like, Hey man, you want to go look for a dinosaur? He's like, fuck yeah, I'll go. Absolutely. Why wouldn't you? You know? But there's this video of him, I want to say he was like 25 at the time too. I think he was pretty young. Yeah. Look at him there. Oh yeah. So he's in the jungle in search of a fucking dinosaur because, and it was one of those things where the, the locals were saying, Hey, there's a dinosaur in the Congo, which doesn't totally make sense, but, but who knows, right? Why not investigate it kind of thing? I mean, how big of an area would there have to be for there to be a species that we are not aware of? Like how big of an area? Oh, I mean, you know, that's, that's, it's a generic question. Cause we discover you'd have to look up the numbers, but it's like 2000 new species a year. But little stuff, but mostly little stuff. Uh, there's an animal discovered the most recently, there's an animal called the Sowla. It's an animal that I'm actually working on later this year. And it is a, an antelope like they call it the Asian unicorn. Cause for generations, people have been talking about this Asian unicorn and Western world's like, yeah, whatever, whatever, whatever. And then finally somebody went down there into the Laotian mountains and, and was like, here's a skull and here's a skin. And they're like, holy shit, this is a real thing. And this is like in a pot, not populated, but there's plenty of people living there. You know what I mean? This isn't like, this isn't like the middle of nowhere. This is where there's villages and tribes and people and they're like, here's this animal. Here's a skin. Here's a skull. And since then, I think one trail camera has the photo has ever surfaced. Like nobody's ever successfully documented it because it's just this incredibly elusive animal. Like whether it has super sensory organs, you know, hearing sight, smell, whatever it is, or it's just super low density and population. Nobody really knows. But this animal, this, this huge like antelope has been around forever. People, little tribal people have been talking about it in like a mythological way, the same way they would talk about dinosaurs in the Congo and the Western world's going sure buddy, whatever you say. And then somebody finally goes down there does an expedition just like David did and goes, Oh, it turns out it's here. Wow. What is it about animals where we're so fascinated by the ones that might not be real or that might be hidden? Like what, what is it about them? I mean, we, we, I mean, people love to study giraffes and things that are absolutely real, but they also have an even more compelling need to search for things that are not quite sure that I'm not quite sure if they exist or not. I don't know, man. I think it's like, it's human nature to want to know more, right? Like we, of course, like not everybody, you see a giraffe, you're like, it's real. I know it. Banked it. Right. Some people go to the extreme. They study every aspect of it. But as a general populace, I feel like once we know something's there, we want to know what the next thing is. Yeah. I mean, we, what do you think? Like what, why, why is it that we're so fascinated with? I don't know the answer. I think it's probably a side effect of our compulsion for innovation. Like human beings are constantly trying to find out new secrets and find, you know, like find out new discoveries and invent new things and find, explore new worlds. I mean, this is just something that's been a part of human nature forever. This desire to improve and to go further, find the next best spot, find a new thing, you know? And then I think that also works with animals. I think we have this desire to find animals that we didn't know are real or weren't sure are real. Well, knowledge is the foundation of that, right? To go to a new planet, we have to have the knowledge of how to get there, right? To go to a new habitat, we have to know what's there. And I think maybe that's, that's kind of that deep rooted desire is like, we need to know about this thing in order to understand if we can innovate off.