Joe Rogan Experience #1927 - Forrest Galante
Narrator, Narrator, Joe Rogan (host), Forrest Galante (guest), Narrator
In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, featuring Narrator and Narrator, Joe Rogan Experience #1927 - Forrest Galante explores cryptids, Cloned Mammoths, and Conservation: Rogan and Galante Roam Wild Joe Rogan and wildlife biologist Forrest Galante range across topics from cryptids and unverified megafauna to cutting‑edge de‑extinction science and global conservation failures.
Cryptids, Cloned Mammoths, and Conservation: Rogan and Galante Roam Wild
Joe Rogan and wildlife biologist Forrest Galante range across topics from cryptids and unverified megafauna to cutting‑edge de‑extinction science and global conservation failures.
They discuss plausible ‘cryptids’ like thylacines, giant sloths, and enormous snakes, contrasting them with misidentifications, hoaxes, and cultural lore around Bigfoot and humanoid creatures.
A major segment explores Colossal Biosciences’ plans to resurrect woolly mammoths and thylacines to actively re‑engineer damaged ecosystems, alongside broader rewilding efforts such as wolves, bison, and mammoth steppe restoration.
Throughout, they connect diet, modern disconnection from nature, industrial food systems, and destructive practices like palm oil monoculture and ocean overfishing to the larger story of how humans shape — and might still repair — the natural world.
Key Takeaways
Many ‘cryptids’ are either misidentified real animals or culturally stretched memories of extinct species.
Galante frames thylacines and giant ground sloths as plausible ‘cryptids’ because they once clearly existed, whereas many humanoid or monster sightings can be explained by mis-seen wildlife, isolated tribes, or distorted legends (e. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Remote, rugged habitats make even large animals incredibly hard to confirm or refute scientifically.
Areas like Papua New Guinea, the Amazon, and the Congo have vast unexplored valleys, dense forest, and logistical barriers (helicopters, tribal guides, refueling, camera grids), meaning small relic populations of species like thylacines or oversized snakes could theoretically persist undetected.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
De‑extinction is moving from science fiction to active conservation tool — fast.
Colossal Biosciences is using CRISPR and elephant/marsupial surrogates to recreate mammoth‑like and thylacine‑like animals, targeting first live mammoths by around 2024 and eventual large populations to cool permafrost and restore lost predator–prey dynamics.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Rewilding apex species can repair ecosystem function but demands active, sometimes radical management.
Examples like wolves in Yellowstone, proposed mammoth herds in Siberia/Alaska, and potential thylacine returns to Tasmania illustrate how re‑introducing predators and megafauna can control overabundant prey, disease, and vegetation — yet also raises safety and social questions.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Modern humans are deeply disconnected from the origins and costs of their food.
They contrast organ‑eating hunter cultures and subsistence lifestyles with supermarket convenience, NIH‑backed food charts that prefer sugary cereals over steak, and the backlash to graphic hunting/fishing content from people who still consume meat and fish daily.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Industrial agriculture, mining, and fishing are quietly doing more ecological damage than most people realize.
Palm oil monoculture in Borneo, cobalt hand‑mining in the Congo, and industrial trawling that scrapes sea floors show how consumer products (Nutella, smartphones, cheap tuna) are tied to habitat loss, biodiversity collapse, and human exploitation that urban consumers rarely see.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Conservation as currently practiced is often reactive and late; radical approaches may be required.
Galante argues that mainstream conservation “loses every year” because interventions are triggered at the brink of extinction; he advocates for proactive, even controversial measures like de‑extinction, aggressive rewilding, and reframing economic incentives around ecosystem services (e. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Notable Quotes
“We are losing the conservation game every single year.”
— Forrest Galante
“Radical conservation… I don’t care what it is. Trying something is better than not trying anything and continuing down the path we’ve been going.”
— Forrest Galante
“If we lose the ocean, we all die.”
— Forrest Galante
“We’ve become so jaded with this idea that nature is in harmony and balance. It’s not. It’s tooth, fang, and claw.”
— Joe Rogan
“Imagine ten years from now, there’s going to be several thousand thylacine back in Tasmania… that’s fixing an imbalance we created.”
— Forrest Galante
Questions Answered in This Episode
If de‑extinction succeeds at scale, how should society decide which species to resurrect, and who gets to make that call?
Joe Rogan and wildlife biologist Forrest Galante range across topics from cryptids and unverified megafauna to cutting‑edge de‑extinction science and global conservation failures.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What ethical lines, if any, should limit genetic engineering and artificial womb technologies when used for conservation rather than food or pets?
They discuss plausible ‘cryptids’ like thylacines, giant sloths, and enormous snakes, contrasting them with misidentifications, hoaxes, and cultural lore around Bigfoot and humanoid creatures.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can consumers realistically reduce their contribution to destructive practices like palm oil monoculture, cobalt exploitation, and industrial overfishing without simply shifting burdens elsewhere?
A major segment explores Colossal Biosciences’ plans to resurrect woolly mammoths and thylacines to actively re‑engineer damaged ecosystems, alongside broader rewilding efforts such as wolves, bison, and mammoth steppe restoration.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
At what point does reintroducing large predators or megafauna (wolves, mammoths, saber‑toothed analogs) become too risky for modern human communities, and how should trade‑offs be evaluated?
Throughout, they connect diet, modern disconnection from nature, industrial food systems, and destructive practices like palm oil monoculture and ocean overfishing to the larger story of how humans shape — and might still repair — the natural world.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Could the same global coordination needed to ‘pause’ ocean fishing for recovery or reform cobalt supply chains ever be achieved in practice, and what incentives would make nations and corporations participate?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays) What's up, buddy?
Hey, bro.
Still alive. You are still alive. This is a truthful title to this book.
That's true. (laughs) It's ridiculous-
(laughs)
... but it's true. And it's catchy-
(laughs)
... that's the whole point. (laughs)
Dude, I watched your show the other day, the, uh, the television show. What is the television show?
Mysterious Creatures?
Yes.
The new one? Yeah.
And you, you, you were looking for some wolf thing?
The, uh, red wolf.
Yes.
Yeah.
But they didn't think it was a red wolf. They thought it was, like, some mystical beast.
A howler. An Ozark howler.
I was like, "Oh my goodness."
(laughs)
Which, you know, I mean, wolves do howl.
Yeah. No, that was, that was an interesting story. If you look at the timeline from when this cryptid, this, this howler popped up, it's right when the red wolf was starting to plummet in its numbers.
Mm-hmm.
And as soon as wolves plummet, they call to each other, right? They howl.
Ah, that makes sense.
So it's like, "Oh, we're hearing this thing and this spooky thing that we've seen running around the woods." And it's like, well, yeah. It's wolves trying to find each other.
Oh.
And it happened to also overlap with when moonshining was, like, a big deal, so they perpetuated the rumor of the howler to keep people outta the woods.
Right.
So it, like, checked all these-
Yeah.
... boxes to, like, make up this animal.
Is there any cryptid that you find compelling?
Just the, I think we talked about it before, the megatherium, the giant ground sloth in Peru.
Yeah.
I, that's the only one... I mean, depends what you define as cryptid, right? Like, I'm not a Bigfoot guy or a Loch Ness monster, but thylacine could be considered a cryptid, right?
Yeah, because it was alive, we do have video footage of it, and there's been a bunch of sightings.
Yes, but now you have all these Bigfoot-esque people, right? All these sort of tinfoil hat guys who are like, "It's here! I've seen it," or whatever.
(groans)
And so it's, like, started to fade into this cryptid realm, and I still think that in Papua New Guinea they, there could be an extant population.
Why in Papua New Guinea?
So they used to range... We got right into this.
Yeah.
This is great, by the way. (laughs) So they used to range from PNG, from New Guinea, all the way down to Tasmania, and then as people came over, they brought dingoes with them, right? And this was like 4,000 years ago. And then the dingoes out-competed the thylacine in mainland Australia and, in theory, in Papua New Guinea, but dingoes were never introduced into Tasmania, which is why they, thylacine, occurred for so much longer in Tasmania.
Install uListen to search the full transcript and get AI-powered insights
Get Full TranscriptGet more from every podcast
AI summaries, searchable transcripts, and fact-checking. Free forever.
Add to Chrome