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Coming up next on Passion Strike.
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I think you hear a lot of entrepreneurs talk about this, but I think so much of it s fear based.
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People are just scared to take risks.
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They re scared of the what if.
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What if I don t make money?
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What if I don t make it?
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What if I can t get a job?
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What if, what if, what if, what if?
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And for me, I m not fearless.
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The definition of bravery is not being fearless.
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I d say the definition of stupidity is being fearless.
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The definition of bravery is being scared of something, but doing it anyway, being willing to take that risk.
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When it comes to being entrepreneurial, just like when it comes to tagging a great white shark, catching a cobra, darting a lion, all the things that I do for work now that I love doing, you have to take a calculated risk and you have to be laser focused and you have to be willing to give it your everything.
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It sounds like a very grandiose message, but I think for me, if you aren t willing to focus 100% of your time and energy and effort on this thing that you want to do, you will end up doing something that you don t want to do for your life.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, John R. Miles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become Passion Struck.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Episode 413 of Passion Struck, consistently ranked as the number one alternative health podcast.
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And thank you to all of you who come back to the show every single week to listen and learn how to live better, be better and make a positive impact on the world.
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If you re new
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of the show, thank you so much for being here, or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, and we so appreciate it when you do that.
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We have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans  favorite episodes that we organize in convenient playlists that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started.
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And in case you missed my interview earlier in the week, it featured Angela Duckworth,
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the number one New York Times best-selling author of Grit, the Rosa Lee and Egert Chang professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and we discuss Grit, self-control, personal agency, and she also gives a sneak peek about her upcoming book.
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Angela s work was so foundational to everything
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that I talk about here on Passion Struck and it was such a great opportunity to have her on the show to help launch my book.
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And if you liked that previous episode with Angela or today s, we would so appreciate you giving it a five star rating and review.
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They go such a long way in strengthening the Passion Struck community where we can help more people.
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create the intentional life that they ve always dreamed of.
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And I know we and our guests love to hear your feedback.
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Today s episode explores the life of someone who is truly passion struck and features a remarkable guest whose work is reshaping our understanding of the natural world.
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Forrest Galante, the executive producer and host of Shark Week.
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Known as the modern-day Charles Darwin, Forrest s dedication to wildlife biology and conservation is not just about adventure, it s about making a significant impact on global conservation efforts and changing the way we view the natural world.
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Forrest Galante s journey is a compelling story of passion
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turned into purposeful action.
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With a degree in biology, specializing in marine biology and herpetology, he has carved a unique niche in high-risk wildlife biology fieldwork, focusing on species on the brink of extinction.
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His work goes beyond the realm of traditional conservation.
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It s a race against time to save the unsung heroes of our ecosystems.
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His groundbreaking discoveries have garnered international attention, not just for their scientific importance, but also for their message of hope and resilience.
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Through his show, Extinct or Alive on Animal Planet, Forrest takes viewers on an exhilarating quest to find species once thought extinct.
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This show is a global platform that highlights the
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critical importance of biodiversity and the urgent need for conservation.
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Forced impact is amplified through his participation in his high-profile projects like Discovery s Naked and Afraid, where he demonstrated not only survival skills, but also deep respect for nature.
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His expertise and hands-on approach have led to rediscovery of eight animals once believed to be extinct, challenging our perceptions and proving that it s never too late to make a difference.
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Beyond television, Forrest continues to lead field expeditions and surveys, dedicating his life to the preservation of wildlife.
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His active social media presence and on-camera expert interviews are not just about sharing adventures, they re about educating and inspiring a global audience about the importance of wildlife and nature conservation.
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Today, as we delve into the fascinating world of Forrest Galante, his Passion Struck life is not just about chasing adventures, but about making a lasting difference in the world.
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Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am so excited today to welcome Forrest Galante to Passion Struck.
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Welcome.
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Hey, John.
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How are you, buddy?
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Of course, I am doing incredible, and as I told you before this show, I have had the opportunity to interview hundreds and hundreds of people.
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Everything from astronauts to Navy SEALs to Green Berets to actors and actresses.
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I have never met anyone quite as unique as your life is, so I can t wait to explore it.
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Well, that s a heck of an honor.
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Thank you so much.
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It s a pleasure to be here.
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And I would say the show about passion definitely aligns with me because I ve always followed my heart on the things that I love to do and somehow managed to turn it into a career.
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So, yeah, it s awesome to be here.
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Thanks, man.
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I love to get these episodes started by giving some people contextual background on where you ve come from.
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And I understand, although you were born in California, you actually grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe and on that farm, you were surrounded by diverse wildlife.
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And your mom was one of Africa s first female safari guides, as I understand it.
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How did this upbringing shape your perspective on nature and conservation?
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Yeah, that s all correct.
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Grew up in the Southern African bush of Zimbabwe and as having safari business running parents, I would spend all of my time if I wasn t in school, either on the farm or in the bush.
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And so how it shaped my life in conservation, one is I was always just passionate about wildlife.
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It was the only thing I cared about.
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I didn t care about video games or TV or anything.
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I cared about fishing, I cared about trapping, I cared about catching stuff, I cared about seeing animals.
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It was the only thing that really interested me outside of maybe a bit of rugby as a kid.
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So there was that.
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And then as far as how it shaped my life with conservation, as I grew up, I saw places that I love
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disappear.
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Trees get cut down and wild areas turn into farmlands and places get developed.
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And so I watched this wildlife that I d spent my whole childhood around monitoring and learning from and learning about disappear and get displaced and get hunted or poached for bushmeat or whatever it happened to be.
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And so I didn t like that.
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And so I didn t realize that when I was 13 years old or 14 years old, when we left Zimbabwe, but that sort of shaped my entire
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future as to trying to mitigate that and prevent wildlife from being displaced and animals from disappearing and wild habitats from drying up.
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Yeah, I want to get to that here in a second.
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Another thing I wanted to explore before we touched on that move from Zimbabwe to California, and that is, I understand when you were seven or eight, you had a firsthand experience.
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I think it was with your grandfather with a great white shark.
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Can you tell me about that experience?
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So I, Zimbabwe is a landlocked country, so I didn t have any great white shark experiences when I was little, but had a lot of big experiences in the bush.
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So with my grandfather, him and I did a lot of stuff together, but had a close call with a big bull elephant in Mauna Pools that came down and blocked us off from our exit area.
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I got stuck in a big thing of mud at a place called Long Pool and had this big Nile crocodile coming to chow me.
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And my grandpa was whacking it with a stick and I had a lot of close calls with him, but no, nothing, nothing specific with a great white shark with him.
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Okay.
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I happened to see an article where they mentioned you were in Mozambique and that happened.
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So inaccurate reporting.
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Yeah.
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We used to go to Mozambique when I was little and we do a bit of snorkeling and stuff, but I don t remember anything with a great white shark.
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Definitely saw a few sharks, but nothing crazy.
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That s where my big love of the ocean came from was those youthful trips to Mozambique, which is a neighboring country from Zimbabwe.
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But, uh, yeah, no, not no memories of a great white shark from there.
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Well, I understand as you moved from Zimbabwe to California, you had to do it because of political turmoil that was underway at that time.
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How has that helped shape your view of the intersection of politics and wildlife conservation?
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It s a good question.
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The problem is Zimbabwe went from one of the richest countries, the richest country in Africa, richer than the United States in some senses, because it was one for one with the British pound at one point in time, meaning the currency was valued higher than
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the United States  currency to the poorest country in the world in under 10 years.
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So when a country goes into a nosedive like that, people do what they can to survive.
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There s no food on the shelves.
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There s no anything.
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And so the wildlife suffers because of it.
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Bushmeat, the trade for bushmeat and things like that goes rampant.
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Just seeing the political turmoil of Zimbabwe go into such a tailspin and seeing how people had nothing and go from being happy, relatively wealthy and food in their bellies to having so little and having to rely on natural resources, I would say was definitely eye-opening, even if in my youth I didn t really understand it.
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I didn t really understand it until much later in life when I understood the politics of it and I understood what it meant for the natural resources and things like that.
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Yeah, and I understand one of the things that you re known for is freediving and spearfishing, and this is something that you picked up when you moved back to California.
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How did those activities start influencing your desire to want to build the career that you have today?
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So what happened was we got chucked out of Zimbabwe in 2001 during the political turmoil, came to California, and I was longing for that same sort of wild connection to nature that I d had as a child.
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And you don t really just get that in California.
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California is very tame, contrary to what you might see in the media.
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You know, there s really nothing above the surface, a couple of mountain lions throughout the state, and that s about it.
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And when you ve grown up in the African bush, where there s something interesting from a wildlife perspective around every corner,
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California feels very, very boring.
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So I was longing for that connection to wildlife, that place where you re not at the top of the food chain, but rather somewhere immersed in it.
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And that was what led me to find freediving in California and specifically freedive spearfishing.
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So I remember the first time I jumped in the freezing ocean of Morrow Bay.
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water was in the 50s and I was in a pair of board shorts I made as long as I could and yeah just seals and sea lions and knowing there are white sharks and things all the way from little tiny gobies and blennies to giant white sharks and whales and so yeah I found that same exact draw for a wild place in the oceans of California which truly are magnificent um that I that same desire that same passion for
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immersion into the food chain that I d grown up with in Africa, in the oceans of California.
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And so we were really poor.
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We came here as political refugees.
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We had nothing.
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And I still remember I spent $1 on a pulse beer, which is like, it s like a stick with a rubber band on the end, basically, and used to feed the whole family with that.
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And I d go out and shoot four or five little surf perch, like as big as my hand, nothing big, like similar to a bluegill.
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for those listening that aren t from California and take that home and make fish tacos out of it or whatever just to feed the family.
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And so I felt very cool because I was providing for the family when we had nothing.
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I was able to be back in the food chain.
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Obviously spearfishing is 100% sustainable.
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You only target the individual animals that you want to harvest and take them home.
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without any, you don t leave any fishing line in the ocean or lures snagged on bushes or anything like that.
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So yeah, I just fell in love with the ocean and fell in love with that.
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I had that same exact stuff, feelings I d had from Southern Africa, just now in the oceans of California and became very competitive in the space.
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Everything I always do, if I fall in love with it and I become very passionate about it,
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I become competitive around it because I think it s just my nature.
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And so I became very competitive in the free dive spearfishing world and started breaking world records and chasing fish and doing all this various stuff, which at the time was just a passion, but helped project.
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It helped build me into the career and place that I m in today, even though once again, I didn t realize it at the time.
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I happen to love spearfishing as well.
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And when my son was younger, middle school and in high school, we used to go out in Tampa Bay because one of my favorite fish is the hogfish.
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And the only place you can get that is pretty much spearfishing.
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So we would go out there and do that.
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And ironically, we would go
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with a friend of mine and his son, and he didn t like hogfish.
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He may be the only person on the planet who doesn t like fish.
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So never heard of that.
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Everybody likes hogfish.
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So he would trade me grouper for hogfish, which I would do any day of the week.
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Something I saw you and I have in common is I ve been to 50, 60 different countries all over the earth and I understand that after you graduated college that you visited 40 plus of the most interesting places on earth.
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What caught my interest on it was that you were hospitalized many times during this journey.
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Can you talk about that and how in the world that led you to end up in high risk wildlife biology chasing?
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I think I was only hospitalized.
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Oh no, three, four.
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Yeah, okay, quite a lot.
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Yeah, I was hospitalized a few times.
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Yeah, so in college, like I said, we had no money.
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We were refugees when we came to the United States.
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My family, it wasn t really much of a tradition, but my mother s generation and her two siblings, their university graduation gifts were a thing that used to exist, which was a round the world trip ticket where you could jump on and off one airline.
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for basically whenever you wanted.
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This is some 55 years ago.
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So that obviously doesn t exist any longer.
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But I d always heard these stories from my mother about when she traveled the world after university.
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And so in university, I started a small business, which was an adventure science business.
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where I take kids, local kids in Santa Barbara, where I live, which is a, you know, it s a pretty rich neighborhood, which is immersed in nature.
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And I take kids for a fee out into the wilds and teach them about Channel Island foxes and catching snakes and this, that and the other thing.
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And so I started this little business that I was able to sell when I graduated from college.
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And in selling that and selling my little boat that I bought for the business and my pickup truck that I used for the business and basically
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everything I had that wasn t nailed down that I couldn t live without, I was able to save up enough money just by my first ticket.
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And the goal was to just travel and go for as long as I could.
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And I came home a year later with negative $400 in my bank account.
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So I just pushed it to the very, very limit.
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And
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During that year, we went to 28 countries, I think.
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I ve traveled so much now, it s hard to keep track.
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But I think we went, we did 28 countries in that year.
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And I went with my girlfriend at the time, who s now my wife.
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And we jumped all over the place with the goal of seeing and document, not documenting, but just immersing ourselves in really wild and unique places, finding a few of the target animals and species I d always wanted to see and find.
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And yeah, we went all over the place.
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We went, we traveled west.
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So we went from California to Samoa and then Tonga and then New Zealand and just continued going west.
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If that makes sense, Australia, blah, blah, blah.
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And yeah, there s a lot that happened in that time.
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I got a couple different things.
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I broke my back in Thailand, jumping off of a waterfall.
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I put myself, wasn t really a hospital, more so in a vet s clinic with a terrible third degree
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Carl Byrne from trying to fish lobster out of a hole in Komodo Island.
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And the list goes on and on.
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But yeah, it was quite an adventure, that s for sure.
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And we did a lot of cool things.
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I got to see things like Komodo dragon and rare wildlife that I wanted to see my whole life that I d only ever read about or seen pictures of.
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And it was how that shaped my future was probably just
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the taking the restrictors off, just giving myself the ability to do something like that, that I was really interested in, excited about, didn t have an end goal.
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Most people come out of college and their first thing is get a job, make money, figure out how to set up in a life.
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And I think even in today s world, maybe today s world more than ever, kids are so concerned about that.
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And they re so motivated to get out of college and find a job.
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And all my friends did that.
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And what s funny is I look at those same groups of friends and most of them still have those same jobs, albeit they ve moved up in their companies or careers.
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And I came home a year, a couple of years later, whatever it was, a year and a bit later with negative $400 in my account and less qualifications than I d ever had before because I just spent a year goofing off.
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And somehow I ve managed to create an even more successful
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career and business for myself than any of those guys who are so singularly focused on work and career.
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And I think it just is because I wasn t willing to accept the conventional norms of you have to get out of school, find a job, do it this way.
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You get your two weeks of vacation a year and going, that s when you can go and play.
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Like I was like, ah, screw that.
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I m not doing any of that.
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I m going to do it my way, which is just to go do the things I love the most, but still have drive and enthusiasm to figure out a long-term plan.
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Just not right then and there.
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So I wanted to ask you, a lot of times we have these big ambitions that we want to pursue, and yet we get stuck.
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We end up not taking the steps to do them, and it s interesting.
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I like to bring up this statistic on the show, but Cornell University did this study of thousands of people in 2018 that were nearing their deathbeds, and they
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asked them what was the number one regret they had in life, and 76% of them said it was not going after their aspirations when they were younger.
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For someone who s listening to this, and our audience is everyone from new college graduates to high achievers, for you, what stops people from pursuing their dreams, and what did you do differently that allowed you to explore this life that you have?
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I think you hear a lot of entrepreneurs talk about this, but I think so much of it s fear-based.
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People are just scared.
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to take risks they re scared of the what if what if i don t make money what if i don t make it what if i can t get a job what if what if what if what if and for me i m not fearless the definition of bravery is not being fearless i d say the definition of stupidity is being fearless the definition of bravery is being scared of something but doing it anyway being willing to take that risk
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And when it comes to being entrepreneurial, just like when it comes to tagging a great white shark, catching a Cobra, darting a lion, all the things that I do for work now that I love doing, you have to take a calculated risk and you have to be laser focused and you have to be willing to give it your everything.
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And that s, it sounds like a very grandiose message, but I think for me, if you aren t willing to focus a hundred percent of your time and energy and effort on this thing that you want to do, you will end up doing something that you don t want to do for your
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life.
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And it s not like I found it straight away.
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It s not like I came out of college.
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It s as I mentioned, so I came out of college was like, all right, I m going to be this is the thing I m going to do.
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I m going to be laser focused on it.
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No, all I was laser focused on was wildlife and pursuit of wildlife and saving wildlife.
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And then over years,
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quite a lot of years.
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It took me from when I graduated college to when I was nearly 30 years old to really get things up and off the ground.
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But it took me that amount of time, so call that nine years, eight years, of trying to figure out how to do that and experimenting in different fields of biology and science and wildlife and conservation.
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and so on and so forth, and narrowing in on this is exactly how I want to do the thing that I want to do.
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So being open, being dynamic, being able to shift and pivot, but also staying true to your core values and your goals, at least for me, is what led to starting a pretty successful career in wildlife communication, so on and so forth.
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And I think that most people are held back by the fear.
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they re held back by the, what if I don t make it?
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What am I going to do for money?
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Blah, blah, blah.
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John, my wife and I, three years living on my girlfriend at the time, she s now my wife s part-time teacher salary, okay?
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She made $18,000 a year as a part-time teacher.
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We ate Top Ramen five meals a week, minimum.
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We had no money.
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We had absolutely nothing.
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But I didn t let the fear of living like that for the rest of my life stop me from giving 100% to the thing that I wanted to do, which was communicate
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conservation to millions of people and help make the world a better place for wildlife.
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And so we never gave up on that.
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And while it took three years during that timeframe for the first thing to click, it wasn t like it clicked.
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It was like, all right, I ve made it.
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Now it s taken another, since then, another 10, 11 years, whatever it s been since that point in time, to get things up and off the ground.
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And it still hasn t clicked.
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You know what I mean?
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I m still chasing the dream.
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I still think I can do better.
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I can reach more people.
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I can make better media.
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I can have a better income all of it.
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It hasn t clicked.
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It s just something you just never give up on.
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You keep pushing the rock uphill no matter what.
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Man, Forrest, there are so many things now I want to unpack that you just brought up.
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One of the first ones, and I got this question on a podcast I was interviewed on yesterday, is that a lot of people say, we re barely making it.
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We only have $50,000 a year.
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I m just making up a number.
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We can barely cover our rent.
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We don t have enough money to go out.
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I ve got this, I ve got that.
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Like, how do I find the extra time?
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How do I find the extra energy and wherewithal to do this?
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What would be your advice to that person?
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You just have to do it.
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It doesn t matter what financial situation you re in, what opportunities, what education, you just have to do it.
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Don t go out.
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Don t go out with your friends and get beers.
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Don t sleep in until eight in the morning.
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Don t watch Netflix at night.
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You just have to do it.
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You just have to keep doing it, whatever it is.
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How do you find the energy?
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You get up and make yourself find the energy.
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You can t take no for an answer.
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You can t get beaten down.
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let the relentless negativity that is the world that we live in stop you.
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You just have to keep doing it.
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It doesn t matter what it is.
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You ve got $50,000 to your name as the number that I know it s arbitrary, but the number you just said, then you re richer than 99% of the entire planet.
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You might not be rich by the United States standards, but you re richer than 99% of the entire planet.
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You ve got enough to keep going.
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You have a car you have a roof over your head you have a computer to work from you ve got enough to keep going you just have to keep doing whether your business is failing whether you have a side job that is just allowing you enough money just to get by so that you can focus on this thing you just have to keep doing it there s.
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nuances to that where say you re peddling a product say you ve made up a product this pen here and it s a crappy pen that doesn t write right and you ve been pushing it for five years and the pen still doesn t write might be time to change the pen it might be time to change the marketing maybe it s a stabbing tool and not a pen maybe it s a digging tool not a pen but you still have to just keep pushing it whatever it is you have to keep pushing forward
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Don t get stagnant.
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Don t get stuck.
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Don t get down.
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We all get depressed.
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I took no s and no s for years when I first started my production company, when I first wanted to pitch television shows.
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I had no background, no credibility, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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Doesn t matter.
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Just say thank you for your opinion and keep going.
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And if you change your mind, I m here, right?
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Thank them for their opinion.
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Keep going.
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To me, it doesn t matter how little you have, how much you re struggling, how hard it is to find the energy or the motivation or the time.
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I ve been there.
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I ve been there on every sense of the word.
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My family came here as refugees.
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We had nothing.
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We lived in government housing on welfare.
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It doesn t matter what it is.
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You just have to keep pushing towards that thing that you care about, towards that passionate thing.
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Find the time.
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Blow off your friends, blow off everything else that is unimportant to that goal and keep pushing towards that goal.
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And slowly things will click and you ll look back, you ll give it a year, you ll give it two years, you ll give it whatever.
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And you ll go, wow, I now have $60,000 instead of $50,000.
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I now actually have an employee instead of me doing it all.
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And it might feel like you re getting nowhere, but when you look back and you ve given it everything to it for a year or two years, five years, whatever it is, things will grow.
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They will amount to more.
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And you, and if you want proof of that, just look back and just look back at where you were a year ago, two years ago, three years ago.
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And you might be like, oh, I haven t grown at a rate that feels sustainable.
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I haven t grown at a rate that I feel successful, but compared to where you were, if you re always pushing forward, it will grow.
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Yeah.
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So many important things that you just brought up.
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And an example I like to use is Hillary Swank because people see she s this Oscar winning actress, but they don t realize that she was living in a minivan with her mom for a very long time.
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And before she got her first Oscar, she actually took that role for $3,500.
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I didn t know that.
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I was just looking, I was just looking it up a little bit.
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That s hilarious.
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Just to get that opportunity.
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And then that has led to what she has now.
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So anyone has the potential to do this.
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And I think it s so important.
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And you brought up another thing that I love to focus on, and you were talking about the comparison.
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And I tell people all the time that so many of us focus on the gap instead of the gain.
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It s a book that I love by Benjamin Hardy, where we measure ourself against someone else instead of measuring ourself against the gains we ve made from our previous self to our future self.
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And I think that s so important because when you re constantly comparing yourself to other people, you re going to live your whole life in that gap.
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Yeah, a hundred percent.
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And John, social media is such a bastard when it comes to that, right?
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Because you go on social media and especially in today s world, this whole hustle culture of seeing, Oh, you got to make millions of dollars.
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You got to be doing this and you can turn a profit in two weeks.
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And just all this nonsense that these people who probably have never made a dollar in their lives are spouting on social media.
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It s easy to fall into that trap and start comparing yourself to all of these other entrepreneurs or whatever you want to call them.
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and just forget it you just have to block out all the noise even from your own family from everything else i m very lucky because i always had a very supportive mother my immediate family but outside of that i remember my cousins being like oh my god you re never gonna make it in television what a joke you re never oh you gotta give up and get a real job and meet like close family saying things like that and i m like yep thanks sounds good appreciate your negativity
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not going to change anything.
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You know what I mean?
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So you just have to block it out.
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It doesn t matter how many people around you are saying no.
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And one thing that I always find or have found helpful is to surround yourself with people that also have big dreams and aspirations.
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So if you are taking time to socialize or you are doing things, sit down with people that, sure, they might not be as
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immediately fun as your college drinking buddies, but make your social group people that also are trying to accomplish something, not necessarily similar to you, but in the same vein, whether that s entrepreneurial wise or a pursuit of passion or creating something or whatever it happens to be.
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Surround yourself with like-minded people in your social group so that when you sit down, you can be like, wow, how s it going for you?
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What s working?
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What s not working?
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as opposed to, oh, yeah, I have a job at a bank or something like that.
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And you re like, OK, well, it s really hard for me to communicate with you about work stuff because what I m doing is so much different to your nine to five at the bank.
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And so building a network and a social group and a support group around you so that when you are taking time off of staring at a computer screen or making phone calls or whatever is the thing that s pursuing your passion, you can at least be talking to other people who are in the same state as you as far as trying to pursue something and create something.
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And I love what you re saying.
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And I just want to go to my book here for a second, because one of the reasons I wanted to bring you on is to show
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people who are living a passion-struck life and I want to highlight some of the chapters of the book that you re just covering.
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The first principle in my book is to become a mission angler, meaning you need to become a life crafter.
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You need to create that vision for the future self that you want to achieve.
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You talked about being a fear confronter and that it s fears that stop most people in their tracks and from pursuing the life that they want.
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and how you have just confronted those.
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I have this chapter called The Mosquito Principle, where we, just like that pesky mosquito that seems to be this invisible thing that s around us, but honestly creates more harm and havoc than any other planet on Earth, so are those toxic people and influences in your life that you talked about.
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And then I also bring up this whole thing that we need to be a brand reinventor and that like you were saying, once you reach this point, you ve got to continually keep pushing it, keep reinventing yourself, keep expanding.
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So you ve nailed a whole bunch of these.
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And one other thing I really wanted to hit on that you talked about.
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is I talk about the triad of passion, perseverance, which Angela Duckworth calls grit, but the missing ingredient that so many people don t take into account, which is intentionality.
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And you brought this up earlier on how you were guiding your life against your core values and your long-term goals.
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And I think oftentimes you can have passion and you can have that willpower to persevere,
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But if you re finding yourselves going on the wrong course, you need to course correct.
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Because to me, the easy thing to do is those things in life where you re doing things that go against your core values.
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You re taking the easy path, taking the harder path or the more intentional path is doing the things that you re talking about.
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It s not going out to have that beer with your friend.
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It s making the choice to get rid of people who are holding you back.
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So, so many amazing lessons.
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And to be clear, John, sorry, I don t want to interrupt you, but to be clear, anyone listening to this and listening to me needs to take it with a grain of salt.
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Yes, I have created a successful business for myself and a successful life in my opinion, but I have no background in business.
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I have no background in, no degrees in financial management or motivational speaking or any of the stuff that we re talking about here.
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This is just how I ve done it, and I ve done it because I have a passion for animals.
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And at the end of the day, you can boil it down to whatever you like, but it is as simple as I care about wildlife and conservation, and I ve thought this is the best way to do it.
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And it s been a very hard and bumpy road, but I ve done it all just because it s what I care about.
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I m not saying it s the right recipe for everybody, because I have no background to validate that, just my own experiences.
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Well, luckily for you, I have a ton of research that backs up that the steps that you re taking are the same ones that people like Jeff Bezos or Michael Dell or professional athletes like Michael Jordan, Supreme Court justices have all taken.
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And it s how they reach the point that they have.
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And one of the biggest thing you re saying is you just never give up.
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And I did this interview with retired astronaut, Wendy Lawrence, and her big message to people is that you ve got to permit yourself to dream the dream.
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And so many people run into a course in school that they can t get through, or they run into this obstacle or that, and they allow it to stop them from pursuing this life adventure that they want.
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Speaking of life adventures, I want to get into now some of the stuff that I m sure the audience wants to hear about, some of the exciting things that you do.
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What are the most challenging aspects, because I m just imagining there are a ton of them, about creating an engaging yet scientifically accurate show?
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Yeah, well, we did things that are really the hard way, right?
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The first TV show I ever did called Extinct or Alive was about looking for extinct animals, right?
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Which extinct doesn t mean hiding in a bush or around the next corner.
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Extinct means gone.
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And we were probably just as shocked as the audience when we found our extinct animal and our second and our third and all the way up to our eighth.
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And talk about doing things the hard way.
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There s a million other, a billion other ideas you could come up with to communicate interesting animal science that doesn t involve having to find something that the world believes is gone, literally the rarest creatures on the planet.
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And yet we were successful in that.
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But I think what s the hardest part of those adventures?
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Honestly, the hardest part of everything I do, no matter what it is or where it is in the world, is the people side.
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It s getting them funded, it s putting the plans together, it s managing the teams, it s doing the research.
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And then when we re in the field,
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The guerrilla warfare, it s the cartels, it s the corrupt Mozambique officials that are chasing us down a runway with machine guns and the list goes on.
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It s always the people.
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If I were just left to my own devices with the wildlife, it would be nothing but smiles over here.
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But it s always the people that are always the biggest challenge.
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But I don t think that s the exciting thing that your audience probably wants to hear about.
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Rather, we push ourselves really hard.
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I think the reason we were successful in finding eight extinct animals, the reason we ve been able to catch some of the biggest man-eating crocodiles in the world and translocate giant herds of elephant, and the list goes on and on.
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is because we push ourselves to that extent, right?
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And we have all of it, amoebic dysentery, heat stroke, thrown in jail, run out of countries, cross borders illegally overnight to not end up being hung, and the list goes on and on.
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I heard speaking of books,
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most of this is in my book by the way and still alive and i m currently in the throes of writing a second one but it s crazy some of the adventures we ve had from being shot at to being stabbed to being caught to being thrown in prison to some of the wildlife run-ins i ve been bitten by sharks twice now i ve been tagged by a lion i ve
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that just earlier this year, I thought I killed myself by rubbing sea snake venom in my eye ducts out of frustration because I grabbed my eyes like that after milking sea snakes.
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There s been some pretty hairy moments.
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It s always a human error or it s a calculated risk that I ve decided to take.
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It s not the wildlife s fault.
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I just want to take that lesson and apply it to other aspects of people s careers because I
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haven t had that adventure life that you have had to that extent.
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But I spent a lot of time in fortune 50 companies and I was the leader of the technology organizations and people would always come to me and say, what makes a successful project or an unsuccessful one?
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And it s the same answer.
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It s the people.
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People always think it s the technology that s going to make it or break it, or even the processes.
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That is not it.
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It is changing people s hearts and minds.
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And if you can t do that, it s not going to be successful.
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And there are so many things that, like my little company and the employees that we have, that you can overlook certain things as long as other people have important qualities.
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And that shared passion, that shared drive, loyalty, certain things like that are just so critical.
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And when it comes to my field, it s loyalty to the wildlife or core values or passion for communication of the same messages, that that s what s allowed us to thrive and make such hit TV shows is
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I ll be sitting around with five guys in the middle of a southern African bush at a camp who haven t slept for three days, who ve just got out of a holding cell because our permits weren t cleared, who ve been shot at on the runway.
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And instead of going, yeah, guys, we just got to sleep and call this one, they re going, hey.
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Dawn s two hours away, get the cameras ready, we might be able to get that shot.
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And they have the same amount of passion and drink the same 12 cups of coffee that we all have to drink to get through the night.
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And again, it goes back to what we were saying, but surrounding yourself with those people that are willing to really just push it to that extent.
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And it sucks because I m getting older now.
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My whole crew s getting older.
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Now it s getting harder.
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You know, the knees creaking a little bit, the bugged up shoulder is hurting a little bit more.
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The lack of sleep is weighing a little bit more, but still have this group of people that are just so passionate for the same things that we can push ourselves and push against each other in order to propel forward, as opposed to having that sort of toxicity of, we got to stop.
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We got to break down and we got to throw in the towel.
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Yeah, I wanted to go back to Extinct or Alive just for a second because you ve described it as some of your most meaningful television work because for you, it combined education, conservation, and adventure.
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Is there a particular moment or expectation from that series that really stands out that s emblematic of that combination?
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Yeah, it s a great question.
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I think the biggest moment for me was on Fernandina Island in the Galapagos, diving into the bushes and picking up fern, the Fernandina Island tortoise, that tortoise right there, that literally the rarest animal in the world.
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There is one known individual of that species, hadn t been seen in 114 years.
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Only one specimen had ever been recorded prior, 114 years before that.
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And there I am diving into the bush and picking up
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this crown jewel of rarity, this animal that is saved from oblivion, or at least should have been by us finding her.
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And that s in season two, Galapagos, I forget the title of the episode of Extinct or Alive, but that moment, about two thirds of the way through that episode is just, I mean, I m getting goosebumps just describing it because to me it was, don t let my wife hear this with our two children, but probably the best moment of my entire life.
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You know what I mean?
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family-oriented or anything else.
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I don t want my wife to hear that.
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But it s just such a big moment.
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And it s just really the fruition of such a pipe dream of finding such rare and critically endangered, lost-to-this-planet things and actually being able to find them.
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Yeah.
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And I wanted to turn to Face the Beast because it was interesting.
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You took on a producer role and you focused on historical animal attacks.
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But what was interesting to me is I have a ton of behavior science experts on this show and you were working through the eyes of one of the most renowned animal behavior experts.
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Can you discuss how that
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shift in perspective for you from the typical work you did to this project influenced you?
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Sure.
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Yeah.
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So for background context, I was just getting my product.
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So I have a production company.
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So all these TV shows that we re mentioning or whatever, typically produced by the company that I own that has a handful of employees that put these shows together now.
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But at the time I was still just a presenter working for another company, trying to figure out how to communicate science the best I could.
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I had producer credits, but not like this.
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Then I created Face the Beast, which was a History Channel show along with a couple partners, and we brought this show to fruition.
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But because of the locations and stories that I wanted to tell, I never let things like the logistics of, well, how are we going to get to Ramree Island in Myanmar that hasn t had Western people there in 30 years?
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I never let that hold me back.
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I always think, what is the biggest, most grandiose, loudest, most exciting thing we can do?
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Oh, let s go to a place where soldiers were killed by crocodiles, even though they re in the height of a war, and nobody s been there in 30 years, and blah, blah, blah.
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I don t consider that.
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I just consider what is the most incredible story to tell.
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And so when we put Face the Beast together, as I just stated, that was the first location.
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And so although I was heinously underqualified at the time, nobody in their right mind
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would go to Ramri Island, Myanmar, to go nipples deep in a swamp to look for man-eating crocodiles.
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There s the Rohingya massacre taking place at the time, and war strewn.
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I mean, it was crazy.
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It was like the dumbest idea we ve ever had, probably.
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And so the only person who can drive the ship directly into the eye of the storm of the dumbest idea I ve ever had is me.
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And while I was heinously underqualified, I went with the old fake it till you make it and said, I got it.
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I ll produce it.
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I ll take the crew.
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I ll run the show.
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I had created it, so it made sense for me to run it.
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But I just didn t have the skill set or the qualification.
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Regardless, it came out really well.
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And it was because of what we re saying.
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was more to it than just passion, but the passion was there from the entire team, the same team that I still work with today on every project that I m on camera for.
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And I took that team and we went to this hellish spot in Myanmar and we made this show.
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And yeah, it was unbelievable.
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But the perspective changed because instead of at that point to date, all I had been doing is I had been producing off camera, meaning I had been
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creating what are the animals I want to search for?
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Where do we go?
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What s the plan?
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How do we do it?
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And handing that over to someone that would then be like, all right, Forrest, well, now tell the camera why this and why that and so on and so forth.
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And at that point in time, the only shift was instead of me writing all that down and handing it over, I then wrote it down and had to take the experiences that I d had of watching other people produce me and apply those same things to
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other people on camera so that was my first real foyer into being a showrunner and executive producer which means creating the show but not being in front of the camera and it was fine to be honest it was an easy transition because i d inadvertently unknowingly already been doing it i d already been producing myself on camera i just didn t really know it so now i just had to produce other people and the challenge there
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and any good person that works in my industry of creating media, the challenge there is managing the people, managing not just the camera crew and the sound guys and the team, but the people that are on camera and making sure they re happy and can convey their message the way they want to do it in the most accurate and concise way possible.
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So it s just keeping all those personalities aligned and making everybody happy there while still focusing on a mission, which is telling the story of this massacre or whatever it happens to be.
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I spent some time binge watching before I got on this episode and I ve always liked shark week.
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I think it started in 1987.
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If I have it right somewhere around that time, 88.
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Yeah, I know because it s the same age I am.
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Well, one of the episodes that I really liked was your one that you did in Alaska.
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I think it was called jaws of Alaska and.
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It was just amazing to me the conditions that you had to film in and the challenges of filming underwater.
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So as I understand it, the reason you did this is that there were these mammals that were being massacred by some creature that couldn t be identified and biologists and scientists were struggling with what was the cause of all this that was happening.
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Maybe you can expand upon that so we set the right scene for everyone.
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Yeah, simply put, there are seals and sea lions in Alaska that were either washing up dead or swimming around with giant bite marks out of them that didn t match any known predator.
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You know, when an orca kills a seal or sea lion, they don t take this sharp surgical bite.
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out of them, or they don t shred them the way that a shark does.
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And those are really the main predators up there.
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Outside of that, in the water, you have other species like salmon sharks or Pacific sleeper sharks.
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But these are not typically large marine mammal predators, as most people that are interested in sharks know.
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Your big mammal-eating shark is the great white shark.
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But historically speaking, great white sharks are not supposed to go to Alaska.
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So the question was, who is it
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What is it that could be eating these seals and sea lions up under the ice in Alaska?
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Which is a pretty hard question to answer because outside of a few bite marks, you have to actually find something.
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You have to actually see what this big predator is, have great white sharks moved into the area, have other known species like salmon sharks or Pacific sleeper sharks change their predation behavior.
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So we went up there where four other crews had completely failed to try and figure it out.
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And it was very cold and very difficult.
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Yeah, and I understand that while you were filming it, you had to do a lot of freediving.
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And so you couldn t wear this layered approach and you re swimming in water because it s seawater that s actually colder than freezing.
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How did you manage to do that?
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And honestly, like how cold was it?
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Yeah, it was cold.
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So yeah, because I always prefer free diving and the reason being you re much less restricted.
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You re not making the noise of bubbles and clambering around with scuba tanks and things like that.
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And so when it comes to wildlife observations, when you re free diving, you re much more a part of the food chain.
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You re not a weird, different thing.
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You re just the same as being an otter or seal or sea lion.
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Whereas when you re scuba diving, you re like a total alien.
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You re like,
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blowing all these bubbles and you re staying under and you re just acting in a manner that s different to anything else in the ocean.
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So I always choose free diving as a methodology for wildlife observation over scuba diving.
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And because I m quite competent in free dive, I ve been doing it a long time.
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But the reason I tell you all of that is because you cannot free dive in a dry suit.
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And typically when you re diving in Arctic conditions like that, you want to be in a dry suit, which is a waterproof suit that you can put on layered jackets and things underneath.
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You cannot do that with a wetsuit, obviously.
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You just put on a layer of neoprene.
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So we put on these layers of neoprene and got in water that I can t remember, but it was in the 30s, 30, maybe 30, 31.
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It might ve been over freezing.
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It might ve been 33.
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I don t even remember anymore.
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I just remember it was so effing cold that you couldn t close your hands because your fingers were just like.
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They weren t frozen, but you just had no blood in them, so you couldn t do anything with your hands, your face.
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You know that ice cream headache you get when you slurp a smoothie too quickly?
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Brain freeze?
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You re in brain freeze mode 80% of the time, where your whole face is stinging, the wind whips, and things like, at least one morning when we were around the glaciers,
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All the water in my beard that you can see here now would freeze within a matter of seconds from coming out of the water.
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And it s just cold.
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It s just unpleasant.
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And there s nothing more relentless than that cold.
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There s nothing that sucks more.
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Put me in heat, put me in whatever condition.
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But when you re wet and cold,
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For weeks on end, like we were in Alaska, it is so effing draining.
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And yeah, it was brutal.
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And if you want to hear something really stupid, we re doing it again in March of this year.
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We re going to a different, equally as cold place, actually colder, to do another thing.
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I can t really talk about it yet for obvious reasons.
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The show hasn t been announced yet.
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But we re going to somewhere even colder to do the exact same thing again for the entire month of March, which I m really not looking forward to.
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When I was in the Navy, I was stationed up in Newport, Rhode Island.
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We used to have to do damage control drills in this makeshift as a vessel like structure that they built for this.
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And we used to have to do it in January and February.
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And I don t think it was as cold as you re talking about, but it was probably in the high thirties, low forties, and that water hits you and your whole body just freezes.
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You cannot even move.
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Yeah.
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A hundred percent.
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It s brutal.
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Absolutely brutal.
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So funnily enough, John, have you seen these cold plunge things that are super popular now?
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Yeah.
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So I just got one.
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I got a plunge, which is a brand of cold plunge thing.
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And I put it in a gym where I work out and I ve been trying to get used to it in preparation for what s coming up in March.
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And that s a big part of these big lengthy expeditions.
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We do pretty extensive training for each one.
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there s no getting used to the cold.
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I don t care, it just doesn t matter.
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It doesn t matter if you do it at 6 a.m., it doesn t matter if you do it in the middle of the night, it doesn t matter if you do it on a full stomach, an empty stomach, get out of a sauna, come from a run, it doesn t matter what you do.
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You get in a damn cold tub, get in the cold water, it is shocking and it is miserable 100% of the time.
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Well, on that expedition, I understand that you used some unique technologies because the sharks that you were going after
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A lot of people had never even seen these before.
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Can you describe, I know you did some that allowed you to see them in the desks that they typically live in, and then you had to use some because some of these sharks can travel at 50 miles per hour to actually be able to catch them.
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Yeah, so it s one of the things that my team and I have become most well known for globally is our ability to adaptive technologies, really taking tech that already exists in the world and adapting it to wildlife science.
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And so you look at something like the salmon shark.
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which is the animal that we wanted to study and get close to.
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It s an incredibly shy and elusive cousin of the great white shark.
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Beautiful, incredible mackerel shark family, amazing animal.
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But pretty much everybody that had ever tried to study them had failed because they can move 50 miles an hour.
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They re elusive.
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They don t like sound.
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They don t like noise.
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And everybody that had ever tried to spend time with them had done the same thing over and failed.
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And so what we re so successful at, my team and I, is we look at
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species we look at a situation or condition and we break it down into okay what are the factors that could or couldn t be going wrong, and I m doing this on a huge malt 10s of millions of dollars project right now that I unfortunately I can t talk about yet, but it s to save a species of animal that there s very few of.
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And if you saw the ridiculous tools and toys that we re using from the military, from the sporting industry, from the fishing world, and the list goes on, you d be like, this is nuts.
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It looks like a toy shop in my office over here because of all the tinkering going on.
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But what we do is we take these technologies that already exist and adapt them for wildlife science.
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And so in the case of the salmon shark in Jaws of Alaska, in Alaska, we went, all right, this shark can go 50 miles an hour.
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OK, so how are we going to keep up with it?
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Well, we can t in the water.
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We need to come up with another idea.
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It s super shy.
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So we need to be low profile and we need to have a low footprint.
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And it s noise sensitive, which is obvious because everybody that s ever gone in the water on scuba to try and film them has failed.
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So what can we do?
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What can we adapt?
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in order to get closer to these animals.
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So we re thinking, how do we figure this out?
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Long story made short, after many sleepless nights, tons of research, tons of figuring out, I found a guy named Dana Lundquist, an amazing dude.
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You should talk to him, John.
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He s a hell of an entrepreneur, too, who
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created this, uh, this jet board, which is an electric, it s basically a jet ski.
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You start up to your feet.
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That s all electric.
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So it s all electric, meaning it s super quiet.
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It goes 50 miles an hour, which is zipping around.
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And the size of my desk here, it s this big, it s five feet long or whatever.
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And I remember calling up my buddy, Mitch, who s my right-hand man, executive producer, shooter, everything else.
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And I m like, what do you think if I strap a jet board to my feet, you know, which is small and we get behind the sharks going 50 miles an hour.
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Do you think that ll work?
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Of course not.
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Let s do it.
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So I called up this guy, Dana, and we became friends and everything else.
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And I told him what I wanted to do.
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And he s like, look, people just use these things to race and jump over, jump on lakes and stuff.
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I have no idea what it s going to do with sharks, but those are the kind of Hail Mary plays with technology that we always do.
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And so ordered a jet board, got the batteries, shipped it all up to Alaska.
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And when all
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the stars aligned, meaning the water was flat, the sun was low in the sky, so the sharks were up high, the conditions were just right.
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I pulled out this ridiculous jet ski that I could strap to my feet, wobbled my way up onto it, and sure enough was able to keep up and study the salmon sharks with the jet board, with the e-wave jet board.
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And yeah, that was it.
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That was how we figured it out.
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And so that kind of system is something we ve done time and time again, where we take other stuff.
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thermal drones for the military to track elephants and hunting technologies like sound decoys or collars to bring in rare wildlife and adapt them.
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And so it s just, you got to figure out the ecology of an animal or the challenges of a situation.
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And then instead of reinvent the wheel, go and find the wheel and figure out how to make it into something that you can use it for.
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Well, man, Forrest, I could spend another three hours talking to you, but I know you ve got to run.
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Unfortunately.
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If there was one thing you would like to leave listeners with, maybe a piece of advice from your own life, what would it be?
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Well, as this is the Passion Struck Podcast, I would say, if you have that passion, and if you want to know if you have that passion, ask yourself, how much time are you thinking about it?
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But if you have that passion for anything, for business, for animals, for sports, for anything at all, for music,
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Figure out a way that you can spend your time working on that every day.
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It doesn t matter if it s for money, not for money.
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It doesn t matter what it s for.
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Just figure out a way that if you care about that passion so much, that when it turns into a job, you don t hate it.
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Figure out a way that you can give everything to that passion.
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And at the end of the day, you re going to feel fulfilled and rewarded, even if you re not making a lot of money.
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Even if you don t have this giant empire of a business, you ll feel like you ve made a difference because you re pursuing your passion.
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So that would be my tidbit.
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Okay.
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And then the last question is people who want to buy your book, want to learn more about you, where s the best place for them to go?
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Yeah, thank you, I always appreciate that.
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In the book, you know, anywhere books are sold, I m on every platform on the internet.
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The one thing I m really excited about now, John, is our new YouTube channel.
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So I just started a YouTube, it s literally just my name, Forrest Galante on YouTube.
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Sounds ridiculous, but YouTube allows you the freedom to do whatever, to communicate whatever I want.
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I don t have to answer to executives at a network, at Discovery, Animal Planet, whatever, and say, here s a show I d like to make, what do you think?
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Instead,
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I could just go out and make whatever I like.
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And so we just started this YouTube just a few months ago.
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It s at about a half a million subscribers so far.
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And I really want to start leaning into that more and bringing a more serious, not serious, but a more scientific and higher production quality approach to YouTube, which is a space that has typically just been kids on iPhones or whatever.
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And I m really excited about that.
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It s like a whole new venture for us.
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It s the first thing in this world of media generation that s got me really excited in a while.
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So I d love it if people would check that out.
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Okay.
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Well, man, thank you so much for being here.
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I absolutely love this interview.
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Anytime, John.
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Thank you for having me.
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Forrest Galante.
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Wow.
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Was that incredible?
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And I wanted to thank Forrest.
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and Chris Kirmesos for the honor and privilege of having them appear on today s show.
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Links to all things Forrest will be in the show notes.
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Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals.
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Videos are on YouTube at both our main channel at John R. Miles and our Clips channel at Passionstruck Clips.
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Please go check them out and subscribe.
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I also wanted to tell you about the Passionstruck quiz.
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If you ever wanted to know where you currently sit on the Passionstruck continuum,
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Now is your opportunity to find out.
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Just go to passionstruck.com.
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Take the 20 question quiz.
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It ll take you about 10 minutes and we ll give you an answer right away.
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What it means, where you currently sit and actions that you can take to get to the next level.
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You can find me at John R. Miles on all the social platforms.
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And you can sign up for our work-related newsletter on LinkedIn.
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It s called Work Intentionally.
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You re about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck Podcast interview that I did with Morgan Hussle, a mastermind in the world of finance, behavioral economics, as well as psychology, and the author of the groundbreaking book, The Psychology of Money, which has resonated with over 4 million readers globally.
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I engaged Morgan in a thought-provoking conversation that dives into his latest work, Same as Ever, A Guide to What Never Changes.
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So I have no idea or neither does anybody else when the next bear market is going to occur in the stock market.
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But I know with certainty how people are going to respond with greed and fear and uncertainty and their tribal influences and how they interpret the media and the incentives of investors, the incentives of advisors, the incentives of the media.
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That s never changed and it will never change.
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So we know, even if we don t know what s going to change, let s put all of our attention in these things that don t.
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As a student of history, I m always most excited reading history when I read something that took place 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago.
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And you realize that if you just change the dates on what you just read from 1823 to 2023, every word would fit right in.
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So when you find something that doesn t change, you know you found something that s particularly important in the world that you should put a lot of your focus and attention on.
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Remember that we rise by lifting others.
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So share the show with those that you love.
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And if you know someone who would love this episode that we did today with force, then definitely share it with them.
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
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And until next time, go out there and become passion struck.