Name: Forrest Galante | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #613
Uploaded: 2025-09-27T14:01:04.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Forrest Galante | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #613' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-09-27. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Forrest Galante | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #613' from Theo Von on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-09-27. Transcript available.

Forrest Galante | This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von #613

Today's guest is an outdoorsman. He's a master of animalia, or animals, means
animals.
He's known for his focus on animals close to extinction. He's a host on
Discovery.
He's been to some of the most insane parts of the world. I'm grateful to get to
know him
and learn about his life. Today's guest is Mr. Forrest Galante.
Yeah, that's the best, dude. Forrest Galante, thanks for coming in, man.
Yeah, dude. Thanks for having me. I'm glad we made it work.
Yeah, I really appreciate it. I'm excited, dude. I'm excited to talk about
animalia
and a little bit about your life so our listeners know who you are.
Sure.
Yeah, I was complimenting those shoes, dude. Those things are nice.
Dude, the GORUCKS. Is this a company that's all about putting heavy weight on
your back
and training? And, you know, I spend a lot of time in a backpack, so I'm a big
fan.
Yeah, they look pretty springy, dude. I went with the boots today.
How do you like the cowboy boots? Is that your go-to? Are you a cowboy boots
guy?
About two days a week now.
Two days a week?
Yeah.
Trying to quit, though?
Yeah.
You have none of these six milligrams.
Yeah, there you go. That's a heavy dose of boot right there.
Dude, what if they do come out with boots? Like, what if Zen or Alp comes out
with a boot
that has, like, nicotine in the rim of it, so it, like, soaks into your body?
Leeching into the feet.
Through your calves.
Yeah, getting that little head buzz.
Yeah, you're just liking it.
I'd buy them.
Dude, I would put them on if I had to do one of those field sobriety tests, for
sure.
There you go. There you go. Yeah, you're like, I'm good from the knees up.
Yeah.
Good to see you today. You were, you grew up in, I mean, you were kind of born
into Anamalia
there in, like, on the edge of Africa in Zimbabwe. That's where you grew up?
Yeah, exactly right. So, son of safari business owners. If I wasn't in school,
we either lived
on a farm or my family ran safaris, so I was out in the bush. So, I've just
been around wildlife
my entire childhood.
Oh, wow. That's you right there.
Yeah. Look at them teeth right there.
Oh, yeah. I wouldn't want to get bit by that.
No. Yeah. I was part beaver growing up. Yeah.
Take me into some of that, like, what it's like growing up in, like, a safari
land. Does
it give you a different appreciation of animals? Does it make you more fearful
of animals?
That's a good question. I mean, I think anything you grow up with, you become
used to, right?
It's like, this is the norm when you're a kid. You just expect that that's the
norm.
So, I grew up, you know, I'd come home from school, kick my shoes off, run out
on the farm,
try and catch snakes, or be looking for jackals, or all these, you know, just
like a coyote,
all these kind of things that sort of is parallel to if you grew up on a farm
here, right?
If you're a farm kid here, you go out and, you know, you're from Louisiana.
Maybe you see a
cottonmouth or coyote in the bush or whatever, right? Yeah, just tickle a
chicken or something.
Tickle a chicken, you know? Yeah, that meant something else when I got to high
school. But,
you know, I grew up thinking that was the norm. And then I'd go out into the
bush on safari with my
family. And it would be like, don't leave the tent after dark and stay here.
And, you know,
there were rules. But as long as you didn't break the rules, you were pretty
safe. And what I saw
throughout my childhood was like a decline in animals. You know, the same camps
we'd go to,
where there used to be huge herds of elephants, there's now two or three
elephants or big wild
spaces, there's now farm fields. So I didn't really realize it as a kid. But as
I got older,
I was like, I don't like that. Like, I don't want it. I don't want all that
wild stuff to go away.
And so I didn't really realize it when I was young. But over time, even as a
child, I was like,
this is something that I would like to dedicate my life to is making sure that
all this wild stuff,
spaces, animals, all of it doesn't go away.
So I'm guessing you're thinking then along the lines of like conservation, like
that,
do you come out of your youth just feeling inspired towards that?
That's a very nice way to put it. It starts by breaking a lot of rules, bending
the laws a lot,
and just being, you know, you know, those kids, right? You're the yoink kid on
Instagram,
he's catching all the snakes and stuff. You're one of those kids. You know what
I mean? And so
in the US, there's a lot of laws against, you know, don't harass this and don't
do that.
In Zimbabwe, there's fuck all for laws, right? So it's just kind of do whatever.
So I think that
love and that appreciation came from fiddling with everything, catching it, trapping
it, working with
it. But ultimately, as you grow, as you fall in love with something, you want
to protect it. And
that's conservation. And so what, what was, what was thinning the herds there?
People just mostly
encroachment, a little bit of poaching, you know, ivory poaching and stuff,
hunting elephants, but
more like habitat encroachment, you know, villages popping up, big trees
getting cut down for farm
field, goats and things getting moved in, you know, stuff like that, like
grazing. And so pushing the
animals out. And was it affecting, like, were you guys on a bigger piece of
like nature reserve or?
The safari camps were, they were all out in the bush, but it would still, you
know, you still would
just see a general impact, like, like a thinning of animals. Okay. Yeah. So did
your family continue
the safari business in Zimbabwe or how do you get from there, um, sort of to
here into the U S?
Yeah. So we tried to, but during the early 2000s, Zimbabwe was under something
called the land reform
campaign, which was president Robert Mugabe at the time who, uh, declared
himself supreme leader for
life. Uh, he did this thing where like a boss, huh? Like bird man. Yeah. He
came in hard. Yeah.
And, uh, he, uh, he made it, this land reform made it so that it was very, very
hard. Like my family's
six generations Zimbabwe, but basically it was a, it was a race war. And if you
were white, you weren't
supposed to, you, there was a, a land reform campaign pass that meant that,
that if you were
black and you had heritage, you could come and take that land away because you
know, of colonial
settlement and things like that. Obviously I grew up long after any colonial
settlement took place,
but yeah, we had gunfights and we had, you know, uh, neighbors murdered and, uh,
Pungwis,
which is indoctrination through torture into the political party, the ZANU PF
political party.
There was some crazy political turmoil. Zimbabwe's land reform refers to a
controversial program that
began in 1980 and escalated in 2000 redistributing farmland from white
commercial farmers to black
Zimbabweans. So your family was, we were farmers. So you were farmers and this
happened as you guys
were there. So when I was a kid, I mean, it says here in 1980 is when it
started, which it may have, but when I
was a kid, we never locked our doors. There was no, we didn't have barbed wire
fences, nothing. It was very
safe, very peaceful country. But in like two, the 99, 2000 and then 2001, when
we left, it got really bad
really quickly. And it was sort of an attempt by Robert Mugabe to, to retain
power for his party, the
ZANU PF political party. Oh, I see. So his party would feel like maybe they
were going to be pushed out. And so he's
like, I need to do something drastic right now in order to stay in. Exactly.
And so I'm going to return
this, uh, uh, colonialized land to the people from whites, to the black, uh, to
the black people.
Exactly. Got it. Yeah. And so we're, but you saw that like in neighbors, you
saw people's lands being
taken over stuff. Oh, I saw a kid get shot in the head. We saw everything. It
was crazy. Yeah. I mean,
there were gunfights there. We had these war veterans settling on the fence
lines. We were the smallest
farm in the Shamva district. That was where I grew up. And so we were the last
ones to get taken
because we had the lowest political incentive or financial incentive. Right. So
you look at the
area where we live, there were all these huge farms, right? Million dollar a
year plus tobacco farms and
things. We were a tiny little Ulstrom area, which is an exotic flower farm. And
so we were the last
ones to get grabbed because why bother with us? Right. We'll get them at the
end. Exactly. So we saw
neighbors get murdered. These pungwees, like I said, which is indoctrination
through torture,
uh, crazy war chants, shootouts, everything. It was nuts for a little while.
And would these groups
just kind of come like in just trucks, like, and sort of, or would they come in
like force?
Was it the, was it the government coming or was it just like citizens, black
citizens? It was pretty
much just citizens, like unemployed citizens, basically. And for the majority,
it was kids with guns.
Wow. You know, you're 14, 15 years old. You grew up maybe on the streets of Harare
and all of a sudden
you have this dictator, like president going, Hey, those rich white guys over
there, go get them. Right.
You know, and they're like, okay, you know, you know, they call it war veterans
that survived the war.
There were no war veterans. It was just kids with guns, like 14 to 20 year old
kids. Wow. Um, and that's,
that's what, you know, shootouts and all this, but all that being said, I don't
want to paint a bad
light on it. It was incredible childhood. There was just a couple of rough
years there. Yeah. Well, one thing that's
fascinating about Africa, even like places that I've been there is you see the
race, like the racial
colonial, you see that it's very evident in a lot of places. You also see a lot
of like, um, like black
leadership that comes into power and gets very desperate and will try to, uh,
own everything
themselves as well. It's a, it's a tribal mentality, right? It's like, I, I
come from this culture, whether
it's Shauna, Zulu, whatever it happens to be. And that tribe is like the way
that I've been a dominant
tribe is I dominate another tribe. Right. And this is not a racial thing. It's
just, it's a cultural thing.
And they're, you know, they, they get leadership, whether that's being a
president or being a minister or whatever
it is. And then how am I going to retain it? I'm going to dominate another
tribe. It doesn't matter if they're
white, black, Zulu, Shauna, whatever, you know, it's just, I'm going to
dominate. And that's, it's a, it's a crazy
thing. I'll tell you a crazy story. I don't think I've ever told anybody this
publicly. I grew up on a
farm, 200, 200 employees that worked on our farm, right? Like 200 people that
pick flowers, blah, blah,
blah. My best friends were all black Shauna kids, Zimbabwean kids. And I
remember one day going to
school, I was 14. So I didn't really understand what was going on other than it
was stuff was going bad.
And my best friend who had been my best friend since we were like seven years
old, we went to lunch that
day, like a random Tuesday. And the prefects, which was like the older, like
the seniors, right?
They come out and they're like, you two come over here. Like Forrest, go on
that side. And I'm like,
at school, at school, like proper school, you know, like button down, like, you
know,
very formal school, like Forrest, go over here. And Malusi, go over here. Malusi
was my friend.
Malusi's black. And they're like, go on this side. And I was like, why are we
getting split up?
And they're like, we're having a fight black versus white at school. And my
best friend who was
felt as shocked as I would, he got like moved by the seniors to the other side
of the rugby field
to have a fistfight with us. And I was just like, why are we doing this? You
know, I was like,
so confused because we didn't understand it. We were just little kids, but this
racial tension got
insane. And yeah, it just, it, it boiled over. And you've seen like Donald
T