Hello, and welcome to the Giant Beast Cast. I am your host, Vinny Caravella. I don't think so. I'm Abby Russell, and I am joined by an amazing crew today. Some of your favorites we have, Dan Ryker, who I believe I scared a little bit with my intro.

Oh, I didn't realize we were starting, so I could tell you even the host voice. Here we go. Red light done. Yep. I also have Mike Mahardi. I also pretended to be Vinny earlier today.

Yep, spoiler alert. Check out next 13 Deadly Sims, and that's not what it is at all. No, six crazy rides. But hi, thanks for having me.

Uh-huh. Hello, and then we also have Alex Navarro, finally back in the office. How are you feeling? A little loggy, a little loggy, a little tired. Interesting. I'm actually doing quite well. Yeah, I'm back. I'm back. That's good. We're glad to have you. Thank you.

We are missing, as I'm sure you can tell, Vinny Caravella, who is out sick, and Jeff Beckler, who has a previous engagement. Yes. I wish them all the best. I hope they listen to this podcast.

Yeah, weird if he didn't. Yeah. Listen, if you didn't wish them the best. I hope things are bad for both of them, because they aren't. Oh, wow. Hopefully they don't listen. That's rough, but fair. You know what? I say it like I see it. This is Friday, September 27th. It is the 227th episode. We've done it. We've made it. We've come so far. 2727. It feels so, so good. Yeah. Mm-hmm. The most important number. Great. Y'all are giving me blanks there, so we shall. I'm happy. Right.

Into it. I'm trying here. This is my first day back. Do you want to talk about your little trip? I heard you meant a lot. Yeah, I did it. Be to slot. I so yeah, I've been missed absent the last couple of shows, because I was on vacation. I went to Peru with my girlfriend. First time in South America. First time anywhere in that general vicinity. And it was a very good trip. It was a lot of fun. We did a lot of stuff. I was in Lima for like a day. So I don't really have a whole lot to comment on on that other than Lima seems like a cool city. How long's the flight to get there? It's like seven and a half hours. That's a bet.

Yeah, not too bad at all. But from there, we kind of jumped around the country a decent amount. We first went to Iquitos, which is in the upper sort of northeast part of the country, which is right on the edge of the rainforest. So we went there, took a bus to a town called Nauta, and then took a boat another hour up the river to a place called the tree house lodge, which was literally what it sounds like. They built a bunch of like little rooms into trees. Wow. Yeah.

But for like adult size. Yeah, like for like normal adult hotel. Wait, so you like stayed in them as a hotel. Yeah, we stayed in these three houses. How high were the trees? The trees were not huge. Like it was it was, you know, we're probably about like a story and a half up every tree have ladders. Or was it like, how do you get down? There were ladders. There were draw bridges between some of them. What is this call? I'm going to Google it. It's literally called the tree house lodge and AC. What's that? AC? No AC. What the fuck? Yeah, I know you're in the jungle. I get used to it. I don't know. I feel like

the time of year we were there was not the hottest. Okay. It's actually winter down there. Oh, it's very nice. Oh, it's like open air. Yeah. So fun fact about this place, which I did not know before I got there. Because my girlfriend is the one who booked this place. Does anyone remember the name Vance Cook? No. It rings a bell. Yeah. So Vance Cook used to be that was the co-founder of Headgate Studios, which eventually got bought by EA and became EA Salt Lake. They made all the PC versions of the Tiger Woods PGA tour games.

For most of the odds. Curious how this loops back around into your trip somehow. It was just written into the story of the place. She was reading the book when she got there. It's like, you know, how this place came to be found in whatever. And so he took his fucking money from EA and apparently decided to build this place. So he made the book. Yeah, he owns it. Okay. Nice. Good for him. He was not there when I was there. Most of the employees there are from a village nearby. But yeah, it's a cool place. I did.

We were basically hanging out in the jungle for three days. I've went piranha fishing. Wow. I saw some pink dolphins in the river, which are a thing I did not know about until we went there in rivers. Yeah, there's a whole. So there's two different species. There's gray dolphins, which look more like, you know, your typical bottle nose. And then these pink dolphins, which are way bigger and have this pink tint to their skin and also these weird flat heads. They are very strange looking. Flat heads. Yeah. Like the opposite of like an Orco whale kind of I don't know how to describe them. I never quite seen a

dolphin-like creature that looked like that before. What river? The river we were on. I remember the exact name of it. It's one of the two that feeds into the Amazon. Okay. Gotcha. So it's one of the two big ones. The Amazon, but I don't. So I saw the edge where like it kind of the Amazon starts officially as far as like, you know, science is concerned. But yeah, I mean, it's all part of like a bunch of different rivers. I want to go to South America very badly. It was cool. And being in the jungle, like I don't do well in hot scenarios, but the time of year we were there was

not so bad. I thought you're gonna say I don't normally do well in jungles, but I don't do well in humidity. Like I melt. So, but it was not so bad there. And then while we were there, we went to the village that was nearby. And that's where I met the sloth. Wow, it smelled good. What?

Poblito is a sloth name? Yes. The sloth name was put. He worked on the Tiger Woods games. He did not as far as I'm aware. As far as I can tell, the only thing he works on is hanging out on a window sill and eating leaves all day, which is a good life.

If you can get it. Poblito is like the child version of Pablo, correct? I think so. Yes. Yeah. Poblito is Mikey. But let's be clear. This is a 14 year old sloth. This is not like it. It was not a child. It's a teen. So a teen sloth.

A pro tip for everyone out there. If you see a sloth in the wild, you should not try to hug it because they, despite their very sluggish, you know, seemingly laid back demeanor, a wild sloth does have predators. It will defend itself. If they'll stressed out or otherwise, you know, does not want to be herringed in any way, shape or form. So don't do that.

The only reason I was able to hug this sloth is because it was raised by humans from very, very early age and was essentially orphaned. So it lived with this, this husband and wife who were chicken farmers.

And part of their thing, you know, whenever tourists come through is, you know, they just charge a little money and then you get to hang out with Pabloito for a few minutes. And so Pabloito, I got to hug him. I held him like a baby. He smelled surprisingly good. And I don't think it was because like he had been given a recent bath or anything. I think he just sort of isn't a smelly animal.

Is that a sloth thing or is that just public? I have no idea. I really, I'm maybe in the wild. I don't know what their bathing habits are. One thing I did learn is apparently they only go to the bathroom once a week.

What sounds nice. That keep it in there for so long. It's all they need is that much. They only eat leaves and they are drunk all the time. Is it like the fermenting thing where they're eating fruits and stuff that are getting them drunk?

Yeah, it's the diet. Whatever the leaves are they eat has an intoxicating effect. So essentially I was holding a fuzzy drunk baby and he was very, very pleasant to hold.

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