Latest / The Joe Rogan Experience / #2536 - Eric Goode & Jermey McBride

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#2536 - Eric Goode & Jermey McBride · The Joe Rogan Experience

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  Speaker 1: Joe podcast. Check it out The Joe Wigan Experience Train
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: by Day.
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  Speaker 2: Joe Rogan Podcast by Night, All Day. Good bro, gentlemen,
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: good to see you again. You've back into the world
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  Speaker 2: of crazy people and animals. I watched episode one today, like,
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  Speaker 2: oh God, First of all, where the fuck do you
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  Speaker 2: find these people? You you live in that world? Like
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  Speaker 2: you you're in the world of reptiles. We should just explain.
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  Speaker 2: It's a docu series. It's on HBO. It's called Monsters
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  Speaker 2: of God, and it's all about the reptile trade, which
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  Speaker 2: may or may not be responsible for Florida having five
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  Speaker 2: hundred thousand pothons. Yeah, it's it's debatable, right, Like, it
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  Speaker 2: seems like it was partially pet owners who let them go,
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  Speaker 2: and partially there was some sort of a reptile research
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  Speaker 2: facility or something like that.
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  Speaker 1: Well, there's different theories. So it was a hurricane theory,
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  Speaker 1: it was the people letting go go. I think the
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  Speaker 1: more reasonable one because I had a Burby spy thot
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  Speaker 1: in the seventies when I was a teenager. I have
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  Speaker 1: a photo of it around my neck.
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  Speaker 2: What happened to it?
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  Speaker 1: People buy them when they're this big, and then when
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  Speaker 1: they're fifteen feet they let them go, because what do
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  Speaker 1: you do? You know there is that what you did?
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  Speaker 1: I did not let it go, but what did you do?
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  Speaker 1: I have no idea what happened to it, to be honest,
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  Speaker 1: I that's weird.
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  Speaker 2: I know you had a monster and it just you
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  Speaker 2: don't know what happened to your monster.
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  Speaker 1: I think when I went to college, briefly I gave
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  Speaker 1: it to someone and then I don't know what happened
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  Speaker 1: to But I gave my whole menagerie away to people.
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  Speaker 1: When I went to college, I had reptiles in my room.
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  Speaker 2: Is there an extra level of responsibility when you're giving
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  Speaker 2: away monsters? You know what I mean? Like if you
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  Speaker 2: have a chihuahua and you said, and your friends like,
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  Speaker 2: I'll take her. I love her. That's you know, you
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  Speaker 2: don't really have to worry about your you know, you
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  Speaker 2: have a fucking python. You're giving away a python.
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  Speaker 1: You got to worry about your chiuaha because your the
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  Speaker 1: python's in the everglace. You're going to eat your chiuaha
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  Speaker 1: when it gets away.
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  Speaker 2: Well, certainly you worry about that, But I mean, you
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  Speaker 2: don't worry about your chihuahua being a monster. I'm kidding. Yeah,
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  Speaker 2: I mean, if you have a fifteen foot python that
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  Speaker 2: can eat a lot of things, and it kind of
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  Speaker 2: needs to eat a lot of things.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, Burbie's pythons, uh, did really well in South Florida.
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  Speaker 1: Iguanas did really well in Florida. You know, they weren't
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  Speaker 1: there in the beginning.
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  Speaker 2: That's a good way to put it, did really well.
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  Speaker 2: Another way to put it is invasive species is destroying
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  Speaker 2: the ecosystem.
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  Speaker 1: Well, they're like us, Joe, They're like us. We came
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  Speaker 1: here and we took over.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess in a lot of ways. So why
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  Speaker 2: did you choose this particular subject for this new docu series.
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  Speaker 1: I'm not gonna let Jeremy talk now. I he'll talk,
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  Speaker 1: but I'll just give you a lot of it starts
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  Speaker 1: with me.
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  Speaker 2: Blame later. We guys did Chimp Crazy, which is one
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  Speaker 2: of my favorites. So fucking insane. That world is so insane.
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  Speaker 1: Well, episode one is kind of setting the table. It
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  Speaker 1: gets better, Joe, it gets more off the charts when
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  Speaker 1: you I can only imagine you watched two and three
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  Speaker 1: and four, but five. Yeah, it all started. First of all,
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  Speaker 1: I'm a reptile guy. Been keeping reptiles and studying reptiles
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  Speaker 1: for over You know, I'm an old guy. I'm older
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  Speaker 1: than you are, so uh, you know, I've kept them
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  Speaker 1: for I don't know, sixty years, you know. Plus I've
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  Speaker 1: kept reptiles since my parents gave me a tortoise when
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  Speaker 1: I was six, and I was catching rattlesnakes in my
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  Speaker 1: lunch box and horned lizards. And you got horn lizards
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  Speaker 1: and texas here that are really cool, and rattlesnakes. I've
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  Speaker 1: been bit by rattlesnakes. It's not fun.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, by rattlesnake.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, but that's another story, more time than one.
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  Speaker 2: No, I got.
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  Speaker 1: Bit once because I learned my lesson after the first one.
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  Speaker 1: What happened, It wasn't good. Don't get which you bet
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  Speaker 1: on my foot?
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  Speaker 2: Did you experience necrossus necrosis? Brother? You know?
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  Speaker 1: So normally you would get across this necrosis where you
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  Speaker 1: your finger would rot. And then there's the guy that
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  Speaker 1: you know, the doctor that I went to at a hospital,
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  Speaker 1: you know, in the the doctor you know in the
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  Speaker 1: emergency room said, the last guy in here that got
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  Speaker 1: bit by a rattlesnake lost his toe or something, or
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  Speaker 1: lost his digits and he said, good thing, you didn't
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  Speaker 1: get bit on a finger, because the necrosis can rot
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  Speaker 1: away your finger. And he said, good thing, you got
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  Speaker 1: bit on the middle of the foot. You're going to
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  Speaker 1: be okay. But this type of rattlesnake, I got bit
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  Speaker 1: by it. There's the most venomous rattlestick in the country
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  Speaker 1: is called a tiger rattlesnake, but it's not the most dangerous.
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  Speaker 1: Most dangerous is probably a majave rattlesnake or an Eastern
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  Speaker 1: diamondback rattlesnake, but you have Western diamondbacks here. But I
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  Speaker 1: got bit by a rattlesnake that had both hemotoxin and neurotoxin,
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  Speaker 1: so the necrosis was less evident with me. It was
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  Speaker 1: more like a cobro was starting to stop breathing, and
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  Speaker 1: I felt like somebody put sandbags on my chest. An
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  Speaker 1: hour into it, but the first thing you sense is, obviously,
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  Speaker 1: it feels like someone jabbed me with an exacto knife.
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  Speaker 1: I looked down and the rattlesnake was retracting into a burrow.
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  Speaker 1: I looked at my foot. But then you taste a
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  Speaker 1: metallic taste. In about fifteen ten minutes, fifteen minutes and
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  Speaker 1: you realize, oh, this wasn't a dry bite, but it's
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  Speaker 1: not fun. I got a lot of antivenom. They make
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  Speaker 1: a different out of venom today. I got bit twenty
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  Speaker 1: five years ago.
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  Speaker 2: And how long does it take you to recover from
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  Speaker 2: something like that?
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  Speaker 1: You know, the most painful part was the serum six
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  Speaker 1: sickness from the anti venom, the lose stop breathing thing.
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  Speaker 1: I remember I was on a gurney and I just
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  Speaker 1: felt like I was going to stop breathing, but weirdly
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  Speaker 1: not that painful, but like you but yet you feel
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  Speaker 1: like you're gonna die and stop breathing. But the serum
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  Speaker 1: sickness is just unbelievably intense for weeks, and you just
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  Speaker 1: have the most insane fever and you got these red
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  Speaker 1: blotches all of you. But they make a different serum now.
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  Speaker 1: That one was made out of horse anti bodies that
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  Speaker 1: they put into and my body didn't like those horse
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  Speaker 1: anti bodies.
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  Speaker 2: Oh god.
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  Speaker 3: So also, maybe don't wear birkenstocks when you hike.
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  Speaker 1: It's probably the river sandals. Yeah, okay, yeah, so I
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  Speaker 1: got bid. Most people get bit fucking around with a rattlesnake.
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  Speaker 4: I was what is this chairming that They used all
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  Speaker 4: of the nto venom at the hospital and I had
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  Speaker 4: to go get more from another.
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  Speaker 2: Ran out of anti venom after using a whopping thirty
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  Speaker 2: six vials. Holy fuck man, Oh they're fucking scary. Man.
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  Speaker 2: I've had dogs bit. I had this one dog. He
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  Speaker 2: got bit twice. Yeah, it was a real problem. His
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  Speaker 2: face would swell up. I'll bring him to the vet.
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  Speaker 2: But luckily they have anti venom for dogs that works
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  Speaker 2: pretty well. Yeah, he was kind of out of it
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  Speaker 2: for a few days. Then he came back.
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  Speaker 3: How fast The response not bad?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, not bad. It was funny because he got bit once.
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  Speaker 2: He was he was a crazy dog. He was always
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  Speaker 2: killing lizards like that was his thing. Like anything in
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  Speaker 2: the backyard he would kill him. And he got bit
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  Speaker 2: by the rattlesnake. And I knew it because I was
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  Speaker 2: I was out there. I heard him, I heard the commotion,
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  Speaker 2: I saw the snake. I knew what it was. So
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  Speaker 2: I got him to the veterinarian immediately they got on
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  Speaker 2: the end. His face swell up, but they got him
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  Speaker 2: the anti venom and he was good. And then he
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  Speaker 2: got bit again, like maybe a year later, and I
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  Speaker 2: brought him to the vet because I said I saw
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  Speaker 2: him get bit by rattlesnake, and the vet was like, well,
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  Speaker 2: I don't see any swelling and I don't see a whole,
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  Speaker 2: but he had developed resistance to it because he had
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  Speaker 2: gotten bit once. And so then I got him home
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  Speaker 2: and all of a sudden his face starts swallowing up.
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  Speaker 2: I'm like, oh fuck, and I bring him back to
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  Speaker 2: the vet and then he had to get the inptyized dog. Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: He was about a ninety pound dog.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, And that was a western dive by back rottlestick.
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  Speaker 2: I got there California. I don't know.
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  Speaker 1: Oh he was in California, in California.
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  Speaker 2: Oh so it wasn't out here, Oh it was what
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  Speaker 2: did me then?
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  Speaker 1: Probably southern Pacific rottlesick.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, yeah, we we had a problem in my
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  Speaker 2: California house, one of the houses that I used to
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  Speaker 2: live in. It was it was there was a lot
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  Speaker 2: of it was very canyony. There was a lot of stuff.
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  Speaker 1: But that's that bobcast that's the same stake that bit me.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, spooky man. We were running once, we were running
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  Speaker 2: the trail, and in mid stride, I realized that the
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  Speaker 2: log that I thought was across the road was a
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  Speaker 2: giant rattlesnake. It was fucking big, man, like the biggest
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  Speaker 2: one I'd ever seen out in the wild. And the
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  Speaker 2: dogs didn't notice it. They ran right over it, and
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  Speaker 2: then I ran over it. I was like, oh, fuck man.
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  Speaker 2: And then I'm trying to figure out what to do
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  Speaker 2: because I know we're going to have to come back
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  Speaker 2: this way when we go back up the hill, so
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  Speaker 2: I'm throwing rocks at it, trying to get it to
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  Speaker 2: run away. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Now, I've handled a lot of rattlesnakes in my life,
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  Speaker 1: and cobras and other snakes, and to get bit that
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  Speaker 1: way is very unusual. Usually people are being jerks and
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  Speaker 1: idiots and and handling a stake and it bites them.
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  Speaker 2: Where were you we just walking?
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  Speaker 1: I was hiking in the mountains north of La just
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  Speaker 1: a bit, and uh, I was actually looking for snakes
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  Speaker 1: and I didn't see the sake. The stake saw me first,
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  Speaker 1: and I was bushwhacking. I wasn't on a trail, I
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  Speaker 1: didn't see it, and it bit me on my foot.
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  Speaker 2: So you have this lifetime experience with reptiles and snakes,
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  Speaker 2: and so you just decide you must have interacted with
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  Speaker 2: a lot of these really crazy people and just decided
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  Speaker 2: this is the next Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: It takes one to know one.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, be careful. The next point of focus.
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  Speaker 3: Sort of where it all started.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no, listen. I was, you know, a closet
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  Speaker 1: a reptile guy, living in New York City, hanging out
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  Speaker 1: with you know, Madonna, cool people in the eighties and nineties.
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  Speaker 1: I had a night club, and I had friends with
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  Speaker 1: lots of artists. Andy Warhol and I never really talked
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  Speaker 1: about reptiles. Actually, Andy asked me what am I going
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  Speaker 1: to do with my money? He interviewed me one time
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  Speaker 1: for Andy Orhole TV, and I said, I'm going to
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  Speaker 1: buy reptiles. And I actually said I'm gonna buy tortoises.
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  Speaker 2: Like tortoises.
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  Speaker 1: But I was pretty closet, but I still kept them
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  Speaker 1: in New York. And you know, fast forward when I
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  Speaker 1: decided to try to do a film about it. I
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  Speaker 1: had been traveling all over the world to Aoudagascar and
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  Speaker 1: Sulawesi and different parts of South America trying to study
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  Speaker 1: reptiles and especially turtles and tortoises that were very rare.
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  Speaker 1: I started photograph filming people like you know, kind of
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  Speaker 1: notable people Christopher Walking and you know Slash and yeah,
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  Speaker 1: I don't know all kinds of people that I knew
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  Speaker 1: in New York City. And I would just ask him
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  Speaker 1: to hold a turtle or tortoise. I'd say some words
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  Speaker 1: were like PSA's. And I was doing that with these
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  Speaker 1: two guys named the Safti Brothers. And fast forward they
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  Speaker 1: now Josh has just had a film called Marty Sapri
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  Speaker 1: with Timothy Shalomy that was up for an oscar. Little
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  Speaker 1: did I know that I was working with these kids
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  Speaker 1: that were going to be these new filmmakers, and we
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: were making these films. And then we made a short
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  Speaker 1: film about reptiles it's crazy, called Trophy Hunter. It's very short,
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  Speaker 1: and we did that together. And then I said to them, hey, man,
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  Speaker 1: you guys are read this new book called The Lizard King.
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  Speaker 2: It's about the reptile world. Let's do a doc about
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  Speaker 2: the reptile world.
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  Speaker 1: And I'd already be told Fisher Stevens, a friend of mine,
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  Speaker 1: hey let's do a talk about this, you know book,
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  Speaker 1: The Lizard Kid. And he said to me, how are
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  Speaker 1: you going to do that doc without getting killed? Eric,
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  Speaker 1: and you know, he'd won an Oscar for the cove
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  Speaker 1: and I thought, you know, I got these good guys
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  Speaker 1: and do a doc about reptiles. So anyway, we started
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  Speaker 1: in two thousands.
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  Speaker 2: What do you think, Why do you think you're going
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  Speaker 2: to get killed?
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  Speaker 1: He read The Lizard King and he said, you know,
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  Speaker 1: you're going to do a story about this guy that
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: went to prison for a hundred years and this other
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: guy that you know is the Pablo Escobar reptiles, And
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  Speaker 1: he just said, it's a dark world. I don't know
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  Speaker 1: how you're going to do this without getting killed.
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  Speaker 2: So what is about the lizard world of the reptile
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  Speaker 2: world that makes it so dark? Like? Why are those
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  Speaker 2: people do you think attracted to it?
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  Speaker 1: Well, not all of them are scary people, and I
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  Speaker 1: would say a lot of them may be misunderstood a
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  Speaker 1: little bit. But there's in the case of Mario, there
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  Speaker 1: was a crossover with drugs, smuggling drugs and animals into
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  Speaker 1: the country.
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  Speaker 3: But for background, you know what, what what is different
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  Speaker 3: than these other films that we've done. You know, this
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  Speaker 3: was an industry story that kind of looks back at
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  Speaker 3: the past half century. You know what, most people don't
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  Speaker 3: know is illegal. Wildlife trafficking represents about a twenty billion
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  Speaker 3: dollar year industry. It's kind of underreported, actually only after guns, drugs,
• 11:46
  Speaker 3: and human trafficking. And what's really interesting about that is
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  Speaker 3: there's there's a convergence of all of it. You know,
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  Speaker 3: wildlife trafficking also involves drugs and trafficking times of guns.
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  Speaker 3: There's a lot of mix mixture of it.
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  Speaker 2: Whenever people are bringing in things illegally, they tend to
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  Speaker 2: be a risk taking type of course.
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  Speaker 3: But you know, the in the kind of pre you know,
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  Speaker 3: customs tsa days as intense ave as it's now, it's
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  Speaker 3: very easy to you know, carry animals and carry wildlife.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. That was something I didn't even think about until
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  Speaker 2: I was watching. I was like, oh god, I remember
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  Speaker 2: those days. But they didn't check your bags and they
• 12:20
  Speaker 2: didn't even check your ID. You just had a ticket. Yeah,
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: and you just get on the plane. So you just
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  Speaker 2: get on the plane with lizards.
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  Speaker 3: Now most cases, yeah, strapped your body right. The thing
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  Speaker 3: with about what was so interesting about reptiles in this
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  Speaker 3: case within the trade is their portable, their nature with
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: handles you go. You see in the early episode of
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  Speaker 3: episode one, people traveling around the world, you know, finding
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: where endangered animals, putting in their suitcase and bringing them back,
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  Speaker 3: putting them on a priceless and selling them to consumer.
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  Speaker 3: And that was the kind of early days. I mean,
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  Speaker 3: the story The Lizard King, but many much you know,
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: in our series, it's handful of guys, mainly guys, you know,
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  Speaker 3: start a multi billion dollar industry and you see this
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: kind of innovation happen over the course of the series,
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: as you know, as the years go on.
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  Speaker 1: But when we say multi billion I have to kind
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: of contextualize that. It's when people say that the wildlife
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  Speaker 1: trade is multi billion dollar industry. You got to remember
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: it's a lot of its consumption. You know, the Asian
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: population eats a lot of turtles, a lot of snakes,
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  Speaker 1: a lot of it's traditional medicine, a lot of its skins,
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: you know, plant material, alligator skin bags, crocodile skin bags,
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  Speaker 1: lizards skin bags, snake skin bags. So it's a lot
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  Speaker 1: more than just the exotic pet industry. But that's gotten
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  Speaker 1: enormous In Asia. They picked up they took a page
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  Speaker 1: out of our playbook about twenty five years ago. You know,
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  Speaker 1: China is now a huge consumer of not just eating
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  Speaker 1: these reptiles, but keeping them as exotic pets. That didn't
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  Speaker 1: happen before twenty five thirty years ago. Asia Asia.
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  Speaker 2: Why why does California have a ban on python skin?
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  Speaker 2: Pythons are not endangered, right, Well, it.
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  Speaker 1: Depends on the type of pythons. But yeah, the python
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  Speaker 1: skinning business actually is where all the Burmese pythons came
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: from in the seventies that I had as a kid.
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  Speaker 1: They would skin the pythons, take the eggs, incubate the eggs,
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  Speaker 1: sell the baby pythons to the United States and other
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  Speaker 1: consumer countries that wanted baby pythons. Most of the pythons
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  Speaker 1: that are skinned in Southeast Asia, and I've been to
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: python skinny places in Sumatra, blood pythons, reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons,
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  Speaker 1: but mostly blood pythons. Reticulated python pythons are wild cod
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  Speaker 1: and most of them are not endangered, but they're it's
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  Speaker 1: but you know, they're less and less pythons out there,
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: but they're not endangered.
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  Speaker 2: Those pythons, Well, there's a shit ton in Florida, That's
• 14:43
  Speaker 2: what I understand. I mean, there's this giant problem in
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: Florida where they're overrun with pythons, and yet California you
• 14:49
  Speaker 2: can't sell python skins. It seems like there's a solution there.
• 14:53
  Speaker 2: You know, people want python skins. Oh, look, place that's
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: overrun with pythons. Maybe you should get your python skin there.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the cooler python skins are not Burmese pythons, the
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: ones in Florida, the cooler whites people like like Nick
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: Cage and what was that film where he's wearing that
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: python skin jacket. It's a reticulated python that wild at heart.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: That's yeah, wild heart, that's gold and black. That cooler
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: python skins just happened not to be Burmese pythons, which
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: are the ones running rampant in Florida. Although they should
• 15:21
  Speaker 1: make those trendy use Burmese pythons, but they're not. Usually
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: you don't you rarely see where it is. That's a
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: reticulated python, that's not a Burmese. That's the one people want,
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: that's from Southeast Asia. That's not the one running wild
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: in Florida.
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: Is that that's illegal in California right now?
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: Then?
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: That jacket is that? Right? I believe? So, I don't
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: believe you can get it imported. I think let's try.
• 15:43
  Speaker 2: I had read something about python being one of the
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: things that they made illegal. Why California bands python skin
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: band dates in nineteen seventy oh aimed at protecting endangered
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: and vulnerable species, particularly the Indian python, which was on
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: the endangered species list, California chose to pavot all pythons
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: products rather than distinguished by species, created an extraordinarily broad
• 16:04
  Speaker 2: statute banning all python imports. Oh, that's interesting, I thought
• 16:08
  Speaker 2: it was fairly recent.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: Well, that's where the laws, I think are really screwed up,
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: when they basically say all pythons are bad to sell.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: When the Indian rock python is endangered, and there are
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: a few endangered pythons, but to say all pythons cannot
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: be used for the skin trade and sold in California
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: because of one python out of many pythons.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: Welcome to California.
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: I happen to live there. I know what it's like.
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: I want to.
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: I love Austin Bay the way I might buy a
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: house sex to you now Austin rules.
• 16:41
  Speaker 2: But California's just so overregulated with everything, so particularly wildlife.
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: And same thing in Florida, though with the green iguana Eric, right,
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: I mean at the same time.
• 16:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, same thing, house regulation.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: And then again there's four people. There's forty five types
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: of iguanas in the world.
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: Do you know that now? Oh yeah, there's a whole
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: YouTube community of people hunt iguanas and cook them in
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: exotic ways. They make iguana stir fry in South Florida. Yeah, yeah,
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: and it looks good. I mean, I don't know anything
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: about what it tastes like, but this guy made like
• 17:12
  Speaker 2: a stir fry over rice and they were eating and
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: they're like, oh my god, it's sensational, like karaokee. Look
• 17:18
  Speaker 2: very good.
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: Everyone always says croc alligator, iguana rattlesteak tastes like chicken.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: But yeah, they eat the tail.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: I mean, I mean, I have a you can imagine
• 17:28
  Speaker 3: I have a really messed up algorithm from being involved
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: in this for so long. But that I never came across.
• 17:33
  Speaker 3: But the you know the frozen that they yeah, yeah, they.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: Use the legs, they cook the legs. Yeah, in the
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: back of the tail because there's the tail, so he's
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: got it marinating ziplocked it. Then it looks like he's gonna,
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: oh look, he's got the whole thing.
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: Oh wow. Usually it's the back of the tail, like
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: like crocodiles, you eat the back of the tail.
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: But it's far. I mean there's a there's a wow.
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: Look at that he's eating the whole thing. In Mexico,
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: I always see them make you know, iguana tamali's out
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: of the back part of the iguana.
• 18:04
  Speaker 2: So you put it in a tomato. Oh wow. And
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: he's got a little saucy's making here with some butter
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: and spices basting it. I mean, why not if it
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: tastes good. And apparently it does taste good according to
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: all these guys that have seen on YouTube channels, like
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: they are pretty honest about it, like they bring it
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: to the family, they let their family try it. I think,
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: you know, that might be the only way out because
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: they're everywhere in Florida, Like they when it gets cold out,
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: they fall out of.
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: Trees, the trees. I love their news reports.
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: They're fucking big too. Man. There's some channels where these
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: guys hunt them and some of them are like four
• 18:44
  Speaker 2: and a half five feet long. This episode is brought
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• 19:42
  Speaker 2: com slash Joe Rogan. It's crazy.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: The mails get crazy and they get very orange and
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: really big.
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: The mail iguama so beautiful. There's such a cool looking
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: lizard man.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of really cool iguanas. And in our
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: show we feature what's called a Fiji Island iguano, very
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: endangered iguana that unfortunately people in the private sector in
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: this country cannot own zoo's can own them. I don't
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: know why private people can't own them. But the San
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: Diego Zoo and the zoo and that zoo can have
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: fiji A and iguanas. But they in our show they
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: literally this one guy says it's reptile magic. It's like
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: reptile art. Fiji aalen and iguana. You might want to
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: put it up there. It's really just the beauty of it,
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: just the sheer beauty.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: It's like yellow lemon highlight, turquoise and green, and it's cool.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: It's a very endangered iguana.
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: So the Florida iguana problem was that all people's pets
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: that got released.
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: Well listen. Also, it's again going back to the show,
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: but you know, we the central figure of the book
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: is this guy named Mike van Nostrom and his dad,
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: Ray Venostrian. They ran an enterprise called Strictly Reptiles in Hollywood, right,
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: It's in Hollywood, Hollywood, Florida, Hollywood, Florida. Yeah, and they're
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: sort of this like you know, I would call it
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: like more of a fulfillment center for wildlife. All across Fromerica.
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: They are, I mean, in.
• 21:03
  Speaker 2: Any way, there's an Amazon warehouse. Click, I want a tortoise.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they were selling five thousands a week.
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: Well, green Baby got.
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: To that point. So so the story goes. Dad moves
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: to Florida, starts, a business evolves, Jurassic Park comes out,
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: Jurassic Park comes out. Everyone wanted a pet dinosaur. The
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: green iguana market went on fire. He was selling five
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: thousand a week. And you know, you know, I was
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: a nineties kid, I had a I had an iguana
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: in my you know, my bedroom.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: Jeremy's a virgin, but he did have a.
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: I had a fedal one that unfortunately passed away. The
• 21:40
  Speaker 3: rock thing, you know, the heated rock you know that happens.
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: But but yeah, no, there's.
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: Sort of so so the story heated rocking.
• 21:47
  Speaker 3: This big rock thing where it sits on and it
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: keeps it warm and warm, and then I think it
• 21:51
  Speaker 3: kept on too long.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: I think he cooked.
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: Yeah, sadly, but I've learned. I've learned a lot, but
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: just but filled with these unintended consequences. You know, I
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: think this idea of a big movie coming out at
• 22:06
  Speaker 3: the correlation to you know, driving you know, demand for
• 22:09
  Speaker 3: pet sales.
• 22:10
  Speaker 2: Thank god, people can't buy a fucking velocal raptor, you know,
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: because people would have them, they'd have friences set up
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: in their yard.
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: Joe, you've had the colossest people on this show. I think, oh,
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: you want to bring back one of those.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: And Willie Mammoth, well, there's no chance that they can
• 22:24
  Speaker 2: bring with current technology. They don't have dinosaur DNA, it's
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: too old. But there, I mean, I met the dire wolves.
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: I know it's wild. They brought back the direly a
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: dire wolf. What does that mean? I mean, if you
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: talk to Genesis, what is it is a bunch of
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: different traits.
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: Don't go down that rabbit hole. It's close to.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: A dire wolf. I mean, I don't know what that means,
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: because like we decide what a dire wolf is, just
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: what a direwolf isn't. But if you take literal dire
• 22:50
  Speaker 2: wolf DNA that's seven thousand years old and you add
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: it to these gray wolves, and this is what they did,
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: and they created essentially a dire wolf. It's like people
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: are our going over semantics. Whatever it is that's not
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: a wolf. It's very different. It looks different than a
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: regular wolf, like a gray wolf. The stature is different.
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: It has a Maine. It's really crazy looking. They're white,
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: they're stockier, they're built differently, like you see, like, oh
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: that's different.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, well like what like mained wolves in Argentina look
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: very different than our wolf. So there are very different
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: types of canines. You know, wild dogs in Africa look
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: very different. Oh yeah, you know than are you know?
• 23:26
  Speaker 1: So yeah, but yeah, I mean one thing i'd just
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: say about iguanas, just since we were on it, is
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: that because I'm on an organization called the International Iguana Foundation,
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: and we protect iguanas around the world, and people get confused, say, think, oh, iguana,
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: that's so common. They're falling out of trees in Florida.
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: But there are a lot of really rare cool iguanas.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: There's about forty five species, and there's pink iguanas in
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: the Galopagos Islands, land iguanas, there's marine iguanas. There's a
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: very rare high elevation pink iguana. There's another land iguana,
• 23:55
  Speaker 1: and the Galopagos there's a you know, marine iguana, but
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: that lizard was fairly recently discovered. And there's some iguanas
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: that were thought to be extinct. Joe like like the
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: Jamaican iguana, and that was thought to be extinct forever,
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: the Jamaican iguana, but they found a tiny population recently.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: So there's a lot of iguanas that are in trouble,
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: and you know, we should care about iguanas. And they're
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: not just green iguanas. Yeah, that pink iguana. That's a
• 24:23
  Speaker 1: marine iguana and a regular glopacus land iguana.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: And then you see some of the pink form. Jamie
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: Cee if you can find a video on Florida people
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: hunting iguanas Florida people hunting giant iguanas, because some of
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: them are so big. You just you see them. You're like,
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: oh my god, are those bad to eat? Though? The
• 24:42
  Speaker 2: big giant ones? Would you eat? One have been like
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: a reptile pet guy? I that one. Yeah, that's a male.
• 24:50
  Speaker 2: That's a male.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: When they got orange like that. Yeah, that's a big male.
• 24:54
  Speaker 2: I mean, these things are gigantic. Yeah.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: Now that's a common green iguana. And the males lose
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: their green and get that incredible yellow orange. Those are males.
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they're crazy. How many of them there are though,
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: I mean it is just overrun with iguanas. I guess
• 25:09
  Speaker 2: they have no natural predators, right, there's nothing that eats
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: them there.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: Not once they get big like that. When they're little,
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: some birds of prey and some snakes can eat baby iguanas,
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: but not once they are like that.
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: But they're pretty chill. I mean, they don't really do
• 25:20
  Speaker 3: much harm.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: Well don't they go to people's crops and people's houses. No,
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: they do.
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: They do do damage. They they're not supposed to be
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: in Florida, let's put it that way. Iguanas like water.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: Typically they like to be around water, a green iguanas.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: But you know, reptiles have a bad pr problem, and
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: that's why we're here, Joe. We're trying to elevate the
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: publicity of people loving reptiles and not killing them.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: This dude is all out there killing them. Is this
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: dude top shelf anglers on Instagram.
• 25:51
  Speaker 3: And you can do an expedition.
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: So he's just a Florida guy that's enjoying the orisons.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: Also know that now is that's a called a tinosaurus.
• 26:02
  Speaker 1: That's a type of Central American Mexican rocky iguana. That
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: lizard that's not a green iguana.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: So Florida has a variety.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they had those as well. And they have tagoos
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: in Florida that come from South America, a different type
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: of lizard that's invasive in Florida.
• 26:17
  Speaker 2: And all of it is pets. Yeah, people letting me know.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: I had no idea that many people had iguanas, that
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: it could be this, but big of a problem.
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: Patt iguanas were everywhere at one time. Yeah, And is
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: this really that's the take that's also invasive in Florida.
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: That's crazy. I used to sleep with.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: One of those when I was a teenager's snake with legs.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: It does the other face right.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: And that lizard really loves to eat eggs. I used
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: to feed my eggs and I've seen them in the
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: wild eating eggs, bird eggs, duck eggs.
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: When I lived in the valley, there was a reptile
• 26:51
  Speaker 2: store and it was a place where I used to
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: go buy goldfish because I used to have piranhas and
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: I used to have turtles too, and the turtles were
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: way more vicious than the piranhas. Those are quality. When
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: you put goldfish in with the turtles, turtles, it's they're crazy, man,
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: and they grab a hold of them and they're they're
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: biting them. It's like very Jurassic Park, like you're watching
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: a little snapping turtle. Yeah, well these are just little
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: you know, little green sliders what they're called. But they
• 27:17
  Speaker 2: had a crocodile monitor in that place, and oh yeah,
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: I briefly thought like, maybe I can figure out an
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: enclosure crocodile monitor feed it. Rabbits and ship.
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: Don't get bit by a crocodile monitor. They're close to it,
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: like a komodo dagon bite. They have scalp old teeth.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: They're serious getting bit by a crocodile.
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: It looked pretty vicious. I mean, they just look like dinosaurs.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: It's like a forgotten thing of the path. There it is. Yeah,
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: there's a crocodile monitor. Look at that face. Man, it
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: totally looks like a dinosaur.
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: Well there's Tommy. Who's Who's that's the guy who's.
• 27:49
  Speaker 3: Chicken.
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: Oh Tommy. They're the weirdest fucking people because I kind
• 27:56
  Speaker 2: of understand the chimp people more because the chimp people
• 27:59
  Speaker 2: like a chimp is interacting with you. It's it's a mammal,
• 28:03
  Speaker 2: it's a primate. It's intelligent. There's a lot going on.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: There's emotions and jealousy and chimps. They're connecting with you.
• 28:10
  Speaker 2: These things, they're just you're just looking into the abyss
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: and tell the chip rips your head off. Yeah. Well,
• 28:16
  Speaker 2: I'm not advocating for people to have champs as bets.
• 28:19
  Speaker 2: I just say I understand the appeal of a pet chimp.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: I think it's a crazy idea.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: And a baby chap.
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: I think if anybody's even remotely thinking about it, they
• 28:26
  Speaker 2: should watch Jim Crazy. Yes, but yeah, especially the babies
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: are so cute and then they eventually get to the
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: point where they kill your neighbor. But it's just you
• 28:35
  Speaker 2: don't want, you know, I get. I just get the
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: appeal of it. The appeal of the reptile thing to
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: me is just very strangely. These people love them.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: Well, I loved what, you know, I used to keep
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: snakes and lizards, but I ultimately they were my gateway drug.
• 28:51
  Speaker 1: And then I ultimately got into tortoises because I like
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: the tortoises coexisting in the garden like plants, like yeah,
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: and so they didn't it didn't feel like they were
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: in a cage and they kind of you know, maybe
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: I'm anthropomorsive primorphizing. My tortoises but I kind of felt
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: like they were having a pretty good life in my garden,
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: so for sure, So I like keeping tortoises. They don't,
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: you know, want to eat a rabbit particularly, they want
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: to eat some lettuce or some greens or so turtles
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: and tortoises is what I gravitated to. And then I
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: found out one day they're the most endangered group of
• 29:22
  Speaker 1: animals on the planet along with primates if you measure
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: it by how many turtles and tortoises are in the
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: world and how many are facing extinction along with primates.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: So then I was like, Okay, I want to do
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: something to help them. And this show we're doing is
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: really to teach people about the evolution of the reptile
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: trade and to make people realize they're cool and they shouldn't.
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: Be disposable pets. And also freak show and freak so
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: of course really good at freak shows.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: As I said, it takes one to know one.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: Of course.
• 29:54
  Speaker 3: But what's different. There's different, though, is that this isn't
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: some like side hustle for animal love gone wrong. You know,
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: it's it's there's these people, there's this the animal, the
• 30:06
  Speaker 3: reptile people that hurt people are incredibly obsessive about you know,
• 30:12
  Speaker 3: living art, about these living things. They like the it's
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: like a baseball card, like where to use the hurt people.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: Her patology people her patology, amphibians and reptiles.
• 30:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well you know coded but people her people know.
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: But but it's you know, it's it's it's really a
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: trade formed around scarcity, and you know, this sort of
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: desire and adventure people have going out to find the
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: rarest of the rare, you know, and bringing it back
• 30:45
  Speaker 3: and selling it, trading it, keeping it. That you are
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: in that category.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: In that category, I'm not the guy that just wants
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: the little pet bearded dragon. I want the roles are
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: also reptiles, but it's.
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: Different than like, you know, an individual person that has
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: an attachment to a chimpanzee that she saw with you know,
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: watching Tarazan when she was growing up and she wanted
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: to have that in her life.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: So, in other words, freaky people.
• 31:05
  Speaker 3: Like freaking people, extreme extreme obsessions, But it's about kind
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: of you know, the psychology of people in this in
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: this particular very niche way.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: Well, any time you're dealing with extreme animal people, it's
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: about the psychology of the human being that's really invested.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: In it, right, Yeah, best in show, Yeah for sure.
• 31:23
  Speaker 2: And these are these are very unusual people because it's
• 31:28
  Speaker 2: a very unusual thing to be connected to something that
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: really doesn't give a fuck about you. Like we're really
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: concerned about this pink iguana. That pincaguana doesn't give a
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: fuck about people. If all the people on Earth died,
• 31:38
  Speaker 2: it would just keep going about its business and not
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: shed a tear.
• 31:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah, especially things they can kill you in this way,
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: like a taipan or whatever someone's playing with that.
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: An inland type is a venomous stake from Australia that
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: may be the most venomous snake in the world. But
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: it's all relative because a black man, you know. Yeah,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: Australia has a lot of venomous stuff. Yea spiders, boxedaeyfish,
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: a lot of snakes that are very dangerous. Australian tiger snake,
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: brown snake, inland type en. They are all things that
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: equally can kill you. So to say one is more
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: dangerous than the other, they all kill you.
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: Is there anti venom for all of them? No?
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: Actually, so it's a good question. So some snakes, like
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: you know, Texas has a coral snake, for example, a
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: very venomous, elapid type of snake like a cobra, not
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: like a rattlesnake. And I think they have less and
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: less antivenom for snakes that rarely bite people. Because like
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: see snakes, the coral snake, which is the red, black
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: and yellow one that you have in East Texas. You know,
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: when the dog gets bit by the one. You were
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: talking about your dog getting bit by rattlesnakes. A lot
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: of time the vet doesn't know because you can't even
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: see the bite. The snake bite is so tiny. So
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: some snakes do not have anavenom. Some really dangerous snakes.
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: The coral snakes, they don't have any venom for them.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: I think I heard that, maybe not anymore.
• 32:57
  Speaker 2: I'm sure it's faded.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: So what happens if you get bit, Well, there may
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: be some ani venom, but there's not a lot of it.
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: Ana venom has gotten very expensive and it's very sophisticated
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: now and it's mostly for you know, in the US,
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: for vipers, you know, for rattlesnakes. You know, But I
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: don't know, good question, that would be something someone smarter
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: than me would know about. Coral snake ana venom, but
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: it's an elapid like a cobra. You know.
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: A friend of mine had two of them in her carport. Yeah,
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: they took pictures of it and send it to people
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: and everyone's like, yeah, that's keep away from that, just
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: chilling in her carport. Yeah, but they're not generally not aggressive.
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: Is that the deal?
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a saying, and it doesn't fit all because
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: there's coral snakes that don't have this. But yellow against
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: black is a friend of jack yellow and black against
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: red is anyway. I can't even say, yeah, you wind
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: up dead. I'm getting it wrong. But there's a saying,
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: and it doesn't hold true for all coral snakes because
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: there's some coral snakes outside of the US that don't
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: have that same pattern.
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: So if there's no anti va, I'm going to take
• 34:00
  Speaker 2: you to the hospital. What did they do? They stopped
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: making the I mean there's so they stop making it.
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: Is that what it says?
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: Effective?
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: I think that's what I cost and effective no longer
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: let people die. Cost Effective is a crazy thing to
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: say when it comes to keeping people. Wow, I was
• 34:17
  Speaker 2: I was right for a change. Maybe the socialists are right,
• 34:22
  Speaker 2: cost effective is crazy. So what did they do? Uh?
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: You know, I heard every rattlesnake joke after I got bit,
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: And there's one that's these three guys are out hiking
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: and someone gets bit here and they go to the
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: doctor and the guy says, you got to go back
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: and suck it out of him. And the guy just
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: says to him, you're gonna die. So maybe you die
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: with a cral snake. Yeah, just leave your dog.
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: The thing I was recently, we're looking at this the
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: way of treating raddlesnake mics not too long ago. By
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: the way, they sell these, Johnson and Johnson sell these
• 34:51
  Speaker 3: kids where you used to have one, right, you actually
• 34:55
  Speaker 3: literally slice out and you suck out the suck out
• 34:57
  Speaker 3: the venom out of your out of your bite.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: Does that actually work?
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: No?
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: That was what was incredible about it.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: When you, when we were young, they had these little
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: rattle steak kits. You know, I'm a little older you,
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: but it was insane what they told people to do
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: back then. They told you to cut yourself and then
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: put a tourniquit and then suck the venom out, which
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: is completely insane because when a rattlesnake strikes. You know,
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: they never hold on a rattlesnake. They strike and let
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: go immediately, and then they track their prey. And it's
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: literally like a hypodermic needle going into your body and
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: the you know, the venom is already just like when
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: they inject you with something, it's already in. You can't
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: suck the whatever.
• 35:35
  Speaker 2: Doctor, what should you do if you get bit? By
• 35:37
  Speaker 2: Ronald B. Mellow.
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: In my case, I walked to my car. Luckily I
• 35:41
  Speaker 1: wasn't too far away from my car, and I was
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: up in the mountains about an hour away from a hospital.
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: I drove, well, I drove like a bat out of
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: hell to the hospital. Actually, But you're supposed to be
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: calm and get to the.
• 35:52
  Speaker 2: Kit incredible, and it was just bullshit. Huh, Well, everything's
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: taken out of the woods, like we're fine.
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: Everything you shouldn't everything you shouldn't do today, everything.
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: And so you just stay mellow and get to the
• 36:03
  Speaker 2: hospital and if they don't have any anti venom, you
• 36:05
  Speaker 2: just die.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: Well, in my case, they didn't have it in the hospital.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: They had to get see highway patrol to bring it
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: from another from Ventura, and it took about forty five minutes,
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: and I thought I was going to die on the gurney.
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: But yeah, you get to a hospital, you get ana
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: venom if it's a bad bite.
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: And if they don't have any venom, you die. Well,
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: it depends on the kind of snake.
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: Like water moccasins usually aren't lethal, but certain rattlesnakes can
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: kill you.
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: And how much time do you have from the time
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: of you get bit where you must get the anti
• 36:34
  Speaker 2: venom in you.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: I mean, in my case, I swear to god, I
• 36:38
  Speaker 1: thought I was gonna stop breathing about two hours into it.
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: It just slowly feels like this pressure on your check.
• 36:45
  Speaker 2: You can't breathe.
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you're like you it felt like somebody put sandbags
• 36:49
  Speaker 1: all over me, and like you have this pressure and
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: you feel like you're gonna stop breathing.
• 36:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of bizarre.
• 36:55
  Speaker 3: Who's that guy Ross Allen? He has the world record
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: for the is it cobra bytes?
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: No, I think you're talking about a serpentarium. And that
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: same guy Bill Haas Bill he lived to like a
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: hundred But and I know people that inject themselves with venom.
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: I was in me and mar and Burma. One time,
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: this guy had snake tattoos all over him and he
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: was a snake wrangler at this zoo in the central Burma.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: And every tattoo he had put on his body, he
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: had put some venom in it so he could handle
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: these really dangerous crates which are like cobra's. And he
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: was this guy with all these stake tattoos, but he
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: had envenomated himself, so you'd have annibodies, so he could
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: handle these stakes and if he got bad, he wouldn't die.
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: But early roadside attractions in South I mean, that's the
• 37:38
  Speaker 3: part about Florida. It goes back. It's in the fifties
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: and sixties. It had you know, Miami Serpentarium was an
• 37:43
  Speaker 3: amazing looking place, had this giant cobra, you know, with sculpture.
• 37:48
  Speaker 2: Basically, here's a question. If they do that with allergies,
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: where they give you like a little bit of the
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: allergen and develop a resistance to it, could they do
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: that with snakes. That's like, if you live in a
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: snake prone area, should you do that? But that's the idea.
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: Why wouldn't you do that.
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: There's a guy right now in the US that's doing it.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: I think they're doing a film upon about him injecting
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: all these venomous snake venoms into him like a pincushion.
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: But no, I don't think people should do it, but
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: people do do it, not a lot of people, but
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: this guy.
• 38:18
  Speaker 2: Does build up your antibodies and you know that you're
• 38:20
  Speaker 2: going to come in contact with snakes. Listen, wouldn't that
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: be Is it bad for you to do?
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: Look, the country that I think has the most deadly
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: snake bites is probably India, the country where there's the
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: most deaths in venomation. The snake that probably kills more
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: people in the world is a puff out or in Africa.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: But it's many countries, but I think India has the highest.
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: US it's pretty low chance you're going to get killed
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: by a snake. You're gonna get killed driving your car
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: or shooting someone with your gun. You know, it's highly unlikely.
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: The odds are very low that you're going to die
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: from a snake bite, no matter where you live in there.
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: I understand it's all well and good, but that doesn't
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: comfort you if you get bit by a snake, like, oh,
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: what are the odds you have to deal with it or.
• 39:06
  Speaker 3: By one of those kids.
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: I think most people live. I think most people.
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean there's a few people that died this
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: year in California, but typically it's like only a few
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: people a year die.
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: In the country of snake bites. And is it generally
• 39:17
  Speaker 2: because they just don't get to medical treatment in time.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: Or they're older, or you know where, they get bit
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: three times, like not just once by the rattlesnake. You
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: know you have more venom in them.
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: Is it true that the young ones give you more
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: venom than the old ones?
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: No, young young young ones have a more condensed, more
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: dangerous venom, but big snakes will are much more dangerous
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: because they can put far more venom into you. If
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: the little ones have a more potent venom that they
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: can't inject as much into So that's kind of people
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: misunderstand that stat Yeah, not that I'm a snake expert.
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: I'm more of a turtle expert, and I am more
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: of a freak expert, So I'm good at finding these
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: crazy people.
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: To do you get uncomfortable being around these people? That's
• 40:03
  Speaker 2: a good question because there's there's a psychological aspect too,
• 40:11
  Speaker 2: particularly like chimp crazy. There's something about those people that
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: makes me uneasy watching it on TV, like you are
• 40:19
  Speaker 2: so far gone, Like some of these people are so
• 40:22
  Speaker 2: far gone in terms of like just being a normal, present,
• 40:27
  Speaker 2: rational person.
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: There's a courtship, and sometimes that courtship takes years to
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: get someone willing to be interviewed. It's generally the reptile
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: world can be very guarded. People that have them don't
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: want the Feds coming and taking their rare reptiles. They
• 40:43
  Speaker 1: don't want animal rights groups PEDA coming and busting them.
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: They don't want people coming because they're very valuable. Some
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: reptils are worth a lot of money, so they're very guarded.
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: And to get access to a lot of these people
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: took a lot of time at times, and sometimes that
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: relationship would go up, been down, And there were times
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: when people that I was interviewing really did not like me.
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: There's something that happened, and then I would have to
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: go there and I'd be nervous because that person may
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: have been someone who did a lot of time in
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: prison and did some heavy things in his life. So yeah,
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: there are times when you were just kind of like,
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: you know, is.
• 41:17
  Speaker 2: This the time I'm going to go there and he's
• 41:18
  Speaker 2: going to really fuck me up. Why didn't they like you?
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: You know, man?
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: You know, like listen, I like this guy. He's done,
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: he's done what he's done in the past. He was
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: sentenced to one hundred years in prison. He got out
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: for whatever reason.
• 41:33
  Speaker 2: But that guy, wat, why did you go to jail
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: for a hundred years?
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: Well, Mario Tobrawi was sentenced to one hundred plus years
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: in prison. He got out early because he must have
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: had some serious It.
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: Was the crime murder and drugs, and he got up
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: early because he said he had information. He must have.
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: He did twelve years and no one knows what. No
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: one knows what.
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: He only did twelve years from murder and drugs. But
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: I like him.
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: Oh great, I wasn't the one murdered.
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: I wasn't in his life back then.
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: He's kind of a like he really actually does love animals.
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: I mean in his way.
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: And I was nervous sometimes going to his place a
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: few times.
• 42:14
  Speaker 2: Well, why was he mad at you? Fuck? Do you
• 42:17
  Speaker 2: remember all the times he was mad at me?
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: He'd he's probably mad at me right now as I'm speaking.
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I definitely won't. Yeah. Well, that's this.
• 42:24
  Speaker 3: This is the next episode. There's an entire episode that
• 42:27
  Speaker 3: talks about kind of the eighties in Miami and the
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: sort of overlap between the drug trade and the legal
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: wildlife trade and the reptail trade, and he's a central
• 42:35
  Speaker 3: character in it. Now he's kind of more tangential because
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: it's really about this this guy, Raven Nostrand, guy from
• 42:43
  Speaker 3: New Jersey, moved down to Florida. I started a business
• 42:47
  Speaker 3: that became strictly reptiles, as I was referencing. But yeah,
• 42:51
  Speaker 3: I mean, I don't think there was anything like particular,
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: but he would get very particular about very specific things,
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: like if you were you could be right about a
• 42:59
  Speaker 3: million things that he hated, but wrong about one thing
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: that he cared about the most, and he would categorize
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: you to be this person that you know.
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: There's an expression honor among thieves, and he weirdly has
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: this kind of honorable sun and certain things I would
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: say to him would make him really upset. But I
• 43:16
  Speaker 1: have to say, the only time I was ever shot
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: at in my life was in fucking Miami. I was
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: shot at, you know, going to a payphone in the
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: early nineties and a van trying to go to a
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: nightclub with a bunch of people, and these guys were
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: walking towards me and they started just blowing out the
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: windows of the van. I remember, I didn't go to
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: the nightclub. I went back to my hotel and I
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: woke up in the morning with that chopped you know,
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: car Glasshall in my hair. I had long hair back then.
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: I had hair back then. But Miami was, you know,
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: it was pretty wild in the eighties and early nineties.
• 43:50
  Speaker 2: I have a good friend, mom. My friend Steve did
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: his residency, he's an ophthalmologist, his residency in Miami in
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: the eighties and worked in emergency rooms, and he said
• 43:58
  Speaker 2: it was fucking insane. It's just like so many gunshot wounds,
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: so many drug deals gone bad, so many heists. He said,
• 44:06
  Speaker 2: it was like an insane place to work. And why
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: do you say that?
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: Because I said to all my characters, I said, what's
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: it like, you know, having been in and out of
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: prison so many times, he goes, bro, everyone in Florida
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: has been in prison, you know. And I was kind
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: of like, well, what's it like.
• 44:21
  Speaker 2: You know, everyone in floyd has been in prison.
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: Sunny places with shady people, right have you seen Cocaine Cowboys?
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, phenomenal. Right, and that story where you
• 44:31
  Speaker 2: find out that the entire graduating class of the police
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: academy either wound up murdered or in jail for corruption.
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: Have you seen Bad Lieutenant? Yes, I'm friends with Harvey.
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: Oh really, he's good in it.
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: Man. Oh yeah, that's great moment.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: But if there's parts of this story that are a
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: little like Bad Lieutenant, you'll see in the end.
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: You know, well, what you'll you'll like about this second episode,
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: about this period. It's from the point of view of
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: this young at the time, you know, coming right out
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: of college, young d agent dea agent on the beat,
• 45:01
  Speaker 3: chasing bad guys. And he was assigned this guy Mario
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: to Browley the case that was a cold case. No
• 45:06
  Speaker 3: one could ever touch him. And you see him kind
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: of chase after him, and you know, understand the whole
• 45:12
  Speaker 3: weaving of this story, but it's a really you know,
• 45:14
  Speaker 3: being around that guy was you know, being talk about
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: the subjects in this animal world, you know, law enforcement.
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: This guy sleeps with a gun every night and gets
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: literally orgasmic with the thought of this guy coming to
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: his house. It was like a hideaway the guy that
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: he put in prison for one hundred years that got out.
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: He literally waits and you'll see a line in the
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: show that is kind of unbelievable what he says about that.
• 45:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but just you know, he lives in this kind
• 45:38
  Speaker 3: of we went to go see him. He lives in
• 45:40
  Speaker 3: this kind of very kind of you know country part
• 45:43
  Speaker 3: of West Virginia, and he's good with guns, good with guns,
• 45:48
  Speaker 3: and he would just you know, he would brag about
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: all the gunship, you know, the puletch you can find
• 45:53
  Speaker 3: from this, you know, leftover from the Civil War in
• 45:56
  Speaker 3: his backyard. And you know, he was very very good
• 45:59
  Speaker 3: with gun. We did a lot of shooting verite with him,
• 46:02
  Speaker 3: and he was just a really at this at the time,
• 46:06
  Speaker 3: very generous with his with his time, wanting to tell
• 46:08
  Speaker 3: his story, but you know, clearly killed a lot of
• 46:13
  Speaker 3: people and would make some very soft references to to
• 46:17
  Speaker 3: that that would be very an nerving, you know, like, yeah,
• 46:20
  Speaker 3: you're really great with you. I've never shot a gun.
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: He's I don't have anything against it, but I've never
• 46:23
  Speaker 3: shot a gun. And I would talk to him about it.
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: I'm interested in it, and he'd be like, yeah, I've
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: had to use it a lot, you know, more than
• 46:29
  Speaker 3: I'd like to admit. So, you know, you're in these places.
• 46:34
  Speaker 3: It's it's it's But.
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: What's so peculiar about this guy. His name's Larry Lovelace.
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: He was a DEA agent in Florida back in those days.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: He put this guy in prison, you know, you know,
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: bringing this guy was bringing a lot of drugs from
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: you know, he was Cuban and you'll see it in
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: episode two. But he really just doesn't understand how the
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: guy got out of prison, and the fact that the
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: very guy that put him in prison wouldn't know that
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: that they were like the whoever the powers that be
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: that put got him out of prison after twelve years,
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: You would think he would know, you know, but he's
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: still to this date worried, worried about.
• 47:07
  Speaker 2: Retellien should be.
• 47:08
  Speaker 3: So this was what's cool is that his dad was
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: actually the person. He was like an hr person for
• 47:18
  Speaker 3: kind of the Cuban was at the time of the
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: Cuban Bay of Pigs, you know, invasion, that kind of era,
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: and he was responsible for taking care of all these
• 47:27
  Speaker 3: kind of Cuban exiles during that time. And he would
• 47:30
  Speaker 3: he was being the one that was going to going
• 47:32
  Speaker 3: to house to house and giving people checks. So he
• 47:35
  Speaker 3: had this kind of very interesting network of people and
• 47:38
  Speaker 3: had this incredible access. And so with what was been
• 47:41
  Speaker 3: insinuated is that you know, his dad had these relationships
• 47:45
  Speaker 3: and knew where everyone was and knew all these people
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: and had information that was useful to the government at
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: the time. That's the idea. Gave information no surprise, or he.
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: Helped bring down the real Pablo Escobar, or he knew
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: a big drug lord that the government wanted and they
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: made a deal. Who knows that it could be. There's
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: lots of theories.
• 48:02
  Speaker 3: Quite an injustice though, like even this guy, you know
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: some you know, we filmed two hundred people over how
• 48:09
  Speaker 3: long fifteen years really the least six was was more
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: intense more than two hundred people, and you never get
• 48:14
  Speaker 3: everybody in. And I remember meeting this guy, Tony Biscaro,
• 48:19
  Speaker 3: remember him. Yeah, he was the this guy was part
• 48:22
  Speaker 3: of He flew planes for drugs. You know, he got
• 48:24
  Speaker 3: busted with like I think six hundred thousand, you know,
• 48:27
  Speaker 3: pounds of weed at the time. He served the single
• 48:32
  Speaker 3: largest sentence for marijuana smuggling crime forty years forty years,
• 48:38
  Speaker 3: got out maybe five years ago. And could you imagine
• 48:40
  Speaker 3: coming out of prison for the longest sentence and then
• 48:42
  Speaker 3: going to Miami and you see weed stores everywhere bucking
• 48:47
  Speaker 3: life's over and these weed stores. It's like insane to me,
• 48:51
  Speaker 3: that's fucked up. But that was at a time. Look
• 48:53
  Speaker 3: Pablo Escobar, like there were people around Pablo Esco where
• 48:55
  Speaker 3: they got indeed, that was the were trafficking ivory horns
• 48:58
  Speaker 3: and stuff like. It was very You know, there's one
• 49:00
  Speaker 3: degree of separation for like wildlife crime and drugs and
• 49:03
  Speaker 3: that era.
• 49:04
  Speaker 2: Why do you think there's that connection easy concealment con I.
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: Mean, look, I don't want to exaggerate. I think there's
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: been connections. You know, like you can put cocaine inside
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: of a Boa constrictor who's going to open a box
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: at customs or fish and Wileye service and look inside
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: the boa constrictors. So there's some pretty ingenious ways.
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: To meaning you put it in their stomach.
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like you either like force feed the bow constrictor
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: like you know, like you put them in those balloons
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: you put cocaine in, or you even.
• 49:31
  Speaker 2: And then you have to cut them open and get
• 49:32
  Speaker 2: your cocaine. Yeah, you cut them open and get your cocaine.
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: But even I remember in New York when the fish
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: markets used to put rug casually about that, by the way,
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: but fish fish markets used to put the drugs and
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: fish and the and they you know in the fish
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: markets New York. Yeah, because no one wants to handle
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: the fish and open up the fish, and they shove
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: all the drugs into the fish. So, you know, like smelly,
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: dangerous animals are good cover for drugs or.
• 49:56
  Speaker 3: Or even more used to be you know, trafficking wildlife.
• 49:59
  Speaker 3: There was a legal version of that. So what they
• 50:01
  Speaker 3: would do is take the crates and they'd pack them
• 50:04
  Speaker 3: and they put the drugs at the bottom, and they'd
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: put you know, another layer of animals and they put
• 50:08
  Speaker 3: some they'd mix in some you know, lookalike animals that
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: are really rare but look like the common animal, so
• 50:13
  Speaker 3: they'd mix them together, and then they put something like
• 50:16
  Speaker 3: you know, spitting cobras up the top. And no one
• 50:18
  Speaker 3: was reaching into the crate when there was these like
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: very dangerous animals many So that's how they kind of
• 50:24
  Speaker 3: got that they were able to prey on the lack
• 50:26
  Speaker 3: of resources at these kind of major ports of entry
• 50:30
  Speaker 3: and realized that fish and wildlife didn't really have any
• 50:33
  Speaker 3: resources at the time. They had limited wildlife inspectors. They
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: had to go through these you know, volumes, values of
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: crates and they play these games.
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: Many Komodo dragons that made it into this country came
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: in illegally in a crate and they would just put
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: a little Komodo dragon in with some other monitor lizards
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: and the inspectors couldn't tell the difference, and they'd go
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: through and the Komodo dragon that bit Sharon Stone's husband.
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: Sharon Stone's husband, I think Los Angeles Zoo is one
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: of those dragons.
• 51:00
  Speaker 2: So was somebody's private collection and then they got released
• 51:03
  Speaker 2: to the zoo.
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: No, it was in a sting that's in our show
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: where they were bringing in illegal animals coming from a
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: guy in Malaysia who's sort of the Pablo Escobar, the
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: kingpin globally of all the reptile animal trade. A guy
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: that we finally accessed after COVID, who his name is
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: Antson Wong, and he was sort of the you know,
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: bad guy number one in the world for reptile and
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: animal smuggling, and so he was sending an Interpol and
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: you know he did the longest longest sentence in the
• 51:32
  Speaker 1: US for a while. I crime ever at the time
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: in the nineties he was busted in Mexico, but and
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: then brought extra diited into the US. But he was
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: bringing in komodo dragons and really rare reptiles, and the
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: zoos were the beneficiary of those reptiles once they were confiscated.
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: So the La Zoo San Diego Zoo brought zoo. A
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: lot of these animals came from reptile smugglers.
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: Wow, very much at origins of collections.
• 51:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, for zoos. And I would also imagine that the
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: kind of people that are really into reptiles probably also drugs,
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: so they probably know a lot of people in that world.
• 52:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like a cross section of.
• 52:08
  Speaker 2: Python.
• 52:09
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of inked guys. There's a lot of
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: like goth guys into Oh yeah, hot snakes, which are
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: the venomous, a lot of.
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: Bikers hot snakes.
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: Hot snakes they call them, yeah hot, I mean they
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: kind they can kill you.
• 52:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they're called hot snakes. Interesting.
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: But yeah, a lot of badass guys. And there was
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: definitely drugs. Listen, I did drugs in my.
• 52:30
  Speaker 2: Life way, Yes, come on, I'll go on.
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: I've done everything. I had nightclubs in New York City
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: for many years.
• 52:38
  Speaker 2: Joe.
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm like, you know, embombed. It's made me live longer.
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: Maybe that's what saved you when you get a bit
• 52:46
  Speaker 2: by the Roles night. Probably, But you gotta think that
• 52:50
  Speaker 2: the type of people that are going to be even
• 52:52
  Speaker 2: interested in having a snake as a pet, that's a
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: very unusual person. Yeah. I don't come on.
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: You know people that have stakes kids have all pythons.
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: You've got kids, They like a baby, a ballpitheon they're clean.
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: You don't have to feed it every day, like a
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: rabbit or a dog. You can go on vacation, leave
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: your ball python. They're a good pat A lot of.
• 53:13
  Speaker 2: Snakes, I don't think of them as a pet. I
• 53:15
  Speaker 2: think of it as a monster that you feed that
• 53:17
  Speaker 2: allows you. You know, it's not big enough to eat you,
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: so it allows you to feed it, and then you
• 53:24
  Speaker 2: have to keep it in this box, which is kind
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: of weird. That's why I like tortoises.
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: You don't have to keep them in a cage or
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: a box.
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: Because it does a snake they experience discomfort because they're
• 53:34
  Speaker 2: in a terrarium.
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: Listen, there's a lot of myth out there that, oh,
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: snakes can live in a little teeny like sweater box
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: or a shoe box, and you can put them in
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: racks like you see in snake stores and snake The
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: truth is, real snakes in the wild do not live
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: in little boxes. They may go in the underground at
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: a certain time of year at hibernate, they may, but
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: they come out and they hang out like us, and
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: they move around, and most snakes do not live in
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: a little teeny box. But yes, they can survive in
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: a box. But there's all different kinds of snakes. There's
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: racer snakes and indigo snakes and snakes that need to
• 54:09
  Speaker 1: move fast and go places. And then there's some snakes
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: like a ball python that can be in a more
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: confined space. But you can't generally.
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: But generally, like when people keep them as pets, they
• 54:18
  Speaker 2: keep them in some common aquarium, right.
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, and they should they should give them more space.
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: They should absolutely give them more space. I mean, part
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: of what we're trying to do in this show is
• 54:26
  Speaker 1: to try to tell people be responsible, don't treat reptiles
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: like disposable pets like a toy that you break one
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: week and then you buy another one, and you break
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: it and the parents buy another one. You know, they're
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: living creatures. The death toll when you import these animals
• 54:40
  Speaker 1: is amazing. I mean, so much mortality, and we don't
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: talk about mortality, whether it's zoos or people bringing in
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: these reptiles, or even myself. Over the years, you ask me,
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: what happened to that snake? Probably died, Probably was flushed
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: down a toilet by someone's mom, you know, you know,
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: like baby green turtles that you had as a kid,
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: Like what happened.
• 54:58
  Speaker 2: To most of those long the snakes? Look? How long
• 55:01
  Speaker 2: does a python live? This episode is brought to you
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• 55:58
  Speaker 1: So the longest lived down animal torrestri animal on the
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: planet is a giant tortoise. They can live almost two
• 56:03
  Speaker 1: hundred years. I have tortoises that are over one hundred
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: years old.
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: What about snakes? Snakes?
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: Generally, most snakes don't live more than thirty to forty years,
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: but there are a few that my lizards can live
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: seventy years. Some of the big land iguanas can live
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: a long time. Those ones in Florida.
• 56:19
  Speaker 2: They live seventy years.
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: I don't know about green iguanas, but there are some
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: that can live fifty to seventy years. Some of the
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: big lizards. Tortoises live the longest. Some crocodilians can live
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: a really long time. Snakes live the least, the lesser
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: time compared to most of the other reptiles.
• 56:34
  Speaker 2: That was another thing that they found in Florida in
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: the Everglades, they found nile crocodiles and they think that
• 56:42
  Speaker 2: they might have a breeding population. There's some suspicion, but
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: it's basically from people having them as pets.
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've swam with nile crocodiles.
• 56:49
  Speaker 2: That's no joke. Why did you do that?
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: I was in Madagascar. They have a form of nile
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: crocodile in Madagascar. They don't uite quite as big as
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: the mainland crocs. And I was looking for turtles and
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: then I all the croc nile crocodiles, and as you know,
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: saltwater crocodiles are the two crocs that really kill the
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: most people. You know, people come and wash their clothing
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: next to the shore. You know, the croc comes up
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: and grabs them. You know, you really got to watch
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: it with nile crocodiles. So if they're in Florida, they're
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: much bigger than American crocodiles.
• 57:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they have a shoot on site order for them,
• 57:19
  Speaker 2: or they did, at least in this article that I
• 57:21
  Speaker 2: was reading is from a while back. I didn't know that.
• 57:23
  Speaker 2: Woll Yeah, a couple of them. Yeah, yeah, I know
• 57:27
  Speaker 2: they've captured at least two of them.
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: Well, the biggest reptile in the world in terms of
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: weight back to our sized conversation, is a saltwater crocodile
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: and it's neck and neck with a leather back seat turtle.
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: They're both over two thousand pounds. So you imagine a
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: two thousand other.
• 57:41
  Speaker 2: Back seat turtle. Is that big? Yeah? Yeah, I had
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: no idea. That's great. I would have never imagined that
• 57:48
  Speaker 2: a sea turtle would have the same body weight as
• 57:51
  Speaker 2: a saltwater crocodile.
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: Their neck and neck to over two thousand pounds both
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: of them. That's a big, big turtle.
• 57:58
  Speaker 2: Well, I know that there's legend right about congo crocodiles,
• 58:03
  Speaker 2: and that there's crocodiles that people had supposedly seen, you know,
• 58:08
  Speaker 2: back in the early nineteen hundreds and the eighteen hundreds
• 58:10
  Speaker 2: that they thought were forty feet long. And the thing
• 58:14
  Speaker 2: about crocodiles is, I don't think they die of old age.
• 58:18
  Speaker 2: I think they just stay alive until they die. I
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: want to be a crocodile, and they keep getting bigger.
• 58:24
  Speaker 2: That's the other thing, like depending upon their food source
• 58:27
  Speaker 2: and how much yeah, one, I think in captivity they
• 58:30
  Speaker 2: wind up dying. But I think there's some there's there's
• 58:35
  Speaker 2: some thoughts as to why that happens, you know, how
• 58:38
  Speaker 2: they're actually eating, whether they're getting fed, what's the difference
• 58:42
  Speaker 2: between the way they live in the wild. But there's
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: some accounts from back in the day where these guys
• 58:48
  Speaker 2: were on a boat and the crocodile was bigger than
• 58:51
  Speaker 2: the boat they were on. Yeah.
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: I mean the thing about crocodilians, and I think there's
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: about twenty seven different types. But once they get to
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: a certain size, you know, they're vulnerable when they're little, right,
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: like birds and fish and things can kill them and
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: eat them. But once they get a certain size, you know,
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: like you're saying, they're pretty much invincible. Nothing can kill them,
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: you know, And some of them developed a taste for people. Yeah,
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: just movement in the water and just there because they're an.
• 59:17
  Speaker 2: Ambush predator, right, Yeah, well they hunt people and they
• 59:20
  Speaker 2: probably hunt people. My friend Jim Shockey, he got hired
• 59:23
  Speaker 2: to go to Africa. I forget what country it was,
• 59:27
  Speaker 2: but he got hired to kill these crocodiles because they
• 59:31
  Speaker 2: were praying on people. And while he was there, someone
• 59:35
  Speaker 2: got snatched up. While he was in camp, said everybody
• 59:39
  Speaker 2: there had like missing a leg, bite, taken another calf.
• 59:42
  Speaker 2: Everybody was all fucked up.
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: I was good friends with Peter Beard and he would
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: go to Kenya and Ethiopia call crocodiles. And there's a
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: really incredible photo of him inside a crocodile that they killed,
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: and he's like writing in his you know journal, but
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: he's half his body is in a huge nile crocodile.
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: But he would go and all of them for probably
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: similar reason.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: Yea, yeah, once they start targeting villagers, once they find
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 2: that there's a place that they can hunt and get
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 2: regular food, they're there all the time. They they're so
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: sneaky that you know, what they developed was they these
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 2: people had put posts into the ground in the water,
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 2: so into the the area where they would wash their
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 2: clothes and gather food. They essentially built like some sort
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 2: of containment area where the crocs couldn't get through these poles.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 2: So what the crocs did was go around the poles
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 2: and into the water. So they had figured it outright,
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 2: that's creepy, that's creepy. Well they realized like, oh the
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 2: people go like they must have been watching and realizing oh,
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 2: the people go into this area, so I gotta go
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 2: on the ground at night, and then I'll go back
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 2: into the water and then I'll catch these fuckers slipping.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 2: And they're patient.
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 3: They can wait eat intelligent.
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 1: They go in a long time.
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: Before they eat anything, you know, for a year.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: They croc Yeah, yeah, well they they're one of the
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: few reptiles that actually really does defend their babies, like
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: you know, like a snake. Snake doesn't do that. Yeah, yeah, wow, yeah, wow, Wow,
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: that's amazing.
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 2: What a dinosaur man? What is that? A saltwater or
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 2: a nile?
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 3: Says saltwater Australia in Australia.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 2: Wow wow. Those things ran the whole world at one
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 2: point in time. Mm hmm. Yeah, it's just weird. There's
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: still creatures like that roaming around. You know, that's a throwback.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: And there's some really endangered crocodiles and you're seeing our show.
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: I think even episode one, there's the zoo curator that says, oh,
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: we bought a few Philippine crocodiles from this dealer. I
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: think it's in the first episode. And Philippine crocodiles today
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: are super endangered, you know, like there's still some really
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: really rare ones, not saltwater crocs and not Nile crocs,
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 1: but there's some really endangered.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 2: Is that a thrill for these guys that they get
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 2: something that they're not supposed to have as a part
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: of it. Yeah, for sure.
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 3: It's like a rare baseball card.
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: No, it's like rare art. It's like having a yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: And then there's a I get excited by seeing something
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: I never saw before, Like, well, when I see a
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: cool like pink landing one, I've never seen one in
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: the wild or anywhere, and I've been to the Galapagos.
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: So yeah, it's a thrill. It's hard.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: I put in your backpack and take it home is
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 3: probably not encouraged.
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: I'd stuff hit down my pants. No, I'd be too scared.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 2: Well, you wouldn't want to do that, right, Well, ever.
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: Since no, I wouldn't want to. You know, my mother
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: gave me a good moral compass with that. She used
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: to say to me when I was a kid, don't
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: play god Eric and I keep my keeping things, and
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: she'd tell me, you got to let it go at
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: the end of the summer. So I was lucky to
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: have that because a lot of people didn't have that mother,
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: and I did, so I kind of again so my
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: better judgment. When I was a kid, I did bad
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: things that my mother didn't like, but later in life
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: she was right.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 2: Keep it in the wild, yeah, for sure. You know, well,
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 2: they're fascinating in the wild. It's just like I do
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 2: appreciate them in the wild. I just I'm perplexed as
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 2: to why people would they would have their life revolve
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 2: around taking care of reptiles. It just seems really odd.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: Well, people get into it, and they get addicted, and
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: they buy more and more and more, and then they
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: get divorced and they get rid of them all or
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: they get burnt out on it because after a while,
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: it's a lot of work taking care of a lot
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: of reptiles. So it's kind of like, you know, people
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: get really into it and sometimes it's hard to sustain it.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: You know, but more trade than the other collectible culture.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: Trade more, more, trade.
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 2: More, you know, like I'll give you a crocodile trade yeah, bear, bear, gullbladder.
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 2: I've never seen this footage that's a shark, So it's
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 2: stealing a shark that it got caught. Wow, that must
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 2: be American crocodile. Right, it's Australia. Okay, a lot of
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 2: sharks in Australia. That makes sense, I don't know. Wow,
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 2: So I just stole this guy's fish.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 3: Okay, Yeah, what's been your interest in wildlife?
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 2: Well, man, I'm fascinated by wildlife. I'm just much more
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 2: interested in mammals for whatever reason. I mean, I'm interested
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 2: in these things. I found them fascinating, but they're not
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 2: as compelling to me for whatever reason. And I always
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 2: wondered what that is like. You know, I did this
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 2: thing on social media once, the social media hierarchy of
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 2: dead animals, and I said, like fish, filets of fish,
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 2: No one cares dead fish. People care a little more,
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 2: but not much. Dead turkey not that big a deal.
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 2: Dead deer Okay, now we're getting weird. You know, dead bear,
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 2: Now people get mad at you. It's interesting.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: You know. I went to this thing called Safari Club
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: International in Vegas. It's the biggest trophy hunting you know, convention.
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 1: And I was filming undercover and I started out.
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 2: You know, asking, yeah, can you taxt it near me this?
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: And then I kind of you know, raised the bar,
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: and I said, you know, can you taxidermy a chimp
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: for me, and they were like, yeah, yeah, we can
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: do a chimp. Said what about an orangutank, Yeah, we
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: could do an orangutang. Anyway, and I was going around
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: two different taxidermists in this giant convention. They had elephants
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: and lions and all kinds of stuff. Eventually I asked
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 1: someone if you could taxidermy a human, you know, And
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: then suddenly I noticed all these guys starting to follow me,
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: you know, And there was a big NRA booth and
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 1: a lot of people with guns, and eventually they surrounded
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: me and I was trying to get rid of my
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: you know, camera gear and throw it in the garbage
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: and stuff. But it was interesting where the line is
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 1: and what you're allowed to.
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 2: Well, it sounds like you're a fucking psychopath. You're asking
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 2: him if you could taxidermy a human. You don't think
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 2: that's They probably thought for sure you're a fed or
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: someone or a joke undercover. I mean, obviously it was.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: Kind of it was kind of a joke, but they
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: literally started putting eyeballs on me and say, who the
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: fuck is this guy?
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah you yeah, but they were do you take a
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 2: fucking human and turn into a statue.
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: People have shrunken heads. I know people with youunkin heads.
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: Actually you know they collect them, but no, it's pretty
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: macab But the fact that they would tax the deermy
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: a chimp and an orangutang and a gorilla.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 2: So who are these people that said they would do that.
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 1: They're just just taxidermists that are in this convention that taxidermy.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 2: Would want to be a game, so someone would have
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 2: to smuggle it back.
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: A lot of what happens is and a lot of
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: the you know, when zoo animals die sometimes they send
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: it to people that taxidermy it. So I know people
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: that get a lot of zoo carcasses and they you know,
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: tax a chimp. I've seen it.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 2: But yeah, so when a zoo, a zoo has the
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 2: option to sell the dead body and then someone turns
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 2: it into a taxidermy statue.
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: It's gone on for a long time. Nothing against zoos,
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: but that was one way to get really unusual animals,
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: Like I have a friend met a guy I know
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: that's taxidermy. Number of Komodo dragons that came from zoos
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: because people don't have komodo dragons in the right in
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: the private sector.
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 2: But I guess, no harm, no foul, it's already dead.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: But I guess I'm making the point you're making. I'm
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: just sort of saying, it's interesting how fish even though
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 1: certain fish can live over one hundred years, certain rock
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: fish and longevity that's incredible. We don't think of them
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: in the same way as we think of these higher.
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 2: We don't care at all. We don't care at all. Yeah,
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 2: we don't seem to. But you know, going fishing is
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 2: much more common than going hunting.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah, now that I said what I just said, you know,
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: maybe that's a little twisted. What do you mean about
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: taxing real person?
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 2: Twisted? Yeah, you asked him.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: I think I said that out of context.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 2: WHOA you could buy this?
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it's real to see if it was fake?
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 2: What real? How is that legal document? I'm not sure
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 2: on the screen, may our friend, it's only three grand I.
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: Mean the guy Riverside, Yeah, the guy that has the
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 3: tax that he's got a funny name for his museum.
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he's the Commodo Dragon.
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 1: But now that I think about it, he had a
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: number of taxidermy guerrillas. Yeah, how do I think about it.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 2: Now, do they say where they got this from? Does
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 2: it say how they acquired this body?
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 4: The document might have to pay for the document.
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 2: That's fucking weird.
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 3: But to your point about you know, this kind of
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 3: societal reaction to.
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 2: You know, different.
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 3: Wildlife issues, I think, yeah, that's what we're super curious about.
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 3: What drives people's obsessions around certain things. In this case,
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 3: this happens to be part sport, part industry, part obsession
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 3: with you know, scarcity. But that is all in this
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 3: case leading more to destructive extinction problems. You know, very
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 3: few animals. More and more animals are threatened with extinction
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 3: than ever before, particularly reptiles. Now one out of every
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 3: five are threatened with extinction, and it's growing at an
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 3: accelerated rate, mainly because of things that we explore in
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 3: our show Pet Trade Exotica, you know, smuggling and all
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 3: of that. But you know, to get people to care
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 3: about things that can harm you, you know, believe it
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 3: or not. You know, we have challenges with you know,
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 3: subject matter in the show that you know, we'll get
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 3: notes back, and it's it's it's it might be too
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 3: hardcore for people to see because it is a brutal,
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 3: volume based industry, and there's.
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: A lot of but we try not to show the
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: bludsheoning and the cruel to the animals. We try to
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: avoid that with Tiger King and chim Crazy in the
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: show because people turn the channel, so we try we
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: could if we wanted to, we could do that.
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 3: Well, I think we're just more talking more about the
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 3: point of like what how do people respond to something
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 3: through an interest and you know, what turns them on,
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 3: what turns them off? And what is it about us
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 3: that has this connection to certain Why are there turtle people?
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 3: Why do you like turtles?
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 2: Why?
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: Why do you think people vilify reptiles? You like mammals?
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: You said, why do you think people don't are so
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: keen on reptiles?
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 2: Well, they're not like us, right, They're a different sort
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 2: of predatory lizard thing, and I think in our mind
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 2: they harken back to the days where these things were
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 2: a real problem for human beings. You know, I think
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 2: you know, crocodiles and alligators like they they enact like
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: there's a visceral reaction that people have to them that
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: I think is warranted. It's genetic probably, But.
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: You don't think because we like to talk about the warm, cuddly,
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: you know, charismatic animals like a panda bear or a
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: quala bear or a you know.
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 2: Well, that I think is anthropomorphism that's done by Disney movies.
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 2: Of course, yeah, that because people in the pioneer days
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 2: they didn't think of bears that way.
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: Right, But I would argue that a bear, you know,
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: a Kodiak bear, a polar bear, a lion, is a
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: lot more concerning than most reptiles, yes, you know. So
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: why we vilify reptiles and have that you know, feeling
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: about them is I think maybe more as to what
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: you said about the anthropomorphism. You can't snake has no
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: legs like us, they don't breastfeed. Their baby is like
• 1:11:03
  Speaker 1: a bear or like like a mammal. They have a
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: forked tongue, they have no ears. A snake is weird.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: They're nothing like us. So maybe we feel so removed
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: from them and they're scary even though they're really not
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: that scary.
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 3: We talked to this guy, were the Disney things so
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 3: interesting to me? Because that that was actually something I
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 3: was kind of deep on. This guy, Carl Safina, he's
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 3: more of is he more of an anthropologist or he's
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 3: more of a behavioral.
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: Like it's like an animal behaviorist and sort of more
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 1: in the groove of like you know, animal welfare and
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 1: animal behavior.
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but this sort of creation of anthropomorphic character is
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 3: through Disney. I mean they were you know, could you
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 3: track this sort of correlation to you know, entry points
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 3: into you know, mainstream culture. You know, it's you know,
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 3: it's they're easy, they're great devices for human emotion. But
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 3: then there's this more perverse side of you know, it
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 3: creates these demands for pets. You know z Utopia with snakes,
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 3: Like Zutopia had a snake as a central character and
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 3: it's going crazy in China.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: You know, well that's a pop culture thing.
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 3: Like but that's the you know that, so these well
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 3: intentioned things in these ways which we portray animals finding Nemo.
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: Everyone wanted a clownfish, Harry Potter, Harry Potter, everyone wanted
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: a baby owl. I was in Asia after Harry Potter
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: and I was like, what are there like fifty baby
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: owls in this market? And they were Harry Potter birds.
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: That's a byproduct of pop culture, right, yeah, you know,
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: you know Jurassic Park. Everyone wants their little beardy dragon
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: because they want a miniature dinosaur. So who knows what's
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: going to happen after monsters of God, They're all going
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: to want snakes again.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 3: Hopefully you have some.
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 2: Did Tiger King open up the door for that? You
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 2: think did people like look at that and find it appealing,
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 2: like that's Robin mission? I think I think I'm looking
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 2: for from my niche.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 3: I think it gave the opposite of people like maybe
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 3: questioning question.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 1: It's like deliverate.
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 3: Maybe question when you take a photo with the baby
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 3: tiger at a roadside zoo, I think that was more more,
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 3: you know, because it was so big and pop culture.
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: I want to get me a tiger after tiger can't
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: want to give me a little bit.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 3: If you're going to plane to this lane, It's like, look,
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 3: everyone was shocked that you could buy you can basically
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 3: going for free.
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 2: Well we've talked about it before on the podcast, but
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 2: there's more tigers in captivity in Texas than all the
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 2: wild in the world in people's private collections.
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 1: I think religion also has it plays a big role
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: in the vilification of reptiles, particularly snakes. You know, like
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: you know something about that. Any complex and you know
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 1: the snake is bad serpent serpent?
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, or I was.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 3: More people dream of snakes in this country than any
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 3: other thing. Bind It's mostly negative dreams, not sharks snakes.
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 3: There's a Google. Google did this sort of like you know,
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 3: infographic by country, and you know what is the most
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 3: common dream that people have, and it's usually abound snakes.
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 1: I have like someone chasing me or panic dreams. Never
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: have a nightmare about a snake.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 2: But we never hear of like a phobia directly attached
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 2: to sharks. You know, you have a fidiophobia, which is
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 2: a fear of snakes, but you don't hear of a
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 2: shark of phobia.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: Or i raknophobia righters. Yeah, people are freaked out by
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: spot Oh yeah.
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 2: I think that's a genetic thing. I think there's a memory.
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 2: I think someone either was bit or knows someone that
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 2: was bit and that information got transferred down to their offspring.
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure that because hosting fear Factor, I got
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 2: to see people legitimate Iraq noophobia and legitimate afidiophobia where
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 2: it is like nothing else like they see it and
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 2: they fucking freak out like it's irrational. It's like everything
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 2: in their body saying you got to get out of
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 2: here right now.
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 2: Not like everybody else. Everybody else who looked at us
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 2: like oh yikes, and then a few people they have
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 2: that genetic memory. I think it's just and it's cultural.
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: It's cultural, like like we have a lot of Mexican
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 1: guys that work with us. Every year we do a
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 1: snake course when the snakes start coming out in the spring,
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: and I show them how to put a rattle snake.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 3: See on the staff meeting.
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 2: He ever does.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's the only thing I care about. But
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: I don't want people killing snakes that work for me.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: And I'm like, hey, you don't have to kill the snake.
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 1: And they're so used to taking the machete and cutting
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: the snake's head off, and we don't do that. We
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: move the rattlesnake and we put it somewhere else. We
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 1: move the gopher snake, the king snake. But they just
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: have this, you know, some of them, as you were
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 1: just saying, just can't wrap their head around even touching
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 1: the snake because they just it's instilled in them, you know,
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: from their parents or from whatever their childhood that they're
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: scared of snakes, and it's hard to change.
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 3: Not with kids, like I'm sure with your kids and
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 3: your daughters. Like I see with little boys you know,
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 3: six and three, how their reaction and they're not fearful,
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 3: like and it's partially because of the influence of the
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 3: work that I'm doing, But you know, I watch them interact,
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 3: I see their friends, I see their cousins that are fearful.
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 3: They have an adverse reaction. I also think it's like,
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 3: you know, your exposure to it, Yeah, you know a lot,
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 3: and you're right, probably some genetic kind.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 2: Of definitely exposure to I mean, if you grow up
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 2: and you're used to being around different kinds of animals
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 2: and the wildlife and different different things, you'd probably be
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 2: more comfortable around unique animals. If you're a person grows
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 2: up entirely in the city, does your parents like animals?
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 2: Do they dogs? We had dogs and cats, normal stuff.
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: I had a weird momb. I had a weird momb
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 1: that likes snakes and so and like salamanders. Would she
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: would take me into pet stores that actually steal the
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: stakes and salamanders and steal them and put them in
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: her purse and then take me out into the woods.
• 1:16:38
  Speaker 2: We'd let them go. So that's the kind of she
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 2: didn't like seeing them in cages.
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: Wow, she didn't mind kleptomania. So I got good at
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 1: stealing for.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 2: A while as an odd mom who's like really in
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 2: the snakes.
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: She just wanted to free them. She didn't like seeing
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: them in cages.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 2: Oh, I understand quariums. Yeah, yeah, I didn't grow up
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 2: around any of that. I didn't know anybody who had
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 2: a snake as a pet, not that I can remember
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 2: really in New Jersey. Well, I was born in New Jersey,
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 2: but I grew up all over the place. I lived
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 2: in San Francisco until I was eleven. Then I lived
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 2: in Florida from eleven to thirteen. Actually was around a
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 2: lot of alligators during that time there. It is. Yeah,
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 2: we're in Gainesville and there was a place called Lake
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 2: Alice there that had a lot of alligators. Ye, you'd
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 2: see it all the time when I was there.
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 3: One lady, fairly impressionable age.
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, I was around them a lot. But
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 2: they were they were weird, like they didn't do anything.
• 1:17:32
  Speaker 2: They just laid on the shore. You could see them
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 2: and you could be fairly close, even though, like they
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 2: could have clearly chased me and caught me because they
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 2: can run like thirty miles an hour, right, they could
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 2: have caught me if they wanted to. They didn't. They
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 2: weren't really interested in people. Apparently they had plenty of
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 2: food and they were at that time they were actually endangered.
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 2: So alligators, Like they were telling people not to feed
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 2: the marshmallows because people would throw marshmallows on the lake
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 2: because you could watch the alligator come up and eat
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 2: the marshmallow. They liked marshmallows, and they said, hey, these
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 2: are not good for alligators. They're super worried about alligator
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 2: diabetes or something whatever.
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, but.
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: They were concernedator sugar rush.
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they were concerned about giving the alligator non nutritious food,
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 2: which I thought was funny because they were saying that
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 2: they were endangered.
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: And it's amazing that in the fifties and sixties they
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: were really endangered and it was hard to find an alligator.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: And when you think about that now and believe, it's
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: hard to believe. And how the Endangered Species Act did
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: help bald eagles birds of prey because it actually worked
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 1: because of DDT but it brought back alligators, and now
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 1: alligators like you can't even imagine they were endangered. They're
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: like ubiquitous in Florida everywhere.
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 2: They literally say, every pond has the potential to have
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 2: an everywhere you look, they move around, there's they're very overpopulated.
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, what's interesting about this work in the show that
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 3: spends so much time.
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: You know, we had which you know, you you.
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 3: Shared in this, you know, curiosity, but we had great
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 3: access to all of these great people in different industry.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 3: So you have heads of the zoo, you have you know,
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 3: dj DA US Fish and Wildlife Service, the collectors is
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 3: you know, the bigger suppliers, and you have all aspects
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 3: of this sort of industry. And what the show became,
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 3: you know, as we were working through the edit, is
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 3: this kind of you know, this real clear story of
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 3: unintended consequences, which is the more you enforce you have
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 3: great laws that happened, but it triggers something else, and
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 3: that triggers something else. And you see this kind of
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 3: time after time after time again, and in some cases
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 3: it leads to some positive things like ESAU or the
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 3: Danger Species Act, or you have a pop culture event
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 3: that drives sales of a you know, animal that's you know,
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 3: going to be poached out of extinction. So it's a
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 3: really interesting way of looking at this and analyzing in.
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: A way what you realize you'll see, Joe, if you
• 1:19:59
  Speaker 1: continue you watching that the pathology behind everyone. The law enforcement,
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: they're going after their prize, right, they're going after their
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: big trophy. Is the bad guy. The bad guy, you know,
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: the dealer, the smuggler, is going after the rarest reptile.
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: The zoo's got very competitive with reptile houses in the
• 1:20:22
  Speaker 1: seventies and eighties because they started realizing they were very popular.
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 1: Some one of the most popular things in zoos are
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 1: the reptile houses. They wanted the kmmoto dragon, the rare reptiles.
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: So and the collector like guys like me that really
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: dig reptiles, wanted like the pink you know, glopicus landing
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 1: go on that no one has or that this on
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 1: top of the unattainable. So everyone kind of is going
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: after each other, the reptile, the you know, the Feds,
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: you're going after the bad guys. And it's a similar pathology.
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: And what you find out in the end of the
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: series is there's a scene where law enforcement has something
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: that you can't believe, and it's a little like doing
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: a film about you know, cocaine cowboys and the law
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: enforcement has a garage full of heroin and cocaine that
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: they're selling. So it's it's like it gets very gray,
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: and the psychology is similar.
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 3: Between the only difference between the prisoner and the guard
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 3: of the bars. Well that's the sort.
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: Of then you'll see there's no clear right and wrong,
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: and sometimes the laws don't work, so it's messy and
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: sometimes there should be laws where there aren't laws. You know,
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: back to the.
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 3: Marijuana islands, get back to the.
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 1: Marijuana analogy, like fucking how twisted is that someone goes
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: to prison for forty years of a plot and now
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: you can go to a weave shop every corner in Oklahoma. Right.
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 1: But it's a very messy, complex story that was hard
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 1: to weave together, and I think it was the most
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 1: challenging for us, certainly more challenging than Tiger the most proud.
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 3: It's really deep and it's it's a it's a good
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 3: one and we lived and we lived for now.
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 2: You guys spend a lot of time on these Yeah,
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 2: this is one of the things that I've found shocking.
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 2: While you were just acussing this, you were saying it
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 2: was like six years more more, how many? So when
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 2: did you plant the seed?
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: Well, the seed was planted really in my head when
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: I read this book The Lizard King in two thousand
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: and eight, and I tried to buy the rights from
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: this author, Brian Christie, who wrote this incredible book, The
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: Lizard King, in two thousand and eight, So that's almost
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: twenty years ago. I didn't start filming until twenty fourteen
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: with Josh Saftie and that was the beginning, but Tiger
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: King and other things got in the way. So yeah,
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 1: maybe six years if it was, if we were to
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: condense that time.
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 3: But when we saw you a couple of years ago,
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 3: we were you know, we were making many projects along
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 3: this because you know, you can't do them all. You know,
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 3: it's a it's a very unstructured way of working. You know,
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 3: we don't have a certain amount of shoot days. It's
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 3: it's kind of a flow. We like these longitudes.
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: We shoe multiple projects at the same.
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 3: Time, you know, and we're lucky because a lot of
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 3: our worlds are in certain places, so you know, it's
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 3: one stop shopping in Florida. There's a lot of interesting people,
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 3: a lot of colorful people that are you know, are
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 3: hitting some of these themes that we're exploring in different works.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 3: So I think, so we're able to kind of do that.
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 3: But the duration, the duration is great because, like you know,
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 3: sometimes constraints are no I think it's great in some
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 3: ways if you're able to kind of balance other work,
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 3: because you know, holding out for access to a really
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 3: important person might not happen in the first go around,
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 3: but you know a year later or two years later.
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 2: What is the common factor that you guys, is it
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 2: fucked up people like that you guys are looking for
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 2: when you decide what kind of documentaries you're making.
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: Not just like that would be off too superficial, like, well,
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: there's too many fucked up people out there.
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 2: Chucked up people in connection with wildlife is the theme
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 2: of the Big Three that you've got.
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: And people that have a story that's somewhat hidden in there.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: So we cast a wide fucking net, like we filmed
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: shark people and taxidermis and the guy that reads the
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: most long tail the cap monkeys for medical research, where
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: we got over from We're filming so many different subcultures
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: of animal people and other people, and then you sort
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 1: of hone in on something and so the monkey mom
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: thing became chim crazy, you know, and we started seeing
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: a story there. So it's not like we just go
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: out and just lock into something and there's a story.
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: We have to kind of find it. And I would
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: say this is not a good recipe for people that
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 1: want to make documentaries, Like anyone's starting out in life
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 1: to try to make dogs. Don't do what we do
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: because it's not a good way to get rich, and
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 1: it takes forever and you may never have a story.
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 2: And so it's like, that's what I'm getting at. It's
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 2: it's like, we.
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 1: Got lucky that Joe Exotic tried to kill Kella Basket
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 1: while we were filming. We got lucky in a sense
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: that and we got lucky he didn't kill her, and
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: we got lucky in a sense that Tanya kidnapped a chimpanzee.
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: This is not a recipe for success. You know. We
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 1: do film, film, film, We do a lot of shit
• 1:24:50
  Speaker 1: that no one ever sees.
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 2: Joe's attic dms of me all the time on Instagram.
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 2: I was still yeah, he wants to get out.
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: You know, there's a way maybe we can get them out.
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 1: By the way, I'll tell you I this show, I'll
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: tell you after this.
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 2: She wanted to get out.
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: You know, the government made a deal with him before
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: the trial. They said, well give it, you can do six
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 1: years or you're going to have a trial six years.
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: He's been in jail now for nine years or whatever
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: it's been. He would be out right now if he
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 1: made that deal. He thought he was going to get off.
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: And I was like Joe. I was on the phone
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: with them every day at the time from prison. I said,
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: take the deal. I don't know. I'm not into throwing
• 1:25:24
  Speaker 1: people in prison and throwing away the key forever.
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 3: Time is in jail too.
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 1: You know, we're good at the perjury.
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 3: I think she doesn't deserve to be there for four years,
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 3: you know, from perjury.
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: Well, she didn't need to kidnap another chimp. We tried
• 1:25:39
  Speaker 1: to help her. She was her own worst enemy.
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 2: Anyway. Well, these people are obsessed. Yeah.
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 3: I think also what attracts the crime element is the
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 3: sentence scene is low for wildlife trafficking, wildlife crime.
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 2: But did they really consider that when they're getting involved, like, oh, no,
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 2: big deal, only do four years they.
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 3: Really think about way back to it. They keep doing it.
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, But I think that's because as they're obsessed, they're
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 2: trying not to get caught. Then I don't think they're
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 2: looking at it and balancing out the low sentence rate
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 2: and going, oh, this is a good thing to get
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 2: involved in. I think that Heroin it's pretty stiff crime.
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 3: I think it's a risk factor that's considered, and especially
• 1:26:15
  Speaker 3: in the sense of life.
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: I think most of them, Jeremy, I think most of
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 1: them think they're going to get away with it, or
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: they're smarter than the fence.
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 3: But they have this sort of you know, worst case
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 3: thinking about if there was something to happen, it's you know,
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 3: eight months at a camp, right.
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 2: You know. A lot of them go.
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: To prison multiple times while we were filming this show.
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: During the filming, we were shocked at one of the
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 1: lead guys in our film was under investigation being indicted.
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: He didn't tell us and then finally he say, guys,
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: I'm going to prison. And we don't cover it in
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 1: the show because it was just too much. But we
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 1: were like, why you've been filming with us for two
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 1: years and you're going to prison now. And then he
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 1: finally got out of prison. We filmed him more and
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 1: he's got an ankle brace and he'd been prisoned five
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: years before that or I don't know, eight years before that.
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 2: So there's a lot of.
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: What was he going to prison for this time for
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: smuggling turtles that were going out to Asia three striped
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: mud turtles.
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we're no longer bringing wildlife into buy and collect.
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 3: It's actually coming out of our country into China.
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 2: Really, yeah, what stuff are we exporting to China?
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 3: Well, there was a lot of it's eric. The one
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 3: recently that happened.
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: I just took I just took it. I just took
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: out a confiscation three weeks ago, three hundred three toed
• 1:27:33
  Speaker 1: box turtles that come out of the central part of
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: the US Oklahoma, Missouri. And two weeks later a guy
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: was busted coming into Mexico with turtles, and I took
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 1: those turtles from Social Wildlife Service. So animals are coming
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: into the country out of Mexico, you know, different countries,
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: and then we're exporting now, which is new in the
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 1: last ten years, a lot of native turtles and reptiles
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: and other wildlife to Southeast Asia.
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 2: And Europe, and how are they getting there?
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: Mostly it's mostly air cargo. Carry on this particular confiscation
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: three weeks ago, they busted the guys with more box
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 1: turtles in their in their luggage once they got to
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 1: Hong Kong and China. Like I said, China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Jakarta,
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: the reptile industry is enormous for now keeping them as
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 1: exotic pets.
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 2: Enormous. I mean it's you know, you.
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: Know in Asia, like the bird world. The birds are
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: called the cut flowers of the wildlife trade in Asia
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: because like we might have a bouquet or a plant
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: in our house, they have a bird cage. In Southeast Asia,
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 1: there's something like some insane statistic about how many people
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: have a bird in their house. And when you go
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: to the bird markets in Jakarta, it's just surreal. Or
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: in Thailand there's there's one in Bangkok called chata Chat Market.
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: These huge, you know, animal markets. You know, we talked
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: about where COVID came from, but the scale of these
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 1: animals markets, you know, bush meat, wildlife, it's it's on
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: a scale that's beyond your imagination. Actually what are they
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: selling Like, they're selling reptiles, they're selling birds for meat. No, no,
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: these are for pets. Okay, birds are ornamental in your house.
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: You have a song bird, you have an owl, you
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: have it.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: Whatever.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: You can't believe there are people that are.
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 2: So they just have like a wildlife mall.
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: It's effectively like an enormous wildlife outdoor mall. Yeah, and
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: in that within that mall, there's also seafood, and then
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: there's the reptiles, and then there's the birds. It's like messy.
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: No wonder, maybe COVID came from that.
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 2: COVID didn't come from that. I don't know it came
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 2: from a fucking lab. I think you're maybe right.
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 1: I have a friend, bless us heart, he's a good
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: friend of mine. He said it was a zoonotic disease.
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 1: It didn't come from a lab. But now I'm beginning
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: to think it might have.
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 2: Come I think a lot of people were influenced to
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 2: say that it was a natural spillover because they didn't
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 2: want to admit that we were working around with gain
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 2: of function research.
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: I think the evidence now shows that.
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty clearly. But also it seems like if you
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 2: see these kind a lab or excuse me, these markets.
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: You would say, what is this right here, Jeremy China
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: chuck market, which this is one of those markets. Oh
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: this I've been to these markets in Jakarta.
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's just a wildlife market. And so it's
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 2: all pets. So what is it about Asia that has
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 2: such a desire for animals?
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: Those are the Hurry power those are the Harry Potter els.
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: That footage is.
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 3: Well, yeah, like that is wealth same same things in
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 3: the US that we're driving you.
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 2: Out, but it's also more common in Asia.
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: Well there's in China alone, there's over a billion people,
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: so there's just more people and and the just the
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: scale and the size of Asia and China is much
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: bigger than the US and Europe combined, so they have
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 1: a bigger market. And the climate's pretty good to keep
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: exotic animals like Florida. So it's just it's like you know,
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: on steroids, the collectors.
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 3: In Asian And why I think that I think that
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 3: the industry, the trafficking numbers still underpreported is you know
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 3: you have this there's like one person, one person that
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 3: is responsible for coordinating in the US. One person she's
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 3: in Delaware, who's responsible for coordinating with US Fish and
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 3: Wildlife to to deal with you know, these these placements
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 3: of confiscated wildlife, if they're able to even detect them.
• 1:31:17
  Speaker 3: I think with something like ten thousand animals in the
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 3: last few years, we're coming through LA's Lax basically the Torrents,
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 3: the border and Lax. It's it's very one little sample market.
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: It's very understaffed, undermanned to build and manage all the
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: wild life coming in and out of the country.
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 3: There's so even with dogs and detection advancement, they're finding
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 3: ways to get get animals out and then and then
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 3: the sad truth is that they've never been starved and dehydrated.
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 3: You know, recovering them is impossible. You know, you've gotten
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 3: lucky with rewilding animals back in the New Jersey and
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 3: stuff like that through its organization. But you know, it's
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 3: a it's a it's a it's a harmful reality that
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 3: is actually still happening.
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: You know, we thought ourselves the percentage wildlife that leaves
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: the country or leaves the country native wild to this
• 1:32:04
  Speaker 1: the US, it's like fifty percent is kind of marine
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: stuff like coral and invertebrates that are in the ocean,
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 1: and the rest is mostly reptiles, mostly turtles. Mammals are
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 1: very small these days, birds are very small. So for
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 1: whatever reason, you know, turtles and the US has the
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: most out of any country in the world. We have
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: more species of turtles and tortoises in any country in
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: the world.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 2: We have fifty one species in the US.
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: Mexico second, you know, India I think is maybe third.
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: But so Asia now really wants these turtles where you
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: grow up, you know, in New Jersey and other places
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 1: where we have these really cool turtles, spotted turtles, bog turtles,
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 1: wood turtles, really beautiful colored Eastern box turtles. Once they
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: get to Asia, they're in the many thousands of dollars.
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: The shipment that just went out that we received the
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: confiscation from it was about half a million dollars just
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: those turtles. Once they get to China, so it's big
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: money and they use mule and the people they got
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: arrested or busted usually aren't the real ones that are,
• 1:33:03
  Speaker 1: you know, organizing the whole thing.
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 2: It's like drugs. Well, that's a good thing about this
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 2: docu series is that you guys are exposing this to
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 2: people because I think most people would be completely unaware.
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 3: No idea, Yeah, yeah, no idea, no idea where you
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 3: know zoos, you know animals and the zoos came from.
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 2: Is there an issue with people stealing eagles and trying
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 2: to import them as pets.
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 1: So raptors are really interesting. So that sector of the
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: bird world, I mean, the bird world is so vast.
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: There's the song bird people, there's the parent people. Really
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: high end you know hyacinth of the cause that are
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: so expensive one highacinth the cause, like you know, sixty
• 1:33:42
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars today or fifty thousand or whatever it is,
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 1: forty thousand. But raptors are increasingly popular in the Middle East,
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: you know, golden eagles and all these really far out
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: birds of prey. And in the US we have really
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: strict laws when it comes to birds of prey and
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: owning them. And Falcyrie Bbby Kennedy is that falconry guy.
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 2: He loves falconry.
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: But it's gotten more popular again around the world, having
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: you know, big birds of.
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 2: Prey because it's interesting. You know, I have friends that
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 2: live in Alaska, and in Alaska eagles are really common,
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 2: like they're all over the place up there, like they
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 2: don't even think anything of them. Yeah, you know, especially
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 2: the guys who go salmon fishing. When they come back
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 2: from salmon fishing, you literally have like thirty forty eagles
• 1:34:23
  Speaker 2: just waiting on the lawn for these boats to arrive
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 2: because they know that they're going to throw the carcasses out.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 2: Bald eagles, yeah, bald eagles. Yeah. I would imagine some
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 2: people would want those as a pet, especially in other countries. Yeah.
• 1:34:36
  Speaker 1: You know, in the US, only Native Americans can have
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: like eagle parts unless you have a permit, like it's parts, well,
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: you know, like feathers for their addresses. Like Native Americans
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: can still do things with them.
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 2: So if you have a stuffed eagle in your house,
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 2: that's illegal.
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 1: I think it's illegal.
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 2: And those guys stuff you an eagle, well that that
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 2: would be interesting. That's where we draw the lawn.
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 3: By the way, that I don't know if they actually
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 3: have them, but we have this footage. I mean imagine
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 3: going in the confiscations room at LAX It's incredible. Oh really, yeah,
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 3: it's incredible. You have like you know, tiger, you know,
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 3: just all this rare animal and transformed into so many
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 3: objects at home, a table, a rug, a pool, cues.
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 2: I was reading about this that there was a place
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 2: in China where people could go to eat endangered species
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 2: and they would have an endangered species menu and they
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 2: would have like a dinner every now and then, you know,
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 2: like rarely, but it was by invitation only, and these
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 2: like super weird wealthy people would go out there and
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 2: they would you know, eat.
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 3: If you're listening to invite us, you know, it's funny.
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: It's fucked up you say that, but I make it back.
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 1: It's funny you say that because you know, we once
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: went to this big turtle show in China, and you know,
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: there's you know, it's a huge turtle show like a
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: car show, and there's girls like in skimpy outfits with
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: banners like you know, like a car show, but it's massive,
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: and all these rare turtles are selling as pets. But
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: then for lunch they have these like dim sum tables
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: that are around and everyone served turtle soup. And it's like,
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: how twisted is that? It would be like, you know,
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: a reptile show in the US, and we have lots
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: of reptiles shows in the US. And now at lunchtime
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: you're eating reptiles.
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 2: Cha China is a whole different think.
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 3: It's this visibility paradox thing. You have this you know, charismatic,
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 3: you know, symbolic thing. There's a very very few a
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 3: lot of protection around them. People want it about eagles,
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 3: just talking about what people want, what they don't they
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 3: can't have. That's the through line in this world.
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 1: But eagle actually, for for rare eagles are like American alligators.
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: They've bounced back since DDT. And and you know the
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: book that what's her name did in this in this
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: late sixties seventies, Silent Spring, that was the book that
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 1: really changed everything for eagles and birds of press. Her
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 1: book what was her name? The Silent Spring, the author
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: she changed everything because no one listened to her about
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 1: d DT and pesticize which were making the eggs of
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 1: birds of prey not viable. And it really took really
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: took Rachel Carson, It really took a toll. Rachel Carson
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: was an unsung hero. People should know her name, and
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: I forgot it for a minute, but she really is
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 1: why you have bald eagles, you know, making that.
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 2: On the verge of extinction.
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: Because of pesticides we were using because of d DT
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: was doing this thing to the eggs where pelicans birds
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 1: of prey were disappearing at alarming rates because of spraying
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 1: of d DT.
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 2: For agriculture for pesticides. Wow.
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: And then we banned it and eagles and birds of
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: prey came back. Yeah, peregrine falcons, all of it, bald eagles,
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: golden eagles. Yeah, anyway, Yeah.
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a that's it's a weird animal. The bald eagle.
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 2: That that's our pet, that's our national animal. Yeah, so
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 2: it's strange. It's a heartless raptor.
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: It's a fishing eagle. There are fishing eagles all over
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: the world that are similar to bald eagles.
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 2: It's a fishing eagle, that's what it is. It's just
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 2: such a cool one.
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 2: And it's something about watching them swim away with a
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 2: salmon their talons. Yeah.
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 3: Well, and also photography's gotten so much better over the years,
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 3: right you can, and I know there's probably a video
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 3: right where we live.
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: Where we live, there was that eagle cab and there
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: was a sick eagle, bald eagle, and it was taking
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: it became California yeah, where we lived, and it became
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 1: national news two weeks ago. Golden bald bald really yeah, yeah,
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: and they if you google bald eagle California, it's in
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: the town we live in where they took it and
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 1: they're bringing it back to health. But the amount of
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: money that poured in to help that eagle was unbelievable. Wow,
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: for this little place.
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 3: Going back to how people care, it's it's remarkable.
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 1: But people care more about eagles than had that been
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: a turtle or a snake that was rested.
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 2: Well, that's the eagles Americas amer I mean, people have
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 2: a tattooed on their back. Yeah, there's something about an eagle.
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 3: It's just niconic.
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of snake tattoos these days, but I'm
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: sure you know.
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but there's something about the eagle tattoos different.
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 3: It's like why, But then the grizzly bear such an
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 3: adverse reaction, so controversial.
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 2: They eat a lot of people. I mean, there's a
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 2: reason why the California state flag has a grizzly bear
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 2: on it and there's no grizzly bears in California.
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 3: We have a friend that's actually trying to bring them back.
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 2: Good luck.
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: We mentioned this to you last time and you were like,
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: why or something.
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 2: Let them naturally return. Reintroduction is always a disaster. Reintroduction
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 2: of wolves in Colorado right now is a fucking disaster.
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: Well, they're back. They've now migrated into California and there've
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: been some wolf sightings even down in quite.
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 2: A few A friend of mine filmed one. We showed
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 2: it on the podcast. He filmed one near Bakersfield, a
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 2: black wolf that was out in the field near Bakersfield. Yeah,
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 2: they can go incredibly long distance.
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: Reintroduction works in some places. It's getting better. I have
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: a good friend that's reintroducing jaguars back to northern Argentina.
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 1: They're doing a pretty good job. But yeah, it's tricky,
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: like condors.
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 2: California different in reintroducing animals to where there's agriculture and
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 2: where there's a bunch of animals that are in pens
• 1:40:02
  Speaker 2: and then they start eating them.
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 1: No, no, don't do that.
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 2: That's what Colorado's experiencing now.
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but I've worked with Ted Turner's group for many
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 1: years in New Mexico on reintroduction programs, and the guy
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: that did the wolf re wilding of gray wolves. Is
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: this guy named Mike Phillips who works for Turner, and yeah,
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: they have a real PR problem, you know, and grizzlies
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 1: are going to be a bigger PR problem.
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: To get people to wrap their arms around the idea
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: of bringing grizzlies back to come, well.
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 2: There's certain states where they're overpopulated, and there's a lot
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 2: of argument that they should be relisted and that people
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 2: should be able to hunt them again like they do
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 2: in Alaska.
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: But the Native Americans in California do buy and large
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 1: want grizzlies back, and they have this new technology that
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 1: might be able to keep them kind of in certain areas.
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 2: It hasn't they haven't.
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: Figured out a full yet, but hopefully they keep them
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: in a certain area because you know, grizzlies migrating into
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: La like the wolves right now.
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 2: Might not be a good idea. Well, you already have
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 2: the mountain lions. There's a great video the other day.
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 2: I don't know if you guys saw it of a
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 2: mountain in a guy's backyard in Santa Monica. Yeah, big cat.
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: I have them in my backyard all.
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 3: The time, motivated by displacement from fires.
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 2: Right, it's also pets. We like to eat people's pets. Yeah, yeah, we.
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: Have these cameras.
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 3: It's too close.
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 2: We're talking about they eat them all the time, that
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 2: pets get snatched all the time.
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 1: Jeremy. This woman down the street from me was walking
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: her dog at three in the afternoon. The mountain lion
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 1: grabbed her dog. She's literally on Ladera. She's walking her dog,
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: a little dog, and the mountain lion just jumped and
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 1: grabbed herug. She's looking at the dog holding a leash
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 1: and goes, I better let go of this leash, and
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 1: she did, and she never saw a dog.
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 3: He's sort of saying, this little particular suburban pocket of
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 3: Santa Monica, it's not very common.
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: Where I live they eat people because you don't see
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: them where I live.
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 2: They eat dogs where I live.
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: The mountain lions are eating people's dogs from time to time.
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 2: They do it all the time. We were talking about
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 2: Marine count I think it's well, it's Bay Area wherever
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 2: it is where they have these depredation tags where they
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 2: have to shoot problem mountains because they're eating pets. And
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 2: they find out that that's half their diet. Half their
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 2: diet is pets.
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: Well, I see them on my cameras that we these
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 1: motion detector cameras and we see them at three in
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 1: the morning right in front of my house. I rarely
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: see them with the naked.
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 2: Is that crazy?
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 3: Well, one get hit by a car and they build
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 3: a bridge across the road. You know, it was kind
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 3: of amazing.
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: You've got a nice mountain lion in the lobby out there.
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 2: That was from my friend Adam. He hunted that in Colorado.
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 2: That was a depredation mountain lion. That mountain lion had
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 2: picked a ranch and it was killing all the calves
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 2: and they actually got to it right after it had it.
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 2: It didn't even kill it. It was eating it while
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 2: it was alive, and then it ran. They ran it.
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 2: All the dogs had ranted off the carcass. They had
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 2: to shoot this calf. It was just torn apart and
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 2: still suffering alive, and then they killed it.
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 1: Luckily, where I am, we have a lot of deer
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: and we find a deer carcass from time to time.
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 2: That's a mountain lion kill. So for sure.
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but you know, back to our show, I wanted
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 1: to just say one other thing about sort of the ending,
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: which it was really fortuitous.
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 2: I just want to bring it up even though you're
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 2: not there yet. But it spoiler alert.
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: Well it's not really the spoiler alert, but I'll say this.
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: I spent about twenty years working in Madagascar with some
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: rare madagascar and tortoises, and eventually I was trying to
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 1: save this tortoise in Madagascar, and I did a sixteen
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: minutes piece with Leslie Stall took her to Madagascar, a
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 1: New Yorker piece on this tortoise. I failed, everyone failed.
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 1: The tortoise functionally went extinct to Madagascar. The poaching was
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 1: so intense and the tortoise had a.
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 3: Very Where does it plash your tortoise?
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 1: Well's a reptile that arguably has the most value in
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: the petrade over almost any other reptile in the world.
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 1: There may be something close, like a Fiji and iguana
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: or maybe a kmmoter dragon, but it's you know, some
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 1: of them can be worth as much as one hundred
• 1:43:47
  Speaker 1: grand And people in Madagascar are so poor, in especially
• 1:43:51
  Speaker 1: in the area where this animal comes from, and it
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: only existed in a tiny part of northern Madagascar. That's it.
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 2: It is, So where are they going to Asia?
• 1:44:00
  Speaker 1: There's a direct flight out of Madagascar to Bangkok and
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: so and they're pets. Yeah, and some of those photos
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: I meane.
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 2: So is it possible to buy them in Asia and
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 2: bring them back to Madagascar.
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 1: Well, so this is where I'm going very hard to
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: do that because of health screening. I took that photo
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: over there with that little guy. I took them. You know,
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: some of these photos I even took. Actually, oh, that's
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: the guy that worked for us. Anyway, I've been working
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: with this species of tortoise for almost twenty years, and
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: we were able to get some confiscated pleasure tortoises out
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: of China and Taiwan, and we waited patiently for fifteen
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: years to try to breed them. And right when we
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: finished this show, and this is a tortoise that's never
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 1: been bred successfully in the western world. No zoo institutions
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: have tried to breathe them and failed. We were lucky
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: enough to get our first hatchling of this really endangered
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 1: tortoise right when we finished the show, and so we
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: filmed it and it made it into the end of
• 1:44:57
  Speaker 1: the show. But it's a story about the reptile train,
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: and this was the story in the end of the
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: show about a confiscated group of animals that came from
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: the reptil trade. The rarest and most valuable tortoise in
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: the world, and today we're trying to bring it back
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: to Madagascar, which we're working on, which is happening as
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: we talked to.
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 2: And is the problem that if you bring them back
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 2: to Madagascar, people going to go to mascar and steal
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 2: them again and then use them in the pet trade.
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: So yes to be blunt, and so it's somewhat symbolic,
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 1: it's somewhat about showing Madagascar that we're not trying to
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 1: profit and take their natural heritage and you know what
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: they rightfully should have. So part of it is showing
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 1: that we can go full circle confiscate an animal that
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 1: was in the illegal exotic reptil trade, breed it, and
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 1: then return it to Madagascar. But the part that no
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: one wants to talk about that's really controversial is in
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: this particular case, and it's not like one thing fits all.
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: I said this to the folks that are working with
• 1:45:54
  Speaker 1: this tortoise a Outagascar to try to save it. You know, hey,
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: the only way you're going to take sure off of
• 1:46:00
  Speaker 1: this tortoise. It's like drugs. Is if you either legalize
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: drugs or in the case of drugs, or make this
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: tortoise available for people around the world so they can
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: have it. Because it breeds quite easily, breed them, try
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 1: to have them in the private sector in institutions and zoos.
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 1: They turn out not to be that difficult to breed,
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: even though no one's ever bred them in the Western world,
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 1: in Europe or the US.
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 3: Well, it takes a long time to reach maturity.
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 1: Well, it's an animal that takes longer twice as long
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: as a human or three times. They don't reach sexual
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: maturity until they're about thirty years old, forty years old.
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 2: They can do it.
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: You can raise them faster in captivity than the wild,
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: so they are very slow to reproduce. They're not like
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 1: rabbits though they opposite, and there's so few of them,
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: and so they're very very rare, very valuable. The only way, ultimately,
• 1:46:47
  Speaker 1: I think you can really take the pressure off of
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: the poaching is to allow people to start to have them.
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 1: That's a radiated tortoise, which we also.
• 1:46:54
  Speaker 3: Grow that is wild, So the dremaline is a way
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 3: to well, Sir we were value.
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 1: Our organization is the group with Dull that did this
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: drembling to try to deface them, like cutting off a
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 1: rhino horns so poachers wouldn't take them.
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 2: So we were.
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 1: Dremaling those tortoises shell to basically deface the tortoise. The
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: poachers would not take the tortoises. It ultimately didn't work.
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 2: So they're just taking them because they're beautiful and if
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 2: you fuck up their shell.
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 1: They have the most they have the highest dome shell
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 1: of any tortoise in relation to the size, so they
• 1:47:30
  Speaker 1: have an incredible longevity, well over one hundred.
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 2: Years they live, and their gold and so that dremaling
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 2: that you did, that's indicate that's the top of it
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 2: right there. Yeah, yeah, And that didn't help.
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: We did that. You can see it over there at
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: the center. That's called the verchiebral scoots of the tortoise.
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: And we drembled them and we put MG for Madagascar
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: and a number and we were hoping that defacing the
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: tortoise would make collectors not want to have them, but
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: it didn't work. In the end.
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 2: Somebody told me this a good time to bring this up,
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 2: that turtle shells when you look at a turtle show
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 2: it's almost representative of a calendar, and that there is
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 2: around the outside edge of the turtle there's like twenty
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 2: eight different little squares and then in the center there's thirteen.
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 2: So it's basically like a thirteen day or thirteen month,
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 2: twenty eight day lunar calendar. Yeah, this is it. How
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 2: weird is that? Yeah, that's really a lunar calendar on
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 2: a turtle's back. Yeah.
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 3: You know a lot of turtle facts.
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 1: I did not know that one. Actually, I know that one.
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 1: I know a lot of cultures like Asia and American
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: Indians believe that the Earth sits on a turtle.
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's turtles all the way down, it's turtle Simpson song.
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't know about that. That's interesting.
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 2: Wow, isn't that weird? Yeah, that's interesting. Why what is
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 2: that all about? Like, that's very strange that it coincide.
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 2: It's like exact to what a lunar calendar is. Yeah,
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 2: very strange. Yeah, that's super interesting. I mean, turtles have
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 2: been on planet Earth longer than dinosaurs. They've been here
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 2: for over two hundred million years, so they've been around
• 1:49:06
  Speaker 2: a long time.
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: So it's been people have been playing with turtles forever,
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: so maybe they came up with a lot of things
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 1: that relate to turtles.
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 2: But it's odd that it syncs up with a twenty
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 2: eight day lunar calendar.
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: I know sports stadiums are in the beginning, or things
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: that were shaped like that, like a geodesic dome came
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 1: somewhat from the how turtles are designed, Like there was
• 1:49:28
  Speaker 1: some architectural thing that came it makes sense from turtles, yeah,
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: like the geodesic, like the structure of it to keep rigidity.
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: And I know turtles the first writing, the earliest writing
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: was on the plastro on the bottom of a turtle
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 1: shell in China. Maybe some of the earliest writing really
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 1: going back some really, I don't know, a couple of
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: thousand years. So turtles have been used for all kinds
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 1: of things, for writing, for medicinal medicine, especially in Asia,
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 1: it's gone back thousands of years. Is using turtles for
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 1: chi and for you know, vitality and all these kinds
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: of things. If you get sick, you make some turtles.
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of weird stuff with a lot of
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 2: stuff to rhino horn, things for boners like, hey, guys.
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 1: Well they really like they really they really put the.
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 2: Bureacle bone script on the bottom of a turtleshell. Looking cool,
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 2: that looks Go back to that beautiful right, beautiful six thousand,
• 1:50:24
  Speaker 2: two hundred BC more six hundred to six thousand, two
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 2: hundred BCNT going to the images again of the writing
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 2: on it. Look how cool that writing is.
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 1: I mean, this one's beautiful, right, that one's beautiful. That's wild,
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: but I think it was some of the earliest writing
• 1:50:40
  Speaker 1: was on turtle shells, Like, well.
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 2: It sounds like it if it's six thousand BC, six
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 2: thousand BC, I mean that's that predates ancient Babylonia. Yeah,
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 2: or at least what we know about it.
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: So turtles have been used in Native American culture forever.
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, a lot.
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 3: Of extinction events. That's oxygen, but it's a turtle shell.
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, box scapula.
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: I mean, there are turtle farms in China that you
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 1: cannot believe. They're breeding these turtles, mostly Asian box turtles,
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: Chinese box turtles, and these people are multi multimillionaires and
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: they sell one turtle for as much as like twenty
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars one turtle and the wildcot turtles are more
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: valuable than the farm turtles. But there's turtle farms that
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 1: are breeding. They're called Golden coin turtles. It's a Chinese
• 1:51:31
  Speaker 1: Asian turtle that can fetch huge amounts of money.
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 2: Why is the wild one worth more?
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 1: It's like wild rhino horn is worth more because they
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: think the wild rhino eats things that are medicinal versus
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 1: just a captive rhino that's eating hay. And it's the
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: stuff they eat that goes into the horn, which makes sense,
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: like your fingernail its keratin. So the wild rhino horn
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: is going to have more good stuff for you. And
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: of course they'll probably grate some viagra in it to
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: make you really believe that it gives you an direction.
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: You know they'll cheat, but no, no, it actually works well.
• 1:52:02
  Speaker 1: They do great the viagrate in the rhinohorn sometimes. But
• 1:52:05
  Speaker 1: the wild turtle is just eating things and has more
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: chi than the farm turtle. But they have these enormous
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: turtle farms, like you know, fifteen story buildings that are
• 1:52:14
  Speaker 1: all turtles.
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 2: Jamie, you're gonna see this.
• 1:52:16
  Speaker 1: So wild turtle farms in China, China turtle farms, and
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: this is all just for pets. No, this is for consumption.
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: This is you'll pay twenty grand.
• 1:52:27
  Speaker 2: Now there's turtle twenty grand for consumption.
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 1: For consumption, for like a golden coin turtle. If it's
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 1: a wild one, like.
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 2: Big money, they want to eat it.
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah. But then in China you can also pay one
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars for a U non box turtle. A
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: U non box turtle can be one hundred thousand dollars.
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 2: So these are these turtle farms. Yeah, but that's all
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 2: for like turtle soup.
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but these are soft shell turtles in this image
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: that you're looking at. I'm talking about things like golden
• 1:52:50
  Speaker 1: coin turtles, much more valuable turtles for consumption than these
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: soft shells.
• 1:52:55
  Speaker 2: Why are they worth more? Is it just because it's rare?
• 1:52:59
  Speaker 1: This guy, I know this guy, Guarden State turtle. I
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: know that guy in New Jersey. He's a good guy.
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 1: Crys Leone. Well, yeah, that's a golden coin turtle. So
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: we breed these in where we are where we work
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 1: with turtles, and we send these back to China from
• 1:53:12
  Speaker 1: time to time.
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 2: Okay, but why explain them? Why is it worth twenty thousands?
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 1: For whatever reason? This turtle is called a golden coin turtle.
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 1: Cora trifalsiata is a scientific name, and it is very
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: coveted and apparently it has certain properties that can cure
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 1: cancer and other diseases. And so this turtle is high
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: on the list for consumption for medicinal reasons.
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 2: But allegedly can cure cancer. Yeah, is there any false beliefs?
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 1: But you can see twenty grand, forty grand.
• 1:53:41
  Speaker 2: Twenty grand, as high as forty grand for a fucking turtle, yeah,
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 2: and to eat it.
• 1:53:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, But then there's turtles. It can be one hundred
• 1:53:48
  Speaker 1: thousand or two hundreds.
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 2: So is it just because it's difficult to acquire that
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 2: it's like a status thing that it's worth twenty or
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 2: forty thousand dollars.
• 1:53:56
  Speaker 1: Well, they're very rare in the wild now, but they
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 1: farm them, but they're very endangered. It's critically endangered turtle.
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: We breathe them, you know, at my facility. But you know,
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of people in China, and if you
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: want to save someone's life, you'll pay whatever it takes
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: to say.
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 2: So, when they're buying it for twenty thousand dollars, they're
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 2: buying it to try to save someone's life.
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 1: Or someone sick, or they really want good health and
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: the wealthy.
• 1:54:19
  Speaker 2: Oh okay, so you could just get it just as like, yeah,
• 1:54:21
  Speaker 2: a prophylactic turtle, you eat it from medicine to make
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 2: sure you don't get sick. Something like that. Sounds insane
• 1:54:28
  Speaker 2: though that it's twenty thousand dollars for a turtle.
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 1: But if you if you look up unon box turtle,
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: it was thought to be extinct for fifty years and
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: they rediscovered it. And a unon box turtle today, if
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: you could even get one, would be hundreds of thousands
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: of dollars. Another turtle similar to that.
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 2: Are they eating those two?
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: No, that one's so rare. There's so few of them.
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 1: That one is people buy it as an exotic pet.
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 2: That's really rare, you know. So this is kind of
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 2: a cat. It's a tricky situation because and on one hand,
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 2: if they're extinct in the wild and these people have
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 2: them as pets, maybe you can recover them somehow or another.
• 1:55:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's that's not that's an American box turtle. That's not.
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 1: Or they're in a zoo, for example, So that's why
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: that's a turtle that's being shipped to that's a US
• 1:55:10
  Speaker 1: turtle from the East Coast that's being sold and smuggled
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: to China and other parts of Asia, because look how beautiful.
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 2: Our turtles are in the US. That is a pretty turtle.
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 1: So you do have a photo of a U non
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 1: box turtle, it's just not the one there. That bland
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 1: thing is a unon box turtle.
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 2: That one above it, that one that's kind of gray
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 2: r there.
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: No, No, that's a three toad box that one.
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 2: That one, that one, that.
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: One could be where that can be where two hundred
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 1: thousand dollars that turtle. That turtle was thought to be extinct.
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 2: For over half a century. That's a boring ass turtle.
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 5: That other one that you're training on now we don't
• 1:55:43
  Speaker 5: get me down the turtle rabbit ball, but that one
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 5: where your cursor was just over the one that yeah,
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 5: that guy, No, the one to the left, yeah, the
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 5: right of it, right, that one, Yeah, that one's cool.
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 2: Ship.
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a that's a male Eastern box turtle. They
• 1:55:54
  Speaker 1: always have red eyes.
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 2: It's so beautiful. Yeah, it's beautiful.
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 3: But solutions to the scarcity part. That's a mailing you know,
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 3: pet pet trade can commercial commercializing the aspects that it
• 1:56:05
  Speaker 3: can reduce. What's important about this conversation actually is people
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 3: think of ivory, rhino horn, you know, whales, and they
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 3: have no idea that a turtle pound for pound could
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 3: be more valuable than a rhino horn.
• 1:56:18
  Speaker 2: Possibly, you know, a turtle idea.
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: Now nobody knows this, but it's crazy what the money
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: involved in these back to the confiscations we're getting, and
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 1: the trade and turtles going out of this country is
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 1: in the millions and millions and millions and millions.
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 2: And there are people.
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: In China and other parts of Asia that are getting
• 1:56:36
  Speaker 1: very rich in the turtle trade. And we always think
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 1: here about panglin scales, rhinohorn, you know, ivory, and those
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 1: things are important, but the turtle trade is really massive,
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 1: and the reptile trade is massive, and there's a lot
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 1: of money in it. And they're easy to transport because
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 1: a turtle doesn't eat, need to eat or drink. Just
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: wrap them in socks, put them in a box, shove
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 1: them all in there, put them in diapers, tape them up,
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 1: ship them. They don't even need much air if you
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 1: have a little air, but they have a very low
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 1: blood pressure, not like we have higher blood pressure than reptiles,
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: and they can live without water or food, as you know,
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 1: for a very long time. So they're you know, like
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 1: wildlife nature. With handles, you can.
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 2: Just transport them, transport them and if they're really worth
• 1:57:18
  Speaker 2: twenty thousand dollars to.
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 3: Forty putting that in your bag, Yeah.
• 1:57:21
  Speaker 1: And they really are, they really are worth it.
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 2: That is crazy. I would have never guessed, and I
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 2: would never guess that it's for consumption. That's that's even.
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: More Well, No, the turtles that are leaving this country
• 1:57:31
  Speaker 1: going to China are for extra pats.
• 1:57:34
  Speaker 2: But that one they're eating, yeah, the ones, Yeah, that
• 1:57:37
  Speaker 2: it's worth twenty thousand dollars. That's insane at least. Is
• 1:57:42
  Speaker 2: there a market for snake meat.
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So if you've been to Taiwan or China, there's
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 1: the snake bars where you can literally have a snake
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 1: bleed out while it's alive, a cobra and put it
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 1: in their drink. There's snakes. There's a snake you can
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 1: talk about diarrhea.
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 2: Snake.
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 1: I was many years ago, my god, I was in
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: me and mar and Burma at a snake place and
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 1: they were just loading snakes up in these trucks, like
• 1:58:08
  Speaker 1: you know, big trucks just stacking snakes and they were
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: heading into China. So the snake meat, the snake.
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 2: Snake meat is big in China. You know.
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 1: Look, tiger penis, tiger this tiger tiger bones, tiger park,
• 1:58:24
  Speaker 1: tiger penis, tiger penis.
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 2: Tiger penis is a big delicacy over there.
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 1: I think they're you know, they're more creative than we are.
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 2: They eat a lot of stuff, that's a fact, okay,
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 2: But the tiger penis thing I wasn't aware of. That's
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 2: a delicacy.
• 1:58:38
  Speaker 1: I don't know what that does for you. Maybe that's
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: another Viagara kind of thing. But all you know, there's
• 1:58:47
  Speaker 1: tiger farms and they part them out and they sell
• 1:58:50
  Speaker 1: them to China.
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 2: So there's tiger farms that are just for consumption. Yeah,
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 2: tiger bone wine, tiger this tiger tiger bone wine. You know,
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 2: but tigers, it's like a rhino horned type deal.
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 3: I think I think that's given them.
• 1:59:06
  Speaker 2: Believed to increase ferility and enhance male sexual performance.
• 1:59:10
  Speaker 4: Dot dot tiger fallas suitis.
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 1: But a turtle is worth more than a tiger.
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 2: Guy, that's crazy. And but I didn't know that there
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 2: was a market for tiger meat. And is it the
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 2: all the meat of the tiger are just dicks? Just
• 1:59:26
  Speaker 2: so chop away, Joe.
• 1:59:28
  Speaker 1: I've been to the turtle farms, I've been to the
• 1:59:32
  Speaker 1: snake bars. I haven't gotten into.
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 2: The penis the future of Chinese medicine. Hey, this guy's
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 2: doing a workshop.
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 3: We should go to this workshop.
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 2: What is this guy teaching a couple of years ago.
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 2: He's on the run right now.
• 1:59:48
  Speaker 1: So they don't get me started to talk about animal penises.
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: My favorite movie is a kid was a movie called
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 1: Birds Do It, Bees Do It. I don't even know
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: if it still exists, but all it was was animals
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 1: having sex from a praying man like eating the hat
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: off of the mail to a rhino, and it was
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: a great movie, just sex.
• 2:00:05
  Speaker 2: I did not know that there was a market for
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 2: the meat. What is that tiger dick?
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 3: Nice?
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 2: I would have thought it looked like crazy looking.
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: That looks like anud to braank a sea slow.
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 2: It looks like a piece of sushi, definitely, it looks
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 2: like a piece of it looks looks like something you
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 2: get at sushi by scratch. So when they're having these
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 2: tiger farms or they're farming the meat, Like, how are
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 2: they cooking tiger meat? Like, what does that go into? Listen,
• 2:00:33
  Speaker 2: I'm really common over there.
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 1: Even though I did Tiger King, I'm not an expert
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 1: on tigers. I do know a little bit more about reptiles.
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 1: But I have a friend that did a movie called
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 1: I think it's called what's it called Karl. A man
• 2:00:46
  Speaker 1: did a movie about the tiger industry in Vietnam and
• 2:00:50
  Speaker 1: farm in Cambodia and farming tigers, and I think it's
• 2:00:54
  Speaker 1: called God. I can't remember, but anyway, there's a whole
• 2:00:56
  Speaker 1: tiger industry and people breeding tigers in parts of Asia
• 2:01:02
  Speaker 1: for tiger parts.
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 3: It's still illegal, but they definitely still do it.
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not like yeah, interesting consumption tiger meat is
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 2: highly illegal, though an illicit black market persists, primarily fueled
• 2:01:12
  Speaker 2: by commercial tiger farms. Despite strict domestic bands, thousands of
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 2: tigers are bread in captivity across the country, creating a
• 2:01:19
  Speaker 2: complex web of illegal luxury. Luxury consumption is a crazy word.
• 2:01:25
  Speaker 2: That's a crazy phrase. Luxury consumption of tiger meat. Traditional
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 2: beliefs and international conservation concern Well.
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 1: It's what you just said earlier that started this conversation
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 1: that people go to restaurants and eat exotic animals and
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 1: bear gallbladder, bear gallblad. But another thing, wait back to
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 1: monsters that God, look up Chinese giant salamander farms. Those
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 1: are unbelievable. That's a salamander this big that can eat
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: you know, like a rat or a rabbit. It's a
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 1: salamander that they eat and farm in China.
• 2:01:59
  Speaker 2: I've seen that on line. I've seen them cook it
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 2: and that's TikTok videos.
• 2:02:02
  Speaker 1: And that's a really rare animal that those those guys
• 2:02:05
  Speaker 1: are really rare, so.
• 2:02:07
  Speaker 2: Oh really and that yet they're still cooking them and eating.
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 1: There's two types of giant salamoners. There's a Japanese giant
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 1: salamoner and the Chinese one. The Chinese one is massive,
• 2:02:17
  Speaker 1: is massive, and they're just.
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 4: It's the one I stumbled down that it says it's ai.
• 2:02:22
  Speaker 1: It's it's an incredible animal. But they farm a lot
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 1: of things that you would never think of. Yeah, turtles, salamanders.
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 2: I just the luxury consumption market, just seeing that phrase, like,
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 2: what a weird culture you have? Luxury consumption of highly illegal,
• 2:02:39
  Speaker 2: endangered species and it's that. Well, that was what a
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 2: friend of mine who had been to China said. That
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 2: was what the whole rhino horn thing was. It wasn't
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 2: even as much as they believed that it would do it.
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 2: It was just that this guy had rhino horns. Status
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 2: symbols very wealthy people. Guy's got to run. You want
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 2: some rhino horn tea? What's how gentlemen come to buy wine? Cellar?
• 2:03:02
  Speaker 2: And in it?
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 1: I got some rhino horn. I got a couple of
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: turtles that were a couple.
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 3: What's difference between that and rare wine from fifty years ago?
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 2: Well, first of all, an animal, it's just wine. Yeah,
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 2: you don't have tiger in your wine. What is the
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 2: tiger bone wine? What is that about? I don't know,
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 2: said wine? They soak in bones of tigers.
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 3: Or it's a barrel?
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 2: Is that what it is?
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 1: I mean they have sake with vipers in them.
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 2: There's a snake in.
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 1: Japan called the hobo and I remember getting saki and
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: this really incredible snake was in my saki. But you know, like, look,
• 2:03:35
  Speaker 1: we're hypocrites. In this country. We eat tuna and they're endangered.
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 2: In Asia, they eat other things? Are they endangered, endangered.
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 1: Well, certain species are tuna, I think are becoming pretty endangered.
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 1: They're not what they were.
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 2: They're certainly not the same numbers that they used to
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 2: be at the Turns Center.
• 2:03:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so I think it's it's easy to point
• 2:03:53
  Speaker 1: fingers at other parts of the world when we've done
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 1: a lot of things here. You know, we had passenger
• 2:03:58
  Speaker 1: pigeons that you know, made the skies dark, and we
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 1: shot every one of them. We have Carolina parakeet. We
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: almost got rid of our condors and bison. We've done
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: a lot of damage, but there's a lot.
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 2: Of damage to you and me, people, people, people that
• 2:04:12
  Speaker 2: lived here. It's not us.
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 1: Well, why is our show called Monsters of God that
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: we're the monsters, not the reptiles.
• 2:04:17
  Speaker 2: We did a lot of damage.
• 2:04:19
  Speaker 1: In the past, some of us.
• 2:04:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a very small percentage people are out there
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 2: eating turtles.
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 1: Well, you're a good guy, and I know that. Actually
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 1: somehow you didn't have that maybe the mother I had,
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 1: but you must have.
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 2: Had something good with my love of animals. Yeah, you
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 2: got you got.
• 2:04:34
  Speaker 1: A good moral compass.
• 2:04:35
  Speaker 2: I've watched you.
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 1: You you when you you know what's right and wrong.
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 2: Well, certainly eating tired dick. I think there's better ways
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 2: to go about your life.
• 2:04:45
  Speaker 3: But the recovery stuff is real. You know, there's a
• 2:04:48
  Speaker 3: lot of cool stuff happening with species recovery, and in
• 2:04:51
  Speaker 3: this case, the plows. Your tortoise is on its way back,
• 2:04:54
  Speaker 3: I mean, you have to kind of still protect it
• 2:04:56
  Speaker 3: for a while. That's a lot that's expensive, you know,
• 2:05:00
  Speaker 3: anti poaching and security, it's a lot of work.
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 2: I agree that it's important, but I am also fascinated
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 2: by our desire to sort of manage nature because ninety
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 2: whatever percent of any animal that's ever been alive, ever done,
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 2: they're all extinct. Everything goes extinct.
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 1: And a lot of our good intentions managing nature doesn't
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 1: work oftentimes, Oh.
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 2: Nos do a terrible job. I mean, especially when we
• 2:05:24
  Speaker 2: bring in an We were talking about this yesterday with Hawaii.
• 2:05:27
  Speaker 2: They brought in mongoose to eat the rats. But mongoose
• 2:05:30
  Speaker 2: are dironal rats each other. Yeah, yeah, Hawaii.
• 2:05:37
  Speaker 1: It's funny you say Awai because Hawaii is kind of
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 1: the poster child of all the states in the country
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 1: of extinction. Second is California. But Hawaii really fucked up
• 2:05:46
  Speaker 1: Hawaii with cats, mongos is we're more in the Caribbean,
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 1: but also Hawaii and mongos is why back to the
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 1: Jamaican iguana. The Jamaican iguana was extinct. We thought it
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 1: was extinct because of mongoose's we've just recently they found
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 1: a small population, but it's a very rare iguana.
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 2: Reading.
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 4: A very similar thing happened with the salamanders in China.
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 4: They were not originally thought of as anything special until
• 2:06:10
  Speaker 4: the mid twentieth century when famine forced people to find
• 2:06:13
  Speaker 4: new stuff to eat. They started eating them and liked it,
• 2:06:16
  Speaker 4: so they made a lot of places to do that.
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 2: Oh, and that's what led them to well, so then.
• 2:06:22
  Speaker 4: They reintroduced them back into the wild because there was
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 4: too many of them, which created a new problem, it says,
• 2:06:28
  Speaker 4: created a new species. So now you have hybrid.
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 2: Salamanders, which is also like what we have that here
• 2:06:33
  Speaker 2: in Austin.
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 3: It's the same story over and over again.
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 2: What did these fuckers look at?
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 3: Giants?
• 2:06:38
  Speaker 2: Whoa can I photos of a giant salamon? They are
• 2:06:43
  Speaker 2: so massive, they're so massive size that thing. There's a
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 2: bunch of videos of guys cooking them and walks outdoors.
• 2:06:51
  Speaker 2: And so is that another thing where it's like one
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 2: of those exotic things that you're not supposed to have,
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 2: and that's why they're cooking it. Yeah, because I mean
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 2: it looks like there's a funny one where dudes singing.
• 2:07:00
  Speaker 2: He's like wrapping over it and the guy's cooking about
• 2:07:03
  Speaker 2: a guy cooking a dragon? Is how you cook a dragon? Yeah,
• 2:07:08
  Speaker 2: they're pretty impressive, but it is a weird desire that
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 2: people have to eat something like incredibly exotic and rare.
• 2:07:18
  Speaker 2: Whoa look at that sucker.
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 1: That's a real one.
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, giant salamonder cook eight ways in the I don't
• 2:07:25
  Speaker 2: know what that word is, men, gay men, seafood China.
• 2:07:29
  Speaker 1: You know, that was one creature we wanted to film
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 1: and I never got to film for Monsters of God
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 1: because that also is a monster of God.
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 2: So these guys are taking them. They're alive and they're
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 2: going to bring them over and kill them and cook them.
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 2: So this is an endangered animal that this guy's killing
• 2:07:44
  Speaker 2: and cooking. Wow, that's crazy.
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 3: But they sort of know it. It's not by necessity.
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 2: They know it's in danger and he's still boiling it up.
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 2: So it's a this the fact that this luxury item
• 2:07:57
  Speaker 2: that you get to eat this luxury item. Look like
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 2: see what it looks like at the end, kind of crazy,
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 2: a lot of meat. It looks delicious. Yeah, would you
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 2: eat it if you were there? Or would you feel bad?
• 2:08:10
  Speaker 1: I don't.
• 2:08:10
  Speaker 2: I wouldn't eat it. But I've been it's already there
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 2: though it's already dead.
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 1: I've been in Southeast Asia with friends that eat dog,
• 2:08:17
  Speaker 1: you know, and I just couldn't eat it. But I'm
• 2:08:19
  Speaker 1: not very adventurous.
• 2:08:20
  Speaker 2: I can't. I don't have the only way I eat
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 2: the dogs if I try to bite one of my kids,
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 2: you know. But if it's like dogs is different.
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 1: You know, we eat cattle, and in India they don't
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 1: eat cows, and then other places eat horses and then
• 2:08:35
  Speaker 1: they eat dogs. Sure, we have our own, you know,
• 2:08:38
  Speaker 1: sort of cultural norms about certain animals that we just
• 2:08:41
  Speaker 1: can't wrap ahead on the way. But I've seen dogs
• 2:08:44
  Speaker 1: being killed in Silhawesi by in huge numbers in Indonesia,
• 2:08:48
  Speaker 1: just the way they kill them, and then they take
• 2:08:51
  Speaker 1: these blowtorches and burn the hair off of them, and
• 2:08:53
  Speaker 1: people buy them just like you're in a regular grocery store.
• 2:08:56
  Speaker 1: The way they you know, and it's just what's normal
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 1: in one culture. Those are snapping turtles, American snapping turtles.
• 2:09:02
  Speaker 2: What's normal? So have these been imported into Asia? Yeah?
• 2:09:07
  Speaker 1: They they're big and we still ethos. By the way,
• 2:09:09
  Speaker 1: New Orleans and the Southeast we eat snapping turtles.
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 2: We eat them, we eat them in gumbo.
• 2:09:14
  Speaker 1: But in Asia they really love our American turtles.
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 2: And snapping turtles are not endangered in America.
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 1: No, but alligator snapping turtles are.
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 2: All those things are crazy looking.
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, which is it? Which you have in Texas? Fish
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 1: and what they they're an ambush predator.
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 2: They have a little pendage on their top.
• 2:09:36
  Speaker 3: Is incredible.
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 2: They've got alligators, they're serv alligant crocodiles, crocodiles, crocs. Jesus Christ,
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 2: imagine just hanging out there watch his buddies get butchered.
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 1: You're good at finding gruesome stuff over there. I mean
• 2:09:50
  Speaker 1: there's a lot of You're gonna really there's a lot
• 2:09:52
  Speaker 1: of gross a lot of people.
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 2: So you know, you see, you guys have a bunch
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 2: of projects always kind of in the works, Like how
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 2: do you go about choosing me? Just like find these
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 2: very bizarre people and these very bizarre niche groups, and
• 2:10:08
  Speaker 2: I think you know, listen.
• 2:10:09
  Speaker 1: I'm more aware of time as I get older, So
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 1: you got to choose carefully what you want to do
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 1: because it takes time to make these projects, so you know,
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 1: a lot of them. We hope there's some silver lining
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 1: or something maybe positive about telling these stories and not
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 1: just frivolous stories about freaky people. You know, but it
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 1: helps to have some freaky people in a story to
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 1: make people interested sometimes, but that's not the real goal.
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 1: We're also doing projects I have nothing to do with wildlife.
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 1: You know. I did a documentary in the last ten
• 2:10:42
  Speaker 1: years about my mom and my parents, and you know,
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 1: I don't know if anyone will ever see that, and
• 2:10:48
  Speaker 1: they both died, you know, but I did that to
• 2:10:51
  Speaker 1: keep them relevant. And I had a crazy family, a
• 2:10:54
  Speaker 1: gay father and a crazy mother who was into animals,
• 2:10:57
  Speaker 1: and so you know, everyone has a crazy family. But
• 2:10:59
  Speaker 1: we did a story that we're working on about New York,
• 2:11:03
  Speaker 1: and we're also doing some other animal stories. So not
• 2:11:06
  Speaker 1: everything gets you see the light of day, right.
• 2:11:09
  Speaker 2: But these last three big ones that you guys did
• 2:11:11
  Speaker 2: are all about people and their bizarre relationship with strange animals. Yeah,
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 2: what else, what's next?
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 1: I mean, we're doing a really interesting project right now
• 2:11:23
  Speaker 1: that should come out next year that I.
• 2:11:24
  Speaker 2: Think you'll like, Joe.
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 1: I have to say, there are big carnivores in it again,
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 1: and some really far out people that you know and
• 2:11:34
  Speaker 1: you may have known personally. I don't think I can
• 2:11:38
  Speaker 1: tell you who they are, but they're they were very
• 2:11:39
  Speaker 1: famous and some anyway, but we're doing a project about that,
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 1: and we're doing what.
• 2:11:45
  Speaker 2: A tease you are?
• 2:11:46
  Speaker 3: I know, I had two much coffee.
• 2:11:49
  Speaker 1: Sorry. And then we're really interested in a few other
• 2:11:54
  Speaker 1: topics that people don't really talk about. We always talk
• 2:11:57
  Speaker 1: about the charismatic megafauna, and we're interested in some other
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 1: groups of animals that we don't even think about.
• 2:12:03
  Speaker 3: It's also, I mean, this time we live in media.
• 2:12:06
  Speaker 3: You know, there's so much stuff that gets made that
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 3: no one sees, and it's a shame, especially you know,
• 2:12:11
  Speaker 3: some of this independent work, especially some of this documentary work.
• 2:12:15
  Speaker 3: It takes many, many, many years, and many people are
• 2:12:19
  Speaker 3: only really able to show to the people that know
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 3: about the issues, and nothing happens, especially if there's an
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 3: impact aspect to it. So I think our formula is great.
• 2:12:28
  Speaker 3: It happens to be. You know, these subcultures that have
• 2:12:31
  Speaker 3: a higher propensity of finding crazy people or people with
• 2:12:35
  Speaker 3: far up beliefs. More than anything, it's more beliefs that
• 2:12:38
  Speaker 3: are more interesting that make us curious. So I think
• 2:12:42
  Speaker 3: I think that's the sort of mixture of conservation storytelling
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 3: plus far out beliefs, you know, in a niche that
• 2:12:49
  Speaker 3: are able to zoom out and talk about themes of
• 2:12:51
  Speaker 3: extinction or attachment or ego or crime.
• 2:12:56
  Speaker 2: You know, maybe there's something to the overfishing thing to do,
• 2:12:59
  Speaker 2: because there's been a lot of it's a huge issue.
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 1: There's been a lot done on it, but I think
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 1: there hasn't been a dock on overfishing the problem. But
• 2:13:11
  Speaker 1: the problem with a lot of those traditional documentaries they
• 2:13:15
  Speaker 1: tend to preach to them. They tend to preach to
• 2:13:18
  Speaker 1: the converted and not the unconverted. And you want to
• 2:13:20
  Speaker 1: reach a bigger audience by somehow telling that story about
• 2:13:24
  Speaker 1: overfishing in a way where you can get more people
• 2:13:27
  Speaker 1: seeing it. They don't know the issue. And the other
• 2:13:29
  Speaker 1: thing I would just say, overfishing is a big deal invertebrate.
• 2:13:32
  Speaker 1: It's insects, butterflies, and what's happening with insects is a
• 2:13:35
  Speaker 1: big deal. We're losing a lot of really weird insects
• 2:13:38
  Speaker 1: and they haven't even been described yet. Marine fish and
• 2:13:41
  Speaker 1: even tropical fish is really interesting to us. Where do
• 2:13:45
  Speaker 1: all the saltwater tropical fish come from? How do you
• 2:13:48
  Speaker 1: get them? They dynamite the reefs in the Philippines. They
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 1: you know, they don't breathe easily. Saltwater tropical fish. Freshwater
• 2:13:54
  Speaker 1: ones typically do. There's a lot of different groups of
• 2:13:57
  Speaker 1: animals that we don't really think about and talk about
• 2:13:59
  Speaker 1: that we kind of take for at it and we
• 2:14:00
  Speaker 1: think of them as disposable. You know, We'll just put
• 2:14:04
  Speaker 1: more tropical fish in our aquarium in a Vegas hotel.
• 2:14:07
  Speaker 3: And imagining the extinction businesses are going to solve our problems.
• 2:14:11
  Speaker 3: I think that's also interesting to us.
• 2:14:12
  Speaker 1: And there's just not a consciousness or smaller vertebrates and invertebrates.
• 2:14:16
  Speaker 1: But I would just say one other thing that I
• 2:14:17
  Speaker 1: think we do. You probably are aware of that. You know,
• 2:14:20
  Speaker 1: people think you have to be in a city to
• 2:14:22
  Speaker 1: get the you know, the weird shit going on New
• 2:14:25
  Speaker 1: York City, La, you know, whatever, big cities, And what
• 2:14:29
  Speaker 1: I've found is oftentimes it's the places that you least
• 2:14:32
  Speaker 1: expect it.
• 2:14:33
  Speaker 2: You know, some weird, you know.
• 2:14:36
  Speaker 1: Suburban landscape where you start turning over, turning over the
• 2:14:39
  Speaker 1: rocks and you find and see that there's weirdness happening everywhere.
• 2:14:43
  Speaker 2: And that is a theme in our stories.
• 2:14:45
  Speaker 1: It's not gravitating to the big cities to find it.
• 2:14:49
  Speaker 1: It's places where you know, the guy next door to you,
• 2:14:52
  Speaker 1: next door where you live, has a garage full of
• 2:14:54
  Speaker 1: hot snakes, and the cobra escapes one day and it's
• 2:14:57
  Speaker 1: in your yard or whatever the fuck the story is,
• 2:14:59
  Speaker 1: but often is in places that you wouldn't expect it to.
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 3: Be your friend's cardport.
• 2:15:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know. Well, listen, guys, thank you again for
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 2: being here. I really appreciate it. Thanks for all the
• 2:15:10
  Speaker 2: work you guys put in. You've really entertained the ship
• 2:15:12
  Speaker 2: out of me over the years and disturbed me as well.
• 2:15:16
  Speaker 2: So it's available, Monsters of God on When when does
• 2:15:19
  Speaker 2: it come out? Tomorrow? Tomorrow? So when this comes.
• 2:15:22
  Speaker 1: Out August sixth, August.
• 2:15:24
  Speaker 2: Sixth, all right, beautiful, Thank you, thank you, thanks for
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 2: being here. Thank you. Bye.
• 2:15:29
  Speaker 3: B