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#078_ STORY INSPIRE: The Dark Truth Behind America’s Exotic Animal Trade · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: by night. All day.
• 0:09
  Speaker 2: Good, bro.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Gentlemen, good to see you again. You're back in the
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: world of crazy people and animals. I watched episode one today. Like, oh, God.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: First of all, where the fuck do you find these people?
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: You live in that world. Like, you're in the world
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: of reptiles. We should just explain. It's a docuseries. It's
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: on HBO. It's called Monsters of God. And it's all
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: about the reptile trade, which may or may not be
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: responsible for Florida having 500,000 pythons. It's debatable, right? Like
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: it seems like it was partially pet owners who let
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: them go and partially there was some sort of a
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: reptile research facility or something like that.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: Well, there's different theories. There was a hurricane theory. It
• 0:55
  Speaker 2: was the people letting go. I think the more reasonable one,
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: because I had a Burmese python in the 70s when
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: I was a teenager. I have a photo of it
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: around my neck.
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  Speaker 1: What happened to it?
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  Speaker 2: People buy them when they're this big and then when
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: they're 15 feet, they let them go because what are you.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Is that what you did?
• 1:12
  Speaker 2: I did not let it go. What did you do?
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  Speaker 2: I have no idea what happened to it to be honest.
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  Speaker 1: That's weird.
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  Speaker 2: I know.
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  Speaker 1: You had a monster and it just– you don't know
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  Speaker 1: what happened to your monster?
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  Speaker 2: I think when I went to college briefly, I gave
• 1:24
  Speaker 2: it to someone and then I don't know what happened
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: to it. But I gave my whole menagerie away to
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  Speaker 2: people when I went to college. I had reptiles in
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: my room.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Is there an extra level of responsibility when you're giving
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: away monsters? You know what I mean? Like if you
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: have a chihuahua and your friend is like, I'll take her.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: I love her. That's– you don't really have to worry
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: about your– you have a fucking python. You're giving away
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  Speaker 1: a python?
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  Speaker 2: You got to worry about your chihuahua because the pythons
• 1:47
  Speaker 2: in the Everglades are going to eat your chihuahua when
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  Speaker 2: it gets away.
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  Speaker 1: Well, certainly you worry about that. But I mean you
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: don't worry about your chihuahua being a monster.
• 1:54
  Speaker 2: I'm kidding. Yeah.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: I mean, if you have a 15-foot python, that can
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: eat a lot of things. And it kind of needs
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: to eat a lot of things.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Burmese pythons did really well in South Florida. Iguanas
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  Speaker 2: did really well in Florida. You know, they weren't there
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  Speaker 2: in the beginning.
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  Speaker 1: That's a good way to put it, did really well.
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  Speaker 1: Another way to put it is invasive species that's destroying
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: the ecosystem.
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  Speaker 2: Well, they're like us, Joe. They're like us. We came
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: here and we took over.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess, in a lot of ways. So why
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  Speaker 1: did you choose this particular subject for this new docuseries?
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: I'm not going to let Jeremy talk. No, he'll talk.
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  Speaker 2: But I'll just– a lot of it starts with me.
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  Speaker 2: So you can blame me. Jeremy, you can blame later.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: We guys did Chimp Crazy, which is one of my favorites.
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  Speaker 1: It's so fucking insane. That world is so insane.
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  Speaker 2: Well– Episode one is kind of setting the table. It
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: gets better, Joe. It gets more off the charts when
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: you watch two and three and four and five. Yeah,
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  Speaker 2: it all started– first of all, I'm a reptile guy.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: I've been keeping reptiles and studying reptiles for over– I'm
• 3:04
  Speaker 2: an old guy. I'm older than you are. So I've
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: kept them for, I don't know, 60 years. Plus I've
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: kept reptiles since my parents gave me a tortoise when
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  Speaker 2: I was six. And I was catching rattlesnakes in my
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  Speaker 2: lunchbox and horned lizards. And you got horned lizards in
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: Texas here that are really cool and rattlesnakes. I've been
• 3:23
  Speaker 2: bit by rattlesnakes. It's not fun.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: You got bit by a rattlesnake?
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, but that's another story.
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  Speaker 1: More times than one?
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  Speaker 2: No, I got bit once because I learned my lesson
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  Speaker 2: after the first one.
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  Speaker 1: What happened?
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  Speaker 2: It wasn't good. Don't get bit by a rattlesnake.
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  Speaker 1: Where did you get bit?
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  Speaker 2: On my foot.
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  Speaker 1: Did you experience necrosis? Necrosis, rather?
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  Speaker 2: You know... So normally you would get necrosis where your
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: finger would rot. And then the guy that, you know,
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  Speaker 2: the doctor that I went to at a hospital, you know,
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  Speaker 2: in the emergency room said, the last guy in here
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: that got bit by a rattlesnake lost his toe or
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: something or lost his digits. And he said, good thing
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  Speaker 2: you didn't get bit on a finger because the necrosis
• 4:06
  Speaker 2: can rot away your finger. And he said, good thing
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  Speaker 2: you got bit on the middle of the foot. You're
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: going to be okay. But this type of rattlesnake, I
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  Speaker 2: got bit by it. The most venomous rattlesnake in the
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: country is called a tiger rattlesnake, but it's not the
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  Speaker 2: most dangerous. Most dangerous is probably a Mojave rattlesnake or
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  Speaker 2: an eastern diamondback rattlesnake. But you have western diamondbacks here.
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  Speaker 2: But I got bit by a rattlesnake that had both
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  Speaker 2: hemotoxin and neurotoxin. So the necrosis was less evident with me.
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  Speaker 2: It was more like a cobra was starting to stop breathing,
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  Speaker 2: and I felt like someone had put sandbags on my
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  Speaker 2: chest an hour into it. But the first thing you
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  Speaker 2: sense is obviously it feels like someone jabbed me with
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  Speaker 2: an X-Acto knife. I looked down and the rattlesnake was
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  Speaker 2: retracting into a burrow. I looked at my foot. But
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  Speaker 2: then you taste a metallic taste in about 15, 10 minutes,
• 4:53
  Speaker 2: 15 minutes, and you realize, uh-oh, this wasn't a dry bite.
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  Speaker 2: But it's not fun. I got a lot of antivenom.
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  Speaker 2: They make a different antivenom today. I got bit 25
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  Speaker 2: years ago.
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  Speaker 1: And how long does it take you to recover from
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  Speaker 1: something like that?
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  Speaker 2: You know– The most painful part was the serum sickness
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  Speaker 2: from the antivenom, the stop breathing thing. I remember I
• 5:14
  Speaker 2: was on a gurney and I felt like I was
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  Speaker 2: going to stop breathing, but weirdly not that painful. But
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  Speaker 2: yet you feel like you're going to die and stop breathing.
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  Speaker 2: But the serum sickness is just unbelievably intense for weeks
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  Speaker 2: and you just have the most insane fever and you
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  Speaker 2: get these red blotches all over you. But they make
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  Speaker 2: a different serum now. That one was made out of
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: horse antibodies that they put into you. And my body
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: didn't like those horse antibodies. Oh, God.
• 5:41
  Speaker 3: Also, maybe don't wear Birkenstocks when you hike. That's probably the.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: River sandals. Yeah. Okay, all right. Yeah, because I got bit.
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  Speaker 2: Most people got bit fucking around with a rattlesnake. I wasn't.
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  Speaker 1: What is this, Jimmy?
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  Speaker 4: They used all of the antivenom at the hospital and
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  Speaker 4: had to go get more from another hospital.
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  Speaker 1: Ran out of antivenom after using a whopping 36 vials.
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  Speaker 1: Holy fuck, man.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. Ugh. Yeah. Yikes.
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  Speaker 1: They're fucking scary, man. I've had dogs bit. I had
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  Speaker 1: this one dog. He got bit twice.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: It was a real problem. His face would swell up.
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  Speaker 1: I had to bring him to the vet. But luckily,
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: they have anti-venom for dogs. It works pretty well.
• 6:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: He was kind of out of it for a few days.
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  Speaker 1: Then he came back.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: How fast the response?
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  Speaker 1: Not bad.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Not bad. It was funny because he got bit once.
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  Speaker 1: He was a crazy dog. He was always killing lizards. Like,
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  Speaker 1: that was his thing. Like, anything in the backyard, he
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  Speaker 1: would kill. And he... Got bit by the rattlesnake, and
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  Speaker 1: I knew it because I was out there. I heard
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  Speaker 1: the commotion. I saw the snake. I knew what it was,
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  Speaker 1: so I got him to the veterinarian immediately. His face
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  Speaker 1: swelled up, but they got him the antivenom, and he
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  Speaker 1: was good. And then he got bit again like maybe
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  Speaker 1: a year later, and I brought him to the vet
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  Speaker 1: because I said I saw him get bit by a rattlesnake.
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  Speaker 1: And the vet was like, well, I don't see any swelling,
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  Speaker 1: and I don't see a hole. But he had developed
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  Speaker 1: a resistance to it because he had gotten bit once.
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  Speaker 1: And so then I got him home and all of
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  Speaker 1: a sudden his face started swelling up. I'm like, ah, fuck.
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  Speaker 1: And I bring him back to the vet. Then he
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  Speaker 1: had to get the antivirus.
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  Speaker 2: But a good-sized dog.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, he was about a 90-pound dog.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And that was a Western Diamondback rattlesnake I got.
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  Speaker 1: California. I don't know.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, it was in California.
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  Speaker 1: It was in California. Oh, so it wasn't out here.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, it was what did me then probably. Southern Pacific rattlesnake. Yeah. Okay.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah. We, we had a problem in my California house.
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  Speaker 1: One of the houses that I used to live in,
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  Speaker 1: it was, it was, there was a lot of, it
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  Speaker 1: was very canyony. It was a lot of stuff.
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  Speaker 2: Well, that's, that's the same snake that bit me.
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  Speaker 4: Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Spooky, man. We were running once we were running the trail.
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  Speaker 1: And in mid-stride, I realized that the log that I
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: thought was across the road was a giant rattlesnake. It
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  Speaker 1: was fucking big, man, like the biggest one I had
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  Speaker 1: ever seen out in the wild. And the dogs didn't
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  Speaker 1: notice it. They ran right over it. And then I
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: ran over it. I was like, oh, fuck, man. And
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: then I'm trying to figure out what to do because
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: I know we're going to have to come back this
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: way when we go back up the hill. So I'm
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: throwing rocks at it, trying to get it to run away.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, I've handled a lot of rattlesnakes in my
• 8:09
  Speaker 2: life and cobras and other snakes. And to get bit
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  Speaker 2: that way is very unusual. Usually people are being jerks
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  Speaker 2: and idiots and drunk and handling a snake and it
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  Speaker 2: bites them.
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  Speaker 1: Where were you? Were you just walking?
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  Speaker 2: I was hiking in the mountains north of L.A. just
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  Speaker 2: a bit. And I was actually looking for snakes because
• 8:27
  Speaker 2: I'm into snakes. And I didn't see the snakes. The
• 8:30
  Speaker 2: snakes saw me first. And I was bushwhacking. I wasn't
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: on a trail. I didn't see it. And it bit
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: me on my foot.
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  Speaker 1: So you have this lifetime experience with reptiles and snakes
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: and so you just decide– you must have interacted with
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: a lot of these really crazy people and just decided
• 8:44
  Speaker 1: this is the.
• 8:45
  Speaker 2: Next– Yeah, it takes one to know one.
• 8:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: Be careful.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Next point of focus.
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  Speaker 3: It's sort of where it all started really.
• 8:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah. No, no. Listen, I was a closeted reptile guy
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: living in New York City hanging out with– Madonna, cool
• 9:03
  Speaker 2: people in the 80s and 90s. I had a nightclub,
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: and I had friends with lots of artists, Andy Warhol.
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: And I never really talked about reptiles. Actually, Andy asked me,
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: what am I going to do with my money? He
• 9:13
  Speaker 2: interviewed me one time for Andy Warhol TV, and I
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: said I'm going to buy reptiles. I actually said I'm
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: going to buy tortoises. He said tortoises. But I was
• 9:20
  Speaker 2: pretty closeted, but I still kept them in New York.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: And fast forward, when I decided to try to do
• 9:28
  Speaker 2: a film about it, I had been traveling all over
• 9:31
  Speaker 2: the world to Madagascar and Sulawesi and different parts of
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: South America trying to study reptiles and especially turtles and
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: tortoises that were very rare. I started filming people like
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: kind of notable people, Christopher Walken and Slash and I
• 9:50
  Speaker 2: don't know, all kinds of people that I knew in
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: New York City and I would just ask them to
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: hold a turtle or tortoise and say some words like
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: PSAs and I was doing that with these two guys
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: named the Safdie brothers. And fast forward, they now, Josh
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: has just had a film called Marty Supreme with Timothee
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: Chalamet that was up for an Oscar. Little did I
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: know that I was working with these kids that were
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: going to be these new filmmakers. And we were making
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: these films. And then we made a short film about reptiles.
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: It's crazy, called Trophy Hunter. It's very short. And we
• 10:20
  Speaker 2: did that together. And then I said to them, hey, man,
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: you guys will read this new book called The Lizard King.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: It's about the reptile world. Let's do a doc about
• 10:27
  Speaker 2: the reptile world. And I'd already told Fisher Stevens, a
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: friend of mine, hey, let's do a doc about this book,
• 10:34
  Speaker 2: The Lizard King. And he said to me, how are
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: you going to do that doc without getting killed, Eric? And,
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: you know, he'd won an Oscar for The Cove. And
• 10:41
  Speaker 2: I thought, you know, I'm going to get these good
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: guys and do a doc about reptiles. So anyway, we
• 10:45
  Speaker 2: started in 2000.
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: Why do you think you're going to get killed?
• 10:48
  Speaker 2: He read The Lizard King and he said, you know,
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: you're going to do a story about this guy that
• 10:52
  Speaker 2: went to prison for 100 years and this other guy that,
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: you know, is the Pablo Escobar reptiles. And he just said,
• 10:58
  Speaker 2: it's a dark world. I don't know how you're going
• 10:59
  Speaker 2: to do this without getting killed.
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: So what is about the lizard world or the reptile
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: world that makes it so dark? Like, why are those people,
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: do you think, attracted to it?
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: Well, not all of them are scary people. And I
• 11:11
  Speaker 2: would say a lot of them may be misunderstood a
• 11:14
  Speaker 2: little bit. But In the case of Mario, there was
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: a crossover with drugs, smuggling drugs and animals into the country.
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: But for background, what is different than these other films
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: that we've done? This was an industry story that kind
• 11:31
  Speaker 3: of looks back at the past half century. What most
• 11:37
  Speaker 3: people don't know is illegal wildlife trafficking represents about a
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: $ 20 billion a year industry. It's kind of underreported, actually.
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: only after guns, drugs, and human trafficking. And what's really
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: interesting about that is there's a convergence of all of it.
• 11:51
  Speaker 3: You know, wildlife trafficking also involves drugs and trafficking of guns.
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of mixture of it.
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: Whenever people are bringing in things illegally, they tend to
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: be a risk-taking type.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: Of course.
• 12:03
  Speaker 3: But, you know, in the kind of pre, you know,
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: customs TSA days, as intense as it is now, it's
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: very easy to, you know, Carry animals and carry wildlife.
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that was something I didn't even think about until
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: I was watching. I was like, oh, God, I remember
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: those days where they didn't check your bags and they
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: didn't even check your ID. You just had a ticket
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: and you just get on the plane. So you just
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: get on the plane with lizards.
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: Now, most cases, yeah, strapped to your body, right? The
• 12:30
  Speaker 3: thing with about what was so interesting about reptiles in
• 12:33
  Speaker 3: this case within the trade is they're portable. They're nature
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: with handles, right? You go, you see in the early
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: episode of episode one, people traveling around the world, you know,
• 12:44
  Speaker 3: finding rare endangered animals, putting them in their suitcase and
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: bringing them back, putting them on a price list and
• 12:49
  Speaker 3: selling them to a consumer. And that was the kind
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: of early days. I mean, the story, the Lizard King,
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: but many much, you know, in our series, it's handful
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: of guys, mainly guys, you know, start a multi-billion dollar industry.
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: And you see this kind of innovation happen over the
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: course of the series as technology you know, as the
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: years go on.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But when we say multi-billion, I have to kind
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: of contextualize that. It's when you, when people say that
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: the wildlife trade is multi-billion dollar industry, you got to
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: remember it's a lot of its consumption. You know, the
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: Asian population eats a lot of turtles, a lot of snakes,
• 13:27
  Speaker 2: a lot of its traditional medicine, a lot of its skins,
• 13:31
  Speaker 2: you know, plant material, alligator skin bags, crocodile skin bags,
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: lizard skin bags, snake skin bags. So it's, It's a
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: lot more than just the exotic pet industry. But that's
• 13:41
  Speaker 2: gotten enormous in Asia. They took a page out of
• 13:44
  Speaker 2: our playbook about 25 years ago. China is now a
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: huge consumer of not just eating these reptiles but keeping
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: them as exotic pets. That didn't happen before 25, 30
• 13:54
  Speaker 2: years ago. Interesting. Asia.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Why does California have a ban on python skin? Pythons
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: are not endangered, right?
• 14:02
  Speaker 2: Well, it depends on the type of python. But yeah,
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: the python skinning, business actually is where all the Burmese
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: pythons came from in the 70s that I had as
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: a kid. They would skin the pythons, take the eggs,
• 14:13
  Speaker 2: incubate the eggs, sell the baby pythons to the United
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: States and other consumer countries that wanted baby pythons. Most
• 14:21
  Speaker 2: of the pythons that are skinned in Southeast Asia, and
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: I've been to python skinning places in Sumatra, blood pythons,
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons, but mostly blood pythons, reticulated pythons
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: are wild cod, and most of them are not endangered.
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: But there are less and less pythons out there, but
• 14:40
  Speaker 2: they're not endangered, those pythons.
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: Well, there's a shit ton in Florida. That's what I
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: don't understand. I mean there's this giant problem in Florida
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: where they're overrun with pythons, and yet California, you can't
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: sell python skins. It seems like there's a solution there.
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: People want python skins. Oh, look, a place that's overrun
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: with pythons. Maybe you should get your python skin there.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the cooler python skins are not Burmese pythons, the
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: ones in Florida. The cooler ones people like, like Nick
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: Cage in– What was that film where he's wearing that
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: python skin jacket? It's a reticulated python.
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: Wild at Heart.
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Wild at Heart. That's gold and black. The cooler
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: python skins just happen not to be Burmese pythons, which
• 15:17
  Speaker 2: are the ones running rampant in Florida. Although they should
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: make those trendy and use Burmese pythons. But they're not usual.
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: You rarely see Burmese.
• 15:27
  Speaker 1: There it is.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: That's a reticulated python. That's not a Burmese. That's the
• 15:31
  Speaker 2: one people want. That's from Southeast Asia. That's not the
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: one running rampant. Wild in Florida.
• 15:35
  Speaker 1: That's illegal in California right now then, that jacket.
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: Is that right?
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: I believe so. I don't believe you can get it imported.
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: Let's try. I had read something about Python being one
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: of the things that they made illegal. Why California bans
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: Python skin? Ban dates to 1970. Oh. Aimed at protecting
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: endangered and vulnerable species, particularly the Indian Python, which was
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: on the endangered species list. California chose to prohibit all
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: Python products rather than distinguished by species. created an extraordinarily
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: broad statute banning all python imports. Oh, that's interesting. I
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: thought it was fairly recent.
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: Well, that's where the laws, I think, are really screwed up.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: When they basically say all pythons are bad to sell
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: when the Indian rock python is endangered. And there are
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: a few endangered pythons. But to say all pythons cannot
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: be used for the skin trade and sold in California
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: is Because of one python out of many pythons.
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: Welcome to California.
• 16:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I happen to live there. I know what it's like.
• 16:37
  Speaker 2: I love Austin, by the way. I might buy a
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: house next to you now.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: Austin rules. But California is just so over-regulated with everything.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: So over-regulated.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: Same thing household?
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: Regulation-wise. I mean, again, there's- But people eat those.
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: There's 45 types of iguanas in the world.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: Did you not know that?
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: No.
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. There's a whole YouTube community of people who
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: hunt iguanas and cook them in exotic ways. They make
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: iguana stir fry.
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: In South Florida.
• 17:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: And it looks good. I mean, I don't know anything
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: about what it tastes like, but this guy made like
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: a stir fry over rice and they were eating it.
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: And they're like, oh, my God, this is sensational. Like teriyaki.
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: It looked very good.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: Everyone always says crock, alligator, iguana, rattlesnake tastes like chicken. But, yeah,
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: they eat the tail.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: I mean, you can imagine I have a really messed
• 17:29
  Speaker 3: up algorithm from being involved in this for so long.
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: But that I never came across. But, you know, the frozen. Yeah,
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: here's a guy.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: They use the legs. They cook the legs.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the back of the tail.
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: There's the tail. So he's got it marinating, ziplocked it.
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: Then it looks like he's going to. Oh, look, he's
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: got the whole thing.
• 17:49
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow. Usually it's the back of the tail, like crocodiles.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: You eat the back of the tail.
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: But it's far out. I mean, there's a— Wow, look
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: at that.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: He's eating the whole thing. In Mexico, I always see
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: them make, you know, iguana tamales out of the back
• 18:03
  Speaker 2: part of the iguana.
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: So he put it in a kamado.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow. Damn.
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: And he's got a little sauce he's making here with
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: some butter and spices, basting it. I mean, why not?
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: If it tastes good. And apparently it does taste good,
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: according to all these guys that I've seen on YouTube channels.
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: They're pretty honest about it. They bring it to their family.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: They let their family try it. I think that might
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: be the only way out because they're everywhere in Florida.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: When it gets cold out, they fall.
• 18:34
  Speaker 2: Out of trees.
• 18:35
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they fall out of trees. I love their news reports.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: They're fucking big too, man.
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they're massive.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: There's some channels where these guys hunt them and they're–
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: Some of them are like four and a half, five
• 18:45
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• 19:44
  Speaker 2: The males get crazy, and they get very orange and
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: really big, the male iguanas.
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: They're so beautiful.
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they are.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: A cool-looking lizard, man.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of really cool iguanas. And in our show,
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: we feature what's called a Fiji Island iguana, a very
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: endangered iguana that unfortunately people in the private sector in
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: this country cannot own. Zoos can own them. I don't
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: know why private people can't own them. But the San
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: Diego Zoo and this zoo and that zoo can have
• 20:08
  Speaker 2: Fiji Island iguanas. But they– in our show, they literally–
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: this one guy says it's reptile magic. It's like reptile art,
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: a fecal iguana. You might want to put it up there.
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: It's really beautiful.
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: Just the beauty of it?
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: Just the sheer beauty. Oh, wow. The sheer beauty.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: It's like– Yellow lemon highlights.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: Turquoise and green. And it's a very endangered iguana.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: So the Florida iguana problem, was that all people's pets
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: that got released?
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: Probably. All of it. Well, listen.
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: Also, again, going back to the show, but we– The
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: central figure of the book is this guy named Mike
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: Van Nostrum and his dad, Ray Van Nostrum. They run
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: an enterprise called Strictly Reptiles in Hollywood, right? It's in Hollywood?
• 20:49
  Speaker 1: Hollywood, Florida. Hollywood, Florida.
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And they're sort of this like, you know, I
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: would call it like more of a fulfillment center for
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: wildlife conservation. All across America. They are. I mean, in
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: many ways.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: It's like it's an Amazon warehouse. Click, I want a tortoise.
• 21:08
  Speaker 2: They were selling 5,000 iguanas a week. Green baby iguanas.
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: It got to that point. So the story goes, dad
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: moves 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 5,000
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: a week. And, you know, I was a 90s kid.
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: I had a iguana in my, you know, my bedroom.
• 21:35
  Speaker 2: Jeremy's a virgin, but he did have a iguana. I did.
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: I had a pet iguana.
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: To reptiles.
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: That unfortunately passed away. The rock thing, you know, the
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: heated rock, you know, that happens. But, yeah, no, there's
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: sort of... So the story's still.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: The heated rock thing?
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: No, they have this, like, rock thing where it sits
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: on and it's... Keeps it warm?
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: Keeps it warm.
• 21:51
  Speaker 3: And then I think it kept on too long.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: He cooked his iguana.
• 21:54
  Speaker 3: My iguana, yeah, sadly.
• 21:55
  Speaker 2: He cooked his iguana.
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: But I've learned a lot. But filled with these unintended consequences.
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: I think this idea of A big movie coming out,
• 22:06
  Speaker 3: the correlation to driving demand for pet sales.
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: Thank God people can't buy a fucking velociraptor. Because people
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: would have them. They'd have fences set up in their yard.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: Joe, you've had the Colossus people on this show, I think. Oh, yeah.
• 22:20
  Speaker 2: They want to bring back one of those and a
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: woolly mammoth.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: Well, there's no chance that they can bring– with current technology.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: I know. I know.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: They don't have dinosaur DNA. It's too old.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: I'm joking.
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: But they're– I mean, I met the direwolves.
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: I know.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: It's wild. They brought back the direwolves.
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: It's not really a direwolf.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: What does that mean? I mean– If you talk to geneticists,
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: what is– it is a bunch of different traits.
• 22:39
  Speaker 2: Don't go down that rabbit hole. It's close to a
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: dire wolf.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: I mean I don't know what that means because like
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: we decide what a dire wolf is, what a dire
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: wolf isn't. But if you take literal dire wolf DNA
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: that's 7,000 years old and you add it to these
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: gray wolves and this is what they did and they
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: created essentially a dire wolf. It's like people are arguing
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: over semantics, whatever it is. That's not a wolf. It's
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: very different. It looks different than a regular wolf, like
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: a gray wolf. The stature is different. It has a mane.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: It's really crazy looking. They're white. They're stockier. They're built differently.
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: Like you see like, oh, that's different.
• 23:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, like mane wolves in Argentina look very different
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: than our wolf. So they're very different types of canines.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: Wild dogs in Africa look very different than our– so yeah.
• 23:25
  Speaker 2: But– Yeah. I mean, one thing I'd just say about
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: iguanas just since we were on it is that, because
• 23:33
  Speaker 2: I'm on an organization called the International Iguana Foundation and
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: we protect iguanas around the world and people get confused.
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: They think, oh, iguana, that's so common. They're falling out
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: of trees in Florida. But there are a lot of
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: really rare cool iguanas. There's about 45 species and there's
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: pink iguanas in the Galapagos Islands, land iguanas, there's marine iguanas.
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: There's a very rare high elevation pink iguana. There's another
• 23:55
  Speaker 2: land iguana in the Galapagos. There's a You know, a
• 23:59
  Speaker 2: marine iguana. But that lizard was fairly recently discovered. And
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: there's some iguanas that were thought to be extinct, Joe,
• 24:06
  Speaker 2: like the Jamaican iguana. And that was thought to be
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: extinct forever, the Jamaican iguana. But they found a tiny
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: population recently. So there's a lot of iguanas that are
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: in trouble. And You know, we should care about iguanas
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: and they're not just green iguanas. Yeah, that the pink iguana,
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: that's a marine iguana and a regular Galapagos land iguana.
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: And then you see some of the pink form.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: Jamie, see if you can find a video on Florida
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: people hunting iguanas. Florida people hunting giant iguanas because some
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: of them are so big. You just you see me like, oh,
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: my God. Are those bad to eat, though? The big
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: giant ones. Would you eat one being like a pet
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: reptile pet guy? Look at the size of that one.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a male. That's a male.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: That's crazy.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: When they get orange like that, yeah, that's a big male.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: I mean, these things are gigantic, man.
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, that's a common green iguana, and
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: the males lose their green and get that incredible yellow-orange.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: Those are males, yeah.
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: Isn't that crazy how many of them there are, though?
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, it is just overrun with iguanas. I guess
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: they have no natural predators, right? There's nothing that eats
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: them there.
• 25:12
  Speaker 2: Not once they get big like that. When they're little...
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: Some birds of prey and some snakes can eat baby iguanas,
• 25:17
  Speaker 2: but not ones that are like that.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: But they're pretty chill.
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: I mean, they don't really do much harm.
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: Well, don't they, though, to people's crops and people's houses?
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: No, they do. They do do damage. They're not supposed
• 25:29
  Speaker 2: to be in Florida. Let's put it that way. Iguanas
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: like water, typically. They like to be around water, green iguanas. But,
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: you know, reptiles have a bad PR problem, and that's
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: why we're here, Joe. We're trying to elevate the publicity
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: of people loving reptiles and not killing them.
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: This dude is all out there killing them. Who's this dude?
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: Top shelf anglers on Instagram.
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: Oh, you can do an expedition.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: So he's just a Florida guy that's enjoying the green
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: outdoors also.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: No, that now is a different. That's called a tenosaurus.
• 26:02
  Speaker 2: That's a type of Central American Mexican rock iguana. That lizard.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: That's not a green iguana.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: So Florida has a variety.
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they have those as well. And they have tegus
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: in Florida that come from South America, a different type
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: of lizard that's invasive in Florida.
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: And all of it is pets.
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, people letting them.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: I had no idea that many people had iguanas, that
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: it could be this big of a problem.
• 26:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, pet iguanas were everywhere at one time, yeah.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: And is this really?
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: That's the tegu. Whoa. That's also invasive in Florida.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: That's crazy looking.
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: I used to sleep with one of those when I
• 26:35
  Speaker 2: was a teenager.
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: That looks like a snake with legs.
• 26:37
  Speaker 2: It does.
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: Look at that. Yeah, their face, right?
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: Totally. And that lizard really loves to eat eggs. I
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: used to feed mine eggs. And I've seen them in
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: the wild eating eggs, bird eggs, duck eggs.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: When I lived in the valley, there was a reptile store.
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: And it was a place where I used to go
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: buy goldfish because I used to have piranhas.
• 26:55
  Speaker 2: Oh, wow.
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: And I used to have turtles, too.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: And the turtles were way more vicious than the piranhas.
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: When you put goldfish in with the turtles, turtles, they're crazy, man.
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: And they grab a hold of them and they're crazy.
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: They're biting him. It's like very Jurassic Park. Like you're
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: watching a little dinosaur.
• 27:10
  Speaker 3: Alligator snapping turtle.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 27:12
  Speaker 1: Well, these are just little green sliders.
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: Sliders.
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: Is that what they're called? But they had a crocodile
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: monitor in that place.
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: Ooh.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah. I briefly thought, like, ooh, maybe I can figure
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: out an enclosure and put a crocodile monitor and feed
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: it rabbits and shit.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: Don't get bit by a crocodile monitor. They're close to, like,
• 27:29
  Speaker 2: a Komodo dragon bite. They have scalpel teeth. They are
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: serious getting bit by a crocodile monitor.
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: It looked pretty vicious. I mean, they just look like dinosaurs.
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: It's like a forgotten thing of the past.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: There it is. Yeah.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: There's a crocodile monitor. Look at that face, man. It
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: totally looks like a dinosaur.
• 27:44
  Speaker 2: Well, there's Tommy who's– Yeah, that's the guy in the
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: first episode.
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah, feeding it chicken.
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: Oh, Tommy.
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: They're the weirdest fucking people because I kind of understand
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: the chimp people more because the chimp people– like a
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: chimp is interacting with you. It's a mammal. It's a primate.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: It's intelligent. There's a lot going on. There's emotions and
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: jealousy and chimps. They're connecting with you. These things, they're
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: just– you're just looking into the abyss.
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: Until the chimp rips your head off. Yeah.
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: Well, I'm not advocating for people to have chimps as pets.
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: I just say I understand the appeal of a pet chimp.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: I think it's a crazy idea.
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: Well, especially a baby chimp.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: I think if anybody's even remotely thinking about it, they
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: should watch Chimp Crazy.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: But, yeah, especially the babies. They're so cute. And then
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: they eventually get to the point where they kill your neighbor.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: But it's just you don't want, you know, I get,
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: I just get the appeal of it. The appeal of
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: the reptile thing to me is just very strange. These
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: people love them.
• 28:45
  Speaker 2: Well, I loved– I used to keep snakes and lizards.
• 28:49
  Speaker 2: But I ultimately– they were my gateway drug. And then
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: I ultimately got into tortoises because I like the tortoises
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: coexisting in the garden. I like plants.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: I like gardens.
• 28:58
  Speaker 2: And so it didn't feel like they were in a
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: cage and they kind of– maybe I'm anthropomorphizing my tortoises.
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: But I kind of felt like they were– having a
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: pretty good life in my garden. For sure. So I
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: like keeping tortoises. They don't want to eat a rabbit particularly.
• 29:13
  Speaker 2: They want to eat some lettuce or some greens. So
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: turtles and tortoises is what I gravitated to. And then
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: I found out one day they're the most endangered group
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: of animals on the planet along with primates if you
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: measure it by how many turtles and tortoises there are
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: in the world and how many are facing extinction along
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: with primates. So then I was like, okay, I want
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: to do something to help them. And this show we're
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: doing is really to teach people about the evolution of
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: the reptile tribe. and to make people realize they're cool
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: and they shouldn't be disposable pets.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: Also, freak show.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: And Freak Show, of course.
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: You guys are really good at Freak Shows.
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: As I said, it takes one to know one.
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: Of course.
• 29:54
  Speaker 3: But what's different though is that this isn't some like
• 29:57
  Speaker 3: side hustle for animal love gone wrong. You know, it's,
• 30:02
  Speaker 3: there's these people, there's this, the animal, the reptile people,
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: the herb people are incredibly obsessive about, you know, living art,
• 30:13
  Speaker 3: about these living things. They like the It's like a
• 30:15
  Speaker 3: baseball card, like the scarcity.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: Well, is that where you use the herp people?
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I call it herp.
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: Herpetology. Herp people, herpetology. Amphibians and reptiles. Yeah.
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry. Well, you know. You're a little coded.
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: The herpy people. Herpy people.
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: No, but it's, you know, it's really a trade formed
• 30:36
  Speaker 3: around scarcity. And, you know, this sort of desire and
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: adventure people have going out to find the rarest of
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: the rare. You know, and bringing it back and selling it,
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: trading it, keeping it.
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: I'm in that category.
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: You are in that category.
• 30:49
  Speaker 2: I'm in that category. I'm not the guy that just
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: wants the little pet bearded dragon. I want the Rolls
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: Royce of reptiles.
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: But it's different than like, you know, an individual person
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: that has an attachment to a chimpanzee that she saw with,
• 31:00
  Speaker 3: you know, watching Tarzan when she was growing up. And
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: she wanted to have that in her life.
• 31:03
  Speaker 2: So in other words, freaky people.
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Freaky people.
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: Extreme obsessions. But it's about kind of, you know, psychology
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: of people in this particular very niche way.
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: Well, any time you're dealing with extreme animal people, it's
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: about the psychology of the human being that's really invested
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: in it, right?
• 31:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Best in show. Yeah.
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: For sure. And these are very unusual people because it's
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: a very unusual thing to be connected to, something that
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: really doesn't give a fuck about you. Like we're really
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: concerned about this pink iguana. That pink iguana doesn't give
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: a fuck about people. If all the people on earth died,
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: it would just keep going about its business and not
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: shed a tear.
• 31:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: Especially things that can kill you in this way. Like
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: a taipan or whatever. Someone playing with that.
• 31:48
  Speaker 2: An inland taipan is a venomous snake from Australia that
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: may be the most venomous snake in the world. But
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: it's all relative because a black mamba. Australia has a
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: lot of venomous stuff. Spiders, box jellyfish, a lot of
• 32:02
  Speaker 2: snakes that are very dangerous. Australian tiger snake, brown snake,
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: inland taipan. They're all things that. equally can kill you.
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: So to say one's more dangerous than the other, they'll
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: all kill you.
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: Is there anti-venom for all of them?
• 32:14
  Speaker 2: No, actually. So it's a good question. So some snakes like,
• 32:18
  Speaker 2: you know, Texas has a coral snake, for example, a
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: very venomous, elapid type of snake, like a cobra, not
• 32:26
  Speaker 2: like a rattlesnake. And I think they have less and
• 32:29
  Speaker 2: less anti-venom for snakes that rarely bite people because like
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: sea snakes, the coral snake, which is the red, black
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: and yellow one, They have in East Texas, you know,
• 32:40
  Speaker 2: when the dog gets bit by them, you were talking
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: about your dog getting bit by rattlesnakes. A lot of
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: time the vet doesn't know because you can't even see
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: the bite. The snake bite is so tiny. So some
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: snakes do not have antivenom, some really dangerous snakes.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: The coral snakes, they don't have antivenom for them?
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: I think I heard that maybe not anymore. I'm sure
• 32:58
  Speaker 2: it's faded.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: So what happens if you get bit?
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: Well, there may be some antivenom, but there's not a
• 33:03
  Speaker 2: lot of it. Antivenom. It's gotten very expensive and it's
• 33:06
  Speaker 2: very sophisticated now and it's mostly for– in the US
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: for vipers, for rattlesnakes. But I don't know. Good question.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: That would be something– someone smarter than me would know
• 33:16
  Speaker 2: about coral snake antivenom. But it's an elapid like a cobra.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: A friend of mine had two of them in her carport.
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: They took pictures of it and sent it to people
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: and everyone is like, yeah, that's– keep away from that.
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: Just chilling in her carport. But they're generally not aggressive.
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: Is that the deal?
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a saying and it doesn't fit all because
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: there's coral snakes that don't have this. But yellow against
• 33:42
  Speaker 2: black is a friend of Jack. Yellow and black against
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: red is– anyway, I can't even say it right now.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: You wind up dead or something? Yeah, you wind up dead.
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: But I'm getting it wrong. But there's a saying and
• 33:53
  Speaker 2: it doesn't hold true for all coral snakes because there's
• 33:55
  Speaker 2: some coral snakes outside of the U.S. that don't have
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: that same pattern.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: So if there's no antivenom and they take you to
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: the hospital, what do they do?
• 34:03
  Speaker 4: They stopped making the quote.
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: I mean, they're so.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: They stopped making it. It was cost.
• 34:07
  Speaker 2: Is that what it says?
• 34:07
  Speaker 3: Ineffective.
• 34:08
  Speaker 2: I think that's what I heard.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: Cost ineffective. No longer cost effective.
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: Just let people die.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: Cost effective is a crazy thing to say when it
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: comes to fucking keeping people alive.
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: Wow, I was right for a change.
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: Capitalist cunts. Maybe the socialists are right. Cost effective is crazy.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: So what did they do?
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: You know, I heard every rattlesnake joke after I got bit.
• 34:28
  Speaker 2: And there's one that's, these three guys are out hiking
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: and someone gets bit here. And they go to the
• 34:34
  Speaker 2: doctor and the guy says, you got to go back
• 34:36
  Speaker 2: and suck it out of him. And the guy just
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: says to him, you're going to die. So maybe you
• 34:40
  Speaker 2: die with a coral snake.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: Just leave you die.
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: The thing I was, we recently were looking at this,
• 34:46
  Speaker 3: the way of treating rattlesnake mites, not too long ago,
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: by the way, you sell these Johnson and Johnson, you
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: sell these kits where you used to have one, right?
• 34:53
  Speaker 3: You'd actually literally slice out and you'd suck out the
• 34:57
  Speaker 3: venom out of your bite.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: Does it actually work? No.
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: That's what's incredible about it.
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: When we were young, they had these little rattlesnake kits.
• 35:06
  Speaker 2: I'm a little older than you, but it was insane
• 35:09
  Speaker 2: what they told people to do back then. They told
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: you to cut yourself and then put a tourniquet and
• 35:14
  Speaker 2: then suck the venom out, which is completely insane because
• 35:17
  Speaker 2: when a rattlesnake strikes, you know, they never hold on
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: a rattlesnake. They strike and let go immediately. And then
• 35:23
  Speaker 2: they track their prey. And it's literally like a hypodermic
• 35:26
  Speaker 2: needle going into your body. And the, you know, the
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: venom is already just like when they inject you with something,
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: it's already in, you can't suck the, whatever.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: So what should you do if you get bit by
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: a rattlesnake?
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: Be mellow. In my case, I walked to my car.
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: Luckily I wasn't too far away from my car and
• 35:43
  Speaker 2: I was up in the mountains about an hour away
• 35:46
  Speaker 2: from a hospital. I drove Well, I drove like a
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: bat out of hell to the hospital actually. But you're
• 35:50
  Speaker 2: supposed to be calm and get to a hospital.
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: That's the kit.
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: Incredible.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: Jeez.
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: And it was just bullshit, huh? Well, everything– Imagine taking
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: that into the woods. You're like, we're fine.
• 35:59
  Speaker 2: Everything you shouldn't do today. Everything you shouldn't do.
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: And so you just stay mellow and get to the hospital.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: And if they don't have any antivenom, you just die?
• 36:06
  Speaker 2: Well, in my case, they didn't have it in the hospital.
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: They had to get– see Highway Patrol to bring it
• 36:12
  Speaker 2: from Ventura. And it took about 45 minutes and I
• 36:16
  Speaker 2: thought I was going to die on the gurney. But yeah,
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: you get to a hospital and you get antivenom if
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: it's a bad bite.
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: And if they don't have antivenom, you die?
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: Well, it depends on the kind of snake. Like water
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: moccasins usually aren't lethal, but certain rattlesnakes can kill you.
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: And how much time do you have from the time
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: you get bit where you must get the antivenom in you?
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: I mean, in my case, I swear to God, I
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: thought I was going to stop breathing about two hours
• 36:40
  Speaker 2: into it. It just slowly... feels like this pressure on
• 36:44
  Speaker 2: your chest. Like you can't breathe. Yeah, it felt like
• 36:48
  Speaker 2: somebody put sandbags all over me. Like you have this
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: pressure and you feel like you're going to stop breathing.
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: 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 most, is it Cobra Bites?
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: No, I think you're talking about Serpentarium.
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: That same guy?
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: Bill Haas. Bill Haas. He lived to like 100. And
• 37:08
  Speaker 2: I know people that inject themselves with venom. I was
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: in Myanmar in Burma one time and this guy had
• 37:14
  Speaker 2: snake tattoos all over him and he was a snake
• 37:16
  Speaker 2: wrangler at this zoo in central Burma. And every tattoo
• 37:21
  Speaker 2: he had put on his body, he had put some
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: venom in it so he could handle these really dangerous crates,
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: which are like cobras. And he was this guy with
• 37:28
  Speaker 2: all these snake tattoos, but he had envenomated himself so
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: he would have antibodies so he could handle these snakes.
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: And if he got bit, 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 50s
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: and 60s. It had– Miami Serpentarium was an amazing looking place.
• 37:44
  Speaker 3: It had this giant cobra. It was sculpture basically.
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: Here's a question. If they do that with allergies where
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: they give you like a little bit of the allergen,
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: you develop a resistance to it, could they do that
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: with snakes?
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: That's the idea.
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: It's like if you live in a snake-prone area, should
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: you do that?
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: No. But that's the idea.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: Why wouldn't you do that if– There's a guy.
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: Right now in the US that's doing it. I think
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: they're doing a film about him injecting all these venomous
• 38:09
  Speaker 2: snake venoms into him like a pin cushion. But no,
• 38:14
  Speaker 2: I don't think people should do it, but people do
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: do it. Not a lot of people.
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: But if it does build up your antibodies and you
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: know that you're going to come in contact with snakes,
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: wouldn't that be– is it bad for you to do?
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: Look, the country that I think has the most– deadly
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: snake bites is probably India, the country where there's the
• 38:33
  Speaker 2: most deaths and envenomation. The snake that probably kills more
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: people in the world is a puff adder in Africa,
• 38:41
  Speaker 2: but it's many countries. But I think India has the highest. U.S.,
• 38:45
  Speaker 2: it's pretty low chance you're going to get killed by
• 38:48
  Speaker 2: a snake. You're going to get killed driving your car
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: or shooting someone with your gun. It's highly unlikely. The
• 38:55
  Speaker 2: odds are very low that you're going to die from
• 38:57
  Speaker 2: a snake bite, no matter where you live in the country.
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: I understand that.
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: You understand that. It's all well and good, but that
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: doesn't comfort you if you get bit by a snake. Like, oh,
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: what are the odds?
• 39:05
  Speaker 3: Seek medical attention.
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: You have to deal with it.
• 39:06
  Speaker 3: Or buy one of those kits.
• 39:07
  Speaker 2: I think most people live, Joe.
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: Most people.
• 39:10
  Speaker 2: I mean, there's a few people that die this year
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: in California, but typically it's like only a few people
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: a year die in the country from snake bites.
• 39:17
  Speaker 1: And is it generally because they just don't get to
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: medical treatment in time?
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: Or they're older, or they get bit three times, like
• 39:24
  Speaker 2: not just once by the rattlesnake, You get more venom
• 39:28
  Speaker 2: in them.
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: Is it true that the young ones give you more
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: venom than the old ones? No.
• 39:32
  Speaker 2: Young ones have a more condensed, more dangerous venom. But
• 39:38
  Speaker 2: big snakes are much more dangerous because they can put
• 39:41
  Speaker 2: far more venom into you. The little ones have a
• 39:44
  Speaker 2: more potent venom, but they can't inject as much into you.
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: So people misunderstand that stat. Not that I'm a snake expert.
• 39:53
  Speaker 2: I'm more of a turtle expert and I'm more of
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: a freak expert. So I'm good at finding these crazy
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: people to cover.
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: Do you get uncomfortable being around these people?
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: That's a good question.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: Because there's a psychological aspect to all– particularly like chimp crazy.
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: There's something about those people that makes me uneasy watching
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: it on TV. Like you are so far gone.
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: Like some of these people are so far gone in
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: terms of like just being a normal, present, rational person.
• 40:30
  Speaker 2: There's a courtship and sometimes that courtship takes years to
• 40:34
  Speaker 2: get someone willing to be interviewed. It's generally the reptile
• 40:37
  Speaker 2: world can be very guarded. People that have them don't
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: want the feds coming and taking their rare reptiles. They
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: don't want animal rights groups, PETA coming and busting them.
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: They don't want people coming because they're very valuable. Some
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: reptiles are worth a lot of money. So they're very
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: guarded and to get access to a lot of these
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: people took a lot of time at times. And sometimes
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: that relationship would go up and down and there were
• 41:00
  Speaker 2: times when people that I was interviewing really did not
• 41:03
  Speaker 2: like me. There was something that happened and then I
• 41:05
  Speaker 2: would have to go there and I'd be nervous because
• 41:08
  Speaker 2: that person may have been someone who did a lot
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: of time in prison and did some heavy things in
• 41:12
  Speaker 2: his life. So yeah, there are times when you're just
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: kind of like, you know, is this the time I'm
• 41:17
  Speaker 2: going to go there and he's going to really fuck
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: me up?
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: Why didn't they like you?
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: You know, man, you know, like, listen, I like this guy.
• 41:27
  Speaker 2: He's done what he's done in the past. He was
• 41:30
  Speaker 2: sentenced to 100 years in prison. He got out for
• 41:33
  Speaker 2: whatever reason. But that guy, that guy.
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: Wait a minute. Why did he go to jail for
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: 100 years?
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: Well, Mario Tabrawi was sentenced to 100 plus years in prison.
• 41:43
  Speaker 2: He got out early because he must have had some
• 41:45
  Speaker 2: serious information.
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: What was the crime?
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: Murder and drugs.
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: And he got out early because you said he had information?
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: He must have. He did 12 years. No one knows. What?
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: He only did 12 years for murder and drugs?
• 41:59
  Speaker 2: But I like him. Oh, great. I wasn't the one murdered.
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: I wasn't in his life back then. He really actually
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: does love animals in his way. And I was nervous
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: sometimes going to his place a few times.
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: But why was he mad at you?
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: Do you remember all the times he was mad at me?
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: He's mad at, he's probably mad at me right now
• 42:20
  Speaker 2: as I'm speaking.
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: I definitely won't be after the show probably.
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, that's the, this is the next episode. There's
• 42:26
  Speaker 3: an entire episode that talks about kind of the eighties
• 42:28
  Speaker 3: in Miami and the sort of overlap between the drug
• 42:31
  Speaker 3: trade and the legal wildlife trade and the reptile trade.
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: And he's a central character in it. Um, now he's
• 42:38
  Speaker 3: kind of more tangential because it's really about this, this guy,
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: Raven Nostrand guy from New Jersey moved down to Florida,
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: started a business, uh, that became strictly reptiles, as I
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: was referencing. But, yeah, I mean, I don't think there
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: was anything like particular, but he would get very particular
• 42:56
  Speaker 3: about very specific things. Like if you were, you could
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: be right about a million things that he hated, but
• 43:02
  Speaker 3: wrong about one thing that he cared about the most,
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: and he would categorize you to be this person that is,
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: you know.
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: There's an expression, honor among thieves, and he weirdly has
• 43:10
  Speaker 2: this kind of honorable side.
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: Unredeemable, yeah.
• 43:13
  Speaker 2: And certain things I would say to him would make
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: him really upset. But I have to say the only
• 43:17
  Speaker 2: time I was ever shot at in my life was
• 43:20
  Speaker 2: in fucking Miami. I was shot at going to a
• 43:24
  Speaker 2: pay phone in the early 90s in a van trying
• 43:26
  Speaker 2: to go to a nightclub with a bunch of people.
• 43:29
  Speaker 2: And these guys were walking towards me and they started
• 43:31
  Speaker 2: just blowing out the windows of the van. I remember
• 43:34
  Speaker 2: I didn't go to the nightclub. I went back to
• 43:36
  Speaker 2: my hotel. And I woke up in the morning with
• 43:39
  Speaker 2: that chopped car glass all in my hair. I had
• 43:43
  Speaker 2: long hair back then.
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: I had hair back then.
• 43:45
  Speaker 2: But Miami was– it was pretty wild in the 80s
• 43:49
  Speaker 2: and early 90s.
• 43:50
  Speaker 1: I have a good friend of mine. My friend Steve
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: did his residency. He's an ophthalmologist. His residency in Miami
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: in the 80s and worked in emergency rooms. And he
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: said it was fucking insane. It's just like so many
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: gunshot wounds, so many drug deals gone bad, so many heists.
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: He said it was like an insane place to work.
• 44:09
  Speaker 2: It's funny you say that because I said to all
• 44:11
  Speaker 2: my characters, I said, what's it like? Having been in
• 44:15
  Speaker 2: and out of prison so many times, he goes, bro,
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: everyone in Florida has been in prison. And I was
• 44:20
  Speaker 2: kind of like, well, what's it like? Everyone in Florida
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: has been in prison.
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: Sunny place with shady people, right?
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: Have you seen Cocaine Cowboys? Yeah. Phenomenal, right? And that
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: story where you find out that the entire graduating class
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: of the police academy either wound up murdered or in
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: jail for corruption.
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: Have you seen Bad Lieutenant? Yes. Yes. I'm friends with Harvey.
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: Oh, really?
• 44:42
  Speaker 2: He's good in it, man.
• 44:43
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. No, it's great.
• 44:44
  Speaker 2: But there's parts of this story that are a little
• 44:46
  Speaker 2: like Bad Lieutenant. You'll see in the end, you know.
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: Well, what you'll like about this second episode, about this period,
• 44:53
  Speaker 3: it's from the point of view of this young, at
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: the time, you know, coming right out of college, young
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: DEA agent, DEA agent, on the beat, chasing bad guys.
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: And he was assigned this guy, Mario, to Browey. The
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: case that was a cold case, no one could ever
• 45:06
  Speaker 3: touch him. And you see him kind of chase after him.
• 45:10
  Speaker 3: And you know, understand the whole weaving of this story,
• 45:13
  Speaker 3: but it's a really, you know, being around that guy, which,
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: you know, talk about the subjects in this animal world,
• 45:19
  Speaker 3: you know, law enforcement.
• 45:21
  Speaker 2: This guy sleeps with a gun every night and gets
• 45:23
  Speaker 2: literally orgasmic with the thought of this guy coming to
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: his house.
• 45:27
  Speaker 3: It's like a hideaway house.
• 45:28
  Speaker 2: The guy that he put in prison for 100 years
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: that got out. He literally waits, and you'll see a
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: line in the show that it's kind of unbelievable what
• 45:35
  Speaker 2: he says about that.
• 45:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but just, you know, he lives in this kind of,
• 45:38
  Speaker 3: we went to go see him, he lives in this
• 45:40
  Speaker 3: kind of very country part of West Virginia. He's good
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: with guns. Good with guns. He would brag about all
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: the bullets you can find left over from the Civil
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: War in his backyard. He was very good with a gun.
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: We did a lot of shooting with him. He was
• 46:04
  Speaker 3: just a really at the time very generous with his
• 46:08
  Speaker 3: time wanting to tell his story. But you know clearly
• 46:12
  Speaker 3: killed a lot of people and would make some very
• 46:15
  Speaker 3: soft references to, to that. That would be very unnerving,
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: you know, like, yeah, you're really great with, I've never
• 46:21
  Speaker 3: shot a gun. He's, I don't have anything against it,
• 46:23
  Speaker 3: but I've never shot a gun. And I would talk
• 46:24
  Speaker 3: to him about it. I'm interested in it. And he'd
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: be like, yeah, I've had to use it a lot,
• 46:28
  Speaker 3: you know, more than I'd like to admit. So, you know,
• 46:33
  Speaker 3: you're in these, these places.
• 46:34
  Speaker 2: It's, it's, it's, But what's so peculiar about this guy,
• 46:37
  Speaker 2: his name is Larry Loveless. He was a DEA agent
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: in Florida back in those days. He put this guy
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: in prison. This guy was bringing a lot of drugs
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: from– he was Cuban and you'll see it in episode two.
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: But he really just doesn't understand how the guy got
• 46:55
  Speaker 2: out of prison. And the fact that the very guy
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: that put him in prison wouldn't know that, that they–
• 46:59
  Speaker 2: like whoever the powers that be that got him out
• 47:02
  Speaker 2: of prison after 12 years– You would think he would know,
• 47:05
  Speaker 2: you know, but he's still to this day worried about retaliation.
• 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. It was at the time of
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: the Cuban Bay of Pigs, you know, invasion, that kind
• 47:23
  Speaker 3: of era. And he was responsible for taking care of
• 47:26
  Speaker 3: all these kind of Cuban exiles. During that time, he
• 47:30
  Speaker 3: was being the one that was kind of going house
• 47:32
  Speaker 3: to house and giving people checks. So he had this
• 47:35
  Speaker 3: kind of very interesting network of people and had this
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: incredible access. And so what has been insinuated is that,
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: you know, his dad had these relationships and knew where
• 47:45
  Speaker 3: everyone was and knew all these people and had information
• 47:48
  Speaker 3: that was useful to the government at the time. That's
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: the idea. Gave information. No surprise.
• 47:53
  Speaker 2: Or he helped bring down the real Pablo Escobar. Or
• 47:56
  Speaker 2: he knew a big drug lord that the government wanted,
• 47:59
  Speaker 2: and they made a deal.
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: Who knows?
• 48:00
  Speaker 2: But it could have been. There's lots of theories.
• 48:02
  Speaker 3: Quite an injustice, though. Like, even this guy, you know,
• 48:05
  Speaker 3: we filmed 200 people over how long? 15 years? Really,
• 48:10
  Speaker 3: the last six was more intense.
• 48:12
  Speaker 2: More than 200 people.
• 48:13
  Speaker 3: And you never get everybody in. And I remember meeting
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: this guy, Tony Pascaro. Remember him?
• 48:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: He was the, this guy was part of, he flew
• 48:23
  Speaker 3: planes for drugs. You know, he got busted with like 600,000,
• 48:27
  Speaker 3: you know, pounds of weed at the time. He served
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: the single largest sentence for a marijuana smuggling crime. 40 years.
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: 40 years. Got out maybe five years ago. And could
• 48:40
  Speaker 3: you imagine coming out of prison for the longest sentence
• 48:42
  Speaker 3: and then going to Miami and you see weed stores everywhere?
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 48:47
  Speaker 3: You're fucking– life's over.
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: You see these weed stores.
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: It's like insane to me.
• 48:51
  Speaker 2: That's fucked up.
• 48:52
  Speaker 3: But that was at a time– look, Pablo Escobar– like
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: there were people around Pablo Escobar that got indicted that
• 48:56
  Speaker 3: were trafficking ivory horns and stuff. Like it was very–
• 49:00
  Speaker 3: one degree of separation for like wildlife crime and drugs
• 49:03
  Speaker 3: in that era.
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: Why do you think there's that connection? Easy.
• 49:06
  Speaker 3: Concealment.
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: Concealment.
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: I mean look, I don't want to– I think there's
• 49:12
  Speaker 2: been connections, you know, like you can put cocaine inside
• 49:14
  Speaker 2: of a boa constrictor who's going to open a box
• 49:17
  Speaker 2: at customs or, you know, Fish and Wildlife Service and
• 49:20
  Speaker 2: look inside the boa constrictor. So there's some pretty ingenious
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: ways to bring it.
• 49:23
  Speaker 1: Meaning you put it in their stomach?
• 49:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like you either force feed the boa constrictor, like
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: you put them in those balloons, you put cocaine.
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: In, or you even— And then you have to cut
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: them open to get your cocaine?
• 49:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you cut them open and get your cocaine. But
• 49:36
  Speaker 2: even more— I remember in New York when the fish
• 49:37
  Speaker 2: markets used to put drugs— You speak so casually about that,
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: by the way. But fish markets used to put the
• 49:41
  Speaker 2: drugs in fish in the fish markets in New York.
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, liquid cocaine, yeah.
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because no one wants to handle the fish and
• 49:48
  Speaker 2: open up the fish, and they'd shove all the drugs
• 49:49
  Speaker 2: into the fish, so— You know, like smelly, dangerous animals
• 49:53
  Speaker 2: are a good cover for drugs.
• 49:55
  Speaker 3: Or even more simply, you know, trafficking wildlife, there was
• 50:00
  Speaker 3: a legal version of that. So what they would do
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: is take the crates and they'd pack them and they'd
• 50:04
  Speaker 3: put the drugs at the bottom and they'd put, you know,
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: another layer of animals and they'd mix in some, you know,
• 50:10
  Speaker 3: lookalike animals that were really rare but looked like the
• 50:13
  Speaker 3: common animal. So they'd mix them together. And then they'd
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: put something like, you know, spitting cobras up the top.
• 50:18
  Speaker 3: No one was reaching into the crate. when there was
• 50:20
  Speaker 3: these very dangerous animals. So that's how they kind of got,
• 50:24
  Speaker 3: they were able to prey on the lack of resources
• 50:27
  Speaker 3: at these kind of major ports of entry and realized
• 50:31
  Speaker 3: that Fish and Wildlife didn't really have any resources at
• 50:34
  Speaker 3: the time. They had limited wildlife inspectors. They had to
• 50:37
  Speaker 3: go through these volumes, volumes of crates, and they played
• 50:40
  Speaker 3: these games.
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: Many Komodo dragons that made it into this country came
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: in illegally in a crate, And they would just put
• 50:47
  Speaker 2: a little Komodo dragon in with some other monitor lizards.
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: And the inspectors couldn't tell the difference. And they'd go through.
• 50:53
  Speaker 2: And the Komodo dragon that bit Sharon Stone's husband at
• 50:58
  Speaker 2: the Los Angeles Zoo was one of those Komodo dragons.
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: So it was somebody's private collection and then they got
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: released at the zoo?
• 51:04
  Speaker 2: No, it was in a sting that's in our show
• 51:06
  Speaker 2: where they were bringing in illegal animals coming from a
• 51:10
  Speaker 2: guy in Malaysia who's sort of the Pablo Escobar, the
• 51:13
  Speaker 2: kingpin globally of all the reptile animal trade. A guy
• 51:16
  Speaker 2: that we finally accessed after COVID who– his name is
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: Anson Wong and he was sort of the bad guy
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: number one in the world for reptile and animal smuggling.
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: And so he was sending– Well, he did the longest
• 51:31
  Speaker 2: sentence in the US for wildlife crime ever at the
• 51:34
  Speaker 2: time in the 90s. He was busted in Mexico. But–
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: And then brought, extradited into the U.S. But he was
• 51:40
  Speaker 2: bringing in Komodo dragons and really rare reptiles. And the
• 51:43
  Speaker 2: zoos were the beneficiary of those reptiles once they were confiscated.
• 51:47
  Speaker 2: So the L.A. Zoo, San Diego Zoo, Bronx Zoo, a
• 51:49
  Speaker 2: lot of these animals came from reptile smugglers. Wow.
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: Very much the origins of collections.
• 51:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah. For zoos.
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: And I would also imagine the kind of people that
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: are really into reptiles probably also do drugs. So they
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: probably know a lot of people in that world.
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like a cross-section.
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: You're into death metal. You've got a python.
• 52:09
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of inked guys. There's a lot of, like,
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: goth guys into hot snakes, which are the venomous. A
• 52:17
  Speaker 2: lot of bikers.
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: Hot snakes.
• 52:19
  Speaker 2: Hot snakes.
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: That's what they call them?
• 52:21
  Speaker 2: Hot snakes.
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: The kind that can kill you.
• 52:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they're called hot snakes.
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: Interesting.
• 52:25
  Speaker 2: But, yeah, a lot of badass guys. And there was
• 52:28
  Speaker 2: definitely drugs. Listen, I did drugs in my life.
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: No way.
• 52:31
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: Come on. I'll go on.
• 52:35
  Speaker 2: I've done everything. I had nightclubs in New York City
• 52:38
  Speaker 2: for many years, Joe. I'm like, you know, embalmed. It's
• 52:43
  Speaker 2: made me live longer.
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: Maybe that's what saved you when you got bit by
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: the rattlesnake. Probably. But you got to think that the
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: type of people that are going to be even interested
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: in having a snake as a pet, that's a very
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: unusual person. I like snakes.
• 52:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: I don't know.
• 52:58
  Speaker 2: Come on. You know people that have snakes. Kids have
• 53:01
  Speaker 2: ball pythons. You've got kids. They like a baby– a
• 53:03
  Speaker 2: ball python. They're clean. You don't have to feed it
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: every day like a rabbit or a dog. You can
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: go on vacation, leave your ball python. They're a good pet,
• 53:13
  Speaker 2: a lot of snakes.
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: I don't think of them as a pet. I think
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: of them as a monster that you feed that allows
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: you– it's not big enough to eat you. So it
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: allows you to feed it. And then you have to
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: keep it in this box, which is kind of weird.
• 53:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, that's why I like tortoises. You don't have
• 53:29
  Speaker 2: to keep them in a cage or a box.
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: Because does a snake experience discomfort because they're in a terrarium?
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: Listen, there's a lot of myth out there that, oh,
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: snakes can live in a little teeny, like, sweater box
• 53:42
  Speaker 2: or a shoe box. And you can put them in
• 53:43
  Speaker 2: racks like you see in snake stores and snake breeders.
• 53:46
  Speaker 3: Like a rack of shoes.
• 53:47
  Speaker 2: The truth is real snakes in the wild do not
• 53:50
  Speaker 2: live in little boxes. They may. go underground at a
• 53:53
  Speaker 2: certain time of year and hibernate. But they come out
• 53:56
  Speaker 2: and they hang out like us and they move around.
• 53:59
  Speaker 2: And most snakes do not live in a little teeny box.
• 54:02
  Speaker 2: But yes, they can survive in a box. But there's
• 54:04
  Speaker 2: all different kinds of snakes. There's racer snakes and indigo
• 54:07
  Speaker 2: snakes and snakes that need to move fast and go places.
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: And then there's some snakes like a ball python that
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: can be in a more confined space. But you can't generalize.
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: But generally, like when people keep them as pets, they
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: keep them in some kind of an aquarium, right?
• 54:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and they should give them more space. They should
• 54:23
  Speaker 2: absolutely give them more space. I mean part of what
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: we're trying to do in this show is try to
• 54:27
  Speaker 2: tell people, be responsible. Don't treat reptiles like disposable pets,
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: like a toy that you break one week and then
• 54:33
  Speaker 2: you buy another one and you break it and the
• 54:35
  Speaker 2: parents buy another one. They're living creatures. The death toll
• 54:39
  Speaker 2: when you import these animals is amazing. I mean it's
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: so much mortality. And we don't talk about mortality, whether
• 54:45
  Speaker 2: it's zoos or people bringing in these reptiles or even
• 54:48
  Speaker 2: myself over the years. You asked me what happened to
• 54:50
  Speaker 2: that snake. Probably died. Probably was flushed down the toilet
• 54:53
  Speaker 2: by someone's mom, you know. You know, like baby green
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: turtles that you had as a kid, like what happened
• 54:58
  Speaker 2: to most of those.
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: How long do snakes live? Like, how long does a
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: python live? This episode is brought to you by Visible.
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• 55:58
  Speaker 2: So the longest lived animal, terrestrial animal on the planet
• 56:01
  Speaker 2: is a giant tortoise. They can live almost 200 years.
• 56:04
  Speaker 2: I have tortoises that are over 100 years old.
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: What about snakes?
• 56:07
  Speaker 2: Snakes generally– most snakes don't live more than 30 to
• 56:10
  Speaker 2: 40 years. But there are a few that might– lizards
• 56:12
  Speaker 2: can live 70 years. Some of the big land iguanas
• 56:15
  Speaker 2: can live a long time.
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: Those like ones in Florida? They can live 70 years?
• 56:20
  Speaker 2: I don't know about green iguanas, but there are some
• 56:22
  Speaker 2: that can live 50 to 70 years, some of the
• 56:24
  Speaker 2: big lizards. Tortoises live the longest. Some crocodilians can live
• 56:28
  Speaker 2: a really long time. Snakes live the least– The lesser
• 56:32
  Speaker 2: time compared to most of the other reptiles.
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: That was another thing that they found in Florida in
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: the Everglades. They found Nile crocodiles. And they think that
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: they might have a breeding population. There's some suspicion. But
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: it's basically from people having them as pets.
• 56:48
  Speaker 2: I've swam with Nile crocodiles. That's no joke.
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: Why did you do that?
• 56:52
  Speaker 2: I was in Madagascar. They have a form of Nile
• 56:54
  Speaker 2: crocodile in Madagascar. They don't get quite as big as
• 56:57
  Speaker 2: the mainland crocs. And I was looking for turtles. And
• 56:59
  Speaker 2: then I saw the crocs. Nile crocodiles and, as you know,
• 57:03
  Speaker 2: saltwater crocodiles are the two crocs that really kill the
• 57:06
  Speaker 2: most people. You know, people come and wash their clothing
• 57:09
  Speaker 2: next to the shore. You know, the croc comes up
• 57:11
  Speaker 2: and grabs them. You know, you really got to watch
• 57:13
  Speaker 2: it with Nile crocodiles. So if they're in Florida, they're
• 57:16
  Speaker 2: much bigger than American crocodiles.
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they have a shoot-on-sight order for them, or they
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: did at least in this article that I was reading.
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: It was from a while back.
• 57:23
  Speaker 2: I didn't know that.
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 57:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they found a couple of them. Yeah.
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I know they've captured at least two of them.
• 57:28
  Speaker 2: Well, the biggest reptile in the world in terms of weight,
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: back to our size conversation, is a saltwater crocodile. And
• 57:35
  Speaker 2: it's neck and neck with a leatherback sea turtle. They're
• 57:38
  Speaker 2: both over 2,000 pounds. So you imagine a 2,000- Wow.
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: A leatherback sea turtle is that big?
• 57:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 57:44
  Speaker 1: I had no idea. That's crazy. I would have never
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: imagined that a sea turtle would have the same body
• 57:50
  Speaker 1: weight as a saltwater crocodile.
• 57:52
  Speaker 2: They're neck and neck, over 2,000 pounds, both of them.
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: That's a big, big turtle.
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: Well, I know that there's legend, right, about Congo crocodiles
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: and that there's crocodiles that people had supposedly seen back
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: in the early 1900s and the 1800s that they thought
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: were 40 feet long. And the thing about crocodiles is
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: I don't think they die of old age. I think
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: they just stay alive until they die.
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: I want to be a crocodile.
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: And they keep getting bigger. That's the other thing. Like
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: depending upon their food source and how much– I think
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: in captivity they wind up dying, but I think there's
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: some thoughts as to why that happens, how they're actually eating,
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: whether they're getting fed, what's the difference between the way
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: they live in the wild. But there's some accounts from
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: back in the day where these guys were on a
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: boat and the crocodile was bigger than the boat they
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: were on.
• 58:52
  Speaker 2: I mean, the thing about crocodilians, and I think there's
• 58:55
  Speaker 2: about 27 different types, but Once they get to a
• 58:58
  Speaker 2: certain size, you know, they're vulnerable when they're little, right,
• 59:01
  Speaker 2: like birds and fish and things can kill them and
• 59:03
  Speaker 2: eat them. But once they get a certain size, you know,
• 59:05
  Speaker 2: like you're saying, they're pretty much invincible. Nothing can kill them,
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: you know.
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: And some of them develop a taste for people.
• 59:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah just movement in the water and just because they're
• 59:16
  Speaker 2: an ambush predator 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 preying on people. And while he was there, someone
• 59:35
  Speaker 2: got snatched up while he was in camp. He said
• 59:39
  Speaker 2: everybody there had like missing a leg, bite taken out
• 59:41
  Speaker 2: of their calf.
• 59:42
  Speaker 1: Everybody was all fucked up.
• 59:43
  Speaker 2: I was good friends with Peter Beard and he would
• 59:46
  Speaker 2: go to Kenya and Ethiopia and call crocodiles. And there's
• 59:49
  Speaker 2: a really incredible photo of him inside a crocodile that
• 59:53
  Speaker 2: they killed. And he's like writing in his journal. But
• 59:56
  Speaker 2: half his body is in a huge Nile crocodile. But
• 59:59
  Speaker 2: he would go and cull them for probably a similar reason.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: As you just said. Once they start targeting villagers, once
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: they find that there's a place that they can hunt
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: and get regular food, they're there all the time. They're
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: so sneaky that what they developed was these people had
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: put posts into the ground in the water. So into
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: the– the area where they would wash their clothes and
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: gather food, they essentially built like some sort of a
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 1: containment area where the Crocs couldn't get through these poles.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: So what the Crocs did was go around the poles
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: and into the water. So they had figured it out.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 2: Smart. That's creepy.
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: That's creepy. Well, they, they, they realize like, Oh, the
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: people go like, they must've been watching and realizing, Oh,
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: the people go into this area. So I got to
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: go on the ground at night and then I'll go
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: back into the water and then I'll catch these fuckers slipping.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 2: And they're patient. They can wait years. They're intelligent. They
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 2: can wait a long time before they eat anything.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they don't have to eat for a year, right?
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: A big croc, yeah. Are they intelligent?
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, they're one of the few reptiles that actually
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 2: really does defend their babies. Like a snake. A snake
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 2: doesn't do that. Yeah, yeah. Wow, yeah. Wow. Wow. That's amazing.
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: What a dinosaur, man.
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 2: What is that, a saltwater or a Nile? Saltwater.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 3: It says sell water crocodiles.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: Is this in Australia? In Australia.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 2: Wow. Wow.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: Those things ran the whole world at one point in time.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 1: It's just weird there's still creatures like that roaming around,
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: you know? That's a throwback.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 2: And there's some really endangered crocodiles. And you'll see in
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 2: our show, I think even episode one, there's the zoo
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 2: curator that says, oh, we bought a few Philippine crocodiles
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 2: from this dealer. I think it's in the first episode.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 2: And Philippine crocodiles today are super endangered. There's still some really,
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 2: really rare ones. Not saltwater crocs and not Nile crocs,
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: but there's some really endangered ones.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: Is that a thrill for these guys that they get
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: something that they're not supposed to have as a part
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: of it?
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 2: 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 2: And then there's a– I get excited by seeing something
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 2: I never saw before. I'm like a kid in a
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 2: candy store. No, but when I see a cool like
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 2: pink landing one, I've never seen one in the wild
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: or anywhere. And I've been to the Galapagos. So, yeah,
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 2: it's a thrill. It's a high.
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: But to put in your backpack and take it home
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 3: is probably not encouraged.
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 2: I'd stuff it down my pants. No, I'd be too scared.
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: Well, you wouldn't want to do that, right? Well, ever
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: since– In its natural habitat.
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 2: No, I wouldn't want to. You know, my mother– It
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 2: gave me a good moral compass with that. She used
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 2: to say to me when I was a kid, don't
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: play God, Eric. I was keeping things and she'd tell me,
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 2: you got to let it go at the end of
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 2: the summer. So I was lucky to have that because
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 2: a lot of people didn't have that mother and I did.
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 2: So I kind of– against my better judgment when I
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 2: was a kid, I did bad things that my mother
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 2: didn't like. But later in life, she was right. Keep
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 2: it in the wild.
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Well, they're fascinating in the wild. It's
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: just like I do appreciate them in the wild. I
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: just– I'm perplexed as to why people would– They would
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: have their life revolve around taking care of reptiles. It
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: just seems really odd.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: Well, people get into it and they get addicted and
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 2: they buy more and more and more and then they
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 2: get divorced and they get rid of them all or
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 2: they get burned out on it because after a while,
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 2: it's a lot of work taking care of a lot
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 2: of reptiles. So it's kind of like people get really
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 2: into it and sometimes it's hard to sustain it.
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 3: But more trade. than the other collectible culture.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 2: Trade?
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: It's more trade, more, you know.
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: Like, I'll give you a crocodile.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: I sell trade, yeah.
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: What's going on here, Jamie?
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 3: Bear gallbladder.
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 2: I've never seen this footage.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: That's a shark.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: So it's stealing a shark that a guy caught?
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah. That must be American crocodile, right?
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: It's Australia? Okay, a lot of sharks in Australia. That
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: makes sense.
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 2: I don't know. Wow.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: So it just stole this guy's fish. Okay.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 3: What's been your interest in wildlife?
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: Well, man, I'm fascinated by wildlife. I'm just much more
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: interested in mammals for whatever reason. I mean, I'm interested
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: in these things. I found them fascinating, but they're not
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: as compelling to me for whatever reason. And I always
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: wondered what that is. Like, you know, I did this
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: thing on social media once, the social media hierarchy of
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: dead animals. And I said, like, fish, fillets of fish.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: No one cares. Dead fish. people care a little more,
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: but not much. Dead turkey, not that big a deal.
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: Dead deer, okay, now we're getting weird. You know, dead bear,
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: now people get mad at you. It's interesting.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 2: You know, I went to this thing called Safari Club
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 2: International in Vegas. It's the biggest trophy hunting, you know, convention.
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 2: And I was filming undercover and I started out, you know, asking, yeah,
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 2: can you taxidermy this and that? And then I kind of,
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 2: you know, raised the bar and I said, you know,
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 2: can you taxidermy a chimp for me? And they're like, yeah,
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 2: we can do a chimp. So what about an orangutan? Yeah,
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 2: we could do an orangutan. Anyway, and I was going
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 2: around to different taxidermists in this giant convention. They had
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 2: elephants and lions and all kinds of stuff. Eventually I
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 2: asked them if you could taxidermy a human, you know,
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 2: and then suddenly I noticed all these guys starting to
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 2: follow me, you know, and there was a big NRA
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 2: booth and a lot of people with guns. And eventually
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 2: they surrounded me and I was trying to get rid
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 2: of my you know, camera gear and throw it in
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 2: the garbage and stuff. But it was interesting where the
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 2: line is and what you're allowed to.
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: Well, it sounds like you're a fucking psychopath. You're asking
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: if you could taxidermy a human. You don't think that's,
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: they probably thought for sure you're a fed or someone
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: or a joke undercover. I mean, obviously it was.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 2: Kind of, it was kind of a joke, but they
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 2: literally started putting eyeballs on me and say, who the
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 2: fuck is this guy?
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but they were– Hey, how do you take a
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: fucking human and turn it into a statue?
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 2: People have shrunken heads. I know people with shrunken heads actually.
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 2: They collect them. But no, it's pretty macabre. But the
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 2: fact that they would taxidermy a chimp and an orangutan
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 2: and a gorilla.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: So who are these people that said they would do that?
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 2: They're just– Just taxidermists that are in this convention that taxidermy.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: Your big game. So someone would have to smuggle it
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: back to.
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 2: A lot of what happens is– and a lot of
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 2: the– when zoo animals die, sometimes they send it to people,
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 2: that taxidermy. So I know people that get a lot
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 2: of zoo carcasses and they– taxidermy. I've seen it. But yeah.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: So when a zoo has the option to sell the
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: dead body and then someone turns it into a taxidermy statue?
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 2: But it's gone on for a long time. Nothing against zoos,
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 2: but that was one way to get really unusual animals.
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 2: Like I have a friend, I mean a guy I
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 2: know that's taxidermied a number of Komodo dragons that came
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 2: from zoos because people don't have Komodo dragons in the
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 2: private sector.
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: Well, I guess no harm, no foul if it's already dead.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 2: But I guess the point you're making, I'm just sort
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 2: of saying it's interesting how fish, even though certain fish
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 2: can live over 100 years, certain rock fish and longevity,
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 2: that's incredible. We don't think of them. In the same
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 2: way as we think of these higher. Right.
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: We don't care at all.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 2: We don't care at all. Yeah.
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 1: We don't seem to, you know, going fishing is much
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: more common than going hunting.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 2: Now that I said what I just said, you know,
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 2: maybe that's a little twisted. What do you mean? About
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 2: taxidermy a person.
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: Well, it is twisted.
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: You asked him.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 2: I think I said that out of context. Whoa.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: You could buy this.
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: It says it's real.
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 4: I was trying to look and see if it was fake.
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 2: What?
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: How is that legal?
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 2: It's a document.
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 3: I'm not sure on the screen.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: I mean, it wasn't hard to find.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 3: There's our friend.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: It's only three grand?
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 2: I mean, hmm. Riverside. Yeah, the guy that has the taxidermy.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 3: He's got a funny name for his museum.
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he's got the Komodo dragon, but now that I
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 2: think about it, he had a number of taxidermied gorillas.
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 2: Now that I think about it.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: Now, do they say where they got this from? Does
• 1:08:08
  Speaker 1: it say how they acquired this body? That document might.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 3: They have to pay for the document.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 2: Oh.
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: That's fucking weird, man.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 3: But to your point about this kind of societal reaction
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 3: to wildlife issues, I think 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 scarcity. But that is all, in this case, leading
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 3: more to destructive extinction problems, you know? Very few animals,
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 3: more and more animals are threatened with extinction than ever before,
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 3: particularly reptiles. Now one out of every five are threatened
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 3: with extinction. And it's growing at an accelerated rate, mainly
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 3: because of things that we explore in our show.
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 2: Pet trade.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 3: Exotic you know smuggling all of that um but you
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 3: know to get people to care about things that can
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 3: harm you you know believe it or not you know
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 3: we have challenges with you know subject matter in the
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 3: show that you know we'll get notes back and and
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 3: it's it's it's it might be too hardcore for people
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 3: to see um because it's a brutal volume-based industry. And
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 3: there's a lot of spoiling.
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 2: We try not to show the bludgeoning and the cruelty
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 2: of the animals. We try to avoid that with Tiger
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 2: King and Jim Crazy in this show because people turn
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 2: the channel. So we try, if we wanted to, we
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 2: could do that.
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 3: But we're talking more about the point of like, how
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 3: do people respond to something through an interest? And what
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 3: turns them on, what turns them off? And what is
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 3: it about us that, has this connection to certain– why
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 3: are there turtle people? Why do you like turtles?
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 2: Why do you think people vilify reptiles? You like mammals.
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 2: You said why do you think people aren't so keen
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 2: on reptiles?
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: Well, they're not like us, right? They're a different sort
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: of predatory lizard thing and I think in our mind
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: they harken back to the days where these things were
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: a real problem for human beings. I think crocodiles and alligators,
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 1: like they enact– there's a visceral reaction. That people have
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: to them that I think is warranted. It's genetic probably.
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 2: But you don't think– because we like to talk about
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 2: the warm, cuddly, charismatic animals like a panda bear or
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 2: a koala bear or a.
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: Well, that I think is anthropomorphism that's done by Disney movies.
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 3: Of course it is.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Because people in the pioneer days, they didn't think
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: of bears that way.
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 2: But I would argue that a bear, a Kodiak bear,
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 2: a polar bear, a lion– It's a lot more concerning
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 2: than most reptiles. So why we vilify reptiles and have
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 2: that feeling about them is I think maybe more as
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 2: to what you said about the anthropomorphism. You can't– a
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 2: snake has no legs like us. They don't breastfeed their
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 2: babies like a bear or like a mammal. They have
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 2: a forked tongue. They have no ears. A snake is weird.
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 2: They're nothing like us. So maybe we feel so removed
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 2: from them and they're scary. even though they're really not
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 2: that scary.
• 1:11:15
  Speaker 3: We talked to this guy. The Disney thing is so
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 3: interesting to me because that was actually something that I
• 1:11:21
  Speaker 3: was kind of deep on. This guy, Carl Safina, is
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 3: he more of an anthropologist or is he more of
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 3: a behaviorist?
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 2: He's like an animal behaviorist and sort of more in
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 2: the groove of animal welfare and animal behavior.
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but this sort of creation of anthropomorphic characters through Disney,
• 1:11:39
  Speaker 3: if you track this sort of correlation to You know,
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 3: entry points into, you know, mainstream culture. You know, it's
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 3: you know, it's they're easy. They're great devices for human emotion.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 3: But then there's this more perverse side of, you know,
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 3: it creates these demands for pets. You know, Zootopia, we
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 3: would snakes like Zootopia had a snake as a central
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 3: character and it's going crazy in China.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 2: Well, that's a pop culture thing.
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 3: So these well-intentioned things and these ways in which we
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 3: portray animals.
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 2: Finding Nemo, everyone wanted a clownfish. Harry Potter, everyone wanted
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 2: a baby owl. I was in Asia after Harry Potter.
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 2: I was like, why are there like 50 baby owls
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 2: in this market? And they were Harry Potter birds. That's
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 2: a byproduct of pop culture, right? Jurassic Park, everyone wants
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 2: their little bearded dragon because they want a miniature dinosaur.
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 2: So who knows what's going to happen after Monsters of God.
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 2: They're all going to want snakes again.
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 3: Hopefully you have some reverence.
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: Did Tiger King open up the door for that, you think?
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 1: Did people look at that and find it appealing? Like,
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: that's what I've been missing. I've been looking for my niche.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 3: I think it gave the opposite of people maybe questioning.
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 2: It's like deliverance. Tiger King, the way you're talking.
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 3: Maybe question when you take a photo with a baby
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 3: tiger at a roadside zoo. I think that was more.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 2: more you.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 3: Know because it was so big in pop culture.
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 2: I want to get me a tiger after tiger came
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 2: well it gave me a little baby tiger okay if.
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 3: We're gonna play into this lane it's like look everyone
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 3: was shocked that you could buy you could basically get
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 3: one for free.
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: Well we've talked about it before on the podcast but
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: there's more tigers in captivity in texas than all the
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: wild of the world yeah yeah in people's private collections.
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah i think religion also has a is it plays
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 2: a big role in the vilification of reptiles particularly snakes
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 2: you know like Something about the Adam Eve complex and,
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 2: you know, the snake is bad.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 3: Serpent. The serpent, yeah. More people dream of snakes in
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 3: this country than any other thing combined. It's mostly negative dreams.
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 2: Not sharks? Snakes? Like nightmare snake dreams?
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 3: Google did this sort of like infographic by country.
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 3: You know, what is the most common dream that people have?
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 3: And it's usually about snakes, which is remarkable.
• 1:13:57
  Speaker 2: I have like someone chasing me or panic dreams. I
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 2: never have a nightmare about a snake.
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: Well, you never hear of like a phobia directly attached
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: to sharks. You know, you have aphidiophobia, which is a
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: fear of snakes, but you don't hear of a sharkophobia.
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 2: Or arachnophobia.
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: Right. Spiders. Yeah.
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 2: People are freaked out by spiders.
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. I think that's a genetic thing. I think
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: there's a memory. I think someone either was bit or
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: knows someone that was bit and that information got transferred
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: down to their offspring. I'm pretty sure of that because
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: hosting Fear Factor, I got to see people with legitimate
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: arachnophobia and legitimate aphidiophobia where it is like nothing else.
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: Like they see it and they fucking freak out. Like
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: it's irrational. It's like everything in their body saying you
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: got to get out of here right now.
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 1: And it's not like everybody else. Everybody else who looked
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: at it was like, oh, yikes. And then a few people,
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: they had that genetic memory, I think.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 2: That's just a theory. I agree. And it's cultural. It's cultural.
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 2: Like we have a lot of Mexican guys that work
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 2: with us. And every year we do a snake course
• 1:15:02
  Speaker 2: when the snakes start coming out in the spring. And
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 2: I show them how to. put a rattlesnake in there.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 3: It's the only staff meeting he ever does.
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. It's the only thing I care about. But
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 2: I don't want people killing snakes that work for me.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 2: And I'm like, hey, you don't have to kill the snake.
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 2: And they're so used to taking the machete and cutting
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 2: the snake's head off. And we don't do that. We
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 2: move the rattlesnake and we put it somewhere else. We
• 1:15:20
  Speaker 2: move the gopher snake, the king snake. But they just
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 2: have this, you know, some of them, as you were
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 2: just saying, just can't wrap their head around even touching
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 2: the snake because they just, it's instilled in them, you know,
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 2: from their parents or from whatever their childhood that they're
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 2: scared of snakes. It's hard to change.
• 1:15:36
  Speaker 3: But 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, their reaction and they're not fearful. Like
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 3: it's partially because of the influence of the work that
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 3: I'm doing. But, you know, I watch them interact. I
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 3: 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.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 3: You know, a lot. And you're right. Probably some genetic
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 3: kind of.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: Definitely exposure, too. I mean, if you grow up and
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: you're used to being around different kinds of animals and
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: the wildlife and different things, you'll probably be more comfortable
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: around unique animals. If you're a person who grows up
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: entirely in the city.
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 2: Did your parents like animals? Did they?
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: Dogs. We had dogs and cats. Normal stuff.
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 2: I had a weird mom. I had a weird mom
• 1:16:24
  Speaker 2: that liked snakes.
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 1: And so that played a role in it. Oh, okay.
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 2: And liked salamanders.
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: Oh, that explains a lot.
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 2: And she would take me to pet stores and actually
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 2: steal the snakes and salamanders and steal them and put
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 2: them in her purse. Oh, God. And then take me
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 2: out into the woods and we'd let them go. So
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 2: that's the kind of mother. Oh, wow. Yeah, she didn't
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 2: like seeing them in cages. Wow. But she didn't mind kleptomania.
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 2: So I got good at stealing for a while.
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: It's an odd mom who's, like, really into snakes. That's
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: an odd mom.
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 2: No, she just wanted to free them. She didn't like
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 2: seeing them in cages.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: Oh, I understand.
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 2: In aquariums. Yeah.
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't grow up around any of that. I
• 1:16:59
  Speaker 1: didn't know anybody who had a snake as a pet.
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: Nothing I can remember.
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 3: Really?
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 2: In New Jersey?
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: Well, I was born in New Jersey, but I grew
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: up all over the place.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 2: Oh.
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: I lived in San Francisco until I was 11, and
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: I lived in Florida from 11 to 13. I actually
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: was around a lot of alligators during that time.
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 3: There it is.
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we were in Gainesville, and there was a place
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: called Lake Alice there that had a lot of alligators.
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: You'd see it all the time. When I was there,
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: one lady.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 2: Got her dog.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 3: I had a fairly impressionable age.
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: I was around them a lot. But they were weird.
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: They didn't do anything. They just laid on the shore.
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: You could see them and you could be fairly close.
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 1: Even though they could have clearly chased me and caught
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: me because they can run like 30 miles an hour, right?
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: They could have caught me if they wanted to. They didn't.
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 1: They weren't really interested in people. Apparently, they had plenty
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: of food. And they were– at that time, they were
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: actually endangered. So alligators, like they were telling people not
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: to feed them marshmallows because people would throw marshmallows on
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: the lake because you could watch the alligator come up
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: and eat the marshmallow. They like marshmallows. And they said, hey,
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: these are not good for alligators. They're super worried about
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: alligator diabetes or something. But they were concerned.
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 2: Alligator sugar rush.
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they were concerned about giving the alligator non-nutritious food,
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: which I thought was funny because they were saying that
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: they were endangered.
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 2: And it's amazing that in the 50s and 60s, they
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 2: were really endangered. It was hard to find an alligator.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 2: And when you think about that now.
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: It's hard to believe.
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 2: It's hard to believe. And how the Endangered Species Act
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 2: did help. bald eagles, birds of prey, because of DDT.
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 2: But it brought back alligators, and now alligators, like you
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 2: can't even imagine they were endangered. They're like ubiquitous in Florida.
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: Oh, they're everywhere. They literally say every pond has the
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 1: potential to have an alligator.
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 2: They're everywhere.
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 1: Everywhere you look. They move around. They're very overpopulated.
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 3: What's interesting about this work, in the show that spans
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 3: so much time, we had, which you shared in this curiosity,
• 1:18:59
  Speaker 3: but we had great access to all of these great
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 3: people in different industries. So you have heads of the zoo.
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 3: You have DOJ, DEA.
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 2: U.S.
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 3: Fish and Wildlife Service, the collectors, you know, the bigger suppliers,
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 3: and you have all aspects of this sort of industry.
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 3: And what the show became, you know, as we were
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 3: working through the edit, is this kind of, you know,
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 3: this real clear story of unintended consequences, which is the
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 3: more you enforce, you have great laws that happen, but
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 3: it triggers something else, and that triggers something else. And
• 1:19:34
  Speaker 3: you see this kind of time after time after time again.
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 3: And In some cases, it leads to some positive things
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 3: like ESA or the Dangerous Species Act, or you have
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 3: a pop culture event that drives sales of an animal
• 1:19:48
  Speaker 3: that's going to be poached out of extinction. So it's
• 1:19:53
  Speaker 3: a really interesting way of looking at this and analyzing
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 3: it in a way.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 2: What you realize, and you'll see, Joe, if you continue watching,
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 2: that the pathology behind everyone, the law enforcement, they're going
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 2: after their prize. Their big trophy is the bad guy.
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 2: The bad guy, the dealer, the smuggler is going after
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 2: the rarest reptile. The zoos got very competitive with reptile
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 2: houses in the 70s and 80s because they started realizing
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 2: they were very popular. One of the most popular things
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 2: in zoos are reptile houses. They wanted the Komodo dragon,
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 2: the rare reptile. So And the collector, guys like me
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 2: that really dig reptiles, wanted the pink Galapagos land iguana
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 2: that no one has, or the this, the unattainable. So
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 2: everyone kind of is going after each other. The reptile,
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 2: the feds are going after the bad guys. And it's
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 2: a similar pathology. And what you find out in the
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 2: end of the series is there's a scene where law
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 2: enforcement has something that you can't believe. And it's a
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 2: little like doing a film about cocaine cowboys, and the
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 2: law enforcement has a garage full of heroin and cocaine
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 2: that they're selling. So it's like it gets very gray,
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 2: and the psychology is similar.
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 3: The only difference between the prisoner and the guard are
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 3: the bars. That's the sort of kind of idea.
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: And you'll see there's no clear right and wrong, and
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 2: sometimes the laws don't work, so it's messy. And sometimes
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 2: there should be laws where there aren't laws. You know,
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 2: back to the marijuana analogy, like fucking marijuana. How twisted
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 2: is it that someone goes to prison for 40 years
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 2: of a plot and now you can go to a
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 2: weed shop every corner in Oklahoma, right? But it's a
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 2: very messy, complex story that was hard to weave together.
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 2: And I think it was the most challenging for us,
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 2: certainly more challenging than Tiger King.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 3: The most proud. I think it's really deep and it's
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 3: a good one.
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 2: And we lived.
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 3: And we lived for now.
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 1: You guys spend a lot of time on these.
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: This is one of the things that I found shocking
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: while you were just discussing this. You were saying it
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: was like six years.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 2: More.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 3: More.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: So when did you plant the seed?
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 2: Well, the seed was planted really in my head when
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 2: I read this book, The Lizard King, in 2008. And
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 2: I tried to buy the rights from this author, Brian Christie,
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 2: who wrote this incredible book, The Lizard King, in 2008.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 2: So that's almost 20 years ago. I didn't start filming
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 2: until 2014 with Josh Safdie. And that was the beginning.
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 2: But Tiger King and other things got in the way. So, yeah,
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 2: maybe six years if you were to 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 making many projects along this. Because you can't
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 3: do them all. It's a very unstructured way of working.
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 3: We don't have a. certain amount of shoot days. It's
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 3: kind of a flow. We like these longitudinal.
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 2: We shoot multiple projects at the same time.
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 3: You know, and we're lucky because a lot of our
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 3: worlds are in certain places. So, you know, it's one-stop shopping.
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 3: In Florida, there's a lot of interesting people, a lot
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 3: of colorful people that are, you know, are hitting some
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 3: of these themes that we're exploring in different works. So
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 3: I think, so we're able to kind of do that.
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 3: But the duration, the duration's great because, like, Sometimes constraints
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 3: are– no, I think it's great in some ways if
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 3: you're able to kind of balance other work because holding
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 3: out for access to a really important person might not
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 3: happen in the first go around but a year later
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 3: or two years later.
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: What is the common factor that you guys– is it
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 1: fucked up people like that you guys are looking for
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: when you decide what kind of documentaries you're making?
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 2: Not just– like that would be too superficial. There's too
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 2: many fucked up people out there, Joe.
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 1: But fucked up people in connection with wildlife is the
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: theme of the big three that you've got.
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 2: And people that have a story that's somewhere hidden in there.
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 2: So we cast a wide fucking net. Like we filmed
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 2: shark people and taxidermists and the guy that breeds the
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 2: most long-tailed cat monkeys for medical research where we got
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 2: COVID from. We're filming so many different subcultures of animal
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 2: people and other people. And then you sort of hone
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 2: in on something. And so the monkey mom thing became
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 2: chimp crazy. And we started seeing a story there. So
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 2: it's not like we just go out and just lock
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 2: into something and there's a story. We have to kind
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 2: of find it. And I would say this is not
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 2: a good recipe for people that want to make documentaries.
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 2: Like anyone starting out in life to try to make docs,
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 2: don't do what we do because it's not a good
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 2: way to get rich and it takes forever and you
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 2: may never have a story.
• 1:24:30
  Speaker 1: And so it's like– That's what I'm getting at. It's
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: like– We got.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 2: Lucky that Joe Exotic tried to kill Cullabascan while we
• 1:24:36
  Speaker 2: were filming. We got lucky in a sense that– and
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 2: we got lucky he didn't kill her. We got lucky
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 2: in a sense that Tanya kidnapped a chimpanzee. This is
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 2: not a recipe for success. We film, film, film. We
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 2: do a lot of shit that no one ever sees.
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: Joe Exotic DMs me all the time on Instagram.
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 3: Oh, still?
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 1: He wants to get out.
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 2: You know, there's a way maybe we can get him out.
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 2: By the way, I'll tell you after the show. I'll
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 2: tell you after the show.
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: Do you want him to get out?
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 2: You know, the government made a deal with him before
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 2: the trial. They said, well, you can do six years
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 2: or you're going to have a trial. Six years. He's
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 2: been in jail now for nine years or whatever it's been.
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 2: He would be out right now if he made that deal.
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 2: He thought he was going to get off. And I
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 2: was like, Joe, I was on the phone with him
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 2: every day at the time from prison. I said, take
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 2: the deal. I don't know. I'm not into throwing people
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 2: in prison and throwing away the key forever.
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 3: Tanya's in jail, too. You know?
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 2: We're good at that.
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 3: For perjury. I think she doesn't deserve to be there
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 3: for four years, you know, for perjury.
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 2: Well, she didn't need to kidnap another chimp. Yeah. We
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 2: tried to help her, but she didn't. She was our
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 2: own worst enemy. Anyway.
• 1:25:43
  Speaker 1: Well, these people are obsessed.
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 3: I think also what attracts the crime element is the
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 3: sentencing is low for wildlife trafficking, wildlife crimes.
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: But do they really consider that when they're getting involved? Like, oh,
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: no big deal. Only do four years. Do they really
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 1: think of that?
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 3: I think they keep going back to it. They keep
• 1:25:58
  Speaker 3: doing it.
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but I think that's because they're obsessed. They're trying
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: not to get caught. I don't think they're looking at
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: it and balancing out the low sentence rate and going, yeah,
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: this is a good thing to get involved in. Get
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: involved in heroin. It's a 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 like– I.
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 2: Think most of them– Jeremy, I think most of them
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 2: think they're going to get away with it or they're
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 2: smarter than the feds.
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 3: But they have this sort of worst case thinking about
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 3: if there was something to happen, it's eight months in
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 3: a camp.
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 2: A lot of them go to prison multiple times while
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 2: we were filming this show. During the filming, we were
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 2: shocked that one of the lead guys in our film
• 1:26:39
  Speaker 2: was under investigation, being indicted. He didn't tell us. And
• 1:26:43
  Speaker 2: then finally he said, guys, I'm going to prison. And
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 2: we don't cover it in the show because it was
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 2: just too much. But we were like, what? You've been
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 2: filming with us for two years and you're going to
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 2: prison now? And then he finally got out of prison.
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 2: We filmed him more and he's got an ankle brace.
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 2: And he'd been in prison five years before that or,
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 2: I don't know, eight years before that. So there's a
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 2: lot of.
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: What was he going to prison for?
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 2: This time for smuggling turtles that were going out to Asia,
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 2: three-stripe mud turtles.
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we're no longer bringing wildlife in to buy and collect.
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 3: It's actually coming out of our country into China.
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: Really?
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: What stuff are we exporting to China?
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 3: Well, a lot of it's, Eric, the one recently that happened.
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 2: I just took in a confiscation three weeks ago of
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 2: 300 three-toed box turtles that come out of the central
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 2: part of the U.S., Oklahoma, Missouri. And two weeks later,
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 2: a guy was busted coming into Mexico with turtles, and
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 2: I took those turtles from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 2: So animals are coming into the country, out of Mexico,
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 2: different countries, and then we're exporting now. which is new
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 2: in the last 10 years, a lot of native turtles
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 2: and reptiles and other wildlife to Southeast Asia and Europe.
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: And how are they getting there?
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 2: It's mostly air cargo carry-on. This particular confiscation three weeks ago,
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 2: they busted the guys with more box turtles in their
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 2: luggage once they got to Hong Kong and China. Like
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 2: I said, China, Taiwan— A lot of socks. Malaysia, Jakarta.
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 2: The reptile industry is enormous for now keeping them as
• 1:28:26
  Speaker 2: exotic pets. Enormous. In Asia, like the bird world, the
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 2: birds are called the cut flowers of the wildlife trade
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 2: in Asia because like we might have a bouquet or
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 2: a plant in our house. They have a bird cage
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 2: in Southeast Asia. And there's something like some insane statistic
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 2: about how many people have a bird in their house.
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 2: And when you go to the bird markets in Jakarta,
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 2: it's just surreal. Or in Thailand, there's one in Bangkok
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 2: called Chadachat Market, these huge animal markets, you know. We
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 2: talk about where COVID came from, but the scale of
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 2: these animal markets, bushmeat, wildlife, it's on a scale that's
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 2: beyond your imagination.
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: What are they selling?
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 2: They're selling reptiles. They're selling birds.
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: For meat?
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 2: No, no. These are for pets. Okay. Birds are ornamental
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 2: in your house. You have a songbird. You have an owl.
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 2: You have a whatever. You can't– there are people that.
• 1:29:18
  Speaker 1: Are– So they just have like a wildlife mall?
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 2: It's effectively like an enormous wildlife mall.
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: An outdoor mall.
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And in that– within that mall, there's also seafood
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 2: and then there's the reptiles and then there's the birds.
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 2: It's like messy. No wonder maybe COVID came from that.
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: COVID didn't come from that.
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 1:29:36
  Speaker 1: It came from a fucking lab.
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 2: I think you may be right. I have a friend.
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 2: Bless his heart. He's a good friend of mine. He
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 2: said it was a zoonotic disease. It didn't come from
• 1:29:43
  Speaker 2: a lab. But now I'm beginning to think it might
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 2: have come from a lab.
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: I think a lot of people were influenced to say
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: that it was a natural spillover. Because they didn't want
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: to admit that we were fucking around with gain-of-function research.
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 2: I think the evidence now shows that it may have
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 2: come true.
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty clearly. But also, it seems like if you
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 1: see these kind of lab, or excuse me, these markets,
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: you would say, what is this right here, Jeremy?
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 2: Chata Chata.
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 1: Chata Market.
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 2: Which one is this?
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: Oh, this is one of those markets?
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, Jakarta.
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 2: Oh, I've been to these markets in Jakarta, yeah.
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: And it's just a wildlife market. And so it's all pets.
• 1:30:15
  Speaker 1: So what is it about Asia that has such a
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: desire for animals?
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 2: Those are the Harry Potter owls. That footage is when– yeah.
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 3: Like status, wealth, same things that were driving the U.S.
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: But it's more common in Asia?
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 2: Well, there's– in China alone, there's over a billion people.
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 2: So there's just more people. And just the scale and
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 2: the size of Asia and China– is much bigger than
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 2: the U.S. and Europe combined. So they have a bigger market.
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 2: And the climate's pretty good to keep exotic animals like Florida.
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 2: So it's just, it's like, you know, on steroids, the
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 2: collectors in Asia.
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 3: And why I think that, I think that the industry,
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 3: the trafficking numbers so underreported is, you know, you have this,
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 3: there's like one person, one person that is responsible for
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 3: coordinating in the U.S. One person, she's in Delaware, who's
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 3: responsible for coordinating with U.S. Fish and Wildlife to deal
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 3: with these placements of confiscated wildlife, if they're able to
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 3: even detect them. I think it was something like 10,000
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 3: animals in the last few years were coming through LAX,
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 3: basically the torrents, the border, and LAX. One little sample market.
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 2: It's very understaffed, undermanned, to be able to manage all
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 2: the wildlife coming in and out of the country.
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 3: Even with dogs and detection advancement, they're finding ways to
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 3: get animals out. And then the sad truth is that
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 3: they've been starved and dehydrated. You know, recovering them is impossible.
• 1:31:47
  Speaker 3: You know, you've gotten lucky with rewilding animals back into
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 3: New Jersey and stuff like that through this organization. But,
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 3: you know, it's a harmful reality that it's actually still happening.
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 2: The percentage of wildlife that leaves the country, native wildlife
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 2: to the U.S., it's like 50% is kind of marine
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 2: stuff like coral and invertebrates that are in the ocean.
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 2: And the rest is mostly reptiles, mostly turtles. Mammals are
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 2: very small these days. Birds are very small. So for
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 2: whatever reason, turtles and the U.S. has the most– out
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 2: of any country in the world, we have more species
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 2: of turtles and tortoises than any country in the world.
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 2: We have 51 species in the U.S. Mexico is second. India,
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 2: I think, is maybe third. But So Asia now really
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 2: wants these turtles where you grew up in New Jersey
• 1:32:39
  Speaker 2: and other places where we have these really cool turtles,
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 2: spotted turtles, bog turtles, wood turtles, really beautiful colored eastern
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 2: box turtles. Once they get to Asia, they're in the
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 2: many thousands of dollars. The shipment that just went out
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 2: that we received the confiscation from, it was about half
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 2: a million dollars, just those turtles once they get to China.
• 1:32:57
  Speaker 2: So it's big money and they use mules and the
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 2: people that got arrested or busted usually aren't the real
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 2: ones that are– organizing the whole thing. It's like drugs.
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: Well, that's a good thing about this docuseries is that
• 1:33:09
  Speaker 1: you guys are exposing this to people because I think
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: most people would be completely unaware. No idea.
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 3: No idea. No idea where, you know, animals in the
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 3: zoos came from.
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: Is there an issue with people stealing eagles and trying
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: to import them as pets?
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 2: So raptors are really interesting. So That sector of the
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 2: bird world, I mean, the bird world is so vast.
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 2: There's the songbird people. There's the parrot people, really high-end,
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 2: you know, hyacinth macaws that are so expensive. One hyacinth
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 2: macaw is like, you know, $ 60, 000 today or $ 50, 000 or
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 2: whatever it is, $ 40, 000. But raptors are increasingly popular in
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 2: the Middle East, you know, golden eagles and all these
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 2: really far out birds of prey. And in the U.S.,
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 2: we have really strict laws when it comes to birds
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 2: of prey and owning them and falconry. Avi Kennedy is
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 2: a falconry guy. He loves falconry. But it's gotten more
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 2: popular again around the world having big birds of prey.
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: Because it's interesting. I have friends that live in Alaska.
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: And in Alaska, eagles are really common. They're all over
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 1: the place up there. They don't even think anything of them.
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: Especially the guys who go salmon fishing. When they come
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: back from salmon fishing, you literally have like 30, 40
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: eagles just waiting on the lawn for these boats to
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: arrive because they know that they're going to throw the
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: carcasses out.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 2: Bald eagles.
• 1:34:29
  Speaker 1: Yes. Bald eagles.
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: I would imagine some people would want those as a pet,
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 1: especially in other countries.
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. In the U.S., only Native Americans can have
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 2: like eagle parts unless you have a permit.
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: Like it's pretty.
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 2: Eagle parts? Well, you know, like feathers for their headdresses.
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 2: Like Native Americans can still do things with birds.
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 1: Also, if you have a stuffed eagle in your house,
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: that's illegal? No.
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 2: I think it's illegal.
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: Did you ask those guys? Stuff you an eagle?
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 3: Well, that would be interesting.
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: That's where we draw the line.
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 3: By the way, I don't know if they actually have them,
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 3: but we have this footage. I mean, imagine going in
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 3: the confiscations room at LAX. It's incredible.
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: Oh, really?
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's incredible. You have like, you know, tiger, you know,
• 1:35:09
  Speaker 3: just all this rare animal and transformed into so many
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 3: objects at home. A table, a rug, pool cues.
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: I was reading about this that there was a place
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: in China where people could go to eat endangered species.
• 1:35:24
  Speaker 1: And they would have an endangered species menu. And they
• 1:35:27
  Speaker 1: would have like a dinner every now and then, you know,
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: like rarely. But it was by invitation only. And these
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: like super weird wealthy people would go out there. And
• 1:35:37
  Speaker 1: they would, you know, eat a lion.
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 3: If you're listening, invite us. You know, it's funny.
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 2: It's fucked up you say that.
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 3: I make it back.
• 1:35:43
  Speaker 2: It's funny you say that because, you know, we went
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 2: to this big turtle show in China. And, you know, there's,
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 2: you know, it's this huge turtle show, like a car show.
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 2: And there's girls, like, in skimpy outfits with banners, like,
• 1:35:57
  Speaker 2: you know, like a car show. But it's massive. And
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 2: all these rare turtles are selling as pets. But then
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 2: for lunch, they have these, like, dim sum tables that
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 2: are round. And everyone served turtle soup. And it's like,
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 2: how twisted is that? It would be like a reptile
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 2: show in the U.S. We have lots of reptile shows
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 2: in the U.S. And now at lunchtime, you're eating reptiles.
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 2: China is a whole different thing.
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 3: I think it's this visibility paradox thing. You have this charismatic,
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 3: symbolic thing. There's only very few. A lot of protection
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 3: around them. People want it.
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 2: What, are you talking about eagles? Just talking about.
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 3: What people want, what they can't have. That's the... the
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 3: through line in this work, especially for rare stuff.
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 2: Eagles are like American alligators. They've bounced back since DDT
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 2: and the book that, what's her name, did in the
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 2: late 60s, 70s, Silent Spring. That was the book that
• 1:36:49
  Speaker 2: really changed everything for eagles and.
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 3: Birds of prey.
• 1:36:53
  Speaker 2: Her book, what was her name, Silent Spring, the author,
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 2: she changed everything because no one listened to her about
• 1:37:00
  Speaker 2: DDT and pesticides, which were making the eggs of birds
• 1:37:03
  Speaker 2: of prey not viable. And it really took a toll.
• 1:37:08
  Speaker 2: Rachel Carson was an unsung hero. People should know her name,
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 2: and I forgot it for a minute. But she really
• 1:37:14
  Speaker 2: is why you have bald eagles. Were they on the
• 1:37:17
  Speaker 2: verge of extinction? Because of pesticides we were using, because
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 2: of DDT was doing this thing to the eggs where Pelicans,
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 2: birds of prey were disappearing at alarming rates because of
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 2: spraying of DDT for agriculture for pesticides.
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 2: And then we banned it and eagles and birds of
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 2: prey came back. Yeah. Peregrine falcons, all of it. Bald eagles,
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 2: golden eagles. Yeah. So anyway.
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: It's a weird animal, the bald eagle, that that's our pet.
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: That's our national animal.
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: So it's strange. Heartless raptor.
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 2: It's a fishing eagle. Yeah. There are fishing eagles all
• 1:37:53
  Speaker 2: over the world that are similar to bald eagles. It's
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 2: just a fishing eagle. That's what it is.
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: It's just such a cool one. Yeah. And there's something
• 1:38:00
  Speaker 1: about watching them swim away with a salmon, their talons.
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, and also photography has gotten so much better
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 3: over the years, right? I know there's probably a video
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 3: you're referencing.
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 2: I mean, where we live, where we live. There was
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 2: that eagle cam and there was a sick eagle, bald eagle,
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 2: and it became national.
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: In California? Yeah, where we live.
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 2: And it became national news two weeks ago.
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: Golden?
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 2: Bald, bald eagle.
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: Really?
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And if you Google bald eagle California, it's
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 2: in the town we live in where they took it
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 2: and they're bringing it back to health. But the amount
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 2: of money that poured in to help that eagle was unbelievable. Wow.
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 2: For this little place.
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 3: Going back to how people care, it's remarkable.
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 2: But people care more about eagles than had that been
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 2: a turtle or a snake that was rescued.
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: Well, that's the eagle's America's bird. Yeah, it's America's bird.
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: I mean, people have it tattooed on their back.
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:38:47
  Speaker 1: There's something about an eagle that's just iconic.
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of snake tattoos these days.
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: I'm sure.
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: But there's something about the eagle tattoo is different.
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 2: It's like America.
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 3: But then the grizzly bear, you know, such an adverse reaction,
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 3: so controversial.
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: They eat a lot of people. They've been in the
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: news a lot lately. There's a reason why the California
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: state flag has a grizzly bear on it and there's
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 1: 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 1: Good luck.
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 2: We mentioned this to you last time and you were like, why?
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 2: Or something.
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: Let them naturally return. Reintroduction is always a disaster. Reintroduction
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: of wolves in Colorado right now is a fucking disaster.
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 2: Well, they're back. They've now migrated into California and there's
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 2: been some wolf sightings even down in Southern California.
• 1:39:33
  Speaker 1: Oh, quite a few. A friend of mine filmed one.
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: We showed it on the podcast. He filmed one near Bakersfield.
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 2: Exactly.
• 1:39:39
  Speaker 1: A black wolf that was out in the field near Bakersfield. Yeah,
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: they can go incredibly long distances.
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 2: Reintroduction works in some places. It's getting better. I have
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 2: a good friend that's reintroducing jaguars back to northern Argentina.
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 2: They're doing a pretty good job. But yeah, it's tricky.
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 2: You're like condors, California condors.
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: But it's a difference in reintroducing animals to where there's
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: agriculture and where there's a bunch of animals that are
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: in pens and then they start eating them.
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 2: No, no. Don't do that.
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 1: That's what Colorado is experiencing now.
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But I've worked with Ted Turner's group for many
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 2: years in New Mexico on reintroduction programs. And the guy
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 2: that did the wolf rewilding of gray wolves is this
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 2: guy named Mike Phillips who works for Turner. And, yeah,
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 2: they have a real PR problem. And grizzlies are going
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 2: to be a bigger PR problem. Yeah. Yeah. To get
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 2: people to wrap their arms around the idea of bringing
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 2: grizzlies back to California.
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: Well, there's certain states where they're overpopulated and there's a
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: lot of argument they should be relisted and that people
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: should be able to hunt them again like they do
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 1: in Alaska.
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 2: But the Native Americans in California do by and large
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 2: want grizzlies back and they have this new technology that
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 2: might be able to keep them kind of. In certain areas.
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 2: They haven't figured it out fully yet, but hopefully they
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 2: keep them in a certain area because, you know, grizzlies
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 2: migrating into L.A. like the wolves right now might not
• 1:40:54
  Speaker 2: be a good idea.
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: Well, you already have the mountain lions. There was a
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: great video the other day. I don't know if you
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: guys saw it, of a mountain lion in a guy's
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: backyard in Santa Monica. Yeah, I saw it. Big cat.
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 2: I have him in my backyard all the time.
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 3: I think that's motivated by displacement from fires, right?
• 1:41:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: It's also pets. They like to eat people's pets.
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah. We have these cameras. They're not there, though.
• 1:41:13
  Speaker 3: It's too close.
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: What are you talking about? They eat them all the time.
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 2: No, no.
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 1: Pets get snatched up all the time.
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 2: Jeremy, this woman down the street from me was walking
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 2: her dog at 3 in the afternoon. The mountain lion
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 2: grabbed her dog. She's literally on Ladera. She's walking her dog,
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 2: a little dog, and the mountain lion just jumped and
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 2: grabbed her dog. She's looking at the dog, holding a leash,
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 2: and goes– I better let go of this leash. And
• 1:41:35
  Speaker 2: she did. And she never saw a dog again.
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 3: I'm sort of saying this little particular suburban park of
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 3: Santa Monica, it's not very common.
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 2: Well, where I live, they eat people's dogs. It's not
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 2: common because you don't see them.
• 1:41:45
  Speaker 1: They eat dogs.
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 2: Where I live, the mountain lions are eating people's dogs
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 2: from time to time.
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: They do it all the time. We were talking about
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: Marin County. Well, it's Bay Area, wherever it is, where
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 1: they have these depredation tags where they have to shoot
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: problem mountain lions because they're eating pets. And they find
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: out that that's half their diet. Half their diet is pets.
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 2: Well, I see them on my cameras. We have these
• 1:42:06
  Speaker 2: motion detector cameras, and we see them at 3 in
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 2: the morning right in front of my house. Look at
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 2: that fucker. I rarely see them with a naked eye.
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: Isn't that crazy?
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 3: But then one gets hit by a car, and they
• 1:42:16
  Speaker 3: build a bridge across the road. It's kind of amazing.
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 2: You've got a nice mountain lion in the lobby out there.
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: That was from my friend Adam. He hunted that in Colorado.
• 1:42:25
  Speaker 1: That was a depredation mountain lion. That mountain lion had
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: picked a ranch. And it was killing all the calves.
• 1:42:31
  Speaker 1: And they actually got to it right after it had–
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: it didn't even kill it. It was eating it while
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: it was alive. And then it ran– they ran it off.
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: The dogs had ran it off the carcass. They had
• 1:42:41
  Speaker 1: to shoot this calf. It was just torn apart and
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: still suffering alive. And then they killed it.
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 2: Luckily, where I am, we have a lot of deer.
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 2: And we find a deer carcass from time to time
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 2: that's a mountain lion kill. Oh, for sure.
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 2: But, you know, back to our show, I want to
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 2: just say one other thing about sort of the ending,
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 2: which it was really fortuitous. I just want to bring
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 2: it up, even though you're not there yet. But spoiler alert. Well,
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 2: it's not really the spoiler alert, but I'll say this.
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 2: I spent about 20 years working in Madagascar with some
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 2: rare Madagascaran tortoises. And I eventually, I was trying to
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 2: save this tortoise in Madagascar. And I did a 60
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 2: Minutes piece with Leslie Stahl, took her to Madagascar, a
• 1:43:22
  Speaker 2: New Yorker piece on this tortoise. I failed. Everyone failed.
• 1:43:25
  Speaker 2: The tortoise functionally went extinct in Madagascar. The poaching was
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 2: so intense. Wow. The tortoise had a.
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 3: Very high— What is a plowshare tortoise?
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 2: Well, it's a reptile that arguably has the most value
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 2: in the pet trade over almost any other reptile in
• 1:43:40
  Speaker 2: the world. There may be something close, like a feijal,
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 2: an iguana, or maybe a Komodo dragon. But some of
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 2: them can be worth as much as $ 100, 000. And people
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 2: in Madagascar are so poor, especially in the area where
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 2: this animal comes from. And it only existed in a
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 2: tiny part of northern Madagascar. That's it.
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 3: There it is.
• 1:43:58
  Speaker 1: So where are they going?
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 2: Mostly to Asia. There's a direct flight out of Madagascar
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 2: to Bangkok. And so– And they're pets. Yeah.
• 1:44:06
  Speaker 1: And some of those photos I made– So is it
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 1: possible to buy them in Asia and bring them back
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 1: to Madagascar?
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 2: Well, so this is where I'm going. Very hard to
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 2: do that because of health screening. I took that photo
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 2: over there, that little guy. I took– I took some
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 2: of these photos I even took, actually. Oh, that's a
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 2: guy that works for us. Anyway, I've been working with
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 2: this species of tortoise for almost 20 years. And we
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 2: were able to get some confiscated plowshare tortoises out of
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 2: China and Taiwan. And we waited patiently for 15 years
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 2: to try to breed them. And right when we finished
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 2: this show, and this is a tortoise that's never been
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 2: bred successfully in the Western world. No zoo institutions have
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 2: tried to breed them and failed. We were lucky enough
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 2: to get our first hatchling of this really endangered tortoise
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 2: right when we finished the show. And so we filmed
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 2: it and it made it into the end of the show.
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 2: But it's a story about the reptile trade. And this
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 2: was a story in the end of the show about
• 1:45:03
  Speaker 2: a confiscated group of animals that came from the reptile trade,
• 1:45:07
  Speaker 2: the rarest and most valuable tortoise in the world. And
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 2: today we're trying to bring it back to Madagascar, which
• 1:45:12
  Speaker 2: we're working on, which is happening as we talk to you.
• 1:45:14
  Speaker 1: And is the problem that if you bring them back
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: to Madagascar, people are going to go to Madagascar and
• 1:45:17
  Speaker 1: steal them again and then use them in the pet trade?
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 2: So, yes, to be blunt. And so it's somewhat symbolic.
• 1:45:24
  Speaker 2: It's somewhat about showing Madagascar that we're not trying to
• 1:45:27
  Speaker 2: profit and take their natural heritage and what they rightly
• 1:45:32
  Speaker 2: should have. So part of it is showing that we
• 1:45:34
  Speaker 2: can go full circle, confiscate an animal that was in
• 1:45:37
  Speaker 2: the illegal exotic trade. reptile trade, breed it, and then
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 2: return it to Madagascar. But the part that no one
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 2: wants to talk about that's really controversial is in this
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 2: particular case, it's not like one thing fits all. I
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 2: said this to the folks that are working with this
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 2: tortoise in Madagascar to try to save it. Hey, the
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 2: only way you're going to take pressure off of this tortoise,
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 2: it's like drugs, is if you either legalize drugs or
• 1:46:04
  Speaker 2: in the case of drugs, Or make this tortoise available
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 2: for people around the world so they can have it
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 2: because it breeds quite easily. Breed them. Try to have
• 1:46:13
  Speaker 2: them in the private sector, in institutions, in zoos. They
• 1:46:16
  Speaker 2: turn out not to be that difficult to breed even
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 2: though no one's ever bred them in the Western world,
• 1:46:20
  Speaker 2: in Europe or the U.S.
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 3: Well, it takes a long time to reach maturity.
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 2: Well, it's an animal that takes longer, twice as long
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 2: as a human or three times. They don't reach sexual
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 2: maturity until they're about 30 years old, 40 years old.
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: They can do it.
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 2: You can raise them faster in captivity than the wild.
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 2: So they are very slow to reproduce. They're not like rabbits.
• 1:46:39
  Speaker 2: They're the opposite. And there are so few of them.
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 2: And so they're very, very rare, very valuable. The only
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 2: way ultimately I think you can really take the pressure
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 2: off of the poaching is to allow people to start
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 2: to have them. That's a radiated tortoise, which we also breed. Wow.
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: That is wild.
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 3: So the Dremelene is a way to deter poaching, deter value.
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 2: Our organization is the group with Durrell that did this
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 2: Dremelene to try to deface them like cutting off a
• 1:47:07
  Speaker 2: rhino horn so poachers wouldn't take them. So we were
• 1:47:10
  Speaker 2: Dremelene those tortoises shell to basically deface the tortoise so
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 2: poachers would not take the tortoises. It ultimately didn't work.
• 1:47:19
  Speaker 1: So they're just taking them because they're beautiful. And if
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: you fuck up their shells.
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 2: They have the highest domed shell of any tortoise in
• 1:47:28
  Speaker 2: relation to the size. So wild. They have an incredible longevity.
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 2: Well over 100 years they live. And they're gold.
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 1: And so that dremeling that you did, that's the top
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 1: of it right there? Yeah. And that didn't help?
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 2: We did that. You can see it over there at
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 2: the center. That's called the vertebral scutes of the tortoise.
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 2: And we dremeled them. And we put MG for Madagascar
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 2: and a number. And we were hoping that defacing the
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 2: tortoise would make collectors not want to have them, but
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 2: it didn't work in the end.
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 1: Somebody told me, this is a good time to bring
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: this up, that turtle shells, when you look at a
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 1: turtle shell, it's almost representative of a calendar. And that
• 1:48:07
  Speaker 1: there is around the outside edge of the turtle, there's
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 1: like 28 different little squares. And then in the center,
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 1: there's 13. So it's basically like a 13th. day or
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: 13 month 28 day lunar calendar yeah this is it how.
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 2: Weird is that yeah that's really a.
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: Calendar on a turtle's back.
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah you know a lot of turtle facts.
• 1:48:34
  Speaker 2: I did not know that one, actually.
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 1: You didn't know that one?
• 1:48:37
  Speaker 2: I know a lot of cultures like Asia and American
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 2: Indians believe that the Earth sits on a turtle.
• 1:48:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's turtles all the way down. It's a Turtle
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: Simpsons song.
• 1:48:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I didn't know about that. That's interesting. Wow.
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 1: Isn't that weird?
• 1:48:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah. That's interesting. Like why?
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: What is that all about? Like that's very strange that
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: it coincides. It's like exact to what a lunar calendar is.
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 1: Very strange.
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:48:59
  Speaker 2: That's super interesting. I mean turtles have been on planet
• 1:49:02
  Speaker 2: Earth longer than dinosaurs. They've been here for over 200
• 1:49:05
  Speaker 2: million years. So they've been around a long time. So
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 2: there's been– people have been playing with turtles forever. So
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 2: maybe they came up with a lot of things that
• 1:49:12
  Speaker 2: relate to turtles.
• 1:49:13
  Speaker 1: But it's odd that it syncs up with a 28-day
• 1:49:16
  Speaker 1: lunar calendar.
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 2: I know sports stadiums. in the beginning or things that
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 2: were shaped like that, like a geodesic dome, came somewhat
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 2: from how turtles are designed. Like there was some architectural thing.
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 1: That came from turtles.
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 2: It makes sense.
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: The geodesic, like the structure of it to keep rigidity.
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah. And I know turtles, the first writing, the earliest
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 2: writing was on the plastron, the bottom of a turtle
• 1:49:43
  Speaker 2: shell in China, maybe some of the earliest writing. Really?
• 1:49:46
  Speaker 2: Going back some really I don't know, a couple thousand years.
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 2: So turtles have been used for all kinds of things,
• 1:49:52
  Speaker 2: for writing, for medicinal medicine, especially in Asia. It's gone
• 1:49:58
  Speaker 2: back thousands of years using turtles for chi and for.
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 2: you know, vitality and all these kinds of things. If
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 2: you get sick, you make some turtle soup.
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of weird stuff with that.
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of stuff that has to do with turtles.
• 1:50:09
  Speaker 1: Like the rhino horn things for boners. Like, hey, guys.
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 2: Well, they really put some viagra.
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 1: Oracle bone script on the bottom of a turtle shell.
• 1:50:18
  Speaker 1: Look how cool that looks. Go back to that.
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 2: Beautiful, right? Beautiful.
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: 6,200 B.C. 6,600 to 6,200 B.C. Go to the images
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: again of the writing on it. Look how cool that
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: writing is.
• 1:50:33
  Speaker 2: I mean, this one's beautiful on the right. That one's beautiful.
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 1: That's wild.
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 2: But I think it was some of the earliest writing
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 2: was on turtle shells like this.
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: Well, it sounds like it if it's 6,000 B.C. 6,000 B.C.,
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: I mean, that predates ancient Babylonia.
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:50:49
  Speaker 1: Or at least what we know about it.
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 2: So turtles have been used in Native American culture forever.
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 3: Survived a lot of extinction events. That's an ox scapula.
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: And turtle shell. Ox scapula.
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 2: I mean, there are turtle farms in China that you
• 1:51:07
  Speaker 2: cannot believe. They're breeding these turtles, mostly Asian box turtles,
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 2: Chinese box turtles. And these people are multi, multimillionaires. And
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 2: they sell one turtle for as much as like $ 20, 000.
• 1:51:20
  Speaker 2: One turtle. And the wild-caught turtles are more valuable than
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 2: the farm turtles. But there's turtle farms that are breeding.
• 1:51:27
  Speaker 2: They're called golden coin turtles. It's a Chinese-Asian turtle that
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 2: can fetch huge amounts of money.
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: Why is the wild one worth more?
• 1:51:36
  Speaker 2: It's like wild rhino horn is worth more because they
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 2: think the wild rhino eats things that are medicinal versus
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 2: just a captive rhino that's eating hay. And it's the
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 2: stuff they eat that goes into the horn, which makes sense.
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 2: Like your fingernail, it's keratin. So the wild rhino horn
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 2: is going to have more Good stuff for you. And,
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 2: of course, they'll probably grate some Viagra in it to
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 2: make you really believe that it gives you like an erection.
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 2: You know, they'll cheat. Unless it does. I don't know
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 2: if it actually works. Well, they do grate the Viagra
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 2: in the rhino horn sometimes. But the wild turtle is
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 2: just eating things and has more chi than the farm turtle.
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 2: But they have these enormous turtle farms. Like, you know,
• 1:52:13
  Speaker 2: 15-story buildings that are all turtles.
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: Jamie, I've got to see this. So wild turtle farms
• 1:52:19
  Speaker 1: in China. China.
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 2: Turtle farms.
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: And this is all just for pets?
• 1:52:23
  Speaker 2: No, this is for consumption. You'll pay $ 20, 000. Now, there's turtles.
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: Wait a minute. $ 20, 000 for consumption?
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 2: For consumption. For like a golden coin turtle, if it's
• 1:52:32
  Speaker 2: a wild one, like big money.
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: They want to eat it.
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But then in China, you can also pay $ 100, 000
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 2: for a Yunnan box turtle. A Yunnan box turtle can
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 2: be $ 100, 000.
• 1:52:41
  Speaker 1: So these are these turtle farms. Yeah, but I'm not-
• 1:52:44
  Speaker 1: And this is all for like turtle soup.
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but these are soft-shelled turtles in this image that
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 2: you're looking at. I'm talking about things like golden coin turtles,
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 2: much more valuable turtles for consumption than these soft-shelled turtles.
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: Why are they worth more? Is it just because it's rare?
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 2: Oh, this guy. I know this guy. Garden State turtle.
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 2: I know that guy in New Jersey. He's a good guy,
• 1:53:04
  Speaker 2: Chris Leon. Yeah, that's a golden coin turtle. So we
• 1:53:07
  Speaker 2: breed these where we are, where we work with turtles,
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 2: and we send these back to China from time to time.
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 1: Okay, but why? Explain why is it worth $ 20, 000.
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 2: For whatever reason, this turtle is called a golden coin turtle.
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 2: Cora trifalciata is the scientific name. And it is very coveted,
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 2: and apparently it has certain properties that can cure cancer
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 2: and other diseases. And so this turtle is high on
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 2: the list for consumption. For medicinal reasons.
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 3: But where?
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: Allegedly can cure cancer, right?
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: Is there any false beliefs?
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 2: But you can see 20 grand, 40 grand.
• 1:53:40
  Speaker 1: 20 grand as high as 40 grand for a fucking turtle.
• 1:53:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: And to eat it.
• 1:53:46
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But then there's turtles that can be 100,000 or 200,000.
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: So is it just because it's difficult to acquire that
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 1: it's like a status thing? That it's worth 20 or $ 40, 000?
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 2: Well, they're very rare in the wild now, but they
• 1:53:59
  Speaker 2: farm them. But they're very endangered. It's a critically endangered turtle.
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 2: We breed them at my facility. But there's a lot
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 2: of people in China. And if you want to save
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 2: someone's life, you'll pay whatever it takes to.
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: Save someone's life. So when they're buying it for $ 20, 000,
• 1:54:14
  Speaker 1: they're buying it to try to save someone's life?
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 2: Or someone's sick or they really want good health.
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: And they're wealthy. Okay. So you could just get it
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: just as like a prophylactic turtle. You eat it for
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: medicine to make sure you don't get sick?
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 2: Something like that.
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: It sounds insane though that it's $ 20, 000 for a turtle.
• 1:54:30
  Speaker 2: But if you look up Yunnan box turtle, it was
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 2: thought to be extinct for 50 years and they rediscovered it.
• 1:54:37
  Speaker 2: And a Yunnan box turtle today, if you could even
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 2: get one, would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Another
• 1:54:42
  Speaker 2: turtle similar to that.
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: And are they eating those too?
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 2: No. That one is so rare. There are so few
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 2: of them. That one is– people buy it as an
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 2: exotic pet. That's really rare.
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 1: So this is kind of a– It's a tricky situation
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 1: because on one hand, if they're extinct in the wild
• 1:54:58
  Speaker 1: and these people have them as pets, maybe you can
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: recover them somehow or another.
• 1:55:03
  Speaker 2: That's an American box turtle.
• 1:55:04
  Speaker 3: Or they're in a zoo, for example, by the way.
• 1:55:06
  Speaker 2: So that's why that's a turtle that's being shipped to–
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 2: that's a U.S. turtle from the East Coast that's being
• 1:55:12
  Speaker 2: sold and smuggled to China and other parts of Asia.
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 2: Because look how beautiful our turtles are in the U.S.
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: God, that is a pretty turtle.
• 1:55:20
  Speaker 2: Oh, you do have a photo of a Yunnan box turtle.
• 1:55:21
  Speaker 2: It's just not the one there. That bland thing is
• 1:55:24
  Speaker 2: a Yunnan box turtle.
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 1: The one above it?
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, the one that's kind of gray.
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: Right there?
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 2: No, no. That's a three-toed box turtle. Which one?
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 1: That one?
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 2: That one. That one can be worth $ 200, 000. Jamie, get
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 2: him right.
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 1: What?
• 1:55:35
  Speaker 2: That turtle. That turtle was thought to be extinct for
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 2: over half a century.
• 1:55:39
  Speaker 1: That's a boring-ass turtle. That other one.
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 3: You're training him on now.
• 1:55:42
  Speaker 2: Well, don't get me down the turtle rabbit hole.
• 1:55:45
  Speaker 1: But that one where your cursor was just over, the
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 1: one that was– yeah, that guy. No, the one to
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: the left. Yeah, the other one. To the right of it.
• 1:55:50
  Speaker 1: That one. Yeah, that one's cool as shit.
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a male eastern box turtle. They always have
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 2: red eyes.
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: God, it's so beautiful.
• 1:55:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's beautiful.
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 3: But solutions to the scarcity problem.
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 2: That's a male eastern box turtle.
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 3: You know, pet trade can– commercializing aspects of it can
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 3: reduce issues.
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 2: But what's important about this conversation, actually, is people think
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 2: of ivory, rhino horn, you know, whales, and they have
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 2: no idea that a turtle, pound for pound, can be
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 2: more valuable than a rhino horn, possibly. I had no idea.
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 2: Nobody knows this, but it's crazy what the money involved
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 2: in these, back to the confiscations we're getting, and the
• 1:56:28
  Speaker 2: trade in turtles going out of this country, is in
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 2: the millions and millions and millions and millions, and There
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 2: are people in China and other parts of Asia that
• 1:56:35
  Speaker 2: are getting very rich in the turtle trade. And we
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 2: always hear about pangolin scales, rhino horn, ivory. And those
• 1:56:43
  Speaker 2: things are important. But the turtle trade is really massive.
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 2: And the reptile trade is massive. And there's a lot
• 1:56:49
  Speaker 2: of money in it. And they're easy to transport because
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 2: a turtle doesn't need to eat or drink. Just wrap
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 2: them in socks, put them in a box, shove them
• 1:56:56
  Speaker 2: all in there, put them in diapers, tape them up,
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 2: ship them.
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 1: They don't even need much air.
• 1:57:02
  Speaker 2: They need a little air, but they have a very
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 2: low blood pressure, not like we have a higher blood
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 2: pressure than reptiles. And they can live without water or food,
• 1:57:09
  Speaker 2: as you know, for a very long time. So they're,
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 2: you know, like wildlife, nature with handles. You can just
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 2: take them.
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: Transport them.
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 2: Transport them.
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 1: And if they're really worth $ 20, 000 to $ 40, 000. You're putting
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: that in your bag.
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Crazy. And they really are. They really are worth that.
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: That is crazy. I would have never guessed.
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 1: And I would never guess that it's for consumption. That's
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: even more weird.
• 1:57:29
  Speaker 2: Well, no. The turtles that are leaving this country going
• 1:57:31
  Speaker 2: to China are for exotic pets. But the ones that
• 1:57:34
  Speaker 2: they're eating. Yeah, the ones.
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: That they're eating. That it's worth $ 20, 000. That's insane.
• 1:57:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, at least.
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: Is there a market for snake meat?
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah. So if you've been to Taiwan or China, there's
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 2: these snake bars where you can literally have a snake
• 1:57:50
  Speaker 2: bleed out while it's alive, a cobra, and put it
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 2: in your drink. There's snakes.
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: You want to talk about diarrhea. What kind of diarrhea
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 1: do you get from snake blood?
• 1:58:01
  Speaker 2: Many years ago, I was in Myanmar, in Burma, at
• 1:58:04
  Speaker 2: a snake place, and they were just loading snakes up
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 2: in these trucks, like big trucks. just stacking snakes, and
• 1:58:11
  Speaker 2: they were heading into China. So the snake meat, the snake.
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: Snake meat is big in China.
• 1:58:17
  Speaker 2: Look, tiger penis, tiger this, tiger bones. Hold on.
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 1: Back it up.
• 1:58:22
  Speaker 2: Tiger parts.
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 1: Back it up. Tiger penis?
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 2: Tiger penis.
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 1: Tiger penis is a big delicacy over there?
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 2: I think they're more creative than we are. They eat
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 2: a lot of stuff.
• 1:58:33
  Speaker 1: That's a fact.
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 2: OK.
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 1: But the tiger penis thing I was not aware of.
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 1: That's a delicacy?
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 2: I don't know what that does for you. Maybe that's
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 2: another Viagra kind of thing. But there's tiger farms and
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 2: they part them out and they sell them to China.
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: So there's tiger farms that are just for consumption.
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah, tiger bone wine, tiger this, tiger that.
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: Tiger bone wine.
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 4: Sounds like it's more of that, like, you know.
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 2: No, but tigers. What, Jamie?
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 4: It's like a rhino horn type deal, I think.
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 3: I think that's given them.
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: Right. It's believed to increase virility and enhance male sexual performance. Dun, dun, dun.
• 1:59:11
  Speaker 3: Tiger phallus soup.
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 2: Ooh.
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 4: One tiger penis.
• 1:59:14
  Speaker 2: But a turtle is worth more than a tiger, guys.
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: That's crazy.
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:59:19
  Speaker 1: And I didn't know that there was a market for
• 1:59:20
  Speaker 1: tiger meat.
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:59:23
  Speaker 1: And is it all the meat of the tiger or
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 1: just dicks? Chop away the rest.
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 2: Joe, I've been to the turtle farms. I've been to
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 2: the snake bars. I haven't gotten into the tiger.
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: Tiger penis, the future of Chinese medicine. Hey, this guy's
• 1:59:38
  Speaker 1: doing a workshop.
• 1:59:39
  Speaker 3: We should go to this workshop, yeah.
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: What is this guy teaching?
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 3: That was a couple years ago.
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 1: He's on the run right now.
• 1:59:45
  Speaker 2: Don't get me started to talk about animal penises. My
• 1:59:52
  Speaker 2: favorite movie as a kid was a movie called Birds
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 2: Do It, Bees Do It. I don't even know if
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 2: it still exists. But all it was was animals having
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 2: sex from a praying mantis eating the head off of
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 2: the male to a rhino. And it was a great movie.
• 2:00:05
  Speaker 2: Just sex.
• 2:00:05
  Speaker 1: I did not know that there was a market for
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 1: the meat. What is that? Tiger dick?
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 2: Yep. Nice.
• 2:00:10
  Speaker 3: Not what I would have thought it looked like.
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: Crazy looking.
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 2: That looks like a nudibranch, a sea slug.
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: It looks like a piece of sushi.
• 2:00:16
  Speaker 3: It definitely looks like a piece of sushi.
• 2:00:18
  Speaker 2: No, it looks like a piece of sushi.
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: It looks like what I had for dinner last night.
• 2:00:21
  Speaker 1: It looks like something you get at Sushi by Scratch.
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: So when they're having these tiger farms where they're farming
• 2:00:27
  Speaker 1: the meat, how are they cooking tiger meat? What does
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: that go into? Is that really common over there?
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 2: Even though I did Tiger King, I'm not an expert
• 2:00:37
  Speaker 2: on tigers. I do know a little bit more about reptiles.
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 2: But I have a friend that did a movie called
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 2: I think it's called– what's it called? Carl Amon did
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 2: a movie about the tiger industry in Vietnam and Cambodia
• 2:00:51
  Speaker 2: and farming tigers. And I think it's called– oh, God,
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 2: I can't remember. But anyway, there's a whole tiger industry
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 2: and people breeding tigers in parts of Asia for tiger parts.
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 4: It's still illegal, but they definitely still do it.
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:01:06
  Speaker 3: It's not like– yeah.
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 1: Interesting. Consumption of tiger meat is highly illegal, though an
• 2:01:09
  Speaker 1: illicit black market persists, primarily fueled by commercial tiger farms.
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 1: Despite strict domestic bans, thousands of tigers are bred in
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: captivity across the country, creating a complex web of illegal luxury.
• 2:01:22
  Speaker 1: Luxury consumption is a crazy word. That's a crazy phrase.
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 1: Luxury consumption of tiger meat. Traditional beliefs and international conservation concerns.
• 2:01:33
  Speaker 2: Well, it's what you just said earlier that started this conversation,
• 2:01:36
  Speaker 2: that people go to restaurants and eat exotic animals.
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 3: And bear gallbladder.
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 2: Bear gallbladder. But another thing that, wait, back to Monsters
• 2:01:44
  Speaker 2: of God, look up Chinese giant salamander farms. Those are unbelievable.
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 2: That's a salamander this big that can eat, you know,
• 2:01:53
  Speaker 2: like a rat or a rabbit. It's a salamander that
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 2: they eat and farm in. China.
• 2:01:59
  Speaker 1: I've seen that online. I've seen them cook it in
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: TikTok videos.
• 2:02:02
  Speaker 2: And that's a really rare animal. Those guys are really rare. Oh, really?
• 2:02:07
  Speaker 1: And yet they're still cooking them and eating them?
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 2: There's two types of giant salamanders. There's a Japanese giant
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 2: salamander and a Chinese one. The Chinese one is massive.
• 2:02:16
  Speaker 1: Can I see that?
• 2:02:17
  Speaker 2: It's massive.
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 1: What, Jamie?
• 2:02:19
  Speaker 4: The one I stumbled down, it says it's AI.
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 2: It's an incredible animal, but they farm a lot of
• 2:02:25
  Speaker 2: things that you would never think of. Yeah, turtles, salamanders, tigers.
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 1: I just– the luxury consumption market, just seeing that phrase,
• 2:02:33
  Speaker 1: it's like what a weird culture where you have luxury
• 2:02:37
  Speaker 1: consumption of highly illegal endangered species.
• 2:02:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: And it's– well, that was what a friend of mine
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 1: who had been to China said that was what the
• 2:02:46
  Speaker 1: whole rhino horn thing was. It wasn't even as much
• 2:02:49
  Speaker 1: as they believed that it would do it. It was
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 1: just that this guy had rhino horns. Yeah.
• 2:02:54
  Speaker 2: Status symbol.
• 2:02:55
  Speaker 1: Very wealthy people.
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:02:57
  Speaker 1: Guy's got a– you want some rhino horn tea? Let's
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 1: have a seat.
• 2:03:00
  Speaker 2: Like a gentleman. Come to my wine cellar and in
• 2:03:03
  Speaker 2: it I got some rhino horn. I got a couple turtles.
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 3: What's the difference between that and rare wine from 50
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 3: years ago?
• 2:03:09
  Speaker 1: Well, first of all, an animal doesn't die. It's just wine. Yeah,
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 1: you don't have tiger dick in your wine. What is
• 2:03:15
  Speaker 1: the tiger bone wine? What is that about?
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: Is it wine they soak in bones of tigers?
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 3: It's a barrel.
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 1: Is that what it is?
• 2:03:23
  Speaker 2: I mean they have sake with vipers in them. There's
• 2:03:25
  Speaker 2: a snake in Japan called a habu and I remember
• 2:03:28
  Speaker 2: getting sake and this really incredible snake was in my sake.
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 2: But like– look, we're hypocrites in this country. We eat
• 2:03:37
  Speaker 2: tuna and they're endangered and in Asia, they eat other things.
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 1: Are they endangered? Tuna?
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 1: Endangered?
• 2:03:43
  Speaker 2: Well, certain species of tuna I think are becoming pretty endangered.
• 2:03:46
  Speaker 2: They're not what they were.
• 2:03:47
  Speaker 1: They're certainly not the same numbers that they used to
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 1: be at the turn of the century.
• 2:03:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. So I think it's easy to point fingers
• 2:03:54
  Speaker 2: at other parts of the world when we've done a
• 2:03:56
  Speaker 2: lot of things here. We had passenger pigeons that made
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 2: the skies dark and we shot every one of them.
• 2:04:02
  Speaker 2: We had Carolina parakeet. We almost got rid of our
• 2:04:05
  Speaker 2: condors and bison. We've done a lot of damage, but
• 2:04:07
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of damage.
• 2:04:08
  Speaker 1: Not you and me. We shouldn't say we.
• 2:04:10
  Speaker 2: People.
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 1: People. People that lived here. It's not us.
• 2:04:13
  Speaker 2: Well, why is our show called Monsters of God? We're
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 2: the monsters, not the reptiles. We did a lot of
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 2: damage in the past. Some of us. Some of us, yeah.
• 2:04:22
  Speaker 1: It's a very small percentage of people that are out
• 2:04:24
  Speaker 1: there eating turtles.
• 2:04:25
  Speaker 2: Well, you're a good guy, and I know that actually.
• 2:04:28
  Speaker 2: Somehow you didn't have maybe the mother I had, but
• 2:04:30
  Speaker 2: you must have had something good.
• 2:04:31
  Speaker 1: What, with my love of animals?
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you've got a good moral compass. I've watched you.
• 2:04:37
  Speaker 2: You know what's right and wrong.
• 2:04:39
  Speaker 1: Well, certainly on eating tiger dick. I think there's better
• 2:04:44
  Speaker 1: ways 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 plowshare 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 expensive. That's expensive. You know, anti-poaching
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 3: and security. It's a lot of work.
• 2:05:03
  Speaker 1: I agree that it's important, but I am also fascinated
• 2:05:06
  Speaker 1: by our desire to To sort of manage nature because
• 2:05:10
  Speaker 1: 90-whatever percent of any animal that's ever been alive ever
• 2:05:13
  Speaker 1: is done. They're all extinct. Everything goes extinct.
• 2:05:16
  Speaker 2: And a lot of our good intentions managing nature doesn't
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 2: work oftentimes.
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 1: Oh, no. We do a terrible job.
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 1: Especially when we bring in animals. We were talking about
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 1: this yesterday with Hawaii. They brought in mongoose to eat
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: the rats, but mongoose are diurnal.
• 2:05:31
  Speaker 2: Rats are nocturnal.
• 2:05:33
  Speaker 1: We never saw each other.
• 2:05:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Hawaii, it's funny you say Hawaii because Hawaii is
• 2:05:39
  Speaker 2: kind of the poster child of all the states in
• 2:05:41
  Speaker 2: the country of extinction. Second is California, but Hawaii really
• 2:05:45
  Speaker 2: fucked up Hawaii with cats. Mongooses were more in the Caribbean,
• 2:05:50
  Speaker 2: but also Hawaii. And mongooses is why, back to the
• 2:05:53
  Speaker 2: Jamaican iguana, The Jamaican iguana was extinct. We thought it
• 2:05:56
  Speaker 2: was extinct because of mongooses. We've just recently found a
• 2:06:00
  Speaker 2: small population, but it's a very rare iguana.
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 4: Reading 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-20th century when famine forced people to find new
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 4: 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 1: Oh, and that's what led them to almost get wiped out?
• 2:06:21
  Speaker 4: Well, so then they reintroduced them back into the wild
• 2:06:24
  Speaker 4: because there were too many of them, which created a
• 2:06:26
  Speaker 4: new problem. It says they created a new species. So
• 2:06:29
  Speaker 4: now you have hybrid salamanders, which is also like what
• 2:06:32
  Speaker 4: we have here in Austin.
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
• 2:06:34
  Speaker 3: It's the same story.
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 2: Over and over again.
• 2:06:36
  Speaker 1: What do these fuckers look like? Look at that thing. Whoa!
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: Can I send photos of giant salamanders?
• 2:06:42
  Speaker 2: They are so massive. They're so massive.
• 2:06:44
  Speaker 1: Look at the size of that thing. There's a bunch
• 2:06:46
  Speaker 1: of videos of guys cooking them in walks outdoors.
• 2:06:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:06:51
  Speaker 1: And so is that another thing where it's like one
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: of those exotic things that you're not supposed to have
• 2:06:55
  Speaker 1: and that's why they're cooking it?
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:06:57
  Speaker 1: Because I mean it looks– there's a funny one where
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 1: a dude's singing. He's like rapping over it. The guy
• 2:07:02
  Speaker 1: is cooking– about a guy cooking a dragon. This is
• 2:07:05
  Speaker 1: how you cook a dragon.
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, they're pretty impressive.
• 2:07:10
  Speaker 1: But it is a weird desire that people have to
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 1: eat something like incredibly exotic and rare. Whoa, look at
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 1: that sucker.
• 2:07:20
  Speaker 2: That's a real one. Yeah.
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 1: Giant salamander cooked eight ways.
• 2:07:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 1: In the, I don't know what that word is. Xiamen. Xiamen. Seafood.
• 2:07:27
  Speaker 2: China. You know, that was one creature we wanted to
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 2: film and I never got to film for Monsters of
• 2:07:33
  Speaker 2: God because that also is a monster of God.
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 1: So these guys are taking them. They're alive.
• 2:07:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:07:39
  Speaker 1: And they're going to bring them over and kill them
• 2:07:41
  Speaker 1: and cook them. So this is an endangered animal?
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:07:43
  Speaker 1: That this guy's killing and cooking?
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Wow.
• 2:07:45
  Speaker 1: Wow. That's crazy.
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 2: But they sort of know it.
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 3: It's not by necessity.
• 2:07:50
  Speaker 1: They know it's in danger and he's still boiling it up.
• 2:07:53
  Speaker 1: So it's the fact that this luxury item, that you
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: get to eat this luxury item. what does it look
• 2:08:01
  Speaker 1: like see what it looks like at the end kind
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 1: of crazy a lot of meat looks delicious would you
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 1: eat it if you were there or would you.
• 2:08:09
  Speaker 2: Feel bad I don't– I wouldn't eat it but I've
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 2: been– It's already there though.
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 1: It's already dead.
• 2:08:13
  Speaker 2: I've been in Southeast Asia with friends that ate dog
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 2: and I just couldn't eat it. I can't. I'm not
• 2:08:19
  Speaker 2: very adventuresome. I can't.
• 2:08:21
  Speaker 1: I would only have– the only way I'd eat a
• 2:08:23
  Speaker 1: dog is if I tried to bite one of my kids.
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 1: But if it's like– dogs, it's different.
• 2:08:30
  Speaker 2: We eat cattle and in India, they don't eat cows
• 2:08:33
  Speaker 2: and then other places eat horses and then they eat dogs. Sure. Sure.
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 2: We have our own sort of cultural norms about certain
• 2:08:40
  Speaker 2: animals that we just can't wrap our head around.
• 2:08:42
  Speaker 3: And ways we justify.
• 2:08:43
  Speaker 2: But I've seen dogs being killed in Sulawesi in huge
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 2: numbers in Indonesia. Just the way they kill them and
• 2:08:50
  Speaker 2: then they take these blowtorches and burn the hair off
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 2: of them. And people buy them just like you're in
• 2:08:55
  Speaker 2: a regular grocery store. And it's just what's normal in
• 2:08:59
  Speaker 2: one culture. Those are snapping turtles, American snapping turtles. What's
• 2:09:03
  Speaker 2: normal in one culture.
• 2:09:04
  Speaker 1: So have these been imported into Asia?
• 2:09:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they're big. And we still eat those, by the way,
• 2:09:09
  Speaker 2: in New Orleans. In the southeast, we eat snapping turtles.
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 2: We eat them in gumbo. But in Asia, they really
• 2:09:15
  Speaker 2: love our American turtles.
• 2:09:17
  Speaker 1: And snapping turtles are not endangered in America.
• 2:09:20
  Speaker 2: No, but alligator snapping turtles are.
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: Well, those things are crazy looking.
• 2:09:23
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Which you have in Texas, by the way.
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 3: They have what?
• 2:09:30
  Speaker 2: They're an ambush predator. They have a little appendage on
• 2:09:32
  Speaker 2: their tongue. The fish is attracted to them.
• 2:09:35
  Speaker 3: The video of them feeding is incredible.
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 1: They've got alligators? They're serving up alligators, too? Crocodiles.
• 2:09:41
  Speaker 2: Crocodiles. Yeah, crocs. Jesus Christ.
• 2:09:44
  Speaker 1: Imagine just hanging out there, watching his buddies get butchered.
• 2:09:47
  Speaker 2: You're good at finding gruesome stuff over there.
• 2:09:49
  Speaker 1: I mean there's a lot out there.
• 2:09:51
  Speaker 2: You're going to really gross out a lot of people.
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 1: So you say you guys have a bunch of projects
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 1: always kind of in the works. Like how do you
• 2:10:00
  Speaker 1: go about choosing them? You just like find these very
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 1: bizarre people and these very bizarre niche groups and.
• 2:10:07
  Speaker 2: … more aware of time as I get older. So
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 2: you got to choose carefully what you want to do
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 2: because it takes time to make these projects. So, you know,
• 2:10:18
  Speaker 2: a lot of them, we hope there's some silver lining
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 2: or something maybe positive about telling these stories and not
• 2:10:25
  Speaker 2: just frivolous stories about freaky people. Um, you know, but
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 2: it helps to have some freaky people in a story
• 2:10:32
  Speaker 2: to make people interested sometimes, but that's not the real goal. Um,
• 2:10:36
  Speaker 2: we're also doing projects that have nothing to do with wildlife. Um,
• 2:10:40
  Speaker 2: I did a documentary in the last 10 years about
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 2: my mom and my parents. And I don't know if
• 2:10:46
  Speaker 2: anyone will ever see that. And they both died. But
• 2:10:50
  Speaker 2: I did that to keep them relevant. And I had
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 2: a crazy family, a gay father and a crazy mother
• 2:10:56
  Speaker 2: who was into animals. And so everyone has a crazy family.
• 2:10:59
  Speaker 2: But we did a story that we're working on about
• 2:11:01
  Speaker 2: New York. And we're also doing some other animal stories.
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 2: So not everything sees the light of day.
• 2:11:08
  Speaker 1: Right, but these last three big ones that you guys
• 2:11:11
  Speaker 1: did are all about people and their bizarre relationship with
• 2:11:14
  Speaker 1: strange animals.
• 2:11:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah. What else?
• 2:11:18
  Speaker 1: What's next?
• 2:11:20
  Speaker 2: I mean we're doing a really interesting project right now
• 2:11:23
  Speaker 2: that should come out next year that I think you'll like, Joe.
• 2:11:26
  Speaker 2: I have to say there are big carnivores in it
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 2: again and some really far out people that you know
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 2: and you may have known personally. Yeah. I don't think
• 2:11:37
  Speaker 2: I can tell you who they are, but they were
• 2:11:39
  Speaker 2: very famous. All right. Anyway, but we're doing a project
• 2:11:43
  Speaker 2: about that.
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 1: What a tease you are.
• 2:11:46
  Speaker 3: I know. It's feeding into the tease, too.
• 2:11:48
  Speaker 2: I had too much coffee. Sorry. And then we're really
• 2:11:53
  Speaker 2: interested in a few other topics that people don't really
• 2:11:56
  Speaker 2: talk about. We always talk about the charismatic megafauna, and
• 2:11:59
  Speaker 2: we're interested in some of the groups of animals that
• 2:12:01
  Speaker 2: we don't even think about.
• 2:12:03
  Speaker 3: It's also, I mean, this time we live in, 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 it to the people that
• 2:12:21
  Speaker 3: know about the issues. And nothing happens, especially if there's
• 2:12:24
  Speaker 3: an impact aspect to it. So I think our formula
• 2:12:27
  Speaker 3: is great. It happens to be, you know, these subcultures
• 2:12:30
  Speaker 3: that have a higher propensity of finding people. crazy people
• 2:12:35
  Speaker 3: or people with far-out beliefs. More than anything, it's more
• 2:12:37
  Speaker 3: beliefs that are more interesting that make us curious. So
• 2:12:42
  Speaker 3: I think that's this sort of mixture of conservation storytelling
• 2:12:45
  Speaker 3: plus far-out beliefs in a niche that are able to
• 2:12:49
  Speaker 3: zoom out and talk about themes of extinction or attachment
• 2:12:54
  Speaker 3: or ego or crime.
• 2:12:56
  Speaker 1: Maybe there's something to the overfishing thing to do.
• 2:12:59
  Speaker 2: Because it's a giant issue. It's a huge issue. There's
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 2: been a lot done on it. But I think there
• 2:13:05
  Speaker 2: hasn't been a doc on overfishing.
• 2:13:09
  Speaker 3: I like Seaspiracy.
• 2:13:11
  Speaker 2: But the problem with a lot of those traditional documentaries,
• 2:13:15
  Speaker 2: they tend to preach to the converted, not the unconverted.
• 2:13:20
  Speaker 2: And you want to reach a bigger audience by somehow
• 2:13:23
  Speaker 2: telling that story about overfishing in a way where you
• 2:13:26
  Speaker 2: can get more people seeing it that don't know the issue.
• 2:13:29
  Speaker 2: And the other thing I would just say, overfishing is
• 2:13:30
  Speaker 2: a big deal. Invertebrates, insects, butterflies, and what's happening with
• 2:13:34
  Speaker 2: insects is a big deal. We're losing a lot of
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 2: really weird insects, and they haven't even been described yet.
• 2:13:40
  Speaker 2: Marine fish and even tropical fish is really interesting to us.
• 2:13:44
  Speaker 2: Where do all the saltwater tropical fish come from? How
• 2:13:47
  Speaker 2: do you get them? They dynamite the reefs in the Philippines.
• 2:13:51
  Speaker 2: They don't breed easily, saltwater tropical fish. Freshwater ones typically do.
• 2:13:55
  Speaker 2: There's a lot of different groups of animals that we
• 2:13:57
  Speaker 2: don't really think about and talk about that we kind
• 2:13:59
  Speaker 2: of take for granted and we think of them as disposable.
• 2:14:03
  Speaker 2: You know, we'll just put more tropical fish in our
• 2:14:05
  Speaker 2: aquarium in a Vegas hotel.
• 2:14:07
  Speaker 3: And imagining de-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 2: And there's just not a consciousness for smaller vertebrates and invertebrates.
• 2:14:16
  Speaker 2: But I would just say one other thing that I
• 2:14:17
  Speaker 2: think we do, you probably are aware of that, you know,
• 2:14:20
  Speaker 2: people think you have to be in a city to
• 2:14:22
  Speaker 2: get the, you know, the weird shit going on, New
• 2:14:25
  Speaker 2: York city, LA, you know, whatever, uh, big cities. And
• 2:14:29
  Speaker 2: what I found is oftentimes it's the places that you
• 2:14:32
  Speaker 2: least expect it. You know, some weird, you know, suburban
• 2:14:37
  Speaker 2: landscape where you start turning over, turning over the rocks
• 2:14:40
  Speaker 2: and you find and see that there's weirdness happening everywhere.
• 2:14:43
  Speaker 2: And that is a theme in our stories. It's not
• 2:14:46
  Speaker 2: gravitating to the big cities to find it. It's places where,
• 2:14:50
  Speaker 2: you know, the guy next door to you next door
• 2:14:52
  Speaker 2: where you live has a, Garage full of hot snakes
• 2:14:55
  Speaker 2: and the cobra escapes one day and it's in your
• 2:14:57
  Speaker 2: yard or whatever the fuck the story is. But it
• 2:15:00
  Speaker 2: often is in places that you wouldn't expect it to be.
• 2:15:02
  Speaker 3: Your friend's carport.
• 2:15:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 2:15:06
  Speaker 1: Well, listen, guys. Thank you again for being here. I
• 2:15:08
  Speaker 1: really appreciate it. Thanks for all the work you guys
• 2:15:11
  Speaker 1: put in. You've really entertained the shit out of me
• 2:15:13
  Speaker 1: over the years and disturbed me as well. So it's available,
• 2:15:17
  Speaker 1: Monsters of God. When does it come out?
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 2: Tomorrow.
• 2:15:20
  Speaker 1: Tomorrow. So when this comes out?
• 2:15:23
  Speaker 2: August 6th.
• 2:15:23
  Speaker 1: August 6th.
• 2:15:24
  Speaker 4: All right.
• 2:15:25
  Speaker 1: Beautiful.
• 2:15:26
  Speaker 2: Thank you for having us again.
• 2:15:27
  Speaker 1: Thanks for being here. Thank you. Bye, everybody.