#2536 - Eric Goode & Jeremy McBride

26:02There's another land iguana in the Galapagos. There's a marine iguana. But that lizard was fairly recently discovered. And there's some iguanas that were thought to be extinct, Joe, like the Jamaican iguana. And that was thought to be extinct forever, the Jamaican iguana. But they found a tiny population recently. So there's a lot of iguanas that are in trouble. And, you know, we should care about iguanas. And they're not just green iguanas. Yeah, that pink iguana, that's a marine iguana. And a regular Galapagos land iguana, and then you see some of the pink form. Jamie, see if you can find a video on Florida people hunting iguanas.

26:41Florida people hunting giant iguanas. Because some of them are so big. You see them, you're like, oh, my God. Are those bad to eat, though, the big giant ones? Would you eat one, being like a reptile pet guy? Look at the size of that one. Yeah, that's a male. That's a male. That's crazy. When they get orange like that, yeah, that's a big male. I mean, these things are gigantic, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, that's a common green iguana, and the males lose their green and get that incredible yellow orange. Those are males, yeah. Isn't that crazy how many of them there are, though? I mean, it is just overrun with iguanas.

27:16I guess they have no natural predators, right? There's nothing that eats them there. Not once they get big like that. When they're little, some birds are prey and some snakes can eat baby iguanas, but not once they're like that. But they're pretty chill. I mean, they don't really do much harm. Well, don't they, though, to people's crops and people's houses? No, they do. They do do damage. They're not supposed to be in Florida, let's put it that way. Iguanas like water, typically. They like to be around water, green iguanas. But, you know, reptiles have a bad PR problem, and that's why we're here, Joe.

27:48We're trying to elevate the publicity of people loving reptiles and not killing them. This dude is all out there killing them. Who's this dude? top shelf anglers on Instagram. Oh, you can do an expedition. So he's just a Florida guy that's enjoying the great outdoors also. No, that now is different. That's called a Tinosaurus. That's a type of Central American Mexican rock iguana. That lizard. That's not a green iguana. So Florida has a variety. Yeah, they have those as well. And they have tegus in Florida that come from South America. A different type of lizard that's invasive in Florida. And all of it is pets.

28:27Yeah, people letting them know. I had no idea that many people had iguanas. It could be this big of a problem. Yeah, pet iguanas were everywhere at one time, yeah. And is this really... That's the tegu. That's also invasive in Florida. That's crazy looking. I used to sleep with one of those when I was a teenager. That looks like a snake with legs. It does. Yeah. Look at that. Yeah, their face, right? Totally. And that lizard really loves to eat eggs. I used to feed mine eggs, and I've seen them in the wild eating eggs, bird eggs. Duck eggs. When I lived in the valley, there was a reptile store.

29:00And it was a place where I used to go buy goldfish because I used to have piranhas. Oh, wow. And I used to have turtles too. And the turtles were way more vicious than the piranhas. When you put goldfish in with the turtles, turtles, they're crazy, man. And they grab a hold of them and they're biting them. It's like very Jurassic Park. Like you're watching a little dinosaur. Alligator snapping turtle. Yeah. Well, these are just little, you know, little green sliders. Sliders. Is that what they're called? but they had a crocodile monitor in that place. Ooh. Yeah. I briefly thought, like, ooh, maybe I could figure out an enclosure and put a crocodile monitor and feed it rabbits and shit.

29:35Don't get bit by a crocodile monitor. They're close to, like, a Komodo dragon bite. They have scapel teeth. They're serious getting bit by a crocodile monitor. It looked pretty vicious. I mean, they just look like dinosaurs. It's like a forgotten thing of the past. There it is. There's a crocodile monitor. Look at that face, man. It totally looks like a dinosaur. Well, there's Tommy who's - Yeah, that's the guy in the first episode. Feeding it, you know, chicken. Oh, Tommy. They're the weirdest fucking people. Because I kind of understand the chimp people more. Because the chimp people, like a chimp is interacting with you.

30:09It's a mammal. It's a primate. It's intelligent. There's a lot going on. There's emotions and jealousy and chimps, they're connecting with you. These things, you're just looking into the abyss. Until the chimp rips your head off. Yeah. Well, I'm not advocating for people to have chimps as pets. I just say I understand the appeal of a pet chimp. I think it's a crazy idea. Well, especially a baby chimp. I think if anybody's even remotely thinking about it, they should watch Chimp Crazy. Yes. But, yeah, especially the babies. They're so cute. And then they eventually get to the point where they kill your neighbor.

30:42But it's just you don't want, you know, I get, I just get the appeal of it. The appeal of the reptile thing to me is just very strange. These people love them. Well, I loved – I used to keep snakes and lizards. But I ultimately – they were my gateway drug. And then I ultimately got into tortoises because I like the tortoises coexisting in the garden. I like plants. I like gardens. That makes sense. It didn't feel like they were in a cage. And they kind of – maybe I'm anthropomorphizing my tortoises. But I kind of felt like they were having a pretty good life in my garden. For sure. So I like keeping tortoises.

31:19They don't want to eat a rabbit particularly. They want to eat some lettuce or some greens. So turtles and tortoises is what I gravitated to. And then I found out one day they're the most endangered group of animals on the planet along with primates if you measure it by how many turtles and tortoises there are in the world and how many are facing extinction along with primates. So then I was like, okay, I want to do something to help them. And this show we're doing is really to teach people about the evolution of the reptile trade and to make people realize they're cool and they shouldn't be disposable pets.

31:54Also, freak show. And freak show, of course. You guys are really good at freak shows. As I said, it takes one to know one. Of course. But what's different, though, is that this isn't some, like, side hustle for animal love gone wrong. You know, it's – there's these people. there's this the reptile people the herb people are incredibly obsessive about you know living art about these living things they like the it's like a baseball card like the scarcity what was that word you use the herb people? herb yeah herpetology herb people herpetology amphibians and reptiles yeah I'm sorry well you know you're deep in it the herpy people the herpy people no but But it's really a trade formed around scarcity.

32:47And this sort of desire and adventure people have going out to find the rarest of the rare and bringing it back and selling it, trading it, keeping it. I'm in that category. You are in that category. I'm in that category. I'm not the guy that just wants the little pet bearded dragon. I want the Rolls Royce or reptiles. But it's different than like, you know, an individual person that has an attachment to a chimpanzee that she saw with, you know, watching Tarzan when she was growing up. And she wanted to have that in her life. So in other words, freaky people. Freaky people. Extreme obsessions.

33:16But it's about kind of, you know, psychology of people in this particular very niche way. Well, any time you're dealing with extreme animal people, it's about the psychology of the human being that's really invested in it, right? Yeah. Best in show. Yeah. For sure. and these are very unusual people because it's a very unusual thing to be connected to, something that really doesn't give a fuck about you. Like we're really concerned about this pink iguana. That pink iguana doesn't give a fuck about people. If all the people on earth died, it would just keep going about its business and not shed a tear.

33:50Especially things that can kill you in this way. Like a taipan or whatever, someone playing with that. An inland taipan is a venomous snake from Australia that may be the most venomous snake in the world. But it's all relative because a black mamba – Of course it's in Australia. Yeah. Australia has a lot of venomous stuff. Spiders, box jellyfish, a lot of snakes that are very dangerous. Australian tiger snake, brown snake, inland type. And they're all things that equally can kill you. So to say one's more dangerous than the other, they'll all kill you. Is there anti-venom for all of them? No, actually.

34:23So it's a good question. So some snakes like, you know, Texas has a coral snake, for example, a very venomous, elapid type of snake like a cobra, not like a rattlesnake. And I think they have less and less anti-venom for snakes that rarely bite people because like sea snakes, the coral snake, which is the red, black and yellow one that you have in East Texas. when the dog gets bit by them, and you were talking about your dog getting bit by rattlesnakes, a lot of times the vet doesn't know because you can't even see the bite. The snake bite is so tiny. So some snakes do not have antivenom, some really dangerous snakes.

35:01The coral snakes, they don't have antivenom for them? I think I heard that maybe not anymore. I'm sure it's faded. So what happens if you get bit? Well, there may be some antivenom, but there's not a lot of it. Antivenom has gotten very expensive, and it's very sophisticated now, and it's mostly for, you know, in the U.S. for vipers, you know, for rattlesnakes, you know. But I don't know. Good question. That would be something someone smarter than me would know about coral snake antivenom. But it's an elapid like a cobra. A friend of mine had two of them in her carport. Yeah. They took pictures of it and sent it to people, and everyone's like, yeah, keep away from that.

35:39Just chilling in her carport. Yeah. But they're generally not aggressive. Is that the deal? Yeah, there's a saying, and it doesn't fit all because there's coral snakes that don't have this. But yellow against black is a friend of Jack. Yellow and black against red is – anyway, I can't even say it right now. You wind up dead or something? Yeah, you wind up dead, but I'm getting it wrong. But there's a saying, and it doesn't hold true for all coral snakes because there's some coral snakes outside of the U.S. that don't have that same pattern. So if there's no antivenom and they take you to the hospital, what do they do?

36:11They stop making the coral snakes. I mean, there's some – They stopped making it. It was cost. Is that what it says? Ineffective. I think that's what I heard. Cost ineffective. No longer cost effective. Let people die. Cost effective is a crazy thing to say when it comes to fucking keeping people alive. Wow, I was right for a change. Capitalist cunts. Maybe the socialists are right. That was made by it. Cost effective is crazy. So what did they do? You know, I heard every rattlesnake joke after I got bit. And there's one that's these three guys are out hiking and someone gets bit here. and they go to the doctor and the guy says, you've got to come back and suck it out of him and the guy just says to him, you're going to die.

36:48So maybe you die with the coral snake. Just leave you dying. The thing I was, we recently were looking at this, the way of treating rattlesnake mites not too long ago, by the way, you sell these, Johnson & Johnson you sell these kits where you used to have one, right? You actually literally slice out and you suck out the venom out of your bite. Does it actually work? No. That was what's incredible about it. When we were young, they had these little rattlesnake kits. I'm a little older than you, but it was insane what they told people to do back then. They told you to cut yourself and then put a tourniquet and then suck the venom out, which is completely insane because when a rattlesnake strikes, they never hold on a rattlesnake.

37:29They strike and let go immediately, and then they track their prey. It's literally like a hypodermic needle going into your body. and the venom is already, just like when they inject you with something, it's already in you. You can't suck whatever a doctor puts. So what should you do if you get bit by Ronald Stump? Be mellow. In my case, I walked to my car. Luckily, I wasn't too far away from my car, and I was up in the mountains about an hour away from a hospital. I drove like a bat out of hell to the hospital, actually. But you're supposed to be calm and get to a hospital. That's the kit. Incredible, yeah.

38:02Jeez, and it was just bullshit, huh? Well, everything happened. Imagine taking that into the woods. You're like, we're fine. Everything you shouldn't do today. Everything you shouldn't do. And so you just stay mellow and get to the hospital. And if they don't have any antivenom, you just die? Well, in my case, they didn't have it in the hospital. They had to see Highway Patrol to bring it from Ventura. And it took about 45 minutes, and I thought I was going to die on the gurney. But, yeah, you get to a hospital and you get antivenom if it's a bad bite. And if they don't have antivenom, you die?

38:33Well, it depends on the kind of snake. Like water moccasins usually aren't lethal, but certain rattlesnakes can kill you. And how much time do you have from the time you get bit where you must get the antivenom in you? I mean, in my case, I swear to God, I thought I was going to stop breathing about two hours into it. It just slowly feels like this pressure on your chest. Like you can't breathe. Yeah, like you're, like you, it felt like somebody put sandbags all over me. And like you have this pressure and you feel like you're going to stop breathing. Yeah. It's kind of bizarre. Who's that guy, Ross Allen?

39:06He has the world record for the most, is it Cobra Bites? No, I think you're talking about the Serpentarium. That same guy? Bill Haas. Bill Haas. He lived to like 100. And I know people that inject themselves with venom. I was in Myanmar in Burma one time. This guy had snake tattoos all over him, and he was a snake wrangler at this zoo in central Burma. and every tattoo he had put on his body, he had put some venom in it so he could handle these really dangerous crates, which were like cobras. And he was this guy with all these snake tattoos, but he had envenomated himself so he would have antibodies so he could handle these snakes.

39:42And if he got bit, he wouldn't die. But early roadside attractions in South Florida, I mean, that's the part about Florida. It goes back. It's in the 50s and 60s. It had, you know, Miami Serpentarium was an amazing looking place. It had this giant cobra. a sculpture, basically. Here's a question. If they do that with allergies, where they give you a little bit of the allergen, develop a resistance to it, could they do that with snakes? That's the idea. If you live in a snake-prone area, should you do that? No, but that's the idea. Why wouldn't you do that? There's a guy right now in the U.S. that's doing it.

40:14I think they're doing a film about him injecting all these venomous snake venoms into him like a pin cushion. But no, I don't think people should do it, but people do do it. Not a lot of people, but this guy did it. But if it does build up your antibodies and you know that you're going to come in contact with snakes, wouldn't that be – is it bad for you to do? Look, the country that I think has the most deadly snake bites is probably India, the country where there's the most deaths and envenomation. The snake that probably kills more people in the world is a puff adder in Africa, but it's many countries.

40:50But I think India has the highest. U.S., it's pretty low chance you're going to get killed by a snake. You're going to get killed driving your car or shooting someone with your gun. You know, it's highly unlikely. The odds are very low that you're going to die from a snake bite, no matter where you live in the case. I understand that. It's all well and good, but that doesn't comfort you if you get bit by a snake. Like, oh, what are the odds? You have to deal with it. Or buy one of those kits. I think most people live, Joe. Most people. I mean, there's a few people that died this year in California.

41:20but typically it's like only a few people a year die in the country from snake bites. And is it generally because they just don't get to medical treatment in time? Or they're older or they get bit three times, like not just once by the rattlesnake. You get more venom in them. Is it true that the young ones give you more venom than the old ones? No, young ones have a more condensed, more dangerous venom, But big snakes are much more dangerous because they can put far more venom into you. The little ones have a more potent venom, but they can't inject as much into you. So that's kind of – people misunderstand that stat.

41:59Not that I'm a snake expert. I'm more of a turtle expert, and I'm more of a freak expert. So I'm good at finding these crazy people to cover. Do you get uncomfortable being around these people? That's a good question. um because there's there's a psychological aspect to all particularly like chimp crazy there's there's something about those people that makes me uneasy watching it on tv like you are so far gone like some of these people are so far gone in terms of like just being a normal present rational person yeah there's a courtship and sometimes that courtship takes years to get someone willing to be interviewed.

42:44It's generally the reptile world can be very guarded. People that have them don't want the feds coming and taking their rare reptiles. They don't want animal rights groups, PETA coming and busting them. They don't want people coming because they're very valuable. Some reptiles are worth a lot of money. So they're very guarded. And to get access to a lot of these people took a lot of time at times. And sometimes that relationship would go up and down. And there were times when people that I was interviewing really did not like me. There was something that happened and then I'd have to go there and I'd be nervous because that person may have been someone who did a lot of time in prison and did some heavy things in his life.

43:21So yeah, there are times when you're just kind of like, you know, is this the time I'm going to go there and he's going to really fuck me up? Why didn't they like you? You know, man, you know, like, listen, I like this guy. He's done what he's done in the past. He was sentenced to 100 years in prison. He got out for whatever reason. But that guy? Wait a minute. Why did he go to jail for 100 years? Well, Mario Tabrawi was sentenced to 100-plus years in prison. He got out early because he must have had some serious information. What was the crime? Murder and drugs. And he got out early because you said he had information?

44:02He must have. He did 12 years. No one knows why. What? He only did 12 years for murder and drugs? But I like him. Oh, great. I wasn't the one murdered. I wasn't in his life back then. But he's kind of a, he really actually does love animals, I mean, in his way. And I was nervous sometimes going to his place a few times. But why was he mad at you? Oh, fuck. Do you remember all the times he was mad at me? He's probably mad at me right now as I'm speaking. Yeah. I definitely will be after the show probably. Yeah. Well, this is the next episode. there's an entire episode that talks about kind of the 80s in Miami and the sort of overlap between the drug trade and the legal wildlife trade and the reptile trade.

44:42And he's a central character in it. The 80s in Miami. Now he's kind of more tangential because it's really about this guy, Ray Van Nostrand, a guy from New Jersey, moved down to Florida, started a business that became strictly reptiles, as I was referencing. But, yeah, I mean, I don't think there was anything particular, but he would get very particular about very specific things. Like if you were, you could be right about a million things that he hated, but wrong about one thing that he cared about the most. And he would categorize you to be this person that is, you know. There's an expression, honor among thieves.

45:18And he weirdly has this kind of honorable side. Unredeemable, yeah. And certain things I would say to him would make him really upset. But I have to say the only time I was ever shot at in my life was in fucking Miami. I was shot at going to a payphone in the early 90s in a van trying to go to a nightclub with a bunch of people. And these guys were walking towards me and they started just blowing out the windows of the van. I remember I didn't go to the nightclub. I went back to my hotel. And I woke up in the morning with that chopped car glass all in my hair. I had long hair back then. I had hair back then.

45:54But Miami was – it was pretty wild in the 80s and early 90s. I have a good friend of mine. My friend Steve did his residency. He's an ophthalmologist. His residency in Miami in the 80s and worked in emergency rooms. And he said it was fucking insane. It's just like so many gunshot wounds, so many drug deals gone bad, so many heists. He said it was like an insane place to work. It's funny you say that because I said to all my characters, I said, what's it like having been in and out of prison so many times? He goes, bro, everyone in Florida has been in prison. you know and I was kind of like well what's it like you know everyone in Florida's been in prison sunny place with shady people right have you seen cocaine cowboys yeah yeah yeah phenomenal right and that story where you find out that the entire graduating class of the police academy either wound up murdered or in jail for corruption yeah have you seen bad lieutenant yes I'm friends with Harvey oh really he's good in it man oh yeah no it's great but it's there's parts of this story that are a little like Bad Lieutenant.

46:56You'll see in the end, you know. Well, what you'll like about this second episode, about this period, it's from the point of view of this young, at the time, you know, coming right out of college, young DEA agent, D-E-A agent, on the beat, chasing bad guys. And he was assigned this guy, Mario, to Browley. The case that was a cold case, no one could ever touch him. And you see him kind of chase after him and, you know, understand the whole weaving of this story. But it's a really, you know, being around that guy was, you know, being, talk about our subjects in this animal world, you know, law enforcement.

47:29This guy sleeps with a gun every night and gets literally orgasmic with the thought of this guy coming to his house. It's like a hideaway. The guy that he put in prison for a hundred years that got out. He literally waits and you'll see a line in the show that it's kind of unbelievable what he says about that. Yeah. But just, you know, it lives in this kind of, we went to go see him. He lives in this kind of very country part of West Virginia. And he's good with guns. Good with guns. And he would brag about all the bullets you can find left over from the Civil War in his backyard. And he was very, very good with a gun.

48:08We did a lot of shooting verite with him. And he was just a really, at the time, very generous with his time, wanting to tell his story. but you know clearly killed a lot of people and would make some very soft references to to that that would be very unnerving you know like yeah you're really great with i've never shot a gun he's i don't have anything against it but i've never shot a gun and i would talk to him about it i'm interested in it and he'd be like yeah i've had to use it a lot you know more than i'd like to admit so you know you're in these these places it's it's it's but what's so peculiar about this guy.

48:46His name's Larry Loveless. He was a DEA agent in Florida back in those days. He put this guy in prison, you know, bringing, this guy was bringing a lot of drugs from, you know, he was Cuban and you'll see it in episode two, but he really just doesn't understand how the guy got out of prison. And the fact that the very guy that put him in prison wouldn't know that, that they, like whoever the powers that be, they put, got him out of prison after 12 years, you would think he would know you know but he's still to this day worried worried about retaliation so this was what's what's cool is that his dad was actually the person he was like an hr person for um kind of the cuban it was at the time of the cuban uh big pigs you know invasion that kind of era and he was responsible for taking care of all these kind of cuban exiles uh during that time and And he was being the one that was going to go house to house and giving people checks.

49:43So he had this kind of very interesting network of people and had this incredible access. And so what was been insinuated is that his dad had these relationships and knew where everyone was and knew all these people and had information that was useful to the government at the time. That's the idea. Gave information. No surprise. Or he helped bring down the real Pablo Escobar. Or he knew a big drug lord that the government wanted and they made a deal. Who knows? But it could have been. There's lots of theories. Quite an injustice, though. Like even this guy, you know, we filmed 200 people over how long?

50:1815 years, really. The last six was more intense. More than 200 people. And you never get everybody in. And I remember meeting this guy, Tony Biscaro. Remember him? Yeah. He was the—this guy was part of—he flew planes for drugs. You know, he got busted with like 600 ,000 pounds of weed at the time. he served the single largest sentence for a marijuana smuggling crime 40 years 40 years got out maybe five years ago and could you imagine coming out of prison for the longest sentence and then going to Miami and you see weed stores everywhere it's like it's over these weed stores or isn't it's like insane to me that's fucked up but but that was at a time look Pablo Escobar like there are people around Pablo Escobar that got indicted that was they were trafficking ivory horns and stuff.

51:07Like it was very, you know, one degree of separation for like wildlife crime and drugs in that era. Why do you think there's that connection? Easy. Concealment. Concealment. I mean, look, I don't want to exaggerate. I think there's been connections, you know, like you can put cocaine inside of a boa constrictor who's going to open a box at customs or, you know, Fish and Wildlife Service and look inside the boa constrictor. So there's some pretty ingenious ways to bring it. Meaning you put it in their stomach? Yeah. Like you either like Like force feed the bowel constrictor, like you put them in those balloons, you put cocaine in, or you even – And then you have to cut them open to get your cocaine?

51:41Yeah, you cut them open and get your cocaine. But even more – I remember in New York when the fish markets used to put – You speak so casually about that, by the way. But fish markets used to put the drugs in fish in the fish markets in New York. Yeah, liquid cocaine, yeah. Yeah, because no one wants to handle the fish and open up the fish and they'd shove all the drugs into the fish. So, you know, like smelly, dangerous animals are a good cover for drugs. or even more simply, you know, trafficking wildlife. There was a legal version of that. So what they would do is take the crates and they'd pack them and they'd put the drugs at the bottom and they'd put, you know, another layer of animals and they'd mix in some, you know, lookalike animals that were really rare but looked like the common animal.

52:22So they'd mix them together. And then they'd put something like, you know, spitting cobras up the top. No one was reaching into the crate when there was these, like, very dangerous animals. So that's how they kind of got, they were able to prey on the lack of resources at these kind of major ports of entry and realize that fish and wildlife didn't really have any resources at the time. They had limited wildlife inspectors. They had to go through these volumes, volumes of crates, and they'd play these games. Many Komodo dragons that made it into this country came in illegally in a crate, and they would just put a little Komodo dragon in with some other monitor lizards, and the inspectors couldn't tell the difference.

53:00And they'd go through. And the Komodo dragon that bit Sharon Stone's husband, Sharon Stone's husband at the Los Angeles Zoo is one of those Komodo dragons. So it was somebody's private collection and they got released to the zoo? No, it was in a sting that's in our show where they were bringing in illegal animals coming from a guy in Malaysia who's sort of the Pablo Escobar, the kingpin globally of all the reptile animal trade. A guy that we finally accessed after COVID who his name is Anson Wong. And he was sort of the bad guy number one in the world for reptile and animal smuggling. And so he was sending— I'll be sought after my Interpol.

53:37Well, he did the longest sentence in the U.S. for wildlife crime ever at the time in the 90s. He was busted in Mexico and then extradited in the U.S. But he was bringing in Komodo dragons and really rare reptiles. And the zoos were the beneficiary of those reptiles once they were confiscated. So the L.A. Zoo, San Diego Zoo, Bronx Zoo, a lot of these animals came from reptile smugglers. Wow. Very much the origins of collections for zoos. And I would also imagine the kind of people that are really into reptiles probably also do drugs. So they probably know a lot of people in that world. Yeah, it's like a cross-section of varses.

54:14You're into death metal. You've got a python. There's a lot of inked guys. there's a lot of like goth guys into oh yeah hot snakes which are the venomous a lot of bikers hot snakes hot snakes that's what they call them hot hot snakes the kind that can kill you yeah they're called hot snakes interesting but yeah a lot of badass guys and there was definitely drugs listen i did drugs in my life no way yes come on i'll go on i've done everything I had nightclubs in New York City for many years, Joe. Yeah, I'm like, you know, embalmed. It's made me live longer. Maybe that's what saved you when you got bit by the rattlesnake.

54:55I probably. But you got to think that the type of people that are going to be even interested in having a snake as a pet, that's a very unusual person. I like snakes. Yeah, I don't know. Come on. You know people that have snakes. Kids have ball pythons. You've got kids. They like a baby, a ball python. They're clean. You don't have to feed it every day like a rabbit or a dog. You can go on vacation, leave your ball python. They're a good pet, a lot of snakes. I don't think of them as a pet. I think of them as a monster that you feed that allows you, you know, it's not big enough to eat you, so it allows you to feed it.

55:32And then you have to keep it in this box, which is kind of weird. Yeah, well, that's why I like tortoises. You don't have to keep them in a cage or a box. Because does a snake experience discomfort because they're in a terrarium? Listen, there's a lot of myth out there that, oh, snakes can live in a little teeny sweater box or a shoe box, and you can put them in racks like you see in snake stores and snake breeders. Like a rack of shoes. The truth is real snakes in the wild do not live in little boxes. They may go underground at a certain time of year and hibernate. But they come out, and they hang out like us, and they move around, and most snakes do not live in a little teeny box.

56:10But yes, they can survive in a box, but there's all different kinds of snakes. There's racer snakes and indigo snakes and snakes that need to move fast and go places. And then there's some snakes like a ball python that can be in a more confined space, but you can't generalize. But generally, like when people keep them as pets, they keep them in some condiment aquarium, right? Yeah. Yeah, and they should give them more space. They should absolutely give them more space. I mean, part of what we're trying to do in this show is to try to tell people, be responsible. Don't treat reptiles like disposable pets, like a toy that you break one week and then you buy another one and you break it and the parents buy another one.

56:44You know, they're living creatures. The death toll when you import these animals is amazing. I mean, so much mortality. And we don't talk about mortality, whether it's zoos or people bringing in these reptiles or even myself over the years. You asked me what happened to that snake. Probably died. Probably was flushed down the toilet by someone's mom. you know you know like baby green turtles that you had as a kid like what happened to most of those how long do snakes look like how long does a python live this episode is brought to you by visible it's officially summer folks and boy what a summer we are having it feels like one of those good old-fashioned summers we just want to enjoy every moment and keep up with the action your best companion this summer visible wireless visible gives you unlimited 5g data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just$25 a month.

57:35So you can make this the summer of fun and savings. Visible is more than just a wireless plan. It's unlimited wireless designed to always keep you connected with no contract to tie you down. Switch today at visible.com. Plan start at$25 a month or get our premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save$10 on your first month when you use promo code ROGAN. Terms apply. See visible.com for planned features and network management details. So the longest lived animal, terrestrial animal on the planet is a giant tortoise. They can live almost 200 years. I have tortoises that are over 100 years old. What about snakes?

58:15Snakes generally, most snakes don't live more than 30 to 40 years, but there are a few that might, lizards can live 70 years. Some of the big land iguanas can live a long time. Those are ones in Florida? They can live 70 years? I don't know about green iguanas, but there are some that can live 50 to 70 years, some of the big lizards. Tortoises live the longest. Some crocodilians live a really long time. Snakes live the least, the lesser time compared to most of the other reptiles. That was another thing that they found in Florida in the Everglades. They found Nile crocodiles. And they think that they might have a breeding population.

58:52There's some suspicion. But it's basically from people having them as pets. I've swam with Nile crocodiles. That's no joke. Why'd you do that? I was in Madagascar. They have a form of Nile crocodile in Madagascar. They don't quite as big as the mainland crocs. And I was looking for turtles. And then I saw the croc. Nile crocodiles and, as you know, saltwater crocodiles are the two crocs that really kill the most people. You know, people come and wash their clothing next to the shore. You know, the croc comes up and grabs them. You know, you really got to watch it with Nile crocodiles. So if they're in Florida, they're much bigger than American crocodiles.

59:26Yeah, they have a shoot-on-sight order for them, or they did at least in this article that I was reading. It was from a while back. I didn't know that. Wow. Yeah, they found a couple of them. Yeah. Yeah, I know they've captured at least two of them. Well, the biggest reptile in the world in terms of weight, back to our size conversation, is a saltwater crocodile. And it's neck and neck with a leatherback sea turtle. They're both over 2 ,000 pounds. So you imagine a 2 ,000-pound. Wow, a leatherback sea turtle is that big? Yeah, yeah. I had no idea. That's great. I would have never imagined that a sea turtle would have the same body weight as a saltwater crocodile.

1:00:00They're neck and neck, over 2 ,000 pounds, both of them. That's a big, big turtle. Well, I know that there's legend, right, about Congo crocodiles, that there's crocodiles that people had supposedly seen, you know, back in the early 1900s and the 1800s that they thought were 40 feet long. And the thing about crocodiles is I don't think they die of old age. I think they just stay alive until they die. I want to be a crocodile. And they keep getting bigger. That's the other thing, depending upon their food source and how much. Yeah. I think in captivity they wind up dying. But I think there's some thoughts as to why that happens, how they're actually eating, whether they're getting fed.

1:00:49what's the difference between the way they live in the wild but there's some accounts from back in the day where these guys were on a boat and the crocodile was bigger than the boat they were on. I mean the thing about crocodilians, I think there's about 27 different types but once they get to a certain size they're vulnerable when they're little like birds and fish and things can kill them and eat them but once they get a certain size like you're saying they're pretty much invincible, nothing can kill them And some of them develop a taste for people. Yeah, just movement in the water and just, because they're an ambush predator.

1:01:26Yeah, well, they hunt people. And they probably hunt people. My friend Jim Shockey, he got hired to go to Africa. I forget what country it was, but he got hired to kill these crocodiles because they were preying on people. And while he was there, someone got snatched up while he was in camp. He said everybody there had like missing a leg, bite taken out of their calf. Everybody was all fucked up. I was good friends with Peter Beard, and he would go to Kenya and Ethiopia and call crocodiles. And there's a really incredible photo of him inside a crocodile that they killed. And he's like writing in his journal, but half his body is in a huge Nile crocodile.

1:02:07But he would go and call them for probably similar reason as you just said. Once they start targeting villagers, once they find that there's a place that they can hunt and get regular food, They're there all the time. They're so sneaky that what they developed was these people had put posts into the ground in the water. So into the area where they would wash their clothes and gather food. They essentially built some sort of containment area where the crocs couldn't get through these poles. So what the crocs did was go around the poles and into the water. So they had figured it out. Smart. That's creepy.

1:02:47That's creepy. They realize, like, oh, the people go. Like, they must have been watching and realizing, oh, the people go into this area, so I've got to go on the ground at night. And then I'll go back under the water and then I'll catch these fuckers slipping. And they're patient. They can wait years. They're intelligent. They can wait a long time before they eat anything. Yeah, they don't have to eat for a year, right? A big crock, yeah. Are they intelligent? Yeah. Well, they're one of the few reptiles that actually really does defend their babies. like you know like a snake this snake doesn't do that yeah yeah wow yeah wow wow that's amazing what a dinosaur man what is that a saltwater or a Nile this is saltwater yeah this is in Australia and Australia Wow though Wow those things ran the whole world at one point in time yeah it's just weird there's still creatures like that roaming around you know that's a throwback.

1:03:44And there's some really endangered crocodiles. And you'll see in our show, I think even episode one, there's the zoo curator that says, oh, we bought a few Philippine crocodiles from this dealer. I think it's in the first episode. And Philippine crocodiles today are super endangered. There's still some really, really rare ones. Not saltwater crocs and not Nile crocs, but there's some really endangered crocs. Is that a thrill for these guys, that they get something that they're not supposed to have as a part of it? Yeah, for sure. It's like a rare baseball card. No, it's like rare art. It's like having a...

1:04:18I get excited by seeing something I never saw before. I'm like a kid in a candy store. When I see a cool pink landing one, I've never seen one in the wild or anywhere. I've been to the Galapagos. It's a thrill. To put it in your backpack and take it home is probably not encouraged. I'd stuff it down my pants. No, I'd be too scared. Well, you wouldn't want to do that, right? Well, ever since not – You'd want to be in its natural habitat. No, I wouldn't want to. You know, my mother gave me a good moral compass for that. She used to say to me when I was a kid, don't play God, Eric. I was keeping things, and she'd tell me, you've got to let it go at the end of the summer.

1:04:56So I was lucky to have that because a lot of people didn't have that mother, and I did. So I kind of – against my better judgment, when I was a kid, I did bad things that my mother didn't like. But later in life, she was right. Keep it in the wild. Yeah, for sure. Well, they're fascinating in the wild. I do appreciate them in the wild. I'm perplexed as to why people would have their life revolve around taking care of reptiles. It just seems really odd. Well, people get into it and they get addicted and they buy more and more and more. And then they get divorced and they get rid of them all or they get burned out on it because after a while it's a lot of work taking care of a lot of reptiles.

1:05:34So it's kind of like people get really into it and sometimes it's hard to sustain it. But more trade than the other collectible culture. Trade? It's more trade. Like I'll give you a crocodile. Buy, sell trade, yeah. What's going on here, Jamie? Bear, bear gallbladder. I've never seen this footage. That's a shark. Yeah. So it's stealing a shark that a guy caught? Wow. Wow. Yeah. That must be American crocodile, right? I don't know. It's Australia? Okay, a lot of sharks in Australia. That makes sense. I don't know. Wow. so it just stole this guy's fish. Okay. What's been your interest in wildlife?

1:06:16Oh, man, I'm fascinated by wildlife. I'm just much more interested in mammals for whatever reason. I mean, I'm interested in these things. I found them fascinating, but they're not as compelling to me for whatever reason. And I always wondered what that is. You know, I did this thing on social media once, the social media hierarchy of dead animals, and I said, like, fish, fillets of fish, no one cares. Dead fish, people care a little more, but not much. Dead turkey, not that big a deal. Dead deer, okay, now we're getting weird. You know, dead bear, now people get mad at you. It's interesting. You know, I went to this thing called Safari Club International in Vegas.

1:06:58It's the biggest trophy hunting convention. And I was filming undercover. And I started out asking, yeah, can you taxidermy this? and that and then I kind of you know raised the bar and I said you know can you taxidermy a chimp for me no yeah we can do a chimp so what about an orangutan yeah we could do an orangutan anyway I was going around to different taxidermists in this giant convention they had elephants and lions and all kinds of stuff eventually I asked someone if you could taxidermy a human you know and and then suddenly I noticed all these guys starting to follow me you know and there was a big NRA booth and a lot of people with guns and eventually they surrounded me and I was trying to get rid of my, you know, camera gear and throw it in the garbage and stuff.

1:07:42But it was interesting where the line is and what you're allowed to. Well, it sounds like you're a fucking psychopath. You're asking if you could taxidermy a human. You don't think that's, they probably thought for sure you're a fed or someone. Or a joke. Undercover. I mean, obviously. It was kind of, it was kind of a joke, but they literally started putting eyeballs on me and say, who the fuck is this guy? Yeah. Wouldn't you? Yeah, but they were - Hey, how do you take a fucking human and turn it into a statue? People have shrunken heads. I know people with shrunken heads, actually. They collect them.

1:08:15But no, it's pretty macabre. But the fact that they would taxidermy a chimp and an orangutan and a gorilla. So who are these people that said they would do that? They're just - Just taxidermists that are in this convention that taxidermy your big game. So someone would have to smuggle it back. a lot of what happens is when zoo animals die sometimes they send it to people that taxidermy is so I know people that get a lot of zoo carcasses and they taxidermy a chimp I've seen it so when a zoo has the option to sell the dead body and then someone turns it into a taxidermy statue it's gone on for a long time nothing against zoos but that was one way to get really unusual animals like I have a friend And I mean, a guy I know that's taxidermy a number of Komodo dragons that came from zoos because people don't have Komodo dragons in the private sector.

1:09:09Well, I guess no harm, no foul. It's already dead. But I guess I make the point you're making. I'm just sort of saying it's interesting how fish, even though certain fish can live over 100 years, certain rockfish and longevity. That's incredible. We don't think of them in the same way as we think of these higher. We don't care at all. We don't care at all. Yeah. We don't seem to, you know. Going fishing is much more common than going hunting. Yeah, now that I said what I just said, maybe that's a little twisted. What do you mean? About taxidermy a person. Well, it is twisted. You asked them a fucking insane thing.

1:09:44I think I said that out of context. Whoa. You could buy this? Yeah. It says it's real. I was trying to look and see if it was fake. What? It says it's real. How is that legal? It's a document. I'm not sure on the screen. I mean, it wasn't hard to find. There's our friend that does that. It's only three grand? I mean. in Riverside. Yeah, the guy that has the taxidermy... He's got a funny name for his museum. Yeah, he's got the Komodo dragon, but now that I think about it, he had a number of taxidermy gorillas. Now that I think about it. Now, do they say where they got this from? Does it say how they acquired this body?

1:10:18The document might be correct to pay for the document. That's fucking weird, man. But to your point about this kind of societal reaction to, you know, wildlife issues. I think that's what we're super curious about, what drives people's obsessions around certain things. In this case, this happens to be part sport, part industry, part obsession with scarcity. But that is all, in this case, leading more to destructive extinction problems. You know, very few animals, more and more animals, are threatened with extinction than ever before, particularly reptiles. Now one out of every five are threatened with extinction.

1:11:01And it's growing at an accelerated rate, mainly because of things that we explore in our show. Pet trade, exotic, smuggling, all of that. But to get people to care about things that can harm you, believe it or not, we have challenges with subject matter in the show that we'll get notes back. And it might be too hardcore for people to see because it's a brutal volume-based industry. And there's a lot of spoilers. We try not to show the bludgeoning and the cruelty of the animals. We try to avoid that with Tiger King and Jim Crazy in this show because people turn the channel. So we try. If we wanted to, we could do that.

1:11:44But I'm more talking more about the point of like how do people respond to something through an interest? And what turns them on, what turns them off? and what is it about us that has this connection to certain? Why are there turtle people? Why do you like turtles? Why do you think people vilify reptiles? You like mammals, you said. Why do you think people aren't so keen on reptiles? Well, they're not like us, right? They're a different sort of predatory lizard thing, and I think in our mind they harken back to the days where these things were a real problem for human beings. You know, I think, you know, crocodiles and alligators, Like they enact like there's a visceral reaction that people have to them that I think is warranted.

1:12:28It's genetic probably. But you don't think – because we like to talk about the warm, cuddly, you know, charismatic animals like a panda bear or a koala bear or a – Well, that I think is anthropomorphism that's done by Disney movies. Of course it is. Yeah. Because people in the pioneer days, they didn't think of bears that way. But I would argue that a bear, a Kodiak bear, a polar bear, a lion is a lot more concerning than most reptiles. So why we vilify reptiles and have that feeling about them is I think maybe more as to what you said about the anthropomorphism. A snake has no legs like us. They don't breastfeed their babies like a bear or like a mammal.

1:13:14They have a forked tongue. They have no ears. A snake is weird. They're nothing like us. So maybe we feel so removed from them and they're scary. Yeah. Even though they're really not that scary. We talked to this guy. The Disney thing is so interesting to me because that was actually something I was kind of deep on. This guy, Carl Safina. He's more of an anthropologist or he's more of a behavioralist? He's like an animal behaviorist and sort of more in the groove of like, you know, animal welfare and animal behavior. Yeah, but this sort of creation of anthropomorphic characters through Disney.

1:13:48I mean, they were, you know, if you track this sort of correlation to, you know, entry points into, you know, mainstream culture. You know, it's, you know, they're easy. They're great devices for human emotion. But then there's this more perverse side of, you know, it creates these demands for pets. You know, Zootopia, we went snakes. Like, Zootopia had a snake as a central character, and it's going crazy in China, you know. Well, that's a pop culture thing. Like, you know. But that's the, you know, so these well-intentioned things and these wanes which we portray animals. Finding Nemo, everyone wanted a clownfish.

1:14:24Harry Potter, everyone wanted a baby owl. I was in Asia after Harry Potter. I was like, why are there like 50 baby owls in this market? And they were Harry Potter birds. That's a byproduct of pop culture, right? Yeah. You know, Jurassic Park, everyone wants their little bearded dragon because they want a miniature dinosaur. So who knows what's going to happen after Monsters of God? They're all going to want snakes again. Hopefully you have some relevance. Did Tiger King open up the door for that, you think? Did people look at that and find it appealing? Like, that's what I've been missing. I've been looking for my niche.

1:14:57I think it gave the opposite of people maybe questioning. It's like deliverance. It's a little deliverance. Tiger King, the way you're talking. Maybe question when you take a photo with a baby tiger at a roadside zoo. I think that was more, you know, because it was so big in pop culture. I want to get me a tiger after Tiger King. I want to get me a little baby tiger. If you're going to play into this lane, it's like, look, everyone was shocked that you could basically get one for free. Well, we've talked about it before on the podcast, but there's more tigers in captivity in Texas than all the wild of the world.

1:15:27Yeah. In people's private collections. I think religion also plays a big role in the vilification of reptiles, particularly snakes. You know, like something about the Adam Eve complex and, you know, the snake is bad. Serpent. The serpent, yeah. More people dream of snakes in this country than any other thing combined. It's mostly negative dreams. Not sharks? No, snakes. Like nightmare snake dreams? Google did this sort of like, you know, infographic by country. And, you know, what is the most common dream that people have? And it's usually around snakes, which is remarkable. I have like someone chasing me or panic dreams.

1:16:08I never have a nightmare about a snake. Well, you never hear of like a phobia directly attached to sharks. You know, you have a phytophobia, which is a fear of snakes, but you don't hear of a sharkophobia. Or arachnophobia. Right. Spiders. People are freaked out by spiders. Oh, yeah. I think that's a genetic thing. I think there's a memory. I think someone either was bit or knows someone that was bit and that information got transferred down to their offspring. I'm pretty sure of that. because hosting Fear Factor, I got to see people with legitimate arachnophobia and legitimate aphidiophobia where it is like nothing else.

1:16:44They see it and they fucking freak out. It's irrational. It's like everything in their body is saying, you've got to get out of here right now. And it's not like everybody else. Everybody else who looked at it was like, oh, yikes. And then a few people, they had that genetic memory, I think. That's just a theory. I agree. And it's cultural. It's cultural. Like we have a lot of Mexican guys that work with us. And every year we do a snake course when the snakes start coming out in the spring. And I show them how to put a rattlesnake in there. It's the only staff meeting he ever does. Yeah, yeah.

1:17:17It's the only thing I care about. But I don't want people killing snakes that work for me. And I'm like, hey, you don't have to kill the snake. And they're so used to taking the machete and cutting the snake's head off. And we don't do that. We move the rattlesnake and we put it somewhere else. We move the gopher snake, the king snake. but they just have this some of them as you were just saying just can't wrap their head around even touching the snake because it's instilled in them from their parents or from whatever their childhood that they're scared of snakes and it's hard to change that but with kids, I'm sure with your kids and your daughters I see with little boys six and three their reaction, they're not fearful partially because of the influence of the work that I'm doing But, you know, I watch them interact.

1:18:01I see their friends. I see their cousins that are fearful. They have an adverse reaction. I also think it's like, you know, your exposure to it. Yeah. You know, a lot. And you're right, probably some genetic kind of. Definitely exposure, too. I mean, if you grow up and you're used to being around different kinds of animals and the wildlife and different things, you'll probably be more comfortable around unique animals. If you're a person who grows up entirely in the city. Yeah. Did your parents like animals? Dogs. We had dogs and cats. Normal stuff. I had a weird mom. I had a weird mom that liked snakes.

1:18:33And so that played a role in it. Oh, okay. And liked salamanders. Oh, that explains a lot. And she would take me to pet stores and actually steal the snakes and salamanders and steal them and put them in her purse. Oh, God. And then take me out into the woods and we'd let them go. So that's the kind of mother. Oh, wow. Yeah, she didn't like seeing them in cages. Wow. But she didn't mind kleptomania. So I got good at stealing for a while. It's an odd mom who's really into snakes. It's an odd mom. No, she just wanted to free them. She didn't like seeing them in cages. Oh, I understand. In aquariums.

1:19:03Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't grow up around any of that. I didn't know anybody who had a snake as a pet. Nothing I can remember. Really? In New Jersey? Well, I was born in New Jersey, but I grew up all over the place. I lived in San Francisco until I was 11. Then I lived in Florida from 11 to 13. I actually was around a lot of alligators during that time. There it is. Yeah, we were in Gainesville, and there was a place called Lake Alice there that had a lot of alligators. You'd see it all the time. When I was there, one lady got her dog. At a clearly impressionable age. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I was around them a lot.

1:19:37But they were weird. They didn't do anything. They just laid on the shore. You could see them, and you could be fairly close. Even though they could have clearly chased me and caught me, because they can run like 30 miles an hour, right? They could have caught me if they wanted to. They didn't. They weren't really interested in people. Apparently, they had plenty of food. And they were, at that time, they were actually endangered. So alligators, like they were telling people not to feed them marshmallows because people would throw marshmallows on the lake because you could watch the alligator come up and eat the marshmallow.

1:20:06They like marshmallows. And they said, hey, these are not good for alligators. They're super worried about alligator diabetes or something. Whatever. But they were concerned about giving the alligator sugar rush. Yeah, they were concerned about giving the alligator non-nutritious food, which I thought was funny because they were saying that they were endangered. And it's amazing that in the 50s and 60s, they were really endangered. It was hard to find an alligator. And when you think about that now. It's hard to believe. It's hard to believe in how the Endangered Species Act did help bald eagles, birds of prey.

1:20:38It actually worked. Because of DDT. But it brought back alligators. And now alligators, like you can't even imagine they were endangered. They're like ubiquitous in Florida. They're everywhere. They literally say every pond has the potential to have an alligator. They're everywhere. Everywhere you look. They move around. They're very overpopulated. What's interesting about this work in the show that spans so much time, you know, we had, which, you know, you shared in this, you know, curiosity, but we had great access to all of these great people in different industry. So you have heads of the zoo, you have, you know, DOJ, DEA, U.S.

1:21:18Fish and Wildlife Service, the collectors, you know, the bigger suppliers. And you have all aspects of this sort of industry. And what the show became, you know, as we were working through the edit is this kind of, you know, this real clear story of unintended consequences, which is the more you enforce, you have great laws that happen, but it triggers something else. and that triggers something else. And you see this kind of time after time after time again. And in some cases, it leads to some positive things like ESA or the Dangerous Species Act, or you have a pop culture event that drives sales of an animal that's going to be poached out of extinction.

1:22:00So it's a really interesting way of looking at this and analyzing it in a way. What you realize, and you'll see, Joe, if you continue watching, that the pathology behind everyone, the law enforcement, they're going after their prize, right? They're going after their big trophy is the bad guy. The bad guy, you know, the dealer, the smuggler is going after the rarest reptile. The zoos got very competitive with reptile houses in the 70s and 80s because they started realizing they were very popular. One of the most popular things in zoos or reptile houses. They wanted the Komodo dragon, the rare reptiles.

1:22:38So, and the collector, like guys like me that really dig reptiles wanted like the pink, you know, Galapagos land iguana that no one has or the this, the unattainable. So everyone kind of is going after each other, the reptile, the, you know, the feds are going after the bad guys. And it's a similar pathology. And what you find out in the end of the series is there's a scene where law enforcement has something that you can't believe. And it's a little like doing a film about cocaine cowboys, and the law enforcement has a garage full of heroin and cocaine that they're selling. So it's like it gets very gray, and the psychology is similar.

1:23:20The only difference between the prisoner and the guard at the bars. That's the sort of kind of idea. And you'll see there's no clear right and wrong, and sometimes the laws don't work, so it's messy. And sometimes there should be laws where there aren't laws. You know, back to the marijuana analogy. Like fucking, how twisted is it that someone goes to prison for 40 years of a pot? And now you can go to a weed shop every corner in Oklahoma, right? But it's a very messy, complex story that was hard to weave together. And I think it was the most challenging for us, certainly more challenging than Tiger King.

1:23:55The most proud. I think it's really deep and it's a good one. And we lived. And we lived for now. You guys spend a lot of time on these. Yeah. This is one of the things that I found shocking while you were just discussing this. You were saying it was like six years. More. More. So when did you plant the seed? Well, the seed was planted really in my head when I read this book, The Lizard King, in 2008. And I tried to buy the rights from this author, Brian Christie, who wrote this incredible book, The Lizard King, in 2008. So that's almost 20 years ago. I didn't start filming until 2014 with Josh Safdie.

1:24:31And that was the beginning. But Tiger King and other things got in the way. So, yeah, maybe six years if you were to condense that time. But when we saw you a couple years ago, we were making many projects along this. Because, you know, you can't do them all. It's a very unstructured way of working. You know, we don't have a certain amount of shoot days. It's kind of a flow. We like these longitudinal. We shoot multiple projects at the same time. You know, and we're lucky because a lot of our worlds are in certain places. So, you know, it's one-stop shopping. In Florida, there's a lot of interesting people, a lot of colorful people that are, you know, are hitting some of these themes that we're exploring in different works.

1:25:13So I think, so we're able to kind of do that. But the duration, the duration's great because like, you know, sometimes constraints are, no, I think it's great in some ways if you're able to kind of balance other work because, you know, holding out for access to a really important person might not happen in the first go around, but, you know, a year later or two years later. What is the common factor that you guys, is it fucked up people like that you guys are looking for when you decide what kind of documentaries you're making? not just like it would that would be off a too superficial like there's too many fucked up people out there but fucked up people in connection with wildlife is the theme of the big three that you've got and people that have a story that's somewhere hidden in there so we cast a wide fucking net like we filmed shark people and taxidermists and the guy that breeds the most long-tailed macabre monkeys for medical research where we got covid from we're filming so many different subcultures of animal people and other people and then you sort of hone in on something and so the monkey mom thing became chimp crazy you know and we started seeing a story there so it's not like we just go out and just lock into something and there's a story we have to kind of find it and i would say this is not a good recipe for people that want to make documentaries like anyone starting out in life to try to make docs don't do what we do because it's not a good way to get rich and it takes forever and you may never have a story.

1:26:38And so it's like... That's what I'm getting at. It's like... It's like we got lucky that Joe Exotic tried to kill Calabasca while we were filming. We got lucky in a sense that... And we got lucky he didn't kill her. We got lucky in a sense that Tanya kidnapped a chimpanzee. This is not a recipe for success. You know, we film, film, film. We do a lot of shit that no one ever sees. Joe Exotic DMs me all the time on Instagram. Oh, still, yeah. He wants to get out. You know, there's a way maybe we can get him out. By the way, I'll tell you after the show. I'll tell you after the show. Do you want him to get out?

1:27:10You know, the government made a deal with him before the trial. They said, you can do six years or you're going to have a trial. Six years. He's been in jail now for nine years or whatever it's been. He would be out right now if he made that deal. He thought he was going to get off. And I was like, Joe. I was on the phone with him every day at the time from prison. I said, take the deal. I don't know. I'm not into throwing people in prison and throwing away the key forever. Tanya's in jail, too, you know? We're good at that. For perjury. I think she doesn't deserve to be there for four years, you know, for perjury.

1:27:43Well, she didn't need to kidnap another chimp. Yeah. We tried to help her, but she didn't. She was her own worst enemy. Anyway. Well, these people are obsessed. Yeah. I think also what attracts the crime element is the sentencing is low for wildlife trafficking, wildlife crime. But do they really consider that when they're getting involved? Like, oh, no big deal, only do four years? Do they really think of that? I think you keep going back to it. They keep doing it. Yeah, but I think that's because they're obsessed. They're trying not to get caught. I don't think they're looking at it and balancing out the low sentence rate and going, oh, this is a good thing to get involved with.

1:28:17I think that has a role. It's a pretty stiff crime. I think it's a risk factor that's considered, and especially in the sense of like how much risk people look at. I think most of them, Jeremy, I think most of them think they're going to get away with it. Or they're smarter than the feds. But they have this sort of, you know, worst case thinking about if there was something to happen, it's, you know, eight months at a camp. Right. You know, a lot of them go to prison multiple times while we were filming this show. During the filming, we were shocked that one of the lead guys in our film was under investigation, being indicted.

1:28:50He didn't tell us. And then finally he said, guys, I'm going to prison. And we don't cover it in the show because it was just too much. But we were like, what? You've been filming with us for two years and you're going to prison now? And then he finally got out of prison. We filmed him more and he's got an ankle brace. And he'd been in prison five years before that or, I don't know, eight years before that. So there's a lot of reason. What was he going to prison for? This time for smuggling turtles that were going out to Asia. Three-striped mud turtles. Yeah, we're no longer bringing wildlife in to buy and collect.

1:29:24It's actually coming out of our country into China. Really? Yeah. What stuff are we exporting to China? Well, a lot of it's, Eric, the one recently that happened. I just took in a confiscation three weeks ago of 300 three-toed box turtles that come out of the central part of the U.S., Oklahoma, Missouri. And two weeks later, a guy was busted coming into Mexico with turtles, and I took those turtles from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. So animals are coming into the country, out of Mexico, you know, different countries. And then we're exporting now, which is new in the last 10 years, a lot of native turtles and reptiles and other wildlife to Southeast Asia and Europe.

1:30:08And how are they getting there? Mostly, it's mostly air cargo carry-on. This particular confiscation three weeks ago, they busted the guys with more box turtles in their luggage once they got to Hong Kong and China. Like I said, China, Taiwan. A lot of socks. Malaysia, Jakarta. The reptile industry is enormous for now keeping them as exotic pets. Enormous. I mean, it's, you know, in Asia, like the bird world, the birds are called the cut flowers of the wildlife trade in Asia because, like, we might have a bouquet or a plant in our house. They have a birdcage in Southeast Asia. There's something like some insane statistic about how many people have a bird in their house.

1:30:54And when you go to the bird markets in Jakarta, it's just surreal. Or in Thailand, there's one in Bangkok called Chattachat Market, these huge, you know, animal markets, you know. We talk about where COVID came from, but the scale of these animal markets, bushmeat, wildlife, it's on a scale that's beyond your imagination. What are they selling? They're selling reptiles. They're selling birds. For meat? No, no. These are for pets. Birds are ornamental in your house. You have a songbird. You have an owl. You have a whatever. You can't believe there are people that are. So they just have like a wildlife mall?

1:31:29It's effectively like an enormous wildlife mall. An outdoor mall. Wow. And within that mall, there's also seafood, and then there's the reptiles, and then there's the birds. It's like messy. No wonder maybe COVID came from that. Maybe COVID didn't come from that. I don't know. It came from a fucking lab. I think you may be right. I have a friend, bless his heart, he's a good friend of mine. He said it was a zoonotic disease. It didn't come from a lab, but now I'm beginning to think it might have come from a lab. I think a lot of people were influenced to say that it was a natural spillover because they didn't want to admit that we were fucking around with gain-of-function research.

1:32:02I think the evidence now shows that it may have come from. Yeah, pretty clearly. But also, it seems like if you see these kind of lab, or excuse me, these markets, you would say, what is this right here, Jeremy? Chata Chata. Chata Market. Which one is this? Oh, this is one of those markets? Yeah, Jakarta. Oh, I've been to these markets in Jakarta, yeah. And it's just a wildlife market, and so it's all pets. So what is it about Asia that has such a desire for animals like this? Those are the Harry Potter owls. That footage is where – yeah. Status, wealth, same things that were driving the U.S., but also cultural.

1:32:38But it's more common in Asia? Well, there's – in China alone, there's over a billion people, so there's just more people. And just the scale and the size of Asia and China is much bigger than the U.S. and Europe combined. So they have a bigger market. And the climate's pretty good to keep exotic animals like Florida. So it's just, it's like, you know, on steroids, the collectors in Asia. And why I think that the industry, the trafficking number is so under-reported is, you know, you have this, there's like one person, one person that is responsible for coordinating in the U.S. One person, she's in Delaware, who's responsible for coordinating with U.S.

1:33:17Fish and Wildlife to deal with, you know, these placements of confiscated wildlife, if they're able to even detect them. I think it was something like 10 ,000 animals in the last few years were coming through LAX, basically the torrents, the border, and LAX. One little sample market. It's very understaffed, undermanned, to be able to manage all the wildlife coming in and out of the country. So even with dogs and detection advancement, they're finding ways to get animals out. And then the sad truth is that they've been starved and dehydrated. recovering them is impossible. You've gotten lucky with rewilding animals back into New Jersey and stuff like that through this organization, but it's a harmful reality that it's actually still happening.

1:34:06We thought ours was the past. The percentage of wildlife that leaves the country, native wildlife to the U.S., it's like 50 % is kind of marine stuff, like coral and invertebrates that are in the ocean. And the rest is mostly reptiles, mostly turtles. Mammals are very small. these days. Birds are very small. So for whatever reason, you know, turtles and the U.S. has the most, out of any country in the world, we have more species of turtles and tortoises than any country in the world. We have 51 species in the U.S. Mexico second. You know, India, I think, is maybe third. But so Asia now really wants these turtles where you grew up, you know, in New Jersey and other places where we have these really cool turtles, spotted turtles, bog turtles, wood turtles, really beautiful colored Eastern box turtles.

1:34:54Once they get to Asia, they're in the many thousands of dollars. The shipment that just went out that we received the confiscation from, it was about a half a million dollars, just those turtles once they get to China. So it's big money, and they use mules, and the people that got arrested or busted usually aren't the real ones that are organizing the whole thing. It's like drugs. Well, that's a good thing about this docuseries is that you guys are exposing this to people because I think most people would be completely unaware. No idea. Yeah, no idea. No idea where animals in the zoos came from.

1:35:30Is there an issue with people stealing eagles and trying to import them as pets? So raptors are really interesting. So that sector of the bird world, I mean, the bird world is so vast. There's the songbird people. There's the parrot people, really high-end, you know, hyacinth macaws that are so expensive. One hyacinthicol is like$60 ,000 today or$50 ,000 or whatever it is,$40 ,000. But raptors are increasingly popular in the Middle East, you know, golden eagles and all these really far out birds of prey. And in the U.S. we have really strict laws when it comes to birds of prey and owning them in falconry.

1:36:08Bobby Kennedy is a falconry guy. He loves falconry. But it's gotten more popular again around the world having, you know, big birds of prey. Because it's interesting. I have friends that live in Alaska. And in Alaska, eagles are really common. They're all over the place up there. They don't even think anything of them. Especially the guys who go salmon fishing. When they come back from salmon fishing, you literally have like 30, 40 eagles just waiting on the lawn for these boats to arrive. Because they know that they're going to throw the carcasses out. Bald eagles. Yes, bald eagles. I would imagine some people would want those as a pet.

1:36:42Especially in other countries. Yeah. In the U.S., only Native Americans can have eagle parts unless you have a permit. Eagle parts? Well, you know, like feathers for their headdresses. Native Americans can still do things with birds. Also, if you have a stuffed eagle in your house, that's illegal? I think it's illegal. Did you ask those guys? They could stuff you an eagle? That would be interesting. That's where we draw the line. By the way, I don't know if they actually have them, but we have this footage. I mean, imagine going in the confiscations room at LAX. It's incredible. Oh, really? Yeah, it's incredible.

1:37:16You have like, you know, tiger, you know, just all this rare animal and transformed into so many objects at home. A table, a rug, pool cues. I was reading about this, that there was a place in China where people could go to eat endangered species. And they would have an endangered species menu. And they would have like a dinner every now and then, you know, like rarely. But it was by invitation only. and these like super weird wealthy people would go out there and they would, you know, eat a lion. If you're listening, invite us. We'd love to explore. You know, it's funny. It's fucked up you say that.

1:37:50I make it back. It's funny you say that because, you know, we went to this big turtle show in China and, you know, there's, you know, it's this huge turtle show, like a car show. And there's girls like in skimpy outfits with banners, like, you know, like a car show. But it's massive. And all these rare turtles are selling as pets. But then for lunch, they have these dim sum tables that are round, and everyone's served turtle soup. And it's like, how twisted is that? It would be like a reptile show in the U.S. We have lots of reptile shows in the U.S. And now at lunchtime, you're eating reptiles.

1:38:25China's a whole different thing. I think it's this visibility paradox thing. You have this charismatic, symbolic thing. There's very few, a lot of protection around them. People want it. What are you talking about, eagles? Just talking about what people want, what they can't have. That's the through line in this work, especially for rare stuff. Eagles are like American alligators. They've bounced back since DDT and the book that – what's her name – did in the late 60s, 70s, Silent Spring. That was the book that really changed everything for eagles and birds of prey. It's America. Her book – what was her name?

1:39:03Silent Spring, the author. she changed everything because no one listened to her about DDT and pesticides which were making the eggs of birds of prey not viable and it really took really took Carson yeah Rachel Carson really took a toll Rachel Carson was an unsung hero people should know her name and I forgot it for a minute but she really is why you have bald eagles you know making that were they on the verge of extinction because of pesticides we were using because of DDT was doing this thing to the eggs where pelicans, birds of prey were disappearing at alarming rates because of spraying of DDT for agriculture, for pesticides.

1:39:39Wow. And then we banned it and eagles and birds of prey came back. Yeah. Peregrine falcons, all of it. Bald eagles, golden eagles. Yeah. So anyway. Yeah. Yeah. It's a weird animal, the bald eagle, that that's our pet. That's our national animal. It's a strange heartless raptor. It's a fishing eagle. There are fishing eagles all over the world that are similar to bald eagles. It's just a fishing eagle. That's what it is. It's just such a cool one. And there's something about watching them swim away with a salmon, their talons. Well, and also photography has gotten so much better over the years, right?

1:40:16I know there's probably that video you're referencing. I mean, where we live, there was that eagle cam, and there was a sick eagle, bald eagle. And it became national. In California? Yeah, where we live. And it became national news two weeks ago. Golden? A bald eagle. Really? Yeah, yeah. And if you Google Bald Eagle, California, it's in the town we live in where they took it and they're bringing it back to health. But the amount of money that poured in to help that eagle was unbelievable. For this little place. Going back to how people care, it's remarkable. But people care more about eagles than had that been a turtle or a snake that was rescued.

1:40:50Well, that's the eagle's America's bird. Yeah, it's America's bird. I mean, people have it tattooed on their back. Yeah. There's something about an eagle that's just iconic. There's a lot of snake tattoos these days, but yeah, I'm sure you know you're yeah Yeah, but there's something about the eagle tattoos different. It's like you know, but then the grizzly bear Mm-hmm, you know such an adverse reaction so controversial They eat a lot of people

1:41:17There's a reason why the California state flag has a grizzly bear on it and there's no grizzly bears in California Yeah, we have a friend that's actually trying to bring it back. Good luck We mentioned this to you last time and you were like, why or something? Let them naturally return. Reintroduction is always a disaster. Reintroduction of wolves in Colorado right now is a fucking disaster. Well, they're back. They've now migrated into California and there's been some wolf sightings even down in southern. Oh, quite a few. A friend of mine filmed one. We showed it on the podcast. He filmed one near Bakersfield.

1:41:46Exactly. A black wolf that was out in the field near Bakersfield. Yeah, they can go incredibly long distances. Well, reintroduction works in some places. It's getting better. I have a good friend that's reintroducing jaguars back to northern Argentina. They're doing a pretty good job. But, yeah, it's tricky. Like condors, California condors. But it's a difference in reintroducing animals to where there's agriculture and where there's a bunch of animals that are in pens and then they start eating them. No, no, don't do that. That's what Colorado's experiencing now. But I've worked with Ted Turner's group for many years in New Mexico on reintroduction programs.

1:42:19And the guy that did the wolf rewilding of gray wolves is this guy named Mike Phillips who works for Turner. And, yeah, they have a real PR problem. And grizzlies are going to be a bigger PR problem. Yeah. To get people to wrap their arms around the idea of bringing grizzlies back to California. Well, there's certain states where they're overpopulated. And there's a lot of argument they should be relisted and that people should be able to hunt them again like they do in Alaska. But the Native Americans in California do, by and large, want grizzlies back. And they have this new technology that might be able to keep them kind of in certain areas.

1:42:55They haven't figured it out fully yet, but hopefully they keep them in a certain area. Because, you know, grizzlies migrating into L.A. like the wolves right now might not be a good idea. Well, you already have the mountain lions. There was a great video the other day, I don't know if you guys saw it, of a mountain lion in a guy's backyard in Santa Monica. Yeah, I saw it. Big cat. I have them in my backyard all the time. I think that's motivated by displacement from fires, right? It's also pets. They like to eat people's pets. Yeah. We have these cameras. They're not there, though. It's too close.

1:43:22What are you talking about? They eat them all the time. No, no. Pets get snatched up all the time. Jeremy, this woman down the street from me was walking her dog at 3 in the afternoon. The mountain lion grabbed her dog. She's literally on Ladera. She's walking her dog, a little dog. And the mountain lion just jumped and grabbed her dog. She's looking at the dog, holding a leash, and goes, I better let go of this leash. And she did. And she never saw a dog again. I'm sort of saying this little particular suburban park of Santa Monica, it's not very common. Well, where I live, they eat people's dogs.

1:43:52It's not common because you don't see them. They eat dogs. Where I live, the mountain lions are eating people's dogs from time to time. They do it all the time. We were talking about Marin County. I think it's Bay Area, wherever it is, where they have these depredation tags where they have to shoot problem mountain lions because they're eating pets. And they find out that that's half their diet. Half their diet is pets. Well, I see them on my cameras. We have these motion detector cameras, and we see them at 3 in the morning right in front of my house. Look at that fucker. I rarely see them with the naked eye.

1:44:21My face, man. Isn't that crazy? But then one gets hit by a car, and they build a bridge across the road. It's kind of amazing. You've got a nice mountain lion in the lobby out there. That was from my friend Adam. He hunted that in Colorado. That was a depredation mountain lion. That mountain lion had picked a ranch, and it was killing all the calves. And they actually got to it right after it. It didn't even kill it. It was eating it while it was alive. And then they ran it off. The dogs had ran it off the carcass. They had to shoot this calf. It was just torn apart and still suffering alive. And then they killed it.

1:44:56Luckily, where I am, we have a lot of deer. And we find a deer carcass from time to time that's a mountain lion kill. Oh, for sure. We have a lot of deer. But, you know, back to our show, I want to just say one other thing about sort of the ending, which it was really fortuitous. I just want to bring it up, even though you're not there yet. But spoiler alert. Well, it's not really the spoiler alert, but I'll say this. I spent about 20 years working in Madagascar with some rare Madagascar tortoises. And I eventually I was trying to save this tortoise in Madagascar. And I did a 60 minutes piece with Leslie Stahl, took her to Madagascar, a New Yorker piece on this tortoise.

1:45:32I failed. Everyone failed. The tortoise functionally went extinct in Madagascar. The poaching was so intense. Wow. And the tortoise had a very high— What is it? What is a plowshare tortoise? Well, it's a reptile that arguably has the most value in the pet trade over almost any other reptile in the world. There may be something close, like a fujal, an iguana, or maybe a Komodo dragon. But some of them can be worth as much as$100 ,000. And people in Madagascar are so poor, especially in the area where this animal comes from. And it only existed in a tiny part of northern Madagascar. That's it. There it is.

1:46:06So where are they going? Mostly to Asia. There's a direct flight out of Madagascar to Bangkok. And so... And they're pets. Yeah. And some of those photos I made... So is it possible to buy them in Asia and bring them back to Madagascar? Well, so this is where I'm going. Very hard to do that because of health screening. I took that photo over there, that little guy. I took some of these photos I even took, actually. Oh, that's a guy that works for us. Anyway, I've been working with this species of tortoise for almost 20 years. And we were able to get some confiscated plowshire tortoises out of China and Taiwan.

1:46:43And we waited patiently for 15 years to try to breed them. And right when we finished this show, and this is a tortoise that's never been bred successfully in the Western world. No zoo institutions have tried to breed them and failed. We were lucky enough to get our first hatchling of this really endangered tortoise right when we finished the show. And so we filmed it and it made it into the end of the show. But it's a story about the reptile trade. And this was a story in the end of the show about a confiscated group of animals that came from the reptile trade, the rarest and most valuable tortoise in the world.

1:47:17And today we're trying to bring it back to Madagascar, which we're working on, which is happening as we talk. And is the problem that if you bring them back to Madagascar, people are going to go to Madagascar and steal them again and then use them in the pet trade? So, yes, to be blunt. And so it's somewhat symbolic. It's somewhat about showing Madagascar that we're not trying to profit and take their natural heritage and what they rightly should have. So part of it is showing that we can go full circle, confiscate an animal that was in the illegal exotic reptile trade, breed it, and then return it to Madagascar.

1:47:51But the part that no one wants to talk about that's really controversial is in this particular case, it's not like one thing fits all. I said this to the folks that are working with this tortoise in Madagascar to try to save it. You know, hey, the only way you're going to take pressure off of this tortoise, it's like drugs, is if you either legalize drugs or, you know, in the case of drugs, or make this tortoise available for people around the world so they can have it. Because it breeds quite easily. They breed them, try to have them in the private sector in institutions and zoos. They turn out not to be that difficult to breed, even though no one's ever bred them in the Western world, in Europe or the U.S.

1:48:31Well, it takes a long time to reach maturity, right? Well, it's an animal that takes longer, twice as long as a human or three times. They don't reach sexual maturity until they're about 30 years old, 40 years old. They can do it. You can raise them faster in captivity than the wild. So they are very slow to reproduce. They're not like rabbits. They're the opposite. and there are so few of them. And so they're very, very rare, very valuable. The only way ultimately I think you can really take the pressure off of the poaching is to allow people to start to have them. That's a radiated tortoise, which we also bring.

1:49:03That is wild. So the dremeline is a way to deter poaching, deter value. Our organization is the group with Dural that did this dremeline to try to deface them like cutting off a rhino horn so poachers wouldn't take them. So we were dremeling those tortoises' shell to basically deface the tortoise so poachers would not take the tortoises. It ultimately didn't work. So they're just taking them because they're beautiful. And if you fuck up their shells. They have the highest domed shell of any tortoise in relation to the size. So wild. They have an incredible longevity, well over 100 years they live, and they're gold.

1:49:43And so that dremeling that you did, that's indicated, that's the top of it right there? Yeah. And that didn't help? We did that. You can see it over there, the center. That's called the vertebral scutes of the tortoise. And we dremeled them, and we put MG for Madagascar and a number. And we were hoping that defacing the tortoise would make collectors not want to have them. But it didn't work in the end. Somebody told me, this is a good time to bring this up, that turtle shells, when you look at a turtle shell, It's almost representative of a calendar and that there is around the outside edge of the turtle.

1:50:20There's like 28 different little squares and in the center there's 13. So it's basically like a 13-month 28-day lunar calendar. Yeah, this is it. How weird is that? Yeah, that's really it. The lunar calendar on a turtle's back. Yeah. You know a lot of turtle facts. I did not know that one, actually. You didn't know that one? I know a lot of cultures like Asia and American Indians believe that the Earth sits on a turtle. Yeah, it's turtles all the way down. It's a Turtle Simpsons song. Yeah, I didn't know about that. That's interesting. Wow. Isn't that weird? Yeah, that's interesting. Like, why?

1:51:00What is that all about? Like, that's very strange that it coincides. It's, like, exact to what a lunar calendar is. Yeah. Very strange. Yeah. That's super interesting. I mean, turtles have been on planet Earth longer than dinosaurs. They've been here for over 200 million years. So they've been around a long time. So people have been playing with turtles forever. So maybe they came up with a lot of things that relate to turtles. But it's odd that it syncs up with a 28-day lunar calendar. I know sports stadiums in the beginning or things that were shaped like that, like a geodesic dome, came somewhat from how turtles are designed.

1:51:35Like there was some architectural thing that came from turtles. Yeah. The geodesic, like the structure of it to keep rigidity. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I know turtles, the first writing, the earliest writing was on the plastron, the bottom of a turtle shell in China. Maybe some of the earliest writing. Really? Going back some really, I don't know, a couple thousand years. So turtles have been used for all kinds of things, for writing, for medicinal medicine, especially in Asia. It's gone back thousands of years using turtles for chi and for vitality and all these kinds of things. If you get sick, you make some turtles.

1:52:15There's a lot of weird stuff with that. There's a lot of stuff that has to do with turtles. Like the rhino horn things for boners. Like, hey, guys. Well, they really put some Viagra. Yeah, the Oracle bone script on the bottom of a turtle shell. Look how cool that looks. Go back to that. Beautiful, right? Beautiful. 6 ,200 BC. More than 6 ,600 to 6 ,200 BC. Go into the images again of the writing on it. Look how cool that writing is. I mean, this one's beautiful on the right. That one's beautiful. That's wild. But I think it was some of the earliest writing was on turtle shells like this. Well, it sounds like it if it's 6 ,000 BC.

1:52:516 ,000 BC, I mean, that predates ancient Babylonia. Yeah. Or at least what we know about it. So turtles have been used in Native American culture forever. Yeah, yeah. Survived a lot of extinction events. That's an ox scapula. And turtle show. Yeah. Ox scapula. I mean, there are turtle farms in China that you cannot believe. They're breeding these turtles, mostly Asian box turtles, Chinese box turtles. and these people are multi multi millionaires and they sell one turtle for as much as like twenty thousand dollars one turtle and the wild caught turtles are more valuable than the farm turtles but there's turtle farms that are breeding they're called a golden coin turtles it's a chinese asian turtle that can fetch huge amounts of money why is the wild one worth more it's like wild rhino horn is horn is worth more because they think the wild rhino eats things that are medicinal versus just a captive rhino that's eating hay.

1:53:52And it's the stuff they eat that goes into the horn, which makes sense, like your fingernail. It's keratin. So the wild rhino horn is going to have more good stuff for you. And, of course, they'll probably grate some Viagra in it to make you really believe that it gives you an erection. You know, they'll cheat. Unless it does. I don't know if it actually works. Well, they do grate the Viagra in the rhino horn sometimes. But the wild turtle is just eating things and has more chi than the farm turtle, but they have these enormous turtle farms. Like, you know, 15-story buildings that are all turtles.

1:54:23Jamie, I've got to see this. So wild turtle farms in China. Turtle farms in China. And this is all just for pets? No, this is for consumption. You'll pay$20 ,000. Now, there's turtles. Wait a minute,$20 ,000 for consumption? For consumption, for like a golden coin turtle if it's a wild one, like big money. They want to eat it. Yeah, but then in China you can also pay$100 ,000 for a Yunnan box turtle, A Yunnan box turtle can be$100 ,000. So these are these turtle farms. Yeah, but I'm not - And this is all for like turtle soup? Yeah, but these are soft-shelled turtles in this image that you're looking at.

1:54:57I'm talking about things like golden coin turtles, much more valuable turtles for consumption than these soft-shelled turtles. Why are they worth more? Is it just because it's rare? Oh, this guy. I know this guy. Garden State turtle. I know that guy in New Jersey. He's a good guy, Chris Leon. Yeah, that's a golden coin turtle. So we breed these where we are, where we work with turtles, and we send these back to China from time to time. Okay, but why? Explain why is it worth$20 ,000? For whatever reason, this turtle is called a golden coin turtle. Cora trifalciata is the scientific name. And it is very coveted, and apparently it has certain properties that can cure cancer and other diseases.

1:55:37And so this turtle is high on the list for consumption for medicinal reasons. But rare. Allegedly can cure cancer, right? Yeah. Is there any false beliefs? But you can see 20 grand, 40 grand. 20 grand, as high as 40 grand for a fucking turtle. Yeah. And to eat it. Yeah. But then there's turtles that can be 100 ,000 or 200 ,000. So is it just because it's difficult to acquire that it's like a status thing? That it's worth 20 or$40 ,000? Well, they're very rare in the wild now, but they farm them. But they're very endangered. It's a critically endangered turtle. We breed them. you know, at my facility.

1:56:14But, you know, there's a lot of people in China. And if you want to save someone's life, you'll pay whatever it takes to save someone's life. So when they're buying it for$20 ,000, they're buying it to try to save someone's life? Or someone's sick or they really want good health and they're wealthy. Okay. So you could just get it just as like a prophylactic turtle. You eat it from medicine to make sure you don't get sick? Something like that. It sounds insane, though, that it's$20 ,000 for a turtle. But if you look up Yunnan box turtle, it was thought to be extinct for 50 years, and they rediscovered it.

1:56:45And a Yunnan box turtle today, if you could even get one, would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Another turtle similar to that. And are they eating those too? No, that one's so rare. There's so few of them. That one is – people buy it as an exotic pet that's really rare. So this is kind of a – it's a tricky situation because on one hand, if they're extinct in the wild and these people have them as pets, maybe you can recover them somehow or another. No, that's an American box turtle. That's not a U.S. Or they're in a zoo, for example, by the way. So that's why that's a turtle that's being shipped to, that's a U.S.

1:57:19turtle from the East Coast that's being sold and smuggled to China and other parts of Asia. Because look how beautiful our turtles are in the U.S. God, that is a pretty turtle. Oh, you do have a photo of a Yunnan box turtle. It's just not the one there. That bland thing is a Yunnan box turtle. The one above it? Yeah, the one that's kind of gray. That right there? No, no. That's a three-toed box turtle. Which one? That one? That one. That one can be worth$200 ,000. Jamie, get him right. What? That turtle. That turtle was thought to be extinct for over half a century. That's a boring-ass turtle.

1:57:48That other one. You're turning him on now. Well, don't get me down the turtle rabbit hole. But that one where your cursor was just over, the one that we—yeah, that guy. No, the one to the left. Yeah, the other one. To the right of it. That one. Yeah, that one's cool as shit. Yeah, that's a male eastern box turtle. They always have red eyes. God, it's so beautiful. Yeah, it's beautiful. But solutions to the scarcity problem. That's a male Easter box turtle. You know, pet trade can, you know, commercializing aspects of it can reduce issues. But what's important about this conversation, actually, is people think of ivory, rhino horn, you know, whales, and they have no idea that a turtle, pound for pound, could be more valuable than a rhino horn, possibly.

1:58:27You know, a turtle. I have no idea. Nobody knows this, but it's crazy what the money involved in these, back to the confiscations we're getting, and the trade in turtles going out of this country is in the millions and millions and millions and millions. And there are people in China and other parts of Asia that are getting very rich in the turtle trade. And we always hear about pangolin scales, rhino horn, ivory. And those things are important, but the turtle trade is really massive. And the reptile trade is massive. And there's a lot of money in it. And they're easy to transport because a turtle doesn't need to eat or drink.

1:59:01Just wrap them in socks, put them in a box, shove them all in there, put them in diapers, tape them up, ship them. They don't even need much air. They need a little air, but they have a very low blood pressure. Not like we have a higher blood pressure than reptiles. And they can live without water or food, as you know, for a very long time. So they're, you know, like wildlife nature with handles. You can just take them. Transport them. Transport them. And if they're really worth$20 ,000 to$40 ,000. You're putting that in your bag. Yeah. Crazy. And they really are. They really are worth it. That is crazy.

1:59:32I would have never guessed. Yeah. And I would never guess that it's for consumption. That's even more weird. Well, no. The turtles that are leaving this country going to China are for exotic pets. But the ones that they're eating. Yeah. The ones that they're eating. That it's worth$20 ,000. That's insane. Yeah. Yeah. At least. Is there a market for snake meat? Yeah. So if you've been to Taiwan or China, there's these snake bars where you can literally have a snake bleed out while it's alive, a cobra, and put it in your drink. There's snakes. You want to talk about diarrhea. What kind of diarrhea you get from snake blood?

2:00:08I was many years ago. Oh, my God. I was in Myanmar in Burma at a snake place, and they were just loading snakes up in these trucks, like big trucks, just stacking snakes, and they were heading into China. So the snake meat, the snake. Snake meat is big in China. You know, look, tiger penis, tiger this, tiger bones. Hold on. Back it up. Tiger parts. Back it up. Tiger penis? Tiger penis. Tiger penis is a big delicacy over there? I think they're, you know, they're more creative than we are. They eat a lot of stuff. That's a fact. Okay. But the tiger penis thing I was not aware of. That's a delicacy?

2:00:47I don't know what that does for you. Maybe that's another Viagra kind of thing. But, you know, there's tiger farms and they part them out and they sell them to China. So there's tiger farms that are just for consumption. Yeah. Tiger bone wine. Tiger this. Tiger that. Tiger bone wine. Sounds like it's part of that, like, you know. No, but tigers. What, Jamie? It's like a rhino horn type deal, I think. Yeah. I think that's given them. Right. It's believed to increase virility and enhance male sexual performance. It's... Dun, dun, dun. Tiger phallus soup. Ooh. One tiger penis. But a turtle is worth more than a tiger, guys.

2:01:25That's crazy. Yeah, yeah. But I didn't know that there was a market for tiger meat. Yeah. And is it all the meat of the tiger or just dicks? It's just... Chop away the... Joe, I've been to the turtle farms. I've been to the snake bars. I haven't gotten into the tiger... Tiger penis, the future of Chinese medicine. Hey, this guy's doing a workshop. We should go to this workshop, yeah. What is this guy teaching? That was a couple years ago. Yeah. There might be a question. He's on the run right now.

2:01:57Don't get me started to talk about animal penises. My favorite movie as a kid was a movie called Birds Do It, Bees Do It. I don't even know if it still exists. But all it was was animals having sex from a praying mantis, like eating the head off of the male, to a rhino. And it was a great movie. Just sex. I did not know that there was a market for the meat. What is that? Tiger dick? Yep. Nice. That's not what I would have thought it looked like. Crazy looking. That looks like a nudibranch, a sea slug. It looks like a piece of sushi. Yeah, it definitely looks like it does. No, it looks like a piece of sushi.

2:02:27It looks like what I had for dinner last night. It looks like something you get at Sushi by Scratch. So when they're having these tiger farms where they're farming the meat, how are they cooking tiger meat? What does that go into? Is that really common over there? Even though I did Tiger King, I'm not an expert on tigers. I do know a little bit more about reptiles. But I have a friend that did a movie called, I think it's called, what's it called? Carl Amon did a movie about the tiger industry in Vietnam and Cambodia and farming tigers. And I think it's called, oh God, I can't remember. But anyway, there's a whole tiger industry and people breeding tigers in parts of Asia for tiger parts.

2:03:11It's still illegal, but they definitely still do it. Yeah. It's not like... Interesting. Consumption of tiger meat is highly illegal, though an illicit black market persists, primarily fueled by commercial tiger farms. Despite strict domestic bans, thousands of tigers are bred in captivity across the country, creating a complex web of illegal luxury... Luxury consumption is a crazy word. That's a crazy phrase. Luxury consumption of tiger meat, traditional beliefs, and international conservation concerns. Well, it's what you just said earlier that started this conversation, that people go to restaurants and eat exotic animals.

2:03:48And bear gallbladder. Bear gallbladder. But another thing that – wait, back to Monsters of God. Look up Chinese giant salamander farms. Those are unbelievable. That's a salamander this big that can eat like a rat or a rabbit. It's a salamander that they eat and farm in China. I've seen that online. I've seen them cook it in TikTok videos. And that's a really rare animal. Those guys are really rare. Oh, really? And yet they're still cooking them and eating them? There's two types of giant salamanders. There's a Japanese giant salamander and a Chinese one. The Chinese one is massive. Can I see that?

2:04:25Is massive. What, Jamie? The one I stumbled down, it says it's AI. So I was... It's an incredible animal. But they farm a lot of things that you would never think of. Yeah, turtles, salamanders, tigers. I just... The luxury consumption market. Just seeing that phrase, it's like, what a weird culture where you have luxury consumption of highly illegal endangered species. And that was what a friend of mine who had been to China said that was what the whole rhino horn thing was. It wasn't even as much as they believed that it would do it. It was just that this guy had rhino horns. Status symbol. Very wealthy people.

2:05:05Guy's got a rhino. You want some rhino horn tea? Let's have a seat. Like a gentleman. Come to my wine cellar and in it I got some rhino horn. I got a couple turtles. What's the difference between that and rare wine from 50 years ago? Well, first of all, an animal doesn't die. It's just wine. Yeah, you don't have tiger dick in your wine. What is the tiger bone wine? What is that about? I don't know. Is it wine they soak in bones of tigers? Sure, it's a barrel. Is that what it is? I mean, they have sake with vipers in them. There's a snake in Japan called a habu, and I remember getting sake, and this really incredible snake was in my sake.

2:05:41But, you know, like, look, we're hypocrites in this country. We eat tuna and they're endangered. In Asia, they eat other things that are endangered. Are they endangered? Tuna? Endangered? Well, certain species of tuna, I think, are becoming pretty endangered. They're not what they were. They're certainly not the same numbers that they used to be at the turn of the century. Yeah, yeah. So I think it's easy to point fingers at other parts of the world when we've done a lot of things here. We had passenger pigeons that made the skies dark and we shot every one of them. We had Carolina parakeet. We almost got rid of our condors and bison.

2:06:14And we've done a lot of damage, but there's a lot of damage. Not you and me. We shouldn't say we. People. People. People that lived here. It's not us. Well, why is our show called Monsters of God? We're the monsters, not the reptiles. We did a lot of damage. In the past, I'm just saying. Some of us. Some of us, yeah. Yeah. Some of us. It's a very small percentage of people that are out there eating turtles. Well, you're a good guy, and I know that, actually. Somehow, you didn't have maybe the mother I had, but you must have had something good. What, with my love of animals? Yeah, you got a good moral compass.

2:06:44I've watched you. You know what's right and wrong. Well, certainly. Eating tired, Derek. I think there's better ways to go about your life. But the recovery stuff is real. You know, there's a lot of cool stuff happening with species recovery. And in this case, the plowshare tortoise is on its way back. I mean, you have to kind of still protect it for a while. That's expensive. For a long while. That's expensive. You know, anti-poaching and security. It's a lot of work. I agree that it's important. But I am also fascinated by our desire to sort of manage nature because 90 whatever percent of any animal that's ever been alive ever is done.

2:07:22They're all extinct. Everything goes extinct. And a lot of our good intentions, managing nature doesn't work oftentimes. Oh, no. You do a terrible job. Yeah. Especially when we bring in animals. We were talking about this yesterday with Hawaii. They brought in mongoose to eat the rats. But mongoose are diurnal. Diurnal. Rats are nocturnal. We never saw each other. Yeah, Hawaii, it's funny you say Hawaii because Hawaii is kind of the poster child of all the states in the country of extinction. Second is California. But Hawaii really fucked up Hawaii with cats. Mongooses were more in the Caribbean but also Hawaii.

2:07:59And mongooses is why back to the Jamaican iguana. The Jamaican iguana was extinct. We thought it was extinct because of mongooses. We just recently found a small population, but it's a very rare iguana. Reading a very similar thing happened with the salamanders in China. They were not originally thought of as anything special until the mid-20th century when famine forced people to find new stuff to eat. They started eating them and liked it, so they made a lot of places to do that. Oh, and that's what led them to almost get wiped out? Well, so then they reintroduced them back into the wild because there were too many of them, which created a new problem, it says.

2:08:35There you go. They created a new species. So now you have one hybrid salamanders, which is also like what we have that here in Austin It's the same story over and over again. What did these fuckers look at look at that? Photos of giant salmon. They are so massive. They're so massive size that thing There's a bunch of videos of guys cooking them in walks Outdoors yeah, and so is that another thing where it's like one of those exotic things? You're not supposed to have and that's why they're cooking it Yeah. Because, I mean, it looks – there's a funny one where a dude's singing. He's, like, rapping over it, and the guy's cooking – about a guy cooking a dragon.

2:09:13This is how you cook a dragon? Yeah. Yeah, they're pretty impressive. But it is a weird desire that people have to eat something, like, incredibly exotic and rare. Whoa, look at that sucker. Yeah, that's a real one, yeah. Giant salamander cooked eight ways. Yeah. In the, I don't know what that word is, Xiamen, Xiamen, seafood, China. You know, that was one creature we wanted to film and I never got to film for Monsters of God because that also is a monster of God. So these guys are taking them, they're alive and they're going to bring them over and kill them and cook them. So this is an endangered animal that this guy's killing and cooking?

2:09:53Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. But they sort of know it. It's not by necessity. They know it's endangered and he's still boiling it up. So it's the fact that this luxury item, that you get to eat this luxury item. What does it look like? Let's see what it looks like at the end. Kind of crazy. A lot of meat. Looks delicious. Would you eat it if you were there, or would you feel bad? I wouldn't eat it, but I've been... It's already there, though. It's already dead. I've been in Southeast Asia with friends that ate dog, you know, and I just couldn't eat it. But I'm not very adventuresome. I can't. I would only have the only way I'd eat a dog is if I try to bite one of my kids.

2:10:34You know, but if it's like dogs, it's different. You know, we eat cattle and in India they don't eat cows and then other places eat horses and then they eat dogs. Sure. We have our own, you know, sort of cultural norms about certain animals that we just can't wrap our head around. And the ways we justify. But I've seen dogs being killed in Sulawesi in huge numbers in Indonesia. Just the way they kill them and then they take these blowtorches and burn the hair off of them. And people buy them just like you're in a regular grocery store. The way they – and it's just what's normal in one culture – those are snapping turtles, American snapping turtles.

2:11:11What's normal in one culture – So have these been imported into Asia? Yeah, they're big. And we still eat those, by the way, in New Orleans and the Southeast. We eat snapping turtles. We've also been sucked out. We eat them in gumbo, but in Asia, they really love our American turtles. And snapping turtles are not endangered in America. No, but alligator snapping turtles are. Oh, those things are crazy looking. Yeah. They have this - Which you have in Texas, by the way. They have what? That's a little bait. They're an ambush predator. They have a little appendage on their tongue. The fish is attracted to them.

2:11:43The video of them feeding is incredible. They've got alligators? They're serving up alligators too? Croc-tails. Croc-tails? Croc-tails. Yeah, crocs. Jesus Christ. That wild. Imagine just hanging out there, watching his buddies get butchered. You're good at finding gruesome stuff over there. I mean, there's a lot out there. You're going to really gross out a lot of people. So, you know, you say you guys have a bunch of projects always kind of in the works. Like, how do you go about choosing them? You just, like, find these very bizarre people and these very bizarre niche groups? And I think, you know, listen, I'm more aware of time as I get older.

2:12:21So you got to choose carefully what you want to do because it takes time to make these projects. So, you know, a lot of them, we hope there's some silver lining or something maybe positive about telling these stories and not just frivolous stories about freaky people. You know, but it helps to have some freaky people in a story to make people interested sometimes. But that's not the real goal. We're also doing projects that have nothing to do with wildlife. I did a documentary in the last 10 years about my mom and my parents. And I don't know if anyone will ever see that. And they both died. But I did that to keep them relevant.

2:13:00And I had a crazy family, a gay father and a crazy mother who was into animals. And so everyone has a crazy family. But we did a story that we're working on about New York. And we're also doing some other animal stories. So not everything sees the light of day. Right, but these last three big ones that you guys did are all about people and their bizarre relationship with strange animals. Yeah. What else? What's next? I mean, we're doing a really interesting project right now that should come out next year that I think you'll like, Joe. I have to say there are big carnivores in it again and some really far out people that you know and you may have known personally.

2:13:45I don't think I can tell you who they are, but they were very famous. Anyway, but we're doing a project about that. What a tease you are. I know. I had too much coffee. Sorry. Yeah, yeah. And then we're really interested in a few other topics that people don't really talk about. We always talk about the charismatic megafauna, and we're interested in some of the groups of animals that we don't even think about. It's also, I mean, this time we live in media, you know, there's so much stuff that gets made that no one sees. And it's a shame, especially, you know, some of this independent work, especially some of this documentary work.

2:14:23It takes many, many, many years. and many people are only really able to show it to the people that know about the issues and nothing happens, especially if there's an impact aspect to it. Right. So I think our formula is great. It happens to be, you know, these subcultures that have a higher propensity of finding crazy people or people with far-out beliefs. More than anything, it's more beliefs that are more interesting that make us curious. So I think that's the sort of mixture of conservation storytelling plus far-out beliefs in a niche that are able to zoom out and talk about themes of extinction or attachment or ego or crime.

2:15:04Maybe there's something to the overfishing thing to do because it's a giant issue. It's a huge issue. There's been a lot done on it. But I think there hasn't been a doc on overfishing. I like Seaspiracy. I like Seaspiracy. But the problem with a lot of those traditional documentaries, they tend to preach to the converted, not the unconverted. And you want to reach a bigger audience by somehow telling that story about overfishing in a way where you can get more people seeing it that don't know the issue. And the other thing I would just say, overfishing is a big deal. Invertebrates, insects, butterflies, and what's happening with insects is a big deal.

2:15:43We're losing a lot of really weird insects, and they haven't even been described yet. But marine fish and even tropical fish is really interesting to us. Where do all the saltwater tropical fish come from? How do you get them? They dynamite the reefs in the Philippines. They don't breed easily, saltwater tropical fish. Freshwater ones typically do. There's a lot of different groups of animals that we don't really think about and talk about that we kind of take for granted. And we think of them as disposable. We'll just put more tropical fish in our aquarium in a Vegas hotel. And imagining de-extinction businesses are going to solve our problems.

2:16:19I think that's also interesting to us. And there's just not a consciousness for smaller vertebrates and invertebrates. But I would just say one other thing that I think we do, you probably are aware of, that people think you have to be in a city to get the weird shit going on. New York City, L.A., whatever, big cities. And what I've found is oftentimes it's the places that you least expect it. you know some weird you know suburban landscape where you start turning over turning over the rocks and you find and see that there's weirdness happening everywhere and that is a theme in our stories it's not gravitating to the big cities to find it it's places where you know the guy next door to you next door where you live has a garage full of hot snakes and the cobra escapes one day and it's in your yard or whatever the fuck the story is but it often is in places that you wouldn't expect it to be.

2:17:11Your friend's carport. Yeah. Well, listen, guys, thank you again for being here. I really appreciate it. Thanks for all the work you guys put in. You've really entertained the shit out of me over the years and disturbed me as well. So it's available, Monsters of God. When does it come out? Tomorrow. Tomorrow. So when this comes out? August 6th. August 6th. All right. Beautiful. Thank you for having us again. Thanks for being here. Thanks a lot. Bye, everybody.

2:17:49We'll see you next time.