#2536 - Eric Goode & Jeremy McBride

I watched episode one today, like, "Oh God."

First of all, we're the fuck to find these people.

You live in that world, like you, you're in the world of reptiles. We should just explain. It's a docu-series, it's on HBO. It's called Monsters of God, and it's all about the reptile trade, which may or may not be responsible for Florida having 500,000 pounds.

It's debatable, right? Like, it seems like it was partially pet owners who let them go, and partially there was some sort of a reptile research facility or something like that. Well, there's different theories. It was a hurricane theory, it was the people that ago ago.

“I think the more reasonable one, because I had a Burmese python in the '70s when I was a teenager.”

I have a photo of that around my neck. What happened to it? People buy them when they're this big, and then when they're 15 feet, they let them go, 'cause what are you, you know, and they're-- Is that what you did?

I did not let it go, but I-- What did you do? I have no idea what happened to it to be honest. I have a lot. I know.

You had a monster, and you didn't know what happened to your monster. I think when I went to college briefly, I gave it to someone, and then I don't know what happened to it. I hold the Nazary Way to people when I went to college. I had reptiles in my room.

Is there an extra level of responsibility when you're giving away monsters? You know, I mean, like, if you have a Chihuahua, and you said, and your friends like, "I'll take her, I love her." That's, you know, you really have to worry about your-- you know, you have a fucking python.

You're giving away a python? You gotta worry about your pythons, because your pythons, and the average age, you're gonna eat your Chihuahua when it gets away. Well, certainly, you worry about that. But I mean, you don't worry about your Chihuahua being a monster.

I'm kidding. Yeah. I mean, if you have a 15-foot python, that can eat a lot of things. And it kind of needs to eat a lot of things. Yeah.

Yeah, Burmese pythons did really well in South Florida. Aguanas did really well in Florida. You know, they weren't there in the beginning. That's a good way to put it did really well. And the other way to put it is invasive species that's destroying the ecosystem.

Well, they're like us. Joe, they're like us. We came here and we took over. Yeah, I guess in a lot of ways.

“So, why did you choose this particular subject for this new docu-series?”

I'm not gonna let Jeremy talk. No, I he'll talk. But I'll just give you a lot of advice with me, so you know what I mean? Yeah. Jeremy, Jeremy, you can blame later.

Yeah. We guys did Chimcrazy, which is one of my favorites, so fucking insane. That world is so insane. Well, episode one is kind of setting the table. It gets better.

It gets more off the, you know, charts when you were on a match. I can only imagine you was two and three and four.

But um, and five, yeah, it all started, you first of all, I'm a reptile guy.

I've been keeping reptiles and studying reptiles for over, you know, I'm an old guy, older than you are. So, you know, I've kept them for, I don't know, 60 years, you know, plus I've kept reptiles since my parents gave me a tortoise when I was six and I was catching rattlesnakes in my lunchbox and horn lizards and you got horn lizards and Texas here that are really cool and rattlesnakes.

Um, I've been bitten by rattlesnakes. It's not fun. You're a bitten by rattlesnake? Yeah, but that's another story. More times than one.

“No, I got bitten once because I learned my lesson after the first one.”

What happened? It wasn't good. Don't get bitten. Where'd you get bitten? On my foot.

Did you experience necrosis, necrosis rather? You know, so normally you get necrosis, necrosis where you get tissue or finger would rot and then the guy, you know, the doctor that I went to at a hospital, you know, in the mental health. The doctor, you know, in the emergency room said, the last guy in here that got bitten

by a rattlesnake lost his toe or something or lost his digits and he said, "Good thing you didn't get bitten on a finger because the necrosis can rot away your finger." And he said, "Good thing you got bitten on the middle of the foot, you're going to be okay." But this type of rattlesnake I got bitten by, there's the most venomous rattlesnake in the

country is called a tiger rattlesnake, but it's not the most dangerous. Most dangerous is probably a mahogany rattlesnake or an eastern dime, a back rattlesnake, but you have western dime at back here, but I got bitten by a rattlesnake that had both hemotox and anandoro toxin. So the necrosis was less evident with me, it was more like a co-brower was starting to

stop breathing and I felt like someone put sandbags on my chest and now we're into it.

But the first thing you sense is obviously the, it feels like someone jab me with an

exacto knife and I looked down and the rattlesnake was retracting into a burrow, I looked at my foot, but then you taste a metallic taste in about 15, 10 minutes, 15 minutes and you realize, "Oh, this wasn't a dry bite." But it's not fun, I got a lot of anandoro venom. They make a different anandoro venom today, I got that 25 years ago.

You know, the most painful part was the serum sickness from the anandoro venom.

“The loose stop breathing thing, I remember I was on a gurney and I felt like I was”

going to stop breathing, but weirdly not that painful, but like you, but yeah, you feel like you're going to die and stop breathing. But the serum sickness is just unbelievably intense for weeks and you just have the most insane fever and you've got these red blotches all of you, but they make a different serum now.

That one was made out of horse anandobotis that they put into you and my body didn't like those horse anandobotis. God, yeah, it's also maybe don't wear Birkenstocks when you hike. It's probably the river sandals. Yeah, okay, yeah.

Yeah, because I got bit, most people get bit fucking around with a rattle snake. I was, what is this, Jimmy? They used all of the antiventiment to hospital and had to go get more from another house. The ran out of antiventiment after using a whopping 36 vials, holy fuck man. Oh, yeah, yeah.

They're fucking scaring man, I've had dogs bit, I had this one dog, you got bit twice. Yeah. It was real problem, his face would swell up, I had to bring him to the vet, but luckily they have antiventant for dogs, it works pretty well. Yeah.

“He was kind of out of it for a few days and he came back.”

How fast the response? Not bad. Not bad. It was funny because he got bit once, he was crazy dog.

He was always killing blizzard, it's like that was his thing, like anything in the backyard

he would kill. And he got bit by the rattle snake and I knew it because I was out there, I heard him, I heard the commotion, I saw the snake, I knew what it was, so I got him to the veterinarian immediately. They got him the antiventant, he is face swell up, but they got him the antiventant

and he was good. And then he got bit again, like maybe a year later and I brought him to the vet because I saw him get bit by rattle snake and the vet was like, well, I don't see any swelling and I don't see a hole, but he had developed a resistance to it because he had gotten bit once.

And so then I got him home and also his face starts swallowing up my off fuck and I bring him back the vet and then he had to get the antiventant. But a good sized dog. Yeah, he was about a 90 pound dog. And that was a western diabetic rattle snake I got out of there.

California, I don't know. Oh, it was in California. Oh, it wasn't out here. Oh, it wasn't out here. Oh, it was what did me that probably saw the Pacific rattle snake, yeah, okay.

Yeah. We had a problem in my California house, one of the houses that I used to live in, it was there was a lot of it. It was very canyony. Yeah, yeah.

It was a lot of stuff. Well, that's the same snake that bit me. Yeah. It's spooky man. We were running once.

We were running the trail. And in mid stride, I realized that the log that I thought was across the road was a giant rattle snake. It was fucking pig man, like the biggest one I'd ever seen out in the wild. And the dogs didn't notice it.

They ran right over it. And then I ran over it. Oh, fuck man. And then I'm trying to figure out what to do because I know we're going to have to come back this way when we go back up the hill.

So I'm throwing rocks at it, trying to get it to run away. Yeah, now I've handled a lot of rattle snakes in my life, anchobers and other snakes. And to get bit that way is very unusual. Usually people are being jerks and idiots and can handling a snake and it bites them. Where are we?

We just walk. I was hiking in the mountains in North of LA just a bit. And I was actually looking for snakes as I didn't say. And I didn't see the snakes. It takes on me first.

And I was bushwacking. I was on a trail. I didn't see it. My foot. So you have this lifetime experience with reptiles and snakes.

“And so you just decide you must have interacted with a lot of these really crazy people.”

And just decided this is the next. Yeah, it takes one to no one. Yeah, be careful. The next point of focus. I'll start it.

Really? Yeah. No, no. Listen, I was a closet of reptile guy living in New York City hanging out with Madonna, cool people in the '80s and '90s had a nightclub and friends with lots of artists, Andy Warhol.

And I never really talked about reptiles.

I actually Andy asked me, what am I going to do with my money? He interviewed me one time for Andy Warhol TV and I said, "I'm going to buy reptiles." I actually said I'm going to buy tortoises and some tortoises. But I was pretty closet, but I still kept them in New York and fast forward when I decided to try to do a film about it, I had been traveling all over the world to Madagascar and

Seoul away from the different parts of South America, trying to study reptiles and especially turtles and tortoises that were very rare. I started filming people like kind of notable people, Christopher Walk, and then slash, and I don't know, all kinds of people that I knew in New York City, and I would just ask him to hold a turtle or tortoise and say some words, like PSAs, and I was doing that with

these two guys named the Safdie Brothers, and fast forward, they now Josh just had a

I know that I was working with these kids that were going to be these new filmmakers,

and we were making these films, and then we made a short film about reptiles that's crazy, called Trophy Hunter, it's very short, and we did that together. And then I said to them, "Hey, man, you guys have read this new book of the lizard king. It's about the reptile world. Let's do a talk about the reptile world."

And I'd already told Fisher Stevens, a friend of mine, "Hey, let's do a talk about this book, the lizard king," and he said to me, "How are you going to do that talk without getting killed, Eric?" And he'd want an Oscar for the curve, and I thought, you know, "I'm going to get these good guys and do a talk about reptiles."

So anyway, we started in 2000. Why did you think you're going to do a kill? He read the lizard king, and he said, "You're going to do a story about this guy that went to prison for a hundred years, and this other guy that is the Pablo Escobar reptiles." And he just said, "It's a dark world, I don't know how you're going to do this without

getting killed."

“So what is about the lizard world of the reptile world that makes it so dark?”

Like why are those people de-think-attracted to it? Well, not all of them are scary people, and I would say a lot of them maybe misunderstood a little bit. But in the case of Mario, there was a crossover with drugs, smuggling drugs and animals into the country.

But for background, you know, what is different than these other films that we've done. This was an industry story that kind of looks back at the past half century.

What most people don't know is a legal wildlife trafficking represents about a 20-billion

dollar year industry. It's kind of under-reported, actually, only after guns, drugs, and human trafficking. And what's really interesting about that is there's a convergence of all of it. You know, wildlife trafficking also involves drugs. And traffic times of guns, there's a lot of mix, mixture of it.

Whenever people are bringing in things illegally, they tend to be a risk-taking type. Of course. But, you know, in the pre-customs TSA days, when it is intensive as it is now, it's very easy to carry animals and carry wildlife. Yeah, that was something I didn't even think about until I was watching.

“I was like, "Oh, God, I remember those days, but they didn't check your bags.”

They didn't even check your ID. You just had a ticket." Yep. And you just get on the plane. So you just get on the plane with lizards.

Yeah. Now, most cases. Yeah. It's strapped your body, right? I don't know.

The thing with what was so interesting about reptiles in this case, within the trade, is they're portable. They're nature with handles. You go, you see, in the early episode of episode one, people traveling around the world, you know, finding where endangered animals, putting their suitcase and bringing them back,

putting them on a priceless and selling them to consumer. And that was the kind of early days. I mean, the story, the lizard king, but many much, you know, in our series, it's handful of guys, mainly guys, you know, start a multibillion-dollar industry. And you see this kind of innovation happened over the course of the series as, you know,

as the years go on. Yeah.

But when we say multi-billion, I have to kind of contextualize that.

“When people say that the wildlife trade is multi-billion-dollar industry, you've got to remember”

it's a lot of its consumption, you know, the aging population, it's a lot of turtles, a lot of snakes, a lot of its traditional medicine, a lot of its skins, you know, plant material, alligator skin bags, crocodiles skin bags, lizards, skin bags, snakes skin bags. So it's a lot more than just the exotic pet industry. But that's gotten enormous in Asia.

They took a page out of our playbook, about 25 years ago, you know, China is now a huge consumer of not just eating these reptiles, but keeping them as exotic pets. That didn't happen before 25, 30 years ago. Asia. Asia.

Why is California have a ban on Python skin? Is it? Python's are not endangered, right? Well, it depends on the type of Python, but yeah, the Python skinning business actually is where all the Burmese Python's came from in the 70s that I had as a kid.

They would skin the pythons, take the eggs, incubate the eggs, sell the baby pythons to the United States and other consumer countries that wanted baby pythons. Most of the pythons that are skinned in Southeast Asia, and I've been to pythons skinning places in Sumatra, blood pythons, reticulated pythons, Burmese pythons, but mostly blood pythons, reticulated pythons are wild cod, and most of them are not endangered.

But they're less and less pythons out there, but they're not endangered. Those pythons. Well, it's a shit ton in Florida. That's what I understand. I mean, this is giant problem in Florida, where they're overrun with pythons, and yet

California, you can't sell pythons skins. It seems like there's a solution there. You know, when people want pythons skins, oh, look, a place that's overrun with pythons. Maybe we should get your pythons skinned there. The cooler pythons skins are not Burmese pythons, the ones in Florida.

So the cooler ones, people like Nick Cage, and what was that feeling where he's wearing

That's wild and hard, that's gold and black, that cooler pythons skins just happen not to be Burmese pythons, which are the ones who are running rampant in Florida. Although they should make those trendy use Burmese pythons, but they're not usually. You rarely see Burmese, that's a reticulated python. That's not a Burmese.

That's the one people want. That's from Southeast Asia. That's not the one running wild and Florida.

“Is that illegal in California right now then, that jacket?”

Is that right? I believe so. I don't believe you can get it imported. I think let's try. I've read something about python being one of the things that they made illegal.

Why can't California bands pythons skin? Band dates to 1970, oh, aimed at protecting endangered and vulnerable species, particularly the Indian python, which was on the endangered species list. California chose to pay it all python products rather than distinguished by species. And it extraordinarily broads statute banning all python imports of that's interesting.

I thought it was fairly recent.

Well, that's where the laws, I think, really screwed up when they basically say all pythons

are bad to sell when the Indian rock python is endangered. And there are a few endangered pythons. But to say all pythons cannot be used for the skin trade and solving California because of one python out of many pythons. Well, come to California.

Yeah. I happen to live there. I know what it's like. I love Austin, by the way. I might buy a house to exe you now.

Austin rules, but California is just so over-regulated, everything, so particularly wildlife.

“And same thing when Florida, though, with the green iguana, Eric, right?”

I mean, at the same time. Yeah. Same thing. House of Regulation. I mean, again, there's four people, there's 45 types of iguanas in the world.

Do you know that? No. Oh, yeah. The community of people hunt iguanas and cook them in exotic ways. They make iguanas stir fry in South Florida.

Yeah. Yeah. And it looks good. I mean, I don't know anything about what it tastes like, but this guy made like a stir fry over rice.

And they were eating in, they're like, oh my god, sensational, a teriyaki. Look, very good.

Everyone always says, crock, alligator, iguana, rattlesake taste like chicken.

Yeah. But yeah, they eat the tail. I mean, I mean, I have, you can imagine I've really messed up algorithm from being involved in this for so long, but that I never came across. But the, you know, the frozen, the first guy, they used the legs.

They cooked the legs. Yeah. The back of the tail. So there's the tail. Yeah.

So he's got it marinating. Is it blocked it? Yeah. Then it looks like he's gonna. Oh, look at he's got the whole thing.

Oh, wow. Usually it's the back of the tail. Like crocodiles. You eat the back of the tail. But it's far out.

I mean, there's a, there's a, wow, look at that. He's eating the whole thing. Yeah. So we see the make, you know, Guana, to Molly's out of the back part of the Guana. So he put it in the Camaro.

Oh, wow. Yeah. And he's got a little saucy's making here with some butter and spices, basting it. I mean, why not? If it tastes good and apparently it does taste good, according to all these guys that have

seen on YouTube channels. Like they are pretty honest about it. Like they bring it to the family, the little family try it. Yeah.

“You know, that might be the only way out because they're everywhere in Florida.”

Like they, when it gets cold out, they fall out of trees. Right. Yeah. They fall out of trees. I love their news reports.

The fucking big team. Yeah. They're massive. There's some, some channels where these guys hunt them. And some of them were like four and a half, five feet long.

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They're so beautiful. There's such a cool looking lizard. There's a lot of really cool iguanas in our show. We feature what's called a Fiji Island iguana, a very endangered iguana that unfortunately people in the private sector in this country cannot own zoos, I don't know why private

people can't own them, but the San Diego Zoo and that's who can have Fiji Island iguanas.

It's like Reptile art, a Fiji Island iguana, you might want to put it up there.

It's really good. Do you have it? Just the sheer beauty. The sheer beauty. Yeah.

For lemon highlight. Turquoise and green. And it's a very endangered iguana. So the Florida iguana problem was that all people's pets that got released? Probably.

Well, listen. Also, again, going back to the show, but you know, the central figure of the book is this guy named Mike Vendostrum and his dad, Raven Nostrum. He ran in an enterprise called Strictly Reptiles in Hollywood, right, in Hollywood. Hollywood Florida.

Hollywood Florida. Yeah. And they're sort of this like, you know, I would call it like more of a fulfillment center

for wildlife all across the marital.

There are.

“I mean, in a many way, they're like, it's an Amazon, what you have to say.”

How is it? I want to tortoise. Yeah. They were selling 5,000 iguanas a week. Well, green, baby iguanas.

That point. And so the story goes, Dad, moves to Florida, starts a business, evolves, Jurassic Park comes out, Jurassic Park comes out, everyone wanted to pet dinosaur. The green iguana market went on fire. He was selling 5,000 a week.

And, you know, I was in '90s kid, I had a, I had a iguana in my, you know, my bedroom. Jeremy's a virgin, but he did have a virginity. I did. I had a pet iguana. To wrap that.

That's the way the rock thing, you know, the heated rock, you know, that happens. But, but yeah, no, there's sort of, so the story, he didn't rock thing. Well, he had this, like rock thing where it sits on and it keeps it warm. It keeps it warm. And then I think it kept on too long.

I think he cooked this iguana. Oh, yeah. Sadly. But I've learned, I've learned a lot, but just, but filled with these unintended consequences. You know, I think this idea of a big movie coming out, the correlation to, you know, driving,

you know, demand for pet sales. Thank God people can't buy a fucking Velociraptor, you know, because people would have them. They'd have fences set up in their yard. Joe, you've had the closest people on this show, I think.

Oh, yeah. They want to bring back one of those and it will, willy mammoth. Well, there's no chance that they can bring with current technology. They don't have dinosaur DNA, it's too old. I'm joking.

But, they're, I mean, I met the dire wolves, it's wild, they brought back the dire dire wolf. What does that mean? If you talk to Genesis, what is, it is a bunch of different traits. Don't go down that rabbit hole, it's close to a dire wolf.

I mean, I don't know what that means, because like we decide what a dire wolf is, what a dire wolf is. But if you take literal dire wolf DNA that's 7,000 years old and you add it to these

“gray wolves and that's what they did and they created essentially a dire wolf.”

It's like, people are arguing over semantics, whatever it is, that's not a wolf. It's very different. It looks different than a regular wolf. It looks like a gray wolf. The stature is different.

It has a main. It's really crazy looking. They're white, they're stockier, they're built differently, like you see, like, oh, that's different. Well, like, like, main wolves in Argentina look very different than our wolf.

So they're very different types of canines, wild dogs and Africa look very different. Oh, yeah. You know, then our, you know, so yeah. But, yeah. I mean, one thing I just say about iguanas, since we're on it, is that, because I'm on an organization

called the International iguana Foundation, and we protected iguanas around the world. And people get confused, they say, oh, iguana, that's so common. They're falling out of trees and Florida, but there are a lot of really rare cool iguanas. There's about 45 species and there's pink iguanas in the galopicos islands, land iguanas. There's marine iguanas.

There's a very rare, high elevation pink iguana. There's another land iguana in the galopicos. So they say, you know, marine iguana, but that lizard was fairly recently discovered. And there's some iguanas that were thought to be extinct, though, like the Jamaica iguana. And that was thought to be extinct forever, the Jamaica 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, the pink iguana, that's a marine iguana, and a regular galopicos land iguana, and then you see some of the pink form.

Jamie, see if you can find a video on Florida people, hunting iguanas, sit Florida people, hunting giant iguanas, because some of them are so big.

“You just, you see them, you're like, oh my God, are those bad to eat though, the big giant ones?”

Would you eat one, have being like a reptile pet guy? I don't know. They're the size of that one. Yeah, that's a male. That's male.

That's male. When they get orange like that, you know, that's a big male. I mean, these things are gigantic. Yeah.

Now, that's a common green iguana, and the males lose their green and get that incredible yellow orange.

Those are males. Isn't that crazy how many of them there are though? I mean, it is just over one with iguanas. I guess they have no natural predators, right?

Not once they get big like that.

When they're little, some birds of 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 go 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. And iguanas, like water typically, they like to be around water, the green iguanas.

“But you know, reptiles have a bad PR problem, and that's why we're here, Joe.”

We're trying to elevate the publicity of people loving reptiles and not killing them. This dude is all out there telling him, "Who's this dude?" Top shelf anglers on Instagram, and he's like, "You can do an expedition." And so, he's just a Florida guy that's enjoying this. He's enjoying the origin.

Also, no, that now is a different. That's a called a TitaSaurus. That's a type of Central American Mexican rocky guana. That's a lizard. That's not a green iguana.

So Florida has a variety.

Yeah, they have those as well.

And they have take goods in Florida that come from South America, a different type of lizard that's invasive in Florida. And all of it is pets. Yeah, people loving it. I had no idea that many people had iguanas.

But it could be this big of a problem. Paddy quinoa is where every word at one time. Yeah. And is this really? That's the take of wood.

Wow. That's also invasive in Florida. That's crazy. Yeah.

“I used to sleep with one of those when I was a teenager.”

That's an egg with legs. It does. Yeah. Look at the other face, right? Totally.

And that lizard really loves to eat eggs. I used to feed my 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. And it was a place where used to go by goldfish, because I used to have paranas.

And that was how he stuffed turtles, too. And the turtles were way more vicious than the paranas. Those are quite-- 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 drastic part.

Like you're watching a little guy or snappy turtle. Yeah. Well, these are just little green sliders. Sliders. Is that what they're called?

But they had a crocodile monitor in that place. Oh, yeah. The briefly thought, oh, maybe I could figure out an enclosure. A crocodile monitor, feed it rabbits, and shit. Don't get bit by a crocodile monitor.

They're just close to a, like, a commuter dragon bite. They have scaffold teeth. They're serious. Getting bit by a crocodile monitor. It look pretty vicious.

I mean, they just look like dinosaurs. It's like a forgotten thing of the pat there it is. Yeah. There's a crocodile monitor. Look at that face, man.

That totally looks like a dinosaur. Well, there's Tommy, who's-- Yeah, that's the guy who's eating it. Yeah. He's eating it.

Oh, Tommy. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Tommy. There are the weirdest fucking people.

Because I kind of understand that chimp people more. Because the chimp people are like a chimp is interacting with you. It's a mammal, it's a primate, it's intelligent, it's a lot going on. There's emotions and jealousy and chimp, they're connecting with you. These things, they're just, you're just looking into the abyss and tell the chimp

rips your head off. Yeah. Well, I'm not advocating for people to have chimp with the pets. I just say I understand the appeal of that 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 the chimp”

crazy. Yes. Especially the babies. They're so cute. And then they eventually get to the point where they kill your neighbor.

But 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 straight. These people love them.

Well, I loved, you know, 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 co-existing in the garden. I like plants. Yeah.

And so they didn't feel like they were in a cage. And they kind of, you know, maybe I'm anthropomorphizing my tortoises. But I kind of felt like they were having a pretty good life in my garden. So for sure. So I like keeping tortoises, they 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 that the most endangered group of animals on the planet, along with plymates. If you measure it by how many turtles and tortoises are in the world and how many are facing

extinction along with primates. So then I was like, OK, 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 pads. Also freak show.

And freak show, of course, I can't really go to freak shows. I said it takes one to no one. But it's different. But what's different, there was different though, is that this isn't some like side hustle for animal love gone wrong.

You know, it's, it's, there's these people, there's the animal, the reptile people, the her people are incredibly obsessive about, you know, living art about these living things.

Like this. Where do you use the her people? Her, yeah, I call me her, her petal, I call her people, her petal, you're amphibians and reptiles. Yeah.

I'm sorry. Well, you know. He called it. The her people. The her people.

Her people. No. But it's, you know, it's, it's really a trade formed around scarcity. And, you know, this sort of desire and adventure people have going out to find the rarers of the rarer, you know, 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 know that guy that just wants a little pet bearded dragon.

I want the, the roles are always so ruptile.

But it's different than like, you know, in 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 another was freaky people. Freaky people, freaky people, extreme obsessions, but it's about, you know, psychology

of people. And this, 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, 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 of the people on earth died, it would just keep going about its business and not shed a tear.

Yeah.

Especially things they can kill you in this way, like a type pan or whatever, someone playing

with that. An inland type pan is a venomous snake from Australia that may be the most venomous snake in the world. But it's all relative because a black man, you know, you know, lost really has a lot of venomous stuff.

Yeah. Peter is 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, what's to say, one's more dangerous than the other, they're all kill you.

Is there anti-vendom for all of them? No, actually. So, 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 than less anti-vendom 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, you know, when the dog gets bit by them, you were talking about your dog getting bit by rattlesnake. A lot of time, 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 anti-vendom. Some really dangerous snakes. The coral snakes, they don't have anti-vendom for them. I think I heard that maybe not anymore, I'm sure, if it's faded, so what happens if you get bit?

Well, there may be some anti-vendom, but there's not a lot of it. Anti-vendom has gotten very expensive, and it's very sophisticated now, and it's mostly for, you know, in the U.S. for Viperch, you know, for rattlesnake, you know. But I don't know, a good question. That would be some one smarter than me would know about coral snake anti-vendom.

But it's an elapid like a cobra. A friend of mine had two of them in her carport. They took pictures of it, and sent it to people, and everyone's like, "Yeah, that's keep away from that." Just chillin' in her carport, but they're generally not aggressive as if they're

the deal. Yeah, there's a saying, and it doesn't fit all because there's cool snakes that don't have this. But yellow against black is a friend of Jack. Yellow, I'm black against red is, anyway, I kind of even say white enough.

Yeah, you wind it dead, but I'm getting it wrong, but there's a saying, and it does it whole 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 anti-vendom, and they take you to the hospital, what did they do?”

They stop making the carport. I mean, they're so... They stop making it. It was caused. Is that what it says?

It's effective. I think that's what I hear. Cost ineffective. No longer. The sweat people die.

Cost effective is a crazy thing to say when it comes to fighting people. I mean, wow, I was right for a change. It happens. Maybe the socialists are right. Cost effective is crazy, so what did they do?

You know, I heard every rattlesake 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 go back and suck it out of him, and the guy just says, "Don't you're going to die." So maybe you die with a coral snake.

Yeah. Just leave you die. The bad thing I was, we recently were looking at this, the way of treating rattlesake bites. Not too long ago, by the way.

These Johnson and Johnson used to 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 that actually work? No.

That was incredible about it.

When we were young, they had these little rattlesake kits. I'm a little older, but it was insane what they told people to do back then. They told you to cut yourself, and then put a turnic kit and then sucked the venom out,

They strike and let go immediately, and then they track their prey, and it's literally

like a hyper-dermic 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 doctor.

“So what should you do if you get bit by rattlesake?”

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 my hospital. I drove a bad out of hell to the hospital, actually, but you're supposed to be calm and

get to all the kit. Incredible. Yeah. And there was just bullshit, huh? Well, everything's taking that to the woods, you're like, we're fine.

Everything you shouldn't do today, everything you shouldn't.

And so you just stay mellow and get to the hospital, and if they don't have any anti-venom

you just die? Well, in my case, they didn't have it in the hospital. They had to get, see how we patrol, to bring it from another from Ventura, and it took about 45 minutes, and I thought it was going to die on the gurney. But yeah, you get to a hospital and you get an event of myth that's a bad bite.

And if they don't have any venom, you die. Well, it depends on the kind of snake. Like, water markets, and usually aren't lethal, but certain rattlesake 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. And it slowly feels like this pressure on your chest, and can't bring it. Yeah, 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. Was that guy Ross Allen, he has the world record for the most? Is it Cobra Bites?

No, I think you're talking about a serpentarium. And the same guy Bill Haas, Bill Haas, he lived to like 100, and I know people that inject themselves with venom, I was in Myanmar, Burma one time in 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 are like Cobra's. And he was this guy with all these snake tattoos, but he had invented himself, so he would have antibodies. So he could handle these snakes, and if he got bit, he wouldn't die. But early roadside attractions in Southland, I mean, that's the part about Florida.

It goes back, it's in the 50s and 60s, it had Miami Serpentarium, was an amazing looking

place. Had just giant Cobra, you know, with sculpture basically. There's a question, if they do that with allergies, where they give you like a little bit of the allergen develop a resistance to it, could they do that with snakes? That's like 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 US that's doing it, I think they're doing a film upon about him injecting all these venomous snake atoms into him, like a pin cushion. But no, I don't think people should do it, but people do do it, not in a lot of people.

But if it does build up your antibodies and you know that you're going to come and contact with snakes, listen, 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 information. So snake, they probably kills more people of the world as a puff out of an Africa, but

it's many countries. I think India has the highest US, 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. It's highly unlikely that odds are very low that you're going to die from a snake by no

matter of where you live in. I understand that. That's all well and good. But that doesn't comfort you if you get bitten by a snake. Like, "Oh, what are the odds?"

“You have to deal with it, if I went to those kids.”

I think most people live, Joe. I think it's possible. There's a few people that die this year in California, but typically it's like only a few people that you're dying in the country for snake bites. And is it generally because they just don't get to medical treatment in time?

Or they're older or, you know, or they get bit three times, like not just once by the rattlesac, you know, you get more venom in them. Is it true that the young ones give you more venom than the old ones? No, young, young ones have a... More condensed, more dangerous venom, but big snakes will are much more dangerous because

they can put far more venom into you. If the little ones have a more potent venom, that they can't inject as much into you. So it's kind of... People misunderstand that, it's that. Yeah.

Not 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 come to you. Do you get uncomfortable being around these people? That's a good question.

Because there's a psychological aspect, particularly like chimp crazy, there's something about those people that makes me uneasy, watching it on TV, like you are so far gone.

person.

“There's a courtship, and sometimes that courtship takes years to get someone willing to”

be interviewed.

It'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. 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. So yeah, there's times when you were 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, why do you go to jail for 100 years? Well, Mario Tabra, we were 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 he said he had information. He must have. He did 12 years.

And no one knows what. No one knows what. He only did 12 years from murder and drugs. But I like him. Oh, great.

I wasn't the one murdered. I wasn't in his life. In fact, then he's kind of a, he really actually does love animals 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 mad at me. He's mad at me right now. Is I'm speaking? Yeah. I definitely would be after a show problem.

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. And he's a central character in it.

He's my own. Now, he's kind of more tangential because it's really about this guy, Ray Van Nostrand, guy from New Jersey, moved down to Florida, started a business that became strictly reptiles, as I was referencing. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there was anything like 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, not, you know. There's an expression on and among thieves. And he weirdly has this kind of honorable side. I'm admirable.

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 my life was in fucking Miami. I was shot at, you know, going to a pay phone in the early 90s and 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 for glass all in my hair. I had long hair back then. I had hair back then. But Miami was, you know, it was pretty wild in the '80s and early 90s.

I have good friend, 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 he he said it was like an insane place to work. I remember you say that because I said to all my character, I said, what's it like, you

know, having been in and out of prison some of the times he goes, bro, everyone in Florida has been in prison. You know, and I was kind of like, well, what's it like, everyone in Florida has been in prison. It's not any 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 badly tattooed? Yes.

I'm friends with Harvey. Oh, really? He's good in it, man. That's great. But it's the parts of this story that are a little like Bad Lieutenant, you'll see

in the end.

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 D.E.A.A. agent on the beat, chasing bad guys. And he was assigned this guy Mario to rally. 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, talking about the subjects in this animal world, you know, law enforcement. This guy sleeps with a gun every night and gets literally orgasmic with the thought

There's like a hideaway guy. 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, we lived in this kind of, we went to go see him, he lived in this

kind of very kind of, you know, country part of West Virginia, and, um, he's good with guns. Good with guns, and he would just, you know, he would brag about all the gun, you know, the bullets you can find from this, you know, left over from the Civil War in his backyard. And, you know, he was very, very good with the gun. We did a lot of shooting, there I take with him, and he was just a really, at the time,

very generous with this, 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 that that would be very

unnerving, you know, like, yeah, I really agree 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 have met.

So, you know, you're in these places, but what's so peculiar about this guy, his name's Larry Lovelace, he was a DEA agent in Florida back in those days. He put this guy in prison, you know, 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 would know that, that they, like, whoever the powers of being that put got him out of prison, after 12 years, he would think he would know, you know, but he's still to this day.

“Well, where are you, where are you about retelling?”

Well, it should be, so this was, what's, what's cool is that his dad was actually the person,

he was like an HR person for, kind of, the Cuban, it was at the time of the Cuban babe pigs, you know, invasion, that kind of era. And he was responsible for taking care of all these kind of Cuban exiles during that time. And he would be in the one that was going to go in house to house and giving people checks. So he had this kind of very interesting network of people and had this incredible access.

And so what, what was been insinuated is that, you know, 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 held, bring down the real Pablo Escobar, or he knew a big drug lord that the government wanted, they made a deal, who knows? But it could have been, there's lots of theories. I didn't adjust it, though, like even this guy, you know, we filmed 200 people over

how long, 15 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 Biscar, I remember him. He was, this guy was part of, he flew planes for drugs, you know, he got busted with like

“I think, 600,000, you know, pounds of weed at the time.”

He served the single largest sentence for 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're, see weed stores everywhere? It's like it likes, over in these weed stores, it's like insane to me. That's fucked up.

But that was at a time. And look, Pablo Escobar, like, there were people around Pablo Escobar, they're going to die to that was, they were trafficking ivory horns and stuff. Like it was very, you know, there were one degree of separation for like wildlife crime and drugs in that era.

Why do you think there's that connection? Easy. It's the element. 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 boat,

constrictor, who's going to open a box at customs or, you know, fish and while I service and look inside the boat, constrictor. So there's some pretty ingenious ways to, meaning you put it in their stomach? Yeah, like you either like force feed that boat constrictor, like, you know, like you put

“them in those balloons, you put cocaine in, or you even, and then you have to cut them”

open and get your cocaine. Yeah, you cut them open and get your cocaine. But even, but even more. I remember New York when the fish markets used to put these drugs casually, about that by the way.

But fish markets used to put the drugs and fish in the, in the, you know, in the fish markets in New York. Yeah, because no one wants to handle the fish and open up the fish and they shove all the drugs into the fish. So, you know, like smelly, dangerous animals are good cover for drugs or, or even more

instantly, 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 put some big mix in some, you know, look like animals that are really rare but look like the common animal.

So they'd mix them together. And then they put something like, you know, speeding copers up the top and no one was reaching into the crate when there was these like very dangerous animals. Many. So that's how they kind of got the, they were able to, to, to prey on the lack of resources

any resources at the time. They had limited wildlife inspectors, they had to go through these, you know, volumes volumes of crates and they, they'd play these games. Many commoto dragons that made it into this country came in illegally in a crate and they would just put a little commoto dragon in with some other monitor lizards and the inspectors

couldn't tell the difference and they'd go through and the commoto dragon that bit Sharon Stone's husband, Sharon Stone's husband, at the Los Angeles Zoo is one of those commoto dragons.

“So somebody's private collection and they got released at the zoo?”

No, it was, it is sting that's in our show where they were bringing in illegal animals coming from a guy in Malaysia who sort of the Pablo Escobar, the Kingpin globally of all

the reptile animal trade, the guy that we finally accessed after COVID, who his name is

Hanson Wong and he was sort of the, you know, bad guy number one in the world for reptile and animal smuggling and so he was suddenly in her pool and all, you know, he did the longest longest sentence in the U.S. for while I crime ever at the time in the 90s, he was busted in Mexico but, and then brought, extradited in the U.S., but he was bringing in commoto 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 at origins of collections. Yeah, for zoos.

And I would also imagine the kind of people that are really in the reptiles probably also do drugs. So they probably know a lot of people in that world. Yeah, it's like a cross-section of your environmental, you got a python, so a lot of inked guys.

There's a lot of like, a goth guys into hot snakes, which are the venomous, a lot of

“bikers, hot snakes, hot snakes, that's what they call them, hot snakes, I mean the kind”

they 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. So, way. Yes, come on. I'll go on. I've done everything, I had nightclubs in New York City for many years, so yeah.

I'm like, you know, embombed, it's maybe a little longer. Maybe that's what's saved, you want to get a bit by the rounds now. I probably. But you got to think that the type of people that are going to be even interested in having a snake is a pet that's a very unusual person.

Oh, I see. Yes. Yeah, I don't know. Come on. You know people that have snakes.

Kids have all pythons. You've got kids. They like a 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 pythons, 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. And then you can't have to keep it in this box, which is kind of weird.

“Yeah, well, that's what I like tortoises, you don't have to keep them in a cage or a”

box. Because does a snake, the experience discomfort, because they're in a terrarium? That's in, there's a lot of myth out there that, oh, snakes can live in a little teeny, like sweater box or shoe box, and you can put them in racks, like you see in snake stores and snake raps.

The truth is, real snakes in the wild do not live in little boxes.

They may go in the underground, at certain time of year, in hibernate, they may. 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. But yes, they can survive in a box. 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 general. But generally, like when people keep them as pets, they keep them in some common aquarium, right?

Yeah, and they shouldn't, 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.

You 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 ask me what happened to that snake, probably died, probably was flushed down a 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 us.

How long the 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.

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Terms apply, see visible.com for plan features and network management details. So the longest live 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?

Snakes generally most snakes don't live more than 30 to 40 years, but there are a few that my lizards can live 70 years. Some of the big, landy one is going to live a long time. Those are ones in Florida? Like other 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 of the 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. There's some suspicion, but it's basically from people having them as pets. I'm swam with Nile crocodiles. That's no joke.

Why'd you do that? I was in Madagascar. They have a form of Nile crocodile and Madagascar. They didn't quite quite as big as the mainland Crocs. And I was looking for turtles.

And then I saw the Crocs. 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. Yeah, they have a shoot on site order for them, or they did it at least in this article that I was reading. It's from a while back.

I didn't know that. Wow. They want to come up. Yeah. Yeah.

I know they've captured at least two of them. Well, the biggest reptile in the world in terms of weight, vector size conversation, is a saltwater crocodile. And it's neck and neck with a leather backseat turtle. They're both over 2,000 pounds.

“So you imagine a 2,000 backseat turtle is that big?”

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. They're neck and neck to 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, there's some thoughts as to why that happens, you know, how they're actually eating, whether they're getting fed, what'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 times, but once”

they get to a certain size, you know, 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, you know, like you're saying, they're pretty much invincible, nothing can kill them, you know. And some of them develop a taste for people. Yeah, just movement in the water and just their casserole and ambush predator, right?

Yeah, 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 praying on people and while he was there, someone got snatched up while he was in camp. There's 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, riding in his, you know, journal, but he's half his bodies in a huge Nile crocodile. But he would go and call them for probably similar reason as you know what I was saying. Once they start targeting villagers, once they find that there's a place that they can hunt and get regular food that they're all the time, they're so sneaky that, you know,

what they developed was they, these people had put posts into the ground in the water. So into the, the area where they would wash their clothes and gather food, they essentially built, like, some sort of, the containment area where the crocodiles couldn't get through

So with the crocodiles, it was go around the poles and into the water, so they had figured

it out. Sorry. And that's creepy. That's creepy.

“They do realize, like, oh, the people go, like, they must have been watching and realizing,”

oh, the people go into this area, so I got to go on the ground at night and I go back on the water and then I catch these fuckers slipping and they're patient. They can wait a year. You're intelligent. They go at a long time before they eat anything.

Yeah, they don't have to eat for a year. They crock. Yeah. Are they intelligent? Yeah.

Well, they, they're, one of the few reptiles that actually really does defend their babies, like, you know, like a snake, snake doesn't do that. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Wow. Wow. That's amazing. What a dinosaur, man. What is that?

A saltwater or a nile. It's a saltwater crock. Yeah. It's Australian. Australia.

Wow. 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. There's some really endangered crocodiles that 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. You know, like, there's still some really, really rare ones. Not saltwater crocks and not nile crocks, but there's some really endangered ones.

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. Think they're rare baseball card.

No. It's like rare art. It's like having a, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And then there's an, I get excited by seeing something I never saw before.

I'm like a kid. I can't do stories. No. Well, I see a cool, like pink landing one, I've never seen one in the wild or anywhere. And I've been to the Galapagos.

So, yeah. It's a thrill. It's like how I put in your backpack and take it home is probably not encouraged. I'd stuff that down my pants. No.

I'd be too scared.

“Well, you wouldn't want to do that, right?”

Well, every since natural habitat. No, I wouldn't want it. You know, my mother gave me a good moral compass with that. She used to say to me when I was a kid, "Don't play God there. I cannot.

I keep my, I was keeping things and she'd tell me, "You've got to let it go at the end of the summer." So I was lucky to have that because a lot of people didn't have that mother and I did. So I kind of, again, so I'd better judge my own 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 just, 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. So it's kind of like, you know, people get really into it and sometimes it's hard to sustain it. But more trade than the other collectible culture trades, more trade, more, you know, like I'll give you a crocodile.

I'll tell trade. Yeah. What's going on here, Jamie? Bear gold bladder.

I've never seen this footage.

That's a shark. Yeah. So it's stealing a shark that a guy caught. 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. This guy's fish.

Okay. Yeah. It's been your interest in wildlife. Well, man, I'm fascinated by wildlife, I've just much more interested in mammals for whatever reason.

I mean, I'm interested in these things. I've found them fascinating, but they're not as compelling to me for whatever reason. And I always wondered what that is. Like, you know, I did this thing on social media once the social media hierarchy of dead animals and I said, like, fish, filais of fish, no one cares.

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.

It's the biggest trophy hunting, you know, convention. And I was filming under cover and I started out, you know, asking, you know, can you taxidermy this and that, and then I kind of, you know, raise the bar and I say, you know, can you taxidermy a champ for me, and then, yeah, we can do a champ. So what about an orangutan, you know, we can 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 them if you could taxidermy a human, you know, 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 at guns and eventually they surrounded me and I was trying to get rid of my, you

But it was interesting where the line is and what you're allowed to, well, that 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 joke, undercover, or, obviously, it was kind of a joke.

“But they literally started putting eyeballs on me and say, who the fuck is this guy?”

Yeah. Yeah. What did you? Yeah, but how do you take up fucking human and turn into a statue? People have shunk and heads.

I know people with shunk and heads actually, you know, they collect them, but no, it's pretty macabre.

But the fact that they would taxidermy a chimp and a rangatang 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 taxidermary. So someone would have to smuggle it back a lot of what happens is in a lot of the, you know, when zoo animals die, sometimes they send it to people that taxidermy it. So I know people that get a lot of zoo carcasses and they, you know, taxidermary a chimp

I've seen it. But yeah, 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. But I, I'd nothing against zoo is, but that was one way to get really unusual animals. Like I have a friend, a middle guy I know that's taxidermy a number of commoter dragons

that came from zoo because people don't have commoter dragons in the private sector. But I guess no harm, no foul if 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 a hundred years, certain rockfish

and I have a longevity that's incredible, we don't think of them in the same way as we think

of these higher, right, we don't care at all, we don't care at all. Yeah, we don't seem to, you know, it's going fishing is much more common than going hunting. Yeah, now that I said what I just said, you know, maybe that's a little twisted. What do you mean about taxidermy a person?

“Well, it is twisted, yeah, yeah, I think I said that out of context.”

Whoa, you could buy this? Yeah. It says it's real, it's a try and look at see if it was fake, but it's real. How is that legal document? Oh, I'm not sure on the screen, I'm able to find that.

Oh, there's our friend. It's only three grand. I mean, no, the guy Riverside, yeah, the guy that has the taxidermy, he's got a funny name for his museum. Yeah, he's got the commander diagram, but now that I think about it, he had a number of

taxidermy grillers. Yeah, now that I think about it. Now, do they say where they got this from? Does it say how they acquired this body? The document might be right for the document.

Oh, that's fucking weird now, but to your point about, you know, this kind of societal reaction

“to, you know, different wildlife issues, yeah, 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, you know, 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 and every five are threatened with extinction, and it's growing in an accelerated rate, mainly because of things that we explore in our show, pet tray, exotic, you know, smuggling all of that. But, you know, to get people to care about things that can harm you, you know, believe it or not, you know, we have challenges with, you know, subject matter in the show that,

you know, we'll get notes back, and it's, it might be too hard core for people to see. Because it is a brutal, volume-based industry, and there's a lot of, we try not to show the bloodshitting and the cruelty animals who try to avoid that with tiger king, and chim crazy in the show because people turn the channel. So we try, if we wanted to, we could do that, but we're just, but I'm more talking more

about the point of like, what, how do people respond to something through an interest, and, you know, 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 turtle people, why do you think people vilify reptiles?

So you like mammals, you said, why do you think people don't, 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 real problem for human beings, you know, I think, you know, crocodiles and alligators, like, they, they, they enact like, there's

a visceral reaction that people have to them, that I think is warranted, it'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 qualla bear, or, you know, well, that I think is anthropomorphism

Of course, yeah, because people in the pioneer days didn't think of bears that way.

But I would argue that a bear, you know, a codiac bear, a polar bear, a lion, is a lot more concerning than most reptiles, you know?

“So why we vilify reptiles and have that, you know, feeling about them is I think maybe”

more is to what you said about the anthropomorphism, you can't, a snake has no legs like us, they don't breastfeed their babies like a bear, or like a mammal, they have a fork 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, we were, the Disney things so interesting to me, because that, that

was actually something that I was kind of deep on, this guy Carl Safina, he's more of an anthropologist or a behavioralist, 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, I mean, they were, you know, that could be tracked this sort of correlation to, you know, entry points

into, you know, mainstream culture, you know, it's, you know, it's, you know, they're easy, they're right devices for human emotion, but then there's this more perverse side of, you know, it creates these demands for pets, you know, as you topia, we would snakes, like as you topia had a snake as a central character and it's going crazy in China, you know.

That's a pop culture thing, like, but that's the, you know, that, so these well-intentioned things and these ways which we portray animals, finding Nemo, everyone wanted a clown to cherish Harry Potter, everyone wanted a baby owl, I was in Asia after Harry Potter, the, I was like, why are there, like 50 baby owls in this market and they were Harry Potter birds that said by product of pop culture, right, you know, you know, Jurassic Park, everyone

wants their little beardy dragon because they want a miniature dinosaur. So who knows what's going to happen after monsters in God, they're all going to want snakes again. Hopefully you have some better time.

“Did Tiger King open up the door for that, you think?”

The people like, look at that and find it appealing, like, that's Robin mission. Well, I think I think I have a look for my niche. I think I gave the opposite of people like, baby questioning the question, he's like deliverance. It's a little deliverance, okay?

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 and pop culture. I want to get me a tiger after Tiger, okay? I'll give you a little baby tiger, okay, if you're going to play into this lane, it's like,

look, everyone was shocked that you could buy, you could basically go in for free.

Well, we've talked about it before on the podcast, but there's more tigers and captivity in Texas than all the wild, the world, and people's private collections. I think we're legit, also, as a, is a place a big role in the vilification of reptiles, particularly snakes, you know, like, you know, something of a baby and you've complex and, you know, the snake is bad.

Serpent. Serpent. Serpent. I was, we were more people dream of snakes in this country than any other thing. We're buying it.

It's mostly negative dreams. It's not sharks. No, snakes. It's like, 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 what snakes. I have, like, someone chasing their panic dreams.

I never have a nightmare about a snake.

We never hear of, like, a phobia directly attached to sharks, you know, you have a video phobia, which is a fear of snakes, but you don't hear of a shark phobia or a rock phobia. Right, spiders. Yeah.

People are freaked out by spiders. Oh, yeah. I think that's a genetic thing. I think there's a memory. Yeah.

“I think someone either was a bit or know someone that was a bit and that information”

got transferred down to their offspring. I'm pretty sure that, because, uh, hosting fear factor, I got to see people with sure. The legitimate Iraq, the phobia and legitimate a phobia, where it is, like, nothing else.

Like, they see it and they fucking freak out, like, it's irrational. Yeah. It's like everything in their body saying, you've got to get out of here right now. Yeah.

And it's not like everybody else. Everybody else who looked at is like, oh, yikes. And then a few people, they have that genetic memory, I think. Yeah. That's just a very, and it's cultural.

It's cultural. Yeah. Like, like, we have a lot of Mexican guys that work with us in 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.

It's the only staff meeting he ever does. Yeah, yeah. So only care about that. 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 snakes head off. We don't do that. We move the rattlesnake, and we put it somewhere else. We move the gophersnake, the king snake. But they just have this, you know, some of them as you were just saying, just can't wrap

their head around even touching the snake because they just, it's instilled in them, you know, from their parents or from whatever their childhood that they're scared of snakes.

But with kids, like, I'm sure with your kids and your daughter is like, I see with

“little boys, you know, six and three, how their reaction and they're not fearful.”

Like, and it's partially because of the influence of the work that I'm doing. But, you know, I watch them interact. I see their friends. I see their cousins that are fearful. They have adverse reaction.

I also think it's like, you know, you're exposure to it. Yeah. You know, a lot. And you're right. Probably some genetic kind of--

Definitely exposure to. I mean, if you grow up and you're used to being around different kinds of animals in the wildlife and different things, you're probably more comfortable around unique animals. But your person grows up entirely in the city. Yeah.

Did your parents like animals? Do they? Dogs? We had dogs and cats. Normal stuff.

I had a weird mom.

I had a weird mom that likes snakes and so I played a role in it.

And likes salamanders. Oh, that explains a lot. She would take me to pet stores that actually steal the snakes and salamanders and steal them and put them in her purse and then take me out into the woods we let them go. Oh, so that's kind of why she didn't like seeing them in cages.

Wow. But she didn't mind kleptomania. So I got to steal it for a while. It's not mom who's like really in the snakes. It's not mom.

She just wanted to free them. She didn't like seeing them in cages. Oh, I understand. It's aquariums. 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 a 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 and 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's a place called Lake Alice there that had a lot

of alligators. You see it all the time. When I was there, one lady had a clearly impressionable age. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I was around a lot. But 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 could 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 the marshmallows because people

would throw marshmallows on the lake because they could watch the alligator come up and eat the marshmallow. They like marshmallows. And they said, hey, these are not good for alligators. Yeah.

They're super worried about alligator diabetes or something. But they were concerned about alligators sugar rush. Yeah. They were concerned about giving the alligator non nutritious food. I would just thought it was funny because they were saying that they were endangered.

And it's amazing that in the 50s and 60s they were really endangered and that was hard

to find an alligator. And when you think about that now and how to believe it's hard to believe in how the endangered species act did help all the eagles, birds of prey, because they actually worked. Yeah.

Rob back alligators and now alligators, like you can't even imagine they were endangered. They're like ubiquitous in Florida. Oh, they're everywhere. They literally say, every pond has a potential to happen with alligators everywhere. Everywhere, you look.

They move around. They're very overpopulated. Yeah. What's interesting about this work in the show that spans so much time. You know, we had, which, you know, you share 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, DA, US National Wildlife Service, the collectors of, 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 the, you know, animal that's, you know, going to be a poachative extinction. So it's a really interesting way of looking at this and analyzing it in a way. But you realize that you'll see, Joe, if you continue watching, that the pathology behind

“everyone, the law enforcement, they're going after their price, right?”

They're going after, they're going after, they're big, the trophy is the bad guy, the bad guy, you know, the dealer, the smuggler is going after the rarest reptile. The zoo's got very competitive with reptile houses in the 70s and 80s because they started realizing they were very popular. Some of the most popular things in zoo, so the reptile houses, they wanted the commuter

dragon, the rare reptile. So, and the collector, like guys like me that really dig reptiles wanted, like the pink, you

So everyone kind of is going after each other, the reptile, the bad, you know, the, the fed you're 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, you know, cocaine cowboys, and the law enforcement

has a garage full of heroin and cocaine that they're selling, so it's, it's like, it gets very gray in the psychology is similar between all the difference between the prisoner and the guard of the bars. Well, that's the sort of kind of thing. 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 lines, back to the marijuana analogy, like fucking, it, how twisted is that someone goes to prison for 40 years of her plot.

“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. The most proud. It's really deep, and it's, it's a, 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've found shocking why you were just discussing this.

You were saying it was like six years. More. More. How many, so when did you plant a 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 Saffty. And 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 of years ago, we were, you know, we were making many projects along this. Because, you know, you can't do them all, you know, it's a, it's a very unstructured way of working. You know, we don't have a certain amount of shoot days, it's, it's kind of a flow.

We like these longitude. We shoot multiple projects at the same time. You know, and we're lucky because a lot of our, 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.

“So 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 because if you're able to kind of balance other, other work because, you know, holding out for access to a really important person might

not happen in the first go around it, you know, a year later or two years later.

Yeah. 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 of a too superficial, like, 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 reads the most long-tell in the cat monkeys from medical research where we got coded 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, 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's starting out in life to try to make docks, don't do it.

We do 'cause it's not a good way to get rich and it takes forever and you may never have

a story.

“And so it's like, that's what I'm getting at.”

It's like, we got lucky that Joe exotic tried to kill Kelabask and where we were filming. We got lucky in his sense that, and we got lucky she didn't kill her. We got lucky in his sense that Tanya kidnapped a chimpanzee. This is not a recipe for success, you know, we filmed film film film. We do a lot of shit that no one ever sees.

Joe'sotic DMs of all the time on Instagram. I was still. 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 this show. I'll tell you after this show.

You want him to get out? You know, the government made a deal with him before the trial. They said, we'll give you, 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 them 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. And time isn't jail, too, you know, we're good at the surgery. I think she doesn't deserve to be there for four years, you know, for perjury. Well, she didn't need to kidnap another champ.

We tried to help her, but she didn't.

She was their own worst enemy. Anyway, she was people obsessed. Yeah.

“I think also what attracts the crime element is the sentencing is low for wildlife trafficking,”

wildlife crimes. But did they really consider that when they're getting involved? Like, oh, no big deal. Only do four years. They really think of 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 bouncing out the low sentence rate and going, yeah.

This is a good thing to get involved. I think that involves a role. It's pretty stiff. Crime. I know.

I think it's a risk factor that's considered and especially in the sense of life. I think most of the risk Army, 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 is thinking about if there was something to happen.

“It's, you know, eight months and 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, he 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, why 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 a more and he's got an ankle brace and he'd been prison five years before

that or I don't know. He years before that. So there's a lot. What was he going to prison for? This time for smuggling turtles that we're going out to and he's a three-striped mud

turtles. Yeah. We're no longer bringing wildlife in to buy and collect. It's actually coming out of our country and to 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 it. I just took it in a conversation three weeks ago, a three-hundred-three-tode boxed

turtles that come out of the central part of the U.S. Oklahoma, Missouri. And two weeks later, Guy was busted coming into Mexico with turtles and I took those turtles so he was just a 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 ten years, a lot of native turtles

and reptiles and other wildlife to Southeast Asia and Europe. And how are they getting there? Mostly, it's mostly Eric Cargo, a carry on, this particular conversation three weeks ago. They busted the guys with more boxed turtles in their luggage once they got to Hong Kong and China, like I said, China, Taiwan, 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 cutflowers of the wildlife trade in Asia because like we might have a bouquet or a plant in our house. They have a bird cage in Southeast Asia and there's something like insane statistic about

how many people have a bird in their house. When you go to the bird markets in Jakarta, it's just surreal or in Thailand, there's one in Bangkok called Chata Chat Market, these huge, you know, animal markets, you know, we talked about where COVID came from, but the scale of these animal markets, you know, bush meat, wildlife, it's, it's on a scale that's beyond your imagination.

So what kind of, what are they selling? They're selling reptiles, they're selling birds for meat. No, no, these are for pets. Okay. You have an ornamental in your house, you have a song bird, you have an owl, you have

a whatever, you can't believe, there are people that are, so they just have like a wild life mall. It's effectively like an enormous wildlife, and an outdoor mall. And in that, within that mall, there's also seafood and then there's the reptiles and then there's the birds, it's like, that's the, no wonder, maybe COVID came from that, it's like

didn't come from that. I don't know, it came from a fucking lab. I think you're maybe right. I have a friend, bless this 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.

“I think a lot of people were influenced to say that it was a natural spill over, because”

they didn't want to admit that we were fucking around with gain of function research. I think the evidence now shows it, 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, Jamie? Chau de Chau.

Chau. Which one is this? This is one of those markets? Oh, this, 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? Those are the Harry Potter elves, that food age as well. Yeah. Like this. Well, same things that you had that were driving you out.

But 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 the scale and the size of Asia and China is much bigger than the US in Europe combined.

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, I think the industry, the trafficking in Brazil and the reported is,”

you know, you have this, there's like one person, one person that is responsible for coordinating in the US, one person she's in Delaware, who's responsible for coordinating with the US Fish and Wildlife to deal with, you know, these placements have confiscated wildlife. If they're able to even detect them, I think with something like 10,000 animals in the last

few years, we're coming through LAX, basically the torrents, the border and LAX.

It's, it's very, one little sample market. It's very understaffed under manned to build a managed all the wildlife coming in and out of the country. So not enough. Even with dogs and detection and advancement, they're finding ways to get animals out.

And then the sad truth is that they've, they've been starved into hydrated, you know, recovering them as impossible. You know, you've gotten lucky with rewilding animals back in New Jersey and stuff like that through a sort of organization. But, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a harmful reality that this is actually still happening.

You know, we thought that was the best. The percentage of wildlife that leaves the country leaves the country, native wildlife to this US, 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 US has the most out of any country in the world, we've more species of turtles and tortoises than any country in the world.

“We have 51 species in the US, Mexico second, you know, India, I think it's maybe third.”

But so Asia now really wants these turtles, where you go up 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. Once they get to Asia, they're in the many thousands of dollars. The shipment that just went out that we received the conversation 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 they got arrested are busted usually aren't the real ones that are, you know, organizing the whole thing. It's like drugs. Well, that's a good thing about this docu-series is that you guys are exposing this to people because I think most people would be completely unaware.

No idea. Oh, yeah. No idea. No idea where, you know, animals and the zoos came from. Is there any 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, highest in the cause that are so expensive, but one highest in the cause, like, you”

know, $60,000 to their $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 on 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, all of the entities of falconry got. He loves falconry, but it's gotten more popular again around the world having, you know, big birds of prey.

Because it's interesting, you know, our friends live in Alaska and Alaska eagles are really common. They're all over the place up there, like they didn't even think anything of them, you know, 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.

So, because they know that they're going to throw the carcasses out. Bald eagles. Yeah. Bald eagles. Yeah.

I would imagine some people would want those as a pet, especially in other countries. Yeah. In the U.S. only Native Americans can have, like, eagle parts, unless you have a permit, like it's pretty hard. Well, you know, like, feathers for their address, it's like Native Americans can still

do things with them. Also, if you have a stuffed eagle in your house, that's illegal. I think it's illegal. And just those guys, stuff you and eagle, well, that would be interesting. That's where we draw the lawn.

By the way, I don't know if they actually have them, but we have this footage, I mean, imagine going in the confiscations from L.A.A.X. It's incredible. Oh, really? Yeah.

It's incredible. You have, you know, tiger, you know, just all this rare animal and transformed into so many objects at home, a table, a rug, a pool cues. Well, 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 little lamb. If you're listening to invite us.

We'd love to hear more. You know, it's funny. It's fucked up. You say that. It's funny.

You say that.

And, you know, there's, you know, it's a 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, like, dim-sum tables that are round, and everyone's sort of turtle soup, and it's, like,

how twisted is that? It would be like, you know, a reptile show in the U.S., and we've lots of reptiles shows in the U.S., and now you, at lunchtime, you're eating reptiles. Well, China is a whole different thing.

China is a whole different thing.

“I think this is visibility parallax thing.”

You have this, you know, charismatic, you know, symbolic thing. There's very, very few, a lot of protection around them. People want it. What do you say about Eagles? Just talking about what people want, what they can't have.

That's the, well, through line in this way. But Eagles, especially for, for rare seagulls, or, like, American aligators, they've bounced back since DDT and, you know, the book that, what's her name did in this, in the late '60s, '70s, Silent Spring. That was the book that really changed everything for Eagles and Birds of Crimes.

Yeah, it's a mirror. Is that a turtle book? What was her name?

The Silent 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 they really took care of them. Really took care of them. That really took control. 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 all the Eagles, you know, making that film. Well, they're 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, alarming rates because of spraying of

DDT for agriculture for pesticides. Wow. And then we banned it and Eagles and Birds of Crimes came back. Yeah. And Falcons, all of it, you know, bald Eagles, Golden Eagles.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a weird animal, the bald eagle, that that's our pet, that's our national animal.

Yeah. So it's strange. It's partless raptor. It's a fishing eagle. Yeah.

There are fishing eagles all over the world that are similar to bald Eagles, it's a fishing eagle. That's what it is. It's just a such a cool one. Yeah.

And it's something about watching them swim away with a salmon, their talents. Yeah. Yeah.

“Well, I also photography's gotten so much better over there, it's right?”

You can, I know they've probably had video you were having in it. I mean, when we lived, when we lived, when we lived, there was that eagle cam and there was the sick eagle bald eagle and it was taken, it became natural for you. Yeah, where we live. And it became national loose two weeks ago, Golden, a bald bald eagle.

Really? 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 help. But the amount of money that poured in to help that eagle was unbelievable.

Wow. 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 resting.

Well, that's the eagle's Americans. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It means people have a tattooed on their back.

Yeah. There's something about an eagle. It's just a panic. There's a lot of snake tattoos these days. But yeah.

I'm sure. Yeah. But there's something about the eagle tattoo's different. Yeah. But then the Grizzly Bear, you know, such an adverse reaction, so controversial.

They eat a lot of people. They've been in the industry lately. I mean, there's a reason why the California state flag has the Grizzly Bear on it. And there's no Grizzly Bear in California. Yeah.

We have a friend that's actually trying to bring it back. Good luck. We've mentioned this to you last time you were like, why or something. But I'm naturally return.

The reintroduction is always a disaster.

The reintroduction of wolves and Colorado right now is a fucking disaster. Well, they're back. They've now migrated into California and they've been spending some wolf sighting. It's even down. Quite a few.

A friend of mine filmed one. We showed it on the podcast to filmed one near Bakersfield. Exactly. Yeah. A black wolf that was out in the field near Bakersfield.

Yeah. They can go incredibly long distance. Reintroduction works in some places. It's getting better. I have a good friend that's reintroducing Jaguar as back to Northern Argentina.

They're doing a pretty good job. But yeah. It's tricky. It's different. It's been 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, 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 and the guy that did the wolf rewilding of gray wolves is this guy named Mike Phillips. Works for Turner. And yeah, they have a real PR problem.

You know, and Grizzlies are going to be a bigger PR problem. Yeah. And they're going to be able to wrap their arms around that idea of bringing Grizzlies back to California. Well, there's certain states where they're over-populated 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 wang Grizzlies back and they have this new technology that might be able to keep them kind of in certain areas.

But hopefully they keep them in a certain area because, you know, Grizzlies migrating

into LA, like the wolves right now might not be a good idea. Well, you already have the mount lines. There was a great video the other day. I don't know if you guys saw it of a mount line in the guy's backyard in Santa Monica. Yeah.

Yeah. I've been cat. I have them in my backyard all the time.

“I think it's going to be divided displacement from fires, right?”

It's also pets. We like to eat people's pets. Yeah. Yeah. We have these cameras.

It's too close. We talking about the eat them all the time. No, no, yes. And that gets snatched up. But all the time.

Jeremy, this woman down the street for me.

She was walking her dog at three in the afternoon. The mount line grabbed her dog. She's literally on La Dara. She's walking her dog a little dog and the mount line 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. I'm sort of saying this. A little particular suburban pocket of Santa Monica.

It's not very common.

“Well, where I live, they eat people's dogs.”

Because you don't see them. They don't see them. They eat dogs. Where I live the mount lines are eating people's dogs from time to time. They do it all the time.

We were talking about Marin County. It's Bay Area wherever it is, where they have these depredation tags, where they have to shoot problem mount lines 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 at the motion detector cameras when we see them at three in the morning, right in front of my house. I get that fucker. I rarely see them with the naked eye. That crazy.

Well, you got one that one gets hit by a car and they build a bridge across the road. It was kind of amazing. You've got a nice mountain line in the lobby out there. That was from my friend Adam. He hunted that in Colorado.

That was a depredation mount line. That mount line had picked a ranch and it was killing all the calves. They actually got to it right after it had, it didn't even kill it. It was eating it while it was alive and then it ran. They ran it off the dogs and ran it off the car because they had to shoot this calf.

It was just torn apart and still suffering alive and then they killed it. Exactly where I am. We have a lot of deer and we find a deer carcass from time to time that's a mount line kill. Oh, for sure.

But you know, back to our show, I wanted to just say one other thing about sort of the ending, which it was really fortuitous and I just want to bring it up even though you're not there yet, but it's a poiler alert. Well, it's not really this poiler 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 Madagascar and I did a 16 minutes piece with Leslie Stahl, took her to Madagascar and New Yorker piece on this tortoise. I failed, everyone failed. The tortoise functionally went extinct to Madagascar. The poaching was so intense and the tortoise had a very...

What is it? Where does the plasher tortoise? Well, a reptile that arguably has the most value in the petrade over almost any other reptile in the world. There may be something close, like a feed gel, a iguana, or maybe a comoda dragon. But some of them can be worth as much as a hundred grand, and people in Madagascar are

so poor in the, especially in the area where this animal comes from. And it only existed in a tiny part of northern Madagascar. That's it. So where are they going? Mostly to Asia, there's a direct flight out of Madagascar to Bangkok, and so...

And their pets. Yeah, and some of those photos, I mean...

“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 that little guy. I took some of these photos, I even took actually. Oh, that's a, 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 plasher tortoises out of China and Taiwan. And 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. Those 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. And the rarest and most valuable tortoise in the world. And today we're trying to bring it back to Madagascar, which we're working on, which is happening as we talked to.

And is the problem that if you bring it back to Madagascar, people are going to go to Madascar 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, you know, heritage and, you know, what they should have. So part of it is showing that we can go full circle. If a skin and animal that was in the illegal exotic reptile trade, breed it, and then return it to Madagascar. But the part that no one wants to talk about that's really controversial is, in this particular

with this tortoise to 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, 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, or the US, well, 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. You 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, though the opposite. And they're so few of them. And so they're very, very, very, 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 radiate towards which we also brew. That is wild.”

Dremelene is a way to, well, so we, we, we, we, we, we are value. Our organization is the group with Dural that's did this trembling 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, their shell. They have the most, they have the highest dome shell of any tortoise in relation to the size, they have incredible longevity, well over a hundred years they live and their gold. And so that dremelene that you did, that's, that's indicate, that's the top of it right there. Yeah. And that didn't help. We did that. You can see it over there at the center. That's called the vertebral scoots of the tortoise. And we dremel 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. There's like 28 different little squares and then the center. There's 13.

“So it's basically like a 13 day or 13 month 28 day lunar calendar. Yeah, this is it. How weird is that?”

Yeah, that's really a junior calendar on a turtle's back. You know, a lot of turtle facts. I did not know that one, actually. I 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 turtle sums and so on. Yeah, I didn't know about that. That's interesting. Wow. And that weird? Yeah, that's interesting. Why? What is that all about? That's very strange that it coincides. It's like exact to what a lunar calendar is.

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 they've been 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 are things that were shaped like that like a geodesic dome came somewhat from the how turtles are designed. Like there was some architectural thing that gave me a sense of turtles. Yeah, like the geodesic like the structure of it to keep rigidity. Yeah. Yeah. And I know turtles the first writing.

The earliest writing was on the plaster on the bottom of a turtle shell in China. Maybe some of the earliest writing going back some really a couple thousand years. The 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, you know, the vitality and all these kinds of things. If you get sick, you to make some turtles. This is a lot of weird stuff with that stuff. I have to do right now horn things. Yeah, boners like hey guys. Well, they really, like they really put some volume. Yeah, the local bone script on the bottom of a turtle shell. Look how cool that looks. Go back to that beautiful right beautiful.

6,000 to 200 BC more than 6,600 to 6,200 BC. You know, go into the images again of the writing on it. Look how cool that writing is. And this one's beautiful. Yeah, right. That one's beautiful. That's wild. But I think it was some of the earliest writing was on turtle shells like, well, it sounds like it. If it's 6000 BC, 6000 BC, I mean, that's that predates ancient Babylonia, or at least what we know about it.

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 $20,000. One turtle and the wild cut 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 hone 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. And it's the stuff they eat that goes into the horn, which makes sense. Like your fingernails, carrot and so the wild rhino horn is going to have more good stuff for you. And of course, they'll probably grate some fire and it to make you really believe that it gives you an erection, you know, they'll cheat.

But no, this does. So the wild one actually works. Well, they do grate the Viagra in the rhino horn sometimes. But the wild turtle is just eating things and has more cheese than the farm turtle.

But they have these enormous turtle farms. Like 15 story buildings that are all turtles. Jamie, you're going to see this. So wild turtle farms in China China turtle farms. And this is all just for pets. No, this is for consumption. This is your pay 20 grand. Now there's 20 grand 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 unobox turtle. A unobox turtle can be $100,000. So these are these turtle farms.

Yeah, but this is all for like turtle soup. Yeah, but these are soft shell turtles in this image that you're looking at. I'm talking about things like golden coin turtles, much more valuable turtles for consumption than these soft shell. Why are they worth more? Is it just because it's rare? Oh, this guy, I know this guy. Garda state turtle, I know like I knew Jersey. He's a good guy, Chris Leon. Well, that's a golden coin turtle. So we breed these in where we are, where we work with turtles. So we send these back to China from time to time.

Okay, but why explain the why is it worth 20,000? For whatever reason, this turtle is called a golden coin turtle. Cora, triphalciata is a scientific name. And it is very coveted and apparently it has certain properties that can cure cancer and other diseases. And so this turtle is high on the list for consumption for medicinal reasons. But we're a ledger league and cure cancer. Yes, or any false beliefs. But you can see 20 grand 40 grand 20 grand is highest 40 grand for a fucking turtle. Yeah, but then there's turtles can be 100,000 or two.

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 dollars? 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, in my facility, but 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. So when they're buying it for 20,000 dollars, they're buying it to try to save someone's life.”

Or someone's sick, or they really want good health in their wealthy? Okay, so you could just get it, just as like a prophylactic turtle. And you need it for medicine to make sure you don't get sick, something like that. Sounds insane though, that it's 20,000 dollars for a turtle. But if you look up you non-boxed turtle, it was thought to be extinct for 50 years and they rediscovered it. And a you non-boxed turtle today, if you could even get one would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. And another turtle similar to that.

And they eating those two? 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 kind of a cat is 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 not. Yeah, that's an American-boxed turtle. That's an obvious one. Or they're in a zoo for example.

“So that's why that's a turtle that's being shipped to. That's a U.S. turtle from the East Coast that's being sold and smuggled the China and other parts of Asia, because look how beautiful our turtles are in the U.S.”

That's a pretty turtle. Oh, you do have a photo of a U.S. turtle. It's just not the one there. That's a bland thing. Is it a U.S. turtle? I want to love it. Yeah, that one that's kind of gray right there. No, no, that's a three-tode box. No, that's one. That one? That one. That one. That one. That one. That one can be worth $200,000. That one. That one. That turtle was thought to be extinct for over half a century. That's a boring astrtle. That other one. You're training 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 right. No, the one to the left.

Yeah, the other right of it. That one's cool, shit. That's a male eastern box turtle. They always have red eyes.

But solutions to this scarcity problem. That's a male eastern box. You know, Pat, Pat trade can commercializing aspects of it can produce.

“But what's important about this conversation actually is people think of ivory, rhino horn, you know, whales.”

We have no idea that a turtle pound for pound can be more valuable than a rhino horn possibly. You know, a turtle idea. Nobody knows this. But it's crazy what the money involved in these back to the, you know, confiscations we're getting and the trade and turtle's 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.

I always think here about pangolin scales, rhino horn, you know, 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. Just 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 feel 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 transport them and if they're really worth $20,000 to $40,000 to $40,000, you're pretty in that in your bag. Yeah, and they really are. They really are worth that. That is crazy. I would have never guessed. And I would never guessed that it's for consumption. That's that's even more. Well, no, the turtles that are leaving this country going to China are for extra pets or exotic pets.

But that one, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that it's worth $20,000. That's the same. 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, there's a snake, you want to talk about diarrhea.

Look at a diary, it's snake blood. I was many years ago.

I was in Myanmar and Burma at a snake place and they were just loading snakes up in these trucks. Like, you know, 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, tiger bones. Tiger, tiger, tiger, parlor, 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. I don't know what that does for you. Maybe that's another Viagra kind of thing, but all, you know, there's tiger farms and they part them out and they sell into China. So there's tiger farms that are just for consumption. Yeah, tiger bone, wine, tiger, this, tiger bone, wine.

Sounds like it's more like that. You know, that but tigers, what's Amy? It's like a rhino horn type deal, I think. Yeah, I think they're giving them. Right, yeah.

Believe to increase virility and enhance male sexual performance.

Don't, don't, don't tiger, fellas. Yeah. Ooh, one tiger penis. But a turtle is worth more than a tiger, guys. That's crazy. And but I didn't know that there was a market for tiger meat. Yeah. And is it the, the, all the meat of the tiger are just dicks.

Just so chop where the right. 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.

I should go into this workshop. What is this guy teaching? Yeah, I might be able to. He's on the run right now.

“So they don't get me started to talk about animal penises.”

My favorite movie is 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 manness, like eating the head off of the male to a rhino. And it was a great movie, just sex.

It did not know that there was a market for the meat. What is that? Tiger dick? Yep. Nice. I thought it looked like crazy looking.

That looks like a new to break a sea slow. It looks like a piece of sushi. Yeah. I don't know if it looks like a piece of sushi. It looks like a piece of sushi.

Yeah. It looks like a piece of sushi. It looks like a piece of sushi. It looks like a piece of sushi. It looks like a piece of sushi.

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“Well, it's what you just said earlier that started this conversation that people go to restaurants”

and eat exotic animals and bear gallbladder. Bear gallbladder is another thing that, way, back to monsters that 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. And that's a TikTok video. And that's a really rare animal.

Those guys are really rare. Oh, really? Yeah, they're still cooking them in eaten. There's two types of giant salamanders. There's Japanese giant salamander and Chinese one.

The Chinese one is massive. That's it. It's massive. And they're just watching. What's it?

The one I stumbled down, it says it's AI shows. It's an incredible animal.

But they farm a lot of things that you would never think of.

Yeah, turtles, salamanders. I just the luxury consumption market just seen that phrase. It's like, what a weird culture that you have luxury consumption of highly illegal endangered species. Yeah. And that, well, that was what a friend of mine who had been a 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 horn. Yeah. Status.

Status. Very wealthy people. Yeah. 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 that were somewhere.

“What's difference between that and rare wine from 50 years ago?”

Well, first of all, an animal. 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 hobo.

And I remember getting socky and this really incredible snake was in my socky.

You know, like, look, we're hypocrites in this country. We eat tuna and they're endangered in Asia. Are they endangered? Are they endangered? Are they endangered?

Yeah. And they're endangered? Well, certain species are tuna. I think are becoming pretty endangered. They're not what they were.

They certainly don't, not the same numbers that they used to be. The terms. 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.

You know, we had passenger pigeons that, you know, made the sky's dark. And we shot every one of them. We had Carolina Parakeet. We've almost got rid of our condors and bison. We've done a lot of damage, but there's a lot of damage.

Not you and me. We wish that we people. People that lived here. It's not us. Well, why is our show called monsters or God?

We're the monsters. Out the reptiles. We did a lot of damage. In the past, I'm just saying. Some of us.

Yeah. It's a very small percentage. People are other eat turtles. Yeah. Well, you're a good guy.

And I know that actually. You look somehow.

“You didn't have that maybe the mother I had, but you must have had something good.”

Well, with that, my love of animals. Yeah. You got a good moral compass. I've watched you. When you, when you, you know what's right and wrong.

Well, certainly, you don't eat entire dick. This is better ways to go by 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 plow share of tortoises is on its way back.

I mean, you have to kind of still protect it for a while. That's expensive. 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 has done. They're all extinct. Everything goes extinct.

And a lot of our good intentions managing nature doesn't work oftentimes. I don't know. If you do a terrible job. I mean, especially when we bring in Anna, we were talking about this yesterday with Hawaii. They brought in Mongus to eat the rats.

But Mongus are dire and all rats are not certain. We know that. We know that. Yeah. Hawaii.

It's funny you say Hawaii. His Hawaii is kind of the poster tile of all the states in the country of extinction. Second is California. But Hawaii really fucked up Hawaii with cats. Mongus is, we're more in the Caribbean, but also Hawaii.

And Mongus is, is why, back to the Jamaican iguana. The Jamaican iguana was extinct.

We've just recently found a small population.

But it's a very rare iguana. Reading a very similar thing happened with the Salamanders and China. They were not originally thought of as anything special until the mid-20th century. When famine for people to find new stuff to eat, they started eating them and liked it. They've made a lot of places to do that.

And that's what led them to. Well, so then we just went back into the wild because there was too many of them, which created a new problem. It says, there you go. They created a new species. So now you have 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 folks look at giant? Look at giant. Wow. Just some photos of giant salamanders.

They are so massive. They're so massive. There's a bunch of videos of guys cooking them and walks outdoors. Yeah. 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 when it looks, there's a funny one where dude singing. He's like wrapping over it. The guy's cooking about a guy cooking a dragon.

Is that how you cook a dragon? Yeah. They're pretty impressive. But it's a weird desire that people have to eat something incredibly exotic and rare. Whoa.

Look at that sucker. Yeah. That's a real one. Giant salamander cooked eight ways. Yeah.

And the, I don't know what that word is. Giant, giant, and 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. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. But they sort of know it.

It's not by necessity. They know it's endangered. Yeah. And he's still boiling it up. So it's the fact that this luxury item that you get to eat, this luxury item.

Yeah. What does it look like? Looks, see what it looks like at the end. Kind of crazy. A lot of meat.

Yeah. Looks delicious. Yeah. Would you eat it if you were there or would you feel bad? I don't.

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. I'm not very adventurous. I can't eat.

“I don't want to have the only way I eat it dogs if it's right.”

I bite one of my kids. You know? But if it's like dogs, it's different. But you know, we eat cattle in India. They don't eat cows.

And then the place is eat horses. And then they eat dogs. Sure. Yeah. You know, sort of cultural norms about certain animals.

We just can't wrap her head out of the ways. But I've seen dogs being killed in soil. We see by in huge numbers in Indonesia. Just the way they kill them. And then they take these blow torches and burn the hair off of them.

And people buy them just like you're in a regular grocery store. Yeah. The way they, you know, and it's just what's normal in one culture. Those are snapping turtles. American snapping turtles.

What's normal in the culture? So have these been imported into Asia? Yeah. They're big. And we still eat those, by the way, New Orleans and the Southeast.

We eat snapping turtles. 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 those things are crazy looking. Yeah. Which is it? They have this, um, which you have in Texas or other. They have what?

They, they. They're an ambush predator. They have a little appendage on their tongue. Oh. They've got alligators.

They're circular. Crack eyes. Crack eyes. Crack eyes. Yeah.

Cracks. Jesus Christ. Imagine just hanging out there watching his buddies get butchered. You're good at finding gruesome stuff over there. There.

There. You're going to really, there's a lot of people. So, you know, you see, you guys have a bunch of projects.

Always kind of in the works.

Like, how do you go about choosing? We just like find these very bizarre people and these very bizarre niche groups and.

“And I think, you know, listen, I, I'm more aware of time as I get older.”

So, 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's 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. I have nothing to do with wildlife. You know, I did a documentary in the last 10 years about my mom and my parents. And, you know, I don't know if anyone will ever see that and they both died.

You know, but I did that to keep them relevant. And I had a crazy family, a gay father and a crazy mother who was into animals.

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 gets, you see, the light of day. Right. But these last three big ones that you guys did, 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. I think you'll like Joe. I have to say, there are big carnivores in it again. And so, really far out people that you know and you may have known personally. I don't think I can tell you who they are.

But they were very famous and some of them. Anyway, but we're doing a project about that. And we're doing what a tease you are. I know. It's coming into the tease too.

I had too much coffee, sorry. 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 other groups of animals that we don't even think about. But 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.

It takes many, many, many years. Many people are only really able to show to the people and know about the issues. And nothing happens. Especially, there's an impact aspect to it. So I think our formula is great.

It happens to be, you know, the subcultures that have a higher intensity 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 sort of mixture of conservation storytelling.”

Plus far out beliefs, you know, in a niche that are able to zoom out and talk about themes of extinction,

or attachment, or ego, or crime, you know.

Maybe there's something to the overfishing thing to do. Because it's been a lot of drama. It's a huge issue. There's been a lot done on it. But I think there hasn't been a dock on overfishing.

I'll see. The problem with a lot of those traditional documentaries. They tend to preach to the Communist boring. Well, 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. They don't know the issue. And the other thing I would just say, you're overfishings a big deal. Invertiver. It's insects butterflies.

And what's happening with insects is a big deal. We're losing a lot of really weird insects. And they haven't even been described yet. Marine fish and even tropical fish is really interesting to us. Where do all the saltwater truckable tropical fish come from?

How do you get them? They dynamite the reefs in the Philippines. They, you know, 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. You know, we'll just put more tropical fish in our aquarium and a Vegas hotel. And imagine indeed extinction businesses are going to solve our problems.

I think that's also interesting to us. It's just not a consciousness or smaller vertebrates in vertebrates. But I would just say one other thing that I think we do. You probably are aware of that.

“You know, people think you have to be in a city to get the, you know, the weird shit going on.”

New York City, LA, you know, whatever big cities. And what I found is oftentimes it's the places that you least expect it. Some weird, you know, suburban landscape where you start 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 to where you live. As a garage full of hot snakes in, and the cobra escapes one day. And it's in your yard. Well, whatever the fuck the story is, but it often is in places that you wouldn't expect it to be.

Friends of cardboard. Yeah. You know. Well, listen, guys. Thank you again for being here.

I really appreciate it. Thanks for all the work that you guys put in. You've really entertained the shit out of me over the years. Okay. And disturbed me as well.

So it's available. Monsters of God. When has it come out tomorrow tomorrow? Tomorrow. So when this comes out.

August 6th. August 6th. All right. Beautiful. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.